Back, and thinking more about genfic

Back from the Internetless Wilds! I think it was good for me to spend a week or so in enforced Internet withdrawal -- I actually didn't miss it (much), and it gave me an opportunity to think a lot and not have other people's thoughts getting in the way (as they sometimes do, on the Internet).

The post I made before I left touched a nerve with a lot of people. That really wasn't something I meant to do. Like I said in the comments, I'd been thinking about the gen thing for awhile (the better part of a year, at least), and tossed off a mention in a post without really thinking about it -- that's what I get for posting on not enough sleep, in between packing. Anyway, though, it was a good thing to have space to think about it for a week or so with that conversation at the top of my mind.

And I'm still thinking about the various points people made. Two particular points struck a chord with me:

• xparrot commented that fictional romance is typically an idealized version of actual romance and people are okay with that, so why isn't it equally okay to write an idealized, romanticized version of friendship?
• And several different people made the point that emotionally-intense friendship fic is affirming for a lot of people (it certainly is for me) and dismissing it also dismisses a lot of people's own experience with diverse kinds of love and affection.

Which is not to say most gen fic is a strictly realistic depiction of friendship or other platonic relationships, but then, most romance isn't particularly true to most people's experience of romance IRL, and that's certainly not going away anytime soon. (Nor should it.)

And I do feel like friendship tends to be an afterthought for most people, in media and in real life, even though we need social bonds to other people and function best as part of a community, whether a geographically connected community or one that we self-select. We aren't really designed to feed all our social needs, emotional and intellectual, off a single person, but we live in a society that valorizes romance and tends to suggest other kinds of relationships are disposable afterthoughts.

That was one of the reasons why I liked Legends of Tomorrow so much, incidentally -- because the non-romantic relationships got their own mini-arcs, and most of them got nearly as much narrative weight as the show's love triangle.

And one reason why I latched onto the Jack-Peggy friendship in Agent Carter so hard is because it really nailed the whole feeling of an experience I've actually had, an intense bonding experience causing a sudden falling-into-friendship with somebody you never saw that way before. In my case it wasn't antipathy to friendship, it was more like indifference to close friendship in a matter of hours. I remember wondering in the beginning if it was going to fade, because it was a startling feeling to go from being near-total strangers to almost as close as family in a single day -- but it didn't; we're still close friends 20 years later. So I know you can have those intense, transcendental experiences in relationships where romance and sex aren't involved; I know you can fall suddenly into friendship the way people fall in love, because I've done it.

And besides, even if I hadn't -- and even if friendship wasn't one of the biggest driving emotional forces in my life, which it is -- I still know that human relationships are endlessly complicated. I think fiction should reflect some of that complexity, and I love getting to explore it myself. Sure, it's often idealized to hell and back, but that's what cranks my engine, and romance gets to have that all the time, so why not do it with gen?

People mentioned in the comments to the last post that they get affirmation from this kind of fic (in an "I am not alone, there's someone else out there who feels this way too, there's someone who's had these experiences too" kind of way). I certainly did, when I first discovered that gen h/c was something that existed on the Internet. And I like the idea of being able to help offer that feeling to other people.

Basically I came back from my wilderness isolation feeling much more like "screw it, I don't care what anyone says, I'm going to write what I want." And I made the conscious decision not to worry about it as I have been. Because, honestly, in the grand scheme of things, there are WAY bigger things in the world to worry about than whether I might be ~teaching bad lessons~ by writing about people loving each other in a socially-unapproved way. Besides, fandom also contains unrepentantly titillating rape fic (I've written some of that too, believe it or not, back in the day of anon SGA fic memes), underage, and basically a whole WORLD of things that are not okay in the real world, and I don't think fics like that shouldn't exist, or that they don't have valuable things to offer people who write and read them. So I cannot and will not bring myself to believe that a PG-rated gen fic about people cuddling each other is something to feel terribly guilty about -- not for me, and not for anyone else.

ETA: I really do appreciate the intelligent and reasonable discussion in the comments to the last post. You guys made thoughtful points, and it gave me a lot to think about.

Oh, and also

MCU Rolling Remix is live -- this is a remix challenge in which the participants remixed each other's fics in a chain (actually three different chains), with no one being able to see any of the fics in the chain except the one they were remixing. One of them is mine! They'll be anon for another week or so. There's a guessing post here.

(The icon is not a hint; it's carefully selected to relate to NONE of the fics in the collection, so as to give nothing away. XD I AM actually kind of surprised, given what a juggernaut pairing it is, that nobody managed to take any of the remix chains in a Steve/Bucky direction.)

But wait, there's more

So apparently this is what happens when you deprive me of Internet for a week and a half. POSTAPALOOZA!

Since I've been thinking about Peggy & co's future lately, let's talk about the MCU future timeline and how it relates to the Agent Carter characters as they age.

To some extent my AC fic is basically taking place in a headcanon AU of my own devising. I haven't watched enough of Agents of SHIELD to avoid canon slip-ups if I deal with SHIELD's future too much, and I don't really want to deal with certain parts of it (like, we know Hank and Janet were active on the superhero scene by the 1960s or the 1970s at the latest, which means they had fully functional shrinking suits -- and for me, the AC 'verse isn't really a superhero 'verse; it's a Cold War spy 'verse). So basically, my fic is taking place in a one-step-away-from-canon 'verse that never quite engages with superheroes if I can avoid it; not that they definitively don't have that future (one of the things I like about AC, actually, is the doomed-tragic aspect of knowing how most of them end up), but rather that I just don't really want to put larger-than-life Marvel superheroes and AC characters into the same fic. They don't really fit together.

But I'm interested in the idea of figuring out how to work characters like a young Alexander Pierce or Obadiah Stane into the future AC 'verse. I was considering the idea that partnering with Stane might have had something to do with Howard really going off the rails. We know that in the 1940s he backed away from making weapons, after the Midnight Oil incident; he's haunted by guilt for the people who died in the weapon's field test. So how did he get from there, to large-scale weapons manufacturing a few decades later? But I'm not sure if Stane actually had that much influence at the company early on. Plus, I don't really want to take all culpability away from Howard; though I do like him, it's much too tidy to say that Stane was largely responsible for the way Stark Industries ended up going. Howard's slide to the darkside isn't something he gets to wash his hands of. Stane might have helped tug him that way, though.

And then there's Pierce. One of my various non-canon-based bits of future speculation is that Jack goes into politics later on -- that he ends up as a Senator or something, not necessarily for the rest of his career, but for awhile. So it's actually very plausible that he might've run into Pierce early in Pierce's career with the State Department. Plus, once Pierce became involved with SHIELD's oversight and management, then Peggy would have known him and worked with him ... though I'm still considering when they might have actually met. (I don't think we know exactly when the hostage crisis involving his family canonically took place, do we?) If we take Pierce as roughly the age of the actor playing him, Redford was born in 1936 according to imdb, so Pierce could've been getting his start in politics as early as the late 1950s.

(Unpleasant thought: Peggy or Jack actually mentored him.)