Alara.net/Personal Archives/Alara's X-Books Fic

Personal Fanfiction Website
Website:	Alara's X-Books Fic
Author:	Alara Rogers
Dates:	1998-2004 (last update)
Fandom:	X-Men
URL:	(via Wayback Aug 5/04)
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Alara's X-Books Fic is an archive for X-Men and related character fanfiction written by Alara Rogers.

This mini-archive is where all of my own stuff is stored. I started to find that primarily using my character archives for my own work, and hiding my subpage under my "Aleph Press Page", was straitjacketing... I've written two Common People stories and one fic which mentions Xavier, Magneto and Doug Ramsey but doesn't have any of them as characters, so it qualifies for none of my archives. Instead of using story summaries, on this page you'll find author's notes describing why I wrote a story or what I was shooting for.

Crossroads X - Alara's X-Book Fic page description

Contents

Notes in italics by Alara.

Comics stories

• All About Eve: There are cliches in Xbooks fanfic I get real tired of. One of them is "human hate and fear of mutants leads humans to beat mutants up and torment them." Hello, mutants aren't gays or blacks or nerdy geeks-- they have superpowers. Wouldn't people be scared of messing with them? This story was written directly about that cliche. It's also the first written, though not the first chronologically, in an unnamed future-Xavier School-trainees story arc based on extrapolating from a What If? where the All-New X-Men never formed for the Krakoa mission.
• And After The Battle: Another thing I can't stand is "Character X and Character Y are destined true loves, so I must demonize Character Z, who loves Character X." I wrote this to demonstrate to Rogue/Remy fans that you could get Joseph out of the picture romantically without making him or anyone villainous or unsympathetic.
• At The Crossroads: Storm started talking to me one day and here's what she had to say. The poetic, repetitive language is something of an experiment. As for the pairing, come on, aren't they obviously made for each other? :-)
• At A Distance: The first fic I wrote without Magneto since 1993 was written for Kaylee's "Guess the Author" challenge. This story was inspired by Sevenall's "Walking Through the Rooms In My Head" and was intended to answer why Xavier has had hardly any personal contact with Lilandra since UXM #276.
• Body And Soul: The Body Snatcher: Adult. Unfinished. Rated adult for rape, violence, and mature themes. One of my most ambitious and disturbing works, in which I respond to facile comic book treatment of torture, imprisonment and rape by taking the strongest character I write and showing that the strength to endure such horrors doesn't come from being proud and unbending, but from being willing to do what it takes to survive. Also, like a lot of my work, deals with gender issues by putting a man in female form and making him and everyone else deal with it.
• Comicverse Drabbles: Two short-shorts (one a drabble, one too long for drabblage) written for challenges on the Livejournal community X-Men100. One is based on New X-Men #138 (I think; it's the one where they find the black box Magneto left behind in Genosha), and the other is a silly Pokemon crossover about Joseph meeting Mewtwo.
• A Confession: People frequently write "Charles gone bad" stories in which he abuses people sexually, founds cults, clamps down on dissent, mind-controls his students... all things that Charles has been shown not to do. The one weak point I think people do not exploit is that, for all his rhetoric about humans and mutants living in harmony, Charles is obviously much more afraid of the dangers presented by mutants than the dangers presented to them. Here, then, is my "Evil Charles" story, which ended up portraying a man not so much evil as horrifically misguided and tragically dedicated to a horrible cause.
• The Damned Have No Right To Weep: A companion piece to "Innocent Heart, Guilty Memories" by Melodist, written in response to it. I was disturbed by the events of that story and Magneto's off-panel death. I wanted to see Magneto's perspective on what he had done, and some remorse. So I wrote this.
• A Death In New Orleans: An early take on a Rogue origin, before XMU #4 came out, and without me remembering what little Rogue had revealed of her origin previously. I'm not too fond of this, it's overly melodramatic and demonizes the father while making a psychic vampire assassin seem a worthy heroine.
• The End of the World: This is a true story more or less. Change "Charles Xavier" to "Alara Rogers" and you have me circa October 1999.
• Five Things That Never Happened To Erik Lehnsherr: The "five things" meme is to describe five AU's in the life of a character, preferably AU's caused by something different happening to the character or a different choice they made. I've seen it done for movieverse Magneto, but not for the comics' version until I did it.
