:: a toe in the water... ::

:: Wednesday, March 27, 2002 ::

I think I am getting far too sensitive to bad writing. Right now it's making my eyeballs ache.

But really, I've gotten to the point where I can't bear to look at the newpapers at the supermarket checkout. Yes, I'm a snob and most celebrities seem to be total idiots. My heart bleeds not for such ilk as Britney Spears. But no one deserves to be used like this -- to have absolute crap about oneself published coast-to-coast. The very nastiness, the mean-spiritedness of these newspapers, these writers (hah!) who concoct this shit for profit -- it makes me want to spit.

So too do awful books. Lurid titles, grotesque covers. [sigh] I'm over-reacting, I suppose, because I'm cleaning out someone else's library right now and I'm drowning in dren.

Speaking of dren...I managed to get my hands on the Farscape mag with BB on the cover. The mag is a fun read, but the Rygel fic? Deah gott. I wouldn't even say it read like fanfic, because there's a whole bunch of fans out here who do it so much better.

Speaking of fanfic (always more fun than ranting about dren) Suela's reccing a soon-to-be-posted fic, and since she's saying it's my fault I'll have to stick my face in here and clarify: it's *not* mine. I wish it was. God, how I wish it.

But yes, it's all she said and a bag of chips and I got to proof it first. So there [g].

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:: fialka 12:48 AM [+] ::

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oh, my lord, has it been a week?

It hasn't really -- I updated the blog the other night. Ruminations about Crichton, if you can believe it. And the damn service ate my entire post.

I'm trying to imagine I'm sitting here with a worn journal in my lap, scribbling ideas rather than writing a dissertation. The way I used to scribble on the trams, one eye on the outside world, one on the inner land. I wrote poetry on the trams. Something about the motion, I guess, the insulation of being surrounded by Czech. Not quite the same as whispering to the internet.

If a blog falls in the forest...

So I was thinking about Crichton and he was thinking about Gilina, of all things. Not story-talk, not yet. But for a moment I saw him through her eyes, on the Gammak base, talking through a stone-bland face. Before Harvey, before the Chair, but already growing harder, cold, wearing a uniform that fit all too well. I saw the good old boy disappear and wondered if it was just about killing Hassan, or something more than that. Wondered if Larraq's knife cut through the thing that holds back vengeance. It wasn't the virus John wanted to see dead; it was the man who tried to take Aeryn.

And the price...some piece of innocent Crichton, gone forever.

So Gilina, knowing none of this, so happy to see him. And John so different from the man she left on Moya a mere half-cycle ago.

That's all that's left, I'm afraid. The rest is just Crichton wandering the back corridors of my brain, shouting "Aeeeerrrrrrryn", the way he does. I'd like to write something that isn't about JohnandAeryn, but it's awfully hard with her standing right behind my eyes, all stoic and silent, and him beating on the back of my skull, looking for a passageway to something that will never exist again.

Sigh.

Maybe I should just watch Sex and the City for awhile...

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:: fialka 11:16 PM [+] ::

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bits of fic that are currently homeless:

This is from a story that can't decide if it's a post-ep for Icarus Abides, Fractures or DW2B (though spoiler-safe for the US). All I know is that D'Argo's POV won't appear, poor thing. So here he is.

-----

D'Argo is in the command, watching the readouts go by. There is nothing out there, nothing to threaten, but also nothing to focus on. Nothing to do, arn by arn. He can either stand here, or wander the ship, hoping something broken will appear. Something he might be able to fix.

"We need to find a commerce planet."

He reaches to his left without looking up, encounters Rygel's throne and shoves it far away from him. The little slug doesn't even protest as the gyros whir and groan, making up for the sudden shift.

"We need to find a commerce planet," he repeats, as if nothing at all has happened.

"We are not landing anywhere." D'Argo bends over the console, growling words the microbes cannot translate. The last thing he needs right now is that damned Hynerian buzzing around his ears like a tetra bug in summer. He might have to squash him flat.

"We're all going farbot, locked up here together." The frumpish voice is coming from a more distant part of the command. Rygel wisely taking himself out of reach, but of course not taking the hint to leave altogether.

