foxauxmirror

[foxauxmirror]

Anyone else looks at it and just imagines the way Legasov inhabits this kitchen? Like, peeling some potatoes from that yellow enamel bowl, or flush makaroni from a pot into that cullender, or frying eggs and then washing that lonely plate after breakfast?

Favourite “Soviet life-style” details in Chernobyl HBO (pt. 2)

What everyone sees here: Legasov

What I see here: cullender :) 

(It’s the exactly the same as ours, even corrosion spots look the same)))

[foxauxmirror]

Got to practice a move with my gayer than gay tango instructor for the first time today. Trying to figure out now how to live with the fact that it was one of the most erotic experiences in the past few months of my life.

[foxauxmirror]

OK, so, I made a thing (or, rather, am still making a thing). It’s who knows how many chapters of Soviet femslash featuring the one and only Ulana Khomyuk (also, whatever the tags say:) ).  If Soviet scientists discovering their sexuality and throwing off the yoke of patriarchy and gender paradigm is your cup of tea, enjoy:) (Also, lemme know if you want to be tagged when further chapters are posted). Chapters: 1/? Fandom: Chernobyl (TV 2019) Rating: Not Rated Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Ulana Khomyuk/Marina Gruzinskaya Characters: Ulana Khomyuk, Marina Gruzinskaya Additional Tags: Femslash, Self-Discovery, Masturbation, Sex Toys, Discovering feminism through sex?, Period-Typical Sexism, Soviet trivia, Work In Progress Summary:

Ulana and Marina go back a long way: science and sex. In the end, that's what made Ulana Khomyuk the person that demands meeting the highest possible authority in Chernobyl.

[foxauxmirror]

Bringing this from an AO3 comment thread

Boris: tried to have the last word

Valery: I will do science to it

Boris: regrets

Valery: :}

(credit for this one goes to Rohnoc - dunno if you're on Tumblr!)

Boris: You will be the death of me, Legasov. 

Valery: No, ten thousand roentgen will be the death of you. I'm the darling of your heart, and you know it. 

Boris: regrets

Valery: :}

[foxauxmirror]

I stand with @mycravatundone‘s version: the cat is called Boris and Legasov addresses him as Boris Valerievich, with a formal ‘you’. Whenever Boris Evdokimovich visits, he has to learn not to jump at all the “Boris, no!”, “Boris, stop that!” and “Boris, spit that out!”.

Ridiculous question to the Chernobyl fandom

Every fic I see has Valery’s cat named Sasha. Is this canon and I just missed it? I called myself checking the script but maybe I’m just not seeing. She makes an appearance in my fic but I picked a different name.

@valerafan2 @elenatria

[foxauxmirror]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Chernobyl (TV 2019) Rating: Not Rated Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Valery Legasov/Boris Shcherbina Characters: Valery Legasov, Boris Shcherbina Additional Tags: Pre-Slash, Crack, Seriously though it's crack, Condoms, This set of tags basically says it all Summary:

In the Soviet Union, even condoms are liable for military duty. Valery tries to prove it inefficient. @pottedmusic, here you go!

[foxauxmirror]

So, I'm doing some research on Soviet sex-toys (officially there were none, of course, but you could buy a 'massage device for muscular tonus and vigor' in a drug store and let the pink rubber replaceable head pieces do the job they were meant for) - and I stumble across a rather detailed overview of Soviet-made condoms.

Rumors said, condoms had a double purpose: in war times they can be used when a tourniquet has to be applied in order to stop bleeding or instead of a bucket to carry 2-5 liters of water.

Now I can't stop thinking about a fic where Valery accidentally discovers condoms in Boris' bag/pocket and Boris tries to tell him, honest to god, that it is an old army habit because you never know when your comrade is hurt and must be taken care of.

[foxauxmirror]

Walking along the fence around a kindergarten playground in Belgrade, always on the lookout for people munching on a burek or sandwich from one of the nearby bakeries and screeching the living daylight out of you with their very persistent demands to GIVE THEM ALL THE BREAD NOW.

shoutout to those random peacocks you find in places that are probably unsuitable for a peacock to inhabit in the first place

[foxauxmirror]

And now for the weather forecast...

[foxauxmirror]

How about Boris Shcherbina’s incredible power of will, like that one time that he was diagnosed with asthma but totally refused to accept it, made his way through tons of information to find a set of breathing exercises. When his colleagues would go for a smoke on a break, he would find an empty room and do the exercises. Reportedly, his doctors were shocked when there were no signs of asthma in a few months. 

