New icon!

[hmpf]

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.

Comments

[kimboo_york]

helloooooo! Welcome back! I hope the move goes well!

Hi!!! :-)

[hmpf]

Thanks!

I've started reading stuff here again, but I'm not very good at commenting yet and also I was feeling weird about saying hi after, what, 12 years, or is it 15? So I'm glad you said hi, because I might have felt too awkward to do so myself for a while yet! :D

Good luck with all your endeavours!

Re: Hi!!! :-)

[kimboo_york]

Mehhhh, I'm hit and miss with the commenting too, so don't feel bad. I have thought of you and wondered how you were doing, though! Esp. as I go through and catalogue all my old LoM fanfic, ahahahaha!

I hope the move goes well. Excited to hear more about the training!

[killabeez]

You are absolutely not alone. My yuletide story was pretty darned easy. Hannah felt completely clear to me, and I don't think I second-guessed myself even once, in any significant way. And Emma, of course, has a very specific place in the narrative, and a clearly delineated journey. But Ramse—wow. I keep thinking of ideas of stories I want, and then going tharn when I try to think of how to write them.

Thinking continuing good thoughts for your move.

Re: Hi!!! :-)

[hmpf]

Nothing interesting to tell there, re: job training. I still work in the same customer service call center; I just finished training to work in a different area of the company's services (previously: car breakdowns and accidents; now also: medical emergencies while travelling abroad. It's an insurance company). Today was the last day of that training period.

Jewellery making has been lying fallow for a year now, thanks mostly to Covid shit but also a string of home-related emergencies, among them the original "just burn your house down, it's the only way to be sure" emergency: bed bugs. 2020 was... fun. Like most bed bug survivors I spent months at war inside my own home, lost a fortune in the fight, and am about 70% convinced they're still around anyway. But several different exterminators checked my place since and confirmed that I don't, so. I hope they're right. I'm not sure I'm ever going to want to travel again; nor have visitors with any luggage. I've even stopped buying used books.

The move's making me nervous because I'm not sure I'll be able to do any soldering at the new place. Other than that, and the fact that I have to buy a kitchen for it, the new place looks great. It's a listed building by a Bauhaus-adjacent architect, very exciting! But fire and any kind of explosive materials are strictly forbidden, officially, and every room has smoke detectors. :-/ With the amount of money I have to invest in a kitchen and move-related stuff now (after just moving to my current place a mere four months ago, arrgh - I'm basically just hemorrhaging money, 2020 and 2021), I really don't want to have to move out again soon. But if I can't solder there, I can't stay there, not for long anyway. So, got a fair bit of anxiety going on there. *sigh*

Haha, sorry, tmi. But I don't talk much about stuff like that here anymore (twitter is my whining venue, these days), and you kind of asked, so... :D

Anyway, I'm really happy to talk to you again, I wasn't quite sure if tumblr made me unfollow you - it does that sometimes, just drops blogs from one's dash unasked - or if you stopped being there. And I was also there only very sporadically in recent years, myself. I'm very glad to see you're still here!

Will you believe I still have some unfinished LoM fic I haven't quite given up on yet? :D (No, but seriously, got a Sandman/LoM crossover, there's some genuinely good stuff there, I'm just horribly stuck, have been for many years. But I still really believe in what I've got, there.)

Mind you, currently I'm in a different time travel fandom. :D

[hmpf]

Why is he so difficult, I wonder? I mean, part of it is probably that he's just genuinely canonically had an extremely weird life with a range of such disparate experiences that it would make for a rather weird psychology in anyone... but I find him hard to write even before the "Traveller" period. I kept trying to put a finger on why, rambling about it for an evening or two on tumblr recently, but I feel like I still can't begin to grasp what the problem is, and all my attempts to put it in words are way off the mark.

"Ghosts" is going to have three parts, if I can manage, now, btw: pt. 1 is the post-Tokyo one whose beginning you read; pt. 2 is 1987-2015, and pt. 3 will be post-finale alt!Ramse. All three will be difficult in different ways, yay. lol

[killabeez]

Honestly? I think it's because we almost never get the story from his POV. There are glimpses—"Yesterday" being one of them, and the episode where he goes through the 12M initiation ceremony another, but they are very rare, and the POV we get is so limited. So we have to extrapolate a whole lot, and given that his moral/emotional/mental landscape is so volatile, that's a challenge.

