Why they work
Feb. 7th, 2018 05:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI've been thinking on a bunch of / pairings today, the characteristic issues they face in fic, and why the canon frequently loses me, when it don't see their issues the same way. ... also when I can't find the source issues to read, and just lose track. But. For all the wide and wild range of fanfic, in many ways each pairing circles around a set of relationship issues, drawn from why they work.
I've been reading the whole of some yuletide fandoms, Peter Grant/Thomas Nightingale of Rivers of London, Tony Foster/Lee Nicholas in Huff's Smoke series, and then I moved on to reading Blue Beetle/Booster Gold fic, Ted Kord and Michael Carter, in a wobbly assortment of canons.
I have not been reading the massive stack of MCU Steve/Tony or Clint/Coulson I have lying around in Marked to Read. I had a couple days detour into Atlantis John/Rodney. And I read any new Jack/Daniel I saw, cause it's not like there is much.
Plus there's some Mick Rory/ Leonard Snart around, but after what canon gave us, not a whole lot, and that getting either au or some odd issues.
... I'm actually staring at these couples and pondering how many of them had grief and resurrection issues. I... may have imprinted on weird things from Immortals? Or there's just a lot of weird grieving and time travel and sarcophagus type whatsits in fiction. I mean if you can fix it then why wouldn't you?
ANYway... these are not the couples with the mass drama of, say, Charles and Erik, having to fix the world and reconcile basic philosophy before they can happily ever after.
A bunch of them have chain of command issues ie they're not supposed to be dating within theirs. They're mostly navigating differences in power, in various ways. Dating the boss is one thing, dating a boss who can blow a hole in a tank with his mind is a little bit another. A lot of trust involved either way.
But Beetle and Booster are just partners. They were partners for the longest time. And then it went wobbly, and they somehow didn't fit any more, and that was when canon did the bad thing so they got stuck that way.
... canon did an assortment of weird things after that, but it has been a while since I knew which way was up in comics canon. This is just the read on it I can't let go of. And they did the same to Snart/Rory, only then they did it again with worse feeling, and it's just...
... their happily ever after, if they could ever get to it, isn't as simple as being both alive and loving each other. They did that. They still ended up out of sync.
And the best fic mileage is figuring out how, why, where they fit and why they didn't notice where they didn't, and how to make them work again.
With Beetle and Booster - it's weird calling them Ted and Michael, but Ted and Booster looks mismatched, even if that's what they called themselves... which is one expression of the problem really...
okay, so, Blue and Gold were inseparable... when they were both in comics at once, and the same one. So the reasons they click or don't, they look Doylist and unsatisfying, to some extent. The two get back together after a drifted apart break and now Ted is all mature and Booster isn't... because Ted had guest appearances in comics that moved him on from pure Bwahaha, and Booster didn't.
It's almost a time travel effect, and given the character backgrounds you could straight up play it that way - Booster skipped ahead, didn't think it would matter much, but now they don't click. What to do?
... I also like the potential of Booster's much older wife being a time travel story, kind of like Cap staying loyal to Peggy, but with more TARDIS or Time Sphere. This is because I don't like woman as punchline, even if it is Booster who is the joke.
And yeah I know the canon doesn't exactly click together smoothly. It's like the whole thing where Booster was briefly a tentacle monster and then nobody ever mentioned it, or anything else in that whole title. Apparently a bunch of stuff is retconned as a multi year practical joke.
comics.
But the interesting to me bits are just: they got out of synch and had arguments about maturity. And this was Booster failing to cope with Ted's disability, or any of the changes in his career. When they had roughly equal capabilities doing roughly the same work for compatible reasons, they clicked. But then they lost some aspects of that, and they had stuff to deal with, and they just didn't, quite, so there's this lost moment that Booster is trying to get back to. But Ted isn't physically able to go back. ... sometimes on account of being dead, but I was mostly thinking, heart condition. The characters aged enough that wildly improbable feats of daring do were just... too bendy and liable to ache. So Ted switched to a desk job. ... except when he didn't. ... which didn't work out too great for him.
So for Blue and Gold to work on a personal level, they either have to write the boring thing and enable Ted to be the guy he was in the early 90s, or the characters have to renegotiate their relationship around a physical disability that doesn't allow them to do things together the way they used to.
Which is way more interesting.
