Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Liz and leather-clad company were kind enough to recommend
Than Fade Away over at
Bright Shiny Objects.
Sad was I to see myself the only representative of all Trekdom - is no one writing,
or is no one reading?

I’m 400 posts behind on ASC, and getting behind on C/7 fic despite the
miniscule size of C/7 fandom, so the trouble isn’t that Trek is dead. Were I as
brave as Lori, to commit myself to the infinite backlog of VS7.5 episodes, I would
have plenty to read. Just reading Lori is a full-time occupation.

Writing Trek is a different matter. It would be an insult, in my mind, to
The Original Cheesies to write serious fanfic about them. I have been
permanently scarred by long-term exposure to the classic caricatures,
marching across the TV screen of my childhood in bright, primary colors.

I confess to being one of those crass souls whose feedback to Lori
opened with a declaration of just how much Picard/Troi squicked me - but
the deeper truth is that any combination of TNG characters
squicks me. Even as individuals, they were squicky - except for Data, Yar and
Spot. Though I watched it off and on, it was never a series that grew on me.

I have the greatest admiration for people who can write DS9 - not, perhaps,
enough to read what they write, but admiration nonetheless. The
characters were, at least, interesting - more human than the TNG crew, more
realistic than TOSsers. But the show itself was a morass of arcs and politics -
even if someone were still broadcasting it, I wouldn’t have the time to watch
it all and find the cracks into which to put my fic. My experiences with Buffy
have set me off the sort of writing in which canon is “more honoured in the
breach than in the observance.”

What is there to say about ENT, except that the franchise should have
taken a break before once-moring into the breach? I, at least, will observe
a decent period of mourning before I go chasing after another
ship called Enterprise.

Which leaves me with VOY, dear, sweet VOY. Dear, sweet, cancelled,
endgamed, over VOY, the only Trek series ever to be
about something (something besides ripping off Babylon 5,
anyway). In fanfic, there’s nothing like that something. It didn’t
matter how many bad time travel eps (and they were all bad)
TPTB tossed at us, nor how many EMH stories, nor how many times Seven
rediscovered her humanity, because the show itself was about a crew
trapped in the back end of the beyond with nobody but one another to rely on,
on a hopeless quest to travel an infinite distance home.

Go ahead, you can write a story about that right now, even without my
telling you who the Captain was, and whether she was in love with her first
mate or her helmsman or, Great Bird preserve us, an idiotic Irish
hologram.

So why aren’t you writing already? You say you need other fanfic to
inspire you, and the well has gone mysteriously dry? You say you need a
show to watch, but UPN barely deigns to recycle the well-worn
episodes of seventh season? I feel your pain, every Sunday at 11am if I’m
even awake yet, but have you
forgotten…Delta
Blues? The series has been preserved forever in the fuzzy-cam eye of Jim
Wright, and you, yes, you, can watch the reruns any time. You could go there
right now, have your own virtual third season.
Remember Seska? Remember Kes? Weren’t those the days? You
can relive them, and even rewrite them.

Don’t mind me - I’m just reminiscing about
the eternal VOY now.
If I had the time, I’d even write some metafic about it.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 17th, 2002 at 10:11 pm and is filed under Trek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.