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One of last week’s prompt fics has made it into the big leagues, I've decided: call the roll of the blacked-out lands, M*A*S*H, dystopia fic, Hawkeye/BJ.
What frightens me about M*A*S*H is... well, okay. So, very early on in the show, when Hawkeye and Trapper make up Tuttle ("You might say that all of us together... made up Tuttle!") - actually, can you leave that there? No, you can't. Hawkeye and Trapper make up another unit surgeon out of whole cloth so they can draw his salary and use it to buy medicines for the orphans on the black market, and then are surprised when everyone keeps telling them about the fascinating conversations they've had with Tuttle in the mess tent, and it kinda makes me hurt laughing.
Anyway! So, when they're trying to produce fake papers for him they need to give him a fake birth date, and naturally give him the same birth year as themselves - 1925. And I'm like - 1925. Seriously. Yes, the Korean War was a long time ago, but that little detail really brings that into relief - in the year Hawkeye Pierce was born, the Depression, Prohibition, Nazi Germany, the Cold War, basically the political body of the twentieth century, were all in the future. But the thing is, Hawkeye, barring accidents, could live right into the twenty-first century (and I wrote a fic a couple of years ago where he did just that). He is uniquely temporally situated to know, to really know, there is no war to end all wars.
So that's the dystopian part, I guess. That you can tell this story set now - make it about twenty-five year old surgeons born in the 1980s, and you can tell the same story. That's the idea M*A*S*H engaged with throughout, and it hasn't stopped being relevant.
Anyway, some notes on trying to make a M*A*S*H vid on a rainy weekend when you're trying not to think:
-( truth, freedom and the American way of plumbing )
Notes on also spending your rainy avoidant weekend trying to write a Vorkosigan story about all the lady spies that were totally secretly in ImpSec all along, I am not writing this story to hit my own kinks, why would you say such a thing:
-Making up characters’ names is hard. So far I have called them all Vorone, Vortwo, Vorthree and Vorfour in lieu of inspiration. Though the canon does this too – I think it’s A Civil Campaign where Miles makes up some rhetorical Counts and calls them Vorenlightened and Vorstodgy. (Maybe I’ll be passive-aggressive and call them things like Vorbharat and Vorshah and Vorkumar. Someone told me – told me, mind you, not suggested or theorised or interpreted – that “Vorpatril” was some sort of variation on Patel and therefore how could I possibly suggest there wasn’t much in the way of brown people in Bujold’s universe. She’s done a bit better in recent years.)
-So is trying to impose some sort of narrative structure on a story that is basically “lady spies! lady spies! my id let me show you it!” Although speaking of ladies, I came across the most amazing fusion the other day: Vormarlow’s Honour, by![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
Ankaret, in which Antonia Forest’s Marlows are reborn into Bujold’s Nexus. I read Autumn Term a long time ago (and found the other books a little too bizarre to get through), so can’t say much to the Marlows, but I love this idea so much, I wish people would write space opera girls’ own boarding school stories. Imagine the Chalet School as a girls’ finishing school for minor Vor in the Southern Continent. Joey Vorbettany has adventures saving Elisaveta Vorbelsornia from kidnappers trying to make a claim to the Imperium. After Robin’s father, an ImpSec agent, dies on assignment in Jackson’s Whole, they send her away to school for her own protection. They have a special school holiday for the birthday of the District Count. I could do this all day.
-Lady spies! Yes. I’m watching The Americans, which is sort of shaping my plots at the moment, but it’s no bad thing. At this point I am a little too avoidant to watch actual TV that’s on TV now, but if I ever decide to engage with my life again I’m going to pick that back up, alongside Orphan Black. Ladies and plots and espionage! Yes.
What frightens me about M*A*S*H is... well, okay. So, very early on in the show, when Hawkeye and Trapper make up Tuttle ("You might say that all of us together... made up Tuttle!") - actually, can you leave that there? No, you can't. Hawkeye and Trapper make up another unit surgeon out of whole cloth so they can draw his salary and use it to buy medicines for the orphans on the black market, and then are surprised when everyone keeps telling them about the fascinating conversations they've had with Tuttle in the mess tent, and it kinda makes me hurt laughing.
Anyway! So, when they're trying to produce fake papers for him they need to give him a fake birth date, and naturally give him the same birth year as themselves - 1925. And I'm like - 1925. Seriously. Yes, the Korean War was a long time ago, but that little detail really brings that into relief - in the year Hawkeye Pierce was born, the Depression, Prohibition, Nazi Germany, the Cold War, basically the political body of the twentieth century, were all in the future. But the thing is, Hawkeye, barring accidents, could live right into the twenty-first century (and I wrote a fic a couple of years ago where he did just that). He is uniquely temporally situated to know, to really know, there is no war to end all wars.
So that's the dystopian part, I guess. That you can tell this story set now - make it about twenty-five year old surgeons born in the 1980s, and you can tell the same story. That's the idea M*A*S*H engaged with throughout, and it hasn't stopped being relevant.
Anyway, some notes on trying to make a M*A*S*H vid on a rainy weekend when you're trying not to think:
-( truth, freedom and the American way of plumbing )
Notes on also spending your rainy avoidant weekend trying to write a Vorkosigan story about all the lady spies that were totally secretly in ImpSec all along, I am not writing this story to hit my own kinks, why would you say such a thing:
-Making up characters’ names is hard. So far I have called them all Vorone, Vortwo, Vorthree and Vorfour in lieu of inspiration. Though the canon does this too – I think it’s A Civil Campaign where Miles makes up some rhetorical Counts and calls them Vorenlightened and Vorstodgy. (Maybe I’ll be passive-aggressive and call them things like Vorbharat and Vorshah and Vorkumar. Someone told me – told me, mind you, not suggested or theorised or interpreted – that “Vorpatril” was some sort of variation on Patel and therefore how could I possibly suggest there wasn’t much in the way of brown people in Bujold’s universe. She’s done a bit better in recent years.)
-So is trying to impose some sort of narrative structure on a story that is basically “lady spies! lady spies! my id let me show you it!” Although speaking of ladies, I came across the most amazing fusion the other day: Vormarlow’s Honour, by
-Lady spies! Yes. I’m watching The Americans, which is sort of shaping my plots at the moment, but it’s no bad thing. At this point I am a little too avoidant to watch actual TV that’s on TV now, but if I ever decide to engage with my life again I’m going to pick that back up, alongside Orphan Black. Ladies and plots and espionage! Yes.