avoidance
One of last week’s prompt fics has made it into the big leagues, I've decided: call the roll of the blacked-out lands, M*A*S*H, dystopia fic, Hawkeye/BJ.
What frightens me about M*A*S*H is... well, okay. So, very early on in the show, when Hawkeye and Trapper make up Tuttle ("You might say that all of us together... made up Tuttle!") - actually, can you leave that there? No, you can't. Hawkeye and Trapper make up another unit surgeon out of whole cloth so they can draw his salary and use it to buy medicines for the orphans on the black market, and then are surprised when everyone keeps telling them about the fascinating conversations they've had with Tuttle in the mess tent, and it kinda makes me hurt laughing.
Anyway! So, when they're trying to produce fake papers for him they need to give him a fake birth date, and naturally give him the same birth year as themselves - 1925. And I'm like - 1925. Seriously. Yes, the Korean War was a long time ago, but that little detail really brings that into relief - in the year Hawkeye Pierce was born, the Depression, Prohibition, Nazi Germany, the Cold War, basically the political body of the twentieth century, were all in the future. But the thing is, Hawkeye, barring accidents, could live right into the twenty-first century (and I wrote a fic a couple of years ago where he did just that). He is uniquely temporally situated to know, to really know, there is no war to end all wars.
So that's the dystopian part, I guess. That you can tell this story set now - make it about twenty-five year old surgeons born in the 1980s, and you can tell the same story. That's the idea M*A*S*H engaged with throughout, and it hasn't stopped being relevant.
Anyway, some notes on trying to make a M*A*S*H vid on a rainy weekend when you're trying not to think:
-God, I love this stupid show, I love it so much. I love how half the time you genuinely can't tell if you ought to be laughing or crying so you kind of make ridic noises that cover all the bases. Like, my favourite episode of the show is "Dr Pierce and Mr Hyde", in which Hawkeye doesn't sleep for four days, and then Frank accidentally gives him the idea that the war isn't about ideology, it's about plumbing, and Trapper and Radar are chasing him around trying to drug him but not in time to stop him taking a latrine, a jeep and a three-star general to North Korea. How do you react to that other than with faint gasping.
-Also, it vaguely upsets me that they could say stuff that you’d have trouble airing on US network television now, e.g., the first-season episode where Hawkeye tells Margaret, "I always say, behind every great man is a woman with a vibrator." I just... how. They aired that in 1976.
-Speaking of which, you could probably cover every kink in
kink_bingo with one not-very-long vid about Frank and Margaret. She paints his toenails in anticipation of the camp foot inspection! They do dress-up kink! Gunplay! It's amazing.
-Making this vid would be so much easier if any of the main cast would ever stop talking. Hawkeye is the worst, of course - he has involved discussions in the shower, breaks off kissing people to have conversations with other people, and even talks when asleep and being pushed around the camp in a wheelchair - but the rest of the cast don’t really talk much less. I can see exactly how M*A*S*H was such a formative influence on Sorkin. (And other people - I was saying on Twitter how much I love that the DS9 episode, “Treachery, Faith and the Great River” lovingly pastiches M*A*S*H when Nog steals Sisko’s desk and sells it on the black market for much the same reasons as Hawkeye and Trapper steal and sell Henry’s.)
-Also, no one cries eminently viddable emo tears in this show. They all ugly-cry, ugly-scream, ugly-get-falling-over-drunk-and-hysterical. Which I am actually perfectly okay with. Because I am trying to vid hugs - lots of hugs in this vid, please - I’m also watching a lot of the serious episodes, and, owww, this shooooow. I’ve said this a hundred times before, but whatever: what this show does with mental health issues, with living with mental illness in general, just kills me.
-Shim noted on the last vid I went straight to the concept album. For this vid he thinks I’ve gone from the concept album to the upbeat pop album full of feelings. (Hugs! Lots of hugs. Also no one being at all heterosexual.) But seriously, I am really really enjoying this - vidding is so far from my self-confessed skillset, I just have no talent for visual art, full stop - and it’s nice to find that the perceptions I have of myself as a writer translate well, and I can write serious stories and make serious vids that I take a lot of time over, and but also write 1000 words of crackfic off the top of my head if I want to and make a 2 minute vid of people hugging if I want to and all of that’s okay, I’m not answering to some platonic ideal of creative output, I’m allowed to do what makes me happy.
