to all the fandoms I loved before
Apr. 21st, 2010 02:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lotesseI've been making The Boy watch through Classic Battlestar Galactica on Hulu with me, and falling in love with the show all over again. I had a thing for it back in high school; somehow it totally feel through the cracks in my fanbrain until now. I've got tiny little hearts love for it. Love that is full of sighs and nerdery. Seriously passionate love.
I was fifteen the summer I first saw watched BSG, looking after a friend's little baby. The kid took lots of naps; the friend had cable tv. I'd never had much access to tv, not having one in my own home, and at fifteen I was really starting to get into media fandom. The SciFi channel used to run episodes of a different syndicated show each afternoon, and I'd watch while the baby slept. I picked up a lot of fandoms that summer: Xena, Classic Trek. Some of those fandoms I've kept up in continuously. I think there were a lot of reasons why I fell out of BSG Classic for so long, but I remember the furor around the reboot as being a major cause. Dirk Benedict was such an absolute ass about the whole thing, and that upset me, and I just didn't have the social confidence to navigate my allegiance to progressive media fandom on the one hand and my deep affection for BSG on the other. I was a kid. I didn't have a LiveJournal yet. And everyone was upset; many behaved badly. It felt like legitimate resistance to the nature of the reboot was getting wrapped up in the genderfail, getting things pretty terribly tangled up. It was easier just to move my attention to more active, less strife-torn fannish spaces.
The first episode of Battlestar Galactica I saw was "The Lost Warrior," a possibly ill-advised western planet ep with a high cheese factor, a number of excitingy chest-baring shirts, and an absolute excess of emotion, care, and sentiment. Apollo, Our Hero, crashes his fighter on this little western planet, angsts a great deal about how much he misses his tiny adopted child, and speaks out against senseless violence. Dorky as the ep is, I'm not surprised that it caught me: the protagonist is characterized primarily through pacifism and parenting, which was pretty much birdlime for a girl like me. Also, preeetty.
It was weird re-watching it. Most of my fandoms I've either had continuously since I was a little kid, or I've picked up as an adult. BSG Classic I had a passionate love affair with as a teenager, and then didn't see again for a long time. It wasn't my baaaby fandom, because all my baaaby fandoms were text-based, but it was one of the first media-based narratives that I ever got lubed up over. And it's like it was preserved in amber for me: I feel all flushed and teenagery about it. Kind of breathless and vaguely inarticulate and sort of excitingly ashamed and secretive. It's not really a love affair; it's a crush. I have this driving need to draw little hearts around something.
So here's my love-letter to Classic Battlestar:
I love this show for its open sentimentality. I love it for its engagement with issues of family and care - seriously, how many other shows can y'all think of where the thirty-something hero actually has to parent a child in a prolonged and ongoing fashion? Supernatural dodges it. Stargate SG1 dodges it. Angel the Series dodges it. But my Apollo falls in love with his baby before he falls in love with the baby's mother. Seriously - they hook up because the child is traumatized and his mother gloms onto Apollo in the hope that he can help. She tells him she got the idea that he was good with kids. It's ridiculous. And when she gets fridged (sigh) and he's left a widower with a six-year-old no one - not him, not the other characters, not the show - doubts that he'll take care of the kid himself. The child asks questions and needs to be looked after when Apollo's off engaging in heroics and sometimes he's complicated. It's great.
I love the show for superficial reasons - Apollo has awfully pretty big green eyes, and there are these great bits where they engage in sporting events by wearing aggressively tiny pants and rolling all over each other. I love it for the hugging and crying and for the way that these people obviously really care about one another. I love it for its random polytheistic vaguely-Egyptian take on Christianity - not to mention the pagan names and the fake!Egyptian combat helmets that don't look good on anybody at all.
I love it for its female characters and for its characters of color. It doesn't always do terribly well with the girls, but there are four solid girl characters and a few more peripheral ones, and they all have professions and interests and, frequently, relationships with one another. They compete for men with one another, but they also actually manage to be friends. One of the peripheral girls is a woman of color. Both of the male characters of color are in positions of power, and one of them is seriously delicious and frequently shirtless. The show passes the Bechdel test in terms of race - I think it also does so in terms of gender, but there's an awful lot of Talking About Men going on.
