Aeryn Sun (Farscape)
Title: Pinup Girl for Frontal Assault
Author: danceswithwords
Fandom: Farscape
Character: Aeryn Sun
Spoilers: The whole series, including the miniseries.
Notes: Eternal gratitude to brynnmck for the beta, the handholding, the helpful suggestions, and her general wisdom in all things; and to everybody who contributed to the discussion when sdwolfpup was watching the show for the first time and whose insights have become a concrete part of my love of this character and this show.
I came to Farscape backwards, first through The Peacekeeper Wars and then through the "best of" collection for Season 1. I can pinpoint the exact moment when I tipped over from admiration to absolute, giddy adoration of Aeryn Sun, in "A Human Reaction," when she and John escape from capture due in large part to her soldier's instincts, and in contemplation of their inevitable demise, right before the kiss, she both tells him she won't be captured alive and signals, obliquely, more with gestures than words, that she doesn't blame him for getting her into this mess. In the morning, John wants to talk about it, and Aeryn shuts him down by telling him, "Yes, it's fine, John, but we have other priorities." These things are fundamental to Aeryn-her grace, the depth of understanding that coexists comfortably with her capability for precise violence, the way actions are often a bigger part of her vocabulary than words, her soldier's outlook and her struggle to deal with emotions. Over the course of the series, she gets better at talking, hones her natural empathy, and finds a way to fit love and family into her battle plans, but always with that striking, uncompromising fierceness, that complete lack of artifice.
Farscape is, in an overarching sense, an Odyssey story, a story of journey. On the most obvious level, it's the story of John Crichton's quest for home, and the way he negotiates that quest as his definition of home changes. But Aeryn Sun has her own journey to make-to fit her past with her future, to take the Peacekeeper values that shaped her and make her own choices about how to use them in her future, to redefine her duty and carry it forward into an entirely different kind of life. And while her journey is in some ways inextricably tied with John's, she has to put the pieces together herself, find her way of being a soldier as the nature of her battles change.
"Have you come to reassign me?"
In Season 1, John's abrupt entrance into her life leads to her exile from the Peacekeepers. Stuck on Moya with a bunch of escaped prisoners she's been taught all her life to believe are inferior, she approaches the situation in a way I think is very telling-by making herself part of a new unit. Aeryn has no problem taking charge when she feels it's necessary, but she is not by nature a leader; she works most comfortably when she's part of a plan, playing a defined role in something larger than herself. She doesn't even like the people she's stuck with, but she's disgusted when most of them turn on one of their own by cutting off Pilot's arm. She finds common cause with D'Argo, a fellow warrior, and with Zhaan, who has useful skills to contribute, and eventually with John, once she comes to understand, through his actions rather than his words, his capacity for loyalty and courage. And because of her own need to contribute, to be useful in the everyday, concrete way she values, she adapts, takes on tech work she once scorned as beneath her, and gains real pleasure and pride in an aptitude she'd never otherwise have known she had, a new way to play a part.
And eventually, Aeryn becomes the invisible glue that holds the crew together, keeps the sharp edges of the other personalities from clashing. I think this is an inevitable result of her impatience with abstraction; she's more able than the rest of them to separate personal conflict from the emergency of the moment, tends to focus on practical action, what she can do to stave off the imminent crisis. One of the things that's interesting about the fractious half of the crew left on Moya in Season 3 is that without Aeryn in the background reminding them all that there's work to be done, directing their energies, all of the rough edges and competing egos come out in force.
So many of Aeryn's strengths are also weaknesses, though, in different areas of life. The focus on practicality that makes her so competent in crisis leaves her blindsided by things that don't have defined, external manifestations. John is going insane by the end of Season 2, more of his brain and his volition taken over by the clone, but she has no frame of reference, no tools to help him combat his anguish besides telling him that he needs to face his fears with strength; and in the end, she's the expert pilot, but he kills her in the air because she doesn't quite believe he will, doesn't quite understand how thoroughly the body and voice of someone she loves and trusts can be inhabited by someone else. She's ready to kill him; it's something she's been trained for all her life; she's not ready for him to kill her. And her training in subsuming her own personal desires to the well-being of the unit, of thinking strategically and fitting smoothly as the cog in a larger machine, is also a way to avoid the emotional intricacies of the kind of relationship John wants from her, with its messiness and its deeply personal need and its insularity.
