thebaconfat: What's the deal with you and White Collar? I think i have maybe watched one episode but whenever you bring it up I'm startled because I never would have figured it would be a show you'd be into.

Ahaha, well, one thing you have to remember is that the things I tend to get wildly, fanficcingly into are the thigns that make me fall absolutely in love with their potential and then annoy me enough to make me go "I NEED TO FIX THIS. AND THIS. AND THIS AND THIS AND THIS." So this may turn into a post of me squeeing over half of the show and ranting about the rest. We'll see.

( Anyway, on with the con. )

Hey, it was less ranty than I thought! More rambledy, though.

Of late I've been falling out of love with the ongoing White Collar canon, which is just normal progression for me with shows; I fell out of love with Stargate: SG-1 over late S7 through S8, and eventually just stopped watching. I took my gathered fandom love and headcanon and parked myself on a little parcel of magibrain land and just considered that my SG-1. In the grand scheme of things, I think my White Collar may be concentrated around in S2, with occasional forays out of it.

AO3 informs me that it has no fics in which Elizabeth Burke hangs out with Abby Bartlet, and this makes me sad in the deep recesses of my soul.

This is the elevator that leads to the White Collar offices.
From this, we know that the floors at least go up to 24.
We don't see whether or not this is the top of the button plate, though.

For ficcing purposes, I need to know exactly how high the buttons on the plate go.

Larger image under cut.

( I just want to do something screwy with the number of floors in this building. LOOKS LIKE HALF MY WORK'S BEEN DONE FOR ME. )

Considering that the sets and props department obviously didn't think I'd ever need to find out many floors were in the building by counting the buttons in the elevator, I decided to just ask the internet how many floors the NYC federal building has.

Cue Wikipedia:

The Jacob K. Javits Federal Office Building at 26 Federal Plaza on Foley Square in the Civic Center district of Manhattan, New York City houses many Federal government agencies, and, at over 41 stories, is the tallest federal building in the United States.

...

Sometimes I don't know why I bother doing research.

(Counting the windows suggests to me that "over 41 stories" means "41 floors of offices and a ground floor that probably has a lobby or something". I can work with that. Though I need to come up with a plausible reason for Neal to accidentally hit a floor button that's twenty floors off his actual destination.) (It would be a lot easier if the federal building were only 24 floors tall, to be honest.) (I wonder if I could just claim that it was. Would anyone except me care?) (I could claim that in White Collar 'verse, the federal building was at 41 Federal Plaza and had 26 stories...)

This is a very small photo appreciation post for White Collar's tendency to put Neal in scenes with people or objects which make him look like a tiny thing.

( It just makes me really happy for reasons I can't articulate. )

That's it, White Collar writers. That's how to make me happy. Put Neal in a scene with someone 6'5", and/or with ostentatiously oversized furnishings.

...I find myself vaguely wanting to write A/B/O fic, except less with sex and more with navigating tricky power dynamics and slews of body dysphoria, and with a heavily tweaked version of the whole A/B/O premise.

(Basically, the idea in my brain is that Alpha, Beta and Omega are just psychophysical modes people operate in, and while people tend to have "baseline" modes that they operate in for long stretches – sometimes even their entire lives – people can switch from mode to mode in response to various physical or psychological stimuli. Like, a baseline beta might find themselves going omega or alpha after a major trauma, for example. And there would be drugs and such which could affect what mode people operated in. Plus, while the modes would have specific physiological effects – people operating in alpha mode might have overactive adrenal glands and produce more testosterone, while people operating in omega mode would experience heat and all its attendant fun – it would only affect personality in as much as, say, gayness does. In that there would be a ton of stereotypes and there would be established cultures which people might or might not do any social commerce with, and aside from that, it's not really something you could tell by looking at someone.)

(...though you could probably tell it by scent. Because that seems to be a thing?)

