Fanfic: Metatextual - Julianna Margulies RPF
Title: Metatextual
Written for sweetjamielee's The "Plan B" Summer 2013 TGW Ficathon
Prompt: sweetjamielee - Julianna Margulies: As a consequence of accidentally getting hooked on TGW fanfic, JM becomes an avid Kalicia shipper and demands that TPTB make it happen in canon RIGHT NOW.
Author: schwarmerei1
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: The Good Wife
Characters: Michelle King, Robert King, Julianna Margulies, Archie Panjabi, and Danielle Sepulveres. Mention of Alan Cumming, multiple fanfic writers alluded to.
Pairing: Alicia/Kalinda
Disclaimer: This is such a work of fiction. Disclaimed to the nth degree!
Author’s note: Thank you to my always obliging beta reader hotladykisses who is more important than ever now that my sleep is completely chaotic! And thank you to the wonderful fandom of “The Good Wife” -- you bring so much happiness to my life.
It all started because the Kings liked being too darn clever. Why just do one thing, when two or even three birds could be killed with a single well-directed stone?
Ostensibly it was a favour to Danielle. She was the exemplar of a team player. Frankly she had a shitty job on the show: all the hours plus a few more, and none of the glory. Substitute for one of Alicia's hands, legs or other body parts; or stand-in for the tedious process of lighting and blocking for Jules (or Jill, or Morena, or anyone else who happened to be 5'6"ish, pale and brunette.)
So when Michelle suggested that a cameo might be a nice way to thank Elle, Robert agreed enthusiastically and set his imagination to work. It had to be something better than just being an extra at a party, or an assistant at Lockhart & Gardner. Elle was a beautiful woman, as well as good sport, and her cameo ought to fit accordingly. If he could write it into the episode he was planning to direct -- so much the better.
When the idea finally struck, it was perfect: a briefly-seen love interest for Kalinda. In under a minute the idea was better than perfect: it was metatextual.
Robert loved an in-joke, and as they went this took the cake!
He also loved creating a text rich with ideas, resonances and interconnections, but then seeing what the audience chose to read (or not) into it. Sometimes it was frustrating, sure. An elaborately constructed parallel would go completely unnoticed. But sometimes the audience latched onto something he'd never intended and gave him ideas. It had never occurred to him when writing and casting, for instance, that viewers watching with such an eye would note that there were certain physical similarities between Alicia, Lana and Donna. And that first, Kalinda had a type; and second, that this was evidence in support of their ship. (Although really, thought Robert, the Kalicia shippers needed to get their act together and write a formal manifesto if they wanted to be taken seriously.)
Hence the idea of Kalinda making eyes at Elle was irresistible, because beyond the fact that she was physically so similar to Jules, she literally was Alicia. Or at least parts of her were, sometimes at critical moments. How many members of the audience realised that the hand that Will grasped in the elevator at the end of "Closing Arguments" belonged to Elle and not Jules?
That few people would get the joke didn't matter. Probably a few thousand people knew that Elle was Jules' double. Probably only a hundred would get the idea that Kalinda picking up this woman in a bar was like her scoring with a substitute for Alicia. But hey, that was part of the fun.
Robert had misgivings the day before shooting the massage therapist scene (as it had come to be known.) He'd clapped a cheerful hand on Elle's shoulder as they were wrapping for the evening and asked her if she was looking forward to tomorrow's shoot. Her tight smile in response said clearly that she was nervous as hell, and that hadn't been his (or Michelle's) aim at all. They’d hoped it would be fun, not something that kept her up at night.
Things looked much better the next day when they convened to start shooting though, because clearly Archie had stepped in. She’d provided a plan, they’d rehearsed beforehand, and Elle looked relaxed and ready to display the powers of flirtation she possessed so amply.
After just a few takes, Robert was relieved as he watched the video playback via the camera monitor. They looked good, their rapport was palpable, and he was confident he was going to capture the little moment he'd envisaged without bending the shooting schedule out of shape.
Later that night watching the dailies with Michelle (paying more attention than they'd usually give to such a brief moment) they exchanged a pleased look. Archie had worked her Kalinda magic and Danielle's masseuse blossomed under the sunshine of the other woman's attention.
“I don’t know how she does it,” mused Michelle. Robert shrugged. It was still a mystery as to why Kalinda seemed to ignite with just about every woman she shared the screen with, yet it was hit-and-miss with even the most considered of her male relationships. He sighed -- maybe there was a message there. The main point though was this material was good! If it weren't such a tightly plotted episode, already brimming with structural ideas Robert wanted to deploy, he'd be tempted to use more of the footage. But he stuck with how he'd conceived it. His idea had borne fruit in the form of one small, but juicy cherry.
Many weeks later, after “Death of a Client” aired, he was tickled to see the evidence online that a few viewers had indeed gotten the joke. Forum posts and Elle's twitter feed chirped enthusiastically. All the parties involved were satisfied they'd delivered their punch line, and no one thought much further on it.