The frelling slug is right, though, and they both know it. It's not good to be locked up here, with Aeryn sucking all the air out of the ship, but letting her loose is out of the question. She may seem calm enough, but D'Argo knows what he was like after his own mate was killed and he doesn't expect an ex-Peacekeeper to be any different. Set loose in the market, Aeryn will pick a fight with the first thing she can find that's bigger, meaner, and more numerous than she is, and if that doesn't work, with the next, and the next. Before Rygel is done filling his third stomach, Aeryn Sun will be lying in bloody pieces in the dust and Ka D'Argo will be the leviathan's only defence.

"Pilot," he growls. The clamshell comes slowly to life, Pilot's mournful face seeming, at last, appropriate to the circumstance.

No, that's not true. It was appropriate when Zhaan--

D'Argo shakes his head hard enough for his tentacles to rattle. This is not the time to think of Zhaan, of how much he misses her blue calm. Zhaan would have known what to do right now.

Pilot tilts his head, waiting for a question, not endlessly patient.

D'Argo clears his throat. "Anything on the scanners?"

"Nothing you cannot see yourself."

Pilot remains on the clam, looking expectant, as if he knows this isn't what D'Argo wants to ask.

"Where is Aeryn Sun?"

"According to her comms, in her cell. But Moya says she is in the training room." Pilot's eyes seem to withdraw a moment as he communicates with the ship, then he's back, looking sadder than ever. "Moya says...she thinks you'd better go there."

"What the yotz is she doing now?" Rygel snorts, but if there's an answer D'Argo doesn't stick around long enough to hear.




For the first moment, as he enters the room, it's her grace that strikes him, each movement fully realised, each hit straight to the center of the target. Aeryn spins and kicks and punches with a controlled fury that he understands, a perfectly unbroken rhythm, a warrior's dance. It is a good way, he thinks, for her to work out her anger, much better than working it out on one of them. On John. D'Argo can't say he never worked a few things out on the Human himself.

He hits his comm, and whispers into it. "Pilot? Tell Moya that Aeryn is fine."

A pause, then the answer comes only through the badge, Pilot's version of a whisper. "Moya says she is not. She has been training for nearly four arns and her core temperature is dangerously high. Moya says if she does not stop soon, she is going to hurt herself."

D'Argo slides further into the room, angling carefully around the target, placing himself so that Aeryn can see him. Could, if she would only look, but she is seeing nothing at the moment, nothing outside herself. He catches his breath as she slams her entire body into the target, hard enough to throw it back a full step, hard enough that he's sure he heard something crack. Without pause, she begins the exercise again, circling the target so the next time she throws herself into it, it winds up where it began.

"Aeryn," he tries, and gets no answer but a rapidly executed series of kicks and jabs.

Another full-body tackle moves the target closer to him, but she still does not acknowlege that he's there. This close, he can see she's gone beyond exhaustion, into something else. Her pale skin is flushed pink beneath the sheen of sweat, and her eyes have a wild glaze to them that makes his stomach clench.

"Aeryn!"

He's no more than two arm's length away and shouting at the top of his rather capacious lungs, and he might as well not be there. He can't even get her to break her rhythm.

"Aeryn!" D'Argo whirls at the familiar voice, the running steps.

"Stay away from her," he growls. Crichton holds his hands up, his expression pained and clueless, the way it was when he first came to them. Hezmana, no wonder Aeryn can't stand to be around him right now.

D'Argo steps into the circle, watches for his opening, waits for the cycle of movement to repeat again. He picks a moment when she's off-balance, her foot firmly planted in the target's worn center. Her recovery is fast, but his tongue is faster. A moment later, she lies on the ground, still at last.

Crichton kneels beside her, one hand hovering as if afraid to touch her, even now.

"Help her, D'Argo."

"I can't. No one can."

---

:: fialka 5:31 AM [+] ::

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Okay, I wasn't going to bother talking about The X-Files anymore, but...

Did anyone else see last night's ep? Did anyone have a frelling clue what was going on? Did anyone else snort beer out their nose when GodbotheringMan asked for 'the head of Fox Mulder'?

