Quicksand by SueN (R)

[wneleh.livejournal.com]

Fandom: THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN
Pairing: None
Length: novel
Author on LJ: scout_lover
Author Website: http://www.angelfire.com/tx5/suen/Index.htm
Why this must be read:

Here's the real thing by SueN - a five-hanky M7 h/c story set in Mog's ATF AU. The basic plot is simple: a traumatic event causes Vin to remember more than he'd like about his childhood; and, this being M7, he's got lots of support, and he needs every last drop of it.

An excerpt:

Vin turned his face away and laid an arm over his eyes. Yet when Chris took his other hand, he did not pull it away, but instinctively closed his fingers about his friend’s. "I’m losin’ my mind," he whispered shakily. "I c’n feel it slippin’ away–"

"You’re not losin’ your mind," Chris said firmly, holding Vin’s hand tightly between his two as if to anchor the man with his grip. "You’ve been through a lot, you know. Nobody expects you to just bounce right back like nothin’ happened. It’s gonna take a while to get past all this."

"I’s taught in the Army," Vin sighed, exhausted in body and soul, "that when ya fall inta quicksand, ya gotta quit thrashin’ about, jist be still and float, else it’ll pull ya under and drown ya. But I’ve floated all I can. I’m tired, Chris, real tired, an' I cain’t float no more. It’s pullin’ me down an' I cain’t stop it. Quicksand’s got me good."

Chris swallowed hard, hurt by the desolation in Vin’s soft voice. "Y’know, pard, there’s another way to get outta quicksand," he said quietly. "Holler like hell for your friends, and grab onto the line when they throw it. And we will throw it, Vin, you know that. All you gotta do is hang on and let us pull you out."

Quicksand

Comments

[villeinage.livejournal.com]

Hi, do you have another link? I can't get to that website--it looks like it may have been hacked?

[mustbekarma.livejournal.com]

I'm having a problem with the link, too. Her page flashes for a minute, and then you're left with nothing but a generical angelfire page. It's now you see it, now you don't.

[mustbekarma.livejournal.com]

I also tried clicking on the author website link you posted, and the same vanishing act happened, but then I got little Vin icon mouse tracks when I scrolled my mouse over the page. That was weird.

[sionell8.livejournal.com]

It's not working for me either. :(

[wneleh.livejournal.com]

Do you have another browser you can try? It works on my Mac using Safari and Firefox, and on my iPhone.

There's got to be a workaround to Angelfire silliness! I'll work on this once the resident web expert wakes up.

- Helen

[wneleh.livejournal.com]

Do you have another browser you can try from?

- Helen

[wneleh.livejournal.com]

It works fine for me using Safari and Firefox on my Mac, and on my iPhone, so I think it's an issue that anglefire sites must be having with just certain browsers/OSes. I'm going to poke at this later - there has to be a work-around!

I've emailed SueN to ask if she has another site for her stories.

- Helen

[farad.livejournal.com]

I go it and I'm using Mozilla's firefox. But - having gotten it, I have to, well, um, ask: don't the characterizations bother you a little? I have read much of SueN's stuff, the stuff on BR, anyway (thanks for the link to her non-BR stuff!) and she is one of the more prolific C/V-ers, as well as one of the better stylists in the fandom. But - I've tried three times now to get past the first hospital room scene (which I will probably give up on and go on as I do want to see the story concept), and I just can't see the characters that I know from the series acting the way Chris and Buck are. Not that they wouldn't blame themselves or be worried but . . . .I just can't see them reacting with that level of displayed emotion and drama, or having a conversation that intimate.

I'm curious - purely, no intent to argue, but - does this characterization work for you? I'm trying to get an idea of the range of character interpretation that the fandom will support and how much a factor canon is to the enjoyment of the fanfic, if that makes sense.

[wneleh.livejournal.com]

I came into M7 through Gil Hale's ATF XO with The Sentinel, The Compassion Trap (http://www.thebrowsery.us/gilhale/m7-fiction/compassiontrap.html), and read heavily in the ATF universe before I started to read OW stories, and was writing M7 fanfic myself before I ever saw the show.

When I actually did see it - and I watched the episodes very closely - I was pretty disappointed. I wanted the tight bonds I found in fanfic, and I just didn't see them on-screen.

So that's where I'm coming from.

As for Quicksand in particular... well, in The Sentinel fandom we'd call it an excellent example of the subgenre smarm. One of the major criticisms of smarm (and smarm has a lot of detractors) is that 'real men don't act that way.' Many defenders say, yes they do! I actually think this is a valid criticism; but most men don't actually have sex with their work partners, or have a new girlfriend every week, or recover from serious injuries during commercial breaks, or regularly find dead bodies, or do most of the other things that characters in books, TV shows, or fanfic do. I think smarm is just one more way of making fictional characters do what we find appealing. Well, some of us! I know it's not a universal draw.

A lot of what I'll be reccing this month will be smarm, because that's what I like. I can only think of only one other story that is THIS intense on my list, though, and I'm having a hard time finding it so this might actually be it. I recommended it first because I thought it went well with the first SueN story I recommended, the parody. I'd be interested to know whether you like any of the less OTT stories I rec.

- Helen

[farad.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the feedback - and I appreciate that you didn't get angry with my questions. I've been in M7 for - going on two years now, and oddly, like you, I came into it through the fanfic first; I had a friend who wrote Ezra/Josiah fic (yeah, how odd is that?) before I had seen more than one or two eps.

