actually

Still thinking about Aeryn, not entirely sure I want slash her.

I'm not quite halfway through season 2 of Farscape (limited to what I can download in the absence of a local source for episodes). Surprised to find that what I'm interested in is Aeryn & Crichton's interaction. It's het! It's canon! Why not just bury me in a shallow grave and get it over with?

I think Voyager made me allergic to canon het. They managed to formalize the Paris/Torres "romance" in the very first episode I saw. Five Trek series, and only one emotionally plausible relationship -- well, maybe two. I liked Dax and Worf together. Likewise Kira and Odo. But for the most part I find Trek about as romantic as cold soup.

I wonder whether I'd have wandered into slash if I didn't fine Voyager het (canon and fic) so utterly appalling. (Let's leave aside the fact that I wrote some of the latter.)

But, yes. Farscape. John and Aeryn.

I like the physicality of their interaction. They touch a lot. And it makes sense, given than John needs to express his good-ol'-boy chivalry and Aeryn has fewer anxieties about physical contact than most human women would have. They play the relationship beautifully -- far more performance than text. Watching them, I find it entirely plausible that (ok, really good) space opera television offered a couple of emotionally mature friends who fuck on occasion.

It's a change from the incredibly adolescent notion (seen in far too much television and even more fic) that sex is an epiphany which transforms the relationship completely, erasing the habits of the earlier friendship and replacing it with capital-R Romance. That same pattern tends to end the emotional and narrative development of a relationship at first sexual contact. While I'm hardly one to deny that sex changes a relationship, it doesn't have to be a cataclysmic rupture which erases what came before.

It's the passing out, I think. Far more people faint from sex in literature than in life. That marvellous fade-to-black too easily stands for "and things were never the same again!"

I demand more stories in which people have bad first sex.

(For some strange reason, my urge to write an long series of tales in which people have extremely bad sex. So awful that they never want to see each other again. But it doesn't really satisfy anyone but me. No one expects their porn to include, "Can we stop? You're on my hair.")

But, yes. The last Farscape ep I watched was "Out of Their Minds" (which was, by the way, many kinds of marvellous). I love the playfulness between characters. Teasing and flat-footed moments (ah, John, your obsession with the boobies never goes away, does it?) and very bad jokes.

When my hard drive crashed last spring, I lost a beloved file of quotes and on-liners, one of which I nicked from an X-Files slash piece. The German's gone from my head, but the English (and the point) was, "People in love will tease each other. This, really, is Freud in a nutshell." (If somebody used that and would like to throw me a bone, I'd be grateful.)

My beloved Shakespeare prof spent a long time reconciling us to the notions of love the plays offered, which often didn't sync well with our own. What she led us to was the recognition that the strongest sign of love or affection is play. Sometimes teasing (Much Ado About Nothing) or wordplay (The Taming of the Shrew -- she had us quite convinced that Katherina didn't mean a word of her final speech on the place of women, that it was all humorously ironic and meant for Petruchio's amusement), or gameplay (The Tempest). But in most modern portrayals of love, we go for either deep drama (angst) or domestic tranquility (curtainfic), leaving no space for a healthy relationship interesting enough to hold its audience.

It's that space which Farscape is creating for me at present. The continued play of two adults who've already had sex and aren't yet committed to dying or destroying each other in some agonizing fashion. Nobody's struggling with feelings of unworthiness (not that that's a bad thing, in fic -- in fact, well-done, it's like crack to me), and they're not headed for the altar.

I have no illusions that I could have written that. Hell, lately I can't even write a mutually unsatisfying sex scene between emotionally damaged pretty-boys. But I love watching it, and it leaves me with nothing, for now, to add.