Hey, you guys, I got a Ripper Street story for Yuletide! I didn't dare hope that I would get that, so I was very excited. It's one of the rare shows where I love everyone in the cast, so it was hard to name just four characters for my request, but this focuses on the relationship of Jackson, Drake, and Reid (with bonus awesome Susan) while solving a crime in Whitechapel. Go read and leave feedback for my author!
Nostalgia for the Light (6602 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom:
Ripper StreetRating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Characters: Edmund Reid, Homer Jackson, Bennet Drake, Susan Hart
Summary:
Inspector Reid, Sergeant Drake and Captain Jackson investigate a case that leaves them more than a bit worse for wear. At least they have each other.
Man, I'll tell you, these days you can only expect to get feedback on anything at Yuletide time, it seems, but I rather hilariously chose to write two stories in a fandom so small that no one but the recipients are going to read these stories. Sigh. I mean, I don't even know anyone in my own fannish life who reads this fandom, so I figured it was going to be pretty much invisible.
But this is the first time in YEARS I've been able to just fuck around all day Christmas eve and day and do nothing. I mean, I know I need to do my Festivid, but outside of that I don't have a single thing weighing on me as I have for so long, no deadlines to meet beyond that, and it is just glorious. Yesterday and today there was sun in Seattle, which never happens here at this holiday, and I strolled up to Starbucks listening to my Christmas playlist, and just enjoyed
not having to do anything and not having anyone dying. Today I've just read most of the day. Soon I will start drinking (which I did last night as well) the alcoholic beverages and reading more fanfic. And there's so much good stuff so far!!!
Starting in January, I'm going to steal
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
raveninthewind's 31 flavors rec meme, and make a rec a day for the month in something different every day. So I'm saving up some Yuletide recs for that, but I've found some lovely stuff so far.
I am behind on memeage.
Today's question:
quarter_to_five said: talk about
The Middleman.
I haven't got to the Ms yet on my Yuletide wanderings, so I haven't read this year's crop of Middleman stories, but I can't wait. People seem to always bring their A game to this fandom, I don't know why.
There is so much to love about this show: its balls to the wall weirdness, the clever banter and pop cultural references, the hilariously low production values that somehow seem to transcend their quality, the fact that even if bad people were doing nefarious things, no one was all that evil. But mostly what I loved about it was that it had a female protagonist who was best friends with another young woman, in an extremely positive relationship, and that the male mentor of the show believed in and supported that female protagonist all the way. He was never patriarchal or condescending to her, in fact he picked her out as his successor, and he genuinely loved her and wanted her to succeed.
Honestly, I can't think of a male-female relationship like it on TV, and we so rarely see female friendships as portrayed by Wendy Watson and Lacey Thornfield. It didn't hurt, either, that Wendy was Latina, and how incredibly rare is that, as well? Wendy was smart, cool, acerbic, capable, without vanity, artistic, and just plain brilliant. And for a show created by a man, the treatment of her was shockingly nonsexist -- it was clear that everyone involved in the show loved Wendy Watson, that she wasn't there to be the Middleman's sidekick only or an object for the male gaze.
We used to talk about how much alike The Middleman and Benton Fraser were, and I still would love to see them meet up at some point. But I'd also love to have Wendy meet a couple people -- Buffy and Willow, and Dana Scully. I think that would be a wingding. You can put Wendy and Lacey and Noser and Ida and the Middleman into almost any kind of fabulous pop culture product and have fun, it's deeply crossoverable (I mean, in their own last episode, they do into an alternate universe where the Middleman is basically Snake Plisskin from Escape From New York, and the Star Trek mirrorverse rules the day with everyone in goatees). As much of a canon girl as I am, I love the idea of something so malleable.
I'm looking forward to more comics (the final episode, never filmed, is available as a comic and you can hear the cast reading it in a YouTube "table read" video from Comicon a few years back), but I have to admit, if I could get just a few more episodes of the show or a movie, I would pay huge money for that. There aren't a lot of shows I would like to see resurrected, because you can rarely capture lightning in a bottle a second time, but The Middleman is definitely one.
I wrote
a story for Yuletide a few years ago, and I got a note from someone who'd worked on the show that it read like an episode. That is still the single greatest compliment I've ever received on a fic, because i admire the show so, so much. And a while later, I got
this awesome vid in Festivids. If you haven't seen the show, this vid is a wonderful introduction!
ART CRAWL!