[hmpf]

Well, the dearth of Ramse-centred scenes certainly doesn't help, true. But I feel like there's something really hard to grasp about the essence of his character, something that probably wouldn't go away if we had more Ramse-centred material (unless they decided to homogenise or flatten him somehow). He's both... extremely contradictory and changeable and volatile, as you said, and at the same time incredibly consistent and solid and true to some unchanging core of himself, I think. So it's a matter of tracing all the volatility back to something that is the very opposite of volatile, and that's pretty tricky.

And in terms of voice, which is such a concern when writing... he's also really tricky to get a handle on, because he's actually one of the chattier people on the show but I get a strong sense of that not at all being his internal voice, not least because the more emotional a scene gets, the more careful and deliberate and sparse he gets with his words. (I mean, I'm not even writing him in a first person POV, but even so, my idea of a character's internal voice influences how I write about them in the third person, too.)

And the 27 years... it's so hard to get an idea of what those do to his mental processes. By all rights he should be a completely different person, after that, but he isn't. But even if he isn't, there must still be huge changes, ones we don't get to see because they're not changes to his personality, to the essence of his thoughts and emotions and convictions, but changes to how he thinks - the actual *how* of the thinking, not its objects/contents. In my mind, pre-Tokyo Ramse has a lot of awareness of abstract things but it's an almost non-verbal awareness. And post-Traveller Ramse has *all* the words and ideas, all that - he more fully understands what he understands, now. But the things he understands... are still the same things.

This is all just headcanon and extrapolation, of course... Trying to extrapolate Ramse is one of my ongoing obsessions here. :D

[hmpf]

(This is also... me trying to reconstruct what my idea of a character is by interpreting how I wrote them in my own fic and trying to understand why I wrote them that way.)

[killabeez]

I don't know if you ever watched the show Jeremiah (probably not—almost no one did) but the titular character and Ramse have a lot in common. And even though Jeremiah was literally named after the character, and he was in every episode, he's still a difficult character to get one's head around, because he is emotionally and morally contradictory. It's a very different plague-apocalypse show, with a different focus, but I'll admit the two shows (and their main characters) are super fascinating mirrors of one another.

[killabeez]

he's also really tricky to get a handle on, because he's actually one of the chattier people on the show but I get a strong sense of that not at all being his internal voice, not least because the more emotional a scene gets, the more careful and deliberate and sparse he gets with his words.

This is a great insight! ♥

[hmpf]

Didn't watch it, but am aware of it (and the comic!) - and at least in the weird corner of German fandom I spent some time in, at the time, there seemed to be a fair amount of fan presence for it? But it was the time I was utterly consumed by Farscape, and there was no space at all in my life for other shows then.

As someone who does not have a strong preference for post-apocalypse stuff (but also doesn't mind it - I like sf&f in general, with a preference for spaceships and space but will take other scenarios, too) and whose enjoyment of tv shows is directly related to how fascinating their characters are to me, should I put it on The List? (That is, the list of stuff I may some day decide to watch... I don't watch a lot of tv, though, usually just one, maybe two shows a year, and I've already reached my quota for 2021 with 12M and The Expanse - the latter, despite being A Good Show and having the best spaceships I've seen and having some great characters and some of the themes I'm always interested in, strangely didn't propel me into obsession like 12M did. I can never predict if a show will "work" for me in that way or not. Though it's interesting to keep Naomi Nagata - "walking away is the only choice anyone ever has" - in mind when watching 12M.)

[hmpf]

Thanks! I keep worrying I'm building a completely inaccurate picture of him in my mind while writing, so it's good to see someone agree with some part of it. :-)

[killabeez]

Yes, that was true of many of my friends, too, at the time, re: Farscape. :) And I don't necessarily recommend it to you specifically, although, if you were a fan of Babylon 5, you might get more out of it than most. (Same creator.) I suspect the character you would find most interesting is actually Markus (the reluctant leader). Oh, but you like hobbits, so you might also enjoy that Sean Astin joined as a main character in S2. (Actually, you might really like him, too.)