It's definitely a Warm Fuzzy kind of show: no serious political analysis, no real darkness, no moral greys. It's a magical 'verse where the military can be idealistic, where the enemy is totally, perfectly Evil, where religious patriarchs are noble and also factually correct and not moonbrained or power-mad. It's flatly unrealistic - but no more so than Stargate, not really. If you can let go of your disbelief in a military without an attaching industrial complex, it's very sweet. (I have this theory in development that Classic BSG is a medieval everyman play in space. There's even an encounter with the devil - one that leads to significant slashyness. the show works much better once you start giving everything allegory-style Capital Letters.)
And yeah, it's dorky and seventies and badly filmed and it recycles effects shots - but it's got some great bits. In the last episode filmed before the show was canceled, Apollo drags his bff Starbuck and Starbuck's girl Cassie and also Sheba, with whom Apollo utterly and very amusingly fails to have sexual chemistry, up to the very top of the gargantuan starship, where's he's found the last remaining Celestial Dome. He activates a mechanism that peels back the covering to reveal a clear chamber, completely open to the stars. Previous generations used it to take navigational observations. there's a sextant! Apollo tells his friends that he found the place a while ago, and had to fix up the mechanism, which is so geeky I just can't even, and he likes to go up there to think and look at the stars the way his ancestors did. And it's all so romantically adorable that I end up cooing and petting my laptop screen. Nothing can reduce me to incoherence faster than this show, for srs. Sigh.
The next time I make it up home, I need to remember to grab my tapes. I hid my media-fannishness pretty assiduously from my parents - it was too lowbrow for me to be able to explain it to them. They would have seen it all as a waste of my time. There wasn't a tv in the house, but I managed to tape shows at my grandparents' house when they were out of town, and then I'd sneak the tapes home and watch them, turned almost all the way down, very very late at night. I labeled them all in elvish runes, so that my parents couldn't read the episode titles. Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, Quantum Leap, and The Sentinel all featured heavily, and they were my secret fannish stash. Now I can feel nostalgic about them - but I don't miss the years when I couldn't watch dorky sff whenever I wanted to!
If any of you all ever watched this show, and want fic, have a pair of recs:
Anna (starry_diadem) has been writing amazing novel-length stories in this fandom since the first time I feel for it. She's an amazing powerhouse of a writer - the novels are all twisty and plotful and fantastically melodramatic in a really satisfying way, and her shorter works are sweet and light and lovely. Her website is here: The Celestial Dome.
Josephine Darcy has one single story in this fandom, Sacrifice, which is the most delectably romantic take on Aliens Made Them Do It that I've ever seen. Seriously - I want to assign the her kissing scenes as a perfect example of Exactly How To Do It.
I was fifteen the summer I first saw watched BSG, looking after a friend's little baby. The kid took lots of naps; the friend had cable tv. I'd never had much access to tv, not having one in my own home, and at fifteen I was really starting to get into media fandom. The SciFi channel used to run episodes of a different syndicated show each afternoon, and I'd watch while the baby slept. I picked up a lot of fandoms that summer: Xena, Classic Trek. Some of those fandoms I've kept up in continuously. I think there were a lot of reasons why I fell out of BSG Classic for so long, but I remember the furor around the reboot as being a major cause. Dirk Benedict was such an absolute ass about the whole thing, and that upset me, and I just didn't have the social confidence to navigate my allegiance to progressive media fandom on the one hand and my deep affection for BSG on the other. I was a kid. I didn't have a LiveJournal yet. And everyone was upset; many behaved badly. It felt like legitimate resistance to the nature of the reboot was getting wrapped up in the genderfail, getting things pretty terribly tangled up. It was easier just to move my attention to more active, less strife-torn fannish spaces.
The first episode of Battlestar Galactica I saw was "The Lost Warrior," a possibly ill-advised western planet ep with a high cheese factor, a number of excitingy chest-baring shirts, and an absolute excess of emotion, care, and sentiment. Apollo, Our Hero, crashes his fighter on this little western planet, angsts a great deal about how much he misses his tiny adopted child, and speaks out against senseless violence. Dorky as the ep is, I'm not surprised that it caught me: the protagonist is characterized primarily through pacifism and parenting, which was pretty much birdlime for a girl like me. Also, preeetty.
It was weird re-watching it. Most of my fandoms I've either had continuously since I was a little kid, or I've picked up as an adult. BSG Classic I had a passionate love affair with as a teenager, and then didn't see again for a long time. It wasn't my baaaby fandom, because all my baaaby fandoms were text-based, but it was one of the first media-based narratives that I ever got lubed up over. And it's like it was preserved in amber for me: I feel all flushed and teenagery about it. Kind of breathless and vaguely inarticulate and sort of excitingly ashamed and secretive. It's not really a love affair; it's a crush. I have this driving need to draw little hearts around something.
