hmpf

Pete and Bob get drunk and search for Bob's soul.

This is the chapter that was 99% done when "Splinter" rudely abducted me at gunpoint and made me write fic about Ramse instead. I've been pretty exhausted, on several levels, lately, so not much writing has been happening in the last three or four weeks, but a few days ago I *finally* managed to finish this thing. Hurray!

Ghosts - 1987

Ramse, after Tokyo. Short, intense angst-o-rama, beta'd patiently and perceptively by

killabeez. First time in quite a while that I've allowed myself to go into perfectionist mode; it felt appropriate here because Ramse is so deliberate. The sloppiness I'm currently allowing myself elsewhere to increase my productivity would have felt out of character, for writing about him.

I'm proud of this one.

Spoilers for a major season 1 event, so beware if you haven't watched all of season 1 and still plan to.

Current Mood: accomplished

*Digs self out of stack of 100+ cardboard boxes*

Gonna stay in this flat till I'm 95. Don't want to move again, ever.

I want to sleep for a month.

I still haven't even figured out if this is an attraction thing or an identification thing (or both? Can it be both? I think in some cases it is.) And I was wondering about that in 1998 already, when I wrote that Methos essay.

ETA: Maybe it's the one for some, the other for others, both for yet another subset, and something completely different for yet another subset?

What the fuck is the essence of "obsession-worthiness", to my subconscious? (ETA2: Is there one? Or has it always been many different things?)

It's gotten even less clear, if possible, over the years. Most of the early ones at least had an attraction component that I could identify, but a lot of the recent ones had no attraction component whatsoever (Herbert and Marvin - the aforementioned duck and a dragon; Bob - a narrative voice, and not even a particularly attractive one; Steven freakin Universe), but the identification element is at best extremely indirect, too.

(Deleted because I was probably wrong about that.)

I think this is not the first time I've thought about these things on this blog. I'm also pretty sure I haven't really gotten any further in understanding what's going on there, since the last time.

I'm as disturbed as anyone by the fact that the list below is basically all guys, btw. And also confused, because as I said, there's a lot of things there where I'm pretty sure that erotic attraction plays no part at all in my interest (there's a freakin' anthropomorphic *duck* on the list! Although I gotta admit that there's one artist on that comic series that draws him in a disturbingly sexy way, which always confuses the heck out of me. I'm not sure I *want* to be attracted to a duck, not even for the duration of a few pages. :D But that's small fraction of the series, and for the most part, he's a stylised duck with noodle limbs.)

Also, anyway, I'm bi, I've been attracted to women, in real life, as often as to men (more often, really) - which is to say, still very, very rarely, haha. So I'm wondering if this lack of women on the list of my past obsessions has something to do with the kind of stories that get told about male characters vs. stories that get told about female characters.

(I thought about whether to put Aeryn on the list or not, and it was a close call. But I had to be honest, ultimately, and admit to myself that although I do love Aeryn, and find her a lot hotter than John, my *obsession* was mostly centred on John, although all the central group of Farscape characters have lots of moments where I get strongly interested in them, which is why I love the show so thoroughly and enduringly.)

Recently, there've been a few books and book series, btw, that I think would have me obsessively interested in their (female) main characters if they were tv shows or longer series. I think one thing about obsessive interests is, they need a somewhat sustained source, a certain amount of material, which is why there's so few single books or short series or standalone movies on that list. (Terra Ignota is the exception, mainly because the wtf factor *and* the density of chewy ideas is so intense there that those alone were enough to fuel obsession, for me.)

So, honorary mentions:

Baru Cormorant (I forget what the series is called but all the books have her name in the title)
Cheris (Hexarchate/Machineries of Empire)
Essun (Broken Earth trilogy)
Gideon and Harrow (Locked Tomb)

Now, the similarities between these four/five (and also some of the guys on my previous list!) are somewhat obvious...

I also really like - this feels too obvious to say, really, for someone of my generation - Ripley and Sarah Connor. (Did like the Terminator tv show, too, but somehow not *quite* strongly enough to fuel an obsessive interest. I'm still slightly confused by this, because I kind of would have expected it to.)

