Friday open thread: we love the things we love for what they are

[dolorosa_12]

Again, I've elected to roll the current snowflake_challenge prompt into today's open thread, since it's a fun prompting question:

Share a favourite piece of original canon (a show, a specific TV episode, a storyline, a book or series, a scene from a movie, etc) and explain why you love it so much.



I always feel a bit weird doing these, because all my fandoms of the heart are fandoms-of-one, the sorts of things that I'd be lucky to get given as gifts for Yuletide, and they have potentially offputting elements (teenage protagonists, a writing style people will either love or hate, divisive relationship dynamics, and so on). So I can talk about why I love them forever, but assume that no one will take me up on the recommendation, or not be hooked by the same things that first hooked me. A lot of these canons are things that I've loved unstintingly for three decades; they're a part of me — they've seeped into my bones, into the story I tell about myself.

I've written a lot of primers/manifestos/gushing walls of emotion over the years!



Adèle Geras's Girls in the Velvet Frame (a widowed Jewish mother and her five daughters living their lives in genteel poverty in 1910s Jerusalem; a celebration of the quiet, powerful, ordinary lives of girls and women).

Kate Elliott's Crossroads trilogy (epic fantasy which interrogates the trope of the rightful, chosen, heroic saviour ruler, and pulls an incredible trick on both the reader and my favourite character in the books)

Bonus post about my favourite character from this series

Sophia McDougall's Romanitas trilogy (dystopian alt-history series in which the Roman Empire never fell, but instead spread to cover half the world, in which a band of misfits and dispossessed people (some with supernatural abilities) take on the might of empire)

Bonus post about my favourite character from this trilogy — my second-favourite fictional character of all time, the one, the only Noviana Una, the character depicted on my default icon

Catherine Jinks's Pagan Chronicles (children's historical fiction set during the Third Crusade in Jerusalem, and later in medieval Languedoc)

Babylon Berlin (historical fiction TV series — part crime drama, part political/espionage thriller, part devastating portrait of a very specific time and place — set in the Weimar Republic)

Trawling back through my tags, the only thing I'm surprised to find missing is Galax Arena. I guess at some point I'll have to write a primer for that.

What about you? Feel free to link back to your own posts if you've already answered this prompt for Snowflake.

Comments

[raven]

I love this question about individual scenes and am going to throw lots of things at you! I'm going to explain the backgrounds to these, forgive me if you already know these shows.

So firstly there's MASH, the show of my heart, which is about a US military hospital near the front lines in the Korean War, staffed by lots of good people who really wish they were somewhere else. They have an episode where a guy has come in claiming that he's Jesus Christ, and won't be convinced otherwise. They find out that he's really a bomber pilot who's had a nervous breakdown, but can't get him to admit to that or anything other than being Jesus. Okay, says Sidney, the unit psychiatrist, if you're Christ, what are you doing here, in this awful place?

Where else would you expect me to be?

All right, says Sidney, who is Jewish. Answer me this. Is it true that God answers all prayers?

And the guy looks up at him, and the camera, and says, "Yes. Sometimes the answer is no."

And this is a show that has only recently taken a turn to being a bit drama as well as comedy and it really is mostly comedy; they've wrung lots of humour out of a guy who thinks he's God. It's a shattering scene, perfectly written and acted, and it kills me every time. Sometimes the answer is no! my god.

Secondly! Deep Space Nine, which is a terribly complicated Star Trek show. Right at the start, it's about these fascist aliens, the Cardassians, who have just withdrawn from Bajor, the planet they've been oppressing with violence for fifty years. One of the main characters, Kira, was a Bajoran Resistance fighter and has spent her entire life fighting, and hating, the Cardassians. Cut to seven years later, when everyone, Bajor, Cardassians and Federation alike, is in a war against the Dominion who want to invade and kill them all. They're already occupying Cardassia, and the guy who takes up the rebellion is a guy named Damar. He's still a Cardassian and was part of the occupying force on Bajor, but he's also an ordinary person with a family, he has a drinking problem but he's trying to quit, etc. He has no idea how to run a rebellion, and Kira the resistance fighter teaches him (with a sigh as to how her life came to this). And they respect each other: Damar values her expertise, and Kira respects a man fighting for his people.

Then the news comes that the Dominion have killed Damar's children back home, and he says, "What kind of people give those orders?"

And Kira turns to him and says, "Yeah, Damar, what kind of people give those orders?"

