alara_archive

Grace in a Vacuum by Marcelo. Stargate Atlantis with Q. Rodney McKay goes through a gate and ends up in a completely deserted Atlantis, with bizarre hallucinations as his only companions... except, of course, they're not hallucinations at all. Rated PG. Recced.

In A Galaxy Where No Man Has Gone Before by Merfilly. Star Wars/TNG, explicit slash. Q isn't exactly in this -- it's a Picard/Qui-Gon Jinn fic -- but the story is more or less a sequel (though it was written first) to Merfilly's "Misunderstandings", recced below, and Picard's backstory with Q is one of the drivers of the plot. Contains explicit consensual m/m sex and implied rape. Rated NC-17.

Information Indiscretions by Anya. TNG/Hitchhiker's Guide. Q is only a minor character in this one. Data meets Marvin from Hitchhiker's and becomes infatuated. Strongly implied P/Q relationship but the entire story is PG-rated.

Colorblind: by Duck. TNG/Firefly. River follows a Crow to the TNG universe, where she learns that she is much more sane out of her home 'verse but much less powerful, and that Crow's other name is Q. PG. Recced.

I Shall Be Made Thy Music by Andraste. TNG/Battlestar Galactica (new). God shows up and offers Gaius Baltar a chance to undo his terrible mistake... at a possible price. Gaius isn't quite sure this is actually God, though. PG. Recced.

In The Shadows by Eren. TNG/Babylon 5. In a universe where a very, very dark version of Jean-Luc Picard is Emperor, courtesy of Q, Lyta Alexander is trying to find a way home... but unfortunately finds Picard first. Picard/Q, though not exactly "our" Picard. Dark, non-explicit torture. Rated R. Recced.

There Is Nothing Like The Truth of the Fool: by Leyenn. TNG/Babylon 5. Before the coming of the Shadows, Morden meets Q in a dream. PG-13. Recced.

Res-Q by Astrogirl. TNG/Farscape. Q finds John Crichton too entertaining to let him stay dead. Humor. PG. Recced.

Meddeling: by Nemesis. TNG/Doctor Who. Milan is burning and the Doctor runs into someone who's as out of place as he is. PG.

Doctor Who crossover, Picard/Q/Ten, untitled: by bagheera_san. Q and the Doctor feud over which one of them Picard will travel through time with. PG.

Bright Young Thing: by bagheera_san. JLU crossover, Picard, Q, Lex Luthor. Q brings Picard to a way station for godlike beings, and has a conversation with Lex Luthor. PG.

Of Gods: by kateydidnt. Doctor Who crossover, Q and Ten. Incomplete. Q shows up in the TARDIS. The Doctor finds out that mysterious aliens popping in out of nowhere to have incomprehensible conversations with one is much more annoying when you're not the mysterious alien. PG.

The Legacy of Haruhi Suzumiya: by Elycat. Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya crossover. The SOS Brigade ends up aboard the Enterprise. Q has an interest in Haruhi; the SOS Brigade has an interest in not letting Haruhi realize *why*. Also, Yuki freaks out, for Yuki-like values of freaking out, because she's lost her connection to the Data Entity. Incomplete. PG.

Lost In The Woods: by Ardwolf. Firefly crossover. Q sends the Enterprise to the Firefly 'verse for a test. Very well done; also does a good job of bridging the viciousness Q shows in "Q Who" to the Enterprise crew's grudging willingness to help him in "Deja Q". PG-13.

Human: Icarus_Chained (aka one of the trio of "Slightly Sinister Sinestra" on fanfiction.net.) This one's my favorite, but we all know my obsessions. Q explains to Picard why yes, being human *was* that bad. Rather angsty. Established relationship for Picard and Q. Rated PG.

A Far Distant Star: Icarus_Chained. Angst *and* schmoop, but in a relatively in-character way. Q accidentally harms Troi while trying to help her improve her mental shields, and the solution must involve Picard learning things about Q that Q would rather keep to himself. The ending gets a little soppy for my taste, but the author acknowledges she was kind of young when she wrote it. Rated PG-13.

Thank You: Icarus_Chained. The meaning of the words "thank you" to Q. Established relationship for Picard and Q. Has Q telling stories about his past, which is always a winner with me. Rated PG.

Eternity: Icarus_Chained. "I have written you into the heart of stars, mon capitaine..." Rather overblown for my taste, but I like my P/Q very understated; I think this will appeal to anyone who likes Varoneeka, for instance. Rated PG.

Fair Maiden's Honour: Slightly Sinister Sinestra, aka Icarus_Chained. Q shows up, darker and crueler than he has ever been, and threatens to rape Picard. And then Picard figures out it's not "his" Q, right before the real Q shows up to stop him. Incomplete, P/Q is implied but more of a pre-P/Q. Rated R, attempted rape.

Only Once: Sasha_Anu. Prompt: Picard/Q, "only once". Picard tricks Q... or does he? Rated PG-13. Sasha_Anu tends to write an almost antagonistic Picard/Q, perhaps not reciprocated on Picard's part, or perhaps it is.

