#benton fraser is jealous

[pigtailedgirl]

Never not laughing over Fraser's deadpan "Crabs and Things" restaurant suggestion of where Ray should bring Louise St. Laurent.

Absolute petty b move Benny Benton Fraser. I see you. Perfection.

[sammaggs]

I just love wherever is going on here between Ray and Dief

[preetkiran1016]

Dear Santa

Hi!!!! i'm preet! It's good to meet ya, and i hope we have a great time this seekrit santa season!! We've matched together, so i can assume we both love these characters a hell of a whole bunch- I want you to know that i already know ill love whatever you're going to come up with, and i can't wait to see what your creativity brings!!!

my DNW is pretty short, but i always add them just in case! so, no ddlg/scat/sounding/character deaths please. just know that i'm super grateful to be a part of this, and that i'll love any fan-work you bring to the table, especially in a fandom thats well into its third decade, yet welcomes new members like me with open arms.

If you'd like, i have some further details on the requests, so take a look! if you'd prefer to take your own spin on them, feel free!!!

request 1:

Benton fraser/ray kowalski

im a sucker for them being cute together! i'd love something fluffy! it's up to you for whatever scenario you like, but i do confess a fondness for winter/snow shenanigans and cuddling for warmth, and drinking hot cider or hot chocolate together. Regardless, im sure ill love whatever you come up with!!

request 2:

Benton Fraser & Robert "Bob" Fraser & Maggie Mackenzie

i mean, they really should've had one holiday or family dinner together don't you think? any familiy event with lots of ghost shenanigans would be great!

request 3:

Benton Fraser/Ray Kowalski/Mark Smithbauer

not gonna lie i love a little jealousy thrown in with my threesomes/throuples XD who's jealous of who in this relationship depends on you! Have fun with it and go nuts! (angst is good as long as its a happy ending!)

request 4:

Benton Fraser/Ray Kowalski/Ray Vecchio

the sky's the limit! perhaps post cotw, growing pains and fluff? moving to canada together? or staying in chicago? to be honest id be delighted by anything (angst is a okay! as long as we get a happy ending)

request 5:

Victoria Metcalf & None

i just really love victoria. maybe a fic about her life after victoria's secret? does she ever go back to see Fraser? does she watch through press coverage? does she see his new relationships? or does she just move on and think of him fondly/angrily from time to time, building her own life? (if she does go back- perhaps some background rayk/fraser or rayk/fraser/rayv she can get jealous about). to be fair i'd love anything you come up with!!

Thank you so much for making something for me this christmas Santa! I can't wait, and i hope you'll have as much fun as i will writing this event!

Yours-

preetkiran1016

[kyashin]

Voltron: The Fandom of You

Soooooo, hi. I want to talk about Voltron fandom, because I have some positive things to say about it. But first, I want to talk about due South.

due South is one of my favorite shows, and the fandom produced some of my favorite fan content. All around, it was a fantastic contribution to the universe. Well done, humanity.

For the uninitiated, the show is: Canadian Mountie Benton Fraser, the most upstanding and honest (and sarcastic) person imaginable, first came to Chicago on the trail of the killers of his father; and, for reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, he remained, attached as liaison officer with the Canadian Consulate. It was a buddy cop show, and for seasons one and two, his cop buddy was an Italian-American dude named Ray Vecchio. Some people shipped it.

The show was canceled, and then, after enthusiastic fan campaigning, lovingly revived for two more seasons with Paul Gross––the actor who played Fraser––at the helm as executive producer. Unfortunately, David Marciano was unable to reprise his role as Ray Vecchio, so yikes! Now what? The entire premise of this thing was “sincere Canadian Mountie and cynical American cop shenanigans”. The solution was to replace Ray Vecchio. Literally. Like...in the show.

The first episode of season three has Fraser arriving in Chicago after a vacation in Canada to find this hot blond dude with a way different accent claiming to be Ray Vecchio, who is dark-haired and different-accented and just...you know...an entire different human being. Aaand let’s skip to the end of the episode where it turns out that Actual Ray Vecchio is undercover with the mob, so this new dude is gonna pretend to be him ‘til Vecchio gets back. New dude’s name is Ray Kowalski. People also shipped that.

But the fans who’d like, worked feverishly to get their show back on the air weren’t counting on having half the duo they wanted back erased from the show. !!!!!!!!!!!

Enter the Ray Wars. (Seriously, there’s a whole thing about them on fanlore.)

And a disclaimer: I wasn’t in the fandom for the height of the rage and fury, but I did saunter in as things were winding down, and even then some of the wreckage was still smoldering. That whole kerfuffle was Fandom Infamous for a super long time––and people who’ve been in Fandom long enough definitely know the Ray Wars by name AND reputation. For years, I’d see the Ray Wars held up by others as one of the ultimate examples of “intense fans” and just how Not Good a Look fandom can make for itself.

Here’s the thing though: the Ray Wars took place in the late 90s. No social media, no widespread understanding of fandom throughout the population. Fans were, like, on mailing lists and shit. The people who created AO3 were posting fic on web hosts like Geocities and Angelfire. Some people still called the internet “the web”, AOL was the gatekeeper to the internet things for a lot of people, and fans were figuring out that we could do ~*~*~*this*~*~*~ to make our user names look super unique and cool (not that I did that, just to be real, real clear). In that time, fandoms were very, super insular worlds with very tall, very robust fourth walls separating fans from creators and actors.

