fifty frenchmen can't be wrong (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
some_stars) wrote2011-10-09 09:30 pm
some_stars) wrote2011-10-09 09:30 pm
Entry tags:
and this was all FIFTEEN YEARS AGO oh my god i'm old
One of the delights of watching old TV--I've fallen victim to fan_eunice's recent Once A Thief enthusiasm--is getting to read old fanfic. Especially old badfic, which is not at all like badfic now. The things that make it bad...well, they're often the same, but because the stories are so much longer (the one I'm in the middle of right now is 173,000 words) and for the most part at least technically competent, the bad things often take a while to resurface. (Aside from the crippling reliance on telling instead of showing; that's pretty much endemic and on every page.)
So I'm reading this non-spectacular but perfectly enjoyable fic with a fun plot, some grin-worthy dialogue and character moments, and it goes on like this for pages at a time...until the two guys in the pairing share a scene again, and it all starts to unravel. Characters stop acting and talking like themselves, the female characters who had been major parts of the story abruptly vanish for no good reason, or they lose all the emotional depth and subtlety they had in canon and in the previous parts of the story. Everything gets abruptly and gracelessly rerouted to the Single Approved Slash Relationship blueprint, so that things can unfold as they must, never mind if they actually would. And then there is a cringingly OOC cookie-cutter sex scene, culminating in or preceded by or followed by "I love you, [full name]"/"And I love you, [full name]", and then the next scene the two main characters are no longer alone together or the plot kicks back in, and the story is decent again. Though the female characters unfortunately never quite recover.
And the whole tone of the fics, of course, is giving me almost as much nineties nostalgia as the show itself. (This particular story was written in 2003, but it reads exactly like the fic I was reading in 1996.) So many abandoned tropes! Such devotion to refusing to end the story until every corner of the relationship has been fully explored, from the first moment of Character A's confusing feelings (and actually preferably starting in the middle of one or both characters' backstories and/or childhoods) through their first time, and their first big fight, and their struggles with each other's issues, and how they learn to live together and embrace some version of domesticity, and their evolving sex lives and EVERY. SINGLE. THING. Hence the 173,000 words, presumably. Because it just wasn't finished before that. I actually admire this aesthetic of when a story is and isn't complete, although I'm glad it's no longer required.
And the gay panic, or just gay anxiety, as a serious issue that totally stands alone as a reason why A doesn't pursue B, or why A and B don't have sex yet--and I realize the current trend in fic is kind of sex-obsessed, but it's so weird to read a first-kiss scene where they start making out on the couch, and then they have to stop because B isn't ready...not because of trauma or a general discomfort with moving too fast, but because This Is All So New To Him, this wanting another man business. I mean, you still get sexuality angst in fic today, and a character kissing another guy and then running out to have unsatisfying casual sex with a woman to assuage his anxieties, but it's usually written as pretty dark nowadays. It's something a character does who's really messed up inside, not a basically normal if slightly unhealthy reaction.
And the parallel or possibly perpendicular trope where Everyone Is Gay, or at least all the guys--which actually I am ideologically totally in favor of, especially when it includes the women, but in practice tends to be done really awkwardly. And the way there are just so many characters besides the main couple and the other main characters of the show, all these new people and expanded minor or only-named characters, and they all get lengthy meaty scenes. And the really weird relationship with kink, where the obligatory noncon/dubcon scenes full of informal/unspoken BDSM are written like erotica, just like the Making Love scenes, but treated as horrifying, and then the characters get into formalized BDSM which is totally awesome and also they all know an awful lot about it and use all the appropriate official terms. (Of course there were also stories where the obligatory rape scenes weren't written like porn at all; this is a separate but once-thriving genre where they were (and they were generally closer to dubcon), but you always got the clear vibe that you weren't supposed to read them that way. Or I did, at least.)
