He's so Dreamy
OMFG INCEPTION FANDOM WHEN DID YOU GET SO AWESOME. SERIOUSLY I MEAN, SO SO AWESOME.
To be clear, I love this movie. I saw it four times in theatres, and one day not long after it came out on DVD my finger poised over the "purchase" button on ebay my lovely roommate proceeded to scream at me that maybe I shouldn't buy it since CHRISTMAS WAS FUCKING SOON, this culminated in three people trying to give me the DVD for christmas. I ran across the Inception kink meme around this time and was relatively unimpressed. The requests that stick in my mind from that time were general, unimaginative things, things like Zero-G sex, a fuckload of Eames/Arthur with bonus voyeur!Ariadne, sex in old lawnchairs, and other strange beasts like Cobb/Saito where all I could imagine were whole hotels imploding under the intensity of their stares. It's not to say that these weren't a hot read, but I guess I wanted more. The movie itself is very much about creation and is left very open-ended; none of these prompts amazed me or made me think thrice or even twice about anything I had seen--in short the completeness, the integrity of the storytelling in canon remained firm. I moved on.
Some time later I wandered into something onthecount had written and realized that one could approach the character of Mal prior to seeing her as only a projection; I still love this idea actually, there are so many permutations of her one could write as Cobb is very much an unreliable narrator or "unreliable projector". If she is a representation of his subconscious guilt made flesh how would she differ and remain the same in RL? I read a little more, didn't quite find what I was looking for, moved away again. Floundered through other more unfortunate fandoms, worked, and came back somehow.
We also have to remember that only recently I found this niche. If you had asked me two weeks ago about inception fandom you would have gotten a tirade, in fact, bellicosus got more than a couple that consisted mostly of me yelling into my phone "WHY DOES EVERY FIC HAVE ARTHUR AS A 19 YEAR OLD GAY ARMY GRUNT. WE KNOW PEOPLE WHO WENT INTO THE MILITARY AT 19; THEY ARE THE SAME AGE AS US, EXCEPT DIVORCED. ALSO THEY DRINK HALLUCINOGENIC ALCOHOL AND BREAK INTO OLD FOLKS HOMES TO USE THE JACUZZI. MILITARY =/= ORGANIZATION&COMPETENCE"... or an hour long lecture on the necessity of cultivating mystery through "blank space" and omission (Don't try and tell me its canonical that he was in the Army either. I've read Nolan's notes, he only mentions there is a sense of rivalry between Eames and Arthur, and it's Tom Hardy who mentions that in his discussions of the 'Eames' character Nolan suggested an ex-pat type who may/may not have come from the SAS community. This does not definitively mean that Arthur was in a rival but equivalent organization, and why limit yourself like this, I mean seriously, wouldn't it be more interesting to see other ways the 'Arthur' we know and love could have been conceived? The mistakes he would have to make and how he would have to learn to be cold and calculating, learn to use a gun, learn fighting in Zero-G. Mal&Dom don't strike me as cut and dried criminals--nor really does Arthur--what was the learning curve, when did he figure out he needed these skills, were they double crossed? Triple crossed? Did he spin a globe and spend a year as an African dictator's aide? Academia? CIA? FSB? Internal affairs? The possibilities are endless and do not need to a clear line from point A to B.) ANYWAY putting aside that can of worms.
To be fair, I feel like I've come at this particular fandom from a prejudiced angle and am having a bit of a Darcy/Elizabeth moment where Inception somehow has revealed the delicate flowering points of it's feelings and I'm just like:
Me: BUT Arthur's fanon characterization makes me gag MY SISTER AND MR. BINGLEY, BUT It's trite and predictable and sometimes the pairings make me cry WICKHAM'S MISFORTUNES. The feelings which, you tell me, have long prevented the acknowledgment of your regard--
Inception: And THIS IS YOUR OPINION OF ME
...and then it proceeds to save my youngest sister from shaming our entire family and shows me its true colors through the gentility of its actions. I know, I have obviously thought about this too long and too hard, and will no doubt make some unhappy post months from now once this strange euphoria has worn off, but like I've said above: the canon is very much about creation and more than that, the joy of creating and discovering within the mind, and rather than that common pitfall that most sequels and fanfic falls into--the homage, the re-creation, the re-hashing of a known--parts of the original modality have survived and carried over into parts of the fandom itself, and lordy do I love it.
If you have recs I'll be glad to take them, but for the record I'm not very interested in anything that falls into the category of "the coming-together-lovestory-of-Arthur&Eames"; there's nothing wrong with it, and let's face it it's super, scorchingly hot, but I've read a lot of it by now and it's just not really my cup of tea. I want dark, thoughtful, introspective stuff. I want the unknown. If there's a pairing sell it to me in the context of the story. I want rich character pieces, things with blurred and muddied relationships, violence, danger some tragedy and some love. Pretty much the movie itself.
And I don't want to come to the table empty-handed:
Recommendations:
+ The Longshot by prosodi & beat_fu.
Gen (sort of). Excellent. My favorite characterization of Arthur of all time. Subtle. Affectionate. Tragic. A story about longing without necessarily being about longing.
+ The Waking Years by weatherfront
Eames/Arthur. Whimsical, irreverent. Dialogue is accomplished (Esp Eames'). Construction of the dream world and it's relationship to the subconscious is expansive, as it relates to the story it is flawlessly integrated.
+ Small Song
Gen. Yusuf character piece. I almost always forget about him; a reason why we should and should not.
+Pants on Fire by Helenish.
Eames/Arthur. As usual the author is a master of the adult implicit conversation (and of one liners that encapsulate an entire sexual relationship dynamic). No one means what they are say.
+Scenes from a life under wraps by weatherfront and it's excellent sequel The Little Enough Damage I do to You by two_if_by_sea
Saito/Arthur. Probably my favorite "matched set" of fics. Bruising. About possessions and possession.
Other than that I am fine! How are you? I am doing research on chronic disease health support groups as mediated through computer communication technology and coping mechanisms for parents of children with chronic diseases babblebabble. Obviously this means that my spare time is filled with thought provoking material like the stuff above, that and pondering the hotness of Joseph Gordon-Levitt.