Meme meme

[raven]

If you want me to talk about something, I will!

In the meantime, here are two things I was asked to talk about!

highfantastical asked: I would LOVE you to talk about Geoffrey and Ellen! Have your thoughts/sympathies changed with time?

Geoffrey Tennant and Ellen Fanshaw are two of the main characters of the Canadian show Slings & Arrows, which is wonderful and is one of my favourite television shows of all time. It's about Shakespeare! And small town theatre! And true love! it's beautiful. Anyway, here they are, with Oliver, the third member of their triumvirate:

"Slings & Arrows: Geoffrey's proposal" (Watch on YouTube)

Their relationship is - oh, it's terrible. It's all crying and screaming and yelling. They are both actors, they both have an operatic tendency towards melodrama, their relationship is terrible for both of their mental health but particularly Geoffrey's - in the clip above, Geoffrey is literally one day away from the psychotic break that's going to destroy his career - and when everything finally falls apart it's probably for the best.

But, here's the thing, and this is a trope I love: they're miserable without each other. Calmer, but miserable. Seven years go by and Geoffrey makes a full recovery; Ellen keeps on acting, worries about being asked to play the nurse rather than Juliet, and they're miserable. When they come back together, it takes time - it takes time, and therapy, and lots more yelling, and ridiculous fights about skulls and impotence and After Eight mints! - but oh, goodness, when they make it, they're beautiful together, they set everything alight. I love them. (And, I mean, it helps that Slings & Arrows is wonderfully written, but it also helps that Paul Gross and Martha Burns are actually married. To say they have chemistry is a lovely understatement.)

At this remove of time I worry about Oliver - I think there's some queer erasure going on there, both for him and for Geoffrey, which bothers me a lot in a show I love so much - and I say this a lot, I'm all for queering the text, I think that's a thing you should do, I came to fandom through slash and slash is part of why I remain, but Geoffrey and Ellen were the first het couple I ever saw on television whose story made me want to sit up and listen.

Er. In answer to your question. No, I do not believe my feelings about them have changed! I think I still have a lot of feelings about them! Er. Yes.

yiskah asked: What do you think is the common factor that draws you to the things you are fannish about?

See, I've been trying to figure this one out for years and even wrote about it quite recently, elsewhere; according to the AO3, I've written nearly two hundred stories in forty-eight different fandoms, so presumably there's got to be something there other than a continual attraction towards the new and shiny. I think what it is, is this. I've described my fandoms before as "politics and spaceships" - and what that really means is that I like stories about found families, about communities and homes.

I mean, now I come to think about it, the original SG-1 (my first fandom!) was a totally serious business show about serious business galactic exploration! Remember? They sat on Jack's roof and ordered pizza and got drunk a lot and bought Teal'c a Stetson and sang "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" and never, in the end, went fishing, and I loved that; I love how the 4077th M*A*S*H was foetid and rat-infested and frightening, but they had movie nights and practical joke wars and Christmas parties, because they were a community; I love how Deep Space Nine had bars and Klingon restaurants and cocktail specials, that Garak and Bashir had lunch together every day and Odo secretly looked forward to his morning meetings with Kira and Sisko kept a baseball in his office; I love that the primary school on the Enterprise-D celebrated Captain Picard Day every year, and I love that there's a Babylon 5 gift shop. I love that Simon Illyan, at the end of everything, when he's broken and his mind is gone, can remember nothing but this: that the family Vorkosigan will carry him home. I love that Leslie Knope is running, not for president, but for city councilwoman for a town of 50,000 people, on a platform of accessibility and public service provision (and that Ben figures it out because "you've been making campaign speeches in your sleep"); I love how, in the Doctor Who universe, you ward off vampires with anything in which you have faith - so the Doctor stands his ground and holds up his head and recites the names of all his companions, one by one. I love that it's Night Vale community radio, that Sports Night was pretty much through with soccer; and that Hogwarts will always be your home.

Okay, I'm done. If you want me to talk about other things, say so!

Comments

[hannah]

I keep telling people Deep Space Nine, as a location, is home the way the other shows never achieved with their starships. The sequence in The Magnificent Ferengi where Quark and Rom wandered through the access corridors is one moment in particular which sticks out to me to properly illustrate that: how this is really a place that's inhabited, that's known, a location that lives and breathes along with everyone inside it.

[raven]

Yes, absolutely! For me, it's the running joke about Ensign Villix'pran, who's budding, and then later has babies that Julian babysits and they get their wings tangled! It's such a warm, loving little offscreen detail, it grounds everything so well in the notion of Deep Space Nine as a community.

[naraht]

At this remove of time I worry about Oliver - I think there's some queer erasure going on there, both for him and for Geoffrey, which bothers me a lot in a show I love so much - and I say this a lot, I'm all for queering the text, I think that's a thing you should do, I came to fandom through slash and slash is part of why I remain, but Geoffrey and Ellen were the first het couple I ever saw on television whose story made me want to sit up and listen.

I hope you don't mind me taking this as a general comment, because I've never seen Slings and Arrows, but this is something that I've been thinking about a lot recently, having fallen in love with a novel all about a romance between an amazing female lead character and her likely-bisexual partner. It's so refreshing to be writing about a woman again and, yes, to be writing het again, in the sense of being able to portray a man being deeply passionate about a woman and not just viewing her as a speed-bump on the way to his True Queer Love.

But then there are other people saying, no, it's erasure of queer stories, or at least queer pairings, to have bi men always being Saved By The Love Of A Good Woman, along the lines of Aral/Cordelia in the Vorkosigan books. I'm not quite seeing it, perhaps because I've not seen the trope *that* often, but I really don't want to believe that people who want to see queer male pairings and people who want to see female characters in more than walk-on roles are inevitably enemies. (And don't get me started on the whole bi erasure issue.)

