#to further complicate the small fandom there was only author in it i'd read

[mego42]

7, 14, 19, 26

7. What’s your favourite quote from a fic?

this is difficult as my memory is shite and I am not the change I want to see in the world and do not leave myself notes in my bookmarks but okay off the top of my head:

@sothischickshe​‘s “howdy” from (a) time to kill is absolutely iconic.

this bit from @hypermania​‘s feel it on the way home makes me wanna punch myself in the face, I really love the like, reluctant desperation for each other it captures):

“Goodbye, Elizabeth.”

The words come easier than he expected, even if he can’t say them until he’s already turned away, on his way out. He’s walked through the back gate more times than he can count, enough that it feels like some sort of path should’ve formed, that his footsteps should be carved into the ground by now. But the grass is just as green, just as alive as ever, and every step he takes feels like more work than the last. It takes a lifetime just to reach the gate.

“No.” It’s incredulous. Petulant. Entitled in that way she’s been from day one.

It’s breathtaking.

obsessed with this bit from @pynkhues​‘ porn star AU (which I am, for the record, aware has a title but I live for shorthand), I love how it captures the spark of beth and rio’s initial connection from canon and translates it to the AU (also find it honestly bizarre levels of endearing that Rio calls Gretchen Gretch but that’s a separate thing):

“Yeah,” he growls against her now bare neck. “You do. Knew it the moment you got all mad and shit at me and Gretch in your audition. You don’t like bein’ ignored. You like bein’ seen.”

She clenches again, eyes falling shut, her thighs wobble, breath catches in her throat, and Rio laughs roughly against her throat.

“Yeah, you like it. I see you. We get in there, everyone’s gonna see you.”

I also think a lot about your bit in ch 1 of collect where Rio’s trying to get away from the thought of Beth and his list of anti-Beth criteria, it feels so right and is also hilarious bc like, buddy, come on now, give it up. if you’re making lists like this you’re done.

No women between 5’7 and 5’10, ‘cause Elizabeth’s height fluctuates dependin’ on her shoes.

No women with doe eyes, doesn’t matter the color, ‘cause she’s all he sees when he looks into ‘em.

They can’t drink bourbon or tequila shots, and shit, it’s not even the things she likes, but the things she doesn’t, too—which means no women nursin’ a chard or a rosé, either.

If they’re got a flower printed or embroidered or embossed anywhere on their person, they’re out.

He’s left women in parkin’ lots for drivin’ vans, and said goodnight ‘cause they carry a large brown purse.

14. What’s the longest fic you’ve read?

i have absolutely no idea, i’ve read some long ones, easily over 100k, probs over 200k? i’d be surprised if over 300k.

19. What fandoms do you enjoy reading fics from?

we’ve talked about this a little but i’m actually super selective about what fandom’s i’ll read fic for! i generally cannot read fic for book fandoms bc the difference in writing style often breaks my brain a little (ex: I cannot read trc fic, the prose style of the series is too distinctive and too wrapped up in what I love about it), though i’ve dabbled in a couple.

usually if i’m driven to read fic, it’s bc i’m not getting idk, enough? i guess? from canon. or i’m just so bonkers over it I have to seek out more. most often it’s driven by ship stuff, though I really love gen in addition to whatever ship content sent me to ao3. 

26. What’s the most obscure pairing you’ve ever read?

answered here but in terms of like, not crackfic, the smallest fandom i ever read for has 133 total fics on ao3, 83 for the main ship so that’s pppppp small 

fanfic reader asks that I may or may not answer as intended

[copperbadge]

Do you have any thoughts about the announced adaptation of 'the City Watch' books by BBC America? Opinions seem pretty mixed in the fandom and I'd love to hear your take?

For a show I was almost definitely never going to watch from the outset, I have more thoughts about the Watch adaptation than I really know what to do with, to be honest. It’s actually hard to assemble them coherently. 

There are basically three strands of opinion I have about watching The Watch: personal, critical, and literary. 

