Old and New Project: 3 by AconitumNapellus

[tinturtle]

Fandoms in this post: The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

It's me again! I didn't read all three of these fics since my last Old and New Project post, but I finished the final one last night, meaning that I can now write up the set.

The fic I had collected was:

The Ballet Shoes Affair by AconitumNapellus (aconitumn) (The Man from U.N.C.L.E.; 988 words; slash)
This is a short fic from AconitumNapellus's catch-all work on AO3. Not much really happens in it—Illya and Napoleon look at a bag of ballet shoes—but I find it appealing as a captured moment in the life of our heroes. There's also a bit of subtext that I enjoyed spotting.

The new fic I read was:

*Red Thread Smile by AconitumNapellus (The Man from U.N.C.L.E.; 11,664 words; gen)
This fic has been at the back of my mind for years as one I wanted to get to, and it was worth having kept track of. The writing is beautiful, as AconitumNapellus's writing tends to be, and the story's atmosphere is wonderfully vivid. Illya is stranded in an isolated cabin on the island of Svalbard, and I felt as if I were there, as well. This fic is not as difficult as some of AconitumNapellus's fics in which Illya meets with misadventures, and I'd recommend it to everyone. I liked the ending a lot.
Comments with spoilers:
As someone who lives a fairly solitary life, I was moved by the way this fic explored the connections even less social people have to the human community.

Also-reads: 0

* = newly collected

After reading Azdak's time-travel fic Divided Halves, I recalled that AconitumNapellus had also written an MFU time-travel fic, The Weekend in Cambridge Affair, so I began this set by reading that again as a follow-up. I don't have a great deal interesting to say about it. It was good. I enjoyed the glimpse it provided into Illya's backstory. It did contain a little more sex relative to other things than I would have preferred, though.

[I always hesitate to say things like that, for more than one reason. I don't want my fellow fans to feel as if I'm at the slash fiction party trying to make people feel bad for enjoying explicit slash fiction. Nor do I want to come off as someone who enjoys reading about gay male relationships as long as they are cute and romantic rather than sexual. (Which I really don't think is what's going on.) I don't have anything against slash sex scenes. They just bore me most of the time. This is true even though slash fiction as a genre has had a profound positive impact on my life, at several junctures. I've thought about what all that means. I'm not going to go into it here, because that would be weird and probably also boring. I've decided that I should be allowed to talk about my lack of interest, though, in moderation, especially in my own journal. For one thing, I'm sure I'm not the only one.]