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one warm line
Here's that Why Due South Is Important To Me post I mentioned earlier!
This is not a post about why due South in general is awesome and should be watched & fannishly participated in; I'm not going point-for-point on all the characters or best moments or scenes of wacky subtext. This is certainly a "due South is awesome" post, but it is not my normal sort of "show is awesome" post. [Actually, if a normal "show is awesome" post is your bag, I made a Why Aria Loves Due South picspam in February, back in my first bout of love.] This is instead about why I specifically and in context love it, which means I'm going to be talking about Aria-specific likes, and about the fandom and the show in relation to other things.
I have lots of reasons for loving due South, but I think the major one (my way in, why I've stuck with it, &c) is Fraser as a character. Sometimes I forget this, because dS fandom quite reasonably likes playing up his arrogance or emotional inarticulation or any of a number of other flaws, and I love that the Caricature Of Upright Mountie has all sorts of writing-exploitable imperfections, but I'm really not there for the flaws -- I like them for depth, or for icing on the cake of awesome, but I'm really here for the capital-g Good stuff. I think that in general we -- and by 'we' I suppose, since being specific even in a generalization might be helpful, I mean 'the fannish community enjoying TV & books & various media from the last decade or so' -- assume that evil = interesting, or at the very least that as much moral ambiguity as possible = interesting. And that second option is wonderful, because I love things that are difficult or don't have easy answers; but it follows that maybe good = boring, and one of the things due South reminded me of was that it simply isn't true. My favourite books in the universe are Diane Duane's Young Wizards series, which is all about redemption and trying to do the right thing no matter the odds, and Fraser is ... kind of the epitome of that. He screws up. Sometimes he screws up big-time. But he has this faith in the best in people that never gets completely knocked down; he's honest and patient with people, even if it isn't all the time; he has a line about how we're all saints, even them, and I just, I can't even deal with that. YMMV, of course, but I hardly ever cry at TV shows, and due South made me cry a few times, once at the end of Victoria's Secret because it was the first time I realized that there were things in that universe that Fraser really couldn't fix, and once near the end of One Good Man, when I realized exactly how much Fraser could do. Essentially, where I am right now, Fraser's turned out to be an important touchstone.
Since I seem to be going in descending order of seriousness, another big thing that I love about due South is the place. I've spent most of my life remembering all the various places I've been without really feeling like I belong to any one of them, so I have slightly funny ideas about place; I have these various conceptions of 'home' that make due South resonate in kind of unexpected ways. The first is the Chicago way: I've been to Chicago, and I don't actually like it that much, but the first place I'm from is the Midwest -- I left when I was very young, and so the Midwest in my head is mostly in my head, and has somehow collided with dS's fictional!Chicago; the Midwest inhabited by all the people in due South is the same one inhabited by my childhood. Meanwhile I also resonate with Fraser's homesickness: I really, really miss California redwoods and the mountains in Alaska and all the camping trips I used to take with my parents; all the Canadian-wilderness bits of dS make me want to run away to a Canadian shack. (Yes, even North makes me want this. I'm aware that my relation to place here is not entirely rational.)
I'm also a sucker for the storytelling. I do occasionally get frustrated with the whimsy (Spy vs Spy makes me want to tear my hair out) but -- I love the synchronized sleeping Mounties on the train headed for nuclear disaster. I love dead Bob living in his son's closet and occasionally going on walking tours of the Borderland. I love the half-deaf half-wolf. I love the dead guy shellacked into the wall of the station, and the Cuban cigar smugglers and little old lady who have philosophical conversations with Kowalski in a crypt, and the way Chicago gradually gets weirder and weirder the longer Fraser stays. I even, forgive me, love the flimsy improbable undercover-that-couldn't-possibly-work switching of the Rays; this is one of those few miracle shows where the holes and flaws in the plot make me want to work with them, make them delightfully sillier, find alternate explanations for them, rather than just making me frustrated and giving me the urge to attempt some sort of major canonical overhaul just so that I can enjoy the canon. Of my fandom loves past, both Harry Potter and Doctor Who suffer from the "I'm in this fandom and having a dialogue with the text because I have so many fundamental issues with the text." Due South isn't that kind of dialogue; instead, it's that miracle wherein I want to generate creative output with the aim of playing in the sandbox and filling in the gaps rather than fixing things. (This is not to say that I don't have a couple of issues with dS, the major one being the way it handles its women -- but even then it's a question of filling in gaps rather than major overhaul. Except possibly in the case of Frannie Vecchio, who needs to go to the Police Academy yesterday.)
