viciouswishes

Five characters that replaced departing characters, and whether you considered each a gain or a loss.

1. Ray Vecchio replaced with Ray Kowalski

Oh, the Ray-Ray wars on due South. Personally, I think both Rays have their good points. (I know you're all disappointed I did not write about which Dief I liked better.)

RayV is a more traditional cop. He works well as Fraser's only friend, in the buddy cop frame of storytelling, and getting Fraser used to Chicago. RayV even has a wacky Italian family and street cred with the mob. Narratively, it's ridiculous the way he "leaves," but this is due South we're talking about.

Once RayK shows up, Fraser knows Chicago and the rest of the force knows Fraser so we don't need a Ray to cover Fraser's butt. In fact, Fraser has to cover for RayK's wackiness almost immediately upon his arrival. The show also changes in a tone a lot given the changes in writers and producers. (Oh, Paul Gross, some of those episodes were just so you could sing.) RayK works a lot better with the constant magical realism, with the baseball AU and sea shanties. RayV would've been all WTF, baseball AU. RayK also works better if you don't look at Ray and Fraser's relationship as buddy cop, but as a romantic tension between partners like Moonlighting or The X-Files. Especially since they go off in the sunset together.

2. Jadzia Dax replaced with Ezri Dax

I hated this switch and continued to hate it all through Season 7 of Star Trek: DS9. Okay, I get it, an actor said goodbye to the show to work on a Ted Danson vehicle where she was later replaced for new opportunities.

Dax was always a foundation of the show. She had a history with Sisko and brought out his human elements in a non-religious and non-annoying-interactions-with-child-actors way. She was a young, bright-eyed scientist with a rich history and who grew up into a wise woman who still knew how to have fun gambling with Ferengi or going to pleasure planets. Jadzia even made Worf more interesting. I loved watching her grow into an officer. And really hated that she was killed in such a lame way, especially since she was a Klingon warrior in her heart, by training, and by marriage, but instead was used a Gul Dukat plotline.

Ezri was too young, too naive. She was even more so than S1 Jadzia; in fact, she was more like newbie Julian and his love of frontier medicine. Which is kind of why her relationship with Julian is creepy in a Mini-Me kind of way. She was also really annoying. (Which based on her recent SGA performance, Nicole de Boer has grown up to be less annoying, if still trapped in sci-fi.) In fact, I kind of wanting Worf to wipe the floor with her. Especially when she made the Sisko religious wacky that much more boring.

3. Data replaced by B-4

When Data is killed in Star Trek: Nemesis, they sent a horrible message that Data is replaceable by B-4, his identical android brother. No. This ruins all those episodes where we were lectured at that Data was just as human as the rest of us and perhaps even more so. Plus, it made lornelover cry. And I won't have that. Horrible lazy writing.

4. Carson Beckett replaced by Jennifer Keller

Okay, they brought Carson back with his clone or whatever on SGA. But he's still not a main character.

I think Carson started losing his appeal when he started all the Michael-related experiments. Carson was always served as the softer, human-side of the military's fix it with guns and McKay's lust after Ancient technologies. He always wanted to save people, but somewhere during the Michael storyline, a writer or two tried to take us to the darker side of Carson and it just didn't work. Which is why Carson and his space trout in "Sunday" is always adorable.

After Carson was killed off by the world's stupidest suicide bombing technique, Keller joined the team. At first, Keller was all over the board. Was she a damsel in distress? Was she Ronon's lady love nurse reincarnated to stand by her man? Was she the one who could really win the McKay heart? Was she action!Carter's sidekick who could tend wounds and talk about boys? Keller has actually grown on me, especially in this current season where I think they've figured out a few things about her and are amazingly writing her more consistently. In fact, as a doctor, I think I like her better than Carson and now I only wish Weir was still around (and no, I'm not even going to get into that in this meme).

5. Steve Rogers replaced by James Buchanan "Bucky" Barnes

I have to give Brubaker props. He killed off Captain America, kept the title going, and made the story still interesting. Brubaker has done interesting things with Bucky as Captain America. I don't think any of this has been a bad thing, and I completely agree with Brubaker when he said that America needed to come to Captain America and not the other way around. I continue to buy the title and consider it one of the better Marvel titles.

Still, I love Steve Rogers. I love Steve Rogers as a character who lived America ideals, not "culture" or deluded patriotism in flag pins, and punched Nazis in the face. Steve Rogers will always by my Captain America. (And bite me, Millar and your Ultimates.)

During some recent wank, lornelover turned to me and said, "Does anyone identify as a femslasher?" I racked my brain and couldn't find a yes. I know many authors who write femslash, but none that I could think of who identified themselves as femslashers and solely write femslash. All my favorites also write gen, het, and/or m/m.