So here's my love-letter to Classic Battlestar:
I love this show for its open sentimentality. I love it for its engagement with issues of family and care - seriously, how many other shows can y'all think of where the thirty-something hero actually has to parent a child in a prolonged and ongoing fashion? Supernatural dodges it. Stargate SG1 dodges it. Angel the Series dodges it. But my Apollo falls in love with his baby before he falls in love with the baby's mother. Seriously - they hook up because the child is traumatized and his mother gloms onto Apollo in the hope that he can help. She tells him she got the idea that he was good with kids. It's ridiculous. And when she gets fridged (sigh) and he's left a widower with a six-year-old no one - not him, not the other characters, not the show - doubts that he'll take care of the kid himself. The child asks questions and needs to be looked after when Apollo's off engaging in heroics and sometimes he's complicated. It's great.
I love the show for superficial reasons - Apollo has awfully pretty big green eyes, and there are these great bits where they engage in sporting events by wearing aggressively tiny pants and rolling all over each other. I love it for the hugging and crying and for the way that these people obviously really care about one another. I love it for its random polytheistic vaguely-Egyptian take on Christianity - not to mention the pagan names and the fake!Egyptian combat helmets that don't look good on anybody at all.
I love it for its female characters and for its characters of color. It doesn't always do terribly well with the girls, but there are four solid girl characters and a few more peripheral ones, and they all have professions and interests and, frequently, relationships with one another. They compete for men with one another, but they also actually manage to be friends. One of the peripheral girls is a woman of color. Both of the male characters of color are in positions of power, and one of them is seriously delicious and frequently shirtless. The show passes the Bechdel test in terms of race - I think it also does so in terms of gender, but there's an awful lot of Talking About Men going on.
It's definitely a Warm Fuzzy kind of show: no serious political analysis, no real darkness, no moral greys. It's a magical 'verse where the military can be idealistic, where the enemy is totally, perfectly Evil, where religious patriarchs are noble and also factually correct and not moonbrained or power-mad. It's flatly unrealistic - but no more so than Stargate, not really. If you can let go of your disbelief in a military without an attaching industrial complex, it's very sweet. (I have this theory in development that Classic BSG is a medieval everyman play in space. There's even an encounter with the devil - one that leads to significant slashyness. the show works much better once you start giving everything allegory-style Capital Letters.)
And yeah, it's dorky and seventies and badly filmed and it recycles effects shots - but it's got some great bits. In the last episode filmed before the show was canceled, Apollo drags his bff Starbuck and Starbuck's girl Cassie and also Sheba, with whom Apollo utterly and very amusingly fails to have sexual chemistry, up to the very top of the gargantuan starship, where's he's found the last remaining Celestial Dome. He activates a mechanism that peels back the covering to reveal a clear chamber, completely open to the stars. Previous generations used it to take navigational observations. there's a sextant! Apollo tells his friends that he found the place a while ago, and had to fix up the mechanism, which is so geeky I just can't even, and he likes to go up there to think and look at the stars the way his ancestors did. And it's all so romantically adorable that I end up cooing and petting my laptop screen. Nothing can reduce me to incoherence faster than this show, for srs. Sigh.
The next time I make it up home, I need to remember to grab my tapes. I hid my media-fannishness pretty assiduously from my parents - it was too lowbrow for me to be able to explain it to them. They would have seen it all as a waste of my time. There wasn't a tv in the house, but I managed to tape shows at my grandparents' house when they were out of town, and then I'd sneak the tapes home and watch them, turned almost all the way down, very very late at night. I labeled them all in elvish runes, so that my parents couldn't read the episode titles. Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, Quantum Leap, and The Sentinel all featured heavily, and they were my secret fannish stash. Now I can feel nostalgic about them - but I don't miss the years when I couldn't watch dorky sff whenever I wanted to!
If any of you all ever watched this show, and want fic, have a pair of recs:
Anna (
starry_diadem) has been writing amazing novel-length stories in this fandom since the first time I feel for it. She's an amazing powerhouse of a writer - the novels are all twisty and plotful and fantastically melodramatic in a really satisfying way, and her shorter works are sweet and light and lovely. Her website is here: The Celestial Dome.Josephine Darcy has one single story in this fandom, Sacrifice, which is the most delectably romantic take on Aliens Made Them Do It that I've ever seen. Seriously - I want to assign the her kissing scenes as a perfect example of Exactly How To Do It.