Then of course there's the Fraser/Kowalski. --I hasten to add here that I will also take permutations of Vecchio, because due South gives me an OTP but it does also give me an OT3, and I think it's worth mentioning because I also flat-out adore the Vecchio seasons and I don't want to give the impression that Vecchio is not a big reason I love this show. But while the Vecchio seasons do have your occasional healthy dose of buddy-cop subtext, the Kowalski seasons kind of knocked me flat. I fairly comfortably at this point identify as queer, and I don't really like the notion of "slash goggles" because that seems to imply welding something to your face in order to see all the pretty people conveniently getting it on; I prefer instead to say I like reading the queer subtexts, as a way to reclaim mainstream media for myself. This means, obviously, that I gravitate towards things where the subtext is thick on the ground, whether intentionally or not. (Ironically this falls apart in things like Buffy, where the canonical lesbianism has a lot of issues and definitely needs a whole other non-dS post to be picked through.) But the great thing about due South is that the F/K subtext is so staggeringly intentional that I don't quite know what to do with it, and it is ... strangely validating. I wish I had a better way of articulating that.
And finally there's the fandom! I'm slightly tempted to not mention it, and leave my due South love specifically about the show, but my enjoyment is deeply enmeshed in the fandom. (Incidentally, what sparked this post in the first place was a conversation with a couple of lovely people who like due South but are much more enthusiastic about Stargate Atlantis. I like me some SGA but, I realize, I'm there for the SGA fandom, with the show as supplemental material. With due South I can enjoy the show completely separately from the fandom, although I don't think the fandom is really supplemental either; in my head it's mostly symbiotic.) And I love the fandom. I love it. I love it because the show stopped airing more than a decade ago but the fandom is still active. I suspect I love it in part because the show stopped airing a decade ago, so the fandom's mostly come to a place of acceptance about the two Rays and shipping preferences, and it's also been weeded down to a handful of enthusiastic people, which means it feels less like a large scary conglomerate and more like an actual community. I love my fandoms small without being insular, and the dS fandom is the first that's really delivered that.
I think, though, I also adore it in context. I don't want to get down on my other fandoms, because I've made fabulous friends in them and because I try not to hang around places that make me unhappy, but comparatively due South is a fucking paradise. Part of it, again, is just an issue of size, meaning it's much less likely to attract the crazies. But I'm also viewing it in the context of my last big fandom involvement, which was Doctor Who. And there are many things I love about DW and the fandom, but the one thing I found really damn difficult about Doctor Who was the Rose vs Martha wars. I tried to avoid them for the most part, but they're kind of unavoidable. Cue my finding dS and hearing about the Ray Wars Of Ages Past. I really, actively did not want to know. Due South was my happy place! But finally, overcome with curiosity, I tracked down the most recently reported due South wank, braced myself, and -- laughed. Actually laughed, out loud, fondly and with relief, while I scrolled through what appeared to be a lot of articulate people having a civil discussion of differences and making the occasional joke about how obviously the real issue at hand was But who is the one true Diefenbaker? If I'd found a Rose vs Martha discussion like that, I would've probably cried tears of joy. If this is due South wanking, I never want to leave.
And of course the due South fandom also cascades into a lot of other mini-fandoms, which is ten kinds of fabulous, but if I started waxing poetic about those I would be here for a long time. So, instead: the fandom is wonderful. The show is wonderful. I have looked into the wanky abyss, and the abyss looked into me, and I discovered that the abyss was actually just a little ice fissure wherein people hung around singing a rousing chorus of Northwest Passage. I love it. I've been here for about eight months; the honeymoon phase is not over yet, and I really do hope the relationship is a long and happy one.
This is not a post about why due South in general is awesome and should be watched & fannishly participated in; I'm not going point-for-point on all the characters or best moments or scenes of wacky subtext. This is certainly a "due South is awesome" post, but it is not my normal sort of "show is awesome" post. [Actually, if a normal "show is awesome" post is your bag, I made a Why Aria Loves Due South picspam in February, back in my first bout of love.] This is instead about why I specifically and in context love it, which means I'm going to be talking about Aria-specific likes, and about the fandom and the show in relation to other things.