I also fall into this pigeonhole. I can't make up my mind what I'm doing today and I get bored of the same thing, whether it's something I've been writing a lot or if it's something that fandom's been overrun with.

When I joined Buffy fandom, I started out reading/writing m/m slash. The slash community is a very solid entity. I know many, many fans that solely identify as slashers (m/m implied) and only write m/m fic. They are the Yellow Dog Slashers who cause wank with their genre superiority. Same goes with those who write OTP het pairings – Spike/Buffy, Veronica/Logan, etc. – and character fen. And once in a while, we even hear from those gen writers. Obviously, individuals may vary, but overall, what all these communities have in common is that they have a loud voice and an identity to cling to. Wank happens when an aspect of this identity is challenged, whether it's something in canon, meta, or other fandom happenings.

What does this mean for femslash?

Because being a femslasher is not an identity – you might be able to argue that it is in sports fandoms – there is no group or mob voice. This means that I read lots of meta that completely forgets the existence of femslash when talking about which genres one writes in. This means I read meta about how in SGA 3x01 that Weir and Teyla calling each other by their first names equals OOC, instead of femslash, which is what I saw.

It also means that femslash rarely causes wank as it isn't a blip on the map. m_butterfly can write – at my nefarious urgings – about how f/f is superior to every genre and have it ignored by everyone (as I predicted).

The thing that I struggle with the most is the idea of creating a community. The women at femslash_today have done a wonderful job; however, I do think it's only worked because they are multi-fandom and incredibly far reaching. (I'm not ever seeing the equivalent newsletter for m/m, het, or gen.) I do think that they are "preaching to the choir" instead of gathering people the way I've seen other communities of people in fandom.

I really want to make sg_femslash into a community hub for Stargate femslash, and perhaps I just don't know how to do that. Lornelover gives me a hard time in that when I see Stargate femslash other places, I make comments about how they should be posting in sg_femslash. She tells me that maybe they don't know; however, I don't know if my reading their fic, leaving feedback, and politely pointing to the comm is helping. Maybe I'm just too much of a hands-off moderator.

I do think that femslash suffers from not having a community identity. There's not a voice, not a dialog, and it's often overlooked as a legitimate writing genre. However, I still don't think that I'll be identifying as femslasher, because who knows what I'll be writing tomorrow. Just like I won't say that I'm a Slasher or a Het Writer or a Gen writer, despite writing all those genres too.

Yesterday's SGA marathon made me think about what I write and why I write it. Mostly because I spent some time trolling on Wraithbait trying to find Rodney/Chuck hockey-watching fic and failed. Fanfic has always been, for me, a what if canon went that way, and usually, considering the nature of it, fanfic is often shipping possibilities. SGA is a particularly interesting fandom for me since 1) There isn't a character I overall dislike; 2) I can ship everyone with everyone; and 3) Fandom is extremely polarized to McKay/Sheppard. But I would say that there are a lot of those same three tendencies in Buffyverse, House, due South, and probably every other fandom I read. I think the only difference with my other fandoms is that there are characters and ships that I downright loathe. I've also been spoiled with Buffyverse as a fandom that has more than one "big" ship and authors who exhibit more flexibility when it comes to writing different pairings.

When I sit down to write a story, my plotbunnies aren't just things that I don't see on the show, they're also things that I don't see in fanfic. I haven't written McKay/Sheppard, because I can go read all those unread fics in my del.icio.us account, same goes with taking on a Fraser/RayK plot bunny. (House is probably the only exception to this rule as I'll write House/Wilson, but that's because the majority of fandom's interpretation of them makes me cry.) Instead, I write Buffy/Gunn or due South femslash or Sheppard as a heterosexual.

I've never been an author who gets a lot of feedback on my stories. If I get 10 comments, that's a lot. For a long time, I thought it was because I sucked (and yes, some of those stories sucked). I also drove myself crazy looking at authors who get pages of feedback for stories with crap characterization and horrible grammar. And then I started getting feedback here and there from authors that I admire, rec, and adore their stories to little pieces, which gave me much needed confidence.

( Instead of moping around and feeling sorry for myself, I wanted to explore the feedback phenomena and started looking at my stories solely based on pairing, instead of quality. )

What trends do you notice? What happens when you change fandoms? Do you notice a significant drop in feedback based on pairing? How is your flist centered? How has it changed as people change?

I am a woman who reads comic books. I am particularly drawn to comics about superheroes and supervillains, especially female ones. I go about every other week to a local comic book shop where the owner knows my name, what comics I read, and engages me in conversations about what I like and what I don't. We had some fun discussions about Serenity when it came out, and he often saves copies of the more popular comics from me since they sell out quickly.

