Association Meme
From londonkds
Comment to this post and I will give you 5 subjects/things I associate you with. Then post this in your LJ and elaborate on the subjects given.
history
My great passion. Well, one of them. I grew up in a town which wasn't just over a millennium old but also had avoided being bombed during WWII, which means an incredible amount of history in one's every day life. Also, I loved historical novels as a child - among the earliest I read were the usual suspects by Alexandre Dumas, The Egyptian by Mika Waltari, and the Angelique series by Anne Golon. Later on, as a teenager, I graduated to Stefan Zweig - who wrote some of the best biographies romancees in the German language; the first of his that I read was his Fouché - and the joys of first hand accounts, of memoirs, diaries, letters etc. of people that interested me through the ages, as well as some understanding of developing societies through the ages in terms that didn't rely on the great man theory of history. I've always seen it as complimentary - interesting individuals (who didn't have to be of the ruling classes; one of the most touching and enraging historical documents I've read is the letter of a man from my hometown Bamberg who had been caught up in the witchcraze of the 1620s and tried to smuggle one last letter out to his daughter before he was executed; the letter was intercepted, ended up in the files, and thus we have the rare description of a witch trial from a victim's pov) and structural analysis, I mean - not as either/or.
Goethe/Schiller
See my post about why if they were fictional and/or in a novel or on tv, people enthusiastically would slash them. All kidding aside, though: I like them both, and I like how they, who were very different in terms of personalities and writing, made up that intriguing whole, die deutsche Klassik. And that they were the antithesis of megalomania, and of nationalism in the increasingly poisonous 19th century sense. Something like the scene where the Marquis Posa demands freedom of thought from Philip II of Spain in Schiller's Don Carlos - Sire, geben Sie Gedankenfreiheit! - works just as breathtakingly well if you read it today; start Goethe's Faust with the very first scene (if you can find a decent translation), the discussion about how to stage a play, between the poet, the director, and the clown, and it's witty and biting (and Goethe pokes as much fun on the poet as on anyone else) and defies the cliché that classic = boring; it also still works for just about every theatre production you thank think of.
Fanged Foursome
I think I would have fallen for Darla after her reappearance anyway, but the fact she made what until then looked like yet another version of the vampire family dynamic as set up by Interview with the Vampire or Forever Knight into something far more interesting and different (with a gender reversal as to who held the power there) was the cream on the cake, so to speak. Here's an essay which goes on about this in detail. There have been times where the Spike Wars made me stay away from any fanfiction or essay that focused on him (or even had him in it), but either fiction or meta that presented the four of them together was always the exception to this. My feelings for Angel during the course of both shows were varied (going from okay but not overly invested during the first three seasons of BTVS to very fond during the first two seasons of AtS to eye-rollingly impatient and emotionally disconnected with in s3 to fond and interested again in s4 and 5), but even during the s3 down, when I seriously considered giving up the entire show, not just the character, again Fanged Foursome meta and fanfic was the exception. Dru I always loved, but her drawback as a character is that she doesn't grow or change, as opposed to the other three, after her big change, so I hardly looked for fanfic that featured her on her own. Lastly: one unwritten fannish commandment for me is Though shalt not watch Fool for Love or Darla on their own, but always together.