The thing about obsessed people though, was that they contrived ways to fuel the fires of their compulsion, especially in the absence of new material for consumption. Nut jobs abhor a vacuum just as much as any other part of nature. So really it shouldn't have come as a surprise that, when just as production began anew for season five, midway through the long months with no new episodes on air, Elle received a message online. She clicked on the link within...
Initially she just smiled at the fact that what several people had predicted had come to pass -- her massage therapist had indeed made it into fanfic. But as she read on, she was impressed. And as a writer herself, her opinion was informed. It was short, taut and made its point well. It was also hot but ultimately poignant. Perhaps not everyone viewed Kalinda’s feelings for Alicia in the same way, but this persuaded its reader in just 350 words. She shut the page of her browser and smiled again. If a girl was to have only one piece of fan-fiction written about her during her lifetime, at least she got a good one.
Elle’s good mood carried over to the next morning when she arrived on set. Apparently it showed.
“You look pleased with yourself,’ observed Julianna as she had her makeup done whilst Elle was festooned with Alicia’s secondary wig.
“Just happy.”
“That’s good. Something nice happen?”
Elle lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I’ve made it. There’s fanfiction about me. I can die happy.”
Jules laughed.
“Well not about me...” Elle continued. “That would be...ugh, just no. But about my character. Well, mostly about Kalinda and Alicia, but I rated a mention.”
“I dread to imagine how fanfiction about Kalinda and a massage therapist involved Alicia.” Horrific thoughts of physiologically impossible threesomes swum in Jules’ head, “But I’m glad you’re happy.”
Elle guessed where Julianna’s thoughts had turned. “Nothing like that. It was actually quite good.”
“Really?” Jules looked unconvinced, but said it anyway. “Go on, send me the link.”
Actually reading it wasn’t a priority given Jules’ always-full inbox and especially now they were back in production and she had ten or more pages of script to prepare every night. But a few days later she shut her iPad app early. Tomorrow she was only on call for half the day, and by some miracle she was prepared, Kieran was asleep, Keith was away, and it was only 9:00 P.M. So why not a brief indulgence? If Elle thought it was good, there must be something to recommend it.
She opened her email, found the one in question and tapped on the link. She read.
It was good. It wasn’t what she was expecting.
Jules had never read fanfiction, but she thought she knew it by reputation: wish-fulfilment. Combine character A with character B, cue unrealistic fucking, and poof: happily ever after!
This wasn’t like that. It didn’t seem to have been written by a fifteen-year-old virgin who was naive about life, longing and people. It was acerbic, and simultaneously a little bit humorous and quite a lot sad. And the Kalinda it portrayed was plausible. Jules could acknowledge reading the character that way was supported by what was onscreen. She’d heard (too many times) there were people who actually believed that Alicia and Kalinda should get together. She didn’t know how the hell someone could get that from her show. Even if (a very BIG if) Alicia had a sexual orientation that admitted the possibility of being with a woman... Kalinda? Really? The woman who’d betrayed her on every level, the woman she would never be able to trust.
No one would be able to persuade her of that!
She went to bed, she slept. The next morning, she got up. Life went on as normal.
So it wasn’t planned the next time she found herself with spare time on her hands and a quiet house, she strayed back to Elle’s email and clicked again. She read over it and started to look at the page she found it on. There were comments. The people seemed friendly and familiar with each other. It was written in response to someone else’s request, seemingly. It took her some clicks to figure out what was going on.
It surprised her. Because if asked, the one thing she would have suspected about the people who wrote and read this stuff, was that they were lonely -- that it was a furtive, solitary pursuit. Not this group that had enough community spirit to hold a writing festival for several weeks each year.
Jules tended to think of the digital age as useful. It made things like her show being written on the West Coast and shot on the East Coast possible. She could send the Kings an email in the evening and expect a reply when she woke up the next morning. But much of the other stuff that came along with it, were things she worried about protecting Kieran from. Even aspects lots of other people seemed to enjoy, like social networking, she tended to think were a poor substitute for real world interactions.
She clicked again on the name of the person who wrote the story. She had written more, lots of things about the show and its episodes (a regular group of people seemed to show up for the discussion) and lots more fanfiction. She’d heard people talk about disappearing down the rabbit hole -- Jules jumped into cyberspace.
She read one story about Alicia’s psychological defense mechanisms. Along with biting humour it presented something that felt like truth. She didn’t quite buy the catharsis, but it was well done. She read another by the same author (Jules couldn’t decide if she was a therapist herself or just well-acquainted with being in the other chair in the room) about Alicia in therapy and in the shower with Kalinda. The therapy sessions amused but also convinced about Alicia’s character (if one could believe that Owen had the power to make Alicia do something she didn’t want to) and the sex was undeniably titillating. Also hot was the sex in a lighter little piece about Kalinda out-doing Will in the bedroom.
It was an entertaining diversion and she’d need to rethink her opinion in future. But that was quite enough. She felt like she’d been in a long fight against lack of sleep since Kieran’s birth and staying up late for a frivolous reason wasn’t something she could afford. So she switched off her tablet and called it a night.
Jules wasn't the sort of person who succumbed to bad habits. She defined herself by discipline and hard work, so it was out-of-character that just two nights later she found her fingers tapping their way out of her script, into her browser, from there to the history tab, and thence into the fic realm.