Unfortunately, the studio (MGM) was absolutely brutal to the show and made it the "worst experience of JMS's career" (his own words), and so the show was cut short, and the second season really shows the effects of that. I love it, but it's a weird, quirky little show with a rather sad behind-the-scenes story.

ETA: I'm musing now that you might also enjoy it as a contrasting version of "what happens after the world ends." *shrug* You might give it a shot and see. The first episode is quite good, IIRC, so it's not like a show where you have to watch the whole thing to get to where it starts to get good.

[hmpf]

>Yes, that was true of many of my friends, too, at the time, re: Farscape. :)

I'll never forget how a non-fannish friend of one of my Farscape friends once asked her what was the difference between Farscape fans and a religious cult. (As in, asked her seriously, not jokingly. She was worried about her! :D)

>Oh, but you like hobbits, so you might also enjoy that Sean Astin joined as a main character in S2.

I like book hobbits, not film hobbits, though. ;-) (Well, I like film hobbits fine, but book hobbits are where it's at, for me. I had the weirdest teen crush ever on book Frodo, a decade or so before the movies. Frodo stands out from my ever-growing menagerie of mass murderers and other compromised types by being possibly the only actual saint on the list, and I'm still very confused about that...)

Anyway, putting Jeremiah on the "to watch" list!

>if you were a fan of Babylon 5

I did like B5 a lot, but never quite reached a level of interest there that I'd call fannish, I don't know why. I really wish I understood better why some things do these things to me and others don't, I've been thinking about this stuff for decades and it's still a mystery to me.

[killabeez]

I had a huge thing for book Frodo, too! My first pet was named Frodo, in fact. Although Merry was my BSO. (Again with the heart on the sleeve, even when I was 7. :)

[hmpf]

I'm always so glad to hear people with a book Frodo thing exist, haha. I felt like the weirdest weirdo, at the time, and still do, sometimes, seeing how absolutely everybody including Tolkien himself agrees that Sam is the most interesting character in the book. (Sam's fine! I love him, too! But c'mon, Frodo has some *fascinating* stuff going on!)

I think the one thing Frodo has in common with a lot of my other favourites (though again, not all of them; I've never found a thing that absolutely all of them have in common) is that there is a gap between his experience and everybody else's that is almost unbridgeable. (Being a martyr and being a murderer is equally far removed from "normal"...)

That gap, the place where communication fails or is only possible in a limited way, is a thing I tend to relate to extremely strongly.

I'm also really interested in when that gap *is* bridged (although if it can be fully bridged, it probably wasn't quite the kind of gap I was talking about. But bridgeable gaps are also interesting. Interfaces are interesting. The experience of difference, and communication across difference, limited or not.)

That's the lens I brought to the Cole and Cassie situation in early season 1, among other things. And also why I'm interested in what happens once Cole tries to integrate into the alt!present.

(It is, curiously, not a significant factor in my fascination with Ramse and Cole as a pair, though! Although they both, separately, have some of that going on in their interactions with the pre-apocalyptic past, of course. To some degree also in their interactions with non-scavengers in the future. But while that's stuff I'd read fic about, and might end up writing fic about, it's not what makes them interesting *together*.)

[killabeez]

I think the one thing Frodo has in common with a lot of my other favourites (though again, not all of them; I've never found a thing that absolutely all of them have in common) is that there is a gap between his experience and everybody else's that is almost unbridgeable.

That makes sense! I think you're getting closer. :)

I have a different version of that, which is the "you and me against the world" trope. When there's only one other person in the world who understands your history, and you have to navigate a world that doesn't. This came into play with Highlander, obviously, but it was more significant for me when it came to the Winchesters, Ramse and Cole, Raylan and Boyd (Justified), and Jeremiah as well. (Jeremiah and Kurdy are the outsiders who grew up in the wild of the post-apocalypse just like Ramse and Cole, while the other main characters had a different experience.) This almost never happens with two female characters, incidentally. Believe me, I've been looking! Andy/Quynh (and potentially Andy/Nile) in The Old Guard is the closest I've seen, and they just didn't get enough story/screen time for me to latch on to, but please, for the love of fandom, let that sequel become reality!

[hmpf]

>I have a different version of that, which is the "you and me against the world" trope. When there's only one other person in the world who understands your history, and you have to navigate a world that doesn't.