Of course plenty of this hasn't changed. Like you still get tons of stories where a character's backstory is rewritten to be hideously traumatic, or if it already was then it's made even MORE hideously traumatic than in canon. But the tone is just completely different now--mostly for the better, but I grew up on this stuff and it does have its charms, primarily in the feeling of total unswerving commitment to everything. That trauma will be inflicted, and its effects explored for an entire novel, and then it will be resolved, and the relationship will settle down with no more issues, and the story will come to a conclusion. Because that's what stories do, dammit, and you will read every single word and you will LIKE it. And despite all the flaws, I do.
(As far as the nineties nostalgia that the show itself is giving me (raves! bikes! RAVES BIKES HACKERS), I think my favorite has been the fond memory of how straight guys spent years tormented by the conflict between their intense desire to be cool, and their intense fear of accidentally piercing The Gay Ear. Which ear was that? Nobody knew. ...really, the nineties were a pretty sweet time, before the backlash hit. Sexy women on TV wore chunky heels even I could have actually run in! Men felt compelled to blur gender boundaries and subject themselves to the ensuing anxiety to maintain social status! I miss those days.) (I don't miss the four-inch-thick beige Compaq laptops, though.)
fan_eunice's recent Once A Thief enthusiasm--is getting to read old fanfic. Especially old badfic, which is not at all like badfic now. The things that make it bad...well, they're often the same, but because the stories are so much longer (the one I'm in the middle of right now is 173,000 words) and for the most part at least technically competent, the bad things often take a while to resurface. (Aside from the crippling reliance on telling instead of showing; that's pretty much endemic and on every page.) So I'm reading this non-spectacular but perfectly enjoyable fic with a fun plot, some grin-worthy dialogue and character moments, and it goes on like this for pages at a time...until the two guys in the pairing share a scene again, and it all starts to unravel. Characters stop acting and talking like themselves, the female characters who had been major parts of the story abruptly vanish for no good reason, or they lose all the emotional depth and subtlety they had in canon and in the previous parts of the story. Everything gets abruptly and gracelessly rerouted to the Single Approved Slash Relationship blueprint, so that things can unfold as they must, never mind if they actually would. And then there is a cringingly OOC cookie-cutter sex scene, culminating in or preceded by or followed by "I love you, [full name]"/"And I love you, [full name]", and then the next scene the two main characters are no longer alone together or the plot kicks back in, and the story is decent again. Though the female characters unfortunately never quite recover.
And the whole tone of the fics, of course, is giving me almost as much nineties nostalgia as the show itself. (This particular story was written in 2003, but it reads exactly like the fic I was reading in 1996.) So many abandoned tropes! Such devotion to refusing to end the story until every corner of the relationship has been fully explored, from the first moment of Character A's confusing feelings (and actually preferably starting in the middle of one or both characters' backstories and/or childhoods) through their first time, and their first big fight, and their struggles with each other's issues, and how they learn to live together and embrace some version of domesticity, and their evolving sex lives and EVERY. SINGLE. THING. Hence the 173,000 words, presumably. Because it just wasn't finished before that. I actually admire this aesthetic of when a story is and isn't complete, although I'm glad it's no longer required.
And the gay panic, or just gay anxiety, as a serious issue that totally stands alone as a reason why A doesn't pursue B, or why A and B don't have sex yet--and I realize the current trend in fic is kind of sex-obsessed, but it's so weird to read a first-kiss scene where they start making out on the couch, and then they have to stop because B isn't ready...not because of trauma or a general discomfort with moving too fast, but because This Is All So New To Him, this wanting another man business. I mean, you still get sexuality angst in fic today, and a character kissing another guy and then running out to have unsatisfying casual sex with a woman to assuage his anxieties, but it's usually written as pretty dark nowadays. It's something a character does who's really messed up inside, not a basically normal if slightly unhealthy reaction.
