the widening gyre

like the way he asked "what is nur-ate-iv?" makes me think man TRULY was not catching all of the words getting tossed at him so fast the second his eyes were even a LITTLE open. like he wasn't asking "what story did you come up with?" he's asking "what word are you even saying to me right now?" man got like 0.2 seconds to be like "oh i'm awake now?" before he was getting PELTED with english because shane had a forty step plan that couldn't wait like. three more hours.

in my heart, shane sleeps like a ROCK and is also non-functional if his sleep schedule is disrupted

either ilya is completely mia because he went to lay down with whatever kiddo came to get him and then fell asleep in their bed without meaning to, or shane wakes up to little feet pushing into his kidney or a little fist tucked under his arm or a kiddo sprawled sideways over him AND ilya in a way that canNOT be comfortable

@zouisalmightie

A missing scene from Berlin

10-pause-10-pause-10-long pause, lean down to kiss-10-pause-10-pause-10.

ROBERT DOWNEY JR and JUDE LAW as SHERLOCK HOLMES and DR. JOHN WATSON

what shippish fic does, according to the thesis, is deliberately mis-read, and re-interpret a text as romance. in a basic sense, it subverts that text. but fic also often goes another level up, to subvert the structure of romantic stories as well (the thesis mentions pamela regis’s “eight essential elements” that make up the structure of a romance). fic can be deeply dense with plot. it can reproduce the entire canonical work, just with a different romantic focus. but by labeling their plot-dense work “a character a/character b story”, a writer is announcing that on some level the point of it is the character a/character b part. that’s why we have the distinguishing concept of “gen” fic, for fic where pairings are not the point, even if it depicts romantic relationships. so there is something arguably, basically subversive (or at least distinct) about the fanfiction project of “i can eat my story cake and have my romance too and i can make them work together even and i’ll prove it.” instead of telling a story or telling a romance, fanfiction will tell a story that is also unabashedly a romance.

so the thing abut farscape is that if you try to read it as a serial plot show like bablyon 5 or episodic philosophy/adventure like star trek, it’s not going to work. but if you try to approach it like friends and other sitcoms or soaps, where the characters and relationships are the point but there’s no coherent story about them, it also won’t work. it won’t even work if you try to approach it like outlander and its ilk, which although they’re also fanfic-y (if not my taste) and story-like, they unambiguously center the romance.

farscape, instead, you have to read as something subverting the structure of its meta-text of adventure science fiction by “misreading” its white-male-hero tv series as a romance. it’s built to be a love story the same way a 100k slow-burn rewrite of a show is built to be a love story. (a) there is lots of non-relationship stuff happening, but (b) even when the pairing in question isn’t together, the status of their relationship is of high, even utmost importance to the story. farscape gives john and aeryn very little in the way of happiness or resolution for most of the show, but it doesn’t really string the viewer along either. all of john and aeryn’s interactions, even from the pilot episode, are moving them along a single romantic arc. the question is not whether they will, but when and how and why. but what truly marks the john-and-aeryn romance as central is the fact that you couldn’t remove it without completely upsetting the show’s entire symbolic and thematic level. without crichton coming to grips with loving, choosing and becoming that which is alien to him (in both wonderful and horrible ways), what the hell would farscape be about? john and aeryn struggling to come together is the symbolic gravity around which the show revolves, even though it is about many things besides them. 

Unlike many other shows of the time that insistently kept their leads at arm’s length, the relationship between Crichton and ex-Peacekeeper Aeryn Sun was the beating heart of the show—which is what creator Rockne S O’Bannon always intended. “I wanted it to be the ultimate romance, the logline for the 1950s paperback novel that never will be: To find each other they had to traverse the entire galaxy”

And on the anti-Star Trek front:

In an era when sci-fi was grounded and emotionally reserved (think the stoic authority of The Next Generation or Stargate: SG-1), Henson and creator O’Bannon wanted to “dial the emotion up to 11” and defy convention. With the Creature Shop at their disposal, the production team meticulously crafted an alien environment that looked genuinely alien, making for what Henson called a “wilder vision of space opera with a more primal energy.”