Rare Women 2014: Given & Received

What I got for Rare Women 2014:

Destiny, by raktajinos
Ancient Egyptian RPF
G • gen • ~1500 words
Ankhesenamun, Nefertiti

Ankhesenamun reflects on the lessons her mother taught her about being Queen.

This was the longest of all possible long-shot matches, but the resulting vignette is a fascinating, intriguing look at one of the most elusive young women in the Egyptian archaeological record. Most of what we know about Ankhesenamun -- the young sister/wife of Tutankhamen -- comes from the latter part of her life; here, we get a speculative yet wholly captivating look at that life's beginning.  I am very happy indeed to have had this written for me.

And what I wrote:

Something in Common for prettysophist
Castle
G • gen • ~3100 words
Alexis Castle, Mandy Sutton

"Six hundred numbers in this phone, and guess how many of those I could call for help with this stuff." Before Alexis could answer, Mandy Sutton made a game-show buzzer noise. "That would be one."

I matched on Castle for the second time in a row; having done a Martha story last year, I put the focus this year on Alexis and followed up the threads from the 6th-season episode "Limelight", featuring pop star Mandy Sutton (a character presented as sort of a Miley Cyrus/Lindsay Lohan fusion).  

Meanwhile, back at the Castle

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD for the Castle season finale.

In a word....oy.

Not surprisingly, such reaction as I've seen so far to the Castle season finale has been mostly...less than pleased.  Clearly, we wanted to see the wedding actually completed onscreen, even if it Jossed the hundreds of fanfic versions thereof we've written over the past several years.  (No, I haven't gotten mine done yet, though I swear I intend to finish that particular piece one of these days.) 

Me? On one hand, I have to agree with a lot of the analysis.  The whole business of an actual legal Vegas marriage?  I can believe in teen wild-child Kate going off to Vegas with scruffy rogue Rogan. That's entirely plausible. But a legally valid marriage that the feds somehow failed to turn up when they background-checked Kate for her new DC job back at the start of the season?  That just doesn't scan.  The writers should definitely have finessed that plot point in the opposite direction, with the problem being a snafu in the New York court records (probably instigated by Rogan one way or another). 

Nor am I happy about the cliffhanger ending -- though not, mostly, for the same reasons I'm seeing in most of the backsplash so far.  Evidently (based on an interview with showrunner Andrew Marlowe) the Castle snatch is a setup for a new "mythology" arc -- and that's not a good sign at all, because the one thing the show's writing team has consistently done badly since day one is to manage their mythology arcs.

Ah, well, this is why we have fixit fic.