A "due South" Rant
Okay, I'm new to the "due South" fandom. And so far, it's been great. The fic is mostly top-notch, nearly every pairing (hell, every character) has at least five or six great stories that give them their due, and the fans themselves are terrific. Because I'm all new and dewy-eyed and still caught up in Season 1/Season 2, I went searching for some good Fraser/Victoria fic. And what do I find? Well, a few gems, but mostly two off-putting stories that deserve a good rant.
Okay, the first one just scores points for random squick and meanness. There were warnings, but it still caught me off-guard. Because, okay, Ray gets shot instead of Fraser. And then he dies. And then Fraser takes Victoria up to his father's cabin and first orally sodomizes her with his service revolver, then uses his gun on her...y'know, I'll just channel OFM and say "lady parts". And then shoots her (and no, he doesn't remove his gun first). And then shoots himself.
So, WTF? There's OOC, and then there's this. It wasn't labeled as AU, so I'm assuming that this author thinks Benton Fraser, RCMP, general do-gooder who has a bit of a dark side (and it's a teeny, tiny bit of a dark side, like maybe sometime he'd consider littering or something). Fraser would not be capable of doing these things. No doughnuts for you!
And the second travesty is less a WTF? type of travesty, although it's completely sloppy and naive and badly-constructed. It attempts to "re-write" Victoria's motivations during "Victoria's Secret" and redeem her in order to *gag* "help Fraser heal". In order to do so, it struggles to give Victoria a sick sister, an abusive childhood and then puts her through the wringer with torture and rape (conveniently perpetrated by Vecchio's nemesis Frank Zuko). This author insists her story was beta'd, but I saw no evidence of it as nearly every third sentence was grammatically mangled or misspelled or formatted incorrectly. And while, in the right hands, this kind of story would be really moving and emotionally-wrenching and offer some great Fraser insight (ie what are the limits of forgiveness? could he love/trust Victoria again?) it was pretty much straight dialog because the plot was so laboured and fucked-up you could practically see the story collecting sweat as it struggled to come to terms with its own ideas. So there was no character work being done. And the sex scenes? Ripped right out of a Harlequin romance, except Harlequins are at least edited by professionals.
Still, a tiny part of me wants to email her and congratulate her for the sheer balls it must have taken to write this thing, which was poor in execution but pretty neat as a concept. Oh well. This girl just needs to remember that fandom retcons usually work better in your head than written out as a full-length story subject to the laws of the English language, the DS fandom, and common sense.
Okay, so two bad apples in a crop of about six Fraser/Victoria fics that I managed to locate. I suppose there's a reason why fic authors avoid this pairing in favour of slashing Fraser and the Rays. At least there's no gunplay involved. *shiver* If anyone knows of any good Fraser/Victoria stuff, please point me in the right direction. My eyeballs need scrubbing.
x-posted to fanficrants
Okay, the first one just scores points for random squick and meanness. There were warnings, but it still caught me off-guard. Because, okay, Ray gets shot instead of Fraser. And then he dies. And then Fraser takes Victoria up to his father's cabin and first orally sodomizes her with his service revolver, then uses his gun on her...y'know, I'll just channel OFM and say "lady parts". And then shoots her (and no, he doesn't remove his gun first). And then shoots himself.
So, WTF? There's OOC, and then there's this. It wasn't labeled as AU, so I'm assuming that this author thinks Benton Fraser, RCMP, general do-gooder who has a bit of a dark side (and it's a teeny, tiny bit of a dark side, like maybe sometime he'd consider littering or something). Fraser would not be capable of doing these things. No doughnuts for you!
And the second travesty is less a WTF? type of travesty, although it's completely sloppy and naive and badly-constructed. It attempts to "re-write" Victoria's motivations during "Victoria's Secret" and redeem her in order to *gag* "help Fraser heal". In order to do so, it struggles to give Victoria a sick sister, an abusive childhood and then puts her through the wringer with torture and rape (conveniently perpetrated by Vecchio's nemesis Frank Zuko). This author insists her story was beta'd, but I saw no evidence of it as nearly every third sentence was grammatically mangled or misspelled or formatted incorrectly. And while, in the right hands, this kind of story would be really moving and emotionally-wrenching and offer some great Fraser insight (ie what are the limits of forgiveness? could he love/trust Victoria again?) it was pretty much straight dialog because the plot was so laboured and fucked-up you could practically see the story collecting sweat as it struggled to come to terms with its own ideas. So there was no character work being done. And the sex scenes? Ripped right out of a Harlequin romance, except Harlequins are at least edited by professionals.
Still, a tiny part of me wants to email her and congratulate her for the sheer balls it must have taken to write this thing, which was poor in execution but pretty neat as a concept. Oh well. This girl just needs to remember that fandom retcons usually work better in your head than written out as a full-length story subject to the laws of the English language, the DS fandom, and common sense.
Okay, so two bad apples in a crop of about six Fraser/Victoria fics that I managed to locate. I suppose there's a reason why fic authors avoid this pairing in favour of slashing Fraser and the Rays. At least there's no gunplay involved. *shiver* If anyone knows of any good Fraser/Victoria stuff, please point me in the right direction. My eyeballs need scrubbing.
x-posted to fanficrants