Cimorene

I've reread a bunch of SGA fic in the last two days, and every time I'm reminded about Don't Ask Don't Tell and marriage inequality, I get a little jarring moment of 'WEIRD!' Even though I lived through that reality, and that fandom, and the concerns were contemporary at the time!

I was rereading Highlander a bit a couple of weeks ago, and it's set during the period where the AIDS crisis was a thing! (Not that it's relevant to the magically healing characters really, but I guess the movement to make a big deal about condoms & lube was gaining quite a bit of steam around the late 90s to make up for all the years where no lube or condoms in fic was the norm.) Now I'm thinking... does the crisis make an appearance in Sentinel fic, where at least the characters are both human, or is it late enough (and AIDS enough of a downer) that it only appears indirectly, in the form of condom hygiene? I haven't reread a bunch of Sentinel fic in years.

The other day in the shower I had an epiphany that I will never be able to ~move on from the unfinished novels that are contributing to my writer's block if I don't post them, so I got rid of the 8-year-old one and the 5-year-old one, both of which present practical difficulties that I haven't figured out yet. (And if you haven't figured out a plot snarl in 5 years, you probably won't.) And I do already feel a bit lighter, actually!

The first one was my original SGA Harlequin, actually started before the original Harlequin challenge and never finished in spite of all isilya's efforts. I got through the arranged marriage bit but then I kinda lost steam without writing the conflict. And the second one is a medieval Vampires vs Werewolves MCR AU. I'm still sad about this one - I loved the premise (which was inspired by header spelunking back in the day) and it was so fun. I bit off more politics and warfare and action than I could chew with the plot, though.

The Trophy Husband (18974 words) by cimorene
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis
Relationships: Rodney McKay/John Sheppard
Summary:

"I would marry you--actually get married to you--we would be spouses--"

"Yes, yes, yes, holy matrimony, husband and husband, yes."

"And in return you would pay for all the medical care my mother needed."

"I think that's the point. Yes."

"So we would get married, and then I would, what, I would be your wife?"

The Midnight Council (42323 words) by cimorene
Fandom: Bandom, My Chemical Romance
Relationships: Frank Iero/Gerard Way
Characters: Mama Way, Mikey Way
Summary:

Gerard, the child of a forbidden love between vampire and werewolf, ascends the throne of werewolf clan Wajdra at the tender age of eleven. The political situation between the dwindling numbers of the werewolves and their ancient enemies, the vampires, is precarious at best, and when his vampire mother and brother retreat to Transylvania, the only one Gerard can truly trust is Frank, the little werewolf cub who swore himself Gerard's liegeman the very day that they met. Gerard and Frank are raised side-by-side in the castle in a political tinderbox, but as Gerard's coming-of-age approaches, a war between vampires and werewolves looms ever nearer, while humans encroaching on their territory threaten both with extinction.

Last night I dreamed my 8th grade English teacher was in charge of a class that included me and all the fictional characters in media fandom, and she put me in a group with Ronon, Teyla, and Gwen from Merlin and then assigned us dust (literally: dust) as an essay topic. I was so pissed off that I started ranting at her - "I can't write an essay about DUST!" - but unfortunately for me, Ronon was laid-back and Gwen and Teyla were too nice, and kept saying they were sure it would be fine, while she assigned other groups topics such as Spaceballs and romance novels.

She wouldn't listen to me, and actually seemed kind of smug - although this particular teacher never did it, you know that way teachers do, when you're the ONLY one who ever has the answer, and they've just decided not to listen to you, as if it's your fault that nobody else will raise their hand and apparently nobody else even knows because they keep calling on other people who guess wrong, and then they finally tell someone else the answer, rather than calling on you at all, and then they're like "Look at my awesome teaching skills, I got someone other than Cim to give a shit" even though the person totally didn't give a shit, and when enlightened was just like "Duh, uh-huh".

ANYWAY, she was like that. And she refused to let us write about anything other than dust. Ronon pointed out that Rodney knows everything, so I asked Rodney to find some kind of tangential connection to something interesting, like big shiny machines. When I woke up, I was saying, "Like, a whatsitcalled collider thingummy, it bombards particles with other particles, right? And dust is particles, right? I mean, different particles, but dust must be involved somehow."

(Big version here)

Please click for the bigger version. This is based on data taken from two polls performed by thefourthvine, with the data in my tables taken out on 22 Feb 2009.

