Meme signup

[owl]

I've just put my name in for the DVD commentary challenge. It's a change from the other commentary meme; someone else does the commentary. Off to find one to do myself...some of you sign up so I can do yours.

I don't think I'm going to watch Bonekickers tonight; I don't think I can bear to watch the destruction of all artefacts in the team's vicinity.

Comments

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

Am seriously thinking about it - if I can find a fic I can write a commentary on, then I'll probably do it, though I can't see any of mine with the possible exception of Correspondence finding commenters.

[owl]

Hey, I'd do yours. I mean, there's nothing in the rules to say you can't recruit your friends and do them, is there?

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

Eeek! I didn't mean to fish for commentaries, but, yes, I'd be honoured. Alas, I've only seen about three episodes of Numbers and I know sod-nothing about Age of Sail (as you already know from the Scuppers Incident), or I'd return the favour.

[owl]

I didn't take it as fishing, don't worry :)

I suspect that my knowledge of the Age of Sail is a sign of a mis-spent youth. It certainly doesn't prevent my motto from being 'huzzah for the inventor of the lifejacket' every time I actually sail myself. If you can call it that when you spend almost as much time in the water as on it. :D

Do give Numb3rs a go if you get the opportunity (I think both ITV3 and Five US are showing it at the minute). It avoids being just another American cop show by putting the two main characters in the same family, not to mention the whole solving crimes with mathematics thing, which means it features unapologetic geekery. The fandom does to tend to suffer from Supernatural-itis, though not as much as in the beginning. (in what universe is the reaction to the concept of sleeping with your brother not a resounding 'Uuuuugh!', and why do so many people appear to inhabit it?)

Long reply, sorry!

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

Yes, I will - I have a soft spot the size of the Sahara Desert for shows about geeks, as long as they're written by people who actually know what geeks are like, and it sounds like Numb3rs is. Thinking about it, I think the actual reason I was avoiding it was that the curly-haired brother kind of reminds me of an ex, and I haven't seen the ex in at least eighteen years and it's about time I got over it.

(in what universe is the reaction to the concept of sleeping with your brother not a resounding 'Uuuuugh!', and why do so many people appear to inhabit it?)

Well, yes. I don't so much mind stories about siblings who are kind of broken in the head, and manifest the broken-in-the-headness by having been sleeping together since childhood - George R. R. Martin's Cersei and Jaime, for example, and I can see how you could see the Supernatural boys that way if you really squint, but from the little I've seen of the Numb3rs brothers I don't get that vibe at all.

What I really don't understand - though it clearly floats some people's boats, and good luck to them - is fic where adult siblings suddenly start ripping each others' clothes off at moments of tension. It just seems so psychologically unlikely, and makes me think 'You know, I understand being squicked by RPF - I'm squicked by RPF - but how is writing fic full of the Random Surprise Incest supposed to be any better?'

Re: Long reply, sorry!

[owl]

Yet longer reply :)

Yeah, they do know what geeks are like. They occasionally fall down over, eg, the details of how an academic journal functions, but the heart is there--for instance, in one episode they dedicate several minutes of screentime to the fact that if you fill a bathtub with cornstarch and water in the right proportions, you can run across it with shrieks of delight, and isn't that awesome? :)

Thinking about it, I think the actual reason I was avoiding it was that the curly-haired brother kind of reminds me of an ex, and I haven't seen the ex in at least eighteen years and it's about time I got over it.

Aw, but Charlie's a sweetheart, if you don't mind cocky brilliance and a tendency to enthuse about maths almost constantly :) Physical resemblance or personality-wise? If it's only physical, I imagine that he's a strongly-written enough character to drown out the resemblance after a bit.

from the little I've seen of the Numb3rs brothers I don't get that vibe at all.

I don't really get the appeal of slash to start with, and the side of incest is enough to send me screaming for the back button. But, no, the Eppes boys really aren't that sort of broken-in-the-head to my eyes. Charlie in particular is preternaturally well-balanced considering the pressures of his upbringing, and most of his brother's issues are burnout from the FBI job. I suppose the thing is that they quite clearly love each other to pieces, with occasional resentment, and love + tension = sex in the collective mind of fandom. Or something.