Notes on also spending your rainy avoidant weekend trying to write a Vorkosigan story about all the lady spies that were totally secretly in ImpSec all along, I am not writing this story to hit my own kinks, why would you say such a thing:
-Making up characters’ names is hard. So far I have called them all Vorone, Vortwo, Vorthree and Vorfour in lieu of inspiration. Though the canon does this too - I think it’s A Civil Campaign where Miles makes up some rhetorical Counts and calls them Vorenlightened and Vorstodgy. (Maybe I’ll be passive-aggressive and call them things like Vorbharat and Vorshah and Vorkumar. Someone told me - told me, mind you, not suggested or theorised or interpreted - that “Vorpatril” was some sort of variation on Patel and therefore how could I possibly suggest there wasn’t much in the way of brown people in Bujold’s universe. She’s done a bit better in recent years.)
-So is trying to impose some sort of narrative structure on a story that is basically “lady spies! lady spies! my id let me show you it!” Although speaking of ladies, I came across the most amazing fusion the other day: Vormarlow’s Honour, by
Ankaret, in which Antonia Forest’s Marlows are reborn into Bujold’s Nexus. I read Autumn Term a long time ago (and found the other books a little too bizarre to get through), so can’t say much to the Marlows, but I love this idea so much, I wish people would write space opera girls’ own boarding school stories. Imagine the Chalet School as a girls’ finishing school for minor Vor in the Southern Continent. Joey Vorbettany has adventures saving Elisaveta Vorbelsornia from kidnappers trying to make a claim to the Imperium. After Robin’s father, an ImpSec agent, dies on assignment in Jackson’s Whole, they send her away to school for her own protection. They have a special school holiday for the birthday of the District Count. I could do this all day.
-Lady spies! Yes. I’m watching The Americans, which is sort of shaping my plots at the moment, but it’s no bad thing. At this point I am a little too avoidant to watch actual TV that’s on TV now, but if I ever decide to engage with my life again I’m going to pick that back up, alongside Orphan Black. Ladies and plots and espionage! Yes.
raven is also at Dreamwidth: there is or are
comment(s). Comment there or here.
What frightens me about M*A*S*H is... well, okay. So, very early on in the show, when Hawkeye and Trapper make up Tuttle ("You might say that all of us together... made up Tuttle!") - actually, can you leave that there? No, you can't. Hawkeye and Trapper make up another unit surgeon out of whole cloth so they can draw his salary and use it to buy medicines for the orphans on the black market, and then are surprised when everyone keeps telling them about the fascinating conversations they've had with Tuttle in the mess tent, and it kinda makes me hurt laughing.
Anyway! So, when they're trying to produce fake papers for him they need to give him a fake birth date, and naturally give him the same birth year as themselves - 1925. And I'm like - 1925. Seriously. Yes, the Korean War was a long time ago, but that little detail really brings that into relief - in the year Hawkeye Pierce was born, the Depression, Prohibition, Nazi Germany, the Cold War, basically the political body of the twentieth century, were all in the future. But the thing is, Hawkeye, barring accidents, could live right into the twenty-first century (and I wrote a fic a couple of years ago where he did just that). He is uniquely temporally situated to know, to really know, there is no war to end all wars.
So that's the dystopian part, I guess. That you can tell this story set now - make it about twenty-five year old surgeons born in the 1980s, and you can tell the same story. That's the idea M*A*S*H engaged with throughout, and it hasn't stopped being relevant.
Anyway, some notes on trying to make a M*A*S*H vid on a rainy weekend when you're trying not to think:
-God, I love this stupid show, I love it so much. I love how half the time you genuinely can't tell if you ought to be laughing or crying so you kind of make ridic noises that cover all the bases. Like, my favourite episode of the show is "Dr Pierce and Mr Hyde", in which Hawkeye doesn't sleep for four days, and then Frank accidentally gives him the idea that the war isn't about ideology, it's about plumbing, and Trapper and Radar are chasing him around trying to drug him but not in time to stop him taking a latrine, a jeep and a three-star general to North Korea. How do you react to that other than with faint gasping.