• Habits: In researching the Holocaust, I found interesting bits and pieces to flesh Magneto out, like people who hoard food. I used Kitty as the foil for this because of her Jewish background and the fact that Kitty is the most likely to confront Magneto over a weird personal habit.
• Heart's Desire: My first Magneto story, and I'm not too happy with it either. I love the theme, but by underplaying what's really going on in favor of Magneto's dreamworld, I am sort of writing a story where "it was all a dream!" and the actions within the story itself seem pointless.
• The Hiding Place: Written as a response to Magneto's apparent death at the end of "Eve of Destruction." I still like to believe it's true and the guy who's been running around since is not Magneto.
• Hobson's Choice: A theory about Joseph. I always wondered whatever happened to Mutant Alpha.
• In Love and War: The first "origin genderswap", changeover of a character from the time of their birth affecting their whole history, I conceived of in the MU was changing Charles to a woman. What struck me was how very closely I could adhere to the existing Xavier/Magneto relationship and still introduce sex and marriage. Of course, following the canon script, it would end badly. So after calling for a "Breakup Challenge" one Valentine's Day when I was sick of soppy romance, I wrote this story.
• Magneto Vs. Spam and the Telnet Connection From Hell: On the Magneto Mailing List, I came down on someone for a chain letter, which prompted the discussion, "what would Magneto do about spam?"
• The Moebius Arc: An alternate history of the X-Universe consisting mostly of short stories. Since it has its own page I won't list it all.
• The Mother of All Retcons: A pregnant Lorna Dane escapes from Sinister and flees smack into the middle of an enormous plot complication. Humor.
• Mother to Mother: Written for the Thelma and Louise ficathon for Apathy. I don't buy Mystique's explanation of Nightcrawler's birth. Here's what I think really happened.
• The Night Before A Funeral: Since no one guessed who I was for the first "Guess the Author" story, I wrote a second one under the same pseudonym to see if people could figure it out with two iterations. They didn't.
• Powderkeg: I made the Power Swap challenge, in which mutants switch their powers around or switch with humans, specifically for this. I wanted to address the complexity of domestic violence in a story about a strong-willed, dominating person who stays with a physically stronger person who is violent to them because the violent one is emotionally weak and the stronger personality feels a need to protect the weaker personality, also the degree to which violence can be caused not by an evil person wanting to torment a loved one but the intersection of two different kinds of damage. People didn't get it. Everyone noticed Erik's emotional abuse of Magda but most overlooked the fact that SHE BROKE HIS ARM WITH AN IRON TABLE. I can't help but think it's hard to write a story about DV in which the man is the victim, and write it about the complexity of real world DV and not the cartoon image of the evil abusive spouse, without having people try to pin the DV on the man.
• Psych_30 Magneto: The Psych_30 challenge is to write 30 short fics on prompts that come from psychology (such as "multiple personality", "delusion", "addiction", etc.) I am trying to write one per month about Magneto. Most of these have ended up as character study bits exploring his crazier side, but then, what should I expect from a prompt list that comes from abnormal psychology terms? :-)
• Raison d'etre: Unfinished. I thought maybe by having Magneto meet Berg Katse I could keep going writing Gatchaman fics. Turns out it didn't work. I will try to finish this though.
• Revenant: Chris Delaney was talking about Xavier disabling Magneto by turning him into a happy vegetable with no aggression centers in his brain. That inspired this.
• Silence: Kaylee proposed a Disability Challenge. I wasn't going to follow through because I had plans to blind XXY Polaris, but then I thought about the fact that unlike blindness, which being EM-based a Magneto-powered character could work around, deafness is nothing Magneto's powers could solve.
• Twin Poles: Journeyman of Magnetism: Unfinished. My first take on Joseph's origin, and frighteningly close to what it turned out to be in some regards. Has all my favorite fetishes: clones, superintelligent mysterious female scientists with sinister agendas, apocalyptic futures, Magneto being depressed... One of my favorites, so why isn't it done? I don't know.
• Unity: A Letter To A Friend: Also inspired by Chris, who wanted to know what would happen if Magneto were the woman and Charles were the man. Charles is much less of a gender traditionalist than Erik canonically, but ambitious women in societies that restrain female power have always pursued their goals anyway, through men. Even still, Erika refused to pursue Charles' goal because it's Charles; she informed me while writing this story that she pursues Charles' dream not out of love and not out of belief in it but because her exposure to humans through Charles has made her feel the alternative is too frightening to contemplate.