I don't know, it's possibly not as complicated as I paint it, but I do think there are certain female characters of whom I get very protective when this sort of thing comes up (Harriet Vane in the Wimsey stories would be another). And, just, lots of feels. :|

ETA: Oh, and if you have enough thoughts on this topic that you feel you could muster a post, then that would be one I would definitely be interested in seeing from you!

[raven]

In this case, I think it's slightly different - Oliver, the canonically gay member of the triumvirate, is always overshadowed by Geoffrey and Ellen, so the queer erasure is more complete than just the erasure of Geoffrey's nascent queerness. But I totally get your general question, and I agree it's tricky. I have a story in the process of being written at the moment - not Slings & Arrows, alas - which features a male protagonist coming out to everyone else, but most notably to himself, as bisexual while he's in his mid-thirties, at a point when he's been long-term partnered with a woman for a long time. (And still loves her and has no intention of leaving her, etc.) I've been worrying about this quite a lot for this story - I mean, is it an implicit erasure of a queer story? Or is every story about a queer character a queer story? Or, if that's not true, is this still a queer story - because to be in a relationship that looks straight on the outside is a reality of a ton of real queer people's lives? That last is how I dealt with it within this particular story, and I think I eventually decided that this problem is a false dichotomy. The problem is the paucity of queer stories, full stop. If the world were full of the queer stories that it ought to contain, there would be room for all of these: m/m romances, bisexual people in love with people of another gender, genderqueer romances, and any number of others. It's not as if there's a quota of queer stories that we must be careful not to overfill, or anything!

I don't know if that was at all helpful/on-point? Apologies for ramble!

[naraht]

I think I was the one who rambled first, so no apologies necessary!

Or is every story about a queer character a queer story? Or, if that's not true, is this still a queer story - because to be in a relationship that looks straight on the outside is a reality of a ton of real queer people's lives?

I would very much hope that the answer is "yes" to both of those. What those stories may not do, I suppose, is scratch people's itch for the representation of same-sex (as opposed to queer) relationships, but as you say, if there were enough queer stories full stop, this wouldn't be a problem.

These issues may become particularly fraught in specific fandoms, because shipping wars become even more painful when they have an ideological edge to them, and because one story being told rather than another can appear to be a zero-sum issue.

It's enough to make a person want to go away and write nothing but femslash! (She said, only half seriously.)

[raven]

Hmm. I think it's true about people's itches being scratched, but I think those issues are epiphenomenal? I guess I can't get behind any argument that says you shouldn't tell the story of your own queerness - which is often what I find myself doing, especially in the story I described above. Actually, that's another argument for femmeslash. :)

[sage]

*loves this post*

I wish I could remember more about the time I did a rewatch of S&A paying particular attention to the way Geoffrey brushes off Terry's advances and just doesn't HEAR Oliver when he says "It wasn't about Ellen, it was always about YOU." On one hand, it's like Geoffrey isn't treating the passes (or the relationship issues) as if they're real, and I don't know whether that makes him guilty of queer erasure in the moment or if he's just that clueless. On the other hand, there's S3, couples therapy with Oliver, crying jags and erectile dysfunction with Ellen (and the reasons for this fascinate me -- how much of this is essentially about Oliver?), and so forth. S3 is hard viewing, but there's so much there!

Um, if you need more to talk about, I'd love to read more S&A thoughts from you. :)

[raven]

I have tonnes of thoughts about S&A! I can definitely come up with more thoughts on it for you. (Also, I've wondered about doing that sort of rewatch myself. Oh feet of clay, etc.)

[hedda62]

This is lovely - and come to think of it, if you will, pick a day and talk about Anna on S&A. Because I love Anna forever.

[raven]

ANNA. <333 I would love to talk about Anna!

[spuffyduds]

"Calmer but miserable." Oh man I never thought about how Geoffrey and Ellen Apart = joe and Billy apart.

[raven]

Alas and alack, I do not know who they may be!

[cosmic_llin]

All the SG-1/M*A*S*H/Trek/Vorkosigans/Who/Harry Potter feels! <3

[raven]

I love how we have ALL the same fandoms. :)

[morethanthese]

The thing you wrote about your fandoms and why you like them: that was kind of beautiful. I've noticed that a lot of the works of fiction that people gravitate to have some sort of sense of community like what you were talking about, and I think that's a really appealing. So yeah, I liked what you said about that.

[highfantastical.livejournal.com]

This post is a THING OF BEAUTY; thank you for taking up the prompt! :D I'm so excited to see the Anna request on DW too -- and now, of course, greedily anticipating our S&A re-watch. I love them all SO MUCH.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

You're very welcome! yaaaay, show! <3

[littlered2.livejournal.com]

I think what it is, is this. I've described my fandoms before as "politics and spaceships" - and what that really means is that I like stories about found families, about communities and homes.
This really comes through in your writing - the majority of people in your fics clearly love each other very much.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Thank you, honey. That is really nice to hear - it's what I aspire to. <3

[littlered2.livejournal.com]

You are definitely achieving it!
(Because I am awful and mad, I sometimes find it very emotional to read - people care about each other so much, and it is lovely and heartwarming, but I feel quite lonely in comparison, and sad that my relationships aren't like that. You are so great at writing interpersonal relationships. So if I fail to comment, it's not because I think things are bad, it's because I am too emotionally wobbly to read them. Sorry for being dreadful.)