Londo/G'Kar
You know, I recently found the post with my first slash story about them, and I sound absurdly apologetic in the preamble. Now of course I was hardly alone in seeing the relationship between Londo and G'Kar, their arcs together and alone, as the emotional core of Babylon 5, but there was frustratingly little fanfiction about them for ten years. By "frustratingly little" I don't mean slash, I mean anything at all. At the old B5 archive, I found one story. Only one. And I couldn't understand it. So I did something about it and lured Andraste into the fandom so she could do something about it, too. I think what makes the enduring appeal, regardless as to whether one sees the relationship as utterly platonic or slashy, is that they're both so richly realized characters you can't consign them one to one category, and that's true for their relationship with each other as well. Depending on when in the show we are, either of them can be hero, villain, antihero, comic relief, or everything at once. I've written an entire essay about why Londo's fall-and-redemption story still remains unequalled on tv for me, so let me say something about G'Kar's here, because it's as remarkable, in a different way. "Ambiguous character ends up as wise and enlightened hero" could have been dull instead of being incredibly compelling; but because G'Kar never loses his - Narnness? I can't use the term "humanity" here, can I? -, his ability to throw a petty tantrum because people won't listen (see Day of the Dead), his eagerness to flirt (Tragedy of Telepaths, Objects at Rest) or his sharp tongue, let alone his outrage and anger when he sees something like Na'Toth's imprisonment, his enlightened state always rings true, hard-won, and as endearing as his early incarnation as a wily ambassador and still bloodthirsty ex freedom fighter. Lastly, so many fandoms try to pull off storylines where enemies become first allies by necessity and then friends and/or lovers, either in fanfiction or on the show proper. But so often it feels that what originally made them enemies is ignored or downplayed. Not so here. When at the culmination of their storyline together G'Kar says "my people can never forgive your people, you understand that, don't you? But I can forgive you", it works, and feels right in every way. (Including the differentiation of personal forgiveness versus general forgiveness - two very different things.)
five things
Ah, "five things that never happened..." I encountered this fanfic format first on lj, in a Farscape story about Aeryn Sun, I think, and it fascinated me when I tweaked that each of the five things was independent from the others. Each asked basically "what if canon had gone differently at one specific point" and explored the consequences for the character it focused on. Until then, the most AUs I had seen were of the dreaded high school type ("aka "everyone is human and in high school") or of the wish fulfillment type (aka "in MY universe, X and Y are still together!"). But the "five things" stories were different and were a fantastic way to explore the canon characters and their relationships, because they didn't just offer one version, and the portrait that emerged usually made the character in question even more intriguing. The first time I tried it myself was for BTVS' Warren Meers, partly due to a discussion with andrastewhite about the Trio in general and Warren in particular, and partly because londonkds' "Mary Sue Goes Septic" essay had given me a lot of ideas about Warren and Willow I wanted to try out in fictional form.
Then iamsab challenged me to write Kira/Dukat. Now I've always regretted that Dukat, post-Waltz, was written as a one dimensional evil madman on the show. And he and Kira undeniably had great chemisty, as well as a very interesting relationship (pre-Waltz). But even if Dukat had remained a, pardon the bad pun, shades of grey character, it would not have changed his prefect-of-Bajor past, and a romance with Kira would have been, to put it mildly, extremely unlikely. However, the "Five Things" format allowed me to explore several angles without whitewashing Dukat (or repeating the Evil Madman thing, for that matter), or making Kira behave in an ooc "you're so sexy, all is forgiven" way. And it allowed me to be wilfully perverse. In the variation where they actually have sex, it's not about Dukat at all for Kira, it's about her depression and anger during the second occupation and also about Odo. In the variation where they genuinenly love each other, the relationship isn't sexual at all but a family relationship, as in this AU Kira Meru raised her children, not her husband and thus Kira Nerys grows up as Dukat's daughter, and AU!Nerys is so passionately pro-Cardassian that she becomes one, which is of course the worst thing regular!Kira could imagine. And so forth. No sooner had I written this that altariel wanted to have a "Five things which never happened between Garak and Bashir" as well. Which she received, after some delay. It made me aware of a difference in gender perception by myself because while during the Kira-Dukat five things I had been very conscious of the occupier-of-planet / member of the brutally occupied population problem, I didn't feel the same burden with Garak/Bashir, though Garak, with his Obsidian Order past, definitely was no less guilty of war crimes (torture and assassination we know about; others are plausible guesswork) than Dukat was. Possibly because Bashir wasn't Bajoran, but also because Bashir was male, and thus there was no chance of falling into a squicky subtext about colonialism with the woman embodying the occupied people. Though again, these Five Things weren't five ways to get the characters together, but focused on traits they brought out in each other, and which particular changes in canon forced them to deal with in somewhat different manners.
I've used the "Five things..." format in other fandoms since, but these three attempts still remain my favourites and the ones I'm proudest of, as a writer.