She started to click her way through some of the other stories that had been written for this so-called ficathon, glancing through some, reading others. She was surprised by the saturation of Kalicia stories -- puzzled even. She supposed it made a kind of sense, it fitted in with what she understood fanfic to be. These fans were substituting their own content for what they didn’t get on the show. But if Team Sharma seemed to be there in numbers, where were Team Florrick and Team Gardner? Shouldn’t the people who liked Alicia with Peter have lots to write about after Season 4? There were conversations not shown, situations unresolved, and sex mostly implied. And what about Will? All that pent-up longing, steamy gazing and flashbacks... Why weren’t there twenty different versions of the inevitable loss of restraint and resulting explosion of lust that surely, surely huge sections of the audience wanted to see?
Jules tried to shut down her confusion as she also shut down her browser. She was supposed to be working, not wasting two hours that would be deducted from her sleep that night. But her mind was still distracted and she read a page of script without retaining any of it. People approached her all the time and gave her opinions about Alicia’s love life and who she should be with. Lots of them thought it would be good for her character to be by herself for a while and that was hard to argue against. But plenty of them found Alicia and Peter compelling, and still more really seemed to want her to end up with Will. So why weren’t they writing stories about it, why were these women seemingly so insistent that Kalinda was the answer to Alicia’s happiness?
She shook her head, she was getting nothing done. She got up and headed for the kitchen and made herself a cup of herbal tea in an attempt to clear her head before returning to what she was supposed to be doing. It seemed to work, and if she was a little short of the correct amount of sleep the next morning, it didn’t show on her face.
She knew she wouldn’t get away with staying up late repeatedly. She could remember those awful weeks at the start of shooting Season 1, before the production stumped up the money to build a standing courtroom set on the soundstages in Brooklyn. They had been trying to shoot in real courtrooms after-hours and it had resulted in an exhausted cast and a borderline seditious crew. Therefore Jules should have known better than to spend yet more of her time on fanfiction just two nights later, but she found herself doing it anyway. This time she forced herself to finish up with her lines first, that made it better surely? Having a little downtime to herself for something trivial was entirely reasonable.
Jules had noticed that some of the people who had written stories posted them directly on the page of the ficathon and others provided a link to sites elsewhere. She was beginning to get a handle on how these things worked so she tapped her way to one of the archive sites and figured out that by selecting the tag for her show she could see all the fanfiction that existed there. Now that she had a changed opinion of the enterprise, it was oddly heart-warming -- seeing that hundreds of stories had been written for this thing she was at the centre of. Too much to waste her time reading certainly, but nice in its way, she decided.
Again though, the page was dominated by Kalicia. The site declared the content of stories, the character and relationships within. Again and again “Alicia Florrick/Kalinda Sharma” was featured. She realised when she tapped on that tag it showed her how many there were. She was startled anew. She went back and compared the number of stories that explored Alicia with Peter or Will. That there were twice as many with Will as with Peter seemed about right, but that there were five times as many that had Alicia with Kalinda seemed out of proportion.
It was with curiosity that she began to tap the tags for the individual characters. How was it (based on the numbers that showed) that only about two thirds of the stories actually featured Alicia? With an almost morbid fascination she then compared the tag for Kalinda. There were almost as many for her, a few of the stories were about Kalinda and Cary and outnumbering those were ones about Kalinda and Lana, but by far and away most of them were about Alicia and Kalinda.
Typical, thought Jules as she shut off her iPad decisively and headed for the bathroom to brush her teeth. Of course the fannish types would be drawn in by the boots, and the bat and the hyper-sexuality. She’d been right originally, she told herself as she scrubbed almost viciously at her gums, these people were obsessed and Jules most definitely had better things to do with her time.
She kept stubbornly to her resolution and stayed off the internet entirely for days. Just email and scripts -- strictly work only.
So why was it that she kept on thinking about this Kalicia thing every now and again? It didn't make sense and her continuing to think about it didn't make sense either. Her resolve slipped and she found herself back on that archive site gazing at the page full of "The Good Wife" fanfiction. One last chance to convince me, she told herself and began to open Kalicia stories at random.
They weren't all equally good, but some of them were excellent. Lots of them didn’t aspire to being more than a scenario to push the two characters together or simply portray a short sexed-up encounter (although it did seem a tad classier to read about Alicia and a bit of kink when it was translated into French), but many of them didn’t have any sex at all. Once again it was a surprise, that people were drawn enough to simply the emotional relationship between these two women to spend time writing and reading about it.
People did keep asserting that to her -- that Alicia and Kalinda were the emotional heart of the show. Hell, she was pretty sure Michelle and Robert shared that opinion even if they were too polite to argue the point when she’d put her foot down about the relationship’s prominence. She got that it was unusual, that it was poignant perhaps... so why did this thing that seemed to resonate so strongly with others elude her?
