The 35th Precinct

So, I've been meaning to talk about Reid and Prentiss' conversation about Gideon's letter in "Scared to Death". It's a short conversation, but it perfectly encapsulates their respective personalities and approaches to life. Reid is the analytic Hermione Granger in a tie, searching for answers in syntax and grammar and etymology; Prentiss is more concerned with the spaces between the words, the truth Gideon wanted told but couldn't say.

For all their collective intelligence, Prentiss and Reid still suffer from miscommunication. When Prentiss tells Reid to reread Gideon's letter, he mistakenly assumes she's questioning his ability to understand the literal meaning of the letter. He says, "I've read it over and over, and I've got an eidetic memory." He doesn't need to reread the letter because it's all in his head.

But Prentiss isn't concerned with the what of the letter so much as the why. Gideon abandoned the team as a whole, yet he left a letter only for Reid. Why? Prentiss might not know why, but she knows it's important, and she knows that Reid needs to answer that question before he can truly understand the letter. But Reid has his Nerd Genius goggles so firmly attached that he can't see that yet, and might never see.

But despite her formidable profiler fu, Prentiss isn't seeing the whole picture, either. Reid succinctly spells out the root of his problem when he independently raises the subject of his father's abandonment when he was ten. Anyone with a firing synapse can see that he's conflating that trauma and Gideon's unceremonious exit from his life. First the father, and now the surrogate father. Reid has Abandonment Issues, and as a profiler, Prentiss should know that intellectual understanding of a hurt seldom heals the wound from which it springs.

Reid can read that letter and have Eureka Moments all day long and twice on Masturbation Sunday, but they won't change the underlying truth that he feels abandoned by Gideon, who, if his weenie apologia is anything to go by, knew exactly how badly this second desertion would affect him, especially on the heels of his ordeal with Tobias. Try as you might, you can't logic your way past hurt, and Prentiss should've known that.


Tomorrow will be another dollop of pop culture meta, this one concerning Jack Malone and his selective morality. In the meantime, I'm going to futz around the Interwebs and maybe scritch a bunny.

I was over at GreatestJournal and noticed a kerfluffle over the sudden limitation of usable icons. Apparently, because of the strain placed upon the GJ servers by the ponderous fandom exodus from LJ, the admins have limited users to 100 icons and disabled notifications and PMs. The 100-icon limit is a steep decline from the 2,000 they so happily advertised to woo new members, and many longtime GJers are unhappy. Not at the admins, but at the fandom diaspora. The Internet truly is a microcoosm of human behavior.

During the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Tallahassee was a waystation for refugees, and for a week or so, the city infrastructure buckled under the strain of the unexpected population surge. It's a town that operates at 100,000 people at its peak and 30,000 between semesters, and the local news at the time reported that as many as 500,000 displaced people from Louisiana and the Gulf Coast were here. With five times the demand, the utilities wavered badly, and for 48 hours, all non-essential lighting and equipment was turned off. The grocery stores and malls operated with minimal lighting, and it was surreal to be browsing the mall in the dark, with no music or TVs or video game consoles beckoning you from the storefront.

What was most interesting, though, was the reaction of the locals. Most were sympathetic and eager to help at first because we were aware of how easily it could've been us, and well, in the South, you're raised to be "neighborly" even if you'd rather not, so the town did what it could. Oh, the fatass alumni bitched when the hotels cancelled their ballgame bookings in order to accommodate refugees, but they put a sock in it quickly when, for once, local sentiment wasn't with them.

After a while, though...well, neighborly impulses have a short shelf life, and after a week of congested roads, frequent power failures, and threadbare grocery stores, folks started to grumble. Sure, they were sorry for those who had lost everything, and as good Christians, they prayed they'd find new homes. They just hoped they wouldn't find them here. After all, it was tragic what had happened to them, but the locals had lives to lead, lives that were being inconvenienced by outsiders' misery. After two weeks, the welcoming signs came down, and the locals waited for the refugees to move on. Eventually, most of them did, and by late September, the alumni were once again kings of the road in their lumbering RVs.

Clearly, there is no equality between the travesty of Katrina and her aftermath and the loss of icons on the Internet, that toy of the idly disenfranchised. But that both events can inspire similar feelings of entitlement and possessiveness fascinates me. Humans are inherently selfish creatures, and there is no better proving ground for this than the Internet.

We locals were peripherally inconvenienced by the flow of human traffic from Katrina, but it took less than a week for that minor discomfort to overshadow-at least in the dim sub-basement of the city psyche-the devastating losses faced by thousands of people. Their losses mattered less than our potential discomforts because we were still comfortable and well-fed and TV coverage had done much to numb us to the scope and humanity of the disaster. We wanted them gone because we were here first, never mind that a great number of "us" were only here for as long as it took to get our degrees. It was like a mammoth game of King of the Hill, and we wanted "our" town the way it was. The notion of "ours", of ownership, carries enormous weight in society, and on the Intetnet as well as in the real world, possession is nine-tenths of unspoken law.