The personal: 

I don’t have a great history of enjoying media adaptations of Terry Pratchett’s work. One reason I didn’t watch Good Omens until a month or two after its release is that I knew this about myself and I didn’t want to turn it on, get disappointed, and turn it off, as I’d done with The Hogfather (we need not speak of The Animated Soul Music, lord). Granted, the Death books are not my favorites, so I was never going to deeply engage with The Hogfather, and then they came out with The Colour Of Magic, another non-favorite, so I skipped it, and so I was super disengaged by the time Going Postal came out (though I should really give Going Postal a chance because I do love Going Postal as a book). So I acknowledge this isn’t objective, this is personal, but it’s still a factor.  

So I’m not coming into this whole situation with The Watch as someone who actually wants, or enjoys, TV adaptations of Pterry’s books, Good Omens notwithstanding – and let’s be real, Good Omens is an outlier. It was a collaboration, one of the original authors had deep control over the adaptation, and also Good Omens isn’t a Discworld book. It’s much more thoroughly rooted in our known reality, which makes it easier to convey to television. But my ultimate point is that when I hear about a Discworld book being adapted to TV, I shrug and move on. I have the books. I don’t need the shows. 

The critical: 

I think it is a bad habit of fandom that we extrapolate a lot of inference from a relatively small amount of data – we tend to take a couple of photos, a press release, some casting information, and very quickly make a large set of assumptions. It’s not necessarily that these assumptions are wrong, but we jump to a lot of conclusions. I’m thinking of early backlash over Good Omens, which I don’t even remember what it was about but I remember Gaiman having to get pretty stern about “could you wait until at least the trailer is out before jumping down my throat”. I’m also thinking of the casting of David Thewlis as Remus Lupin, which was not well-received until we saw more than blurry set photos. 

Now, all that having been said, some of the casting news has been…difficult. On the one hand, a Black Sybil Ramkin? Sign me the fuck up. On the other, I know that for a lot of people, having a Sybil who is both large and older is really important (I think it’s important too). Especially if Vimes is older, it’s creepy and backwards to have Sybil be young and hollywood-idea-of-pretty (even if the time travel element is involved, it gets into a weird area). Also, I’m really over only ever casting people of color as villains or supporting-role-women. Vimes canonically comes from a “poor but respectable” neighborhood that could easily be reframed as an ethnic neighborhood, which would be especially pointed and interesting given his family’s long connection to the history of the city. An Indian or part-Indian Sam Vimes would be really, really interesting and cool, for example. 

There’s also a lot of discussion about casting a nonbinary person as Cheery and explicitly setting Cheery up as nonbinary, as opposed to explicitly a trans woman*, especially since in the books she identifies as a woman, not as nonbinary. But I’m not entirely sure if Cheery as nonbinary is actually going to be canon or if that’s just the reporting on the show not knowing how to handle the whole Female Dwarf situation. Not everyone interprets Cheery as trans at all, either, because of how dwarf gender identity works, which complicates matters somewhat, so I’m not going to wade too far into these waters. I do think it’s great enby actors are getting work in enby roles, but there’s some issues there that need further examination. 

(* Note -- corrected the above after it was pointed out to me that NB are not trans light; I’ve changed it to trans woman rather than trans-as-umbrella-term, more here.)

So I think overall it’s early days to make a lot of calls about what The Watch will and won’t be, but I also think there’s a lot of reason to be concerned and annoyed, and that brings us to the real, hardcore reason that I saw the first reporting on The Watch and immediately noped out: 

The literary:

“Punk rock thriller.”

Oh go fuck yourself. 

Despite everything I said above about not making snap judgements I immediately read that it would be a dark punk rock thriller police procedural and went “Well, guess that’s that” and walked away from the idea of being even vaguely excited about this show, because what I read demonstrated a basic, fundamental lack of grip on what the Watch books are about. 

One, the Watch books aren’t about crime. They really genuinely aren’t. The crimes are macguffins on which to hang social commentary about other things entirely. Even in the very earliest Watch books, when Pterry was still mostly making fun of high fantasy, the crimes the Watch investigated were committed in the service of a larger discussion about things like totalitarianism, interculturalism, and civic life. There’s at least one moment, and I believe several but I’d have to re-read the books to be sure, where Pterry explicitly makes fun of murder mysteries where the hero Solves Crimes Like Sherlock Holmes. Vimes hates clues. Feet Of Clay has an extended subplot about how you 100% cannot trust clues even when the author is the one feeding them to you. I do not want a Watch series that is about Clues.  