But I've always been a sucker for historicals, and I love EC, so my sister bought me season one a couple of years ago and I fell in love with Vin and Chris - they jumped off the screen at me in terms of slash. I had the great pleasure of finding Smilla and True Enough and Maygra early on and I suspect they imprinted me for style - that, and I have always been a . . . well, as you point out, it is *fic* by its very nature and slash - which is what I write and mostly prefer to read - is already taking great liberties with the characters, but I've always been more compelled toward the darker, more . . . well, masculine/canon interpretations of the characters.

I came into the fandom as a writer through LJ and Sara_Merry99 and the very open community here, so I was quite surprised to discover the tensions among the non-LJ fandom over pairings. Over the past year or so, I've also discovered that it's not just the pairings that are of contention, but also, to a certain extent, style. I'm primarily a C/V-er. But I don't tend toward the - to use your word - smarm as much as most C/V-ers. What I have been hypothesizing - and it is that, merely a hypothesis - is that much of the tension in the pairing wars isn't so much about the pairings themselves (we see 'who' we see in pairings - it's an emotional thing, not a rational thing and everyone seems to agree with that!) as it is about the fact that certain pairings have come to be associated with certain styles of writing.

Vin - who is my favorite character - tends to be very much on the receiving end of pain. How the boy managed to live to be an adult is a mystery given the things fanon has done to him - *myself included*! We definitely love to hurt him, and love to have Chris pick him up, dust him off, and send him back out to be butchered some more. But I think one of the reasons there's been such a backlash against C/V over the past years has been because so much of what has been done to him and to them is, well, accepted as fanon 'truth', to the point that - as you are an example yourself - people coming into the fandom are surprised to find the fanon so far removed from the canon.

I'm not being critical - as I said about pairings, and as is true here, we like what we like. It's emotional, not rational. I'm just intrigued by the popularity of C/V H/C that, *to me*, is a genre all of its own, and could be almost its own - well, actually, with some name changes and minor restructuring - original character universe, prime for professional publishing, I think.

I am very much looking forward to your other reviews - please please don't take my thoughts as any sort of insult; I'm just intrigued by the various ways that fandoms - all of them - evolve and fracture in terms of styles and themes, and M7 is particularly intriguing because it adds a second level of complexity because of the 'pairings issues'; despite being a C/V-er, I end up spending more time discussing the actual vagaries of writing with non-C/V-ers because of - well, style and theme, so I tend to think about the issues a lot.

[wneleh.livejournal.com]

Confession time: I don't read M7 slash. I know, I know, so what am I doing driving the crack van? :-)

My reasons are kind of historical - I came into M7, like I've said, through an XO with TS. In TS I'm (almost exclusively - there are exceptions) a gen reader, and the XO was gen, and for ages all I ever came across were gen stories in M7.

I'm pretty naive; for the longest time I knew slash existed (I was going to Trek cons as a HS student in the early 80s), but I also knew that genderswitch stories existed, and stories in which people became penguins... I thought "what if x and y were gay" was an interesting question to pose, but one I wasn't all that interested in personally, in TS at least, because I was asking other questions of the characters, and also Jim and Blair as a couple would worry me if I knew them socially because Jim so dominates the relationship, and I didn't really feel up to exploring the implications further.

So this was the circumstance of my several-year M7 reading frenzie, and the first stories I wrote in M7.

Then I discovered DS, and primarily read DS slash because, really, *is* there DS gen? But the authors were great. And then I saw the show, and realized that even *I* couldn't write Benton Fraser straight. Then I started watching SGA, and, again, I found a slash pairing I liked to read (John/Rodney) - but, as with Fraser, a lot of this is because John Sheppard seems very non-straight to me.

So, getting back to M7 - none of the characters, or, more importantly, none of their relationships, twig as anything other than, essentially, asexual, to me. Not in that they don't get dates (Buck!) but in that I just don't automatically see a pairing (either slash or het) and think, I can't write and not have this at least be in the background.

Which is a really long way of saying, I'm totally neutral about C/V :-) As a pair of friends - well, that's something else entirely, though for me what I find interesting is the Buck-to-Vin transition as Chris's chief confidant. But I'm also interested in how the Buck-JD friendship develops, and how Ezra integrates into the group, and somewhere in me I have a story about how Nathan and Josiah deal with the changing nature of Four Corners (or their roles in the Denver ATF) when the other five come.

RE: Characterization - well, I think the nice thing about canon characterizations is that there's a bunch of them to chose from. What I mean is, if I pay attention to who writes what episode, I can usually see distinct differences in the characters, writer to writer and (to a lesser extent) director to director. I didn't pay enough attention to the credits when I watched M7 to see if this held for that show; but, for example, w/ SGA, I'm currently avoiding all spoilers, and for me that includes looking away when the writing credit comes up. Doesn't work, though, because I've usually guessed correctly by the end of the teaser.

So, having fandom put a different spin on a character doesn't really bother me. Well, I should say, how an individual story presents a character might have me hitting the back button, but that's because I don't feel like reading a story with that sort of character just then, and not out of annoyance that he's not who I want him to be.

And I have a feeling that the characterizations that you like best, I like worst :-) I like smarmy stories best, and I can't really explain why, because I don't go around infantilizing people IRL. But then, I suppose that people who really resonate with slash don't really think all their male coworkers are having sex in the broom closet. So, as far as I'm concerned, it's all good.

7 is particularly intriguing because it adds a second level of complexity because of the 'pairings issues'; despite being a C/V-er, I end up spending more time discussing the actual vagaries of writing with non-C/V-ers because of - well, style and theme, so I tend to think about the issues a lot.

Where are these discussions taking place? Though I'm primarily gen oriented, I get a lot out of slash discussions.

- Helen