I have no idea where they went with the Waverider thing. Comics I don't know how to get hold of, much more recent than I gave up on DC. But if it doesn't dig in to that I'll still prefer fanfic.
We're not who we were, we can't go back, and the thing we're obsessed with in the past cannot in fact be fixed with time travel, so we have to renegotiate.
Characters who actually can time travel would feel this one differently.
But like, Ted and Michael had an age difference, probably maybe. Did different amounts of college with different degrees of success. When the job is hitting things together, no problem. But when either of them tries for other sorts of milestone, they don't have a robust framework to keep their relationship together.
I mean if they were married they'd have to discuss things like where to live and whose career took priority or, well, what happened would happen and they'd have separate lives. But for them as friends it happened because they'd not done a deciding phase, they'd just lived together because team, and the team wasn't there.
That's some good meaty stuff to fix. Booster got his own team and Beetle flunked the physical and everything changed out from under them.
But later on, the Booster that outlived Ted, depending on canon there's like Brave and the Bold where it seemed to me Booster was going back and spending extra time with his buddy?
Which would exacerbate the drift from his younger self's point of view because Ted wouldn't call cause he wouldn't know he needed to.
But the tragedy of losing someone is they never move on. They never have a new day new phase, new thoughts. And Booster would, did, will.
So even if he's doubling back and filling in the diary, he would eventually have a day when it's *Booster* who thinks *Beetle* is immature, because he has moved on from that particular joke or hang up.
So then what?
... in the sad world, then nothing, more sad and either getting stuck or letting go.
... I like fix its better.
But part of the argue they have about maturity is this different life paths thing gets turned into value judgements. Looking down on each other's lives. Big mess.
But the times they were doing the same things weren't quite for the same reasons, so their paths only overlap.
Ted Kord watched Dan Garrett die, and took up his mantle. Fill in a few puzzlers about why a scientist engineer was taking classes and hanging out with an archaeologist. I mean in comics logic of course if you find out your uncle is an aspiring supervillain you ask a superhero for help, but how they got close enough to know to do that is pre crisis and I know not of it, so I'm left to wonder. But, they were close, and Ted made a promise to carry on his Beetle work, and when a magic user goes looking in Ted's mind for his true spirit, he finds him wearing the uniform of Blue Beetle the first.
And then he has to retire.
Whatever the thing was that drove him, guilt or grief or a true calling to heroism of his own, he had to go from living that life to being retired, and he didn't get a whole lot of support from his community about it.
So what need did he fill with the costume? And what would he need to do instead, after?
... put it back on and die trying, apparently, but again, as a story end, that's frustrating.
Booster didn't make any oaths or have a dying mentor. But he did have survivor guilt. He went to the past because he thought he could do better there after screwing up his own life. In college. So he's basically a teen runaway with a much cooler outcome than usual. Maybe not teenage, but probably still. And suddenly he's in the past thinking he'll just step in and do everything better, but oh dear, it turns out life is complicated whenever you are. But Booster stuck with it, and became the hero he was trying to be.
But the problem is most people around him think he's doing it for money and glory.
But even before becoming a time traveller who just can't ever tell what he's done for everyone, that didn't quite fit.
The screw up he ran from? Was because he was trying to get money for his mom's medical bills. Fortune and glory on the football field were how he knew to do it. And that did not work out, because he got desperate and cheated, because he and his mom ran out of time.
Hence time travel.
So fortune and glory aren't the icing on top for Booster, they aren't some bonus you go looking for when mundane life is too boring. They're how to keep your family alive. Underneath every get rich quick scheme was a memory of gnawing hunger and medical bills that cost too much to keep someone alive.
Ted? As far as I know? Was a lot more comfortable than that.
His get rich quick wasn't from that kind of fear, and he wanted the glory, when he wanted it, to fuel his self respect. He was running from a self image as fat, geeky, and physically not enough when it mattered.
Same heroics fuelled by loss, different angles to come at it.
Booster running out of money is living the nightmare again, even if he actually has no one left to support. Ted physically unfit for the heroic life is stuck in his nightmare too, though again, he's not got someone particular to protect. Neither of them could cope with That One Day, so they both get a bit desperate of unmet need. And they both think the hero thing is about the here now needs, so they miss some of the reasons for the feels.
Or at least, that's the interesting stuff to dig in to.
Booster as Beetle's partner? Beetle cant protect him in the field like they used to, and Booster can do damn all about the heart condition, just like with his mother.