(Also, people would be able to resist physical urges, with varying degrees of difficulty from "I am having this strong craving right now!" to "I am experiencing this with the intensity of an addiction." And there would probably be a lot of discussion on medical and political stages about that.)

I don't know. I've read a grand total of two A/B/O fics in my life – feels like the start of something and The toppiest girl in the school, and ironically neither of them is for a fandom I'm actually in – and I feel like this may just be a continuation of my picking at the assumed conventions of tropes I don't actually write or read (see also), which always makes me feel a little weird. But I feel like, given some of the discussion in the prompt thread for feels like the start of something, it might be a weird little space to explore which other people are also interested in seeing explored. And it does seem like there's a healthy movement in A/B/O writing areas to dissect the heck out of the trope, from what I've read.

Of course, it also doesn't help that I already have way too many other projects clamoring for my attention. Including the one where Neal is stuck on a magical Greyhound for five years.




This is one of the ways you can tell I'm ace. I find tropes that are deeply rooted in kinky sex and then expend considerable time and energy carefully plucking out the sexybits so I can nest in the kinky power dynamics. <_< One of these days I'll write and post my WC OT3 fic and it will be 80,000 words of neither sex nor romance, continuing my trend of OT3 fic which is neither sex nor romance, and everyone will be able to tell me that I'm doing it wrong. AND I WILL LAUGH FROM ATOP MY ASEXY THRONE, I SHALL EAT THE CAKE THAT IS MY BIRTHRIGHT, AND KNOW THAT I AM THE OVERMIND, THE ETERNAL WILL OF THE ACE COMMU – no, wait, that got away from me, sorry.

Title: Three Times Neal Ran (and one time he was found) – 8. Checkmate
Index Post: [Fic][White Collar] Three Times Neal Ran (and one time he was found) – Index

---

( In which checkmate. )

Title: Three Times Neal Ran (and one time he was found) – 6. Action
Index Post: [Fic][White Collar] Three Times Neal Ran (and one time he was found) – Index

---

( In which reversal, gambits, mistrust. )

Title: Three Times Neal Ran (and one time he was found) – 4. Escalation
Index Post: [Fic][White Collar] Three Times Neal Ran (and one time he was found) – Index

---

( In which recognition, revelation. )

Title: Three Times Neal Ran (and one time he was found) – 2. Searching
Index Post: [Fic][White Collar] Three Times Neal Ran (and one time he was found) – Index

---

( In which uncertainties, a trail, a hunt. )

Title: Three Times Neal Ran (and one time he was found)
Rating: T.
Genre: Drama, character study, some angst, some action.
Beta: sholio read through this one, and helped me gently untangle some of the snarls!
Continuity: Wow, that's a difficult one. Pilot AU, Out of the Box AU, Wanted and Most Wanted AU, and then some mostly-canon-compliant stuff sometime early-mid S4 after Parting Shots but before Compromising Positions.
Prerequisites: Primarily the Pilot, Out of the Box, Wanted, and Most Wanted, though there are scattered references to other eps, and you should probably have watched through Parting Shots or a bunch of background references to canon are going to elude you.
Summary: There are times when you can run, times when you have to run, and times when you'd better pray to be found.
Disclaimer: I would never even dream of running off with White Collar; that's all Fox and USA. The opinions expressed herein are the properties of the characters and not of Mekhi Phifer. Objects in recollection may be closer than they appear. If fic is inhaled, call a poison-control center immediately. Questions, comments and construction equipment can be left in replies or directed to magistrata(at)gmail(dot)com. Thank you for reading!

	DW	AO3
1. Waking	Dreamwidth	Archive
2. Searching	Dreamwidth	Archive
3. Fraying	Dreamwidth	Archive
4. Escalation	Dreamwidth	Archive
5. Threat	Dreamwidth	Archive
6. Action	Dreamwidth	Archive
7. Abandon	Dreamwidth	Archive
8. Checkmate	Dreamwidth	Archive
9. Found	Dreamwidth	Archive