Queer as Folk, and multifandom links

[selenak]

Having watched Queer As Folk (the original UK version, that is, not the US remake), these days also known as The Other Famous Cult Show Russel T. Davies Wrote, I was entertained and couldn't help but conclude the following:

- RTD really likes the name "Tyler" as a surname
- but not as much as he likes the constellation of "dependable kind person in unrequited love with charismatic guy also fancied by the rest of the
universe, whose sidekick dependable kind person is, charismatic guy is seemingly oblivious to when he hurts dependable kind person's feelings"
- and he loves Doctor Who even better than that.

Seriously. When Vince watched a Fourth Doctor episode in the pilot, I was just amused; when it got really hardcore later, complete with Genesis of the Daleks instead of sex, a K-9 model as the birthday present to top all other birthday presents and the ability to name all actors who ever played the Doctor as the ultimate test of true love, I wondered whether this was an early sneaky attempt to get the BBC to revive the show and make Rusty the headwriter, but then I checked the date, and Queer as Folk is from 1999 (New Who started in 2005), so no, it must have been pure fanboy devotion. Then I listened to the audio commentary for the final episode (which was recorded in 2003), in which Aidan Gillen and Craig Kelly (who play Stuart and Vince) say they wouldn't be able to name the Doctors anymore and RTD says that of course he can. Bless.

Of course, if you have a show in which all three main characters are white gay men, then you don't have to worry about the fact Charismatic Guy might love Dependable Kind Person but doesn't LOVE DKP in the same way DKP loves him, or does things like looking at someone else longingly right in front of DKP, could be read as either having a subtext that favours heterosexual romance over gay romance, or a subtext that discriminates against women, or a subtext that discriminates racially.

ETA for clarification due to a question: In other words: Vince loving his best friend Stuart unrequitedly (as far as a sexual relationship is concerned) while Stuart has sex with everyone BUT Vince and isn't above exploiting him occasionally is perceived differently than either Jack-Ianto-Gwen or Doctor-Martha. Presumably this has something to do with all participants (including potential rival Nathan) being of the same race and gender, because the emotional structure is remarkably similar, if not the same.

Also of possible interest in the eternal debate on how oblivious or not Our Russel is to minorities other than the one he belongs to: when recently outed Nathan gets into a teenage rant at his (black and female) best friend about her belonging to the "heterosexual fascist majority", she pwns him by saying "I'm black, and I'm a girl; try that for a day". Exit Nathan, silent and stunned.

***

Of interest for fanfiction writes in all fandoms: penknife wrote great meta: On letting the characters you love be wrong. Because that's one of the hardest things to achieve, and few fanfic writers manage it.

Speaking of fanfiction, two links:

Heroes:

Ordinary Boy: futurefic, in which Lyle along with Claire (and Mr. Muggles!) ends up living with the Petrellis. Lyle's pov on the craziness that is Petrelli family interaction is simultanously wry, funny and touching, and the relationship between him and Claire (the only non-dysfunctional siblings in the Heroesverse, they!) is wonderfully drawn.

Blake's 7:

Things That Happen In The Dark: Blake and Avon in the first season. Gen, with slashy subtext. You know, just like the show. *g*

Doctor Who:

Pockets: a great Donna pov, and through her an indirect portrait of the Doctor. Short but perfect.

Torchwood:

Waiting For A Dream: Martha and Owen during A Day in the Death. As the episode itself, dark and intense.

Comments

[buffyannotater.livejournal.com]

Aww, I love the original Queer as Folk. Mind you, the US version can be quite fantastic, too, though they each have their shortcomings.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

Didn't you write a compare and contrast post a few years back?

[buffyannotater.livejournal.com]

Yes, here it is: http://buffyannotater.livejournal.com/431528.html

Though I don't agree with much of what I wrote there anymore. That was all very much a reaction to having had seen all of the UK and only very scattered bits of the US one. Once I sat down and watched the whole US series, there are aspects that I think that it handled much better. I do still think that it's more glossy and soapy, but I do not agree any longer with what I said about most of the characters. Just the fact that the American show had 5 seasons to develop its characters, and the UK only had 5 hours all together is a big factor. In the end, I came to prefer the American characters, though that took a while. Still, it's interesting to look back at my early opinions of the show. And to note how resistant I was to embrace the American one. But now, I'm much more a fan of Brian Kinney than I am of Stuart (his counterpart).

