Or, what happens when you realize you've become possessive over fictional people and their fictional sex lives despite best intentions!

So, this month crack_van, after YEARS, does Babylon 5 recs again. Which makes me happy. Now today I check and find a story recommended with a summary that reads: This story starts off with Londo being an ass, which is perfectly believable and has Sheridan and Sinclair enlisting the help of their friends to get back at him. This story is funny, has fun characterization, and is also totally hot. The Centauri apparently have an incredibly strong taboo against same-sex couples, so Sheridan and Sinclair decide to play a practical joke on him by pretending to be a couple.

My first thought wasn't "how come Sinclair and Sheridan are on the station at the same time"?, oh no. It was "the Centauri don't have an incredible strong taboo against same-sex couples because I would know about that by virtue of having written more Centauri fanfic than anyone safe hobsonphile. Also, Londo in particular had sex with his best friend in his teenage years." And we all know he's destined to figure out his feelings for G'Kar.

And then I realized. I have become THAT kind of fan. The one who insists on treating her fanon as canon. Great Maker, I feel so embarassed.

But I still think Londo would find a Sinclair/Sheridan tryst hilarious and definitely wouldn't be shocked. And that the Centauri in general due to being obviously modelled on the Romans by JMS probably have the Roman attitude towards same-sex relationships, patriarchal but not tied to religious taboos, to wit: post-adolescence, it's all about the power hierarchy. If you are on the receiving end, as it were (well, the equivalent for Centauri anatomy), you admit to a lower status. True for either gender.

Now excuse me. I'm going to write down "JMS did not in any way sell the Centauri to me" a hundred times.

Since I never participated previously and always was fascinated by the results, I gave into temptation and signed up for the Remix Redux Ficathon, aka the one where one of your stories get rewritten by someone else from a new perspective and you do the same thing to someone else's story. artaxastra and self did this once with a Roman history ficlet, and I loved it then, so, temptation, I'm yours. Mind you, two of the fandoms I named are my shiny space stations, Babylon 5 and Deep Space Nine, and I expect there won't be much interest for those, but with the exception of the Jossverse and Alias, that's where most of my fanfic lies.

As this put me in a B5 state of mind, I decided to have a go at the personal fanon/canon meme.

Take your OTP
List your personal canon for those characters. So the stuff that has nothing whatsoever to do with canon, but in your head is irrefutably what would have happened.

I don't have many OTPs, being usually in love with characters, not pairings, and even those I have are definitely not exclusive (Londo/G'Kar! except that I also love Londo with Timov/Adira/Urza/First Wife We Don't Know The Name Of/Other People To Be Announced, and G'Kar with Lyta, platonically or otherwise), but B5 and especially Londo & G'Kar have some personal canon for me, so this one is easiest. Mind you, said fanon usually resulted in a fanfic, but here's the condensed version:

So, Londo Mollari and G'Kar of Narn:

- like all Narn born under Centauri occupation, G'Kar is fluent in Centauri; he never uses the language, though, except for his "Where is Mr. Garibaldi?" question upon his arrival at Cartagia's court. He also used it out loud and inside Londo's mind during the Dust incident. Which is one of the reasons why he doesn't use it with Londo after their relationship turns into love friendship

- Londo can speak Narn, not fluently, but enough to get through conversations, except he never has conversations in Narn with anyone, and didn't since he was a boy; the only time he used it with G'Kar was after G'Kar returned from his travels with Lyta, took one look at Londo and basically figured out what was going on. It seemed like the thing to do to say "Hello, G'Kar" in Narn then. The Keeper didn't quite know what to make of it.

- for all the canonical jokes about having six and giving G'Kar sexual pointers, Londo actually never had sex outside his own species before, whereas G'Kar, to put it mildly, was an erotic xenophile; Londo thinks he's good about bluffing regarding this difference of experience

- Mariel wasn't the first Centauri G'Kar slept with; he'd have loved to flaunt the liason to annoy Londo but had to keep it quiet because lusting after Centauri is a Narn taboo, for obvious reasons, which is why he originally started to get interested in humans, who look similarly enough but are acceptable. G'Kar's sexual backstory with Centauri is an extremely murky affair and has a lot to do with power issues and memories of the occupation, which forms some of the background of my version of the Mariel affair

- Londo pretends not to have read G'Kar's book and keeps this up through the years, but in fact he asked Delenn - not Vir, because Vir as a Centauri and Londo's aide would have stood out, whereas nobody would be surprised if Delenn ordered several copies for herself - to buy him a copy as soon as it appeared and swore her to silence about this

- what G'Kar hated most about Londo for a long time was the fact that Londo, as opposed to Refa, who was G'Kar's childhood idea of a Centauri personified, could have been better; what he kept hating most about Londo after they became friends was that Londo wasn't worse, because a worse man would have turned his back on Centauri Prime and avoided his destiny. The simple fact of the matter is that G'Kar would have prefered a destroyed Centauri Prime and a Keeper-free Londo; he's aware that this might be a sign that his path to enlightenment is far from complete.

- to cope with her debts as a divorced woman, Mariel wrote her memoirs, which outsold not only the book of G'Kar but also Sheridan's memoirs; unfortunately, G'Kar's followers were so incensed about the content that they declared the Narn equivalent of a fatwah, and the human publisher who published it to begin with had to withdraw it. Copies survive via downloads in crystals, of course.