Arctic Light

Someone on Tumblr got their hands on the Sons & Bowlers script and there are extended versions of a couple of the Charles/Hawkeye scenes!

I made a very quick gifset of Margaret and her guy friends semi-platonically kissing each other. (There are at least two other instances, I think - Charles kisses her hair once, and I think she kisses Potter on the cheek? But these were the only ones I could think of when I was compelled to make this.)

That show was so good for amperslashy feelings, I swear.

I finally finished watching all of seasons 9-11 last night, and boy was that a mixed experience. I complained about this on Tumblr after I finished - I had kind of incidentally managed to cherry-pick nearly all of the relevant-to-my-interests episodes beforehand, so what was left was a run of episodes that ranged from okay/fine/funny (but generally not very teamy) to downright bad.

It was just such a wildly mixed bag in the the last three seasons, is the thing! I feel like the character arcs and relationships are generally pretty consistent from oh, about season 3 onward, and in particular I feel like from season 4-8, as the final version of the cast develops, you can see them growing into each other and becoming the found family that they are, and especially across seasons 7-8 there's a pretty consistent trend of Charles warming up to the others and slowly edging his way inside the group. (I mean, there are individual episodes that buck the trend, but on the whole you at least know where you are with the characters in any given season.)

And then season 9 comes slamming into the found family like a wrecking ball, and from there it's just completely random whether you're going to get the Softest™ episode you've ever seen, or one in which they barely even seem to tolerate each other. Some of the very best and highest highs are in the last three seasons (Sons and Bowlers, my beloved! Where There's a Will! Who Knew! The Life You Save!) ... and then there are whole runs of episodes that are just sitcom-y and mean-spirited and the characterizations are all over the place. Charles especially takes it in the teeth with the inconsistent characterization; whether he's a valued member of the group and one of Hawkeye's closest friends, an arrogant ass they barely tolerate, or an incompetent, bigoted buffoon is almost completely random from episode to episode.

( Some noodling on Hawkeye and BJ in late seasons, also Hawkeye & Trapper )

I have a few random thoughts on various episodes, and I've been intending to write up something more detailed on "Sons & Bowlers" for months, but I guess I'll just throw some late-in-season individual episode thoughts out there, in no particular order.

( 11x12 Say No More )

( 10x19 Sons & Bowlers )

Okay, I DID write an essay, I guess. Also, I've written almost 2K to talk about just two episodes so I guess I'll knock it off and save the other thoughts for another day. Those were mainly the ones I wanted to talk about anyway. (Well, and "Who Knew," but I already did that.)

Okay so this one came together at the last minute. I was vidding a different song entirely, but if you've ever done vidding, you might also have had the experience that some songs are MUCH harder to find clips for than others - and the one I was working on (although I really liked the song for them, a moody folk song) was absolutely glacial. I was running into the last few days before the deadline, a week that also was going to involve travel for me, and I was starting to face the fact that I might not get a second vid done in time.

However, you know what's really fast to vid? Bouncy pop music with clear, non-metaphorical lyrics! This song came up on the playlist I was listening to, and I realized immediately that I could visualize the intro-outro of the vid very clearly, popped it into the timeline and had like half the vid done in just a couple of hours.

It's not the kind of song people usually vid for MASH, so I was honestly surprised the response was so positive - I mean, good surprise! Very good surprise! ♥ But I was kind of expecting it to be many fewer people's cup of tea. However, I feel like the song lends itself very well to the concept I had in mind for it - as one commenter astutely pointed out, it's both how Hawkeye felt about the people he lived and worked with (and how they felt about each other), and how the fans feel about the show after all these years.



Song: I Will Always Love You
Artist: Whitney Houston
Length: 4:02
Lyrics can be found here.
Also posted on AO3.

Oh, and both of these vids contain canon-typical scenes of wartime violence, guns, explosions, etc. ("Lantern" more so than this one, which is softer and more focused on the group dynamic.)

I watched 10x14 "The Tooth Will Set You Free" and promptly nominate "B.J, don't forget it's your turn to milk Charles in the morning" for the "dialogue that doesn't sound like it's from an actual episode" files.

(They are so hard to write!! It's like 60% normal conversation, 20% rip-your-heart-out sad, and 20% Completely Unhinged. Or something like that.)

( Then I posted about the episode to Tumblr (although I've added some stuff since then) )

Rewatched MASH 8x11 "Life Time," promptly wrote a manifesto on Tumblr:

https://www.tumblr.com/laylainalaska/772914527984599040/i-rewatched-8x11-life-time-for-reasons-and-i

In spite of the blorbo focus in the link, I just love every single person in this episode; they are all the best and most wonderful versions of themselves!! And the delighted Hawkeye-BJ-Margaret hug in this episode is truly one of my favorite scenes in the whole series.

I'll get back to the later seasons in order soon - currently I'm stopped at the start of season 9 while going back to rewatch 6-8 with Sheron, and I'm absolutely loving it; there's so much growth for everyone! In the meantime, when I need a fix from an episode I haven't seen yet, I'm going back to watch episodes kind of randomly from the earlier seasons, whichever ones catch my eye as interesting-looking or potentially useful for vidding.

Under the cut, stray thoughts on some of the bottle or limited-cast episodes from seasons 4-5: 4x7 "The Bus", 4x19 "Hawkeye", and 5x11 "Hawkeye Get Your Gun".

( Vague random spoilers )

It occurred to me tonight that MASH would work *really* well for the kind of "characters send postcards to each other" epistolary fic/art that I've done in other fandoms before, like Postcards to Jeannie. I'm just saying.

(Also special mention for rosanicus's LOVELY inspired-by epistolary Biggles postcard fic wish you were here.)

I keep meaning to post about this in more detail, but I've mainly just been watching and enjoying it. I've now seen about half of seasons 1 and 4, scattered episodes from 2 and 3, all of 6-8, and assorted episodes from the rest of it, including the finale. I don't normally watch things like this, but I keep deciding to watch straight through and then getting sidetracked by Yet Another Episode that I just have to watch. I really do intend to watch the whole thing; it's just looking like it's going to be all over the place. Then I might have to ACTUALLY watch it straight through to appreciate the evolution of characterization and writing. (One of the ??? of the Abyss is definitely rewatching the 11-season show you just watched to micro-analyze the character arcs in detail.)

It's somehow easier to throw random comments on Tumblr, where I've posted (spoilery) meta rambles about 8x22 "Dreams" and 11x03 "Foreign Affair" and I also got an unexpected amount of reblog traction surrounding this random screencap of Charles and kids.

(I continue to be completely gone on Charles, but I've also gone down a Hawkeye hole at a speedrun, I love Margaret's character evolution, and basically they're just all great.)

In random not-my-stuff, I recced this "Marching On" MASH vid in my previous MASH post, but it really is a brilliant encapsulation of the series, its mood switches, and all its many changes over time without being too spoilery. I've been watching it a lot.