Friday Fannish 5
From fannish5: Five best speeches in your fandoms: what made them great?
5) Spike, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. "You're not friends. You'll never be friends. You'll be in love 'til it kills you both. You'll fight, and you'll shag, and you'll hate each other 'til it makes you quiver, but you'll never be friends. Real love isn't brains, children. It's blood. It's blood screaming inside you to work its will. I may be love's bitch, but at least I'm man enough to admit it."
I love the bluntness of this, and it always makes me think of Stoppard's piece on blood, love, and rhetoric from Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead: "We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see."
4) Fraser, due South: "Where I come from the challenges are quite different. There are no drug dealers or pimps, few thieves to bother with. There's only the environment, and surviving in the face of it is the challenge of the Inuit. A mother gives birth somewhere out on a glacier field, hundreds of miles from the nearest outpost and she knows the odds are stacked against her son even living to see the spring; disease, or the lack of food, the elements. And even if he should survive and grow to be a boy, she knows very well that all he has to do is lose his footing on the smooth surface of a glacier and that will be that. In other words, she should know that her son cannot live. So, why should she try? Well, I know this woman. I helped deliver her son. She was weak and undernourished, but the next morning she stood up and she picked her child up in her arms and and she set out again into the blinding snow and I think... I think that was the single most courageous act I've ever seen."
This gets right down to the basics and reminds you they're basic for a reason.
3) LaCroix, Forever Knight: "Who knows the pain of death better--he who gasps his final breath, or those of us who must breathe the foul air of his decomposition? Who bears the greater burden--the cold bones of the dead man in his coffin, or the spine of the pallbearer carrying his load? No one knows this burden better than we, dear listener, we who have seen so many pass. I see you sagging, laden. And yet, I have to ask, is it grief that weighs so heavily on your shoulders, or is it that should've, would've, could've fool's game called guilt?"
That end summary of guilt is possibly the most concise definition I've ever agreed with.
2) Krycek, X-Files. "Hear this, Agent Mulder. Listen very carefully because what I'm telling you is deadly serious. There is a war raging, and unless you pull your head out of the sand, you and I and about five billion other people are going to go the way of the dinosaur. I'm talking planned invasion. The colonization of this planet by an extraterrestrial race. ... Kazakhstan, Skyland Mountain, the site in Pennsylvania. They're all alien lighthouses where the colonization will begin, but where now, a battle's being waged. A struggle for heaven and earth. Where there is one law: fight or die. And one rule: resist or serve."
Oh, look: Krycek's real motivations! (Yup. YMMV, but this is mine.) And regardless, it makes a very good point: This is our planet, and we'd better pay attention if we want to live on it.
1) Methos, Highlander: "I killed. But I didn't just kill fifty, I didn't kill a hundred. I killed a thousand. I killed ten thousand. And I was good at it. And it wasn't for vengeance. It wasn't for greed. It was because - I liked it. Cassandra was nothing. Her village was nothing. Do you know who I was? I was Death. Death - Death on a horse. When mothers warned their children that the monster would get them, that monster was me. I was the nightmare that kept them awake at night. Is that what you want to hear? The answer is yes, oh yes."
Someone who's 'just a guy' can also have been (or be) a nightmare monster? Yeah. And isn't that the damn truth.
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5) Spike, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. "You're not friends. You'll never be friends. You'll be in love 'til it kills you both. You'll fight, and you'll shag, and you'll hate each other 'til it makes you quiver, but you'll never be friends. Real love isn't brains, children. It's blood. It's blood screaming inside you to work its will. I may be love's bitch, but at least I'm man enough to admit it."
I love the bluntness of this, and it always makes me think of Stoppard's piece on blood, love, and rhetoric from Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead: "We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see."
4) Fraser, due South: "Where I come from the challenges are quite different. There are no drug dealers or pimps, few thieves to bother with. There's only the environment, and surviving in the face of it is the challenge of the Inuit. A mother gives birth somewhere out on a glacier field, hundreds of miles from the nearest outpost and she knows the odds are stacked against her son even living to see the spring; disease, or the lack of food, the elements. And even if he should survive and grow to be a boy, she knows very well that all he has to do is lose his footing on the smooth surface of a glacier and that will be that. In other words, she should know that her son cannot live. So, why should she try? Well, I know this woman. I helped deliver her son. She was weak and undernourished, but the next morning she stood up and she picked her child up in her arms and and she set out again into the blinding snow and I think... I think that was the single most courageous act I've ever seen."
This gets right down to the basics and reminds you they're basic for a reason.
3) LaCroix, Forever Knight: "Who knows the pain of death better--he who gasps his final breath, or those of us who must breathe the foul air of his decomposition? Who bears the greater burden--the cold bones of the dead man in his coffin, or the spine of the pallbearer carrying his load? No one knows this burden better than we, dear listener, we who have seen so many pass. I see you sagging, laden. And yet, I have to ask, is it grief that weighs so heavily on your shoulders, or is it that should've, would've, could've fool's game called guilt?"
That end summary of guilt is possibly the most concise definition I've ever agreed with.
2) Krycek, X-Files. "Hear this, Agent Mulder. Listen very carefully because what I'm telling you is deadly serious. There is a war raging, and unless you pull your head out of the sand, you and I and about five billion other people are going to go the way of the dinosaur. I'm talking planned invasion. The colonization of this planet by an extraterrestrial race. ... Kazakhstan, Skyland Mountain, the site in Pennsylvania. They're all alien lighthouses where the colonization will begin, but where now, a battle's being waged. A struggle for heaven and earth. Where there is one law: fight or die. And one rule: resist or serve."
Oh, look: Krycek's real motivations! (Yup. YMMV, but this is mine.) And regardless, it makes a very good point: This is our planet, and we'd better pay attention if we want to live on it.
1) Methos, Highlander: "I killed. But I didn't just kill fifty, I didn't kill a hundred. I killed a thousand. I killed ten thousand. And I was good at it. And it wasn't for vengeance. It wasn't for greed. It was because - I liked it. Cassandra was nothing. Her village was nothing. Do you know who I was? I was Death. Death - Death on a horse. When mothers warned their children that the monster would get them, that monster was me. I was the nightmare that kept them awake at night. Is that what you want to hear? The answer is yes, oh yes."
Someone who's 'just a guy' can also have been (or be) a nightmare monster? Yeah. And isn't that the damn truth.
Original post on Dreamwidth | Leave a comment on DW | Read
comments on DW