When John is twinned, equal and original, she is able to scold the two Johns for arguing and give them different shirts so that everyone can tell them apart, but completely unwilling and unable to fathom the larger implications. She finally opens herself up to her need for John on Talyn, and it's a need that has been developing years with a single John, but she acknowledges it with the John who's there. I know some people feel she was selfish in choosing one John over the other and planning to return to Earth with him, but in my personal opinion, she wasn't actually making a conscious choice between the two men because she didn't want to think about what it meant that there was another John Crichton out there; she was living her life with the John who was by her side, and that's why she couldn't see the surviving John as "real" when she returned to Moya. She had experienced his death, it had made an indelible mark on her, and the abstraction of the situation, the fact that he was still standing there in front of her, still John but not the John she'd spent the past months with, was simply not something she was equipped to handle-at least not without far more time to grieve and sort out her feelings than she'd had by the time the crews reunited.
At the end of "The Choice," she bound up her hair and strapped on her gun and told John's ghost that she was a Peacekeeper, and that was all she'd ever been; in her grief, she tried to erase the change that had caused her so much pain and reconnect with the things that had made sense in her past, with her duty, with the hope of a soldier's death in battle, first by finishing the task that had killed one John, then by going to join another unit, to take up a different kind of fight. Jool was right; joining an assassin squad wasn't a step forward, but it was part of a pattern she knew. She chose, we later learn, a squad that was carrying out killings of beings like the Prime Hokaithian, an aggressive bioweapons developer-she took the skills and values the Peacekeepers had taught her, values they didn't practice themselves, and even after leaving Moya, she tried to use them to make a new life.
And when she returned, it was an action, a concrete demonstration, something she thought John would want and understand; she didn't realize, even after seeing him change over the past three painful years, how much more he could have changed in her absence, or how much more he could want from her than plain gesture. And she didn't understand, even though it was a gesture made in her own language, an action, how much of a betrayal her bringing Scorpius onto Moya was for him.
Family Ties
Family, both biological and otherwise, is central to Farscape, and for Aeryn this plays out in several different ways.
First, there is the contradiction she carries around for years between the Peacekeeper prohibition against family relationships and her own secret family history, the fact that her mother and father chose to have her contrary to Peacekeeper norms and regulations, and her mother sought her out to tell her so. As much as Aeryn wants to be the consummate Peacekeeper, to not stand out except in officially sanctioned ways like excelling as a pilot, this is something that alters her perception of herself, gives her a unique experience in an otherwise regimented life where she goes through the same training and has the same kinds of relationships as everyone around her, marks her as special. It's something she both fears and wants-Velorek, her Peacekeeper lover, sees it, and the idea of giving into it, and to her emotions, frightens her so much that she betrays him.
Later, she finds a new family on Moya, and someone else who thinks she can be more, John. This new family is more complicated, a tangled web of mutual cooperation in a hostile environment, respect for one another's abilities, affection borne of shared experience, and not a little snarking and squabbling. She is altered by Pilot DNA-irreversibly contaminated for real-and her relationship with Pilot and Moya comes full circle as she names Moya's son for her father, and goes on to play a major role in the troubled ship's life. Talyn is the connection between all of her families, between her Peacekeeper past and her chaotic, free-form family in the present, and the bridge to her mother's return to her life. He is also another product of the Peacekeepers who straddles both worlds, and doesn't survive the competing demands any better than her mother, who was given a choice to kill her or her father and chose the father, and was eaten up by bitterness afterwards. It's a choice Aeryn transforms into her own way of dealing with grief, a choice between her Peacekeeper heritage or family love, and for a time she chooses the heritage, not understanding that she can't go back to that life; but she's learned the importance of family, and she never stops trying to reach out and make her mother understand that, to share that discovery.
And finally, there is her own family with John. One of the most interesting things, to me, about the last five episodes of Season 4 is that up until that point in the series, her involvement with the struggle against Scorpius has been about John; she understood herself as valuable to Scorpius and John's other enemies in relationship to John, as a means to an end. But after "Prayer," his fight becomes hers in a way it never was before, because the child is a concrete representation of their shared family and their future; she has internalized the threat to John in the most concrete way, with the threat to her child, at the same time that the larger pieces of the storyline, the political conflict between the Scarrans and the Peacekeepers, reaches critical mass. And that's why, although I'm generally not fond of pregnancy storylines, for Aeryn Sun it works; by the miniseries, the pieces are clicking into place as she finds the way her love and her friends and her future fit into her duty, and it makes her both incredibly fierce and full of peace and joy, and it is an amazing thing to see. After they're rematerialized, she and John fantasize about hiding away, but it's not possible, and I don't think they ever truly believed it was; her family is caught up in the ongoing war, unable to escape its tentacles or, even if they did, its aftermath. In the end, she and John make the decision and she stands with their newborn son and watches him activate a weapon of incredible destruction, because they are going to see their fight through to the end, all or nothing. And at the end of the miniseries, she can put down her gun and name her son with John and look to the future with the knowledge that she had discharged her duty, fought the battle she had to fight, kept most of her loved ones safe and mourned the ones she couldn’t, and look to the future.
