In which I try my hand at fannish meta
Oct. 23rd, 2014 09:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livSo azurelunatic posted adorable Pacific Rim fan jewellery to Tumblr. And I appear to have thinky thoughts about a work of fanart.
I loved the film of Pacific Rim but in a very superficial escapist way, I didn't at all feel like it stands up to analysis. Apparently there's going to be a sequel, and I'm not sure that from a narrative point of view it really needs a sequel, but I am thrilled for the prospect of more shiny giant robots. I really like Pacific Rim fandom, I feel like the fan community see subtleties and complexities in the film way beyond what was there when I just watched it in the cinema. Basically I love the version of Pacific Rim portrayed in this vid bychaila much more than I like the canon.
And beyond PR fandom itself, I really passionately love that the concept of drift compatible has been adopted into fannish critical vocabulary. A lot of the time I don't care about ships and slash, or I care, but I get annoyed that any possible affection, teamwork, or even hatred and rivalry between characters is collapsed down to sex. Not that slash is a bad thing, not at all, and I can very much appreciate fanworks that postulate and explore a sexual / romantic relationship between characters where I don't really see that dynamic in canon. So it's not that there's too much sex in fandom, it's that there's too little of every other kind of connection I'm interested in.
So, the option of considering whether characters are drift compatible is very dear to my heart. I love that drift compatible can cover a romantic relationship or a sibling relationship or friends or even frenemies like Newt and Hermann. (Though at least in![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sovay's hands I can really buy sexual tension between them too.) I love that there's a canon three where any pair of the three are DC, and ok, they're triplets but it's easy enough to extend that concept to a triad or OT3. I particularly like drift compatible crossovers, because speculating whether two characters from different universes would have sex can certainly be hot, but it's hard for it to be more than that when there's no textual evidence of them interacting. But whether they could pilot a Jaeger together, now that gives you some really interesting character exploration!
I like that the ur-example of a drift compatible pair is Raleigh and Mako, who are certainly friends and only ambiguously a romantic couple. (I thought the final scene with them kissing against the sunrise was forcing a romantic frame onto the relationship, but other people with a good eye for films likerysmiel interpreted this as them being kissing friends, not a couple, and I do think there's room for that reading.)
The thing is, I feel absolutely starving for language and frames to talk about strong, passionate connections that are not romantic and heteronormative. In real life I've found it sometimes hard to tell friends how much I love them without resorting to either romantic language or quasi-religious terms like soul-mate. And in media and analysis of media it really frustrates me that there's such a gap for talking about any kind of strong connection that isn't a couple relationship. But now there's drift compatible. There's the kind of connection where you can cope with direct access to eachother's brains without going mad, and you can work together on a complex and dangerous task requiring both halves of the team to give the best of themselves constantly or they and the world may be destroyed. I've sometimes used LM Montgomery's term kindred spirits to talk about the friends who mean everything to me, but drift compatible is stronger than that. I'm sure there are words for this kind of thing in Classical Greek, but I'd rather a term that is instantly recognizable to everybody on the internet, not only to erudite classical scholars.
So yes, I really like the idea of people being able to give their friends matching jewellery with little cute Jaegers and a tag saying "drift compatible"! (And aww at the little note that says you can add a third or fourth necklace.) I kind of wish the tags in this particular example weren't heart-shaped, because yes, a heart means "love", but it kind of drags the drift compatible thing back towards the massive gravity well that is romantic connection. And really, you have to have a gender expression within a certain range to wear a pendant with a sparkly crystal and a heart, which limits the usefulness of this jewellery. Still, I'm really grateful to del Toro for coming up with this concept and to fandom for elaborating it.
azurelunatic posted adorable Pacific Rim fan jewellery to Tumblr. And I appear to have thinky thoughts about a work of fanart. I loved the film of Pacific Rim but in a very superficial escapist way, I didn't at all feel like it stands up to analysis. Apparently there's going to be a sequel, and I'm not sure that from a narrative point of view it really needs a sequel, but I am thrilled for the prospect of more shiny giant robots. I really like Pacific Rim fandom, I feel like the fan community see subtleties and complexities in the film way beyond what was there when I just watched it in the cinema. Basically I love the version of Pacific Rim portrayed in this vid by
chaila much more than I like the canon. And beyond PR fandom itself, I really passionately love that the concept of drift compatible has been adopted into fannish critical vocabulary. A lot of the time I don't care about ships and slash, or I care, but I get annoyed that any possible affection, teamwork, or even hatred and rivalry between characters is collapsed down to sex. Not that slash is a bad thing, not at all, and I can very much appreciate fanworks that postulate and explore a sexual / romantic relationship between characters where I don't really see that dynamic in canon. So it's not that there's too much sex in fandom, it's that there's too little of every other kind of connection I'm interested in.
So, the option of considering whether characters are drift compatible is very dear to my heart. I love that drift compatible can cover a romantic relationship or a sibling relationship or friends or even frenemies like Newt and Hermann. (Though at least in
sovay's hands I can really buy sexual tension between them too.) I love that there's a canon three where any pair of the three are DC, and ok, they're triplets but it's easy enough to extend that concept to a triad or OT3. I particularly like drift compatible crossovers, because speculating whether two characters from different universes would have sex can certainly be hot, but it's hard for it to be more than that when there's no textual evidence of them interacting. But whether they could pilot a Jaeger together, now that gives you some really interesting character exploration!I like that the ur-example of a drift compatible pair is Raleigh and Mako, who are certainly friends and only ambiguously a romantic couple. (I thought the final scene with them kissing against the sunrise was forcing a romantic frame onto the relationship, but other people with a good eye for films like
rysmiel interpreted this as them being kissing friends, not a couple, and I do think there's room for that reading.) The thing is, I feel absolutely starving for language and frames to talk about strong, passionate connections that are not romantic and heteronormative. In real life I've found it sometimes hard to tell friends how much I love them without resorting to either romantic language or quasi-religious terms like soul-mate. And in media and analysis of media it really frustrates me that there's such a gap for talking about any kind of strong connection that isn't a couple relationship. But now there's drift compatible. There's the kind of connection where you can cope with direct access to eachother's brains without going mad, and you can work together on a complex and dangerous task requiring both halves of the team to give the best of themselves constantly or they and the world may be destroyed. I've sometimes used LM Montgomery's term kindred spirits to talk about the friends who mean everything to me, but drift compatible is stronger than that. I'm sure there are words for this kind of thing in Classical Greek, but I'd rather a term that is instantly recognizable to everybody on the internet, not only to erudite classical scholars.
So yes, I really like the idea of people being able to give their friends matching jewellery with little cute Jaegers and a tag saying "drift compatible"! (And aww at the little note that says you can add a third or fourth necklace.) I kind of wish the tags in this particular example weren't heart-shaped, because yes, a heart means "love", but it kind of drags the drift compatible thing back towards the massive gravity well that is romantic connection. And really, you have to have a gender expression within a certain range to wear a pendant with a sparkly crystal and a heart, which limits the usefulness of this jewellery. Still, I'm really grateful to del Toro for coming up with this concept and to fandom for elaborating it.