Yeah, that's definitely also something of a factor in the few pairings and ships I've ever been interested in. The strongest example is actually from my previous (or possibly still main, we'll see) longterm fandom, the urban fantasy book series The Laundry Files, where I actually ship the main character and his wife who is a secondary main character. They're spies in the (deep black) magical secret service who know that the apocalypse is coming and that they won't be able to stop it, and who both have made and continue to make horrible moral tradeoffs to at least delay defeat for as long as possible (he eats souls; she kills people with a magical violin) - and they have to live with that knowledge amidst the clueless normal population, interact with their normal family members, etc. I've never written about them together, though, all my ongoing fic there is set at a point in the series' chronology where the ontological status of the wife is extremely... vague, and I therefore don't know how to write her at that point. I'd totally read a bunch of shippy fic about them if it existed, though! - Unfortunately this is the "32 fics in 15+ years" fandom. I started getting really productive there out of sheer desperation, lol. But all my fics are currently about the husband, and people in his life dealing with his double life and the fact that he's an actual, literal, supernatural monster. Also, him interacting with a friend who is (very recently) a vampire vicar (I mean, he was a vicar before, it's the vampire thing that's recent). Also, that vampire vicar angsting a lot, bc... vampire vicar. :D

Wow, wall of text. Sorry, I talk too much about my fandoms, especially the ones where I still have fic projects going. Just imagine if I put all those words directly into fic instead... Anyway, seems safe to say that I'm not done with this fandom yet. Still way too excited about the fics I'm writing there.

>This came into play with Highlander, obviously,

Strangely, that's where I can see it the least, because both Duncan and Methos are quite good at relating to people, IMO. They both have had plenty of meaningful relationships!

I'm also not sure if Duncan really completely "gets" Methos. Not because he's too limited or anything like that, but simply because... being 5000 years old (*and* having Methos' kind of history, to boot) is a true unbridgeable gap if I ever saw one. And 400 may be closer to it than 40, but at the same time, 400 is closer *to* 40 than it is to 5000. This doesn't preclude having a meaningful relationship, but the *complete* understanding implied by the trope is, I think, impossible here.

(Yeah, in my mind, Methos is somehow very good at relating to people, and living with a real "unbridgeable gap", all at the same time. It's a weird contradiction, but it makes complete sense in my head, I dunno. Methos headcanons: I have them, lol.)

>but it was more significant for me when it came to the Winchesters, Ramse and Cole, Raylan and Boyd (Justified), and Jeremiah as well. (Jeremiah and Kurdy are the outsiders who grew up in the wild of the post-apocalypse just like Ramse and Cole, while the other main characters had a different experience.)

With Ramse and Cole, their antagonism is a big part of the attraction for me (I'm not sure if their connection alone, without the antagonism, would have been enough to get me interested) but it's only so damn attractive because they have such an undrainable reservoir of mutual benevolence and understanding at the same time (that moment of rage in Tokyo notwithstanding). I think that in itself, the difference between them and their surroundings isn't quite big enough for me to get that charge of "two people understanding each other perfectly in a world that doesn't understand either of them" out of it. Strangely, though, the extremity of their relationship then goes on to *create* difference, because nobody around Ramse and Cole, not even Cassie (for the longest time) really *gets* their complete inability to *not* forgive each other.

The experience that Ramse and Cole share that nobody else has shared and nobody can really fathom is... their experience of each other.

>This almost never happens with two female characters, incidentally. Believe me, I've been looking! Andy/Quynh (and potentially Andy/Nile) in The Old Guard is the closest I've seen, and they just didn't get enough story/screen time for me to latch on to, but please, for the love of fandom, let that sequel become reality!

The Old Guard is on my To Watch list already because I suspect I may Really Like Andy. :-)

[killabeez]

Strangely, that's where I can see it the least, because both Duncan and Methos are quite good at relating to people, IMO. They both have had plenty of meaningful relationships!

I agree! The places where that particular trope hit my buttons in HL were actually Duncan/Amanda and the Horsemen (which is why I said it "came into play"). Well, that and the shared secret that binds all Immortals.

Well, if you liked Furiosa and Sarah Connor and Ripley, you are gonna LOVE Andromache. ♥

[hmpf]

>I agree! The places where that particular trope hit my buttons in HL were actually Duncan/Amanda and the Horsemen (which is why I said it "came into play"). Well, that and the shared secret that binds all Immortals.