And the parallel or possibly perpendicular trope where Everyone Is Gay, or at least all the guys--which actually I am ideologically totally in favor of, especially when it includes the women, but in practice tends to be done really awkwardly. And the way there are just so many characters besides the main couple and the other main characters of the show, all these new people and expanded minor or only-named characters, and they all get lengthy meaty scenes. And the really weird relationship with kink, where the obligatory noncon/dubcon scenes full of informal/unspoken BDSM are written like erotica, just like the Making Love scenes, but treated as horrifying, and then the characters get into formalized BDSM which is totally awesome and also they all know an awful lot about it and use all the appropriate official terms. (Of course there were also stories where the obligatory rape scenes weren't written like porn at all; this is a separate but once-thriving genre where they were (and they were generally closer to dubcon), but you always got the clear vibe that you weren't supposed to read them that way. Or I did, at least.)
Of course plenty of this hasn't changed. Like you still get tons of stories where a character's backstory is rewritten to be hideously traumatic, or if it already was then it's made even MORE hideously traumatic than in canon. But the tone is just completely different now--mostly for the better, but I grew up on this stuff and it does have its charms, primarily in the feeling of total unswerving commitment to everything. That trauma will be inflicted, and its effects explored for an entire novel, and then it will be resolved, and the relationship will settle down with no more issues, and the story will come to a conclusion. Because that's what stories do, dammit, and you will read every single word and you will LIKE it. And despite all the flaws, I do.
(As far as the nineties nostalgia that the show itself is giving me (raves! bikes! RAVES BIKES HACKERS), I think my favorite has been the fond memory of how straight guys spent years tormented by the conflict between their intense desire to be cool, and their intense fear of accidentally piercing The Gay Ear. Which ear was that? Nobody knew. ...really, the nineties were a pretty sweet time, before the backlash hit. Sexy women on TV wore chunky heels even I could have actually run in! Men felt compelled to blur gender boundaries and subject themselves to the ensuing anxiety to maintain social status! I miss those days.) (I don't miss the four-inch-thick beige Compaq laptops, though.)
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I have Issues with the 'everyone's gay' genre, but when I try to unpack them, it turns out I actually have issues not with the genre but with certain (straight) authors who write them. There was this woman on an email list I was on who churned them out, and I remember having some arguments with her own gay rights. Her country offered same sex civil unions but not marriage[1], and she didn't get why this was a problem. Why yes, she was married herself, and why no, she wouldn't be contented with a civil union herself. And why yes, her fic did have a gay stereotype problem.
[1] This was in 2001. Her country has since allowed same sex marriage, I'm happy to say.
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(Although, Adam Lambert today demanding that the internet explain 'shipping to him HAS made me want to go read some old TXF fic instead ...)
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This show actually stars Krycek so it's REALLY been making me want to read old XF fic. SO MUCH NOSTALGIA.
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"Are you calling me a slut?"
"No, you dumb fuck, I'm telling you I want to have a relationship with you!"
So I'm glad I stuck with it.
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--and actually this reminds me of the story I wish I could write, except I can't write anymore but SOMEONE should, where Mac and Vic get together post-series and it's great, but it just isn't quite right, and Li Ann is having Issues and emotional turmoil and stuff, and eventually they rescue HER with love, because that's my favorite kind of threesome fic and the woman never gets to be the angsty rescued-with-love person. And Li Ann would be so perfect for it. They would have to reach out to her and be persistent and sneak past her walls! There would be anger and fighting and then it would morph into desperate sex! SO MANY FEELINGS.
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Issues both with himself, because I've noticed he freaks out pretty hard when he sees Michael tendencies reflected in the mirror. And with Victor, because what if he doesn't really love Mac and is just going along waiting for an opportunity to shut Mac out. But then Li Ann convinces him that he's not going to turn into Michael and Victor is very convincing that he loves Mac and he's not looking for a way to get rid of him. And then they all live happily ever three way married after.
I may have thought about this a lot.
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I mean, he is not wrong for feeling cut up about the fact that his father has way more affection for Mac than him. How fucked up has that got to be, sensing that your father loves you out of duty, but he likes this other kid better. I get the feeling that happens to him a lot in a lot of different situations. Where he's off putting to people, but he can't understand why (because you act like a creepy douchebag, dude), so instead of backing off and assessing himself, he projects it all outward. It is no mystery to me that it's Mac with his easy charm and ability to get people to like him who ends up being the prime target for his rage.
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