How you turn my world you precious thing
I'm not sure what it is lately, maybe it's hormones, maybe it's the upcoming masquerade (eeee, I ordered my dress and got my wings, now I just need to find a mask!), maybe it's rediscovering a fandom that I loved and have sorely missed, I don't know, but I am seriously obsessed with Labyrinth these days.
I ought to watch the movie again, just to get it out of my head, but I'm not sure that will help. Listening to the soundtrack certainly hasn't.
Nor has reading fanfic--and...well, maybe this little facet of my personality isn't so well known as I thought, so I won't preface this with 'anyone who knows me very well,' and will simply say this: I have Issues with fanfic, so the fact that I'm reading any at all is strange in and of itself.
Why issues with fanfic?
Well, one reason really depends on the genre--I had to stop reading Harry Potter fanfic because I was starting to get the book canon vs the fanfic canon all messed up. If the writer isn't finished with the series, there's a big hazard that I'll get the worlds mixed up, and...yeah. I've tried very hard to stay away from HP fanfic, though for anyone who's interested in a Severus Snape mentors Harry kind of thing, I strongly recommend Aspen in the Sunlight's 'A Year Like None Other,' which is on skyehawke (archive.skyehawke.com, click on Popular Stories, hers is right at the top). But that one fic aside, I don't read HP stuff anymore--I can't. LotR is somewhat safer, as is Labyrinth, since the stories are finished, but...
The other problem I have with fanfic is that oh so much of it is written by either 15 year old girls who have no idea what life is really like, people who want to insert themselves into the story so make horrible Mary Sue-ish original characters, or people who have no command of the English language and refuse to get a beta reader so instead force their reader to try and figure out just what the fuck they're talking about because they don't know how to format dialogue and can't spell worth a damn and...arrrg. Yes, I am a self-admitted grammar nazi. Yes, I know I am not perfect, not by any stretch of the imagination, but if your summary is full of AOL or l33t speak, or if you misspell names of the main characters, or forget that there are supposed to be spaces after punctuation marks, well, sorry. I won't read your stuff.
ANYway. So, I've been reading a lot of Labyrinth fanfic lately--all Jareth/Sarah, of course--and have had to wade through a ton of CRAP to find a few of the jewels that I have, and none of this has helped me solve the obsession. Hell, maybe it's caused it, for all that I know. But if anyone's interested, I can make some recommendations.
But I'll be there for you,
As the world falls down