That has to be their personal nightmare. So how do they cope?
... comics stuff happened, the sad thing happened, they... didn't have time.
Ted has protected Booster before though by building him better tech. Sometimes with a lot of life support built in. The time when Booster was a bit dead also has to be emotionally scarring. And Booster by a comatose Beetle's bedside with nothing he could do? The whole world mourning someone else, only Gold focused on Blue?
They have been through some hard times.
And I haven't even started in on the mind control.
But they've got these issues that are excellent story engine. ... and not much story on Ao3. There might be old stuff around LJ but I forget how we ever managed to find it.
But I keep reading the few things I can find, because, I want to see how these to work things out. I want to see them fit again, with Ted finding self respect in a desk job, and Booster finally moved on enough he knows he's worth more than his endorsements and he and his family can be secure without the get rich schemes.
And the Rebirth comic where Ted is mentor to the next generation of hero is one angle on parts of that, but, other parts get weird, and it's not really the same background anyway.
So only fanfic might go there, and generally it doesn't.
The whole how do we fit now at least one of us retires thing is a theme across multiple pairings. Or just the thing where they get together in one specific high pressure high achievement set of circumstances, and what do they do after? Or the part where one is more often in need of rescue than the other, and really, how do you do a relationship where you're vulnerable like that?
There's all this interesting stuff to work through, and yet while they're in canon getting in fights with things, they're not so much working on this.
And I want to see what happens next.
There's a lot of stories about young people finding their callings and starting to be a hero. But not so many about After. And I'm interested.
So this mostly ended up as me rambling about Blue Beetle and Booster Gold, and they get changed every time canon hiccups, but I haven't followed it for years.
But I still have a lot of feelings about who I think I remember they used to be.
And are in fanfic, sometimes.
I've been reading the whole of some yuletide fandoms, Peter Grant/Thomas Nightingale of Rivers of London, Tony Foster/Lee Nicholas in Huff's Smoke series, and then I moved on to reading Blue Beetle/Booster Gold fic, Ted Kord and Michael Carter, in a wobbly assortment of canons.
I have not been reading the massive stack of MCU Steve/Tony or Clint/Coulson I have lying around in Marked to Read. I had a couple days detour into Atlantis John/Rodney. And I read any new Jack/Daniel I saw, cause it's not like there is much.
Plus there's some Mick Rory/ Leonard Snart around, but after what canon gave us, not a whole lot, and that getting either au or some odd issues.
... I'm actually staring at these couples and pondering how many of them had grief and resurrection issues. I... may have imprinted on weird things from Immortals? Or there's just a lot of weird grieving and time travel and sarcophagus type whatsits in fiction. I mean if you can fix it then why wouldn't you?
ANYway... these are not the couples with the mass drama of, say, Charles and Erik, having to fix the world and reconcile basic philosophy before they can happily ever after.
A bunch of them have chain of command issues ie they're not supposed to be dating within theirs. They're mostly navigating differences in power, in various ways. Dating the boss is one thing, dating a boss who can blow a hole in a tank with his mind is a little bit another. A lot of trust involved either way.
But Beetle and Booster are just partners. They were partners for the longest time. And then it went wobbly, and they somehow didn't fit any more, and that was when canon did the bad thing so they got stuck that way.
... canon did an assortment of weird things after that, but it has been a while since I knew which way was up in comics canon. This is just the read on it I can't let go of. And they did the same to Snart/Rory, only then they did it again with worse feeling, and it's just...
... their happily ever after, if they could ever get to it, isn't as simple as being both alive and loving each other. They did that. They still ended up out of sync.
And the best fic mileage is figuring out how, why, where they fit and why they didn't notice where they didn't, and how to make them work again.
With Beetle and Booster - it's weird calling them Ted and Michael, but Ted and Booster looks mismatched, even if that's what they called themselves... which is one expression of the problem really...
okay, so, Blue and Gold were inseparable... when they were both in comics at once, and the same one. So the reasons they click or don't, they look Doylist and unsatisfying, to some extent. The two get back together after a drifted apart break and now Ted is all mature and Booster isn't... because Ted had guest appearances in comics that moved him on from pure Bwahaha, and Booster didn't.
It's almost a time travel effect, and given the character backgrounds you could straight up play it that way - Booster skipped ahead, didn't think it would matter much, but now they don't click. What to do?