And this, I think, is why she's the strongest and most remarkable female character I've seen on television. She may need John's help to accept the possiblity of love, but he needs her help to learn to survive. She learns to open up and let others into her heart, but that ability to care grows from seeds that already existed within her, and she never turns completely inward to emotion, never softens her awareness of what's happening around her and the way she fits into bigger things. The character was first conceived as a romantic interest for John, the show's lead, but because of who Aeryn Sun is, and because of Claudia Black's immense talent in bringing her to life, she starts and ends a whole person, fierce and full of grace whether she's making terrible mistakes or saving and cherishing her loved ones, as much transformer as transformed.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of links, but they will hopefully steer you towards interesting and fun Farscape information and fannish endeavors.
On livejournal, farscape_weekly is a wonderful general resource for links to fanfic, vids, icons, and discussion. farscapefriday is a currently active drabble community, and farscapefic is an active fanfiction and archive community. crack_van has ongoing recommendations for fanfiction in the Farscape fandom and a collection of story recommendations in memories here.
Off livejournal, Terra Firma and Frell Me Dead are two of the largest active boards.
The Snurcher's Guide to Farscape (which covers the entire series and the miniseries) has episode guides and extensive information on characters, actors, and directors. The Tourist's Guide to the Uncharted Territories (which covers through the end of Season 4 but not the miniseries) has episode reviews, fanfiction, and other show information.
Leviathan is a fabulous searchable fanfiction archive. Farscape Fantasy has a large collection of links to vids. And watchfarscape.com has current news on show cast and syndication and links to other sites.
Author: danceswithwords
Fandom: Farscape
Character: Aeryn Sun
Spoilers: The whole series, including the miniseries.
Notes: Eternal gratitude to brynnmck for the beta, the handholding, the helpful suggestions, and her general wisdom in all things; and to everybody who contributed to the discussion when sdwolfpup was watching the show for the first time and whose insights have become a concrete part of my love of this character and this show.
I came to Farscape backwards, first through The Peacekeeper Wars and then through the "best of" collection for Season 1. I can pinpoint the exact moment when I tipped over from admiration to absolute, giddy adoration of Aeryn Sun, in "A Human Reaction," when she and John escape from capture due in large part to her soldier's instincts, and in contemplation of their inevitable demise, right before the kiss, she both tells him she won't be captured alive and signals, obliquely, more with gestures than words, that she doesn't blame him for getting her into this mess. In the morning, John wants to talk about it, and Aeryn shuts him down by telling him, "Yes, it's fine, John, but we have other priorities." These things are fundamental to Aeryn-her grace, the depth of understanding that coexists comfortably with her capability for precise violence, the way actions are often a bigger part of her vocabulary than words, her soldier's outlook and her struggle to deal with emotions. Over the course of the series, she gets better at talking, hones her natural empathy, and finds a way to fit love and family into her battle plans, but always with that striking, uncompromising fierceness, that complete lack of artifice.
Farscape is, in an overarching sense, an Odyssey story, a story of journey. On the most obvious level, it's the story of John Crichton's quest for home, and the way he negotiates that quest as his definition of home changes. But Aeryn Sun has her own journey to make-to fit her past with her future, to take the Peacekeeper values that shaped her and make her own choices about how to use them in her future, to redefine her duty and carry it forward into an entirely different kind of life. And while her journey is in some ways inextricably tied with John's, she has to put the pieces together herself, find her way of being a soldier as the nature of her battles change.
"Have you come to reassign me?"