Ultimate X-Men stories:

• The Hollow Man: A character study of Ultimate Xavier. Ultimate Magneto is a psycho loon and wholly uninteresting, but Ultimate Xavier is just twisted enough to interest me.

The XXY Universe:

A shared world I edit and write for, where all the mutants have been born of opposite sexes. The stories I've written include:

• XXY: First Genesis: The launch of the XXY Universe. John Grey joins X-Factor, and the team must fight Polaris (a gender-swapped Magneto.) Nothing to say about this story except that it had to exist.
• XXY: At Home With the Mutant Menace: A day in the life of the Mutant Menace, the counterpart to the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants in the XXY genderswap universe. This story will probably make no sense if you don't visit the XXY page first. Written as a warmup to get familiar with the swapped characters.
• XXY: Bittersweet: Adult. In the XXY Universe, Carolyn Xavier and Erika Magnus had a brief affair in Israel. This is the story of how it began. Explicit f/f. Based on a true story, and no, I won't give you the details.

Common People stories:

The Common People (TCP) is a genre of stories about original-character Marvel mutants leading ordinary lives, not spandexers. I've written two stories in this series, the first for Sheldon Burnell's Original Powers challenge and the second because I was a little tired of "all the humans hate the mutants" TCPs.

• Five Minutes: Sheldon Burnell proposed the "Unusual Powers" challenge-- write about a power that's never been written. I dusted off a Mary Sue from my teen years and toned her waaaay down to write this.
• The Mother of a Mutant: Another anti-cliche story. "Human parents hate their mutant children and throw them out!" waah waah waah. After reading about parents who beat a child with a tail to death and are murdered by her fire-controlling sister, I got fed up enough to write this. Mutancy is genetic; most parents would not blame their children for a mutation that, after all, they passed on. They would think of it in terms of how it might hurt their kid, not generally in terms of how their kid is evil. Again, mutants aren't gays or Wiccans. It's not a lifestyle choice and no one mistakenly thinks it is.

Movieverse stories:

• Movieverse Drabbles: Also written for X-Men100.  Two Magneto/Xavier bits -- one fluffy, one tragic -- and a Mystique one.
• Desperate Memories Lie: Magneto/Xavier, explicit sex, takes place while they're building Cerebro together. A remix of Amanda Lee/Henrika's "Shadows of the Past". As a remix, I think this one is okay; it's not really the sort of story I'd have written myself. The title comes from the Pink Floyd song "The Hero's Return", which is quoted at the start of the story but not the part that has the title, oddly enough. The lyric the title comes from goes "Though they'll never fathom it, behind my sarcasm desperate memories lie."
• Broken Home: An AU powerswap written for Minisinoo's take on the powerswap challenge-- give movieverse Scott and Jean different powers, and others as well if you want. This is actually a Scott&Erik story, not something I frequently do, although I think there's a fascinating potential in the relationship between those two, whether in comicverse or movieverse. (Not slashy at all, mind; I don't mean "relationship" as anything more than human interaction.)
• Similar Features: Unfinished. Crossover with Star Trek. Charles Xavier rescues a mutant-- if that's what he is-- who appears as either a ball of light or a dark-haired man and who seems to think Xavier's name is Jean-Luc.