Comment to this post and I will give you 5 subjects/things I associate you with. Then post this in your LJ and elaborate on the subjects given.
history
My great passion. Well, one of them. I grew up in a town which wasn't just over a millennium old but also had avoided being bombed during WWII, which means an incredible amount of history in one's every day life. Also, I loved historical novels as a child - among the earliest I read were the usual suspects by Alexandre Dumas, The Egyptian by Mika Waltari, and the Angelique series by Anne Golon. Later on, as a teenager, I graduated to Stefan Zweig - who wrote some of the best biographies romancees in the German language; the first of his that I read was his Fouché - and the joys of first hand accounts, of memoirs, diaries, letters etc. of people that interested me through the ages, as well as some understanding of developing societies through the ages in terms that didn't rely on the great man theory of history. I've always seen it as complimentary - interesting individuals (who didn't have to be of the ruling classes; one of the most touching and enraging historical documents I've read is the letter of a man from my hometown Bamberg who had been caught up in the witchcraze of the 1620s and tried to smuggle one last letter out to his daughter before he was executed; the letter was intercepted, ended up in the files, and thus we have the rare description of a witch trial from a victim's pov) and structural analysis, I mean - not as either/or.
Goethe/Schiller
See my post about why if they were fictional and/or in a novel or on tv, people enthusiastically would slash them. All kidding aside, though: I like them both, and I like how they, who were very different in terms of personalities and writing, made up that intriguing whole, die deutsche Klassik. And that they were the antithesis of megalomania, and of nationalism in the increasingly poisonous 19th century sense. Something like the scene where the Marquis Posa demands freedom of thought from Philip II of Spain in Schiller's Don Carlos - Sire, geben Sie Gedankenfreiheit! - works just as breathtakingly well if you read it today; start Goethe's Faust with the very first scene (if you can find a decent translation), the discussion about how to stage a play, between the poet, the director, and the clown, and it's witty and biting (and Goethe pokes as much fun on the poet as on anyone else) and defies the cliché that classic = boring; it also still works for just about every theatre production you thank think of.
Fanged Foursome
I think I would have fallen for Darla after her reappearance anyway, but the fact she made what until then looked like yet another version of the vampire family dynamic as set up by Interview with the Vampire or Forever Knight into something far more interesting and different (with a gender reversal as to who held the power there) was the cream on the cake, so to speak. Here's an essay which goes on about this in detail. There have been times where the Spike Wars made me stay away from any fanfiction or essay that focused on him (or even had him in it), but either fiction or meta that presented the four of them together was always the exception to this. My feelings for Angel during the course of both shows were varied (going from okay but not overly invested during the first three seasons of BTVS to very fond during the first two seasons of AtS to eye-rollingly impatient and emotionally disconnected with in s3 to fond and interested again in s4 and 5), but even during the s3 down, when I seriously considered giving up the entire show, not just the character, again Fanged Foursome meta and fanfic was the exception. Dru I always loved, but her drawback as a character is that she doesn't grow or change, as opposed to the other three, after her big change, so I hardly looked for fanfic that featured her on her own. Lastly: one unwritten fannish commandment for me is Though shalt not watch Fool for Love or Darla on their own, but always together.