There was even a video posted. Jules was wary of clicking, the collected moments of Kalicia probably, just a bunch of assembled fragments squashed together to make it look like Alicia and Kalinda were in a relationship -- more wish fulfilment, nothing more. She shrugged internally and clicked anyway to find that it wasn’t a mash-up, it was actually the story of the show -- Alicia’s story almost as much as Kalinda’s. Missing some aspects of Alicia’s journey certainly, but it was the gist of it and she could see how Kalinda accompanied Alicia for each step of it until... And then Kalinda...it said everything important about her. And for once, Jules could feel what was compelling, feel the draw that existed between these characters and had from the start. And could see how it had built, how it wasn’t actually so crazy that people saw more to it, or believed that more should happen. She watched the last scene in the video, almost the last time she’d shot with Archie -- the scene on the hotel room beds.
Suddenly it punched her in the gut. This was where their story had ended. This short scene loaded with layers of meaning was not an incremental thaw that would lead to renewed closeness the way it felt in this video, it was Kalicia’s funeral oration. And Jules realised that it shouldn’t have been. How had they all just let things drop for half a season? It really didn’t make any sense after all the work that had been done building then destroying then regenerating characters’ relationship for three-and-a-half years.
Jules actually felt depressed. At the time she hadn’t thought it was a misstep, she’d felt that the show needed to shift focus from peripheral issues to the heart of Alicia’s personal and professional dilemmas. Now she wasn’t so sure.
She tried to distract herself from her sense of uneasiness and browsed around looking for a piece of fiction she hadn’t read yet. She found another from that Canadian author she liked so much, the one with the elliptical writing style and piquant scenarios. She needed a little serve of sorbet to cleanse her palate.
She got served something quite different. She could see immediately that this story was much darker and denser. It was obviously inspired by D. H. Lawrence, which seemed like quite an aspiration for a fanfiction writer. She began to devour it. She had to stop herself, realising that this was a read that couldn’t be rushed and that in her haste she was missing tasting all its flavours. It was compelling and she clicked for the next chapter, dragged into the tension between these two wounded women who obviously needed to find their primal selves out in the woods to heal. Why hadn’t the Nick storyline been this good? Jules pondered this as she read an amazing chapter: half surreal imagery of Kalinda’s ambulance nightmare, half the throat-choking realisation of the happiness she’d destroyed portrayed via Alicia’s family photographs. She read the next chapter where the plot picked up and then the... There was no next chapter. She checked again. She was aghast. She saw the comments at the bottom of the page that started in praise of chapter five, but then became hopeful pleas for an update. There hadn’t been one in almost a year.
Jules’ frustration mounted. This story deserved to be seen through to its conclusion. There! This just went to show how frustrating this fanfiction drug was, the high wasn’t sustainable. She didn’t need this in her life. She got herself ready for bed. She was over this.
Unusually, she found herself having trouble going to sleep. How could someone leave a story that good unfinished? Sure, something probably happened in the author’s life that prevented her continuing it -- there must have been a good reason. But, it just seemed so unfair to leave readers hanging like that. Just like it was unfair to the viewers that the show had...
Jules sat up. She needed to talk to Robert tomorrow. She had power, she could change things, maybe she could make it better.
It was fortunate timing. Robert was in New York, in preparatory discussions for the hundredth episode. Writing for it, for the season, was already substantially underway, but even though she knew she was going to be causing headaches and trouble and cost everyone involved extra work, there was still a window.
She got to Brooklyn an hour before her call, hoping to grab Robert and have a chance to talk without delaying the day’s schedule. She was in luck.
“Can I get a moment?”
“You can have several,” was his reply. He looked a little concerned when Jules led him to the privacy of her trailer.
“Is everything alright?” Because that’s what Robert was like, if something was wrong with his cast or his crew, he wanted to know and fix it.
“I’m fine. I just wanted to talk about the plans for the season. I think we might be headed in the wrong direction.”
“Okay...” Robert sat, hoping the feeling of déjà vu he was experiencing would prove to be wrong.
“You know how you said you wanted episode one hundred to be a blowout?”
Robert nodded.
“Well...”
+++++++
Robert found Archie in her trailer. Apparently she was in one of her ascetic phases. The stash of Cadbury Flakes had disappeared and she was sipping on a mug of hot water with a slice of lemon in it. Rumour had it she’d even abandoned mac and cheese at lunch the previous day and joined Alan at the vegan option. Privately Robert suspected that these little purges were a part of some series of cosmic deals Archie made, and wondered what she was hoping to bring about this time. For once at least, he was bearing what he thought was good news.
“Do you have a moment Arch?”
“Sure.” She settled back on her lounge and made herself comfortable, Kalinda boots resting on the coffee table.
Not for the first time, Robert wondered how on earth she could stand wearing them all day even though he believed her that it wasn’t worth the trouble of taking them off between takes.
“You know how things have been quiet on the Kalicia front?”
Archie rolled her eyes. The same way Kalinda did back in the pilot.
“We’ve had a change of heart.” Robert was far too diplomatic to ever talk about the how of any decision of course.
“Back to the bar scenes?” Archie winked at him.
“No, we’re thinking of something a little more...escalated...” Robert paused for a moment. “How do you feel about Alicia’s bedroom, Archie?”
Archie liked an in-joke almost as much as Robert, so all she needed to say was, “I’m in.”