The GJers are rankled because fen who have elected to leave LJ are crashing their carefully ordered party. They're weighing down servers and upsetting the established zen of the GJ community that was in full swing long before LJers turned up with their dirty faces and grabby hands. Resources are being curtailed and redistributed to cope with the changing virtual landscape, and some are unhappy. They want the wanderers to "go home and leave us alone." They feel a sense of ownership and entitlement to something that doesn't really exist beyond servers in California and isn't really theirs to begin with. In the grand scheme of things, it matters not a good goddamn; no one is starving or dying for want of user icons, but it's fascinating to watch such disparate situations evoke such similar responses.

It seems faylinn_drake is having fun in L.A. with the CSI:NY gang. She was nice enough to RP a scene with me involving Wasted!Flack. Maybe after she gets back and settles in, I'll nudge her about continuing that scene with a stuffed frog, a can of chicken soup, and a rumpled tie.

In more serious news, LJ has resumed its campaign against fannish endeavors with this post in lj_biz, wherein they have decided to ban any works, fictional or not, describing "graphic" sexual contact involving minors, even if that sexual contact occurs consensually and with another minor. What constitutes graphic is dreadfully vague; at one point, LJ mouth monkey burr86 mentioned bodily fluids as an objectionable criterion. By that standard, a sloppy, inexperienced kiss could merit the banhammer. After all, saliva is a fluid.

( LJ and the Dirty Bad Wrong Sex, Round 2 )

This started as a comment to runedgirl about the not-for-profit nature of fandom and its influence on the issue of writerly responsibility and ballooned into something else entirely. Well, here it is.

That's a really tricky question, one to which I don't have definitive answers. I do have opinions out the wazoo, however, and as a giddy participant in Internet culture, I have to say that the Internet is a double-edged blade in terms of creative exchange.

Anything can go up anywhere at any time, and that free and ready access has made people both less appreciative of fannish output and more inclined to criticize what is offered. After all, if they don't like what you've written, there are thirty thousand other folks waiting to ply their wares. Because there are no pages to hold, people forget that work went into creating the story they're reading, and they're more apt to dismiss it out of hand.

And let's face it, posting things on the Internet gives both writer and reader bigger balls. I've written and posted fic for Internet consumption that I would never read aloud to a writing circle. The Internet grants us safe harbor in anonymity, and it's easy to be brave when you can pretend no one's watching.

The anonymity comes with a price, though. It dehumanizes the writer to an aggregate of pixels, and folks therefore say things that they wouldn't were they face to face and forced to confront their adversary's humanity, their reality. I'm not talking about story-related concrit that bursts the ego bubble and leaves the backside sore, but the personal jibes meant just for plain meanness.

It's paradoxical that the medium that strips creators of their essential reality imbues their creations with such immediacy that many cannot separate fiction from advocation. Maybe it's because fen are so involved and engaged with the characters they love that they forget they aren't real, or maybe the recent content hysteria is symptomatic of a broader disconnect. Maybe it's because so many people have bought into the idea that the world is a dirty, rotten place, not because people have done bad deeds, but because they have bad thoughts. Even if that were true, banning them from public discourse wouldn't get rid of them. It would just make the things that go on in the dark that much darker and make it that much harder for frightened people to find the light and expose the monster when he does shamble from the closet.

The fact that fannish output is free should absolve us of responsibility more than it should increase our moral onus. Someone-a crackpot, no doubt-could lay the charge that proficcers profit from their work, and thus, the propagation of their ideas, latent and overt. Someone has paid them for their brain soup and distributed it to the masses, and what is more, people have paid to consume it.

The fanficcer, on the other hand, gets nothing in return for the dissemination of ideas. Occasionally, a "Good job" comes down the pipeline, but by and large, he has no clue how large an audience he is reaching, or even if he is reaching one at all. Since he is gaining little tangible profit from his contributions, he should not be bound by the same standards that govern content acceptability and saleability in profic. Fandom has exceptions to this, of course, such as giftfic and prompt and thonfic, but in those cases, the writer is aware of those strictures before he begins.

Writers, in fandom or out, should have no fetters placed upon their creativity. They should, however, avail themselves of the climate of the fandom or genre in which they want to write. Wincest, for example, has no place in a gen or het comm, and a writer of gay erotica would do well to stay out of the fundamentalist Christian arena.