This plot follows the same format as my earlier graph here, which, of course, did not have any Science behind it, only me squinting at the screen and placing the dots by the seat of my pants. I've reversed the axes in this one, however, so that better-written canons are at the top of the graph and gayer ones to the right this time. I prefer placing slashiness and quality on the two axes so that there's one data point per show and one show per data point, which lets the interaction be more easily seen.

(ETA: The clearest example of skewing I see on the plot is Highlander. LOTR might be skewed, too, by people's childhood memories or something, I guess. But Highlander? Look at it! IT HAS THE SAME QUALITY SCORE AS SGA. I'm pretty sure that it's not just my personal... weirdness, or whatever, that wants to ROFL at that. SGA is bad, but it's not that bad.)

It should be noted that mean is only one measure of central tendency and, at these sample sizes - which is to say they're all rather small but they vary from fandom to fandom - it's important to look at the others as well. To that end, here is the table I used to generate the graph:


(big version here)

Median and mode (ie, the most popular rating) are just as interesting as mean in their own ways. Scanning down the standard deviation columns, a few of those numbers will jump out as extremely large, representing a much higher degree of disagreement on the rating in question: the slashiness of Supernatural (no surprise where the primary pairing is incest) and the quality of Merlin (I'm kind of at a loss for this one but there it is), for example.

It's well worth checking out the results in the two posts of thefourthvine's where I took the data because you can easily see the bell curves for some questions, and distinguish others where the distribution shows much higher or lower consensus. (The Science of Slashiness & Moar Science!)

It's been a long time since any discussion made me as furiously angry as the comments in this post.

In case you're worried about your blood pressure, let me summarise the argument in advance:

Silly little women, SGA is about boys! If you wanted women to be treated with equal screentime/writing/dignity/quantity, you just came to the wrong show! Take your mean feminist critique out to the real world and quit harshing our blinkered homosocial squee! Also, more men have died on SGA than the total number of women who ever appeared in more than one episode, so it's totally not sexist at all!

RAGE.

i feel acutely my lack of fandom (read: arashi) participation over the last couple of weeks. ohmiya daily has been on hiatus because i ran out of capped ohmiya episodes and time for watching japanese reality tv on my own. i still love arashi! and you guys! and after my exam on monday i'm sure i will have some fandom time again.

in the meanwhile for stress relief i've been surfing delicious¹ and reading stargate atlantis again. isilya and wax_jism have heard a bit of half-formed meta stewing in my brain about the phenomenal popularity of sheppard/mckay, which i think can be compared to no other fandom/OTP explosion in the past decade so germanely as to the qui-gon/obi-wan one after TPM (which was similarly popular and also based on a similarly slim foundation of canon).

1. del.icio.us-surfing procedure: click on a "also saved by n other people" link from your own page of bookmarks, preferably from a story you like a lot; the trick is not to pick a story that's been saved by too many other people. the best is one you like which isn't very popular and isn't by one of the authors whom everyone bookmarks; the incidence of their stuff is going to be high in any list of bookmarks, and it's not much use to you obviously, unless you've just discovered fandom this very instant. browse the comments/tags used by the other people who bookmarked it. click on the fandom/pairing tag of one of these users and skim their bookmarks for new reading material.

( csi ny ) ( veronica mars ) and house was just as brilliant as everyone else is saying. i was somewhat disturbed by the fact, though, that the elder of the two guest stars bore a strong resemblance to my crazy conspiracy-theorist homophobic racist maternal grandfather. much more cultured accent though.

ooh, the new itunes has a slightly updated interface. i like it.

also, a couple of days ago i pouted until wax agreed to watch a bit of sherlock holmes with me. did you know that "the second stain" is "den andra fläcken" in swedish? it's great that their word for "stain" is the same as their word for "speck". it's one of my favourite film episodes because of the scene involving the titular stain when holmes and watson get my little rat boyfriend lestrade out of the room for about two minutes and holmes frantically examines every inch of the floor in his absence. also, holmes absent-mindedly sets the newspaper on fire at breakfast.

uh, so, i seem to have started reading sga again, though only from links i find from other people (there's just no way i could go archive-wading again in a fandom that big). it's funny, but i have some old-fandom nostalgia and everything for it even though it hasn't even been a year since i stopped reading and watching it.