You know, I really *don't* recommend that. {g}

Now, I actually have been watching this season. All right, I'm usually doing something else in front of the tv and waiting for Gillian Anderson's two line appearance, but you know, I keep an ear out. I occasionally look up. And a couple of the eps have even been interesting if I think of Season 9 as just another one of those paranormal-partners knock-offs that seem to be all over the place the last few years.

The thing is, last week's setup made it look like we might get to see Scully *do* something this week. Kick some butt or figure something out, like she used to do before the pregnancy hormones fried her brain, instead of running round in circles saying the same four lines over and over again in not-so very different ways. So, for the first time this year, I was kind of...curious to see what would happen next. (Okay, not so curious that I refused to talk to Suela when she called at 8:55pm, but you know, that's what TiVos are for.)

I'd need a term stronger than "jump the shark" to describe last night, though. XF jumped the shark a long time ago, this is jumping off the shark wearing a pair of lead fins and sinking into the Cayman trench. I swear, not one thing that happened made any kind of sense.

Oh, and boys? Dears? No religion ever called for the sacrifice of an infant? Here is a book. It is sometimes called The Old Testament. Better yet, here it is on a searchable CD. Look up Egypt + plagues. Look up Isaac. Look up...

On second thought, why don't you just give me back that CD before you get any more cockamamie ideas.

Someone in the Farscape 'dom was asking where all these new writers are suddenly coming from. Well, here's the answer. It's us, fleeing the drowning philedom, throwing ourselves upon the shores of a show that makes sense.

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:: fialka 4:04 PM [+] ::

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The problem with a blog, is you have to update it with some regularity, don't you? [g]

It's four in the morning and I keep thinking I should wait to talk about the last eps, at least until my reaction is less visceral and more distanced. I don't see that happening any time soon though -- I still can't manage to say much about Infinite Possibilities aside from pass me the [sniffle] tissues. And I still don't feel like futzing with html, so here's some blathering, with any spoilers after Fractures black-holed out.

=======

It seems to me, even after The Choice, that Aeryn kept choosing on the side of her love for John. As strange as her actions have been, distorted as they are through the lens of her training as a mindless, heartless killer; as much as she wants not to think, just to do what she must and stay numb, it's still all for John. It's too late for her to escape that, to be only "what she was bred to be." Returning to her place as Moya's first line of defence, standing beside MJ when he proposed a suicide mission, (spoiler)destroying the ship that was once her home. (/spoiler) She did these things not for herself, but for John -- *her* John, yes, Talyn John, but still John. Finishing the work he died for on Dambada.

And in a way, that was the easy part. She had a mission, something to focus on, something that was in one sense, familiar.

The problem is, of course, the other John. One theory I haven't heard mentioned seems the simplest -- if Talyn John was a separate, unique person to her, if he was the "real" John (and he must have been because they seemed to have blocked out the fact that there was another John on Moya) then to accept Moya John now would be to render Talyn John interchangeable with him. It makes TJ replaceable. And he's not.

The problem is that the split Johns followed different paths. TJ grew up, because he had a woman to love and a cause to fight for. MJ, who had neither, descended into adolescence. (spoiler) And remained there, as only an adolescent would get pissed off enough to stake the love of his life on a toss of a coin. (/spoiler) I'm not faulting MJ for this -- he's had his own hell to live through and since she came back he's been grieving the loss of the Aeryn he loved almost as much as she's grieving the loss of Talyn John. Aeryn is also two different people -- the one who left Moya and the one who returned. And MJ's been in limbo for far too long. It's too much to ask him to wait again, not knowing if she's alive or dead, if she'll ever return or if she'll be ready for him when she does.

Unfortunately, Aeryn *does* need that time, and John's no longer the patient man who arrived in the UT. He's a warrior hanging onto sanity by a bare thread, and that thread is his love for this woman who is walking around in shards. She has nothing to give him right now. Aeryn's wounds are still bleeding, they haven't even had the time to scar.

But John has wounds too, and his are no less profound than hers.

(yes, there's thought below, but it's all spoilers. Apologies to the US folks) Sitting together at the end of Lambs, it seemed to me she might have talked then, if John had still been the John who said 'hey' at the end of a bad day. But John was busy doodling his wormholes, and I think that was the moment when Aeryn finally gave up. That conversation isn't one she knows how to start. Again, I'm not blaming MJ, who had already tried so many times to reach her. But it was clear then that they cannot help each other. Aeryn takes time, but she also takes a bit of prodding. Moya John doesn't have that kind of patience any more.