I couldn't ever manage to forget that they're siblings. They're just such brothers sometimes, down to squabbling over whole gets to hold the Playstation controller. :) Ever since Charlie was three, the entire family has danced attendance on him and his special talent, including five-years-older Don, who's a bright, athletic overachiever, and in any other family would have been the star. Not unnaturally, Don never wants to hear the words 'genius' or 'maths' in his adult life, and goes off for a decade or so to make his career without baby brother around. Given the premise of the series, he's not able to keep that up, so you get a mix of you're such a pest, buddy and hurt my little brother and I will make sure you die in pain. Charlie, meanwhile, has been thoroughly loved and protected and babied, while at the same time going through the education system at a rate of knots, so that he acts young for his age (he gives me the impression sometimes of being a well-socialised Aspie), and IMO the first disaster that happens to him in his life is their mother dying just before the series starts. He is kind of overeager to impress Don whom he hero-worships, and get his attention in a way that's not tagalong-pain-in-the-neck. So I suppose you could add slightly needy little brother to the equation up there. But the main drive of the family subplot is that they're getting over the resentment and the neediness.

Re: Long reply, sorry!

[owl]

So the foregoing ramble boils down to: I see every sign that the pair of them were well-loved and reasonably happy kids, with not much more than the usual amount of teenage angst, if in a rather unusual situation, and I certainly don't see any signs that they're messed up enough to sleep with each other.

What I really don't understand - though it clearly floats some people's boats, and good luck to them - is fic where adult siblings suddenly start ripping each others' clothes off at moments of tension. It just seems so psychologically unlikely, and makes me think 'You know, I understand being squicked by RPF - I'm squicked by RPF - but how is writing fic full of the Random Surprise Incest supposed to be any better?'

Yeah, word. I suppose the psychologically likely versions would be more likely to a) have LJ come down on them for child pr0n and b) squick the audience or the author, but if my 30-year-old brother started kissing me my reaction would not be to respond in kind, and that's putting it mildly.

Re: Long reply, sorry!

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

The other thing that boggles the heck out of me with regard to incest is people who think that sex between anyone who's related at all is squicky - there's an example here (http://hokorii.livejournal.com/584882.html?style=mine) from someone who's very annoyed about a picture in which Bonnie Wright is inexplicably blurry compared to Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint, and there was a storyline on 30 Rock in which the heroine was unfeasibly grossed out by discovering she was dating a man who was something like her fifth cousin.

I mean, I would have an ugh no what on earth do you think you're doing are you drunk? reaction if propositioned by a first cousin, and more distant cousins are a bit iffy if you've been seeing them at family weddings since forever, but seriously, the world's population has been rising, not falling, over the last few millenia. Do they think that they bucked the odds and managed to have all unique ancestors, all the time, since we started diverging from the bonobos, or what?

Re: Long reply, sorry!

[owl]

My response to that poster would be , "Schaedenfreude, got to love it", so I am refraining. How did she miss the whole thread of all the purebloods being related that's been going on for the last three books?

First cousins squick me a little, especially if they've known each other since childhood, but second cousins outwards is fair game. At that level of consanguinity, the chances of matching harmful recessives isn't much above the general population anyway, IIRC.

Re: Long reply, sorry!

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

It makes me wonder what on earth happens when they read Persuasion or worse, Mansfield Park. Do they just assume that Jane Austen was an enormous pervert?

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand my brain has just looped back to the previous conversation about brothers and I am now wondering whether there's someone out there writing Tom Bertram / Edward Bertram in which they fall improbably into each others arms during a thunderstorm.

Re: Long reply, sorry!

[owl]

Do they just assume that Jane Austen was an enormous pervert?

That had occurred to me as well.

I am now wondering whether there's someone out there writing Tom Bertram / Edward Bertram in which they fall improbably into each others arms during a thunderstorm.

Once again I shall refer you to Rule #34: if it exists, someone on the internet has written pr0n for it.

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

Though actually - have just remembered there is Vorkosigan!fic. :)

[owl]

There is. Two Ivan short and the Gregor fic that I'm personally rather fond of.

It occurs to me that we could have formed our own mutual appreciation society without the mediation of the comm, but, hey, free publicity.

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

Ah well, I don't think it's just us. From the odd distribution of fandoms in the story signups (http://community.livejournal.com/dvd_commentary/54036.html?style=mine), I think it's probably proliferating virally through people picking it up because their friends are - there's about five times as much Stargate Atlantis as HP or indeed anything else, and the only reason I can think of for that is that it's the organisers' home fandom. Though you undoubtedly know more about this than I do.

[owl]

Yeah, I got it off taraljc, who I know via Doctor Who fandom. If it's on LJ, it's pretty much viral by definition.