write like you need it to survive

So I basically called in sick today so I could lie around and read Paladin of Souls in a single quick burst, and for the first time in years I regret my departure from the List, because I'm sure someone's already done the critical essay comparing Ista to Cordelia, and I missed it and am not quite motivated enough to go try to hunt it down in the archives.

( So instead, I ramble a bit. )

One of the many people on my flist who's just recently gotten hold of DS season three on DVD remarked recently that she was a bit puzzled by the way "Asylum" - an episode vaunted for the increased closeness between Fraser and Kowalski - was immediately followed by "Mountie on the Bounty" - a two-part episode whose B-plot is quite firmly centered around whether or not the Fraser-Kowalski partnership is going to break up.

I just rewatched "Asylum" last night, and I have to say: it makes perfect sense to me. You just have to remember that, like Buffy said, it's about power.

( Who's got it, and who doesn't. )

So, yeah. There's my spot of episode-analysis for the year.

Hey, look, almost a week since my last post. I've been, um, really busy - actually doing work at work more often than not, and busting out eight thousand words on the hockey AU since Friday. Too bad I'm not actually getting any closer to the end.

Anyway, the other day I managed to wrench my brain free of the hockeyhockeyhockey (It was, seriously, about three minutes. I was making ramen.) for long enough to have a thought about Joe Dick ( and some massive Hard Core Logo movie-spoilerishness ).

But I dunno; maybe my brain is getting all mooshy from malnutrition - I understand ramen will do that. Whaddya think?

A) It's apparently still free,
B) I got an evening appointment for next time, so I will actually get to eat lunch on my lunch break all five days next week, no bus-car-car-bus adventures required, and
C) K cracks my shit up. ( I think she gets it. )

I was going to say something, but this lovely Daniel icon from daughtershade has driven it completely out of my mind.

Oh. I think it was 'Why can I cheerfully write and read D/s relationships for vampires (e.g. Angel/Spike) but not humans (e.g. Harry/Draco or, on the not-writing side, Muir/Bishop from Spy Game)?' As far as I can tell, the answer is "You expect vamps to be more fucked up than humans," but that's sort of philosophically unsatisfying.

I think there's a reason we call them bunnies. I think it's because of their kinship to the Velveteen Rabbit.

They first show up, eyes dewy and bright, fur soft and addictively pettable, with button noses and cottony tails, and of course we want to play with them. And they want us to play with them, because that's the only way they'll ever become Real. We have to believe in them hard enough and long enough, and in the process rub off half their fur and lose one eye and unravel half their stitching... After a while they're looking pretty mangy, but, if we're lucky, by then we're so attached to our darling bunnies that we keep on anyway, playing and playing with them, sharing them out with a trusted friend or two, crying over them and flinging them at the wall but always gathering them up and apologizing and jamming the bits of stuffing back inside the rents, until - poof - one day we open our hands and they spring away from us, whole and alive and Real.

Unless, of course, just when the bunny's gone a bit funny looking and developed an odd smell, when the ribbon's gotten tatty and one eye is loose and the stitching fragile, so you're a bit afraid to play with it as vigorously as you once did, you're distracted by other toys, other concerns, and then one day you come home and there, sitting on top of the toy chest, is a brand new rabbit, with a shiny ribbon tied round its neck and dewy eyes and a button nose and its fur is soooo soft and clean and you just can't stop playing with it. Maybe you feel a twinge of guilt - maybe more than a twinge - when you look at the poor manky old bunny sitting next to the toy chest, and several more when you think of all the other bunnies in various states of disrepair, jammed into the trunk and under the bed and on the shelf at the top of the closet. But there's a new bunny, now, and you're a shallow bastard when you come down to it.

Or maybe that's just me.

Which is to say, Jesus Tap-Dancing Christ, I needed another post-CotW angst-epic like I needed a hole in my head. And I'm sorry.

roane's post prompted me to go have a look at bash for the first time in a while - a gratifying number of new [internal struggle over correct usage... oh, fuck it, it's Friday] quotes have appeared since my last visit, including this one:

#128114 +(1622)- [X]

Time for my prayers:
Our Father, who 0wnz heaven, j00 r0ck!
May all 0ur base someday be belong to you!
May j00 0wn earth just like j00 0wn heaven.
Give us this day our warez, mp3z, and pr0n through a phat pipe.
And cut us some slack when we act like n00b lamerz, just as we teach n00bz when they act lame on us.
Please don't give us root access on some poor d00d'z box when we're too pissed off to think about what's right and wrong, and if you could keep the fbi off our backs, we'd appreciate it.
For j00 0wn r00t on all our b0x3s 4ever and ever, 4m3n.


Which cracks my shit up. I'd send it on to #4 Brother, except he's probably already seen it. In fact, he probably wrote it or submitted it or something.

Whaddya think, daveamongus, could l33t be the next vulgate?

I have all these thoughts, and keep forgetting to post them. And as I may well be spending a lot of tomorrow drinking, I might as well toss out what I can remember now.

( Fic Peeve )

And I'd been meaning to ask this at ds_discourse but I'm too lazy to post twice.

Is it ever canonically established which set of grandparents Fraser grew up with? Fic seems to point unanimously to his paternal grandparents, but I'd never really been able to see Bob as the child of librarians. Also, I always thought he was significantly older than Caroline (itself probably a baseless assumption) and the odds were therefore better on her parents still being alive than his - I can see Bob coming from a long line of Mounties, dying in the traces like his father before him (though hopefully not his son and daughter after him - good long lives for Ben and Maggie, please). And if Ben was raised by his Fraser grandparents, where the hell were the Pinsents?

With apologies if this is all established in one of those Vecchio-era episodes that I swear I am going to get around to watching sooner or later.

It's possible that I'm just lexically hypersensitive, but has anybody else noticed that Ray says "queer"? I can only recall one instance right now - it might well have been the only one - but in "Eclipse," when he notices something hinky about the coffin that's been brought in, he says "Something's queer." It's not a common usage anymore - outside of people who've been reading a lot of Tolkien or Frances Hodgson Burnett - and, dammit, I want to be able to explain this without reference to the writers (although, hey, what's going on *there*?).

( So let's see... )

The other instance where "queer" pops up is in "The Ladies' Man" - Ray is fumbling to explain to Beth why he's here, and Beth, who is, admittedly, kinda crazy at this point, interrupts him with, "I'm here? Because I'm here? Because I'm queer?" Hard to say whether Beth is talking about herself in the first two 'I'm here's, and the third one, well, who knows. Ray's response ("Kinda nutty, huh.") gives no sign of responding to the word "queer" in any case, no matter who he thinks it's being applied to, though, again, he seems to take it in its uninflected sense, to mean 'strange', which is some kind of seriously willful misreading, because "I'm here, I'm queer" is not to be understood in that sense. (And what's the traditional end to that line, anyway? "I'm/we're not going anywhere?" Apropos...)

And, um, I'm going to stop before I actually attempt to write an essay based on two occurrences of a given monosyllable in a character's twenty-two episode run, because, yes.

Library computers close in about ten minutes, so let's see what I can say before then...

We're supposed to have DSL today and, perhaps obviously, we don't. And neither I nor either of my roommates is willing to call SBC and ask them why not. I think this makes us pathetic.

Before I forget: ( about Billy, Joe, and money )

And, bugger, there's the three-minute warning, so the dream about Fraser wearing nothing but the serge and a strategically-placed tape dispenser (okay, actually that's all I remember) will just have to wait...