Written for sweetjamielee's The "Plan B" Summer 2013 TGW Ficathon
Prompt: sweetjamielee - Julianna Margulies: As a consequence of accidentally getting hooked on TGW fanfic, JM becomes an avid Kalicia shipper and demands that TPTB make it happen in canon RIGHT NOW.
Author: schwarmerei1
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: The Good Wife
Characters: Michelle King, Robert King, Julianna Margulies, Archie Panjabi, and Danielle Sepulveres. Mention of Alan Cumming, multiple fanfic writers alluded to.
Pairing: Alicia/Kalinda
Disclaimer: This is such a work of fiction. Disclaimed to the nth degree!
Author’s note: Thank you to my always obliging beta reader hotladykisses who is more important than ever now that my sleep is completely chaotic! And thank you to the wonderful fandom of “The Good Wife” -- you bring so much happiness to my life.
It all started because the Kings liked being too darn clever. Why just do one thing, when two or even three birds could be killed with a single well-directed stone?
Ostensibly it was a favour to Danielle. She was the exemplar of a team player. Frankly she had a shitty job on the show: all the hours plus a few more, and none of the glory. Substitute for one of Alicia's hands, legs or other body parts; or stand-in for the tedious process of lighting and blocking for Jules (or Jill, or Morena, or anyone else who happened to be 5'6"ish, pale and brunette.)
So when Michelle suggested that a cameo might be a nice way to thank Elle, Robert agreed enthusiastically and set his imagination to work. It had to be something better than just being an extra at a party, or an assistant at Lockhart & Gardner. Elle was a beautiful woman, as well as good sport, and her cameo ought to fit accordingly. If he could write it into the episode he was planning to direct -- so much the better.
When the idea finally struck, it was perfect: a briefly-seen love interest for Kalinda. In under a minute the idea was better than perfect: it was metatextual.
Robert loved an in-joke, and as they went this took the cake!
He also loved creating a text rich with ideas, resonances and interconnections, but then seeing what the audience chose to read (or not) into it. Sometimes it was frustrating, sure. An elaborately constructed parallel would go completely unnoticed. But sometimes the audience latched onto something he'd never intended and gave him ideas. It had never occurred to him when writing and casting, for instance, that viewers watching with such an eye would note that there were certain physical similarities between Alicia, Lana and Donna. And that first, Kalinda had a type; and second, that this was evidence in support of their ship. (Although really, thought Robert, the Kalicia shippers needed to get their act together and write a formal manifesto if they wanted to be taken seriously.)
Hence the idea of Kalinda making eyes at Elle was irresistible, because beyond the fact that she was physically so similar to Jules, she literally was Alicia. Or at least parts of her were, sometimes at critical moments. How many members of the audience realised that the hand that Will grasped in the elevator at the end of "Closing Arguments" belonged to Elle and not Jules?
That few people would get the joke didn't matter. Probably a few thousand people knew that Elle was Jules' double. Probably only a hundred would get the idea that Kalinda picking up this woman in a bar was like her scoring with a substitute for Alicia. But hey, that was part of the fun.
Robert had misgivings the day before shooting the massage therapist scene (as it had come to be known.) He'd clapped a cheerful hand on Elle's shoulder as they were wrapping for the evening and asked her if she was looking forward to tomorrow's shoot. Her tight smile in response said clearly that she was nervous as hell, and that hadn't been his (or Michelle's) aim at all. They’d hoped it would be fun, not something that kept her up at night.
Things looked much better the next day when they convened to start shooting though, because clearly Archie had stepped in. She’d provided a plan, they’d rehearsed beforehand, and Elle looked relaxed and ready to display the powers of flirtation she possessed so amply.
After just a few takes, Robert was relieved as he watched the video playback via the camera monitor. They looked good, their rapport was palpable, and he was confident he was going to capture the little moment he'd envisaged without bending the shooting schedule out of shape.
Later that night watching the dailies with Michelle (paying more attention than they'd usually give to such a brief moment) they exchanged a pleased look. Archie had worked her Kalinda magic and Danielle's masseuse blossomed under the sunshine of the other woman's attention.
“I don’t know how she does it,” mused Michelle. Robert shrugged. It was still a mystery as to why Kalinda seemed to ignite with just about every woman she shared the screen with, yet it was hit-and-miss with even the most considered of her male relationships. He sighed -- maybe there was a message there. The main point though was this material was good! If it weren't such a tightly plotted episode, already brimming with structural ideas Robert wanted to deploy, he'd be tempted to use more of the footage. But he stuck with how he'd conceived it. His idea had borne fruit in the form of one small, but juicy cherry.
Many weeks later, after “Death of a Client” aired, he was tickled to see the evidence online that a few viewers had indeed gotten the joke. Forum posts and Elle's twitter feed chirped enthusiastically. All the parties involved were satisfied they'd delivered their punch line, and no one thought much further on it.
The thing about obsessed people though, was that they contrived ways to fuel the fires of their compulsion, especially in the absence of new material for consumption. Nut jobs abhor a vacuum just as much as any other part of nature. So really it shouldn't have come as a surprise that, when just as production began anew for season five, midway through the long months with no new episodes on air, Elle received a message online. She clicked on the link within...