I have lots of reasons for loving due South, but I think the major one (my way in, why I've stuck with it, &c) is Fraser as a character. Sometimes I forget this, because dS fandom quite reasonably likes playing up his arrogance or emotional inarticulation or any of a number of other flaws, and I love that the Caricature Of Upright Mountie has all sorts of writing-exploitable imperfections, but I'm really not there for the flaws -- I like them for depth, or for icing on the cake of awesome, but I'm really here for the capital-g Good stuff. I think that in general we -- and by 'we' I suppose, since being specific even in a generalization might be helpful, I mean 'the fannish community enjoying TV & books & various media from the last decade or so' -- assume that evil = interesting, or at the very least that as much moral ambiguity as possible = interesting. And that second option is wonderful, because I love things that are difficult or don't have easy answers; but it follows that maybe good = boring, and one of the things due South reminded me of was that it simply isn't true. My favourite books in the universe are Diane Duane's Young Wizards series, which is all about redemption and trying to do the right thing no matter the odds, and Fraser is ... kind of the epitome of that. He screws up. Sometimes he screws up big-time. But he has this faith in the best in people that never gets completely knocked down; he's honest and patient with people, even if it isn't all the time; he has a line about how we're all saints, even them, and I just, I can't even deal with that. YMMV, of course, but I hardly ever cry at TV shows, and due South made me cry a few times, once at the end of Victoria's Secret because it was the first time I realized that there were things in that universe that Fraser really couldn't fix, and once near the end of One Good Man, when I realized exactly how much Fraser could do. Essentially, where I am right now, Fraser's turned out to be an important touchstone.
Since I seem to be going in descending order of seriousness, another big thing that I love about due South is the place. I've spent most of my life remembering all the various places I've been without really feeling like I belong to any one of them, so I have slightly funny ideas about place; I have these various conceptions of 'home' that make due South resonate in kind of unexpected ways. The first is the Chicago way: I've been to Chicago, and I don't actually like it that much, but the first place I'm from is the Midwest -- I left when I was very young, and so the Midwest in my head is mostly in my head, and has somehow collided with dS's fictional!Chicago; the Midwest inhabited by all the people in due South is the same one inhabited by my childhood. Meanwhile I also resonate with Fraser's homesickness: I really, really miss California redwoods and the mountains in Alaska and all the camping trips I used to take with my parents; all the Canadian-wilderness bits of dS make me want to run away to a Canadian shack. (Yes, even North makes me want this. I'm aware that my relation to place here is not entirely rational.)
I'm also a sucker for the storytelling. I do occasionally get frustrated with the whimsy (Spy vs Spy makes me want to tear my hair out) but -- I love the synchronized sleeping Mounties on the train headed for nuclear disaster. I love dead Bob living in his son's closet and occasionally going on walking tours of the Borderland. I love the half-deaf half-wolf. I love the dead guy shellacked into the wall of the station, and the Cuban cigar smugglers and little old lady who have philosophical conversations with Kowalski in a crypt, and the way Chicago gradually gets weirder and weirder the longer Fraser stays. I even, forgive me, love the flimsy improbable undercover-that-couldn't-possibly-work switching of the Rays; this is one of those few miracle shows where the holes and flaws in the plot make me want to work with them, make them delightfully sillier, find alternate explanations for them, rather than just making me frustrated and giving me the urge to attempt some sort of major canonical overhaul just so that I can enjoy the canon. Of my fandom loves past, both Harry Potter and Doctor Who suffer from the "I'm in this fandom and having a dialogue with the text because I have so many fundamental issues with the text." Due South isn't that kind of dialogue; instead, it's that miracle wherein I want to generate creative output with the aim of playing in the sandbox and filling in the gaps rather than fixing things. (This is not to say that I don't have a couple of issues with dS, the major one being the way it handles its women -- but even then it's a question of filling in gaps rather than major overhaul. Except possibly in the case of Frannie Vecchio, who needs to go to the Police Academy yesterday.)
