and the fox ate my pigeons, all but two

[lemorttoussaint]

Someone needs to slash Maurice.  Not EM Forster's Maurice, which the author already did quite nicely for us, but Northern Exposure's Maurice.  His denial and homophobia are pathological, and his interest in Officer Semanski is highly suggestive of a desire for physical equality in a relationship.  Plus his name, which, as mentioned above, brings to

Comments

[melodyclark]

I still have a reply to a reply of yours to answer but being a Northern Exposure fan and a Faust freak, I'm here. lol

I think Maurice is sort of obviously gay. Maybe that's why he isn't slashed a lot. A lot of slash seems to be about finding the ambiguous areas of sexuality and Maurice (from his stereotypical love of cooking and domesticity to Office Semanski to his curiously bonded friendship with the "sodomites" aka "gay couple" to the rest of humanity) seems to be pretty much pro forma.

There isn't a whole lot of fan fiction in NX anyway, for whatever reason. Most of it is Joel/Maggie (yawn, stretch) based.

I have a friend of mine who is a literature professor who insists upon calling Homunculus "mini-me". It's very clear they didn't know a whole lot about biology back then. I've always thought "Lamia" was a fascinating name from a Freudian angle.

It does indeed drag. But it came out of an era where everything dragged.

[lemorttoussaint]

I recently read a book exploring homosexuality in German lit of that era. The chapter on Faust relied most heavily on traditional literary scholarship in examining the Faust/Mephistopheles dynamic, and points out that by the second half Mephistopheles has assumed the more passive "female" role. In that light, the fact Mephistopheles is both fascinated and frightened by the Lamia (half-snake) is indeed pretty telling from a Freudian angle

[melodyclark]

Mephistopheles himself was a study in depth psychology. Goethe tended to bend toward Aristotelianism unless he was going in detail.

Oh, you're the other person who read The Eagle and the Raven! LOL I wondered

I do think NX was more about archetypes than stereotypes. There's always going to be a "type" flavor in there.

[lemorttoussaint]

I can see that. Each character as a unified cross-section of the communities/types they represent (homosexuals, Jews, women, baby boomers, men, hunters, artists, Indians, etc.). I hadn't thought of it quite that way before, but it does make sense.

[melodyclark]

There's a perfect Maurice scene to underscore that -- where he stands atop his house and plays the bagpipes. He's your typical Scots-Irish US southerner in all his glory but writ so large it's easy to see a higher meaning. He also plays a lot of golf which is, of course, a Scots sport.