Londo/G'Kar
You know, I recently found the post with my first slash story about them, and I sound absurdly apologetic in the preamble. Now of course I was hardly alone in seeing the relationship between Londo and G'Kar, their arcs together and alone, as the emotional core of Babylon 5, but there was frustratingly little fanfiction about them for ten years. By "frustratingly little" I don't mean slash, I mean anything at all. At the old B5 archive, I found one story. Only one. And I couldn't understand it. So I did something about it and lured Andraste into the fandom so she could do something about it, too. I think what makes the enduring appeal, regardless as to whether one sees the relationship as utterly platonic or slashy, is that they're both so richly realized characters you can't consign them one to one category, and that's true for their relationship with each other as well. Depending on when in the show we are, either of them can be hero, villain, antihero, comic relief, or everything at once. I've written an entire essay about why Londo's fall-and-redemption story still remains unequalled on tv for me, so let me say something about G'Kar's here, because it's as remarkable, in a different way. "Ambiguous character ends up as wise and enlightened hero" could have been dull instead of being incredibly compelling; but because G'Kar never loses his - Narnness? I can't use the term "humanity" here, can I? -, his ability to throw a petty tantrum because people won't listen (see Day of the Dead), his eagerness to flirt (Tragedy of Telepaths, Objects at Rest) or his sharp tongue, let alone his outrage and anger when he sees something like Na'Toth's imprisonment, his enlightened state always rings true, hard-won, and as endearing as his early incarnation as a wily ambassador and still bloodthirsty ex freedom fighter. Lastly, so many fandoms try to pull off storylines where enemies become first allies by necessity and then friends and/or lovers, either in fanfiction or on the show proper. But so often it feels that what originally made them enemies is ignored or downplayed. Not so here. When at the culmination of their storyline together G'Kar says "my people can never forgive your people, you understand that, don't you? But I can forgive you", it works, and feels right in every way. (Including the differentiation of personal forgiveness versus general forgiveness - two very different things.)
five things
Ah, "five things that never happened..." I encountered this fanfic format first on lj, in a Farscape story about Aeryn Sun, I think, and it fascinated me when I tweaked that each of the five things was independent from the others. Each asked basically "what if canon had gone differently at one specific point" and explored the consequences for the character it focused on. Until then, the most AUs I had seen were of the dreaded high school type ("aka "everyone is human and in high school") or of the wish fulfillment type (aka "in MY universe, X and Y are still together!"). But the "five things" stories were different and were a fantastic way to explore the canon characters and their relationships, because they didn't just offer one version, and the portrait that emerged usually made the character in question even more intriguing. The first time I tried it myself was for BTVS' Warren Meers, partly due to a discussion with andrastewhite about the Trio in general and Warren in particular, and partly because londonkds' "Mary Sue Goes Septic" essay had given me a lot of ideas about Warren and Willow I wanted to try out in fictional form.
Then iamsab challenged me to write Kira/Dukat. Now I've always regretted that Dukat, post-Waltz, was written as a one dimensional evil madman on the show. And he and Kira undeniably had great chemisty, as well as a very interesting relationship (pre-Waltz). But even if Dukat had remained a, pardon the bad pun, shades of grey character, it would not have changed his prefect-of-Bajor past, and a romance with Kira would have been, to put it mildly, extremely unlikely. However, the "Five Things" format allowed me to explore several angles without whitewashing Dukat (or repeating the Evil Madman thing, for that matter), or making Kira behave in an ooc "you're so sexy, all is forgiven" way. And it allowed me to be wilfully perverse. In the variation where they actually have sex, it's not about Dukat at all for Kira, it's about her depression and anger during the second occupation and also about Odo. In the variation where they genuinenly love each other, the relationship isn't sexual at all but a family relationship, as in this AU Kira Meru raised her children, not her husband and thus Kira Nerys grows up as Dukat's daughter, and AU!Nerys is so passionately pro-Cardassian that she becomes one, which is of course the worst thing regular!Kira could imagine. And so forth. No sooner had I written this that altariel wanted to have a "Five things which never happened between Garak and Bashir" as well. Which she received, after some delay. It made me aware of a difference in gender perception by myself because while during the Kira-Dukat five things I had been very conscious of the occupier-of-planet / member of the brutally occupied population problem, I didn't feel the same burden with Garak/Bashir, though Garak, with his Obsidian Order past, definitely was no less guilty of war crimes (torture and assassination we know about; others are plausible guesswork) than Dukat was. Possibly because Bashir wasn't Bajoran, but also because Bashir was male, and thus there was no chance of falling into a squicky subtext about colonialism with the woman embodying the occupied people. Though again, these Five Things weren't five ways to get the characters together, but focused on traits they brought out in each other, and which particular changes in canon forced them to deal with in somewhat different manners.
I've used the "Five things..." format in other fandoms since, but these three attempts still remain my favourites and the ones I'm proudest of, as a writer.