Birthday Surprise for Madame Meretrix!

[electricalgwen]

madame_meretrix is fantabulous. Yup.

Sometimes I wish I could have followed her and apreludetoanend into Supernatural fandom. Because I love them both and I miss playing with them, and because I'd like to be writing stuff they'd like to be reading. Especially for birthdays.

But you know what? It's surprisingly easy writing for a fandom you don't really know, if you go with AU RPS. Kinda. Sadly, this is only a drabble, but it's my only SPN output thus far so, y'know. Take what you get. *g* Thanks to darkhavens for advice and inspiration.


Jensen doesn’t get it.

He’s always figured the pit crew resent him, want to be where he is. When he’s had his hands all over the insides of a car, that baby’s his. No way is some other punk gonna take her out on the track. For him, it was always driver or nothing.

The tall floppy-haired kid doesn’t seem bugged by it, though. Just sweet-talks the engine, gets her good and hot and purring just right and… hands her over, with that crazy little smile. Lets Jensen take control.

Like maybe he really doesn’t mind some other guy driving.


This is not really Meretrix's birthday present - which, um, I started last year and still haven't finished - but she's kindly given me a couple of months grace.

Comments

[electricalgwen.livejournal.com]

Yay! I'm so glad you like it, even if it's just a little snippet, and that you felt there was meaning there even if I don't know the boys all that well! :)

Hope it was a good day!

[laisserais]

and that you felt there was meaning there even if I don't know the boys all that well! You know? I'll tell you a secret: that's one of the main attractions of RPS AU for me. Everyone has a different interpretation of the 'canon' and there's all this room to play in it. it feels sort of freeing, to me. you don't have to necessarily have a lot of background for meaning to happen. it's like magic! ;)

and yeah, this is excellent, and i had a wonderful day! thank you again!

[electricalgwen.livejournal.com]

Good point. It's also why it almost doesn't feel like RPS to me. I seldom know much about the actors themselves even in shows that I like, just their characters. (As an aside, it's same with musicians for me: I don't actually care much what the band members names are, and certainly not about their birthday or favourite food or dog's name; I just like the music.) So even if I were trying to write actual RPS, it'd be deeply shaped and informed by the characters they play: kind of like reverse engineering? Like imagining what the actor must be like based on the way they interpret a character. With JM, for instance, an awful lot of Spike characterization is physical and not something that's actually written on the page, so it makes sense to imagine that JM's got that kind of physicality and angular movement. (It gets easier if you've seen the actor play different roles.) And imagining what the way Dean looks at Sammy might give away about the ways JA thinks about family ties or guilt or expressing his emotions.

And then in an AU, where the roles and eponyms are changed - not "vampire", or "demon hunter", or "computer geek", but "Formula One driver", etc. - I don't really know where the characterization is supposed to come from or be informed by! My completely invented view of the actor? The character they play? Practically speaking, I imagine that if I were to expand this I'd end up writing it much more as "Dean as driver" than "JA as driver", but in the end I'm not sure it'd resemble the guys in anything beyond the names.

/blather

Um. Now perhaps I'll go read your AU to gather some info, instead of musing aloud about something I don't really understand? *g*

[laisserais]

yes, exactly, i think you've hit the nail on its microscopic head: RPS is really all about the fanon. it's most successful, it seems to me, when we play in the negotiated space created by the community. it's the one genre that we're almost completely agreed upon - as fans - that it's not about the actual people, it's about the simulacrum. successful characterization thereof requires, imo, less specific knowledge about the real actors than it does the skill to synthesize the various subtexts of the actors' performances.

so i agree- good JM fic would totally incorporate nuances of how he played spike, because it's in the overt lie of acting that we find involuntary truth. in an interview, JM would be skillfully playing JM, but on screen, there are certain basic things that he can't obscure.

well. JM might be a bad example, because it seems like he has no capacity for obfuscation in interviews. *G* but you get my drift.

and not that i'm pressuring you to read my AU, but if you do, you'll see that i started out doing this exact thing. because i'm less aware of the fanon around tom welling and michael rosenbaum, i relied on the clever (or lame) prop of setting up their relationship as a meta commentary on their characters in smallville. as i did more research, i was able - i think - to tailor them a little better, but the basic architecture of their characters was, of necessity, built on the foundation of my first exposure to them. so it looks like a silly nod to the reality of them being actors, and their characters, in the fic, when i say that tom welling leads a double life.

next time around, if i write them again, i'll probably be able to distance them from their characters more. but there's also the thing where i enjoy the dynamic between clark kent and lex luthor (thing spike and angel x a billionty), and so i kept it and mapped it (imperfectly) onto TW/MR.

uh. and why am i writing a novel-length meta piece in your journal? eep. i'll stop now. haha, but it's just that AU RPS was a revelation , and it's still new enough for me to have all the fervor of the newly converted. *G*

[electricalgwen.livejournal.com]

Ha, not to worry, I like your meta anytime! Bring it. *g*