i feel like martin freeman is really underrated which seems weird to say because he has a huge fan base and all of his performances are always very well reviewed but he isn’t considered one of our great modern dramatic actors yet which i truly believe he should be
his style is so original and i honest to god can’t think of any other actor who gives more emotionally authentic performances or even just anybody who is better at realism in delivery/speech in general he is truly one of a kind and i can’t wait for him to get himself an emmy with fargo he is so talented and i love him so much
“omfg is that a next generation top? so you think picard is better than kirk? wow loser kirk is way better!”
“what, really? you like the reboot? you’re not a trUE fan omfg i bet you’ve never even seen the original series!?!!!?!?”
i think my favorite thing about this is that the light fixture looks like a tiny crown
Writing is magic because it harnesses the energy generated by the chaos within.
Linda Gray Sexton, from 45 Mercy Street: Anne Sexton (via corvidae-and-crossroads)
On Fanfiction
I was cruising through the net, following the cold trail of one of the periodic “Is or is not Fanfic the Ultimate Literary Evil?” arguments that crop up regularly, and I’m now bursting to make a point that I never see made by fic defenders.
We’re all familiar with the normal defenses of fic: it’s done out of love, it’s training, it’s for fun. Those are all good and valid defenses!
But they miss something. They damn with faint praise. Because the thing is, when you commit this particular Ultimate Literary Evil you’ve now told a story. And stories are powerful. The fact that it wasn’t in an original world or with original characters doesn’t necessarily make it less powerful to any given reader.
I would never have made this argument a few years ago. A few years ago I hadn’t received messages from people who were deeply touched by something I wrote in fanfic. So what if it’s only two or three or four people, and I used someone else’s world and characters? For those two or three or four people, I wrote something fucking important. You cannot tell me that isn’t a valid use of my time and expect me to feel chastened. I don’t buy it. I won’t feel ashamed. I will laugh when you call something that touches other people ‘literary masturbation.’ Apparently you’re not too up on your sex terminology.
Someone could argue that if I’d managed the same thing with original characters in an original world, it could’ve touched more people. They might be right! On the other hand, it might never have been accepted for publication, or found a market if self published, and more importantly I would never have written it because I didn’t realize I could write. The story wouldn’t have happened. Instead, thanks to fanfic being a thing, it did. And for two or three or four people it mattered. When we talk about defending fanfic, can we occasionally talk about that?
I once had an active serviceman who told me that my FF7 and FF8 fic helped get him through the war. That’ll humble you. People have told me my fanfic helped get them through long nights, through grief, through hard times. It was a solace to people who needed solace. And because it was fanfic, it was easier to reach the people who needed it. They knew those people already. That world was dear to them already. They were being comforted by friends, not strangers.
Stories are like swords. Even if you’ve borrowed the sword, even if you didn’t forge it yourself from ore and fire, it’s still your body and your skill that makes use of it. It can still draw blood, it can strike down things that attack you, it can still defend something you hold dear. Don’t get me wrong, a sword you’ve made yourself is powerful. You know it down to its very molecules, are intimate with its heft and its reach. It is part of your own arm. But that can make you hesitate to use it sometimes, if you’re afraid that swinging it too recklessly will notch the blade. Is it strong enough, you think. Will it stand this? I worked so hard to make it. A blade you snatched up because you needed a weapon in your hand is not prey to such fears. You will use it to beat against your foes until it either saves you or it shatters.
But whether you made that sword yourself or picked it up from someone who fell on the field, the fight you fight with it is always yours.
Literary critics who sneer at fanfic are so infuriatingly shortsighted, because they all totally ignore how their precious literature, as in individual stories that are created, disseminated, and protected as commercial products, are a totally modern industrial capitalist thing and honestly not how humans have ever done it before like a couple centuries ago. Plus like, who benefits most from literature? Same dudes who benefit most from capitalism: the people in power, the people with privilege. There’s a reason literary canon is composed of fucking white straight dudes who write about white straight dudes fucking.
Fanfiction is a modern expression of the oral tradition—for the rest of us, by the rest of us, about the rest of us—and I think that’s fucking wonderful and speaks to a need that absolutely isn’t being met by the publishing industry. The need to come together as a close community, I think, and take the characters of our mythology and tell them getting drunk and married and tricked and left behind and sent to war and comforted and found again and learning the lessons that every generation learns over and over. It’s wonderful. I love it. I’m always going to love it.
Some badass arguments for the next time somebody pooh-poohs on fanworks in your vicinity.
Do you ever have passive OTPs
Like, you don’t read fic, you don’t look for art
but whenever something turns up you’re like hell fuckin yea
A writer is a world trapped in a person.
Victor Hugo (via post-traumatic-apathy)
The Chemistry of Mycroft and Lestrade
It occurs to me as I’m elbow-deep in editing this Mycroft/Lestrade story—and feeling that exquisite torment of loving this story, of being proud of it—that there are those who will never bother to read the thing simply because they can’t be bothered reading anything with the pairing. That gives me a sad. I wish I could convince them otherwise.
See, to me, there’s so much potential in these two. They’re visceral. They’re compelling. As someone who writes both, the problems, issues, and dynamics between Mycroft and Lestrade are just so different from those between John and Sherlock. There’s so much to explore between the two that isn’t often explored with John and Sherlock, or is explored in vastly different ways: Age. Experience. Interaction with work colleagues. The various manners in which they enact the business of caring for others. How the two must fight to fit a relationship between them into such busy, work-entrenched lives.
All pairings are different from one another, obviously. That’s the way of it. Well-written stories are the volatile combination of two or more characters, and that reaction is by definition going to be different with any other combination. However, I’ve talked to many people who have said, “oh, I read Johnlock, but I just don’t care about Mystrade.” And when I ask why, it turns out that they’ve built up this image of the pairing that may reflect the way Mycroft and Lestrade appear to be, but it doesn’t consider what happens beneath the surface when you put these two disparate elements in a room together, shake it up, and let it go.
It can be explosive. Illuminating. Rich. Satisfying. Real.
It can be a story of two men who have achieved within their own particular spheres negotiating how they interact with each other. Two men who have separate lives of their own who nevertheless decide to meet in the middle. Two men whose baggage doesn’t necessarily match, but they decide, regardless, to try.
The combination of Mycroft Holmes and Gregory Lestrade is so much more than the sum of its parts.
I admit, I didn’t get it at first. I read books, I wrote my own original pairings, I read and wrote Sherlock/John. My dance card was full up, I thought. I knew Mycroft/Lestrade existed, of course, but I just didn’t bother to get involved. Greg has silvering hair, and Mycroft carries an umbrella, and what else can there be between them? What more did I really need to know?
But then for some forgotten reason I read one of their stories, and all that changed. I read a story, and I finally understood that there was a there, there. I read a story, and all my barriers crumbled away into nothing the first time Greg made Mycroft smile. I fell in love.
If you’ve read good Mycroft/Lestrade and it’s not been your cup of tea, that’s one thing. I can understand that. But if you haven’t even tried any, if you’ve rejected them on spec, I just really wish I could convince you to give them a try.
I wonder if you wouldn’t fall just a bit in love, too.