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crack_van2004-07-11 05:24 pm
ianmcduff.livejournal.com) wrote in crack_van2004-07-11 05:24 pm
‘Restaurateur Lance,’ AU / PicProv, by Beatpropx (Cooper) (PG-13, basically)
Fandom: POPSLASH
Pairing: Everything is on the cusp, imminent, implied, not yet realized, in this one. Make sure you check the comments for ‘Easter egg’ surprises.
Author on LJ:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
beatpropx
Author Website: Found only on LJ, at beatpropx’s journal.
Why this must be read: Well, now.
Something I wanted to emphasize this weekend is the AU (or AR, or AH).
Now, this is a problem, in its way, as an astonishing number of AUs are WIP series, and, as I learnt earlier, we don’t rec those here.
(My apologies, by the way, for the trial-and-error reccing this month, but since 28 JUN or so, my email has apparently been in a snit with the bosses’s emails, such that the guidelines never went through to my account, despite their several attempts, and my anguished pleas for the guidelines didn’t reach the mods in return. Nobody’s fault, just the Murphy-ite nature of email. Sigh.)
(At least it explains why – I had thought it was the usual ‘overlooking the obvious’ that we all fall prey to – but at least that explains the otherwise inexplicable non-reccing of, say, Lucy’s ‘The Center’ or Mercutio’s and Kate’s ‘Chords’ series. Now you know.)
(Final parenthetical: It’s All-Star Break coming up, people. Why aren’t there more baseball AUs, hmmm?)
Anyway – and as a few of you saw in an abortive earlier post…. The fundamental characteristic of a good AU – an AU’s gold standard, pardon the pun* – is that it convincingly identifies the fundamentals of the character and uses them in a new setting. This is not as easy as it looks: what part of a character’s character is fundamental, inherent, and what is accidental, the function of the RL environment? Tough to know, and even tougher in popslash, when even canon cannot be counted on to stay canonical. The risk for anyone writing AUs in popslash is heightened accordingly. Sometimes, in fact, the touches of ‘canonical’ character that make one of Our Lads interesting to the story-teller turn out to be false: for example, Lance was, arguably, much more interesting, under the canon we had at one time, as a weapons-collecting Reagan fan (who was nonetheless still widely presumed to be gay as an Ungaro spring frock) than as yet another cookie-cutter Hollywood liberal today, because there was a quirky tension there; under the canon we had at the time, including Chris’s interviews and the whole ‘anti-drug’ and anti-underage-drinking PSA series, JC was much more intriguing to a writer as a person who was simply hard-wired eccentrically and whose ‘anti-drug’ was ‘baroque minimalism,’ than he is under current canon, babbling of ’shrooms. When the characters have become their own stereotypes, the AU writer has a hard row to hoe; the converse danger is that, in extracting the underlying character from the accidental trappings of the pop world, the character becomes instead just a personified ‘humor,’ fit only for a mystery play, a Stuart masque, or Pilgrim’s Progress.
Another problem with popslash AUs is that it can be hard for a reader to suspend a disbelief in the odds: unless the writer breaks the five or the ten fully out of the frame of their RL groups, there’s the niggling feeling that it’s statistically unlikely that ALL of them would turn out to be gay or bi or ‘fluid-enough-to-slash’….
Trust Our Boy Coop to overcome these problems, and do it with a twist, by combining the AU with the PicProv. (It is NOT a series, but his LJ does contain several other one-off AU / PicProv pieces, each in a separate and self-contained alternate world.) This short is one of the first such AU / PicProvs he crafted, and still one of the best: the story flows naturally from the pic that inspired it, the detail is remarkable for the length, and the air of realism, of mere objective reportage, is perfect. It’s little wonder that this trick, of combining the PicProv with the AU, is catching on (for instance, Lincolnkw has begun following suit with a Broadway AU universe that takes a similar tone and tack). Get in on the ground floor, folks: the PicProv AU short may be the Wave of the Future.
In ‘Restaurateur Lance,’ as in all the best AUs, each character is at once recognizable as the AU version of his (or her) RL self, and is a believable, motivated, in-place inhabitant of this alternate world. All in all, this small gem is one of the best and most fully-realized AU shorts out there. I can hardly be emphatic enough in urging it on you.
READ … ‘Restaurateur Lance.’
____________
* C’mon, people, work with me here. Failing that, look at the periodical table.
Pairing: Everything is on the cusp, imminent, implied, not yet realized, in this one. Make sure you check the comments for ‘Easter egg’ surprises.
Author on LJ:
beatpropx Author Website: Found only on LJ, at beatpropx’s journal.
Why this must be read: Well, now.
Something I wanted to emphasize this weekend is the AU (or AR, or AH).