Initially she just smiled at the fact that what several people had predicted had come to pass -- her massage therapist had indeed made it into fanfic. But as she read on, she was impressed. And as a writer herself, her opinion was informed. It was short, taut and made its point well. It was also hot but ultimately poignant. Perhaps not everyone viewed Kalinda’s feelings for Alicia in the same way, but this persuaded its reader in just 350 words. She shut the page of her browser and smiled again. If a girl was to have only one piece of fan-fiction written about her during her lifetime, at least she got a good one.
Elle’s good mood carried over to the next morning when she arrived on set. Apparently it showed.
“You look pleased with yourself,’ observed Julianna as she had her makeup done whilst Elle was festooned with Alicia’s secondary wig.
“Just happy.”
“That’s good. Something nice happen?”
Elle lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I’ve made it. There’s fanfiction about me. I can die happy.”
Jules laughed.
“Well not about me...” Elle continued. “That would be...ugh, just no. But about my character. Well, mostly about Kalinda and Alicia, but I rated a mention.”
“I dread to imagine how fanfiction about Kalinda and a massage therapist involved Alicia.” Horrific thoughts of physiologically impossible threesomes swum in Jules’ head, “But I’m glad you’re happy.”
Elle guessed where Julianna’s thoughts had turned. “Nothing like that. It was actually quite good.”
“Really?” Jules looked unconvinced, but said it anyway. “Go on, send me the link.”
Actually reading it wasn’t a priority given Jules’ always-full inbox and especially now they were back in production and she had ten or more pages of script to prepare every night. But a few days later she shut her iPad app early. Tomorrow she was only on call for half the day, and by some miracle she was prepared, Kieran was asleep, Keith was away, and it was only 9:00 P.M. So why not a brief indulgence? If Elle thought it was good, there must be something to recommend it.
She opened her email, found the one in question and tapped on the link. She read.
It was good. It wasn’t what she was expecting.
Jules had never read fanfiction, but she thought she knew it by reputation: wish-fulfilment. Combine character A with character B, cue unrealistic fucking, and poof: happily ever after!
This wasn’t like that. It didn’t seem to have been written by a fifteen-year-old virgin who was naive about life, longing and people. It was acerbic, and simultaneously a little bit humorous and quite a lot sad. And the Kalinda it portrayed was plausible. Jules could acknowledge reading the character that way was supported by what was onscreen. She’d heard (too many times) there were people who actually believed that Alicia and Kalinda should get together. She didn’t know how the hell someone could get that from her show. Even if (a very BIG if) Alicia had a sexual orientation that admitted the possibility of being with a woman... Kalinda? Really? The woman who’d betrayed her on every level, the woman she would never be able to trust.
No one would be able to persuade her of that!
She went to bed, she slept. The next morning, she got up. Life went on as normal.
So it wasn’t planned the next time she found herself with spare time on her hands and a quiet house, she strayed back to Elle’s email and clicked again. She read over it and started to look at the page she found it on. There were comments. The people seemed friendly and familiar with each other. It was written in response to someone else’s request, seemingly. It took her some clicks to figure out what was going on.
It surprised her. Because if asked, the one thing she would have suspected about the people who wrote and read this stuff, was that they were lonely -- that it was a furtive, solitary pursuit. Not this group that had enough community spirit to hold a writing festival for several weeks each year.
Jules tended to think of the digital age as useful. It made things like her show being written on the West Coast and shot on the East Coast possible. She could send the Kings an email in the evening and expect a reply when she woke up the next morning. But much of the other stuff that came along with it, were things she worried about protecting Kieran from. Even aspects lots of other people seemed to enjoy, like social networking, she tended to think were a poor substitute for real world interactions.
She clicked again on the name of the person who wrote the story. She had written more, lots of things about the show and its episodes (a regular group of people seemed to show up for the discussion) and lots more fanfiction. She’d heard people talk about disappearing down the rabbit hole -- Jules jumped into cyberspace.
She read one story about Alicia’s psychological defense mechanisms. Along with biting humour it presented something that felt like truth. She didn’t quite buy the catharsis, but it was well done. She read another by the same author (Jules couldn’t decide if she was a therapist herself or just well-acquainted with being in the other chair in the room) about Alicia in therapy and in the shower with Kalinda. The therapy sessions amused but also convinced about Alicia’s character (if one could believe that Owen had the power to make Alicia do something she didn’t want to) and the sex was undeniably titillating. Also hot was the sex in a lighter little piece about Kalinda out-doing Will in the bedroom.
It was an entertaining diversion and she’d need to rethink her opinion in future. But that was quite enough. She felt like she’d been in a long fight against lack of sleep since Kieran’s birth and staying up late for a frivolous reason wasn’t something she could afford. So she switched off her tablet and called it a night.
Jules wasn't the sort of person who succumbed to bad habits. She defined herself by discipline and hard work, so it was out-of-character that just two nights later she found her fingers tapping their way out of her script, into her browser, from there to the history tab, and thence into the fic realm.
