An Unexpected Fandom (no, it's not the Hobbit)

So it turns out that Rosemary Sutcliff's The Eagle of the Ninth has a fairly significant fandom (upwards of 600 fics on AO3), and that this has somehow flown over my head for my entire fandom life up to this point. Also, there was apparently a movie with Channing Tatum? (Also, according to Wikipedia, in the movie, Romans speak with American accents in order to draw parallels with modern-day imperialism. Hm.) However this managed to slip by me unnoticed until now, I am very pleased to finally discover it, and filled with a desire to go and reread the book.

On this note, the thing which brought this to my attention wassineala's excellent AU fic, which was recommended to me during Fandom Snowflake:

Chosen Man (116551 words) by Sineala
Chapters: 5/5
Fandom: The Eagle | The Eagle of the Ninth (2011)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Relationships: Marcus Flavius Aquila/Esca Mac Cunoval
Characters: Marcus Flavius Aquila, Esca Mac Cunoval, Original Characters
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Military, Canon Era, First Time, Loyalty, Shame, Submission, Romance, Action/Adventure
Series: Part 1 of Chosen Man
Summary: The son of the man who lost the Eagle of the Ninth would never be allowed a first command of his very own fort, would he? Marcus is posted not to Isca Dumnoniorum, but to a wretched and run-down garrison north of the Wall. There he finds that he is the new centurion of a group of scouts and spies, all of them British. He has few supplies and no experience. His men distrust him. His superiors despise him. His second-in-command is an incompetent drunkard. And the local tribes are determined to kill all of them. But the worst thing of all is one of Marcus' soldiers. He is an enigmatic, dangerous, and insubordinate man by the name of Esca, who makes Marcus yearn for terrifying things he has never before wanted and can never, ever let himself have...

And then there was cute holiday-themed Saturnalia fluff. So we should all go and read this fic.

In other news, I am still looking at my bingo card and telling myself that thinking about it will eventually turn into do something about it...

December meme: My Favourite Things About Yuletide

 Yes, it is still December in my heart. This one is for the_rck, who asked, "If you can do it without giving away what you're writing, what are your favourite things about doing Yuletide?" I am far too late to worry about giving anything away, so here goes.

One excellent thing about Yuletide, I think, is that it encourages me to write things, and better yet, encourages me to write things that might not find an audience if I'd written them out of Yuletide season, or that I might not even have thought of, except that I saw someone's prompt about them. This Yuletide I spent a great deal of time reading primary sources about the Punic Wars, and begging my sister, who has studied it at uni, to pass on resources and juicy details. I am lucky she is an impassioned supporter of the Roman Republic, and saw it as an opportunity to preach her cause. Anyway, I came out of it with a lot of exciting knowledge, a new fandom, and a fic people seemed to like, so that was delightful.

One of my other favourite things about Yuletide is the things people nominate and write for which are not conventional fandoms - artworks, poetry, twitter accounts, TV ads, memes, Ghost Soup: Infidel Blue, Peter Capaldi's Eyebrows Anthropomorfic... The hard-boiled-detective-meets-Greek-mythology fic. Sleeping Beauty in space. Like, on the one hand, Yuletide is about tiny fandoms and forgotten fandoms, but it's also about finding things that were never meant to be stories, and making them into stories.

I enjoy Dear Author Letters a lot. I like writing my letter, and reading other people's. People put a lot of thought into them, and it's interesting seeing people articulate what's great about their fandom, or even what they hate and want to see changed. And I mean, sometimes you read someone's letter and find that the thing you really love about that fandom is a thing they barely even noticed, or a thing they hated, or vice versa. But because it's all about tiny fandoms, and a lot of people get involved who aren't very active in fandom the rest of the year, it's a whole lot of new voices writing exciting meta, and an audience for that fic you never knew you wanted to write until to read that prompt, all wrapped up together, and it's great.

Also - it's really lovely to have fic written for you, and people do such a fantastic job of it!