In Season 1, John's abrupt entrance into her life leads to her exile from the Peacekeepers. Stuck on Moya with a bunch of escaped prisoners she's been taught all her life to believe are inferior, she approaches the situation in a way I think is very telling-by making herself part of a new unit. Aeryn has no problem taking charge when she feels it's necessary, but she is not by nature a leader; she works most comfortably when she's part of a plan, playing a defined role in something larger than herself. She doesn't even like the people she's stuck with, but she's disgusted when most of them turn on one of their own by cutting off Pilot's arm. She finds common cause with D'Argo, a fellow warrior, and with Zhaan, who has useful skills to contribute, and eventually with John, once she comes to understand, through his actions rather than his words, his capacity for loyalty and courage. And because of her own need to contribute, to be useful in the everyday, concrete way she values, she adapts, takes on tech work she once scorned as beneath her, and gains real pleasure and pride in an aptitude she'd never otherwise have known she had, a new way to play a part.
And eventually, Aeryn becomes the invisible glue that holds the crew together, keeps the sharp edges of the other personalities from clashing. I think this is an inevitable result of her impatience with abstraction; she's more able than the rest of them to separate personal conflict from the emergency of the moment, tends to focus on practical action, what she can do to stave off the imminent crisis. One of the things that's interesting about the fractious half of the crew left on Moya in Season 3 is that without Aeryn in the background reminding them all that there's work to be done, directing their energies, all of the rough edges and competing egos come out in force.
So many of Aeryn's strengths are also weaknesses, though, in different areas of life. The focus on practicality that makes her so competent in crisis leaves her blindsided by things that don't have defined, external manifestations. John is going insane by the end of Season 2, more of his brain and his volition taken over by the clone, but she has no frame of reference, no tools to help him combat his anguish besides telling him that he needs to face his fears with strength; and in the end, she's the expert pilot, but he kills her in the air because she doesn't quite believe he will, doesn't quite understand how thoroughly the body and voice of someone she loves and trusts can be inhabited by someone else. She's ready to kill him; it's something she's been trained for all her life; she's not ready for him to kill her. And her training in subsuming her own personal desires to the well-being of the unit, of thinking strategically and fitting smoothly as the cog in a larger machine, is also a way to avoid the emotional intricacies of the kind of relationship John wants from her, with its messiness and its deeply personal need and its insularity.
When John is twinned, equal and original, she is able to scold the two Johns for arguing and give them different shirts so that everyone can tell them apart, but completely unwilling and unable to fathom the larger implications. She finally opens herself up to her need for John on Talyn, and it's a need that has been developing years with a single John, but she acknowledges it with the John who's there. I know some people feel she was selfish in choosing one John over the other and planning to return to Earth with him, but in my personal opinion, she wasn't actually making a conscious choice between the two men because she didn't want to think about what it meant that there was another John Crichton out there; she was living her life with the John who was by her side, and that's why she couldn't see the surviving John as "real" when she returned to Moya. She had experienced his death, it had made an indelible mark on her, and the abstraction of the situation, the fact that he was still standing there in front of her, still John but not the John she'd spent the past months with, was simply not something she was equipped to handle-at least not without far more time to grieve and sort out her feelings than she'd had by the time the crews reunited.
At the end of "The Choice," she bound up her hair and strapped on her gun and told John's ghost that she was a Peacekeeper, and that was all she'd ever been; in her grief, she tried to erase the change that had caused her so much pain and reconnect with the things that had made sense in her past, with her duty, with the hope of a soldier's death in battle, first by finishing the task that had killed one John, then by going to join another unit, to take up a different kind of fight. Jool was right; joining an assassin squad wasn't a step forward, but it was part of a pattern she knew. She chose, we later learn, a squad that was carrying out killings of beings like the Prime Hokaithian, an aggressive bioweapons developer-she took the skills and values the Peacekeepers had taught her, values they didn't practice themselves, and even after leaving Moya, she tried to use them to make a new life.
And when she returned, it was an action, a concrete demonstration, something she thought John would want and understand; she didn't realize, even after seeing him change over the past three painful years, how much more he could have changed in her absence, or how much more he could want from her than plain gesture. And she didn't understand, even though it was a gesture made in her own language, an action, how much of a betrayal her bringing Scorpius onto Moya was for him.
Family Ties
Family, both biological and otherwise, is central to Farscape, and for Aeryn this plays out in several different ways.