For me, the problem lies with the fact that fandom readers demand newer, fresher ideas and plots, while at the same time refusing to be drawn from their comfort zones or to accept that they might not like what they read. They want to know everything about a story before they begin, and then they wonder why the story holds no surprises and packs no punch. Fandom wants to have its cake, eat it, and then complain about it, too. And then it wants the cooks whose efforts they have just derided to get back in the kitchen and make them more. It's and endless, vicious cycle.

I recognized that some time ago, and now I write whatever I please. Fewer folks read my output, but I'm happier and prouder for it.

GOD FUCKING DAMMIT!!!

Before we proceed to the rant proper, a preface that may or may not be brief:

a)I believe that most slashers fall into three categories-fangirls who just want to see hot guys doing the nasty, sane folks who may have deeper reasons, but still just want to have fun, and people who honestly want to explore the unique dynamics of a same-sex relationship.

I'm sure most slashers would happily pin themselves in the latter group and proceed to tout their open-mindedness in the arena of sexual awareness, but I would submit that most slashers, regardless of talent level, would fall into the first two groups, with the third group less than five percent of active slashers.

This is not to say that writing slash is bad: a person shouldn't have to justify writing slash-or anything else, for that matter, to the fandom at large. Noble motivation doesn't always translate into good fic, and pure squee artists have generated remarkable slash across all fandoms.

So, what am I getting at? I wish CSI:NY fandom would stop dressing up its fascination with slash as anything more or less than what it is. If you're writing slash for any of the three reasons above, fabulous, but don't present it as a drive to be progressive if it's not, and in ninety-five percent of cases, I have serious doubts.

Why? Because for all the talk of wanting to revolutionize TV with the introduction of gay characters, most of that desire is centered solely around Danny/Flack. Not Mac/Danny, Hawkes/Mac, Flack/Mac, or Stella/Lindsay. Not even Character A/OMC. Danny/Flack. Therefore, I can only surmise that those clamoring for a gay canon ship are less interested in advancing national perceptions of same-sex relationships and more interested in seeing Flack and Danny fuck. Which is fine. But don't present it as anything more noble than that, and don't couch it in terms of "revitalizing the show" when what you really mean is, "Producers, if you feature a gay or bisexual pairing, we'll watch."

b)Most folks participate in fandom because it's fun. They write the fic and draw the art that they do to express themselves and indulge in a little fantasy. Right on. I will state for the record that I write Flack/Rebecca because I like playing dress-up and what-if, and if I ever try to bandy about Serious Issues as my primary reason, I want you to beat me with a dead carp. Because I'm lying.

So, preface out of the way, on to the rant proper.

The following are posts I made to a TalkCSI thread entitled "How to Revitalize CSI:NY". I spliced them together in what I think is a cogent whole, but if anyone disagrees, speak up.

( Slash and TalkCSI: A Polemic )

There's a new Supernatural tonight, but I'm not sure I'll be able to watch since thunderstorms are expected during late afternoon and evening. If not, I've got books to read, including two CSI:Miami tie-ins by Donn Cortez, who is, by far, the best of the CSI franchise writers. If only he'd been tapped to write the CSI:NY novels, too.

Part X of Danse Macabre is rolling, and even better, I finally got around my mental block on September When It Comes. Greg can leave the couch now. As soon as Part X is finished, that is.

I watched "Cool Hunter" on Spike. God, I love Flack's interrogation scene with the junkie doctor. Eddie Cahill once commented in a TalkCSI interview that Flack can sometimes get on his high horse, and that was a perfect example. His contempt was obvious, and he wore an expression akin to that of the Church Lady from SNL the whole time. The "Can I get you anything? Some chicken soup, maybe?" and the subsequent "Ha! I showed him" swagger put it over the top, and the best part is, I don't think the facial expression or the swagger were conscious affectations. He's gold. Gold, I tell you.

Actually, that scene is one of my favorites in terms of bolstering the scant validity of my Flack/Rebecca ship. I just tell myself that he's so indignant because he doesn't want a doctor like that treating his wife. ~bliss~

My other favorite scene for that is the one in "Not What It Looks Like"(?), where Stella wonders what the victim was doing in the men's toilet if she was a woman. Flack wanders in and says, "I could think of several things, but they all have a happy ending." What's he looking at? The handicapped stall.

Good boy, Flack. I just figure he and Rebecca got busy in a bathroom stall at one point, and he has fond memories. Of course, this countermands his confession to Aiden in S1 that he refuses to "go" in public, but I'm willing to believe that the sweet lure of panty manna overcame his aversion to public toilets. Besides, that statement brings up the question of what he does when he's pulling a triple. Hold it? Is he a camel? Maybe he doesn't consider the precinct "public".