Now, this is a problem, in its way, as an astonishing number of AUs are WIP series, and, as I learnt earlier, we don’t rec those here.
(My apologies, by the way, for the trial-and-error reccing this month, but since 28 JUN or so, my email has apparently been in a snit with the bosses’s emails, such that the guidelines never went through to my account, despite their several attempts, and my anguished pleas for the guidelines didn’t reach the mods in return. Nobody’s fault, just the Murphy-ite nature of email. Sigh.)
(At least it explains why – I had thought it was the usual ‘overlooking the obvious’ that we all fall prey to – but at least that explains the otherwise inexplicable non-reccing of, say, Lucy’s ‘The Center’ or Mercutio’s and Kate’s ‘Chords’ series. Now you know.)
(Final parenthetical: It’s All-Star Break coming up, people. Why aren’t there more baseball AUs, hmmm?)
Anyway – and as a few of you saw in an abortive earlier post…. The fundamental characteristic of a good AU – an AU’s gold standard, pardon the pun* – is that it convincingly identifies the fundamentals of the character and uses them in a new setting. This is not as easy as it looks: what part of a character’s character is fundamental, inherent, and what is accidental, the function of the RL environment? Tough to know, and even tougher in popslash, when even canon cannot be counted on to stay canonical. The risk for anyone writing AUs in popslash is heightened accordingly. Sometimes, in fact, the touches of ‘canonical’ character that make one of Our Lads interesting to the story-teller turn out to be false: for example, Lance was, arguably, much more interesting, under the canon we had at one time, as a weapons-collecting Reagan fan (who was nonetheless still widely presumed to be gay as an Ungaro spring frock) than as yet another cookie-cutter Hollywood liberal today, because there was a quirky tension there; under the canon we had at the time, including Chris’s interviews and the whole ‘anti-drug’ and anti-underage-drinking PSA series, JC was much more intriguing to a writer as a person who was simply hard-wired eccentrically and whose ‘anti-drug’ was ‘baroque minimalism,’ than he is under current canon, babbling of ’shrooms. When the characters have become their own stereotypes, the AU writer has a hard row to hoe; the converse danger is that, in extracting the underlying character from the accidental trappings of the pop world, the character becomes instead just a personified ‘humor,’ fit only for a mystery play, a Stuart masque, or Pilgrim’s Progress.
Another problem with popslash AUs is that it can be hard for a reader to suspend a disbelief in the odds: unless the writer breaks the five or the ten fully out of the frame of their RL groups, there’s the niggling feeling that it’s statistically unlikely that ALL of them would turn out to be gay or bi or ‘fluid-enough-to-slash’….
Trust Our Boy Coop to overcome these problems, and do it with a twist, by combining the AU with the PicProv. (It is NOT a series, but his LJ does contain several other one-off AU / PicProv pieces, each in a separate and self-contained alternate world.) This short is one of the first such AU / PicProvs he crafted, and still one of the best: the story flows naturally from the pic that inspired it, the detail is remarkable for the length, and the air of realism, of mere objective reportage, is perfect. It’s little wonder that this trick, of combining the PicProv with the AU, is catching on (for instance, Lincolnkw has begun following suit with a Broadway AU universe that takes a similar tone and tack). Get in on the ground floor, folks: the PicProv AU short may be the Wave of the Future.
In ‘Restaurateur Lance,’ as in all the best AUs, each character is at once recognizable as the AU version of his (or her) RL self, and is a believable, motivated, in-place inhabitant of this alternate world. All in all, this small gem is one of the best and most fully-realized AU shorts out there. I can hardly be emphatic enough in urging it on you.
READ … ‘Restaurateur Lance.’
____________
* C’mon, people, work with me here. Failing that, look at the periodical table.
no subject
Or rather they make for a much happier Friends List at my end.
Gina
no subject
one of the things i love best about popslash is its evolving canon, don't you :-) nicely phrased up there...
no subject
Sigh. Sorry. (General Response to Comments 1 Through 3.)
And no, of course I paid no attention to the f-lock problem. I didn't notice it, to be honest.
I'm look forward to August. I can stop doubling up on my blood pressure meds, then. (No one is to blame; it's just that the incessant interference of Murphy's Law here is frustrating me massively.)
And yes, Cath, the Amazin' Unstable Canon! is fascinating in its way ... except of course when it Keeps Getting In the Way When One Writes.
PS...
If he doesn't, and soon, sigh, grumble, I'll sub a different rec in.
Sorry about that, folks.
no subject
We've just been debating that elsewhere and agreed that more than one to two screens in a normal browser window really needs to have enough of the text behind a cut-tag to bring it back down to that level.
Gina
no subject
(Anonymous) 2004-07-13 06:00 am (UTC)(link)no subject
(Anonymous) 2004-07-15 05:23 am (UTC)(link)no subject