Though I was already starting to come around by the time I made this post...

http://buffyannotater.livejournal.com/437435.html

This post is a bit spoilery re: the US version, so if you haven't seen it, you may not want to read...

http://buffyannotater.livejournal.com/441085.html

[londonkds.livejournal.com]

On that Penknife link: hey, a lot of original fiction authors can't manage it either...

[astrogirl2.livejournal.com]

It doesn't seem that difficult to me, but then, my characters are always, like, accidentally committing genocide and stuff. :)

[selenak.livejournal.com]

Or intentionally, in the case of the Master.*g* (And the Doctor, come to think of it.) Though you know, the whole "characters being written as victims and always in the right" happens to murderers, too. I mean, check FFN on any day and look at the summaries of stories starring Sylar, and shudder.

[astrogirl2.livejournal.com]

I think I'll pass on that, thanks. :) But I definitely do understand the phenomenon of Bad Guy as a poor misunderstood woobie who would never hurt anybody who didn't really, really deserve it, despite any and all canonical evidence to the contrary. I have trouble understanding it on any but the most purely intellectual level, though. To my mind, the really interesting bad guys (and good guys, for that matter!) are really interesting precisely because they're way more complex than that.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

True!

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

RTD really likes the name "Tyler" as a surname

Oh, doesn't he just! The first time I came across him was Revelations (http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0313121/), a 1994 drama about two intermarried families, one of them called Tyler. There was also a Tyler (and a Harkness) in The Grand (http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0118327/), and another Tyler (and some Saxons) in The Second Coming (http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0353104/). He'd previously used Harkness in Century Falls (http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0105969/). There are black bridegrooms called Lance in Queer as Folk and The Runaway Bride. If it weren't for all of that, you might not think there was anything odd about the number of Joneses in his work, or the fact that there was a Mickey Smith in Queer as Folk 2.

I was convinced that the Doctor's next companion after Tyler and Jones would be a Maloney, but that didn't work out because they didn't know Donna would be a regular when she first appeared. But she does share a name with Nathan Maloney's sidekick, Donna Clark.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

Well, "Jones" was already popular on DW before Rusty entered the field (Jo's future husband from The Green Death is Cliff Jones as I recall), but the Tylers and Harknesses are really something.

Though, you know, it's not his fault Matthew Graham caught the disease via his daughter having watched Rose when asked to give Sam a surname...

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

Incidentally, I meant to say that I initially read Blake and Avon in the first season. Gen, with slashy subtext as "Gan, with slashy subtext", and was quite intrigued that you thought this was "just like the show"! Not to mention spending the whole story wondering when Gan was going to get involved - I was seriously expecting a cutaway to him watching from the ship.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

Bwahahahahaaaa. Well, I'm sure voyeur!Gan has been written SOMEWHERE, because everything in this fandom has been written, including Zen/Orac.

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

Closest I can think of is Nova's Bend Me, Shape Me (http://www.hermit.org/Blakes7/Fanzines/Reviews5/BendMe.html); that has Vila as a genuine voyeur, but in practice most of the crew do it, because it's B/A as viewed by everyone including Zen.

[ide-cyan.livejournal.com]

Not just any K-9 model for a present: they apparently used the real Doctor Who prop!

[selenak.livejournal.com]

But - how did they get it in 1999? Did the BBC lend it out to Channel 4?

[ide-cyan.livejournal.com]

Yeah.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/news/cult/news/drwho/2004/08/10/13657.shtml

[selenak.livejournal.com]

Go BBC. Is the "Matthew Jones" mentioned by any chance the same Matt Jones who recently wrote Dead Man Walking on Torchwood? (Since RTD obviously reemployed the Queer as Folk composer for DW, and seems to be into reemploying in general...)

[ide-cyan.livejournal.com]

Yes again. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Jones_%28writer%29

[skywaterblue.livejournal.com]

I remember being charmed by all the Doctor Who stuff in Queer as Folk (UK edition) as I'm a geek and that's how geek dating goes. *g* I've been really hankering to rewatch all that now that I'm apparently For Real Into Doctor Who.

