B-S-G ... S-G-A... M-O-U-S-(RAT)
Hello!
I have been taking a little LJ break, so sorry if I have neglected anyone's comments- seems to be some sort of compulsion.
It has not, however, been a fandom break, oh no. Due to a combination of luck and inspiration, I found out last week why bittorrent didn't work for me, got it to work, and obtained all the eps of Battlestar Galactica (the new one) before BT crapped out again. Thankfully (from my current p of v), there aren't so many episodes yet, and I have watched all of them hungrily. The series is great in some ways- big budget, some terrific acting, writing, and effects, and it feels fresh and current. It's also got quite a bit of sort of mystical stuff that I don't much care for and is a military drama through and through, which is not, historically, my favorite thing. But I am gripped. I wish I trusted them to at least leave open the possibility of a rational explanation for everything, but what do you want from a show that's so cavalier about gravity.
I've also watched about half a dozen eps of Stargate: Atlantis - it's kind of boring, IMO, and I don't really see what lights people up about the characters or the setting (though Sheppard is certainly adorable, and there's a general sweetness about him and the show; like I said to Elgoose, it's a throwback). It is, I guess, classic slash fodder; if Sheppard and McKay are buddies I haven't gotten to that yet, but it has loads and loads of the language I hereby dub Geeksass. It's Geeksasstic! It's all Geeksass to me. Anyway, you know, all those derring do-ish, insouciant, incredibly geeky jokes.
But what watching a few eps of SG:A enables is the reading of SG:A fic, of which I've read about a half-dozen this afternoon, mostly very short. There's some terribly witty and smart stuff from Speranza, but what most knocked my socks off was Julad's Thicker than Water. Like the show, the story feels like a throwback in some ways; it's a sort of very modern and subtle curtainfic. Nothing really bad happens in the sci-fi/fanfic scheme of things- no torture, death, near-death, anguish etc- but something bad does happen towards the end, which isn't that bad really, but it's petty, ordinary, real-world bad and sad and then everything is quietly OK again, the story having taken an incredibly quiet- dare I say Canadian- stand against injustice.
There's another thing at the end which I also won't specify because I want this to be totally unspoiling, but it's something funny that comes right after the bad and just encapsulates something about a certain tradition of slash for me, in its current incarnation, just brilliantly.
There's this thing Freud says about dirty jokes, an origin story: originally a man tells the dirty joke to a woman to turn her on, but later men tell them to each other where women can overhear, and later still where they can't, and the woman is sort of a phantom presence there, being titillated and insulted on an imaginary plane. There's something in that about slash, but it's different obviously- these male/female things are never symmetrical. But this bit of humor in Julad's story, though not a dirty joke at all, struck me as the kind of joke that men are allowed to make to other men about masculinity and that imply a phantom woman- a mom, in fact, who wants you to eat a nutritious breakfast (cue N. Chodorow, flitting by upstage)- and then when a female slasher waltzes in and makes something like it, lovingly, in the context of slash, without permission or to impress a male reader (or is there a phantom male in the slash reading/writing exchange?), it can just be incredibly fresh. As Julad's is.
Anyway, all this John/Rodney has been very sweet, and I was thinking wryly of HP. (I have a couple friends from HP who are now writing SGA, but I haven't read their's yet, so I can't comment on that angle). But the last 2 HP stories I read, of any length that is, were Isolde's Twelve Days and Ellen Fremedon's Long Summer Trilogy (which are both absolutely splendid- I think Ellen's is her best work yet.) Like Julad's story (which covers a two week vacation with Rodney's sister in Canada), these are both vacation stories, wee idylls. Except it's HP, so the idylls revolve around stuff like dubious consent, death, near death, war, dearth, pain, and extremely severe neurosis.
It seems- and maybe I've got it all wrong, I've only read a few- but preliminary findings do seem to suggest that it's possible to tell a perfectly good story about Rodney and John in which they love each other. Not "we hate each other so much/are so incredibly repressed/etc that you have to read a whole novel to find out how we ever got to kiss" love each other, not "fuck or die" love each other, not "we are literally the only two people in the world who can stand each other especially since almost everyone else has died hideously" love each other, but "we like each other and like having sex and keep liking each other more and more and respect each other and hell, love each other" love each other. Huh.
And yes, I do recall HP shmoop, once upon a time. But that was in another country, and besides, Sirius is dead.
(No, I realize it's still being written, I just wanted to say that.)
So I've gone on and on and I guess my in-depth remarks on BSG will have to wait. But I will confess that (a) I've read a few BSG stories but nothing I liked much. Any recs? and (b) I've spewed out a few thousand words of BSG fic myself, but... Well, 2 bits are scenes for what I would like to be a longish story, but I have the usual problem for me, which is that I know what I want to say-- like, how I want to intervene in canon (my story is called "Promised Land," and, if you watch the show and know me, you may be able to guess how I want to nudge it)-- but I don't actually know what the story should be. So I can write the first conversation between Cmdr Adama and Starbuck, but then what happens? I can think of settings and situations and even secrets, but not events or a trajectory.
The other bit that found it's way across the keyboard is - I'll say it - uber-cliché shmoopy het prisoner porn, Kara/Lee, yes, the most boring obvious uncool thing you can imagine, and no, you will never ever see it. At least not under my name. :)
I have been taking a little LJ break, so sorry if I have neglected anyone's comments- seems to be some sort of compulsion.
