time: early 1940s, place: Somewhere in Europe (near the western front), though the person in question grew up in the US and went to college in England. The same character that 4 of my last 5 posts have been about (she's eating my brain!)
Not really sure how to search this, though I took a vague stab at "slang terms (1940s OR ww2 OR "world war 2")--can't tell levels of rudeness very well, however, and there wasn't much on relatively generic nasty names.

Our Heroine is from a wealthy family (and fairly proper/correct/prim), but she's a bastard (in the literal sense, basically no one but her mother knew who her father even was). So I don't think she'd use that as a pejorative term (if, for example, she ever meets her absentee father and wants to call him something rude)--it would be too sensitive of a subject for her.

But I have no idea what other words a relatively gently reared 25-year-old would *use* in the early '40s to indicate that someone was worthless/bad/morally corrupt/etc, or otherwise indicate extreme displeasure. Having her call someone a f***-head or a**hole or whatever just doesn't feel right at all--I don't think someone of her class and upbringing would speak like that.

(She's a surgeon, and also knows French and Latin, if that suggests anything in particular to anyone)

Fandom: FOREVER KNIGHT
Pairing: none
Length: one-shot
Author on LJ: not applicable
Author Website: Fiction by Kathy Whelton
Why this must be read: I adore stories that take place before the series premiere, particularly those that deal with the Nick and Natalie dynamic. In this story, author Kathy Whelton peels back the layers to Nick and Natalie's "rocky" first encounters and explores the characters' insecurities and hopes. We are treated to a Nick who wields the persona of a cold, emotionless vampire to protect himself from false promises and a Natalie who tries to balance her desire to rise up to a scientific challenge with her inherent curiosity. The story setup is simple but it packs an emotional punch. Nick and Nat's very proper and detached early forays into finding a cure to Nick's vampirism get derailed by a medical emergency. Pre-series stories are all special and unique but this one stands out as wonderful introduction to the genre.

( Excerpt )


A Crack in the Wall by Kathy Whelton

This morning I got up, checked my flist and a few communities, saw that an author had posted part II of a Hetalia fic I had enjoyed part I of and that it was rather long, so I saved it to my PDA, meaning to read it at lunch and respond when I got back from work. I got back from work, opened the fic, wrote a comment, and tried to post it, only to discover the fic had been locked down. As far as I could tell from the last comments posted before it vanished, the author decided to take it down because a commentator pointed out some historical innacuracies, and they were no longer satisfied with the work. This is the second time I've seen this happen with a Hetalia fic.

While I respect your desire to only share work that you're truly satisfied with and that meets your personal standards of historiocity, I do - it's that urge which makes you such damn fine writers - I can't help but grit my teeth, because the fics that were taken down were in both cases better-written and more historically accurate than not only 99% of the fandom, but the original manga. The commentor who pointed out the innacuracies also pointed out the manga characterizations just don't work in a lot of ways. Following them and history at once would be an outright miracle, especially in the period the fic was set in.

Seriously. I don't mind well-characterized ahistorical fic, but there's just not enough passable historical fic lying around, let alone brilliant. One of said fics went up again less than a week later. I really hope the second one comes back too. There's fic that deserves to be struck from the face of the Internet, but these really were not in that category. I've seen fics that appear to completely forget the Hundred Years War was fought! If this fic was wrong, it was wrong it ways nobody who hadn't studied the topic in college would notice.

I originally wrote this as commentfic for redstarrobot, but I'm really rather pleased with it, so I figured I'd repost it.

And what does it say about me that this actually seems to have put me into the holiday spirit?


Title: Pretender Christmas Snippets
Fandom: The Pretender
Summary: Tiny holiday glimpses.
Rating/Warnings: PG-ish. Specific spoilers through about the middle of season 2, possibly some vaguer ones through season 4. Contains serious Pretender-esque twistedness.
Length: ~200 words

( Pretender Christmas Snippets )