She started to click her way through some of the other stories that had been written for this so-called ficathon, glancing through some, reading others. She was surprised by the saturation of Kalicia stories -- puzzled even. She supposed it made a kind of sense, it fitted in with what she understood fanfic to be. These fans were substituting their own content for what they didn’t get on the show. But if Team Sharma seemed to be there in numbers, where were Team Florrick and Team Gardner? Shouldn’t the people who liked Alicia with Peter have lots to write about after Season 4? There were conversations not shown, situations unresolved, and sex mostly implied. And what about Will? All that pent-up longing, steamy gazing and flashbacks... Why weren’t there twenty different versions of the inevitable loss of restraint and resulting explosion of lust that surely, surely huge sections of the audience wanted to see?
Jules tried to shut down her confusion as she also shut down her browser. She was supposed to be working, not wasting two hours that would be deducted from her sleep that night. But her mind was still distracted and she read a page of script without retaining any of it. People approached her all the time and gave her opinions about Alicia’s love life and who she should be with. Lots of them thought it would be good for her character to be by herself for a while and that was hard to argue against. But plenty of them found Alicia and Peter compelling, and still more really seemed to want her to end up with Will. So why weren’t they writing stories about it, why were these women seemingly so insistent that Kalinda was the answer to Alicia’s happiness?
She shook her head, she was getting nothing done. She got up and headed for the kitchen and made herself a cup of herbal tea in an attempt to clear her head before returning to what she was supposed to be doing. It seemed to work, and if she was a little short of the correct amount of sleep the next morning, it didn’t show on her face.
She knew she wouldn’t get away with staying up late repeatedly. She could remember those awful weeks at the start of shooting Season 1, before the production stumped up the money to build a standing courtroom set on the soundstages in Brooklyn. They had been trying to shoot in real courtrooms after-hours and it had resulted in an exhausted cast and a borderline seditious crew. Therefore Jules should have known better than to spend yet more of her time on fanfiction just two nights later, but she found herself doing it anyway. This time she forced herself to finish up with her lines first, that made it better surely? Having a little downtime to herself for something trivial was entirely reasonable.
Jules had noticed that some of the people who had written stories posted them directly on the page of the ficathon and others provided a link to sites elsewhere. She was beginning to get a handle on how these things worked so she tapped her way to one of the archive sites and figured out that by selecting the tag for her show she could see all the fanfiction that existed there. Now that she had a changed opinion of the enterprise, it was oddly heart-warming -- seeing that hundreds of stories had been written for this thing she was at the centre of. Too much to waste her time reading certainly, but nice in its way, she decided.
Again though, the page was dominated by Kalicia. The site declared the content of stories, the character and relationships within. Again and again “Alicia Florrick/Kalinda Sharma” was featured. She realised when she tapped on that tag it showed her how many there were. She was startled anew. She went back and compared the number of stories that explored Alicia with Peter or Will. That there were twice as many with Will as with Peter seemed about right, but that there were five times as many that had Alicia with Kalinda seemed out of proportion.
It was with curiosity that she began to tap the tags for the individual characters. How was it (based on the numbers that showed) that only about two thirds of the stories actually featured Alicia? With an almost morbid fascination she then compared the tag for Kalinda. There were almost as many for her, a few of the stories were about Kalinda and Cary and outnumbering those were ones about Kalinda and Lana, but by far and away most of them were about Alicia and Kalinda.
Typical, thought Jules as she shut off her iPad decisively and headed for the bathroom to brush her teeth. Of course the fannish types would be drawn in by the boots, and the bat and the hyper-sexuality. She’d been right originally, she told herself as she scrubbed almost viciously at her gums, these people were obsessed and Jules most definitely had better things to do with her time.
She kept stubbornly to her resolution and stayed off the internet entirely for days. Just email and scripts -- strictly work only.
So why was it that she kept on thinking about this Kalicia thing every now and again? It didn't make sense and her continuing to think about it didn't make sense either. Her resolve slipped and she found herself back on that archive site gazing at the page full of "The Good Wife" fanfiction. One last chance to convince me, she told herself and began to open Kalicia stories at random.
They weren't all equally good, but some of them were excellent. Lots of them didn’t aspire to being more than a scenario to push the two characters together or simply portray a short sexed-up encounter (although it did seem a tad classier to read about Alicia and a bit of kink when it was translated into French), but many of them didn’t have any sex at all. Once again it was a surprise, that people were drawn enough to simply the emotional relationship between these two women to spend time writing and reading about it.
People did keep asserting that to her -- that Alicia and Kalinda were the emotional heart of the show. Hell, she was pretty sure Michelle and Robert shared that opinion even if they were too polite to argue the point when she’d put her foot down about the relationship’s prominence. She got that it was unusual, that it was poignant perhaps... so why did this thing that seemed to resonate so strongly with others elude her?