Two, the Watch books are explicitly the antithesis of the action genre. They have action in them, but the point is that nobody in these books are action heroes; they’re ordinary people attempting to go about their jobs in a situation where that constantly becomes increasingly difficult. I read “punk rock thriller” and I thought to myself of the dedication of Guards! Guards!: 

They may be called the Palace Guard, the City Guard, or the Patrol. Whatever the name, their purpose in any work of heroic fantasy is identical: it is, round about Chapter Three (or ten minutes into the film) to rush into the room, attack the hero one at a time, and be slaughtered. No one ever asks them if they want to. This book is dedicated to those fine men.

This does get a bit tricky because by the end of Snuff, Vimes is very heroic, almost too heroic for my comfort, but at the same time his heroism is of a very specific sort: he is heroic not because he slaughters the palace guard who get in his way or shoots the baddie or blows up a cop car with a helicopter (or vice versa) but because he deeply, intensely hates those things, and wants nothing to do with them. He is heroic because he is forced into it by circumstance, but spite in the face of monstrousness is what powers him. I think of The Fifth Elephant, where Vimes has just killed a werewolf: 

There were a lot of things he could say. “Son of a bitch!” would have been a good one. Or he could say, “Welcome to civilization!” He could have said, “Laugh this one off!” He might have said, “Fetch!” But he didn’t, because if he had said any of those things then he’d have known that what he had just done was murder.

I don’t trust someone who thinks The Watch should be reimagined as a thriller to understand Sam Vimes. Like, there’s room for interpretation as to Vimes’ character, but there is a fundamental underlying bedrock Vimes is built on and if you don’t grasp the broad points of that, you’re just writing a cop show with some names stitched on.  

Three, the Watch books aren’t a static series, they aren’t like cozy mysteries where the circumstances change but the hero rarely does. That’s nothing against cozy mysteries; I love mystery novels and some of my favorites involve characters who don’t even age over the course of the forty years the books were written in. But you cannot pastiche the Watch and expect it to work. 

Again this is a bit of extrapolation based on low amounts of data but I think it’s probably accurate – the casting indicates that either we’re dealing with the events of Night Watch or at the very least heavily engaged with aspects of it. But Night Watch, while I think it’s one of Pterry’s best books hands down, doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is one point in a very specific developmental arc, not just for Vimes but for the entire Watch. If we’re dealing just with the plot of Night Watch (which I don’t think we are) that’s tough to pull off. If, as I suspect, they’re going to be pulling from various aspects of various Watch books, then that’s just fucking nonsense. 

Even Carrot, who is a very constant figure, undergoes some fundamental shifts in personality between Guards! Guards! and, say, The Fifth Elephant. Vimes, while maintaining his personal moral and ethical code, undergoes a radical shift between Guards! Guards! and Night Watch, and he continues to develop emotionally and in some ways spiritually up until Snuff. The Vimes who bitches about diversity in hiring in Men At Arms will not react to any given situation the way the Vimes who befriends the goblins in Snuff will. 

And because these books also all address very specific issues, you can’t just slam them all together and expect to get anything resembling the Watch as Pterry envisioned it over the course of the books.

So while I love the comedy, the characters, the plots, even the macguffin crimes, I believe that a Watch book – a Discworld book of any kind – without that satirical bite is just a high-fantasy husk. There’s no point to it, nothing that sets it apart from a bad Saturday Night Live skit about Game of Thrones. The tv series might actually turn out great and all my concerns will have been unfounded, but first looks aren’t promising on a number of really basic levels. 

So we’ll see. If I’m wrong, great; the show will probably electrify fandom in the same way Good Omens did. If I’m right, well, I had no hopes to begin with, so I’ll just enjoy re-reading Night Watch, which is the book that got me back into fandom and which you can all blame for my presence here today. :D