... I also like the potential of Booster's much older wife being a time travel story, kind of like Cap staying loyal to Peggy, but with more TARDIS or Time Sphere. This is because I don't like woman as punchline, even if it is Booster who is the joke.
And yeah I know the canon doesn't exactly click together smoothly. It's like the whole thing where Booster was briefly a tentacle monster and then nobody ever mentioned it, or anything else in that whole title. Apparently a bunch of stuff is retconned as a multi year practical joke.
comics.
But the interesting to me bits are just: they got out of synch and had arguments about maturity. And this was Booster failing to cope with Ted's disability, or any of the changes in his career. When they had roughly equal capabilities doing roughly the same work for compatible reasons, they clicked. But then they lost some aspects of that, and they had stuff to deal with, and they just didn't, quite, so there's this lost moment that Booster is trying to get back to. But Ted isn't physically able to go back. ... sometimes on account of being dead, but I was mostly thinking, heart condition. The characters aged enough that wildly improbable feats of daring do were just... too bendy and liable to ache. So Ted switched to a desk job. ... except when he didn't. ... which didn't work out too great for him.
So for Blue and Gold to work on a personal level, they either have to write the boring thing and enable Ted to be the guy he was in the early 90s, or the characters have to renegotiate their relationship around a physical disability that doesn't allow them to do things together the way they used to.
Which is way more interesting.
I have no idea where they went with the Waverider thing. Comics I don't know how to get hold of, much more recent than I gave up on DC. But if it doesn't dig in to that I'll still prefer fanfic.
We're not who we were, we can't go back, and the thing we're obsessed with in the past cannot in fact be fixed with time travel, so we have to renegotiate.
Characters who actually can time travel would feel this one differently.
But like, Ted and Michael had an age difference, probably maybe. Did different amounts of college with different degrees of success. When the job is hitting things together, no problem. But when either of them tries for other sorts of milestone, they don't have a robust framework to keep their relationship together.
I mean if they were married they'd have to discuss things like where to live and whose career took priority or, well, what happened would happen and they'd have separate lives. But for them as friends it happened because they'd not done a deciding phase, they'd just lived together because team, and the team wasn't there.
That's some good meaty stuff to fix. Booster got his own team and Beetle flunked the physical and everything changed out from under them.
But later on, the Booster that outlived Ted, depending on canon there's like Brave and the Bold where it seemed to me Booster was going back and spending extra time with his buddy?
Which would exacerbate the drift from his younger self's point of view because Ted wouldn't call cause he wouldn't know he needed to.
But the tragedy of losing someone is they never move on. They never have a new day new phase, new thoughts. And Booster would, did, will.
So even if he's doubling back and filling in the diary, he would eventually have a day when it's *Booster* who thinks *Beetle* is immature, because he has moved on from that particular joke or hang up.
So then what?
... in the sad world, then nothing, more sad and either getting stuck or letting go.
... I like fix its better.
But part of the argue they have about maturity is this different life paths thing gets turned into value judgements. Looking down on each other's lives. Big mess.
But the times they were doing the same things weren't quite for the same reasons, so their paths only overlap.
Ted Kord watched Dan Garrett die, and took up his mantle. Fill in a few puzzlers about why a scientist engineer was taking classes and hanging out with an archaeologist. I mean in comics logic of course if you find out your uncle is an aspiring supervillain you ask a superhero for help, but how they got close enough to know to do that is pre crisis and I know not of it, so I'm left to wonder. But, they were close, and Ted made a promise to carry on his Beetle work, and when a magic user goes looking in Ted's mind for his true spirit, he finds him wearing the uniform of Blue Beetle the first.
And then he has to retire.
Whatever the thing was that drove him, guilt or grief or a true calling to heroism of his own, he had to go from living that life to being retired, and he didn't get a whole lot of support from his community about it.
So what need did he fill with the costume? And what would he need to do instead, after?
... put it back on and die trying, apparently, but again, as a story end, that's frustrating.
Booster didn't make any oaths or have a dying mentor. But he did have survivor guilt. He went to the past because he thought he could do better there after screwing up his own life. In college. So he's basically a teen runaway with a much cooler outcome than usual. Maybe not teenage, but probably still. And suddenly he's in the past thinking he'll just step in and do everything better, but oh dear, it turns out life is complicated whenever you are. But Booster stuck with it, and became the hero he was trying to be.