And Furiosa, of course.

But yeah, none of these interests ever reached obsession level. (I have read my share of Terminator fic, though, and that's probably the thing, out of the ones listed above, that got closest to actually being a fandom for me. Probably not a coincidence that it's also the one with the most canon material.)

Just rambled a bit (in a comment) about what, recently, I've gotten obsesssive about and what I haven't, and you know what? Even after twenty-odd years of observing and analysing this in myself, I still can't say what the common factors are in all of the things that got me intensely interested in my life. It's strange. There is no one theme, no one character type or ship, no one genre, no kink, not even a physical type (and sexual attraction is really only present in a fraction of these, anyway)... There's a certain cluster of themes I tend to be interested in, some characters I like tend to have *some* traits in common, but really, nothing reliably predicts obsession. The only universally common factor, "angst", is so general that it's practically useless as a distinguishing characteristic. It's also present in a zillion texts I've consumed and *not* gotten obsessively interested in. And it comes in so many different shapes, even in the texts I'm interested in, that I'm not even sure you can say it's a commonality between all of them.

Things, texts, characters, and people I've been strongly obsessive about, somewhat chronologically, over the past 31 years, a by no means exhaustive list:

Twin Peaks (Cooper)
Lord of the Rings (Frodo; Frodo and Sam; Frodo, Sam and Rosie; hobbit members of the Fellowship in general)
Highlander (Methos)
Deep Space Nine (almost everybody had stuff going on, there, that I was deeply interested in. Also, group dynamics & politics.)
Farscape (John Crichton, most strongly, but also very much the whole Moya family)
Remus & Sirius of Harry Potter (never interested in the books or the world of the books, in particular, just these two, mostly as fanon had them, ca. 2002/2003)
Life on Mars (Sam)
Hellblazer (John Constantine)
Doctor Who (the Doctor, esp. Nine and Twelve)
Radiohead (Thom Yorke but also the whole band and its collective dynamics - and let me tell you, this entire thing threw me for a loop, because I don't get obsessive about people, only stories, or so I thought. But of course the media image of real people *is* a story.)
Terra Ignota (Mycroft, I guess? But entirely in a "wtf" kind of way. Yeuch.)
The Laundry series (Bob; also Bob & Mo)
Donjon (Herbert & Marvin)
Steven Universe (mostly Steven, I guess, but really the whole family dynamic there. But Steven is the nexus of that, of course.)
Foreigner series (Bren)
12 Monkeys (show, not movie, though I loved the movie. Ramse; Ramse & Cole; Cole; also absolutely everybody and their twisted conscience and even more twisted, shifting relationships)

There's some things that crop up a lot here, like trauma, like mass murder, like falls from grace, like discrepancies between internal identity and external presentation and perception... but none of these can be generalised.

Tumblr post about the moment from my icon, just because. (You can see how dark the scene originally is, there. Ramse's hand is almost invisible!)

First icon I've made in... fifteen years or so? So I felt like it deserved a post. I really like how it came out. Had to mess with the lighting values of the image a lot because this show is so dark that a lot of screencaps just come out almost entirely black.

It's Ramse and Cole, from 12 Monkeys. (Check previous entries here for more info on them, esp. if you're looking for a new pairing and/or some very satisfying heartbreak.)

Also, sorry I've been so absent, just after tentatively dipping a toe in the waters here again, but I have to move very suddenly, this month or possibly first week of the next, with my - apparently - 27 cubic metres of stuff (50% books and other paper), and am also getting trained in a new field at work, and am still very much consumed by this show/these two guys (and talking about it approximately twice a week at great length on killabeez's dw, because there's a rewatch going on there).

I'm still writing fic about these guys, too! Mostly Ramse, at the moment, who's really, really, really hard to write for some reason. It's a return to my old, slow pace of maybe a sentence or two a week, which is a bit aggravating after the speed at which I could produce Laundry fic. It's a very different mode of writing, though.