Bits of historical trivia that I wish were included in Chernobyl (HBO):

1) “Legasov was a romanticist. He wrote poetry; in fact, in early youth he had aspired to become a professional writer, but had been dissuaded by Konstantin Simonov, a leading Soviet literary figure.” © Serhii Plokhy, Chernobyl. (Simonov’s poem featured in episode 2 of the series, I think.)

2) The character of Alla Yaroshynska, a journalist whose boss wouldn’t let her go interview residents of contaminated villages and evacuees, so she lied that she needed a day off to have an abortion, and went to cover the story. A+ act of weaponizing femininity.

What are the moments you wish were included?

[foxauxmirror]

Thanks for tagging, @elenatria! This challenge makes me a touch nostalgic - back when I was a middle-schooler, we used to have little notebooks that we called anketa/voprosnik - ‘a questionnary’. Basically, they were the first social networks, I guess - each page had a set of personal questions, and you could decorate it the way you want, writing in different colors, of drawing stuff, or - if you were THAT cool - using stickers:) So, here we go.  ONE / name/alias Friends call me Lis - it’s Russian for ‘fox’. I’m also considering officially changing my last name to it.  TWO / birthday I’m a winter kid. Also, born on a Sunday. THREE / zodiac sign I’m an Aquarius with a heavy Capricorn influence:) Which basically means being an over-enthusiastic pain-in-the-ass loaded with questionable ideas and, at the same time, a Sheldon Cooper level of an uptight pedant.  FOUR / height Where I’m currently living, I’m a shortie - a fair share of women and almost all men are significantly taller.  FIVE / hobbies Oh, there are a lot of things I love but don’t practice currently - I usually give a crazy amount of my time, energy and passion to a new hobby and feast on it until it no longer drives me. Currently, I’m into tango, also planning to get back to archery once I buy a new bow. Things I’ve always loved and still do is writing, playing board games and theater. I’m also a book-worm and a dedicated shower-singer. SIX / favorite colors If I chose a piece of clothes, it would probably be grey, black or blue. Otherwise, there’s something about all variations of yellow/gold/orange, purple and white that makes me stare and stare. SEVEN / favorite books   This would be a long list! I love everything by Neil Gaiman, Stephen Fry, Jeanette Winterson (her novels were the subject of my PhD thesis), Johnathan Safran Foer. Every summer I re-read Boris Akunin’s “Adventures of Fandorin” - the whole series. Les Miserables - that’s the one I’d bring along to a deserted island. Russian classics is something I’m always up for re-discovering. Loved last three novels by Sarah Waters. One of the recent discoveries that kept me awake way past my bedtime hours was Emma Donoghue. This month I’m determined to catch up on the recent award-winning books by Russian-speaking writers. EIGHT / last song i listened to ‘A Bar in Amsterdam’, Katzenjammer NINE / last film i watched If TV-series count, then it was the last episode of ‘Handmade’s Tale’. TEN / inspiration for muse That’s a tough one! Rather than having a particular person for inspiration, I steal bits here and there: something that makes my heart resonate and calls for a surge inside my soul. It can be a post in social networks, a piece of art or writing, something I see on the street - or, indeed, a person.  ELEVEN / dream job Somewhere in parallel universes, I’m a surgeon, a forensics expert and a crisis negotiator. TWELVE / meaning behind your url  Well, ‘fox’ comes from my nickname. As for the rest of it, I’ve always been good at listening and mirroring people to themselves.  THIRTEEN / top 3 ships Jean Valjean/Inspector Javert from ‘Les Miserables’. Valoris, obviously:) Hm, third place has to be shared between Holmes/Watson and Jeeves/Wooster.  FOURTEEN / lipstick or chapstick Chapstick - though from time to time I put on bright red lipstick. FIFTEEN / currently reading  ‘Sexual Culture in Russia: A Strawberry on a Birch-tree’ (”Клубничка на березке. Сексуальная культура в России”) by Russian sexologist Igor Kon. It’s a thorough and detailed research of the history of Russian sexual culture from the pagan times till our days. I’m re-reading it, actually, and it’s a part of my own research for a fanfic I’m writing right now. Not tagging anyone in particular but feel free to join:)

FOURTEEN PEOPLE I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW BETTER

I was tagged by the gorgeous, precious @thephilosophicaljew <3 ( love your book choices btw).

ONE / name/alias Eleni / Elenatria

TWO / birthday November 8th (happens to be the day when we celebrate the names of the angels Gabriel, Michael, also Angela etc so if you’re an Orthodox Christian it’s easy to remember when I was born ;-P).

THREE / zodiac sign Scorpio

FOUR / height 160 cm

FIVE / hobbies movies and TV shows, drawing fanart, writing fics/meta/headcanons, working out, collecting anything ‘80s (from earrings to clothes to toys to stationary to books, you name it), going to cons, traveling abroad (once a year sigh) and meeting tumblr friends in person. ^^

SIX / favorite colors pink, baby blue.

