I'm feeling all fannishly giddy

[nell65]

And suddenly understanding - just a tiny bit - what the TRs must have felt during all of LFN. In the, what it feels like to root for not the main couple sense. Not that I'm opposed to the main H50 couple (fannishly speaking - I'm honestly not sure who the show runners think the 'main couple' is? Doris and Mick? They appear to be the only two to

Comments

[sk56]

Reading too quickly, I thought you said snuggling. So there it is. Snuggling with pirates. I'll leave the choice of urchins up to you.

[nell65]

Well, snuggling too, of course, as Kono and Adam are running away together - cold nights out there on the Pacific on a cargo ship.... *g*

[ms_artisan]

PIRATES! You should definitely write that! :D

[nell65]

Oh yes. Pirates. Definitely pirates. Whom Adam and Kono and Doris fight off, course. *g*

by the bye - did you know that Grace Park is actually older than both Alex and Scott? That she is actually almost 40??? Girlfriend looks GOOD.

I was doing some googling, you know, in case I write a fic about her, and now I'm wondering if I have been misreading Kono on the show... I've always read Kono as a middle 20s 'kid' in comparison to the three older dudes, but that would mean Grace seems to have been playing roughly 15 years younger than her actual age. Or, at least, convincingly so to me!

[ms_artisan]

I did know that. She's amazing, isn't she? As for Kono -- well, I've never seen anything actually written by the showrunners, but my impression is that Kono was in her early(ish) twenties when the show started. She was just about to graduate from the academy where she went after (no indication how soon after) she blew out her knee. I might be making it up, but I think she was recruited to a surfing team at a young age (around 15, I think) and so still a teenager when the knee thing happened.

So, yeah -- she's playing substantially younger than her actual age. Sells it well, doesn't she? :D

[nell65]

Completely sells it.

But I'm also relieved to know that you also think Kono (as opposed to Grace Park) is now in her middle/lateish 20s. Story imagining can go forward from here. LOL!

(Of course - if Kono was supposed to be older, she is utterly failing to sell that. !! I'm having trouble imagining a woman as tough as Kono appears to be putting up with some of the shenanigans at 5-0, much less Adam's secretiveness, if she was the same age/older than the fellows, which is part of what led to my surprise in the first place ....)

[madamedarque]

Ha, well, shipping the not-the-main-couple does require being pathetically grateful for the smallest shippy tidbits thrown your way, both within the show and fandom! I'm currently most involved in a fandom where I ship the most prominent, canon couple, which is nice. You know, our little LFN group on LJ was interesting in that the TRs definitely outnumbered the HRs at different times! I always wondered why that was, given the overwhelming HR orientation of the archives/message boards; it always seemed amusing to me that we managed to essentially reverse the shipping dynamics of the larger fandom in our later resurrection of LFN discussion and fic-writing.

[nell65]

I know - that is odd, isn't it? I don't have much explanation other than the majority of the HR shippers (and huge Roy Dupuis fans) who remained active were, more or less, online fruitcakes? IMO, of course

[madamedarque]

I wonder if it was a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy as well--we had more TRs, so we produced more TR fic and plenty of TR-themed discussions, which then drew more TRs to the group? A similar dynamic could be in play with the Eureka slash pairing on A03; if more people are writing it, then that tends to produce even more writers, larger audiences, etc. (And perhaps crowds out writers of het pairings, who may fear their comments/hits can't compete.)

But I do think there's something in the fruitcake explanation; the discourse of our group was obviously vastly different than, say, Michael's Retreat. But then, the FF Message Board was similar in tone to our later LJ discussions, and Jaybee was still pretty much sailing the good ship TR on her own, from what I saw. So it seems like it does have a lot to do with the fannish platform itself. It's probably not a coincidence that sites like ff.net or the Voy forums tend to be more hospitable to het, mainstream pairings, while the slicker, more discussion-based spaces for transformative

[nell65]

Yeah. I do think platform plays a role in shaping online interactions. I haven't looked for studies of it or anything, but having been playing online for fifteen years (and heard similiar observations from those who've been around even longer) that's definitely been my experience

[jaybee65]

no post-apocolyptic golf carts or insane artists/scientists on private islands.

If anyone ever comes across anything like that, I want to know!! I don't care *what* fandom it's in.

[sk56]

Me too! Me too!!

[nell65]

If I ever see such a thing - in any fandom - I will *definitely* be sharing it widely! LOL!

And you know where there is, to my surprise, a LOT of over the top AU fic? Once Upon a Time. That's my first, best bet for truly over the top fic weirdness.

[jaybee65]

Oooh. That makes sense. I got behind in my episode-watching due to a crazy schedule in May, but I'm ready to catch up now and will soon be sifting through fic. This idea motivates me even more!