There was even a video posted. Jules was wary of clicking, the collected moments of Kalicia probably, just a bunch of assembled fragments squashed together to make it look like Alicia and Kalinda were in a relationship -- more wish fulfilment, nothing more. She shrugged internally and clicked anyway to find that it wasn’t a mash-up, it was actually the story of the show -- Alicia’s story almost as much as Kalinda’s. Missing some aspects of Alicia’s journey certainly, but it was the gist of it and she could see how Kalinda accompanied Alicia for each step of it until... And then Kalinda...it said everything important about her. And for once, Jules could feel what was compelling, feel the draw that existed between these characters and had from the start. And could see how it had built, how it wasn’t actually so crazy that people saw more to it, or believed that more should happen. She watched the last scene in the video, almost the last time she’d shot with Archie -- the scene on the hotel room beds.
Suddenly it punched her in the gut. This was where their story had ended. This short scene loaded with layers of meaning was not an incremental thaw that would lead to renewed closeness the way it felt in this video, it was Kalicia’s funeral oration. And Jules realised that it shouldn’t have been. How had they all just let things drop for half a season? It really didn’t make any sense after all the work that had been done building then destroying then regenerating characters’ relationship for three-and-a-half years.
Jules actually felt depressed. At the time she hadn’t thought it was a misstep, she’d felt that the show needed to shift focus from peripheral issues to the heart of Alicia’s personal and professional dilemmas. Now she wasn’t so sure.
She tried to distract herself from her sense of uneasiness and browsed around looking for a piece of fiction she hadn’t read yet. She found another from that Canadian author she liked so much, the one with the elliptical writing style and piquant scenarios. She needed a little serve of sorbet to cleanse her palate.
She got served something quite different. She could see immediately that this story was much darker and denser. It was obviously inspired by D. H. Lawrence, which seemed like quite an aspiration for a fanfiction writer. She began to devour it. She had to stop herself, realising that this was a read that couldn’t be rushed and that in her haste she was missing tasting all its flavours. It was compelling and she clicked for the next chapter, dragged into the tension between these two wounded women who obviously needed to find their primal selves out in the woods to heal. Why hadn’t the Nick storyline been this good? Jules pondered this as she read an amazing chapter: half surreal imagery of Kalinda’s ambulance nightmare, half the throat-choking realisation of the happiness she’d destroyed portrayed via Alicia’s family photographs. She read the next chapter where the plot picked up and then the... There was no next chapter. She checked again. She was aghast. She saw the comments at the bottom of the page that started in praise of chapter five, but then became hopeful pleas for an update. There hadn’t been one in almost a year.
Jules’ frustration mounted. This story deserved to be seen through to its conclusion. There! This just went to show how frustrating this fanfiction drug was, the high wasn’t sustainable. She didn’t need this in her life. She got herself ready for bed. She was over this.
Unusually, she found herself having trouble going to sleep. How could someone leave a story that good unfinished? Sure, something probably happened in the author’s life that prevented her continuing it -- there must have been a good reason. But, it just seemed so unfair to leave readers hanging like that. Just like it was unfair to the viewers that the show had...
Jules sat up. She needed to talk to Robert tomorrow. She had power, she could change things, maybe she could make it better.
It was fortunate timing. Robert was in New York, in preparatory discussions for the hundredth episode. Writing for it, for the season, was already substantially underway, but even though she knew she was going to be causing headaches and trouble and cost everyone involved extra work, there was still a window.
She got to Brooklyn an hour before her call, hoping to grab Robert and have a chance to talk without delaying the day’s schedule. She was in luck.
“Can I get a moment?”
“You can have several,” was his reply. He looked a little concerned when Jules led him to the privacy of her trailer.
“Is everything alright?” Because that’s what Robert was like, if something was wrong with his cast or his crew, he wanted to know and fix it.
“I’m fine. I just wanted to talk about the plans for the season. I think we might be headed in the wrong direction.”
“Okay...” Robert sat, hoping the feeling of déjà vu he was experiencing would prove to be wrong.
“You know how you said you wanted episode one hundred to be a blowout?”
Robert nodded.
“Well...”
+++++++
Robert found Archie in her trailer. Apparently she was in one of her ascetic phases. The stash of Cadbury Flakes had disappeared and she was sipping on a mug of hot water with a slice of lemon in it. Rumour had it she’d even abandoned mac and cheese at lunch the previous day and joined Alan at the vegan option. Privately Robert suspected that these little purges were a part of some series of cosmic deals Archie made, and wondered what she was hoping to bring about this time. For once at least, he was bearing what he thought was good news.
“Do you have a moment Arch?”
“Sure.” She settled back on her lounge and made herself comfortable, Kalinda boots resting on the coffee table.
Not for the first time, Robert wondered how on earth she could stand wearing them all day even though he believed her that it wasn’t worth the trouble of taking them off between takes.
“You know how things have been quiet on the Kalicia front?”
Archie rolled her eyes. The same way Kalinda did back in the pilot.
“We’ve had a change of heart.” Robert was far too diplomatic to ever talk about the how of any decision of course.
“Back to the bar scenes?” Archie winked at him.
“No, we’re thinking of something a little more...escalated...” Robert paused for a moment. “How do you feel about Alicia’s bedroom, Archie?”
Archie liked an in-joke almost as much as Robert, so all she needed to say was, “I’m in.”