SEVEN / favorite books  The three musketeers, The hunchback of Notre Dame, Do androids dream of electric sheep?, A clockwork orange, The exorcist, His dark materials, 1984, Brave new world, Solaris, Fahrenheit 451.

EIGHT / last song i listened to Space Oddity by David Bowie.

NINE / last film i watched “Breaking the waves”. I had to watch it in parts because I was cringing like whoa thinking MISOGYNY! MEN RUINING THEIR WOMEN! So not my thing! :-D But as I finished it I realized Bess was basically a metaphor, a composite character, a combination of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. It still bugs me that “Breaking the waves” turned out to have one of the most cliche religious tropes of all, however the ending is so bittersweet and brilliant I can forgive anything.

TEN / inspiration for muse I always was and always will be a shipper. Mostly of slash pairings. I’ve been encouraged by artist friends to draw pin ups, characters in heroic poses, the kind that sells at cons. I can’t. I can only illustrate  stuff that… cannot be sold as prints, love scenes, sex scenes, anything that happens between a couple.

ELEVEN / dream job the one I’m doing now.

TWELVE / meaning behind your url Couldn’t come up with anything funny/witty/original. So I chose my name instead. ;-) 

THIRTEEN / top 3 ships Let’s make them five. So, by chronological order, Thorki, Hiddlesworth, Taikris, LawRusso, Valoris.

FOURTEEN / lipstick or chapstick Lipstick. I eat the rest.

FIFTEEN / currently reading  “Chernobyl prayer” by Svetlana Alexievich. I knew there was ONE book on Chernobyl translated in Greek so I barged into the bookshop and asked for it. Turns out the Greek translation was more expensive so I ended up buying “prayer” instead. …You didn’t know it’s basically the U.K. edition of “Voices from Chernobyl” (on which part of the HBO script was based), did ya? Well neither did I. I thought I had bought a random book and then I realized I was reading Lyudmila and Vasily’s scenes almost verbatim.

“Oh no, guys, I’m done for! She’s even found me here!” (p. 10)

Also the door story Jared keeps mentioning is in there. I freaked out realizing I was reading from The Source without knowing.

And if you thought the show was bad, try reading Lyudmila’s descriptions, they’re more real, more gruesome than what we saw. They’re heart-wrenching. I tell you nothing hurts after reading this book.

(And now I want to find another book, one that shows us where Mazin got his inspiration for what happened at the power plant, and for his portrayals of Legasov and Shcherbina. Can anyone help?)

I tag @drunkardonjunkyard, @sherbal @johnlockismyreligion @tryingtobealwaystrying @randomingoftherandomness @itspradawitch @sleepylovesslash @two-screaming-rats @thegreenmeridian @foxauxmirror @poppiesandappletrees  @feanope  @redrighthandgirl @roominthecastle

[foxauxmirror]

Me: I am super vain and live for the feedback.

Also me: Hm, a 15k words Chernobyl fanfic featuring a so far non-existent femslash pairing with zero mentions on AO3? Hell yeah, let's invest all of the creative writing time I have into it!

Mayday, mayday, send help.

[foxauxmirror]

These are amazing! Got my Chernobyl prints today - these two are making me happy just by looking at them.

@kami-ships-it , thank you so much for your art, love it!

[foxauxmirror]

I can take care of the Russian part. Do you mean songs that were common back in the days? Something that the characters could’ve heard/listened to/sung, @ultimatraditor​?

never knew my life would be like this but I guess I badly need a valoris playlist composed of time-appropriate russian & ukrainian stuff (as in, nothing that could not have been created by the late 1980-s)

[foxauxmirror]

A stream of consciousness thing with a fair share of personal stuff about why write smut featuring two elderly Soviet dudes - aka Valoris