Infatuation: Sasha_Anu. Picard figures something out. Q does not like the end result. Rated PG-13.

Sweet Dreams: Sasha_Anu. Written for the Porn Battle, prompt: "dreams." Rated R.


Misunderstanding : Merfilly. Dark and painful. Q screws up, majorly. Rated R, non-con. Is a prequel to a Picard/Qui-Gon Jinn crossover pairing fic from Multiverse.

Games: Jen. Q watches Jean-Luc and Beverly play chess.

And Justice for Q: John Berger. Q shows up on the Enterprise, Picard actually manages to take him captive with force fields and technobabble, and the Federation puts him on trial for exposing humanity to the Borg. The Continuum think this is hilarious, and agree to enforce whatever sentence the Federation enacts, as long as Q is permitted to choose anyone from all time and space to be his lawyer. Q picks Kirk. Rated PG (no sex, no bad language, no violence).

I absolutely love this story. Many fan writers try to pull off some sort of situation where technology can be used to contain Q in some way; few manage it, and few do anything interesting with it once it's done. This was a very nice handling of the concept. I liked the use of Kirk and I liked the arguments presented. Since I myself am of the opinion that Enterprise has made canon that the Borg were on their way anyway, and TNG strongly implied it in the first place, I was at first afraid that the writer would completely ignore the fact that Q prepared the Federation for an invasion that was coming anyway... but no, that's a plot point. Very well done. Also, pretty funny in places.

StarCrossed Stravo. (Incomplete, but huge.) Like many Star Wars/Star Trek crossovers, this uses Q as one of a large cast of characters, but it does some very interesting stuff with him. It's the only fic I've ever seen to *both* use the fanon that Q was Trelane, *and* acknowledge that Q is a lot older and more mature than Trelane, *and* treat Q as a sympathetic, even heroic, character. The universe is ending, a result of humans engaging in too much time travel. Gary Mitchell and Q are playing a game involving throwing the Star Wars characters, the Classic Trek Enterprise, and the NX-01 together into the TNG/VOY era. Gary's motive is primarily to torment Kirk and secondarily to make so much chaos it will be impossible for anyone to save the universe; Q's motive, though he pretends to Gary that he's more disinterested than he is, is to save humanity and the universe.

Has good roles for Wesley Crusher and Charlie Evans; for some reason, though, no female Trek superpowered allies show up. Some of the stuff with Janeway is a little weird. The Star Wars stuff goes heavily AU with a Luke who's on the Dark Side, allied with Vader, when the story begins. Not great for P/Q fans, since I don't think Q and Picard even interact with each other; mostly Q deals with Kirk, Janeway, and Gary, and occasionally the rest of the omnipotent community. This is *very* long and has a metric buttload of characters. Sadly, he hasn't finished it yet, but who am I to talk? Rated PG-13, I think (I could be wrong... the damn thing's huge, so I may have missed a sex scene.) No sex, possible bad language, violence but nothing like explicit torture.

I just can't handle the tedium of old-school archiving anymore, in a world with so many blogs and journals and auto-archives. So I'm going to use this journal to post links to fics.

Not all of the linked fics are recommended. I tend to be a total slut about the characters I like; if they're in it, I'll read it, and I might even like the story even if objectively it is a piece of crap. So I'll be linking stories, and reccing only *some* of the linked stories. Tags will be used to classify the story posts.

I haven't updated archives in so long, I'd almost forgotten about this LJ.

This month, I have:

Updated Alara's Magneto Site, mostly broken link fixes but some new fiction and FAQs.

Put Shifting Sands back up and added one story, although I probably will not update again after that one story is completely loaded.

Updated Alarascape with two Scorpius stories written in 2005.

Updated my Q archive with broken link fixes and several new stories.

There will probably be an update of the Xavier and Mystique sites and another Magneto update before the end of the month, but now I really have to get writing.

I have finally launched a decent auto-archive.

One of the Few is an archive dedicated to the concept that mentor and teacher characters are themselves human. (Or they're not because they're mutants, or aliens, but you know what I mean.) It's using eFiction, an auto-archiving script that runs on PHP and MySQL. I had the idea quite some time ago -- in fact the original One of the Few is probably still around on my web site -- but with auto-archiving, I actually have some hope of maintaining it.

Man, it's been a psychotically long time since I updated this thing. I'd almost stopped thinking of myself as an archivist.

I have rescued the alt.fan.q archive (mostly-- missing about three stories) and put up a static mirror at http://www.alara.net/trek/alt_fan_q . This archive will not be updated; I'm just not stupid enough to take on a task like updating an inclusive archive again. :-) If anyone is stupid enough to do this, go ahead and contact me, and I'll hand you over my copies, though I will also maintain the static mirror of the original indefinitely.