I've officially started writing fic for, ahem, "Splinter" (let me continue to have my stupid joke, lol). This is probably a boon to everyone: once I start writing fic in a fandom, I usually stop being quite so obnoxiously vociferous about that fandom, which will be a relief to everyone over on tumblr (and possibly also to some other people, heh). And the fandom itself might get a fic or two out of it, eventually. Though nobody knows when that will be, least of all me.

Got two story beginnings, one that's barely a beginning yet and one that's around 500 words, 200 of which are really rather good, the rest needing improvement (or excision, possibly).

I like those 200 words so much that I have to exert a lot of self-control to not just post them here, but who wants 200 words, only to then be left hanging for what with me may well be years?

So, yeah. Not gonna do that.

Current Mood: exhausted

Oh man, I can' t believe I'm getting back into LJ/DW, in 2021, lol. I mean, I've been saying I wanted to do it for years now, but it looks like I'm actually doing it, now. Thank you, lockdown.
We'll see how long it lasts; I've never been good at consistency, with any social network.

... about violence on Farscape and on 12 Monkeys (yeah, I'm getting over my issues with the show's title — since the meta is about a week old, though, I'm still calling it "Splinter" there).

I really dislike the word "broTP" actually.

Just feels like it fits here, though.

Looking for a new broTP? Do I have one on offer for you!

(I have no idea how long my current phase of frantic fannish activity on tumblr will last, but I've decided to share some of the more worthwhile posts resulting from it with my LJ/DW... Mind you, I'm not sure if this is anybody else's idea of "worthwhile"...)

SF&F lately has been strangely obsessed with themes of mass murder for the "Greater Good", as well as other forms of extreme moral compromise for various lofty(ish) goals. My latest fannish love, the show I kind of refuse to call 12 Monkeys (it's called Splinter, I tell you, Splinter!) is part of that strange glut of texts dealing with extreme - and sometimes really rather artificial - ethical dilemmas of that sort. It's not the first such text that I've been obsessed with in recent years, though. Two of the previous ones caused me to produce long, unfinished essays, which I recently decided to post to tumblr (though there is no discernible fan presence for either of the two book series in question there).

I'm somewhat troubled by my own fascination. Unfortunately I ran into messy clumps of thought tangle before I could really get to the bottom of that, or get to any sort of definitive point, with either of these two unfinished beasts. (My brain is really only half-smart, and in situations like this, it shows.)

Still, I poured a lot of work into these, and maybe someone will find them a little bit interesting even in this fragmentary shape. Or maybe not, that's also fine. I'm just putting them here because, well, they already exist, so why not.

Links to the relevant tumblr posts:

On Morally Evaluating the Mass Murderers of Terra Ignota (This is probably the more useless of the two; though it does, at least, have some bullet points of the things I still meant to cover, i.e. "where it actually would have gotten interesting, probably".)

Dirty Laundry, part 1; part 2 (This works fairly well as is, but is lacking a crucial third chapter on the problems of trying to have your Lovecraftian apocalypse and subvert it, too.)

Also kind of relevant:

My review of The Delirium Brief

All this is very much the background for most of my ongoing, disorganised and meandering "Splinter" discussion on tumblr, as well as all of my fic writing of the last two or three years.

ETA:

1.) This is actually a slightly weird & arguably off framing for "Splinter", although my discussion of the show *does* grow from all this because that's where my mind has been.

2.) I should just go and read some actual philosophy already, instead of fumbling around in the dark for years...

Current Mood: tired

I've been absolutely metaing and rambling my head off about 12 Monkeys (tv show version, which incidentally I absolutely hate to call by that name for probably rather idiosyncratic reasons too boring to explain here, so please be aware that I'm referring to it as "Splinter", which was its pitch title, lol) over at tumblr. I keep thinking I should post the longest/best posts here, too, but really it's all one long stream of consciousness.

If that might be your thing, head on over here:

https://compartmentalisinghmpf.tumblr.com/

(I'm so damn desperate to talk to someone about that show, seriously. The fandom is mostly dead. Mind you, my refusal to tag with the show's actual title probably doesn't help the few remaining fans to find me, haha.)