“I get what makes you watch this show for the eighths time”, my husband said, as we sat down to catch up on the two last episodes of Chernobyl that he did not want to watch while I was away for a month. “I don’t get what makes you sacrifice your sleep for two weeks in a row to write about two elderly Soviet dudes having sex”. My husband is the biggest supporter of my writing and my most enthusiastic reader – he’s also the one to discuss all of my (sometimes unlikely) ships with. To top it all, he’s exceptionally cool with me, or anyone else, for that matter, sliding up and down the Kinsey scale, and occasionally takes a trip of his own, like that one time we were watching “The Death of Stalin” and the incredibly doable Jason Isaacs appeared on the screen as Field Marshall Zhukov: “Holy shit”, my husband said for the whole movie theater to hear, “I’d let him have it right here and now”. He doesn’t, however, see anything sexy about Chernobyl-the-series. Come on, fellow fandom members, had anyone told you that you’d be shipping two ‘elderly Soviet dudes’ (and, chances are, find ‘elderly Soviet dudes’ smut hot as hell – can anyone bring a fan in, please?) before Chernobyl, would you have believed it? There are quite a few reasons why this show speaks to me on a very personal level. Some of them have to do with me being a Russian immigrant, currently in my third step-motherland of choice, - the series was quite a cathartic experience in my long-lasting quest to rediscover my national identity (I hadn’t thought much about it until moving to the US at the age of 16 and being bullied at school for being a Russian. Since then, I have constantly been rediscovering what does it mean to me, being a person who was born in the USSR, raised mostly in Russia and who fled this country due to an assortment of disagreements between us. I have grown myself an identity called 'not that kind of Russian’, having to constantly stress that I do not necessarily rhyme with stereotypes about my homeland, or its questionable policy, or whatnot).

Others are of the same nature that sweet @elenatria was so open about in her Hashimoto post. I have a bunch of medical conditions, including thyroid issues, and altogether they make my life rather shitty on some days, also dependant on some limitations to be followed for the rest of my days. It’s not something you easily come to terms with, being chronically ill with no prospect of getting rid of it all, just trying to tame the condition down. I know that at least part of it is Chernobyl-related – the region I’m from was on the way of the radioactive cloud’s trajectory, and we were also getting deliveries of poisoned food. Since that, the region has been scoring very high in the national ranking of thyroid illnesses, including cancer. I was four months when Chernobyl happened. I have never given much thought to that until the series was out. When it was, it took me a gallon of chamomile tea, a hot shower and a couple of shots of local fruit brandy after each episode to come round. During the first viewing most of what I felt was anger and frustration, letting myself think, for the first time in my life, of how my life could’ve been different was it not for… oh, but what’s the use listing the reasons and being angry at something that has been cooking literally for generations to result in the biggest nuclear meltdown in history, affecting who knows how many lives for how long a time, right? @elenatria is so right in quoting Shcherbina: in a way, we’ve gotten off easily. Now, none of these were enough to move me towards shipping a certain nearly 70 years old Soviet bureaucrat and a certain not-too-much-younger bespectacled dorky Soviet scientist. It has to do with other reasons.

I’ve been around people who write slash fanfiction since I was 16. So many stories to witness, so many reasons why people choose to write all those alternative narratives. Of course, there is the sheer fun of it, and the joy of putting words together, and the wonderful not-aloneness of being part of a fandom. And then, for some of us, there are very dark corners of our souls that are packed with unwanted experience. Writing turns into therapy. One reaches for a similarly dark and sinister story, one takes two characters and one makes them… I was going to write 'find love’ but that has a somewhat soapy ring to it, also doesn’t really express what I mean. One takes two characters and makes them feel fucking alive – and yes, more often than not, it is through finding love. Doesn’t matter, whether it’s bromance, or domestic fluff, or the smuttiest smut – come on, it’s still about love, all shapes and sorts of it. Though, at the bottom of it, it’s about being alive. About being able to stick to life in the darkest of times. Like, exploded nuclear reactor dark, you know? Some of us have been there. Some of us are like vinyl records with a slight stutter that comes from a place that was damaged and now bears a scratch. Some of us bear the memory of what’s it like, getting that scratch mark, and hear a slight echo of that memory when you see a damn good shown that features something unseen and yet deadly, something cutting your life in half, something capable of poisoning you pretty quick and leave a long-lasting impact of that poison. So, what do you do? You make life out of it. Like, drawing art or writing your own version of events that includes a big fat chunk of life, be it wrapped into a gift paper of chaste kisses and handholding, or fucking each other’s brains out in a miserable hotel room, or anything in between the two extremities. By letting two people who are overwhelmed by fear, frustration, anger and desperation, discover their own vitality in a place like the surroundings of an exploded nuclear reactor, it is very possible to dance oneself out of a dark place into – oh, well, somewhere else. So, yeah, that’s what makes me sacrifice my sleep for two weeks in a row to write about two elderly Soviet dudes having sex – it’s my way of saying “Don’t you fucking give in on living”. (Also, if someone can’t appreciate the silver fox that is Stellan’s Shcherbina being sex on legs, I feel sorry for that someone:) ). Dixi.

[foxauxmirror]

Someone from the same creative writing program I’m taking: So, is there a particular genre you’re partial to?  Me: Yep. It’s called ‘Trash, frenzy and nothing sacred’.

[foxauxmirror]

I’m probably going to hell for this but oh well... ̶s̶o̶r̶r̶y̶,̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶s̶o̶r̶r̶y̶.̶ Music: Little Big, ‘I’m OK’.