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crack_van2007-11-04 11:11 am
severuslovesme.livejournal.com) wrote in crack_van2007-11-04 11:11 am
Come True, by Nameste (PG-13)
Fandom: HOUSE
Pairing: Cuddy Gen
Author on LJ:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
namasteyoga
Author Website: Namaste's House Fics
Why this must be read: This is one of my favorite gen Cuddy-centric pieces because it does such a great job examining Cuddy's character - who she is, why she is the way she is, and what the consequences are. It's great Cuddy backstory, containing the seeds of her meteoric rise at PPTH and also the root of her relationship with House, and continues on to about Season 2 canon-wise. It's lovely and offers insight on House and Wilson as well, though Cuddy is the focus. The fairy tale theme is well-chosen and well-executed, down to the last nuance. So what are you waiting for?
Once upon a time, Lisa Cuddy took a class on fairy tales.
At first she thought it would be good to bone up on the stories about princesses, dragons and castles in case she needed them one day to put young patients at ease.
Besides, it seemed like an easy elective to fill out her remaining liberal arts credits while still focusing on her final year of pre-med, cramming for the MCATs and her new duties as president of Michigan’s premed chapter of the American Medical Students Association.
She should have known better. Rather than fantasy and escape, the class was all about history and analysis. From the first minutes on that warm sunny day in late August, the professor made sure to strip away any illusions she may have had.
“Fairy tales are a literary form of anthropology,” he said. “Rather than bones and shards of pottery, we’ll be sifting through the development of the character. If the hero is a warrior knight, we’re looking at something that was created prior to the middle ages. A scholar with a stout heart brings us to the expansion of the church and the increasing clout of priests and monks.”
“Sleeping Beauty” was merely a fable about the dangers of apathy while countrymen suffer under a tyrant. “Little Red Riding Hood” could be explained away by a Freudian analysis of sexual awakenings, “Beauty and the Beast” as a Jungian treatise on the ability to accept and overcome our own dark emotions.
Cuddy told herself she didn’t care that they were picking apart every Disney classic her parents had ever taken her to -- or that the real stories had been corrupted by Disney in the first place. She had never believed in Prince Charming, had never expected a white knight to rescue her from a life of drudgery.
She had always known that her future depended on her own abilities. There were no fairy godmothers out there handing out good grades. So if she wanted to retain the GPA needed to get her into the med school of her choice, she had to do the work herself, even if she didn’t buy into everything the professor said.
And he was full of himself. He’d pace the length of the classroom, gesturing wildly at the students to emphasize every point, shouting out regularly that they should take note of what he was saying, since he might put it on the final exam.
She regretted signing up for the class from the moment he opened his mouth. She pulled out a pen and began taking notes resenting every moment she spent in the required humanities class when her time would have been spent better in the lab running tests for her senior research project.
But it was the only class that fit into her already overpacked schedule outside of either Shakespeare or Chaucer, and no matter how pretentious the professor, “Hansel and Gretel” had to be easier than either of those options.
So Cuddy settled in with the stories and with the assignments -- and four weeks in, was surprised to find herself looking forward to class
Rather than a mindless exercise, she found she enjoyed diving beneath the surface, learning what evil was lurking below the fantasy. She wondered if this was what psychiatry was like, using patients’ words to diagnose their illnesses.
Come True
Pairing: Cuddy Gen
Author on LJ:
namasteyogaAuthor Website: Namaste's House Fics
Why this must be read: This is one of my favorite gen Cuddy-centric pieces because it does such a great job examining Cuddy's character - who she is, why she is the way she is, and what the consequences are. It's great Cuddy backstory, containing the seeds of her meteoric rise at PPTH and also the root of her relationship with House, and continues on to about Season 2 canon-wise. It's lovely and offers insight on House and Wilson as well, though Cuddy is the focus. The fairy tale theme is well-chosen and well-executed, down to the last nuance. So what are you waiting for?
Once upon a time, Lisa Cuddy took a class on fairy tales.
At first she thought it would be good to bone up on the stories about princesses, dragons and castles in case she needed them one day to put young patients at ease.
Besides, it seemed like an easy elective to fill out her remaining liberal arts credits while still focusing on her final year of pre-med, cramming for the MCATs and her new duties as president of Michigan’s premed chapter of the American Medical Students Association.
She should have known better. Rather than fantasy and escape, the class was all about history and analysis. From the first minutes on that warm sunny day in late August, the professor made sure to strip away any illusions she may have had.
“Fairy tales are a literary form of anthropology,” he said. “Rather than bones and shards of pottery, we’ll be sifting through the development of the character. If the hero is a warrior knight, we’re looking at something that was created prior to the middle ages. A scholar with a stout heart brings us to the expansion of the church and the increasing clout of priests and monks.”
“Sleeping Beauty” was merely a fable about the dangers of apathy while countrymen suffer under a tyrant. “Little Red Riding Hood” could be explained away by a Freudian analysis of sexual awakenings, “Beauty and the Beast” as a Jungian treatise on the ability to accept and overcome our own dark emotions.
Cuddy told herself she didn’t care that they were picking apart every Disney classic her parents had ever taken her to -- or that the real stories had been corrupted by Disney in the first place. She had never believed in Prince Charming, had never expected a white knight to rescue her from a life of drudgery.
She had always known that her future depended on her own abilities. There were no fairy godmothers out there handing out good grades. So if she wanted to retain the GPA needed to get her into the med school of her choice, she had to do the work herself, even if she didn’t buy into everything the professor said.
And he was full of himself. He’d pace the length of the classroom, gesturing wildly at the students to emphasize every point, shouting out regularly that they should take note of what he was saying, since he might put it on the final exam.
She regretted signing up for the class from the moment he opened his mouth. She pulled out a pen and began taking notes resenting every moment she spent in the required humanities class when her time would have been spent better in the lab running tests for her senior research project.
But it was the only class that fit into her already overpacked schedule outside of either Shakespeare or Chaucer, and no matter how pretentious the professor, “Hansel and Gretel” had to be easier than either of those options.
So Cuddy settled in with the stories and with the assignments -- and four weeks in, was surprised to find herself looking forward to class
Rather than a mindless exercise, she found she enjoyed diving beneath the surface, learning what evil was lurking below the fantasy. She wondered if this was what psychiatry was like, using patients’ words to diagnose their illnesses.
Come True
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