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selenakToday is the day for the remix reveal. For my story, I was able to go back to one of my oldest and most beloved fandoms, DS9. I wrote:
Fear No More (The May-December Remix)
There is something about writing a remix that makes one chatty, so forgive me for talking a bit about this one. My earlier remixes were all based on material from authors I was familiar with,kangeiko and leyenn, which made choosing a remix relatively easy. This year, I got caitn, of whom I hadn't read anything before. Which was great (I love new challenges), except once I had read her stories in the fandom we shared, I felt stupefied. There were a lot of drabbles. Some remix authors do great things with drabbles, but the only one I could see myself enlarging upon was one of Sisko and Garak, and welll, between Five things which never happened between Garak and Bashir, Coming in from the Cold and Nowhwere Man, I had pretty much written all I wanted to say about Garak. Then there was a longer Kira/Ezri story which I could see myself covering from the Quark angle (he's marginally involved), but that was the safe story. I was already tentatively eyeing the possibility of writing about a cat on Babylon 5 when I reread the DS9 stories again, and inspiration struck, because one of the stories was a missing scene between Jadzia Dax and Curzon Dax' lover Arandis from a season 5 episode, Let he who is without sin....
Now, I love Dax. I did write her before, twice, but in both cases it was from Quark's pov and the focus was on him. (Oh, and there was one vignette with Future!Odo, but again, the focus was on Odo.) The lightning bulb which went off in my head was that this was an opportunity for some Dax character exploration. Specifically through the Curzon backstory. The symbionts switching gender with hosts, and the hosts remembering being both has always fascinated me. And the show gave us enough tidbits of Dax' past hosts, plus of course Ezri in s7, to make some educated guesses as to which traits they all shared, and which were specific to one individual host. While Curzon actually never shows up on the show as an acting character, save for Facets when Odo is channelling him, we probably know more about him than about any other Dax host save for Jadzia. Including what he did to her during her initiate training, and why, something I hadn't seen explored in fanfic before.
There were other reasons why writing a Dax story suddenly seemed irresistable to me. By and large, it seems to me that a lot of fanfic falls into two extremes when it comes to pairings featuring one or two characters who aren't young anymore (and don't look it, either; Highlander style immortals or vampires are another issue). Either they get the "old people + sex = ewwww, do not want!" treatment, and are treated as asexual if they show up at all, or, especially if it's a pairing with only one older participant, their hotness is acknowledged but the possibility there might be not so attractive signs of physical decline is not. Just like characters with actors who during a show gain weight remain magically slim and are more likely to lose some in fanfic (seriously, descriptions of Blake's 7's Avon as thin always make me giggle), characters older than 50 somehow have unlimited stamina, prostata problems are unheard of, and the younger party in a pairing finds everything about them irresistable from the get go.
Well, Curzon Dax canonically had the Dax symbiont for about 80 years. He must have been an adult when he became joined. Arandis is his last lover, and she when meeting Jadzia five years after Curzon's death looks like she's in her mid-thirties, 40 at most. Even given higher life expectancy in the 24th century and the fact Curzon is a Trill, not a human, he must have been old in every sense of the word, and using this in my story, dealing with it became very much an incentive. It would be coy not to acknowledge a cinematic inspiration: the film Venus and Peter O'Toole in the leading role. (I definitely imagine Curzon looking like him.)
Lastly, there was the fact that Let he who is without sin... is one of the most unpopular DS9 episodes ever. No, I don't think it's a misunderstood masterpiece, either;jesuswasbatman sums up perfectly one of the biggest problems with a basic premise of the story, and that's not the only one. I like some individual scenes, but overall it's a weak episode. But you know, that was a part of the challenge to me. Because while it would be a Dax character exploration story, my pov character would not be Dax, but Arandis, i.e. a character we only meet in this so widely disliked episode and then only for a very few scenes. (And who in caitn's story is presented from Jadzia's pov.) I wanted Arandis to feel real, with her own agenda; I wanted to make the reader to become invested in her as well as in Curzon and Jadzia. Yes, I thought; this is the story for me.
