AO3 postings of kissfic

[gwyn]

I finally have a couple of the kissfics up on AO3 if that's where you're more inclined to read. I tidied them up a bit and added a few things here and there. First is the Bucky and Peggy one:

That Only You Would Know (933 words) by gwyneth rhys
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Peggy Carter
Characters: Peggy Carter, James "Bucky" Barnes
Additional Tags: Platonic Kissing, Tests, Bonding, implied Steve/Bucky
Summary:

Let's make a test of our own, shall we?

And then yesterday I posted this Steve/Bucky one and holy crap. I got more kudos and notes on Tumblr in 8 hours than I get on most of my stuff for its lifetime. It's kinda depressing--these things you slave and sweat over, that you craft for weeks and weeks, disappear into a void, even when you think they're the best things you've written, but commentfic gets…that. I don't even know how fandom works anymore. (I mean, I get it, when you can post a fic to Tumblr it's easier for people, but that generally has not been the case for me. This stupid thing I wrote for Sam/Steve last year suddenly got picked up by someone popular a couple weeks ago, and next thing I know I had more notes on that than I've ever had for anything. Destina's right: Tumblr is a naked singularity.) So yeah, there's this:

Your 21st-Century Boy (1765 words) by gwyneth rhys
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Characters: Steve Rogers, James "Bucky" Barnes, Clint Barton, Tony Stark
Additional Tags: Gender Roles, Bucky Barnes Isn't Having Any of Your Gendered Marketing Bullshit, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the Fabulous Soldier, Kissing
Summary:

Clint had peered at him out of one eye and said, "You know pink's a girl's color."

"Not in my day, bub," Bucky said, sliding the tube of the grenade launcher up, chambering the shell, and racking it back down as he stared coolly at Clint. "You know who started that pink is feminine shit? Hitler."

I suppose it's too late now to add a note about the title--it's a play on T Rex's "20th Century Boy," and anyone who's old enough knows Marc Bolan was one of the original gender-bender glam rock artists. Here's a clip of him performing it in all his glory.

Comments

[dine]

god, I loved T.Rex - I played Electric Warrior to pieces

also! I love the gives-no-fucks Bucky in Your 21st-Century Boy; it's great to know that he goes with what he likes and doesn't care what others think

[gwyn]

I think after being an object and having your humanity so violated, you'd just kind of be like "I like what I like, and you can go fuck yourself" once you got to start making choices again. Also, I like a Bucky who would have been super secure in his own masculinity before the war, nurturing to his little siblings and to Steve even while being the classic ladies' man of that era. So now all bets are off. ;-)

And in conclusion, yes, Marc Bolan. People keep saying that they now want art for Bucky in leather pants and a feather boa…I wish I knew an artist who could do me a glam rock AU.

[kore]

Marc Bolan! <333

And yeah, it can be disorienting/a bit upsetting to have something more tossed-off get WILDLY popular, but maybe it can lead people to your other stuff? That's how it worked for me sometimes (back when I posted public stuff, heh).

[gwyn]

Man, I wish--I have never seen a trickle-down effect, though. I mean, hell, even when there's an explosion of interest it's very short-lived and the amount of hits I'll see is still only equivalent to the amount of kudos most people will get. It's depressing especially when it's those stories you slave over and feel really proud of. Not that I'm not, you know, proud of this too, or anything. I wouldn't post it if I wasn't.

In short, basically, I don't get how fandom works. ;-D

[sholio]

It's funny how some things take off, isn't it? I still can't get over some of the completely unexpected fics of mine that had a popularity surge. I'm glad yours got to ride the popularity wave, unexpected though it may have been! <3

[gwyn]

Yeah, you never know what's gonna hit with people. Like, I thought my last piece, this epic epistolary thing, would be so terrible despite how long I slaved over it, and even though it's not what you could call popular, the reactions some people had to it blew me away, sometimes left me kind of speechless. I just honestly didn't think anyone would like it. I think it's just that we see the nuts and bolts being pieced together, we work on it in our heads for days or weeks or months, we see where the scaffolding was put up and the paint got chipped and oh, there's that bad patch job over there…and all anyone else sees is the final creation, the public presentation of it.