State of the ficathons: having participated in both the Remix and the Rarewomen ficathons which had their posting limit last weekend and will go live next weekend, I am of course impatiently waiting for the later. And eyeing the "gifts" list at the AO3, trying to guess. Also, Remix Madness is open for business, as is the custom in the week between the posting limit and the reveal, and I couldn't resist and joined.

Meanwhile, I watched the Inside the writers' room video at the Bates Motel series website, and it hit me a second before it was mentioned that with the exception of Carlton Cuse, all the producers and writers seen there who were making the decisions about the show, mapping out the characters and their development, were women. This btw does not mean the show is a wonder of social justice putting no foot wrong with its female characters - there's at least one female character this season whose main point of existence seems to have been so that the most popular male character can have a sex scene - , but it still strikes me as worth mentioning. And related to, the above mentioned criticism not withstanding, the show's qualities: it makes you care about the majority of their cast, root for them without trivializing the enormity of their psychological damage (let alone see it as "cool"). And it's about a mother and her sons. In a tv world and pop culture world where 90% of the characters seem to have daddy issues and "dead parents" usually means "dead father who is important and dead mother who doesn't even get to speak", this is a show who picked one of the few famous mothers in pop culture who in her original incarnation only was a corpse and a (horrible) persona inside the head of her son, and made her three dimensional, human, alive and the center of the tale. Both Cuse and co-producer Kerry Ehrin gave post season 2 finale interviews (hers is here and his is here), and Cuse, asked why, given that Bates Motel put the story in the present, he connected it with Psycho at all instead of making the characters originals, he said:


The idea was to tell a tragedy. But it’s super hard to go out and pitch that as an original concept to a network and say, “Hey, I have a great mother-son tragedy for you,” but if you put it in the framework of the Psycho franchise it becomes something that’s marketable. When you watch Bates Motel you kind of know that, well, Norma Bates ends up sort of stuffed in the fruit cellar and Norman becomes this crazed serial killer, but in our version, you kind of love these characters. If you watched the movie you’d think, Okay, Norman Bates became Norman Bates because he was berated by [his] mother and she drove him into insanity — but what if, in fact, she just loved him? What if she was this wonderful, smothering, slightly crazy, over-the-top mother who just had the misfortune of having a son who had a flawed piece of DNA? And what if somehow because of her behavior she sort of catalyzes something that is inevitably going to happen, and because she loves him so much she kind of enables him to become the character he becomes? So we subvert all those expectations you’d have walking in. (....) Norma Bates is one of the great characters of cinema and yet ultimately we know nothing about her, so to be able to sort of create and invent a character for her was something that was super appealing.


I'll end with two great Norma scenes from this second season which aren't really spoilery. The first is Norma talking to the city council, trying to prevent that bypass which, as Psycho watchers know, will end up isolating the Bates Motel, taking nearly all the customers:





And the other is Norma auditioning for the local community theatre (yes, Bates Motel used that idea before Orphan Black did) with the most appropiate song I can imagine for her:

The gifts have been revealed, with author identity from the get go. Rec posts to follow in the days ahead, but for now, just what I wrote, and what I got. I was matched in The Borgias, and my prompt asked for Sancia. Who shows up only in a few season 1 episodes and has not many scenes in them, so she was a rare woman indeed. But I enjoyed fleshing her out wiht a bit of history and speculation, and besides, outsider takes on the ensemble are always fun to write. And thus, I wrote my first Borgias fanfiction:

More composition and fierce quality (6108 words) by Selena
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Borgias
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Sancia & Vannozza, Sancia & Rodrigo Borgia, Sancia/Juan Borgia, Sancia & Alfonso, Sancia & Lucrezia Borgia, Rodrigo Borgia/Vannozza dei Cattanei, Sancia & Ferrante of Naples, Sancia/Gioffre Borgia
Characters: Sancia (Borgias), Rodrigo Borgia, Vannozza dei Cattanei, Juan Borgia, Lucrezia Borgia, Alfonso (Borgias), Alfonso of Aragon, Cesare Borgia, Gioffre Borgia
Summary:

Sancia and the art of survival among the Borgias.

One of my requests had been for Margaret of York, for reasons touched upon in a post I wrote a year ago and because Margaret the survivor always intrigued me, so I was delighted I got a tale about her from Planatagenet expert lareinenoire:

Queen of Swords (5260 words) by La Reine Noire
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 15th Century CE RPF
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Characters: Margaret of York, Richard III of England, Edward IV of England, Mary of Burgundy, Cecily Neville Duchess of York
Additional Tags: Off-screen Character Death, Court Factionalism, Uncivil War, Epic Yorkist Fail
Summary:

For the duchess of Burgundy, there are no easy decisions.

These last few days I was in Bamberg, pacifying Darth Real Life, and therefore rarely online. I did see both the bad news - Robin Sachs dead (though I first saw him in various minor roles in Babylon 5, it was of course as Ethan Rayne in BTVS that I think of him most; followed by the gloriously over the top evil Warlord Sarris in Galaxy Quest) - and the good (well, for geeky history interested people like yours truly) - the confirmation that those bones in Leicester were indeed those of Richard III. (Though like kalypso, I think he should be buried in York.)

Since the rarewomen ficathon is in its nomination phase, I went and nominated the various ladies from the House of York, hoping for revived interest by the findings. (I really hope someone will do something with Richard's sister Margaret, who had a far better ending than her brothers (whom she loved dearly) - she successfully governed her duchy of Burgundy for her stepdaughter after her husband, the not for nothing thus nicknamed Charles the Rash kicked it, offered a haven for surviving Yorkist loyalists and occasionally made Henry Tudor's life miserable by financing revolts against him. Also she died peacefully in bed.) If you want to do some nominations of your own (which isn't a sign-up for the ficathon itself, so don't worry about that), you can do so here and check the already approved characters here. Incidentally, I also nominated my beloved Agent Abigail Brand from the Marvelverse, comics edition, only to be told someone had already nominated her for Earth's Mightiest Heroes, the tv show. Abigail Brand is in Earth's Mightiest Heroes and nobody told me?



***

In other news: I've started to read a highly interesting Doctor Who blog, currently covering the "Wilderness" years, i.e. the time between the show's cancellation in the 80s and its 2005 revival. Among other things, there is a fascinating entry on the feud between Lawrence Miles and Paul Cornell (New Whovians, the later would be the writer of "Father's Day" and "Human Nature/The Family of Blood"), which might be useful to get back to next time someone reminisces of the good old days when fans were more civil to each other. (Well, Cornell was civil. Miles... isn't nicknamed Mad Larry for nothing.) On the brighter side, there is also a fascinating analysis of Queer As Folk (Russel T. Davies' original series from 1999, that is, not the American version), which reminded me of something, because it sums up Our Former Welsh Overlord in totem: Perhaps the funniest and best scene in the entire series is the cut between some strikingly explicit gay sex and Vince watching the end of Episode One of The Pyramids of Mars and rewinding it to quote along with “I bring Sutekh’s gift of death to all humanity.” As if they’re comparable actions. Because, of course, they are. Oh, RTD.