New fic: Kings

[gwyn]

I have now completed both my Fandom Loves Puerto Rico auction items! The vid I made for minim calibre I'm waiting to post till closer to the Escapade vid show, but the Kings fic I wrote for innie_darling is up now. My little short story turned into another 10k monster, how does this keep happening?

The Captains and the Kings (10565 words) by gwyneth rhys
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Kings (TV 2009)
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Jack Benjamin, Ephram Samuels, Original Characters, David Shepherd, Lucinda Wolfson
Additional Tags: Post-Series, referenced suicide attempts, Character Death Fix, Rescue Missions, Personal Growth: Slow Burn Edition
Summary:

He stood for a moment gazing up at the night sky clotted with stars. As a boy he'd been fascinated by exploration and seafaring, and had learned how to steer by the sky when the king took them sailing. Every constellation in this hemisphere, every visible planet, had once been familiar to him, and he tried to name the ones he could recall, but they were too few, now. He'd let other interests take their places.

Comments

[mackiemesser]

Haven't watched the show, but I have the vaguest gist of it from the internet, so I'm gonna read it!

Thanks!

[kass]

I still haven't seen Kings. I should probably fix that, huh? I keep thinking it would be relevant to my interests.

[gwyn]

It's a really amazing show, but it's not without its problems, though Sebastian had kind of a breakout role in it and he is really incredible, and much of the cast is also quite good. But on the biblical level, it takes some liberties with the story in modernizing David and the world around him that are at times really irritating, especially in that they make Jonathan (Jack, Sebastian's character) and David enemies rather than have them love one another. Of course, David's a complete heterosexual. Some of the mythology is intersting in how they made it modern, but it's also…well, quite Christianized, which has made my Jewish friends laugh a lot. Like, Samuel the prophet becomes Reverend Samuels, and his church is very much a modern Christian style church interior, and Saul is Silas in this story.

But it has this cool (some say pretentious) sort of biblical/Shakespearean/modern jargon language (which fan writers often have trouble mimicking), and it explores some important themes, and it's just…a really interesting concept. Sebastian was recently talking about it in an interview and he said that if it had been on a pay channel or cable network it might have fared better, it was just ahead of its time, and I'd agree. I'm not sure the showrunners could have pulled off more and kept it interesting, and I found the guy who played David very uncompelling and the character really boring and flat, but most people I know adore him so he seems to have different responses.

My main issue is honestly how they made Jack so awful in some respects so he could be the dark to David's light, and that was just shoddy writing to me, and also that they made Jack gay but David so straight, so that there could be a young person's romance in the story. I have little patience for that sort of shit. But fanfic is very, very much a Jack/David orientation, I'll say that.

[spikedluv]

Bookmarking because, dang it, I still haven't watched this!