My Yuletide gift (Sleepy Hollow), Fight Club, and why I love fanfic
First off, let me recommend my Yuletide story, Come and See. It's 4,000 words of beautifully-crafted friendship-rooted Abby/Ichabod. The author warns for dub-con, but I'm not sure I would have, so don't let that put you off unless you're really careful about such.
The big challenge of Abby/Ichabod, of course, is that the show spends quite a bit of time and energy on the train-wreck of a love story that's Ichabod/Katrina. It's his capital-M Motivation, because saving the world isn't enough /sarcasm; and, more seriously, it lets the show dwell in the land of friendship veering toward UST, which works very well when you have a male-female pairing having adventures together. The big problem with this dynamic in shows like Moonlighting, Remington Steele, X-Files, and Lois and Clark (to name my favorites; yes, I'm showing my age) is that there's really no reason for a couple that has the chemistry these do NOT to start dating by episode four or whatever. So we get perfectly competent, single adults acting like 12-year-olds in this one area, for no reason other than UST is thought to work better dramatically than RST. (Scratch that about behaving like 12-year-olds; G is 12, and her friends seem to have no trouble asking each other out, even when "out" only means hanging out on the playground after lunch; BID.)
Anyhoo. With Sleepy Hollow we have purgatory!Katrina keeping Ichabod and Abby from getting too far even into UST territory; which, as a non-shipper, is actually fine with me - romantic relationships just aren't my favorite.
But fanfic - fanfic isn't canon, and while I was reading Come and See I didn't give Katrina a single thought. Come and See takes an essential premise of the show, boils it down, and extrapolates what would happen. There's sex, but it's sex that fits; and without the angst that I think canon!Ichabod would find debilitating. All with a flare for language and pacing that has me ready to read the author's entire ouevre once her identity is revealed.
- - - - -
E had really been wanting to introduce me to Fight Club, so we saw it this afternoon. I don't want to give too much away; but, while I can see its appeal, the switch from being a buddy-movie-gone-bad-meets-a-rumination-on-the-male-condition to being just about Modern Maleness left me feeling pretty unsatisfied. It felt like the opposite of fanfic. Fanfic, starting with our insistence on headers, starts honest and tries to deliver, with as much artistry as the author can manage. That's not so say all fanfic is straight-forward; and it's rarely completely canon-compliant. But where it varies from canon, it's trying to get at an honesty that canon can't, or won't.
Come and See is a very honest fic. The Abby and Ichabod of canon can't quite be who they are in Come and See; I think that's fine, given the entirety of the canon world. But canon is not all, and I love my gift :-)
The big challenge of Abby/Ichabod, of course, is that the show spends quite a bit of time and energy on the train-wreck of a love story that's Ichabod/Katrina. It's his capital-M Motivation, because saving the world isn't enough /sarcasm; and, more seriously, it lets the show dwell in the land of friendship veering toward UST, which works very well when you have a male-female pairing having adventures together. The big problem with this dynamic in shows like Moonlighting, Remington Steele, X-Files, and Lois and Clark (to name my favorites; yes, I'm showing my age) is that there's really no reason for a couple that has the chemistry these do NOT to start dating by episode four or whatever. So we get perfectly competent, single adults acting like 12-year-olds in this one area, for no reason other than UST is thought to work better dramatically than RST. (Scratch that about behaving like 12-year-olds; G is 12, and her friends seem to have no trouble asking each other out, even when "out" only means hanging out on the playground after lunch; BID.)
Anyhoo. With Sleepy Hollow we have purgatory!Katrina keeping Ichabod and Abby from getting too far even into UST territory; which, as a non-shipper, is actually fine with me - romantic relationships just aren't my favorite.
But fanfic - fanfic isn't canon, and while I was reading Come and See I didn't give Katrina a single thought. Come and See takes an essential premise of the show, boils it down, and extrapolates what would happen. There's sex, but it's sex that fits; and without the angst that I think canon!Ichabod would find debilitating. All with a flare for language and pacing that has me ready to read the author's entire ouevre once her identity is revealed.
- - - - -
E had really been wanting to introduce me to Fight Club, so we saw it this afternoon. I don't want to give too much away; but, while I can see its appeal, the switch from being a buddy-movie-gone-bad-meets-a-rumination-on-the-male-condition to being just about Modern Maleness left me feeling pretty unsatisfied. It felt like the opposite of fanfic. Fanfic, starting with our insistence on headers, starts honest and tries to deliver, with as much artistry as the author can manage. That's not so say all fanfic is straight-forward; and it's rarely completely canon-compliant. But where it varies from canon, it's trying to get at an honesty that canon can't, or won't.
Come and See is a very honest fic. The Abby and Ichabod of canon can't quite be who they are in Come and See; I think that's fine, given the entirety of the canon world. But canon is not all, and I love my gift :-)