i was reading a master’s thesis on a piece of fanfiction tonight, and it clarified for me why it is that farscape feels like fanfic, but in the best sense of the word.
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.
romance aside, there’s a way that fanfiction often tries to thumb its nose at its source material by adding physicality, emotionality and weirdness that it feels like farscape also does. jacob clifton described the show as something like “the sewer that star trek runs into so it can stay nice and clean” which is, if you think about it, also a pretty apt description of the fanfic relationship to canon. fan fiction makes characters gay, or in love, or have truly transgressive things happen to them because it wants to follow its id regardless of what canon “allows.” or perhaps to spite what canon “allows.” farscape, similarly, wants aliens and ensembles and feelings and sex and farts and it’s going to make a ton of jokes about science fiction so you know it’s taking the (explosive) piss of its genre context on purpose. it’s aware that it fundamentally exists in relation to other media. it’s critical star trek fan fiction.
was reading a recent retrospective on the show, and i feel the need to emphasize that all of this wasn’t me misreading the show as romance. because per the article (and i’ve read comments like these from the creators in other places):
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.”
“It was called Kirking Crichton,” Browder said. “I always fought that, every time a storyline would come down which was trying to make Crichton into [Star Trek’s Captain] Kirk. There were a couple of episodes where Crichton hooked up with someone, and I was like ‘no, no, no we’re not gonna do this—or better yet if you do it, there have to be repercussions’.”
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the commonly accepted favorite characters in the first two Star Trek series were, variously, a half-human/all-logic robotic person who went psycho whenever he got horny, and an actual robot guy who spent the entire thing trying to figure out basic human interaction, humor, sexuality, emotion. Or that Voyager’s most intriguing relationship combined the two, with additional breasts everywhere … If Star Trek is a utopian civics lesson, in a surgical theatre, Farscape is anonymous sex. In a sewer … Farscape is the drain that Star Trek runs into, so it can stay nice and clean.”
– Jacob Clifton’s TWoP recap of Farscape s1e3 (”Exodus from Genesis”)