First, there is the contradiction she carries around for years between the Peacekeeper prohibition against family relationships and her own secret family history, the fact that her mother and father chose to have her contrary to Peacekeeper norms and regulations, and her mother sought her out to tell her so. As much as Aeryn wants to be the consummate Peacekeeper, to not stand out except in officially sanctioned ways like excelling as a pilot, this is something that alters her perception of herself, gives her a unique experience in an otherwise regimented life where she goes through the same training and has the same kinds of relationships as everyone around her, marks her as special. It's something she both fears and wants-Velorek, her Peacekeeper lover, sees it, and the idea of giving into it, and to her emotions, frightens her so much that she betrays him.
Later, she finds a new family on Moya, and someone else who thinks she can be more, John. This new family is more complicated, a tangled web of mutual cooperation in a hostile environment, respect for one another's abilities, affection borne of shared experience, and not a little snarking and squabbling. She is altered by Pilot DNA-irreversibly contaminated for real-and her relationship with Pilot and Moya comes full circle as she names Moya's son for her father, and goes on to play a major role in the troubled ship's life. Talyn is the connection between all of her families, between her Peacekeeper past and her chaotic, free-form family in the present, and the bridge to her mother's return to her life. He is also another product of the Peacekeepers who straddles both worlds, and doesn't survive the competing demands any better than her mother, who was given a choice to kill her or her father and chose the father, and was eaten up by bitterness afterwards. It's a choice Aeryn transforms into her own way of dealing with grief, a choice between her Peacekeeper heritage or family love, and for a time she chooses the heritage, not understanding that she can't go back to that life; but she's learned the importance of family, and she never stops trying to reach out and make her mother understand that, to share that discovery.
And finally, there is her own family with John. One of the most interesting things, to me, about the last five episodes of Season 4 is that up until that point in the series, her involvement with the struggle against Scorpius has been about John; she understood herself as valuable to Scorpius and John's other enemies in relationship to John, as a means to an end. But after "Prayer," his fight becomes hers in a way it never was before, because the child is a concrete representation of their shared family and their future; she has internalized the threat to John in the most concrete way, with the threat to her child, at the same time that the larger pieces of the storyline, the political conflict between the Scarrans and the Peacekeepers, reaches critical mass. And that's why, although I'm generally not fond of pregnancy storylines, for Aeryn Sun it works; by the miniseries, the pieces are clicking into place as she finds the way her love and her friends and her future fit into her duty, and it makes her both incredibly fierce and full of peace and joy, and it is an amazing thing to see. After they're rematerialized, she and John fantasize about hiding away, but it's not possible, and I don't think they ever truly believed it was; her family is caught up in the ongoing war, unable to escape its tentacles or, even if they did, its aftermath. In the end, she and John make the decision and she stands with their newborn son and watches him activate a weapon of incredible destruction, because they are going to see their fight through to the end, all or nothing. And at the end of the miniseries, she can put down her gun and name her son with John and look to the future with the knowledge that she had discharged her duty, fought the battle she had to fight, kept most of her loved ones safe and mourned the ones she couldn’t, and look to the future.
And this, I think, is why she's the strongest and most remarkable female character I've seen on television. She may need John's help to accept the possiblity of love, but he needs her help to learn to survive. She learns to open up and let others into her heart, but that ability to care grows from seeds that already existed within her, and she never turns completely inward to emotion, never softens her awareness of what's happening around her and the way she fits into bigger things. The character was first conceived as a romantic interest for John, the show's lead, but because of who Aeryn Sun is, and because of Claudia Black's immense talent in bringing her to life, she starts and ends a whole person, fierce and full of grace whether she's making terrible mistakes or saving and cherishing her loved ones, as much transformer as transformed.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of links, but they will hopefully steer you towards interesting and fun Farscape information and fannish endeavors.
On livejournal, farscape_weekly is a wonderful general resource for links to fanfic, vids, icons, and discussion. farscapefriday is a currently active drabble community, and farscapefic is an active fanfiction and archive community. crack_van has ongoing recommendations for fanfiction in the Farscape fandom and a collection of story recommendations in memories here.
Off livejournal, Terra Firma and Frell Me Dead are two of the largest active boards.
The Snurcher's Guide to Farscape (which covers the entire series and the miniseries) has episode guides and extensive information on characters, actors, and directors. The Tourist's Guide to the Uncharted Territories (which covers through the end of Season 4 but not the miniseries) has episode reviews, fanfiction, and other show information.
Leviathan is a fabulous searchable fanfiction archive. Farscape Fantasy has a large collection of links to vids. And watchfarscape.com has current news on show cast and syndication and links to other sites.