Fear No More (The May-December Remix)
There is something about writing a remix that makes one chatty, so forgive me for talking a bit about this one. My earlier remixes were all based on material from authors I was familiar with,
kangeiko and leyenn, which made choosing a remix relatively easy. This year, I got caitn, of whom I hadn't read anything before. Which was great (I love new challenges), except once I had read her stories in the fandom we shared, I felt stupefied. There were a lot of drabbles. Some remix authors do great things with drabbles, but the only one I could see myself enlarging upon was one of Sisko and Garak, and welll, between Five things which never happened between Garak and Bashir, Coming in from the Cold and Nowhwere Man, I had pretty much written all I wanted to say about Garak. Then there was a longer Kira/Ezri story which I could see myself covering from the Quark angle (he's marginally involved), but that was the safe story. I was already tentatively eyeing the possibility of writing about a cat on Babylon 5 when I reread the DS9 stories again, and inspiration struck, because one of the stories was a missing scene between Jadzia Dax and Curzon Dax' lover Arandis from a season 5 episode, Let he who is without sin.... Now, I love Dax. I did write her before, twice, but in both cases it was from Quark's pov and the focus was on him. (Oh, and there was one vignette with Future!Odo, but again, the focus was on Odo.) The lightning bulb which went off in my head was that this was an opportunity for some Dax character exploration. Specifically through the Curzon backstory. The symbionts switching gender with hosts, and the hosts remembering being both has always fascinated me. And the show gave us enough tidbits of Dax' past hosts, plus of course Ezri in s7, to make some educated guesses as to which traits they all shared, and which were specific to one individual host. While Curzon actually never shows up on the show as an acting character, save for Facets when Odo is channelling him, we probably know more about him than about any other Dax host save for Jadzia. Including what he did to her during her initiate training, and why, something I hadn't seen explored in fanfic before.
There were other reasons why writing a Dax story suddenly seemed irresistable to me. By and large, it seems to me that a lot of fanfic falls into two extremes when it comes to pairings featuring one or two characters who aren't young anymore (and don't look it, either; Highlander style immortals or vampires are another issue). Either they get the "old people + sex = ewwww, do not want!" treatment, and are treated as asexual if they show up at all, or, especially if it's a pairing with only one older participant, their hotness is acknowledged but the possibility there might be not so attractive signs of physical decline is not. Just like characters with actors who during a show gain weight remain magically slim and are more likely to lose some in fanfic (seriously, descriptions of Blake's 7's Avon as thin always make me giggle), characters older than 50 somehow have unlimited stamina, prostata problems are unheard of, and the younger party in a pairing finds everything about them irresistable from the get go.
Well, Curzon Dax canonically had the Dax symbiont for about 80 years. He must have been an adult when he became joined. Arandis is his last lover, and she when meeting Jadzia five years after Curzon's death looks like she's in her mid-thirties, 40 at most. Even given higher life expectancy in the 24th century and the fact Curzon is a Trill, not a human, he must have been old in every sense of the word, and using this in my story, dealing with it became very much an incentive. It would be coy not to acknowledge a cinematic inspiration: the film Venus and Peter O'Toole in the leading role. (I definitely imagine Curzon looking like him.)
Lastly, there was the fact that Let he who is without sin... is one of the most unpopular DS9 episodes ever. No, I don't think it's a misunderstood masterpiece, either;
jesuswasbatman sums up perfectly one of the biggest problems with a basic premise of the story, and that's not the only one. I like some individual scenes, but overall it's a weak episode. But you know, that was a part of the challenge to me. Because while it would be a Dax character exploration story, my pov character would not be Dax, but Arandis, i.e. a character we only meet in this so widely disliked episode and then only for a very few scenes. (And who in caitn's story is presented from Jadzia's pov.) I wanted Arandis to feel real, with her own agenda; I wanted to make the reader to become invested in her as well as in Curzon and Jadzia. Yes, I thought; this is the story for me.