Damar breaks after that, and it is incredible. Seven years of amazing storytelling has been required to get them to this point, and it puts a crown on it. Finally, someone asks that question. I think about it every time I hear about real-life terrorist movements and occupations. It's just so good.

And finally. Frasier, the sitcom of my heart that isn't MASH, which is about a psychiatrist in Seattle and his extremely neurotic family. Frasier's brother Niles is also a psychiatrist and has just learned that his wife wants a divorce. Which is funny, but played mostly straight; it's really a terrible thing that's happening to him and he's in denial about it. The other plot is a straight-up sitcom plot about Frasier and Niles's father being persuaded to throw away a bunch of crap he got off the shopping channel in the eighties. Then something triggers Niles, and it finally hits him that yes, his wife is leaving him, and his life as he knows it is over, and starts having a panic attack and won't be soothed by his family. He locks himself into the bathroom, and a minute later we hear the sound of a gunshot.

And then he comes out again, covered top-to-toe with shaving foam. Because of an eighties device for heating shaving foam that his father got off the shopping channel. And also much calmer and ready to cope with life. It is so funny, and the characterisation so perfect, I have seen it a thousand times and I laugh every time.

Honestly I love this question! I could probably manage a dozen more.

[dolorosa_12]

I know of all of these shows, but have never watched any of them, so I appreciate the additional context, which really illuminates the meaning and weight of the moments you've described. (It's also really making me want to watch Deep Space Nine, although ... seven seasons! I don't have the energy for that amount of commitment to TV shows these days. But that sounds like some incredible writing.)

[likeadeuce]

So I can't remember if you've read this series or not, but I know some of your readers will have and others won't, so I'll try to talk about something in a way that is comprehensible but not excessively spoilery --

I think about the "table duel" scene in Tamsyn Muir's Gideon the Ninth -- I've read it a bunch of times and there are parts I still don't fully understand (why do the characters choose to be standing on a table for their duel? What kind of table are we supposed to be picturing, why does the table not fall over?? -- yet it's very memorable because "oh yes the table fight!" gets you to the heart of a very complex book.) Gideon, our point of view character, isn't even in the duel, she's just WATCHING two other characters duel.

I love this scene because it brings together a lot of complex threads that have set down throughout the novel -- this is the power dynamic between necromancers and their cavaliers, these are the customs for how duels are conducted, these are the parameters of the extremely complicated key-collection game that the characters are involved in, these are the cultures of the various houses and the goals of their representatives -- and suddenly it all comes together in a competition that's exciting even if all those other things haven't crystallized for the reader. In fact, all these things have not crystallized for GIDEON, even though we're getting the whole story through her eyes.

And this is a moment where the complex POV games that Tamsyn has been pulling really come together because Gideon (and thus the reader) is not privy to everything that is going on, BUT Gideon/Reader are privy to a key piece of information, which is that Camilla, the character most people expect to lose the duel, is a good fighter. Gideon knows this because earlier in the book, we got a seemingly just-for-fun scene of Camilla and Gideon fighting, seemingly just because, like with superheroes, when a couple of badasses run into each other, they fight for no good reason. However, Gideon has not had an opportunity to tell anybody this because (1) no one asked because they assume Gideon has no useful information and (2) Gideon is supposed to pretend to be under a vow of silence for [REASONS].

So the fight scene is a fun fight scene that solidifies the stakes and brings the different factions and their goals into sharp relief, but it's also just got that little extra bit of glee from knowing that you and Gideon are in on a secret that everybody else is going to find out soon.

(And then Camilla kicks ass, and Palamedes gets to be righteously indignant and Gideon gets to be smug and despite the very dire and urgent stakes of the story at large, the reader gets to have a lot of damn fun).

[dolorosa_12]

I read Gideon the Ninth at a time of my life when it really was the wrong book to be reading, found it not to my taste (whereas I suspect the problem was its unremittingly bleak outlook, which, encountered during a mental health low point, was never going to work), and never continued with the series. But I know a lot of people in my Dreamwidth circle adore those books, I enjoy your description of that moment, and I'm certain that there are other people who read my journal who appreciate it as much as you.

[chestnut_pod]

I'm afraid it looks like my library doesn't have any of those, which is shocking! I have at least now requested the Geras; I hope they acquire it.

[dolorosa_12]

The Geras book is fantastic — I really hope they order it, and that you have the chance to read it.