-Also, it vaguely upsets me that they could say stuff that you’d have trouble airing on US network television now, e.g., the first-season episode where Hawkeye tells Margaret, "I always say, behind every great man is a woman with a vibrator." I just... how. They aired that in 1976.
-Speaking of which, you could probably cover every kink in
kink_bingo with one not-very-long vid about Frank and Margaret. She paints his toenails in anticipation of the camp foot inspection! They do dress-up kink! Gunplay! It's amazing.
-Making this vid would be so much easier if any of the main cast would ever stop talking. Hawkeye is the worst, of course - he has involved discussions in the shower, breaks off kissing people to have conversations with other people, and even talks when asleep and being pushed around the camp in a wheelchair - but the rest of the cast don’t really talk much less. I can see exactly how M*A*S*H was such a formative influence on Sorkin. (And other people - I was saying on Twitter how much I love that the DS9 episode, “Treachery, Faith and the Great River” lovingly pastiches M*A*S*H when Nog steals Sisko’s desk and sells it on the black market for much the same reasons as Hawkeye and Trapper steal and sell Henry’s.)
-Also, no one cries eminently viddable emo tears in this show. They all ugly-cry, ugly-scream, ugly-get-falling-over-drunk-and-hysterical. Which I am actually perfectly okay with. Because I am trying to vid hugs - lots of hugs in this vid, please - I’m also watching a lot of the serious episodes, and, owww, this shooooow. I’ve said this a hundred times before, but whatever: what this show does with mental health issues, with living with mental illness in general, just kills me.
-Shim noted on the last vid I went straight to the concept album. For this vid he thinks I’ve gone from the concept album to the upbeat pop album full of feelings. (Hugs! Lots of hugs. Also no one being at all heterosexual.) But seriously, I am really really enjoying this - vidding is so far from my self-confessed skillset, I just have no talent for visual art, full stop - and it’s nice to find that the perceptions I have of myself as a writer translate well, and I can write serious stories and make serious vids that I take a lot of time over, and but also write 1000 words of crackfic off the top of my head if I want to and make a 2 minute vid of people hugging if I want to and all of that’s okay, I’m not answering to some platonic ideal of creative output, I’m allowed to do what makes me happy.
Notes on also spending your rainy avoidant weekend trying to write a Vorkosigan story about all the lady spies that were totally secretly in ImpSec all along, I am not writing this story to hit my own kinks, why would you say such a thing:
-Making up characters’ names is hard. So far I have called them all Vorone, Vortwo, Vorthree and Vorfour in lieu of inspiration. Though the canon does this too - I think it’s A Civil Campaign where Miles makes up some rhetorical Counts and calls them Vorenlightened and Vorstodgy. (Maybe I’ll be passive-aggressive and call them things like Vorbharat and Vorshah and Vorkumar. Someone told me - told me, mind you, not suggested or theorised or interpreted - that “Vorpatril” was some sort of variation on Patel and therefore how could I possibly suggest there wasn’t much in the way of brown people in Bujold’s universe. She’s done a bit better in recent years.)
-So is trying to impose some sort of narrative structure on a story that is basically “lady spies! lady spies! my id let me show you it!” Although speaking of ladies, I came across the most amazing fusion the other day: Vormarlow’s Honour, by
Ankaret, in which Antonia Forest’s Marlows are reborn into Bujold’s Nexus. I read Autumn Term a long time ago (and found the other books a little too bizarre to get through), so can’t say much to the Marlows, but I love this idea so much, I wish people would write space opera girls’ own boarding school stories. Imagine the Chalet School as a girls’ finishing school for minor Vor in the Southern Continent. Joey Vorbettany has adventures saving Elisaveta Vorbelsornia from kidnappers trying to make a claim to the Imperium. After Robin’s father, an ImpSec agent, dies on assignment in Jackson’s Whole, they send her away to school for her own protection. They have a special school holiday for the birthday of the District Count. I could do this all day.
-Lady spies! Yes. I’m watching The Americans, which is sort of shaping my plots at the moment, but it’s no bad thing. At this point I am a little too avoidant to watch actual TV that’s on TV now, but if I ever decide to engage with my life again I’m going to pick that back up, alongside Orphan Black. Ladies and plots and espionage! Yes.
raven is also at Dreamwidth: there is or are
comment(s). Comment there or here.