on the other hand, while i do dislike giant fandoms for the pure sake of their giantness, another factor which sends me away from them is the increased quantity of bad and mediocre which accompanies the increased quantity of good (and even more particularly the increased quantity of fanon, which is like the opposite of a kink for me - not even a pet peeve exactly, because my boundless fuming rage at fanon is really totally illogical and kind of hair-triggered - but doesn't persist in all fandoms since, like, you could never read highlander or the sentinel or tpm at all if you didn't like fanon sometimes). perhaps going from sga into small fandoms with much lower quality overall has let me regain some perspective, much the way even food you are getting a bit tired of (say, plain mashed potatoes) will seem like a good choice if the other dishes on the banquet table are those really gross fish things that nordic people like to serve for christmas (lax and sill, i think, but that's beside the point; you just have to know that i can only eat like a milligram of them at a time, even smothered in cream sauce).

my point, though i've digressed from it rather, is that in big fandoms there is so much fiction that if it were possible to rank all of it you could split the bell curve into 1/10ths and 1/100ths of a percent; whereas in tiny fandoms, distinctions of quality almost don't exist (and really don't seem to for most of the denizens) because there's so little to draw on that even if you force the grades into a curve the top six ranked stories might go below the mean quality. (and of course in other even smaller fandoms, there might not even be six stories total, but i haven't been reading in ones quite that tiny)(and of course, even if there's a total of 25 stories, which means the top six wouldn't go down to the mean, the sample's still small enough that it might be really improper to force them into a curve). the bigger the fandom, the better the mean story quality is likely to be (although i don't think that's a straightforward positive correlation at all). if you take "mediocre" to mean, say, 20th to 40th percentile, the high end of it is highly readable in a big fandom, whereas in a small one it likely suffers from multiple kinds of mechanical errors and unintentionally hilarious dangling modifiers (which, okay, is readable in the sense that you can read to the end of it, but by the end you're just wheezing with laughter, not taking the story-telling  seriously in any sense).

i can read from other people's recs, but my preferred method is to use those only as an introduction to a fandom; i'm a compulsive completist and never really feel right about it till i've been archive wading. so for my methods of reading, a fandom's size gets inconvenient as soon as it grows past the rate of fic-production that i can somewhat kinda keep up with reading. even if it's going to produce five reccable things a day and even if i had time to read all the bad and mediocre ones in between, the increased quantity of non-reccable will put me off. if it's five reccable things in, say, two weeks, and the accompanying twenty to forty unreccable things that go with them are stretched out over the same period of time, it's totally manageable. but if you prefer reading only from recs everywhere you go, a giant fandom is totally ideal; because you never have to touch anything below the mean quality (hypothetically, assuming reccers agreed about measures of quality, which i know is a counter-factual assumption).

i didn't rec this when permetaform first posted it because by the time i saw it her bandwidth had already been used up, and that would have been a cruel tease.  but this is one of the best vids i've watched in this fandom (not that i'm a comprehensive watcher, but it's definitely a really really good vid).  the timing is absolutely exquisite, the storytelling is deft, and it's gorgeous--basically it's outstanding all around.

welcome home, by permetaform.  atlantis and elizabeth, gen, set to a piece of gorgeous instrumental music from the soundtrack of boondock saints.  it can be downloaded from her journal.

i feel like coming out as a detester of crackfic.  it's somewhat ironic, actually, because i often enjoy badfic and read it for amusement.  and i've always liked crackfic before.  i enjoy it as crack and not as normal fic, but in general i've been fine with that.  what's been making me cranky lately is that i prefer real fic, dammit, and the ratio of crack:real is getting too high for me.  now i can't enjoy the crack properly because it's just boring by comparison to the real fic which i can wistfully imagine enjoying. 

i'm mostly talking about sga fandom, here, which is the one i'm principally involved in.  and my preferences are different in every fandom, so it's not like i've actually gone off crackfic as a whole.  but wow, am i past fed up with it here.

it may be that there's something specific about the canon that lowers my crack tolerance.  as i said, my preferences are different in every fandom.  i wonder if it has something to do with the hefty dose of fantasy that's already inherent in a canon that's stuffed with star trek-esque pseudoscience and has a very deep fount of potential deus ex machinae in the form of the ancients.  i love my pseudoscience and the mixture of fantasy and hard sf elements and the cynical contemporary reactions of the main characters when they're stuffed into these plots and situations.  i'm right there with everyone else on the coolness of the fact that, with this canon, you can believably pull off almost anything.  perhaps what makes it especially annoying in this fandom is that going even beyond canon's levels of improbability seems, to me... unnecessarily greedy.  i mean, it's so improbable already--can it be that your thirst for the improbable (or your reliance on the large wiggle room provided by the expansion of probability) is so great that the quantity of it in canon doesn't satisfy you?