And time, I believe, is all Aeryn really wanted when she decided to leave, not a permanent end to their relationship. It's been a hell of a half-cycle, to finally fall whole-heartedly into love and lose it all. Far too much for even a whole, stable person to process. I hadn't caught it the first time around, but the second time I saw that she *did* finally say goodbye, when she had begged not to before. Does that mean Aeryn has accepted the toss of the coin to mean it is over unless the universe throws them into each other's arms again? That she is not ever to look for him, even if she heals enough to want to try again, and he is not to look for her?

I think it did, and if so, that was MJ's fatal mistake. He should never have resorted to that damn coin. Scorpius isn't dead and Furlow is still out there. What John needed to do is come up with a mission, an outside enemy to fight together. That would have kept Aeryn beside him, at a safe distance and with a clear goal. Perhaps long enough for them to begin to find their way back to each other.

But John is tired, vastly, vastly tired and hardly thinking things through. Giving up his dream of ever going home is the last gift he can muster, the last thing he can give her, and it is a total surrender. It is John trying to grow up, all in one moment, accepting the thing he's been lying to himself about the last three cycles. He cannot have both. It's a hell of a sacrifice he's willing to make to be with her, and it's something that Talyn John was never able to do. So I am not bashing John for his failure to get through to her. But I also understood her inability to accept the offer when she knows she's not the same woman he once loved.

In the end, I was furious at Aeryn for running off, and I was furious at John for letting her go. But on the other hand, damaged as they both are right now, I guess there is not much else they could have done. Aeryn has learned as much about love as John can teach her. What she needs to learn now -- how to survive loss of love, how to find the strength to love again, she needs to learn alone. The problem, the true tragedy, is that if she ever does learn it, if she's ever able to give back to Moya John what Talyn John gave to her, it may be too late. It's too likely that without her, John will give in to madness or get himself killed (well, he won't 'cause it's tv, but *she* doesn't know that and hell, *we* know this is going to shadow them for the next two seasons). She's risking losing him for good this time, which is why I think a part of her did not really want to go. That she can conceive even the tiniest glimmer of a future where she might be able to be with this John is immensely hopeful for a woman who had no concept of the future until a few monens before. But she cannot conceive of what to be *now*, apart from soldier. It's all she has left. And even at the best of times, without a battle to fight, Aeryn Sun always was a bit lost.

BEWARE! END-OF-SEASON SPOILERS IN COMMENTS

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:: fialka 9:38 AM [+] ::

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I have a lot of stuff to say on the final ep, but I won't do it now, because it either makes a big black hole here or I have to fuss with html. And it's ten minutes to Buffy where I am, and I'm in a happy mood today, so instead I'll continue Aeryn where I left off...

=======

I've read some things that made me scratch my head of late...and I wonder...is Aeryn really as horrible and selfish as some seem to think? Or is she selfless, as Zhaan saw her?

I think she is both, but not quite as we understand those concepts in terms of human behaviour. This is the problem when analysing Aeryn -- her entire experience until three cycles ago is rooted in a world that's missing the essential search for love and connection that so much of our culture, our morals, and our fictions are based on. It is so entrenched in us that it's difficult to imagine the extent of the void when that has been removed in infancy and nothing given to take its place. No wonder Aeryn ran in terror every time she felt it taking over. Love, even for us, is an emotion terrifying in its power, its irrationality. For someone with no idea what it is, who had been warned against it all her life, it must have sometimes felt like she was going insane.

And yet, we see from non-PK Sebaceans that love is not a foreign concept to the rest of the culture, that the need for intimacy, comfort, affection, connection is as much part of their physiology as ours. It's not a gland they're missing, it's a natural desire forcibly eradicated from the children who will become Peacekeepers. All creatures must love something, so they are taught to love their duty, their unit as a collective, their guns. They're taught to release their desire for connection through frequent sexual contact. But they cannot be stopped from needing something more, something beyond the definition of most, something for which the few who do understand what it is they want and reach for it are harshly punished. The message absorbed from infancy it that caring deeply about another individual will get you both killed. The damage that breeds is incalculable, and must be one of the reasons PK society -- with its resultant sociopathic quality -- has to be so tightly controlled.

