this completely besotted feeling which lowers your work productivity and makes people look at you weirdly on the bus because you're sitting there with a foolish smile on your face writing fic in your head. Oh, same! What is it about this book... I can vividly remember when I was first reading it walking along the corridor at work grinning foolishly to myself and thinking, okay, this is silly, I need to calm down (and then not calming down, at all). Great stuff.

I know what you mean about historical military type settings being great shipping material, too. Besides all the loyalty and hurt/comfort and emotional repression etc., I love exploring what happens to relationships caught up in conflict and war: characters who love each other but have to be enemies, characters who are enemies but end up loving each other. It's what I find so compelling in Rosemary Sutcliff's stories about Roman soldiers, too.

I find I can ignore the often-present issues with settings like that as long as they're not directly relevant to these characters and their stories—I mean, Flight of the Heron is pretty much, we're all gentlemen here, honour and the decent thing and all that, and I don't have to think about what was happening to the peasants as long as they're not actually there in the story. But YMMV, of course.