However, I haven't always felt comfortable going into comic shops. ( More about comic shops, demographics of comic fans, and marketing )

The target audience also determines the way that covers, storylines, and art turn out. And while, every superhero or villain wears his/her share of spandex, there's a clear divide in how men and women are depicted. ( Gender and a bit about racial divides in storylines and art )

When looking at the issue of women in comic books, specifically, many of the characters end up as what's known as Women in Refrigerators where they're either maimed, killed, raped, de-powered, or otherwise cruelly incapacitated to further the boyfriend's or hero's story along. How many thousands of times has Jean Grey died to further an X-Men storyline? Or Spider-Woman been killed, de-powered, or played by both Hydra and S.H.I.E.L.D?

Some DC fans have started a campaign to bring light to this and celebrate female superheroes, in reaction to the killing off of Stephanie Brown, aka Spoiler or Robin IV. (DC has a far more active and broad fanbase, at least on lj, than Marvel.) monkeycrackmary is setting up Girl-Wonder.Org and is seeking people want to make their own sites about female comic characters.

I think this is important because the comic companies need to realize that they have a broader audience and to treat all characters equally and not hire the Frank Millers of the world. I know that post-school, I'll probably work on a site or two myself, and I hope once things are setup that there's some Google-bombing.

I love Star Trek. I really do. But today, I watched "Symbiosis" (TNG) and omg, one big crack is bad PSA.

Group A: We're dying and need our medicine! *have withdrawal symptoms*
Group B: *hoards the 'medicine'* "We're rich. We need money for our drugs."
Dr. Crusher: "OMG, they're drug addicts. I *know* an addict when I see one. Captain Picard, tell them."
Picard: "Prime Directive, non-interference, blah blah blah. Did you miss that part of Starfleet?"
Dr. Crusher: "Crack is bad. Group B, we know that you know it's drugs."
Picard: *outsmarts them all and destroys their dependant economy by not fixing some important ship part*

( The actual script between Tasha, Data, and Wesley is even funnier and more PSA-y. Beware as Tasha morphs into Nancy Regan, though keeps her utopian principles )

*cues the laughter* Seriously, I was sitting there in shock. It was the 80s very special drug episode of Star Trek, and it was so bad. I wanted a guest appearance by House, popping his vicodin like potato chips and snarking at Beverly for her naive approach to drug use. (Side note: Actual drug addiction is very serious, what I mock is the PSA.)

dovil wrote about tops and bottoms. Her original question is about writers turning the bottom into women/Mary Sues/children. Like OTPs, I'm puzzled by people with fixed 'x' person is bottom or 'x' person is a top. People's favorite tops were Angel, Giles, and Gunn. People's favorite bottoms were Spike, Andrew, and Xander. Wesley and Riley were debated. I smirk. I also make Angel call Wesley 'sir' and be the student in teacher/student role playing.

I also wonder what it is about Gunn that gives everyone such an impression that he's a top. Masculine? Height? Axe (which mallyns and I couldn't decide if it was vaginal or not)? Race? Leader of his crew? Combination of everything?

The impossibility of Angel/Gunn was brought up due to them both being tops, but for me, seeing that 'ship is really more about Gunn's issues with vamps than anything else. Also my Gunn will bottom for Wesley. In Kat's AU Bent Justice, Gunn is a bottom, and one thing I really like about this fic (among others) is her discussion of the consequences of Gunn's image if people knew he was a bottom.

Also, you all failed. Failed, failed. Why did I accidentally stumble onto jar_daily? Why wasn't anyone like 'hey, Erica...'?

In other news, fist-fuck is in the O.E.D.

Watching Bend It Like Beckham and I love how they have to throw a 'hot' young coach into the mix to distract from the Jess/Jules complete and utter gayness. Even Jules' mom thinks they're lesbians. I really like Keira's hair. Maybe I'll cut mine that short. It's far too long for summertime. Of course, that would include finding someone to cut my hair.

I've also been editing my threesome fic, finished by X-Men ficathon piece, and reading Good Omens, fic, and meta.

kattahj talks about bisexuality in fiction, slash, and RL and mofic adds her thoughts about her characters and their self-identification. In light of this, I've decided that in the fall, I'm only going to be gay, except on Tuesdays. Why Tuesday? Because I can't pretend not to drool over the four hour line up of DB, House/Wilson, Spader, and Jon Stewart.

twinkledru talks about Xander and ultimately why Mary Sues are very bad. She's more forgiving of Xander than I am, summing most of his character issues up to bad writing.

paratti breaks down Joss' writing team into their positions as fic writers as an addition to the recent published vs. ficcers writing wars. I pretty much agree, especially given to what I was reading in She Hulk last night concerning continuity and fans (Marvel's idea of 'good' vs. 'bad' fans). Also known as the best Marvel fanwanking ever.

( Scans from the comic book - pretty high res )

On a side note: Where are the women in the comic shop?