But the problem is most people around him think he's doing it for money and glory.
But even before becoming a time traveller who just can't ever tell what he's done for everyone, that didn't quite fit.
The screw up he ran from? Was because he was trying to get money for his mom's medical bills. Fortune and glory on the football field were how he knew to do it. And that did not work out, because he got desperate and cheated, because he and his mom ran out of time.
Hence time travel.
So fortune and glory aren't the icing on top for Booster, they aren't some bonus you go looking for when mundane life is too boring. They're how to keep your family alive. Underneath every get rich quick scheme was a memory of gnawing hunger and medical bills that cost too much to keep someone alive.
Ted? As far as I know? Was a lot more comfortable than that.
His get rich quick wasn't from that kind of fear, and he wanted the glory, when he wanted it, to fuel his self respect. He was running from a self image as fat, geeky, and physically not enough when it mattered.
Same heroics fuelled by loss, different angles to come at it.
Booster running out of money is living the nightmare again, even if he actually has no one left to support. Ted physically unfit for the heroic life is stuck in his nightmare too, though again, he's not got someone particular to protect. Neither of them could cope with That One Day, so they both get a bit desperate of unmet need. And they both think the hero thing is about the here now needs, so they miss some of the reasons for the feels.
Or at least, that's the interesting stuff to dig in to.
Booster as Beetle's partner? Beetle cant protect him in the field like they used to, and Booster can do damn all about the heart condition, just like with his mother.
That has to be their personal nightmare. So how do they cope?
... comics stuff happened, the sad thing happened, they... didn't have time.
Ted has protected Booster before though by building him better tech. Sometimes with a lot of life support built in. The time when Booster was a bit dead also has to be emotionally scarring. And Booster by a comatose Beetle's bedside with nothing he could do? The whole world mourning someone else, only Gold focused on Blue?
They have been through some hard times.
And I haven't even started in on the mind control.
But they've got these issues that are excellent story engine. ... and not much story on Ao3. There might be old stuff around LJ but I forget how we ever managed to find it.
But I keep reading the few things I can find, because, I want to see how these to work things out. I want to see them fit again, with Ted finding self respect in a desk job, and Booster finally moved on enough he knows he's worth more than his endorsements and he and his family can be secure without the get rich schemes.
And the Rebirth comic where Ted is mentor to the next generation of hero is one angle on parts of that, but, other parts get weird, and it's not really the same background anyway.
So only fanfic might go there, and generally it doesn't.
The whole how do we fit now at least one of us retires thing is a theme across multiple pairings. Or just the thing where they get together in one specific high pressure high achievement set of circumstances, and what do they do after? Or the part where one is more often in need of rescue than the other, and really, how do you do a relationship where you're vulnerable like that?
There's all this interesting stuff to work through, and yet while they're in canon getting in fights with things, they're not so much working on this.
And I want to see what happens next.
There's a lot of stories about young people finding their callings and starting to be a hero. But not so many about After. And I'm interested.
So this mostly ended up as me rambling about Blue Beetle and Booster Gold, and they get changed every time canon hiccups, but I haven't followed it for years.
But I still have a lot of feelings about who I think I remember they used to be.
And are in fanfic, sometimes.
no subject
Date: 2018-02-07 11:44 am (UTC)Graduate students often teach and tend to get stuck with the classes most likely to be taken by non-majors. This could be something where all of the classes are 25 to 30 students but there are 20 sections or could be something with a big lecture of 600 students that has follow up discussion sections in smaller groups. The professor will lecture, the graduate student teaching assistant will grade homework and lead discussions.
They could also meet as part of a special interest club-- kayaking, solving world hunger, performing Gilbert and Sullivan.
I attended a big university, so this stuff won't apply at schools that are very small.
Graduate students who don't get financial support from their programs (likely in archaeology but not on engineering) also sometimes teach at smaller schools nearby.
Undergraduates with no training in archaeology also often get recruited as volunteers for underfunded digs. It looks good on a resume, covers room and board, and most first timers assume glamor and adventure instead of backbreaking work.
Depending on engineering specialty, such a person might work a dig, as a professional consultant, that needs a water pump running constantly to make digging possible or help design and deploy some scanning devices.
no subject
Date: 2018-02-09 11:14 pm (UTC)