Hieroglyfics Recs

Firefly/Jane Eyre fusion-pastiche-parody, Jayne/Rochester (and really, Jayne/lots of other characters). The great novel Jayne Eyre comes to life before your gorram eyes. A fourth-wall-optional story in which Jayne from Firefly grumpily assumes the title role. Jayne is spot-on perfect, the Bronte characters adapt well, and the narrator is perhaps my favorite character of all.

Don’t be dismayed by the seven chapters - they’re all very short. Read the first two, at least, and I promise you’ll be hooked. Not to mention laughing out loud. You probably do need to have at least a passing acquaintance with both Firefly (or Serenity) and Jane Eyre (book or movie) to fully enjoy the story.

Oh, fine, have an excerpt:

“I have decided to send you away,” Aunt Reed said imperiously. “You are going to school.”

“School?” Jayne replied as though someone had trodden upon his toes. “What you tryin’ to do? Kill me?”

“Yes, actually,” Aunt Reed muttered under her breath. “You shall repair at once to Lowood, from whence I hope I shall never have the undesirious result of seeing you more, young Jayne Eyre.”

“You people sure do like speechifying with the big words,” Jayne said, stomping up the stairs to pack his simple bag of effects, including his dresses, his pantalettes, and his doll.

“I ain’t got no doll!”

It says you do in the book.

“Hell with the book!”

Fine. No doll. The next morning, his cheek unkissed and his kinspeople still happily asleep in their finely draped beds, Jayne boarded a carriage to be transported away to Lowood school, a place renowned for its rampaging bouts of typhus, consumption, and chillblains.

“Does my coach get robbed by a gang of desperate outlaws?”

It’s not that sort of coach.

“Well, it woulda been more interestin’ if it were.”

Sorry, dearheart. Jayne’s coach sped through the misty countryside of England, off to unknown places, where he should be faced with new trials and tribulations to make him prove the goodness within his heart was paramount to all obstacles.

“Narrator, I think you’re gonna be right unhappy with the outcome of that sentence.”

Pirates of the Caribbean, Tia Dalma. It’s a sonnet. It’s gorgeous and evocative.

Being Human: George/Mitchell. And after my complaints about understanding the actors’ accents, you can laugh at me, but what I like best about this story is how utterly British it reads. When I was in HP fandom, you could tell the Americans who were really trying from the Americans who didn’t give a damn, but then something like A.J. Hall’s stories stood out as something entirely different. The deadpan humo(u)r is very much like the show’s, and the story continues the theme of monsters and humanity, of what it is that separates Mitchell in particular from his fellows.