So yes, Aeryn is self-ish in the sense of not being able to see outside herself, of being unable to understand her how her actions might impact on others since she was never allowed to have an impact on any other being outside the course of duty, and then her impact tended to be fatal. Aeryn was born and raised as a weapon for someone else to wield, not to be an individual with wants and needs and desires. These she was harshly trained to ignore.

If she did ever have an emotional impact on another individual, she would likely not know, since the other would be equally trained not to show it. Apart from Velorek, she appears to have been careful to engender no feeling stronger than comradeship, holding herself somewhat aloof even by PK standards. Perhaps deep inside she believed she would never find what she was missing, that the PK taboo against love was a wise one to follow in a life that was completely out of her control. And she was not quite wrong.

What she fails to understand now is how her actions, a logical reaction to her upbringing, might affect someone without that training in emotional control. Namely Crichton, who from the start demanded of her things she did not think herself capable of -- demanded that she share herself in exactly the way she'd been taught not to do. I think she understands his frustration, but not the fact that she is capable of hurting him deeply by holding herself apart.

But she is not selfish as Rygel is selfish -- in the sense of consciously trying to keep things for herself, of doing only for herself, of refusing to share what she has with the others. Indeed, she shares all she has, since all she has -- in her mind -- is a steady hand and a loaded gun. She is selfish in the way the PKs taught her to be -- to be aware of herself as a functioning part of a unit, to do whatever she needed to do to keep herself fit and alive to fight, to make of herself the most effective possible weapon. And never to think of what it means to be on the other side of her gun.

In that sense, she is self-less, without any idea of her intrinsic value as a thinking, feeling creature. Three cycles on, she still has no concept of herself as anything other than a soldier. Even the other markers of her identity -- Sebacean, woman -- do not deepen that by much. If she has no ability to see her impact on others, she also cannot see what there is in her to love. What else apart from soldier they might see in Aeryn Sun. (That, I think, is the root of her action with Velorek. With no experience of love, she could neither know nor believe what he meant when he said he felt something for her.)

But she is also selfless in the more heroic sense -- more than willing to give her life to protect Moya and her comrades, even before she is doing it for love (which actually comes as early as Through the Looking Glass, though it's certain at that point Aeryn wouldn't recognise it as such). Indeed, her ability to protect the others seems to be the only value Aeryn comfortably manages to place upon herself and there is a level of truth in that. She's not much of a conversationalist, she's not a giving, caring & sharing sort of girl. She's not much company unless you're comfortable with silence.

So why does John keep seeking her out, even early on? Because...Aeryn listens. Unlike the others, Aeryn doesn't think of herself as someone with a story worth telling. But she is curious, hungry even, to hear John's. That's a very attractive quality to someone who *needs* to talk. Someone who needs to love. Surely half John's initial attraction was his belief that by loving Aeryn he could heal some of her wounds, make her enjoy her life a little, make her a better person than she was. And he was right.

And now Buffy is on...

BEWARE! END-OF-SEASON SPOILERS IN COMMENTS

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:: fialka 12:53 AM [+] ::

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*
Hmm, so I did it. Went legit. The ad-free blogger service. Support the small webserver yearning to remain free, instead of the monster eating the internet.

[casts eye above] So how come the ad's still there?

======

Maayan says she proves her theories in her fic (or something to that effect -- apologies if I'm misquoting, but the post I'm looking for seems to have gone to archive heaven). I never thought about it quite that way, but she's right. I can (and do) get all academic and analytical, and it's all kinds of fun, but if I can't make the characters live the way I see them and still be recognisably themselves to someone else, then some part of my hypothesis is false.

So, here is Between the Stars. This is the first Farfic I wrote, about a month ago, right around the time I fell madly in love with a lost astronaut and a soldier with the strangest kind of baggage. Spoiler safe for the Americans, unless you haven't seen A Human Reaction. There are two others out to beta now...and didn't I say I wasn't going to do this again when I stopped writing XF?

Ah, well. Never say never.

If you're into XF fic, by the way, there's The Candybox to your left. No babies there, I promise . But I'm not going to talk about XF now. Everything I had to say is there.

