somniloquence

I have this theory (my theory actually goes better with a large glass of alcohol in hand, but I can't do that over the net) about slash: 90% of slash fandom has to have a girl. They don't know they want a girl, they think they don't, but they do. So one guy gets to be the girl --

I don't disagree with that. In a way, given that most slash writers are women, it makes sense. It's a) what they are familiar with and while it may not go as far as self-identification, it's still close enough to count and b) it's what they are familiar with [g] in that it's what most of us (not all) but most of us grew up reading -- that kind of romance, the soft against the hard, the emotional against the logical, the taming of men by love, the rise of a woman's self esteem by being the one to tame such a wild creature. That's a highly idealized look at it and I'm not abandoning all my feminist roots, but that framework is there, for nearly every woman regardless of whether they embrace it, revile it or want to change it -- it's still a common point of reference.

which is what I noticed right away with Brian. And they make him such a fucking saint and it's just like... jesus christ, he let the criminal go! He's not much better!

Well, I'd agree that he's not a saint, but at the same time, I don't think my impression of the fandom as a whole is that he's made out to be one. More like a tarnished angel…throwing it all away for love. I do it myself to some extent mostly because I think *Dom* sees him that way. I mean, Brian ends up forcing Dom to look at things differently through the whole movie. Not just what he's doing with his life, but everything. Dom tacitly gives his approval to Dom and Mia when you kind of get the impression that maybe Mia and Dom have clashed on this before. Set up or not, Brian saves Dom's ass from the cops after the first race, making him wonder where his team was and how much reciprocity is going on there -- because given the party scene Dom and Brian walk into, if Dom had been picked up, he might have been cooling his heels in jail overnight until someone gave him a phone, and my guess is that it would have been Mia he'd call to either bail him out or come get him, rather than Vince or Leon or even Letty. And even after Brain reveals that he's a cop, Dom still owes him, for Vince, for doing that Dom couldn't. There's a lot of sacrifice on Brian 's part regardless of motive and on some level, Dom had to wonder why Brian is like that…yeah, he let him go, and if you take 2F2F into account, Brian then *ran* and didn't face the music, not voluntarily. In my own head, in my own writing, I have that in the back of my mind -- that in UB, if Dom hadn't come back (also regardless of reason) Brian would have run anyway. So for me, the idea was to balance the scales back out -- only Dom doesn't know he id. I'm not sure Brian realizes it entirely. Be a different twist to take if I ever get around to doing another ending.

I'll come back to this but it's midnight here and my brain is shutting down.