Monday notes
May. 17th, 2010 01:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakHeroes having been cancelled has evoked grief from some of my flist and celebration from others. I said my personal goodbye to the show two seasons ago, and I never doubted I made the right decision, but I can't forgot how much I enjoyed watching it once upon a time, how I used to love the characters (well, Sylar excepted...), that it inspired me to write over thirty stories and allowed me to meet and befriend some great people online. Every now and then people do the "fandoms as boyfriends/girlfriends" meme; I suppose Heroes for me turned into the one whom I would have stayed the hell away from for the rest of my life if he hadn't died, but now that someone has actually pulled the plug to the articifial nourishment keeping him alive in his coma, I can't help but remember that we did have some good, really fabulous times, and be grateful for those.
(But if someone resurrected said boyfriend and he'd want to meet again, I'd still say "thanks, but no thanks" and run a mile.)
Speaking of old fandoms, here's a Buffy rec: The Ones Not Kissed is a very good story about Oz and Cordelia post-Lover's Walk, in their respectively laconic and acerbic way commiserating. Fits beautifully within canon, and the voices are dead-on.
A footnote to the point of view and "B, getting together with A, realizes he never loved A" = anti-kink posts: browsing through Mary Renault's The Persian Boy the other day, it occured to me that here's an example of how to do both things, subjective pov conveying that the story does not always agree with the narrator, and relationships not being devalued in favour of another but both treated with respect. The "main" relationship of The Persian Boy, so to speak, is Bagoas/Alexander, and Bagoas is the narrator, but he's also keenly aware that he's not the main relationship in Alexander's life, that, as Bagoas puts it near the end of the novel, Achilles may care for Briseis but there is but one Patroklos for him, in Alexander's case Hephaistion. Who comes across as an admirable character, which is by no means exclusive with Bagoas (not a saint, and also 16 when he falls for Alexander) being jealous early on. In terms of pov character displaying attitudes not identical with the author's, an excellent example is the scene where Hephaistion and Bagoas talk about Alexander killing Kleitos, and Bagoas, being Persian and having a very different standard when it comes to kings executing offending subjects, doesn't really get why the Macedons see it as such a terrible crime, but Hephaistion, of course, does, and voices it. That's what I was talking about...
(But if someone resurrected said boyfriend and he'd want to meet again, I'd still say "thanks, but no thanks" and run a mile.)
Speaking of old fandoms, here's a Buffy rec: The Ones Not Kissed is a very good story about Oz and Cordelia post-Lover's Walk, in their respectively laconic and acerbic way commiserating. Fits beautifully within canon, and the voices are dead-on.
A footnote to the point of view and "B, getting together with A, realizes he never loved A" = anti-kink posts: browsing through Mary Renault's The Persian Boy the other day, it occured to me that here's an example of how to do both things, subjective pov conveying that the story does not always agree with the narrator, and relationships not being devalued in favour of another but both treated with respect. The "main" relationship of The Persian Boy, so to speak, is Bagoas/Alexander, and Bagoas is the narrator, but he's also keenly aware that he's not the main relationship in Alexander's life, that, as Bagoas puts it near the end of the novel, Achilles may care for Briseis but there is but one Patroklos for him, in Alexander's case Hephaistion. Who comes across as an admirable character, which is by no means exclusive with Bagoas (not a saint, and also 16 when he falls for Alexander) being jealous early on. In terms of pov character displaying attitudes not identical with the author's, an excellent example is the scene where Hephaistion and Bagoas talk about Alexander killing Kleitos, and Bagoas, being Persian and having a very different standard when it comes to kings executing offending subjects, doesn't really get why the Macedons see it as such a terrible crime, but Hephaistion, of course, does, and voices it. That's what I was talking about...