It has not, however, been a fandom break, oh no. Due to a combination of luck and inspiration, I found out last week why bittorrent didn't work for me, got it to work, and obtained all the eps of Battlestar Galactica (the new one) before BT crapped out again. Thankfully (from my current p of v), there aren't so many episodes yet, and I have watched all of them hungrily. The series is great in some ways- big budget, some terrific acting, writing, and effects, and it feels fresh and current. It's also got quite a bit of sort of mystical stuff that I don't much care for and is a military drama through and through, which is not, historically, my favorite thing. But I am gripped. I wish I trusted them to at least leave open the possibility of a rational explanation for everything, but what do you want from a show that's so cavalier about gravity.
I've also watched about half a dozen eps of Stargate: Atlantis - it's kind of boring, IMO, and I don't really see what lights people up about the characters or the setting (though Sheppard is certainly adorable, and there's a general sweetness about him and the show; like I said to Elgoose, it's a throwback). It is, I guess, classic slash fodder; if Sheppard and McKay are buddies I haven't gotten to that yet, but it has loads and loads of the language I hereby dub Geeksass. It's Geeksasstic! It's all Geeksass to me. Anyway, you know, all those derring do-ish, insouciant, incredibly geeky jokes.
But what watching a few eps of SG:A enables is the reading of SG:A fic, of which I've read about a half-dozen this afternoon, mostly very short. There's some terribly witty and smart stuff from Speranza, but what most knocked my socks off was Julad's Thicker than Water. Like the show, the story feels like a throwback in some ways; it's a sort of very modern and subtle curtainfic. Nothing really bad happens in the sci-fi/fanfic scheme of things- no torture, death, near-death, anguish etc- but something bad does happen towards the end, which isn't that bad really, but it's petty, ordinary, real-world bad and sad and then everything is quietly OK again, the story having taken an incredibly quiet- dare I say Canadian- stand against injustice.
There's another thing at the end which I also won't specify because I want this to be totally unspoiling, but it's something funny that comes right after the bad and just encapsulates something about a certain tradition of slash for me, in its current incarnation, just brilliantly.
There's this thing Freud says about dirty jokes, an origin story: originally a man tells the dirty joke to a woman to turn her on, but later men tell them to each other where women can overhear, and later still where they can't, and the woman is sort of a phantom presence there, being titillated and insulted on an imaginary plane. There's something in that about slash, but it's different obviously- these male/female things are never symmetrical. But this bit of humor in Julad's story, though not a dirty joke at all, struck me as the kind of joke that men are allowed to make to other men about masculinity and that imply a phantom woman- a mom, in fact, who wants you to eat a nutritious breakfast (cue N. Chodorow, flitting by upstage)- and then when a female slasher waltzes in and makes something like it, lovingly, in the context of slash, without permission or to impress a male reader (or is there a phantom male in the slash reading/writing exchange?), it can just be incredibly fresh. As Julad's is.
Anyway, all this John/Rodney has been very sweet, and I was thinking wryly of HP. (I have a couple friends from HP who are now writing SGA, but I haven't read their's yet, so I can't comment on that angle). But the last 2 HP stories I read, of any length that is, were Isolde's Twelve Days and Ellen Fremedon's Long Summer Trilogy (which are both absolutely splendid- I think Ellen's is her best work yet.) Like Julad's story (which covers a two week vacation with Rodney's sister in Canada), these are both vacation stories, wee idylls. Except it's HP, so the idylls revolve around stuff like dubious consent, death, near death, war, dearth, pain, and extremely severe neurosis.
It seems- and maybe I've got it all wrong, I've only read a few- but preliminary findings do seem to suggest that it's possible to tell a perfectly good story about Rodney and John in which they love each other. Not "we hate each other so much/are so incredibly repressed/etc that you have to read a whole novel to find out how we ever got to kiss" love each other, not "fuck or die" love each other, not "we are literally the only two people in the world who can stand each other especially since almost everyone else has died hideously" love each other, but "we like each other and like having sex and keep liking each other more and more and respect each other and hell, love each other" love each other. Huh.
And yes, I do recall HP shmoop, once upon a time. But that was in another country, and besides, Sirius is dead.
(No, I realize it's still being written, I just wanted to say that.)
So I've gone on and on and I guess my in-depth remarks on BSG will have to wait. But I will confess that (a) I've read a few BSG stories but nothing I liked much. Any recs? and (b) I've spewed out a few thousand words of BSG fic myself, but... Well, 2 bits are scenes for what I would like to be a longish story, but I have the usual problem for me, which is that I know what I want to say-- like, how I want to intervene in canon (my story is called "Promised Land," and, if you watch the show and know me, you may be able to guess how I want to nudge it)-- but I don't actually know what the story should be. So I can write the first conversation between Cmdr Adama and Starbuck, but then what happens? I can think of settings and situations and even secrets, but not events or a trajectory.
The other bit that found it's way across the keyboard is - I'll say it - uber-cliché shmoopy het prisoner porn, Kara/Lee, yes, the most boring obvious uncool thing you can imagine, and no, you will never ever see it. At least not under my name. :)