Scales and Tales

anotherfmafan hosted her usual Roy/Ed Day chatroom a few days early this year. There was a trivia contest (which I did terribly at), a custom crossword puzzle, lots of laughter, and 5-sentence fic prompts (most of which I missed the 5-sentence mark on), and much fun was had by all! Thank you so much, Fanny, for hosting it!

Here are my collected tiny ficlets, lightly edited, for anyone interested:


( Prompt: Hotel (in) California )

( Prompt: Playing with fire )

( Prompt: Playing with automail )

( Prompt: Surprise )

( Prompt: The past )

( Prompt: The future )

( Unprompted, unofficial follow-up to the above )

Or, as I summarised it in the chat:
Ed: Go fast!
Al: What about stopping?
Ed: Go fast!
Al: But can you steer?
Ed: Fast!

As Though in Deliberate Mistranslation by verdenal. FMA '03 fic (though featuring minor mentions of FMA:B characters); Ed/Roy. After eight years, Ed and Al find their way back across the gate. As it turns out, you can go home again.


Ed first gets the idea in Prague, where they’re lying low and trying to figure out the best way to escape Central Europe. The Germans are constantly on their trail, probably because two foreigners with gold eyes and six flesh limbs between them stand out in people’s memories.


Watching FMA:B has me reading fic again, not that I need an excuse to revisit FMA fic. :D It's one of those fandoms I always return to, and I love every incarnation of it... but I sometimes suspect that FMA03's ending lends itself to great fic setups.

I mentioned a while ago I was watching this, I think? Anyway, I am! Finally. :D It's practically vintage at this point, but I still think of it as 'the new FMA' because I entered this fandom in 2003 and okay wow that is a lot longer ago when I count it out than it feels like it should be.

( discussion under the cut )

In an effort to keep myself on track with various things, including posting, here's a round-up of where my current fannish efforts are focused.

Rewatching Nirvana in Fire
I've just started this, so if anyone wants to join in - either rewatching, or as a first-time viewing - I'd love to have company. :D At the moment I'm just four episodes in. If other people are interested in watching along, we can come up with a specific schedule and I'll make regular posts designated for discussion! If it ends up being just me, I'll probably be quieter about it; I feel like I've flooded everyone with NiF reactions lately, and you've all been very patient about it and deserve a break in return. :D

Reading Yami no Matsuei
I started this a while ago but got sidetracked, so I plan to start over at the beginning. I'll try to post after each volume completed, to avoid being sidetracked again. No specific schedule in mind, but I should manage at absolute minimum a volume a week.

Watching Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood
Believe it or not, I've never watched FMA:B before! I didn't want to watch it before finishing the manga, and when I'd finished the manga it wasn't readily available, so it's taken me all this time to get round to it. :D The first anime will probably always be my true love, but for completion's sake I do want to get through Brotherhood as well. There may not be much to post about, though, given that this is the third incarnation of FMA for me.

Reading new SF/F from my To-Be-Read Pile
Most of my reading thus far this year has been rereading, but this pile needs to shrink, and this year is as good as any. :D No idea what will call to me first when I start going through it, but as long as I pick something, it's progress! (Reminder to self: take a picture of the pile and post it!)

Rec Some Fics
The lack of fic recs in this journal is just sad. Gotta get back in that rec habit, even if it means stumbling through different ideas on how to approach it till I hit on one that works. (By fandom, by trope, by length?) DW friends, if you have suggestions for recs you'd like to see, now is the time to toss them out here! I had fun posting about Identity Porn, and I've made at least one other post about a beloved trope before, so maybe that's a good approach. Or maybe it should be under a separate heading like "Write Some Meta" that would include stuff like characterisation notes and thoughts on archive warnings.

Had a great time tonight in the FMA Fandom Chat (sorry that's not a link; I'll add one in the comments) with anotherfmafan, greedylover, and some non-DW fen!

If you're a Fullmetal fan, drop in and join us Saturday!

I went out today and bought the next volume of Fullmetal Alchemist!

...Or so I thought.

Instead, I bought the same volume that I bought a month ago, so I have no new FMA to read today after all, and I'll need to go back to the bookshop to get the correct volume. (That, however, is probably going to be a project for tomorrow.)

To make matters worse, my plan was to buy FMA along with the next Foreigner novel! Only the bookshop didn't have the newest Foreigner, so I left with just the FMA.

I think that *facepalming* is the only appropriate phrase for my current level of chagrin.

Well, I'm falling behind on my resolution to post more, already; fandoms to the rescue!


Guess who just got Kings Rising and devoured it in a matter of hours? That's right, this snake! What a great finale - the juxtapositions went a fair way toward letting everyone have some "resolved" feelings about their past conflicts.

( More spoilery comments below the cut. )

I've also been rewatching the original Fullmetal Alchemist anime lately, and have just about decided - after browsing a whole lot of fic and having to skim over all the manga-verse and Brotherhood-verse choices - that it's time to pick up one or both of those, too. There's just not enough fic, especially longfic, for the 2003-verse! Not sure yet which I'll go for first; it'll probably come down to "whom do I know that will loan me theirs" and/or "which can I manage to download first." So we'll see!

Fellow FMA fans on my flist, which did you like best? Where would you recommend starting? Do you have any fic recs for me, either for now (from 2003-verse) or for later (after I've started the manga/Brotherhood)? I can hardly wait to have another thing to squee about!

This post was made for painless_j, but because I subscribe to the theory that it's better to do a thing once and well, it contains ALL of my Roy/Ed recs, including those I know J has already read, the better to serve as my own personal bookshelf and a rec list for others.

Warnings, disclaimers, notes, and other miscellany:

I should perhaps warn that many of these are AU-from-the-movie, because the movie breaks my stupid little heart and I prefer to pretend it doesn't exist.

I have not read every fic by every author; ergo, that I have recced one thing by Author X but not another may mean that I liked the former and not the latter, or that I simply haven't read the latter, and thus have no opinion.

Edward Elric, in canon, is 12-16 years old. This means that in a lot of fic, Edward is 12-16 whilst Having Feelings For someone. I do not warn for underage-ness unless Ed's in the lower half of that range.

Other miscellaneous quirks:
* I detest fangirl-Japanese, and won't rec fics where everyone is "Taisa" and "nii-san" and "Edward-kun"; likewise I hit Back immediately upon encountering "Edo" and "Aru", so if there are any really brilliant fics out there that use these, they will not be recced here.
* I'm dreadful at summaries, so I just tried to keep them short; please don't put too much weight on them.
* I have tried to warn for the timeline status of things, but reserve the right to have goofed up in places.
* I have included Al/Roy/Ed in this Roy/Ed post.
* I do not use the "name order conventions" common in anime fandoms; "Roy/Ed" does not imply any particular sexual role for each character.
* I hope you enjoy it! I am amazed at how much I found once I started digging through my folders... :D


( Let the recs begin! )

Next post: recs for other pairings; gen fic; character-centric fic.