I was boggled to find there's less than a full page of stories under the Sloane filter at fanfiction.net. I mean, I already knew it would be too much to ask to find Sloane/Emily stories - nobody wants to write about established marriages, let alone happy ones - but where are all the fics about his relationships with Jack and Sydney? I'm bewildered that Sloane/Jack friendship fic, even one-sided stuff that paints Sloane as solely the evil betrayer, is virtually non-existent. It's the most interesting relationship on the show!

I have read andrastewhite's fic (best thing about getting into a fandom late is finding all the people who are on your flist already who've written fic for it!) and yes, I gleefully dug through all your old meta and episode reviews. There's a painful dearth of old-school show discussion that actually talks about Sloane instead of just booing and hissing everything he does. (That said, I'm finding the rewatch at the_retelling pleasantly Sloane-friendly for the most part.)

My annoyance at the Irina whitewashing, I think, is really more about the hypocrisy of how the two characters are viewed by fandom than anything else - I certainly didn't think she merited the horrible character assassination of the finale. I thought the season four finale was note perfect in the places it had all the characters end up emotionally, and it definitely would have been the more satisfying ending.

So, yeah, I have mixed feelings about approaching season five: on the one hand, I am pretty glad it exists, because hey, more episodes = more opportunities to watch Ron Rifkin being awesome, and I'm greatly anticipating the Grandpa Jack arc... but on the other hand, I know in advance it ends poorly and kills off the entire generation of characters that I'm most interested in. About the only consolation is that with Alias, when you're mentally plotting out the denial-fic where they all turn out to survive and have had good reasons for their actions, it doesn't feel so much like a cheap fix-it because you know they'd have done the same in canon given the chance.