Things that make a crabby Maat:
Season 5 of House. And this one is so elaborate that it gets its own rant.

An otherwise spectacular story about Giles recovering from the end of Season 2 and finding love (with a male of whom I approve completely), that focuses on the physical torture and psychological repercussions thereof without a single mention of Jenny. Dammit, what broke Giles was Drusilla faking Jenny, not the physical torture. Thank you for treating one of my favorite BtVS characters like she never existed.

Someone saying (paraphrase here, but a pretty close one) that the entire time he was reading Tale of Genji, he "couldn't forget" that Murasaki Shikibu was a woman, so every time Genji did something bad (which he does a lot), he had to wonder if it was a critique of the males in Murasaki Shikibu's Heian society. Way to completely flatten an incredibly complex book.

Things that make a happy Maat:
Java! I am having so much fun with this. Even when my programming class is killing me, I love this language. I also kind of love code and writing it in general. So much fun. Whee!

Heike monogatari. Pretty, pretty complicated use of Buddhism as both a narrative structure (the fall of the Taira is being told through a heavily Buddhist perspective on the inevitable degeneration of the world) and as a practical "character" in the story (the Buddhist monks who run down the mountain and invade the capital whenever they get annoyed!). And awesome characters, of course.

Saiunkoku monogatari and Shuurei being allowed to have her career, be really kickass at her career, be occasionally wrong about how she approaches her career (no, trusting people doesn't always work), but still also be allowed to be right, too (and sometimes it does work). The fact that the show is not going anywhere near, Shuurei needs to give up serving Ryuuki as an official to become his wife or she will never be fulfilled! No. where. near. it. SaiMono, I love you.

Leverage and White Collar. Methinks I may need to stop picking my new fandoms based on whether they have an appealing threesome in them, but it's working out all right for me so far (so far being, hmm, the past seven months or so). Granted, I still need to get caught up... More fun episodes to be had!

Hey, it's a babble post.

( Tortall )

( Eureka )

( Harry Potter )

My belated squee. I'm really, really sorry for being a horrible person who can't keep deadlines, but if you're by any chance also on an academic schedule and haven't figured out what you're writing yet, well... Maybe it'll be useful? Anyway, if you have, don't worry about this.

Here goes:

( Amara, Gaius, and Alera )



( Lee, Laurin, and The Worlds )



( Murasaki, Tō no Chūjō, and Heian Japan )



( LePic, Theisman, and Haven )

Squee! Thank you for agreeing to write a story for me. I'm honestly equally enthusiastic about all four of these fandoms and you could count the fic for all four of them put together on the fingers on one hand, so any story will make me so veryvery happy.
 
On that note, please believe me when I say my prompts are just to get you thinking. A story about any of them would make me ecstatic, but if you have a plot bunny that you’d love to write, I know I’d love to read it. I think I might have scared my author off last year, so I want to emphasize this a lot. You're writing this fandom (I hope!) because you love it as much as I do, and a story coming out of that will be awesome.

( If you still feel like reading... )

And now, on to fandom-specific babble.

( Honorverse )

( Stealing the Elf-King's Roses )

( Alera )

( Tale of Genji )

Huh. In retrospect, all of the prompts except the Genji one have a common thread of "They love their jobs, they're kick-ass at their jobs, and hopefully they can fit in a life around their jobs, but the job comes first." Which could be a source of angst, but, really, doesn't have to be, and the characters already know that (Lee!) or really ought to (re)discover it (*cough*Amara*cough*). I'm now wondering what this says about me.

 EDIT: I might have gone into analytical mode while writing this. If I did and it sounds like I dislike everything, I'm really, really sorry, and will try to fix that by creating a post by this weekend of all of the giggly squee that got cut out of this thing for length. I'm spending too much time in academia. Sorry!

EDIT2: Here be happiness!

* I thought that since I'm snagging liviapenn 's icons, I might as well use the form of address, too.