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:: fialka 1:29 AM [+] ::

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*

Suela, Suela take the crack pipe from my mouth...

I tiptoe in, I look around. A toe in the water. Ripples fan out.

===

Suela tells me I talk too much Farscape. No, not really, she just keeps poking me to talk about it to someone *else* [VBG]. She's also been poking at me to get a blog for some time now. So, since it's her fault that a) I got sucked through the wormhole in the first place and b) I'm now standing on these shores, having taken off my shoes and socks, I feel it's only fair to bla-- er, give credit where credit is due.

===

Opinions, analysis, dissection via fanfic...it's all good. The rubbing of minds. The casting of stones, not at each other, but upon the waters to see where the ripples intersect.

And sometimes it's more interesting when they don't.

===

I get to thinking at three in the morning. When I'm home in Europe, this is fine. America is still awake. When I'm in America, and even the left coast is asleep, this is dangerous. This means I might open Wordpad and start dribbling a few thoughts and by the time I'm done the dawn is peering through the skylight over my shoulder, my eyes are red, and I've got 18k on Aeryn Sun.

Crichton can be judged by human standards -- he is, after all, one of us. The others -- D'Argo, Zhaan, even Rygel -- can as well to some extent. All came from families, from societies where love and lifelong unions are not a foreign concepts and where children are reared by their own parents. Aeryn did not. Aeryn came from a world without love, where the need for "family" is filled by allegiance to a constantly changing unit of fellow soldiers. While she says she'd never been physically alone before Moya, it's also true that emotionally, Peacekeepers are completely isolated from each other.

So how do we, who can at least imagine love, begin to understand someone who cannot? Even though Aeryn's mother told her that she was conceived in love, what meaning could that word have for a little girl who'd never experienced it? (just in case spoiler space) The child we see on the carrier gives us Aeryn's childhood in a nutshell -- let it bleed, let it scar, do not be soft. That's how she arrived on Moya, hard as nails and deeply scarred in places that did not show. Someone to whom love was so foreign a concept she didn't even know she had once loved someone. Velorek. And she traded that for a prowler, because the way she felt about flying was more real (and probably less frightening) to her.

John's love is a tangible presence, expressed in word and deed, but between Harvey and the wormholes, not quite steady enough to completely trust. In Aeryn's mind love is a danger, and in fact it did get her killed once. And how frightening must it be to love a man who might go (or have already gone) insane, who might choose to drop through a wormhole to another part of the universe at any moment?

This is not to bash either Aeryn or John; the flaws that are built into the characters are exactly why they're so compelling to watch. I don't need them to be perfect to love them both. I like them not perfect. Perfection is boring. Or worse, it's Namtar.

So, bugger perfection. Back to love...and John. The ballad of John, who tried so hard, and kept getting lost.

John's patience with Aeryn has been enormous, but I think it was rewarded when the tables turned, when Aeryn stood by him as best she knew how -- even though he was clearly losing his mind, endangering them all, even after he theoretically killed her. Aeryn could be his personal protector even if she didn't know how to give him a hug. To stand between John and the universe, weapon at the ready, to die for him, even at his hands -- that *was* Aeryn Sun's best definition of love, even if it may not be ours.

So the progress Aeryn makes on Talyn -- giving herself heart and soul, despite Harvey, despite the wormholes, despite the very real possibility either of them could be killed in the next ten minutes -- really was quite phenomenal. And she blossomed within that, as did he, and it was perfect. Never mind whether or not we see it as perfect, what matters is that *she* did, that she was whole and happy. A synthesis found between who she was and who John wanted her to be. Still the stalwart soldier, but also a person who had learned to share affection, tenderness, joy. For the first time in her life, she knew what love truly was. Revelled in it. Became transcendent.

And then lost it all in an instant, in a moment when she wasn't there.

Even those of us who have always known love, who have family, friends, faith, future -- all the things that Aeryn doesn't have -- there isn't one of us who would be able to cope well with that.

Now...well, "now" must wait till tomorrow. Because there are things I want to talk about that require me to watch the last four eps again. And no one should take 18k to complete her first journal entry.


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:: fialka 10:05 PM [+] ::

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