Like, thanks, Winter, for holding off until like two months late and then suddenly shitting all over me and my family. My baby sister left midday yesterday for a 2-day drive out Midwest to visit in-laws, and she and her husband and baby had to white-knuckle it through four inches of slush in Indiana; meanwhile my older sister and her husband and two dogs and three kids left first thing this morning and had to deal with the tail-end of the same huge storm system crapping freezing dribbles on them and slowing them enough that they got stuck in DC rush hour traffic enroute to their Georgia home. We hit bad snow about 3 hours into the 5-hour drive and it was real bad for a bit there. And it’s going to be 45 and raining tomorrow.
WTF anyway. I spent the drive first reading the gift fic I got in the first fic exchange I ever did, which was an adorable and elaborate bit of… I’d describe it as earnest sweetness. I’ll have to go back and reread it tomorrow and comment more intelligently– I just reblogged the post with the link, and it’s really delightful. The formatting was a bit messed up on my e-reader though, so I look forward to giving it another readthrough in a proper browser.
Then I read the literal actual novel I wrote while trying to come up with the fic I eventually wrote for my part of the exchange. I seriously wrote 50k of an AU that didn’t even have the correct pairings in it. I got off on the wrong footing, stumbled around, hit a tangent and started going, and couldn’t tear myself away even when I realized it was utterly unsuitable. And rereading it…
I could file the serial numbers off this one and do an original novel, like I’d been considering for literally years. Nothing else I’ve ever done would really work; all my epics are too based in canon of whatever thing I’m working off of to work. But this one was an AU enough that I could actually just shift everything about six inches to the left and be fine. It’s really tempting.
It’d probably be 100k long or more by the time I was done, but– I mean– why not?
Ficlet series: outtakes from before I fell down the rabbit hole and wrote an epic. (This is how I write epics, btw, I open a document and start writing things that amuse me until I suddenly get sucked into A PIT OF FEELS and that’s where the plot comes from.)
Bucky Barnes makes hilarious, sometimes-serious videos as part of his recovery.
The text appeared, bright yellow, on a blank black screen. Bucky Barnes’ Children’s Funtime Corner.
The Benny Hill theme started playing over a montage of images. Steve ran by, in workout gear, obviously just jogging for fitness, and suddenly Bucky dropped from above the frame, wrapped his thighs around his neck, and took him to the floor. “Ow,” Steve said, off-camera, weakly.
Sam came down a hallway in his underpants (exceedingly flattering boxer briefs), looking morning-sleepy and half-conscious (and fucking glorious), shuffling stiffly and yawning. Bucky jumped out at him and Sam screamed and reflexively punched Bucky so hard they both fell over.
I don’t often see abuse posts about the opposite spectrum of post-abuse behavior, and it’s. Kind of a bummer bc those are still things people experience.
So shout out to :
people who feel like they have to aggressively defend the things that are important to them because they’re so used to it being torn down and taken from them – even if a friend was just kidding, it’s so hard to see it as just kidding.
People who are constantly on high alert for a fight and had to learn to treat everything like a debate because it was the only way they could stand up for themselves. People who have a hard time rationalizing not everything is an attack because everything used to be an attack.
People who are mad and furious over what happened and get completely consumed by rage no matter how hard they try to let it go. And who have to deal with people telling them they’re making it bigger than it was.
People who have to constantly front as being a badass or aloof because they can’t be seen as vulnerable in any way.
People who constantly fear they’re just like their abuser because they lash out at a moment’s notice to defend themselves
There’s a ton more things but I’m on my break and these are just things I experience that I know a lot more people relate to omg. It’s hard to unlearn aggressive means of self preservation and it hurts to hurt people after you’ve had to experience that hurt and it seems impossible to get over or unlearn those things but you’ll do alright it just needs time and patience and there’s nothing wrong with being angry.
In order to post this self-indulgent bullshit in which characters from my various fictional fanthings meet each other. Like, it’s just Bucky and Steve from Ain’t No Grave meeting some Buckys and Steves from Except it Abide. That’s it. That’s the plot. So like, I guess you should read it if you’re kinky like that. There’s cussing, lots of sex jokes, and some light violence, but the only other naughtiness it contains is how gotdamn masturbatory writing fanfiction of ones own fanfiction is. So like, read it if you’re kinky like that, I guess!
Okay, I have a rant brewing. It’s kinda tangential to Canada Day, old TV shows and superhero blockbuster trends. It’s too late to run.
So, this is mostly about Superman. See, lately there’s this weird assumption that you need to rework his character to make him interesting in the movies. You can’t have a guy with godlike powers helping people just cuz, you need to imbue the character with depth, which usually means a trauma, an internal conflict, a space to grow and change and have an arc. Also you have to make him Batman. All of this may or may not be directly blamed on Zack Snyder, Ayn Rand and misconstrued Joseph Campbell, but let’s leave these guys alone, they’ve had enough already.
What we won’t leave alone is that one Canadian buddy cop show from 20 years back which I love to bits and which presents us with a perfectly functional alternative approach to writing a superhero story.
And yes, Due South is lowkey one of the best superhero shows out there. Let’s see. We have a stranger in a strange land (of Chicago (shot in Toronto)) story, a set of weird powers that can not be chalked up to our hero simply being Kryptonian Canadian, a bright, ridiculous outfit, a magical pet, a dad from beyond the grave, a strong moral code and no gun, a sidekick and a catchphrase. All of the above is Benton Fraser, the mountie exiled to the barbaric land of Illinois and partnering with a local cop to, well, help people.
The thing is, he has no arc and doesn’t need one.
Writing perfectly stable, goody-two-shoes hero is, of course, kinda boring, but here’s that one simple trick that drives Warner Bros. execs mad. Superman Fraser does not need to grow and change and have his world shattered by some bullshit third act revelation, because it’s not him who does the growing, it’s everyone around.
He has some shady shit in his past which will resurface to Sarah McLachlan’s song, but that is not why he’s great. He’s already this out of nowhere towering beacon of hope who may need to catch up on American slang and customs, but other than that comes pretty much perfect out of the box.
Pictured: the box.
It would have been super easy to set this up as a typical fish-out-of-water-and-into-late-capitalism kinda story, but the show starts to subvert these tropes from day one. Fraser does not even leave the airport yet when there’s a guy asking to borrow some money, and Fraser, this naive Canadian unprepared for tough streets of Chicago, of course, takes his word for it and lends that guy like a hundred bucks.
This is the rare show where that guy actually comes back at the end of the pilot and returns the money, thus proving it’s the naive humanist who was right about people all along, and not the cynical genre cliches. The sheer element of surprise in the mountie being nice to people is what gets to everyone on this show and steers them right every goddamn time.
Like, hey, someone actually believes in me.
This shit gets you a long way.
So, yeah, I just needed to reiterate I love Due South.
When I was training to be a battered women’s advocate, my supervisor said something that really blew my mind:
“You can always assume one thing about your clients; and that is that they are doing their best. Always assume everyone is doing their best. And if they’re having a day where their best just isn’t that great, or their best doesn’t look like your best, you have to be okay with that.”
Any now whenever anyone in my life, either a friend or a client, frustrates me, disappoints me, or pisses me off, I just tell myself They are doing their best. Their best isn’t that great today, but I have days where my best isn’t that great either.
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