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( A long post about why I love Dean Winchester, in which everything comes back to Lymond. Yeah, I dunno. )Originally published at rusty-halo.com. You can comment here or there.
I’ve read some amazing fic recently. My favorites from the past few days:
* Suck It Up by ![[info]](https://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
strangeandcharm
Supernatural, post-S4, Dean/Castiel, NC-17.
Author’s summary: Dean’s hungry. Dean’s very hungry.
My notes: Vampire!Dean. This is ultra-dark, scary, disturbing, and angsty, with a good plot and [highlight for spoiler] a delightful schmoopy ending. You get all the traumatic angst of Castiel breaking down trying to save scary vampire Dean, and then all the traumatic angst of re-humanized Dean having to deal with his memories of tormenting Castiel and Sam. Excellent characterization of Dean and Castiel, with awesome Sam characterization, too.
* All the King’s Horses and All the King’s Men by alyse
Dark Angel, post-S2, Alec/Logan, R.
Author’s summary: Logan had grown used to the quiet in the evenings, but that was before he took a sharp left into Surrealsville, population two. (From the prompt, “Alec having seizures and Logan helping him through it.”)
My notes: Fantastic, visceral, vividly-detailed hurt/comfort with wonderful characterization. Great exploration of Alec’s vulnerabilities; perfectly tolerable even if you hate Logan.
* Every single Dark Angel fic by aflightoffancy. To be honest, they’re not actually all that good, but they’re fantastically satisfying. They’re all Max/Alec romantic adventures, with great plots, great banter, and ridiculously indulgent hurt/comfort (obviously, for some of us, that’s a plus). Unfortunately they tend to make Alec a little too perfect and to sideline Max more than I’m comfortable with, but on the plus side I’m totally in favor of their dismissal of Logan. These stories are exactly what I was craving after yelling at my screen for most of Dark Angel season two.
(I don’t know if anyone else will get these references, but basically what these fics do is turn Alec/Max into a classic Spike/Buffy shipfic–it’s all about how they’re equals and can have adventures and banter and Max can be her true self and how Alec can match Max on a level that Riley Xander Logan never could. And they turn Alec into Lymond*–so it’s all about getting through Alec’s charismatic mask to the epicly traumatized woobie underneath, and hurting him gratuitously while reveling in how superhumanly competent he is.)
* I feel like I’d be a lot more successful at getting people to read the Lymond books if I could just explain that past all the obscure Renaissance literary references and convoluted 16th century politics lies the greatest hurt/comfort epic ever written.
Originally published at rusty-halo.com. You can comment here or there.
White Collar Comes Clean
Jun. 8th, 2010 01:54 pm
I went to the White Collar Comes Clean event at the Paley Center last night, which was kind of fun. I was a little out of it, though, because I’d been in the middle of reading a Dark Angel fic (via my smartphone) and couldn’t really focus on anything but wanting to get back to it. I am honestly a little bit concerned about my sanity. (It wasn’t even a particularly *good* Dark Angel fic, but it was an incredibly satisfying one in which Max recognized that Logan was a boring douche and that Alec was totally and completely awesome, and then Max and Alec had bantery romantic adventures together.)
Anyway, there are pictures and write-ups of the White Collar event here. I got there late but ended up in a lone seat in the fourth row. It would’ve been more fun if I’d known someone there and had someone to talk to. The audience was full of fans and must’ve been 90% female; the woman sitting next to me spent most of her time primping and leaning forward, blocking my view.
Marsha Thomason probably did the most talking of any cast member, and there was a very moving question from an audience member who talked about how inspiring it is to have a lesbian character of color as an accepted member of the team. Also, I realized why her dialog delivery seemed so stilted in the pilot–she’s English and was struggling a bit with the US accent. I definitely think she improved in her second episode. She was a lot of fun at the event.
Willie Garson closed the event with a surprisingly moving and thought-provoking speech about how television shows couldn’t exist without their fans, and how they become fan-driven as time goes on. It was interesting because it hit me how much more fan-driven and collaborative TV is than many other art forms, especially now that the Internet facilities so much two-way communication between show and fandom. This can be bad, obviously, if a show panders to the lowest common denominator, but it can also be really cool as canon takes on a life of its own and reacts to what fans love, and I think it’s a big part of why I keep returning to television as my fannish focus despite its many flaws. It’s a lot like a concert in a way, that when it’s good it’s a shared experience between artist and fan and each heightens the others experience. TV is like that symbiotic artist/fan concert experience, drawn out over months or years instead of the space of a few hours.