Oh yeah, that makes sense.

(Though I think the Horsemen *also* don't actually get Methos, anymore. But they get a part of him that nobody else does, of course, and that means something, definitely.)

>Well, if you liked Furiosa and Sarah Connor and Ripley, you are gonna LOVE Andromache. ♥

Yeah, I saw the trailer and was like, THIS SPEAKS TO ME.

[killabeez]

I talk too much about my fandoms, especially the ones where I still have fic projects going

Hey, you're talking about a bulletproof trope of mine, and I've never read this series (nor knew anything about it), so consider me a receptive audience.

[hmpf]

Fair warning, the trope isn't as present as it could be (but that's why there should be more *fic* about these two!!!) and the series has flaws of varying degree of seriousness. It just does a number of things I'm really into fairly well, and does some of the most fascinating ones *really* well, and most of the flaws aren't so bad that I can't put up with them, but people's mileage on these things varies, of course.

If you want to give it a try, start at book three, The Fuller Memorandum. (That's also where the Bob & Mo ship is at its best, to me.) Then, preferably, move back to the beginning, then forward. I actually really like the first book but a lot of people find it tough going. Early Bob isn't the greatest, he's a stereotypical nerd in the worst sense, and the first three or four books are also dense with computer jargon *and* British bureaucracy jargon *and* spy jargon. Which I actually kind of like, because it adds to the verisimilitude.

I like the first book, *love* the novella in the back of that (The Concrete Jungle, available online somewhere I think), like the second book all right, LOVE the third, quite like the fourth, then find vols. 5, 6, and 7 slightly less great, though still entertaining. 8 was utterly fantastic again, though. 9 is good though not quite outstanding. 10 is on my to read pile currently. The main series will end with book 12. (10 and 11 constitute a spin-off that may or may not continue, I think.)

Flaws include a certain sloppiness to the writing in, especially, the middle books (lots of repetition); some cringeyness in the first two; characters all sounding a bit too much the same throughout; a mix of Lovecraftian and more general urban fantasy elements that doesn't always work entirely.

Things it does well include the shadow of impending doom hanging over things; explosive climaxes; satirising bureaucracy and somehow having that make things feel more grounded; generally grounding the magic in the everyday; the Mo/Bob relationship (which really needs more people to ship it, because the ship name would be Mob, and I want that to be a thing), turning Bob from a boring nerd self-insert into something quite a lot more interesting; entertainingly colourful side characters (favourites: Pinky & Brain, gay mad scientists and former roommates of Bob's); and morally complicating things to the point where the Laundry (the magical secret service our protagonists work for) supports a coup by a guy who quotes Hitler approvingly, and you can kind of understand how they got there, even as you're horrified.

(This, unsurprisingly, is the point at which I started writing a lot of fic. I needed Bob's family to look at him with horror and ask him to justify that. I needed Pete the Vampire Vicar (also a Laundry agent, and a genuine good guy) to wrestle with that, and also have conversations with Bob about that. Etc. I'm having entirely too much fun making Bob very uncomfortable, in this fandom. :D)

[hmpf]

Spoilers, obviously, but I wrote a pretty decent review of the eighth book, a few years ago:

https://compartmentalisinghmpf.tumblr.com/post/178057040752/oh-yeah-hey-i-finally-reviewed-the-latest

I also wrote one of the third book, a while before that, but can't find it anymore. It's somewhere on goodreads...

[killabeez]

*takes all the notes!*

Re: Hi!!! :-)

[kimboo_york]

I'm so glad to catch up with you! I actually quit tumblr a years back, although I kept my personal blog "live" and haven't deleted it. All the others, I blew away. I moved mostly to twitter myself - I'm big into the c-drama fandom right now, although for values of "hanging out on the fringes and liking everyone else's posts." I don't feel comfortable writing in it, and the wank can be absolutely vicious, so I'm okay with that decision. I read a lot of fanfic and enjoy the pretty art. :)

I'm sad about all the move anxiety! It does sound like a great place, but if you can't do what you need to do, then it's not the place for you. Personally I've lived in my hobbit hole for 15 years and I hate being a renter but the idea of moving makes my hyperventilate.