Trying my hand at a seriously long-form thing for the first time (though there's only a prologue and one finished chapter, so far, and the rest will take... *a while*, knowing me). The outline for this thing is longer than some of my finished fics! And it's full of BIG THEMES. And it has something approaching plot, maybe? Also, a very weird - possibly unacceptably weird - dramatic structure dictated by the ups and downs (and less clearly spatially describable changes) of a very complicated relationship. This is fanfic, so why not?

What's there for now kinda works on its own, I think.

Fandom is the Laundry books again, which has actually grown a bit since I last talked about it here, but is still tiny. There's maybe four active writers now, counting me. All of whom are doing very much Their Own Thing - including me, because this fic is nothing if not idiosyncratic.

I've been very excited about this project for a couple of years now, and am still very excited to continue it (although I'll have to read the next book first, which just came out. And also, finish the next chapter of the vampire vicar fic that's about three quarters done.)

This story is basically about having someone who knew the canon main character *before* he was a magical secret agent go, "what the fuck are you doing" at him a lot. :D The character I've chosen for that role is the barely canonical (mentioned in passing, once) brother of the main character.

Also, there was a failed/defeated invasion from another universe, very recently, followed almost immediately by a coup (in which the magical secret service was involved, though of course not publicly), and the gen pop - protag's brother included - now knows about magic!

These two have a *lot* they need to talk about! But one of them doesn't know the half of it... and the other one literally cannot talk about most of it. And yes, my brand in this fandom is having the main character have all the most uncomfortable conversations.

Link: The Resistance Is Useless, by Hmpf MacSlow

Current Mood: accomplished

This story has been online a few weeks already, but things have been very busy since then, so I didn't get around to announcing it properly. Also, I went back and edited this thing several times since posting, and only as of the latest edit has it begun feeling "finished" to me.

So! This is still for the Fandom That Is Barely a Fandom, The Laundry Files.

CLICK HERE if you‘re interested in:
- monsters discussing ethics
- doing the right thing for the wrong reasons
- doing the wrong thing for the right reasons
- grossly inaccurate applications of the Trolley Problem
- awkward manipulation attempts
- dehumanised and instrumentalised people convincing others to be dehumanised and instrumentalised too
- decent people enabling authoritarianism
- anagnorisis. So much anagnorisis.

Some fandom background for the curious behind the cut. Spoilers, obviously.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: accomplished

The eternal paradox: making potential new friends online is much easier than offline, and with each new fandom/interest pursued online there are new opportunities for it. Yet *keeping* friends you made online becomes *harder* than offline, because after a while there are so many, and there’s so little time (and if you’re not in the same fandom anymore you don’t simply “happen” to interact so much anymore, either).

So I dropped out of LJ/DW, lost nearly everybody due to neglect… and then decided to just refrain from making new friends, when I joined tumblr, because I knew I couldn’t take care of them as I should. (Made a couple anyway, though.)

And now I’m in this state of limbo where there’s a bunch of people I still care about but basically *never* talk to (but whose blogs, at least, I still follow); plus a bunch of people I *also* still care about and miss, yet don’t even follow (mostly because I don’t even know their URLs or new nicks), and I guess it would be time to let go, because some things you just can’t salvage after fucking up so thoroughly. But I don’t trust myself to make a new start, because I know I have neither the energy, nor the time, nor the personality to consistently invest in new friendships.

(This is kind of the subtext to all my complaining about not having enough fannish interaction at the moment. - Even if I could find a fandom - would it be wise for me to engage?)

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New Pete the Vampire Vicar chapter!

New fic! Surprisingly, not a Laundry one! (Unsurprisingly, it's 12 Monkeys!)

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Feel like I should mention this here, too:

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Another small meta from tumblr...

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Some unfinished meta about moral compromise and (mass) murder (in fiction!)

Stuff happening elsewhere

New fic! Spies, magic, secrets, political upheaveal, and strained family relations!

New(ish) fic! Vampires! Vicars! Monsters discussing ethics!

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