Then of course there's the Fraser/Kowalski. --I hasten to add here that I will also take permutations of Vecchio, because due South gives me an OTP but it does also give me an OT3, and I think it's worth mentioning because I also flat-out adore the Vecchio seasons and I don't want to give the impression that Vecchio is not a big reason I love this show. But while the Vecchio seasons do have your occasional healthy dose of buddy-cop subtext, the Kowalski seasons kind of knocked me flat. I fairly comfortably at this point identify as queer, and I don't really like the notion of "slash goggles" because that seems to imply welding something to your face in order to see all the pretty people conveniently getting it on; I prefer instead to say I like reading the queer subtexts, as a way to reclaim mainstream media for myself. This means, obviously, that I gravitate towards things where the subtext is thick on the ground, whether intentionally or not. (Ironically this falls apart in things like Buffy, where the canonical lesbianism has a lot of issues and definitely needs a whole other non-dS post to be picked through.) But the great thing about due South is that the F/K subtext is so staggeringly intentional that I don't quite know what to do with it, and it is ... strangely validating. I wish I had a better way of articulating that.
And finally there's the fandom! I'm slightly tempted to not mention it, and leave my due South love specifically about the show, but my enjoyment is deeply enmeshed in the fandom. (Incidentally, what sparked this post in the first place was a conversation with a couple of lovely people who like due South but are much more enthusiastic about Stargate Atlantis. I like me some SGA but, I realize, I'm there for the SGA fandom, with the show as supplemental material. With due South I can enjoy the show completely separately from the fandom, although I don't think the fandom is really supplemental either; in my head it's mostly symbiotic.) And I love the fandom. I love it. I love it because the show stopped airing more than a decade ago but the fandom is still active. I suspect I love it in part because the show stopped airing a decade ago, so the fandom's mostly come to a place of acceptance about the two Rays and shipping preferences, and it's also been weeded down to a handful of enthusiastic people, which means it feels less like a large scary conglomerate and more like an actual community. I love my fandoms small without being insular, and the dS fandom is the first that's really delivered that.
I think, though, I also adore it in context. I don't want to get down on my other fandoms, because I've made fabulous friends in them and because I try not to hang around places that make me unhappy, but comparatively due South is a fucking paradise. Part of it, again, is just an issue of size, meaning it's much less likely to attract the crazies. But I'm also viewing it in the context of my last big fandom involvement, which was Doctor Who. And there are many things I love about DW and the fandom, but the one thing I found really damn difficult about Doctor Who was the Rose vs Martha wars. I tried to avoid them for the most part, but they're kind of unavoidable. Cue my finding dS and hearing about the Ray Wars Of Ages Past. I really, actively did not want to know. Due South was my happy place! But finally, overcome with curiosity, I tracked down the most recently reported due South wank, braced myself, and -- laughed. Actually laughed, out loud, fondly and with relief, while I scrolled through what appeared to be a lot of articulate people having a civil discussion of differences and making the occasional joke about how obviously the real issue at hand was But who is the one true Diefenbaker? If I'd found a Rose vs Martha discussion like that, I would've probably cried tears of joy. If this is due South wanking, I never want to leave.
And of course the due South fandom also cascades into a lot of other mini-fandoms, which is ten kinds of fabulous, but if I started waxing poetic about those I would be here for a long time. So, instead: the fandom is wonderful. The show is wonderful. I have looked into the wanky abyss, and the abyss looked into me, and I discovered that the abyss was actually just a little ice fissure wherein people hung around singing a rousing chorus of Northwest Passage. I love it. I've been here for about eight months; the honeymoon phase is not over yet, and I really do hope the relationship is a long and happy one.
no subject
Haha, me too! Every time I hold the door for someone I get a little Fraser-ping in the back of my mind. And then I'll get snarky-while-being-super-polite with someone for doing or saying something stupid and, you know, I'm allowed that.
I suspect my attempts to explain why Fraser/RayK is THE OTP OF PERFECT HAPPINESS would reveal a lot more about me than it would say about the pairing, tbh. It's one of those OTPs that I can't bear to see broken up in fanfic, and a lot of that is personal. Somehow it really lends itself to personal investment, and I can't explain why.
no subject
Re: Fraser/RayK, YES, it really does lend itself to personal investment. Maybe someday I will grit my teeth and actually talk about why it resonates, and then find out if my own weird personal reasons for it being THE OTP OF PERFECT HAPPINESS are the same as anyone else's.