Anyway, I'm off to lunch.

painless_j wrote a post last night on the importance of respecting your readers as a ficcer in fandom, and while I agree with most of her points, I do think some of her fandom expectations are unfair or unnecessary. For instance, I agree with her that writers should respond to all feedback with at least a simple, "Thank you", and I agree that a good summary is a writer's best offense.

I do not, agree, however, that word counts belong in headers. To me, the word count is irrelevant; it's the sum of the thousand parts that matters. And like the Fraggles say, humans are silly creatures and easily spooked. If I announce that the story behind the cut is 34,000 words, folks are apt to click the Back button, but if I plunge directly into the story, and if I've done my job with the opening paragraphs, they won't care about word length. They'll just want to know how it all turns out.

As a whole, I think fandom is rife with unreasonable and contradictory expectations. Just in the comments to the entry, there were conflicting views on response to feedback. Some wanted a simple acknowledgment, while others wanted a "more personal" response.

I'm not sure what that is, to be frank. A case could be made for it with the longer, more specific feedback, but how personal can you get with a comment like "This was nice"? It's appreciated, yes, but it hardly lends itself to introspective analysis. And if you do make an effort to engage the reader on a more protracted, intimate level, you open yourself up to the accusation of self-absorbed navel-gazing.

Well, I'm sorry, but when a reader asks me about a certain action or passage in the story, all I can tell them is what I was thinking when I wrote it. That makes it about me. A story says just as much about the person who wrote it as it does about the characters in it. If you don't want to know about me, then don't read my stories, or at least refrain from asking about them.

Fandom is fickle. Admit that your work has flaws, and you'll be dismissed as a hack or a self-pitying attention-whore, but defend your work and the ideas presented in it, and you're too emotionally-invested and obviously writing a Mary Sue.

So how do you win in fandom?

You don't. The only sensible course to take is to be as selfish with your fandom largesse and involvement as you can. That might sound like an oxymoron, but it's not. Contribute to and participate in the fandom to the extent which you are comfortable, and no more. To hell with everybody else, even your readers. Fandom is supposed to be enjoyable escapism from the grind of real-life obligations, and the minute it becomes more demanding than the job you get paid for, it's time to stop. Fandom should be fun, not Internet college. A lot of people forget that.

So, I got thinking. What are my obligations to fandom and/or my flisters and readers? Well, here they are:

-To respect the English language and present my fic to the best of my ability.

-To respect your right not to read said fic, or to read it without comment.

-To acknowledge the comments I do receive with a simple "Thank you."


That's it. I don't owe fandom anything else. Not explanations, not justifications, not apologies. I refuse to censor myself for fear of being accused of Suedom, and I will not apologize for schmoop and love and tenderness. Nor will I apologize for hatred and violence and gore and terrible people saying terrible things because I can.

I reserve the right to respond to feedback, positive or negative, in any way I see fit, including a thesis on why I chose to write X the way I did. You accepted that possibility the minute you hit "Post comment". I can also choose to invite you to kiss my ass, even if in so doing, I look like a tit.

So, there we are, and now that I've written down my "obligations" to fandom, I feel a lot better.

( CSI 717--SPOILERS )

The bouncing baby board is going well. I don't think it's ever going to be a CSI:NY fandom hub, but at least the posts there don't make my eyes weep for their lost innocence.

I've considered adding a fanfiction pimp section. What do those of you who've joined up think?

I was thinking about "Consequences" today and started wondering: how do you think Flack is coping since "Consequences"? In "Sweet Sixteen", he mentioned getting heat from the uniforms and his fellow detectives for cooperating with Mac, and then there was no follow-up. Just another teeth-gnashingly sanctimonious lecture from Mac on Why He Was Right. The tension between them has been dropped. Do you think the other detectives have gotten the burr out of their saddle, or is the issue going to flare in time for May sweeps?


I'm willing to bet that even if we don't see it onscreen, Flack is still struggling with what happened. Mac, of course, has blithely declared the issue dead, but then again, Mac isn't the one working in the precinct every day, and I can't help but think a few of the other detectives-particularly those who worked the Truby bust with Flack-are still smarting.

As for Flack, I'm sure it hurts that his colleagues and beer buddies are giving him the cold shoulder, but I suspect what bothers him more are all the cases that will be re-opened because of this. He said as much before surrendering his memo book to Mac. Flack likes being a hero, fixing things for people who can't help themselves, and it must be a knife in his gut to know that child molesters, wife beaters, and killers are going to walk. And I have no doubt that he blames himself for not seeing that Truby was dirty.

So, how is he coping, and do you think the obvious trust issues between him and Mac will ever be addressed again?