cimorene

I never watched the first Pacific Rim movie because I can't really abide a lot of smashy fight scenes, though I knew all about the plot and concept of course.

So a couple of weeks ago I read Hello Tailor's article ‘Pacific Rim’ actor Charlie Day says slash fanfic informed his performance because of general interest in slash fanfiction in wider culture and all the associated issues, and I watched the video clip with the same thing in mind.

Except then the phrase he used, something like, "He misses the man that he's in love with", sort of snagged me with its pathos and I remembered that after the first movie there was an explosion of fan interest in the pairing and

waxjism was definitely reading it for a while. So, being temporarily without a fannish reading interest, I went to AO3 and started acquainting myself with the fanfiction in descending order of kudos.

It's always quite an experience going into a body of fanfiction for a canon that you haven't seen, even with a fair amount of fannish osmosis background information to draw on.

In this instance, after a few pages of results I'd gone through enough post-Uprising stories to have been spoiled for it as well, and that note of pathos was basically Chekhov's gun.

To wit, it was the exactly appropriate emotional tone for the character in the new movie. It's all VERY poignant and distressingly unhappy. The other things he said about how it's "the better way to read the character" also make much more sense, and I think he's right - that reading of the situation is about character motivation and filling in the character's history in the missing years, and yeah, that is the better reading and the one that makes the most sense, but it's also... all tragic.

And it makes reading the body of fanon produced after the first movie a bit bittersweet, and full of dramatic irony, because at the time, the pairing situation was pretty fluffy, with their plot arc in that movie essentially standing in for a romance between them, and a jubilant feeling of relief and success pervades much of the fanfiction. But, of course, it's now overshadowed by the ominous BWOOOOOOMMMP of oncoming separation, possession, destruction, desperation, and imprisonment.

What I really want is to read a ton of good, satisfyingly happy-endinged yet appropriately hurty first successful fix-it, but it's ... a lot harder to fix this time... and while there are, obviously, mostly fix-its, the really long ones haven't even had time to be finished yet. And it's, well, an amount of hurt that seems to call for a lot of fixing.

So that's what most of my recent AO3 bookmarks are now - mostly ones from before the new movie, but I think there's a couple there and there are bound to be more, so those could be spoilery.

waxjism has mentioned trying to make me watch the first movie a few times now, and I might be open to watching everything except the action sequences, so I guess we'll see.