[joonscribble.livejournal.com]

Queer as Folk (UK) was my very first RTD show and I really loved it back when I first saw it. The character of Stuart Allen Jones always fascinated me because he was the kind of guy who was an utter bastard about 364 1/2 days of the year and yet had flashes of genuine kindness. Plus, as dysfunctional as Stuart and Vince's relationship was, there was a purity to it that I loved.

Even though I'm probably making something out of nothing, I feel like a lot of things I saw in QAF ended up surfacing in one form or another in DW or TW.

And yes! RTD has a great love for the last names Jones and Tyler. I think I read somewhere once where he said he feels a character doesn't really take shape until he names him or her and so he tends to go with the same name over and over because it helps him ground the character a little.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

Re: Stuart - you also need an actor who pulls this off and makes it believable both Vince and so many other people in general would react the way they do. Which is the case. And, especially bearing penknife's post which I linked in mind, a script that doesn't gloss over or glorify Stuart's flaws, for example by letting him be only a bastard to people the audience doesn't care about, so kudos for RTD for never falling into that trap.

I agree re: shared themes with both DW and TW, so you're not alone.*g*

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I love the British Queer as Folk. Though I think Russell T. Davies makes some colossally bad judgement calls sometimes, I have no problem with his handling or gender or race: i think is errors in judgement are random and non-targeted.

when recently outed Nathan gets into a teenage rant at his (black and female) best friend about her belonging to the "heterosexual fascist majority", she pwns him by saying "I'm black, and I'm a girl; try that for a day". Exit Nathan, silent and stunned

I wouldn't mind seeing this as a conversation with Martha or Toshiko. Though I can't imagine it being Captain Jack in the male role; he's an outsider so far beyond the norm that he couldn't even conceive that rant. Ianto or Owen, maybe.

[stoplookingup.livejournal.com]

Here via Who Daily:

It's really weird that I just found this post, because minutes ago I posted on my lj about Casanova (http://parrotfish.livejournal.com/93646.html) and asked why Rusty seems to favor the hetero. And I asked if anyone who'd seen Queer as Folk (which I haven't) saw any of that there. And here you are, with "having a subtext that favours heterosexual romance over gay romance." Can you expand on that?

[selenak.livejournal.com]

Let me clarify: what Rusty favours is the triangle structure. Doesn't matter which participants and the gender of same. If he does this with three men, nobody minds. If one of the participants is a woman, as in TW, suddenly the implication for fandom is different.

(There is no heterosexual romance in Queer as Folk. The supporting female characters are: Nathan's platonic best friend Donna, Vince's mother, and the lesbian couple Stuart has donated his sperm to so they can have a child.)

[ionlylurkhere.livejournal.com]

(also here via who_daily, and very much going off on an inconsequential tangent ...)

Nathan's platonic best friend Donna

Someone needs to buy RTD a baby names book. Stat.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

LOL. As kalypso_v notes above, in addition to the main characters being called Stuart JONES and Vince TYLER, and the platonic best friend Donna, you have Jones' and Tylers all over the place in his other works as well. And also two Harknesses.

[stoplookingup.livejournal.com]

Ah -- I see your point. Clearly you're right about that structure he uses over and over. I guess when using it with non-homogeneous threesomes, there are certain patterns Rusty falls into regarding who plays which roles, but those don't come into play when it's three white men.

But regardless, when the guy whom everybody loves and who is a user toward the one who loves him is also set up as the moral authority with power over life and death, it's not quite the same as three guys who have no inherent inequalities. So maybe that's another problem with using that pattern in Doctor Who.

[kindkit.livejournal.com]

I came for the interesting meta (via who_daily) and unexpectedly found that you'd recced one of my stories! I am gleeful now.

I haven't seen the UK QaF, so it's interesting to hear that RTD was just as fond of unrequited love/love triangles then. But you're right, it looks different when the race or sexuality enters the picture. And RTD ought to realize that.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

Oh, as a B7 fan of old, I was thrilled to find new fanfic, and glad to rec it!

It ought not to make a difference, but it does. This being said, I recently came across an insightful comment by laurashapiro (to someone else's post, so I can't find it again right now) about gay writers versus slash writers and very different expectations/representations; it also made me think of Six Feet Under (written and produced by Alan Ball, who like RTD is openly gay), David and Keith and their relationship, which I love but which definitely far more resembles the relationships on QaF UK (or for that matter Jack/Ianto on the show) than the fannish conception of how a pairing out to be.