There was also some talk about how character-driven the show is and how Neal and Peter love each other (complete with Bomer/DeKay hug) but it wasn’t anything I hadn’t heard before in other interviews.
At the end, they gave out White Collar cookies. (Someone posted a photo here.) I couldn’t resist taking one because I wanted the label, although now I’m going to have to find a non-vegan to feed the actual cookies to. :P
***
Dreamwidth now has expandable cut tags–you just click them open while reading your flist and don’t have to open a new tab. It’s awesome. I’m starting to seriously think about closing my hosted blog and moving over there permanently.
Originally published at rusty-halo.com. You can comment here or there.
Dark Angel season two, in a nutshell:
Jessica Alba: I’m a gorgeous, snarky, brilliant genetically-enhanced super-soldier, on the run from a corrupt government and conflicted about how to deal with my emotions thanks to my dark past.
Adorable!Baby!Dean: Hey, so am I! Want to have exciting adventures together with lots of clever banter and smoldering sexual tension?
Jessica Alba: No, I’m going to ignore you entirely because I’m too busy moping over my creepy, self-righteous, passive-aggressive, controlling, unbearably boring douche of an ex-not-quite-boyfriend.
Unbearably Boring Douche: *is creepy, self-righteous, passive-aggressive, controlling, unbearably boring, and in EVERY FUCKING SCENE OH MY GOD GET HIM OFF MY SCREEN BEFORE I THROW SOMETHING AT IT*
Jessica Alba: *mopes for an entire season*
Adorable!Baby!Dean: *stands in the background looking gorgeous and having nothing to do*
Me: *has traumatic flashbacks of watching Veronica Mars for Logan and Buffy for Spike*
This show was terrible. It’s sad, too, because the premise is awesome. It’s a well-realized near-future dystopia with a great three-dimensional, complex female lead* that regularly passes the Bechdel test and includes gay characters and characters of color. Unfortunately the writing is trite, predictable, cliched, and insipid. I’ve seen more nuanced and thoughtful childrens’ cartoons. (Seriously, it’s got an evil snake cult and a goofy dog-man and one-dimensional cackling villains and cliche!mobsters and cliche!vampires and, dude, my brain is melting out of my ears just thinking about it.)
* I assume she was more interesting in the first season, which would have been more about exploring her as a character; unfortunately she really does spend most of the second season moping over the boring douche guy.
I’m guessing maybe the first season was better–I started by watching 1×17 and 1×18 before moving on to season two, and both of those episodes were promising–the exploration of Max’s past at Manticore and the way it fucked up those children was dark and actually interesting. Plus 1×17 has three women of color, two of whom are gay, passing the Bechdel test and being at the center of the narrative, and 1×18 has Jensen Ackles + blood, tears, and bondage.
It’s really too bad. If anything, it highlights how much better Supernatural is. If you’d asked me before I saw either show, I would have assumed that Dark Angel would be better-written. But actually Supernatural is more willing to take risks, to give its characters genuinely complex choices instead of silly manufactured ones, to let its characters be dark and make real mistakes with consequences, to allow ambiguity and refuse to provide easy answers, and (especially in later seasons) to play with genre and subvert audience expectations. There was just nothing smart, challenging, or interesting about Dark Angel. :(
That said, I don’t regret that I watched it. Young Jensen Ackles was so incredibly pretty, and you get more shirtless scenes of him in one season of Dark Angel than you get in the entirety of Supernatural. (Plus his body type was way more to my taste back then–I’m not so fond of bulky guys.) His eyes are so pretty and those eyelashes! and those lips! And his acting isn’t bad–although he doesn’t have much to do, he does get to cry and be vulnerable a couple times. I would be much happier if I’d watched an Ackles-scenes-only edit of the show, though.
BTW, if anyone has Alec-centric fic recs, I would love to read some. I’m going right back to Supernatural but it would be good to have something to take the icky taste out of my mouth before I finish with Dark Angel entirely.
Originally published at rusty-halo.com. You can comment here or there.