I have also updated my fanfic index for halfway decent Q fic, available at http://www.alara.net/q.html -- this is an index, not an archive, in that it doesn't archive anything locally. It only points to existing files out on the Net. I will take suggestions for stories I should be indexing; my goal is more to avoid crap than to archive only the stuff I personally recommend (I may revise the archive to flag my personal recommendations, though.)

Today I will probably be updating my personal fic page (www.alara.net/aleph.html) so that the remixers have a one-stop shop for all my fic; I've joined the Remix Redux project again this year.

I've learned it's kind of pointless to post about grandiose archiving plans in this journal, because they don't happen. I would, however, rather like to update Darkest Heart (it's probably broken link o'rama now), the main Marvel X-Books sites (Magneto in particular desperately needs it), One of the Few, and if I *can* in time for Valentine's Day I'd like to launch Corazon Malherido, my site for Romance Gone Wrong. :-)

It is depressing to see that I last updated this lj in *May*, and I talked about updating my archives, and Andraste gave me Xavier links to do... and I didn't incorporate them until *now.*

However, the Xavier site has finished stage 1 of its update cycle. I've fixed the broken links, used the wonders of the Wayback Machine to find everything that was lost forever, and added a pile of new stories. The pile continues to grow as I add new Magneto fanfics to Asteroid A.

There's a bug in Asteroid A I need Tom to fix for me. It thinks it has a moderator. It doesn't. So I approve stuff as the editor and it says it's waiting for moderator approval. Hello, there is *no* moderator! This makes updating slower than it could be. Fanfiction.net going down like a 2 dollar whore doesn't help. Many of the Magneto fanfics I had lined up were on ff.net.

What I need to do is systematically go through Luba's site since last October, Outside the Lines, X-Men Movieverse, and fanfiction.net (once it's up) and identify all the new stories in 616, Ultimate, Movie and Evolution universes which focus on Doug, Mystique, Magneto or Xavier, and get queries out to people.

I also absolutely need to streamline Shifting Sands. Not sure if Liquid Mercury is ready to run with the big dogs yet; Tom says it is and Asteroid A is just broken because it's old. Maybe I can talk him into making me a second LM site for Shifting Sands. If that happens I'll need a volunteer staff for moving stuff over. Life would be sweet if Tom had the time to build an applet that allows me to just load a filename from a browser, instead of opening the file, cutting, and pasting the HTML into LM's "New Page" template. If he doesn't things will go slow. Alternatives for Shifting Sands include breaking Darqstar's directory structure all to hell, putting everything into author directories, and then having *one* Master Author List to access all the authors, removing the Story Shortcut page and replacing it with a search function... but damn it'd be so much easier to do with Liquid Mercury.

Next time I get on my computer at home I need to remember to give Andraste an account.

So what's planned for this cycle of updates: I'm going to update all my X-Men sites (including XXY), my Q site, and Darkest Heart, and create a new site called "One of the Few" which focuses on mentors and teachers. (LOTR fans: this means Gandalf. BTVS fans: this means Giles. Potter fans: this does *not* mean several megatons of Lupin/Black slash because I am basically sick to death of romantic pairings dominating fanfiction, but if you give me some good character studies on Dumbledore, Snape, Lupin, or McGonagall I will be very happy.) On the Xavier site I have to put up the article Neva gave me on the Anti-Xavier phenomenon and write an article debunking anti-Xavier myself (without reading Neva's article first, that wouldn't be fair :-)), and Andraste has promised me an FAQ soon. On the Magneto and Q sites I need links to the IMDB for Ian McKellan and John de Lancie respectively. I think I may also be putting up links to Left Turn At Westchester on Magneto, Xavier and Mystique sites.

Has it actually been three months since I did any archiving work?

I want to create new archives. But dammit, I really *should* fix the ones I have. Just because I'm feeling like I'd really like to have a Garak shrine, and he's not a villain so I can't give him a subpage on Darkest Heart, isn't really a good reason for doing so when I'm so behind on all the archives.

I'm considering pruning, but prune what? Hell, I actually want to bring back my Seven of Nine archive, although it wouldn't have the same fics on it necessarily, as I find I am really bored in general by Seven/any male character. I'd probably have some angsty Chakotay and Seven break up stories, because *anything* to break those two up, and some Seven/Janeway, a little Seven/Torres, and mostly just Seven with no pairing.

What else can I prune? Mystique and Cypher don't seem to get updates as often as they should, but no one else has a Mystique site with fic on it; Elseworlds mostly I've lost interest in, but occasionally something shiny comes along I must have... dammit, I don't *want* to prune anything. Yet I'm not getting any work done.

Well. This weekend, I should focus on Darkest Heart, Shifting Sands, Magneto and Xavier. And then nag Tom a lot about what I'd need to be able to build the other sites in Liquid Mercury. Maybe solicit some help, get some other people accounts on my site so I can have them help me move Magneto stories over to Asteroid A.

Should go looking for some Anakin fics, too. Now that Episode II is out, there should be a spate of them, maybe enough finally to justify a Star Wars section on Darkest Heart.