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Not a Humanities Gal, Just a Standard Issue Social Science Nerd Who Loves a
Damned Good Story.
by Makd
A look at Historical!Angel and the Short Story
Herewith - a continued response and a tidbit of the essay (a WIP)on fanfiction:
I think you'll like the Historical!Angel stories. They helped me to fall in love with the character of Angel. I've always loved the short story genre, and for many years one of my favorite writers was O.Henry. I have a much-crinkled 1st edition that I inherited from my adoptive gran. I was the only one of her grandkids that liked to read - a lot - so she left the book to me. When I was younger, I read every story over and over again. His stories became so familiar to me, that I could identify the stories that TV writers had stolen from him (without attribution).
By the time I was in my teens I was an avid short-story reader, having fallen in love with Conan Doyle before I was 8, and having succumbed to a love of "the story and all it's glory". I had a slender paperback of short stories written in the 20s and 30s that were re-read so often that by the time I hit 30, the pages were falling out. My favorite stories were by Dorothy Parker (Big Blonde), Leo Tolstoy (God Sees the Truth, But Waits), Gogol (The Overcoat), and Willa Cather (Paul's Case). Wonderful stories, parsed and pared and pure: written with an eye to economy of words that still impresses me.
I no longer have the book of short stories; it fell apart completely about 15 years ago and I had to throw the shell of the book away. It was no longer in print, and it was before Amazon, so I couldn't replace it. Can you believe it: I cried a bit. It was like losing a friend. I still have the O.Henry. I feel deeply that had we been contemporaries, I'd have loved the man, charmer, con, and all.
Anyway, I think that one of the many reasons why I so love fanfiction is because I love to read fiction that's well-written: pure, parsed, and pared - like the short stories I read as a girl.
Getting back On-Topic:
The Historic!Angel stories are sometimes violent; they reverb with the lack of humanity with which we sometimes treat each other. Almost, to a tale, they remind us that we - like Angel - stumble, fail, wonder, question, stumble, fail, wonder, question, in a constantly-repeating cycle of attempts to find out WTF is going on, and if we'll ever be comfortable with our guilt-ridden, sinful, selves.
Like Angel, we are always trying; we often fail. The wonder is that we do continue to wonder and that we do continue to try, despite the stumbling.
Historic!Angel tales do not, generally have much sex. 'Cause: Angel. Our Darling Boy is worried about a lot more than sex. Ironic, isn't it? The Darling of Galway who charmed and whored and drank his way into an alley till he met immortality, who whored and sucked, who raised torture and death into an art form, who spent ~100 years traveling with a soul he's never been at ease with, seems to have had very little sex on his Journey to SunnyD.
The stories I recommended will occasionally re-unite him with Darla or Spike, or Spike and Dru, and there's a wonderful story about his encounter with a prostitute, but aside from that, no sex. Contrast that with Spike, who is literally the Jossverse's fanfic version of "Sex on a Stick".
Read Cas' two stories first: Poppies Are The Color of Blood, then The Hobo. If you are not crying, or thinking about crying, or at the very least deep in thought, at the end of each of these, you are more stalwart than I am. Read Ang-Nuo and Tin-Can. They require thought and leave you wanting to think more about life and what evil means and if it's possible, at all, to be a good person.
Read ALL the stories. While you're reading them, don't read other fanfic. Immerse yourself. Get to know Angel better, deeper. As you do, you'll get to know yourself better, deeper. You'll ask yourself the same questions you know Angel is asking himself.
Afterwards, tell me how you feel about Angel. I dare you to tell me that you don't love him, "stoopid straight-up hair" and all. I know that you will love him; I know that you will join me in calling him "Our Darling Boy". Yes, he's controlling; yes, he's kinda cheap; yes, he's broody and serious, and just. Wonderful. He shines; he glows in his struggle with himself and his fears and his surprisingly very modern sense of anomie and alienation and pain.
After you've read them, ponder again the genius of Joss Whedon. The characters he created are archetypal, modeled after older archetypes, but freshener and shinier for our times. The age-old stories of The Prodigal Son, the High School/College Athlete/Frat boy, Prince Hal drinking and whoring, The Legend of The Golden Boy, DeSade, The Snake in The Garden - Joss put them all together and made a most excellent new archetype. Good looks AND an archetype. It's not a mystery why Buffy was attracted to him. Or Darla. Or Drusilla. Or Cordelia. Or Kate. Or Wes. Or Spike. Or Nina.
Ponder also, the talent of fanfic writers: they take a character millions of folks know - or think they know - and, like Shakespeare, Homer, and Virgil, tell their story as they see it. They take the pain, the anomie, the alienation, the humor, the wonder, sometimes the crap, of their lives and transform it into a beautiful thing. To paraphrase, they "make their art with their hands", typing away, sharing their souls with their readers. A sacred job, that.
I consider every story I recommend to be beautiful; every story is a little slice of life - or unlife, since we are talking about a vampire here - that enriches our lives, that makes us feel a little better having read it.
These are beautiful stories, and, if I were an editor for a major publisher, and we were going to publish a volume of short stories, I wouldn't hesitate to include the work of the writers I recommend here, along with the work of Dorothy Parker, Leo Tolstoy, O.Henry and J. D. Salinger.
A short while ago, I told automatedalice_ that after I'd read Herself's Manhattan Nocturne, I knew I'd never be satisfied with printed fic again. It just couldn't match the energy, the inventiveness, of what I'd just read in fanfic. (or whatever. I'm not good at remembering the exact what of the what that I said. Or wrote.)
The best? Is still the best. I don't care if it's based on original characters or not. A good story? is a goddamned good story. And that, gentle readers, is what I like, and how I found my way into the depths of the Jossverse, and into LJ-Land: the neverending search for - and the joy of finding - a damned good story.