everything to me

[flambeau]

Things I really should have learned by now, #3,754: that someone has a rec page does not mean that their taste or standards are compatible with mine.I've been reading a lot of Fraser/Kowalski lately, but I had to stop today, because I was getting too claustrophobic. On their behalf, I mean. It's not the first time a slash pairing gives me

Comments

[katallison]

::loving you wildly::

Of course, there are also the stories where they go up to Canada and live alllll by themselves in the tiny cabin, a zillion miles from anyone or anything else, which I always tend to imagine ends up rather like The Shining (except with sled dogs), where Kowalski's grinning dementedly and chasing Fraser around with an axe.

[flambeau]

Hee! And you know, Fraser has two axes. So that adds up to quite a bit of blood in the snow. :)

Defiant and possibly deranged

[cesperanza]

Actually, it's funny you should write this, because I actually recently had the breakthrough that I'm much much more attracted to the isolated shack than even I let myself admit. I'm the opposite of lonely--I'm overextended, pressured, tyrranized by the social--so much so that some of my favorite time of the day is the time alone in my car during my commute. So I found myself wondering if the Canadian Shack, for me, represents getting away from it all, losing all the (I'd argue: distinctly female, at least for me) community and social responsibilities I've spent my life trying to shuck: the fucking Christmas cards (which I won't send) and christenings and family birthday parties and easter and thanksgiving, and visiting my mom, his mom, his dad, his sister, my sister, pasta on Sunday... all the real pressures of community--X's child's third birthday party, Y's backyard fucking barbeque, etc. A lot of people fetishize community, but often they're not actually IN one; I mean community rather than subculture (the difference is,

Re: Defiant and possibly deranged

[katallison]

I think you're totally on to something here, Ces, because I realized, reading this, that being of very different temperament and circumstances from you--madly introverted, depressive, and asocial to the point where apart from unavoidable work stuff I have almost *no* human contact in my daily life--the shack, for all its appeal, would be the death of me. I've been forced to acknowledge that I *need* to be yanked out of isolation on a really regular basis, or I tend to just pull deeper and deeper into my own head until I disappear.

(Granted this is kind of a side loop from torch's original point about intensely close/closed pair-bonded relationships, which I too find scary for reasons that are probably also very idiosyncratic. *g*)

Anyway, I hope you can find a few more interstices of solitude and getting-away-from-it-all in your life, which sounds just exhausting.

[callmesandy]

I think it's more of a squick to me, as well. Heck, it's one of the reasons I think Dan/Casey wouldn't last at ALL. And you're right, it strikes me as stifling.

I don't think it's endemic to buddy pairings so much as it's endemic to buddy pairings in fandoms where work is our setting. (With your well said exception about popslash.) Like, Sports Night, Due South, yes. But family based dramas like Everwood or the OC (neither of which you watch, but I'm hoping family-based covers something ...), the buddy dynamic works differently, since there is time apart, possibly different jobs, different classes for sure.

[flambeau]

Maybe I should watch more family-based shows. :) Because yes, it's the working together part that really trips my trigger, when they lock together in some unholy trinity of work-social life-love life.

Dan and Casey actually give me faint claustrophobia vibes as it is, without hooking up. But all the same, the fiction rarely gave me the same reaction, I think possibly because I mostly read light-hearted stuff without too much of a me-and-thee 4evah! vibe. Maybe. I don't think I could write it without worrying about them, though. *g*

[margueritem]

I think it also happens in other fandoms where they're not only two main characters (i.e. Phantom Menace, Sentinel, cop shows). It tends to also happen in fandoms where there are more main characters. For example, in the Stargate fandom, there are four main characters, but many stories that put Jack and Daniel together, suddenly the other two characters practically disappear (well, Teal'c on the show doesn't have much to do, but Carter does and she's brushed aside - and let's not talk about the whole "Evil woman! You shall be humiliated and beaten and killed for coming between the OTP!!!!1!!!" cliche). Of course, there are stories where the whole team works together, but the whole claustrophobic thing often happens in a show that isn't

[thornsilver]

Things I really should have learned by now, #3,754: that someone has a rec page does not mean that their taste or standards are compatible with mine.

Shocking, isn't it? And *why* certain stories get recced, I will never know!

[gwendolen]

And *why* certain stories get recced, I will never know!

One of the great mysteries of the world.

[pearl_o]

...and it's just the two of them and their insecurities in mad mad mad love together forever and they both have obsessive tendencies to put it mildly and next up, the folie a deux and the suicide pact, you know?

It's a probably a bad thing that "...I'd read that story" was my brain's first response to this post.

[flambeau]

Oh, I'd read it too. :) I'm all over the interesting story ideas. It's just sometimes the discrepancy between the idealized romantic togetherforeverness the writer seems to think she's presenting me with, and the obsessoriffic downward spiral I can so easily see it turning into, gives me the squick-o-hics.