And for decades, these niche-occupying fans were accustomed to consuming very heterosexual content––shows and movies and comics and video games––and then writing whole-ass essays about how you could interpret this same-sex ship as legitimate within canon if you tilted your head 23 degrees, closed one eye, ignored the heterosexual ending, and stared long enough at these four screenshots from that one scene in episode 13.

You’d see flinches of contact between Fandom and The Established Source Material Creators sometimes. but it was rare. Anne Rice, for example, haaaaaaaaates fanfiction, and she’d go to great lawyery lengths to erase all she could find of it from the internet. Generally speaking, though, creators lived over there, and fans lived here, and we didn’t have much of an opportunity to interact with each other outside of, like, letters and conventions. There were still disrespectful fans, but you had to, like, make an effort to be a direct nuisance to the cast or crew.

Also, admitting to liking “slash” fanfiction as a woman back then got you “you just like slash because you’re too jealous to imagine your favorite male characters with women” at best and “that’s disgusting” at worst. ...Eh, there was probably worse, let’s be real.

So you can imagine the reaction many of us had when Paul Gross was interviewed about due South’s upcoming third season in 1997 and said of Callum Keith Rennie, the actor who’d play Ray Kowalski, “I tell you, slash fiction is going to go crazy when they see the new guy. He is really good-looking and sexy, the dangerous side of Fraser. It will be totally homoerotic.” THESE WERE THINGS AN EXECUTIVE PRODUCER SAID. IN 1997. KNOW WHAT ELSE HAPPENED IN 1997? ELLEN DEGENERES CAME OUT. AND THEN LOST HER CAREER BECAUSE OF IT FOR A LONG-ASS TIME. WILL AND GRACE WASN’T EVEN A THING YET (1998). NEITHER WAS THE ORIGINAL UK VERSION OF QUEER AS FOLK (1999).

Like, holy shit???

And the thing is? He wasn’t baiting. The show intentionally included a LOT of subtext between Fraser and Ray Kowalski, to the point where the last episode of the show showed Ray having a literal identity crisis because he could tell Fraser wanted to go back to Canada permanently and like, “who am I without him” and then the series ends with the two of them sledding into the actual sunset no I’m not exaggerating that happened WHAT EVEN WAS THIS BLESSING IN 1999.

Were they canon? Eeeeeh. Kinda? It was 1997, I’d call whatever they were groundbreaking, at least for me. And the reason I say it wasn’t baiting is because all Paul said was, “Slash fans will like this,” and many of us did. So, y’know. Truth in advertising. Well done, Paul.

AND NOW IT IS THE YEAR OF OUR QUEERS, 20gayteen, and SO MANY THINGS have changed for the better for LGBTQ folks in the last two decades. Like, Voltron fandom is WILD to me sometimes (in a fantastic way) because some of the fans are actually young enough to have been born after the AIDS crisis, after Matthew Shepard was brutally murdered, after Don’t Ask Don’t Tell––after all these horrible, devastating wounds were inflicted on our beautiful queer family. There are actually fans in Voltron who believe, without a sliver of doubt, that a same-sex pairing can and will become canon.

That’s bananas to me. That there is hope like that! Belief like that! Because I was born at the very end of the AIDS crisis and I didn’t hear the word bisexual until I was, like, twelve, let alone have enough of a support system around me to embrace that label for myself. B A N A N A S.

So of course––of course––there’s a part of me that hopes a same-sex pairing will happen in Voltron. Just thinking about how Dreamworks almost made Miguel and Tulio a canon couple in The Road to El Dorado in 2000 makes my heart twinge with disappointment. (Yes, Chel is great, but.)

See, I’m super attached to Voltron even when the writing is clearly stifled and bridled in by the people whose job it is to sell lots and lots of Voltron toys. I read klance fic and reblog VLD fanart and I have one (1) friend who also watches the show. We talk about it sometimes, and I throw fanart of Shiro at her because he’s her favorite. She doesn’t ship anything, and I am a cheerful little klance-shipping demon. I am in a fandom of two, and it’s pretty great in here.

But.

Voltron’s a lighthearted kid’s show about humans and aliens piloting mecha lions in space to save the universe from space colonialism, and while I will be dizzy with glee if a same-sex couple becomes canon in this show, I want it more for the intended audience of Voltron: kids.

I met a kid last year at Osaka Pride whose mother said, “He came home from school and told me, ‘I don’t feel like a girl or a boy,’” so this young mother brought her child to Pride to learn more about the community that her baby might belong in. And that lovely little human stayed on the fringes at first, apparently shy, until their mother told them, “Go on,” and then they spent the next ten minutes literally jogging around all the booths and beaming at everyone: the trans women in neon dresses cooing at how cute this little sunbeam was, the booth folks selling rainbow-themed merch, the couples hand-in-hand without shame or fear. And when they came back to their mom, they were completely carefree. And I thought, I wish that had been me.

And maybe it could’ve been, if every single cartoon I consumed as a child wasn’t coding gay men as villains, overtly implying that LGBT people had a direct link to actual pedophilia, and aggressively promoting heterosexual romance as The Only Acceptable Way of Love. If I’d grown up in a world where Ruby and Sapphire were on TV being happily in love every week, I might’ve realized what was in my own heart sooner than college.

So there is part of me who understands why people are so emotionally connected to the possibility of a ship like klance becoming canon. I’ve felt that urgent hope, that wild hunger, again and again and again and again in my life, and the only time I’ve ever had that hope realized in canon was in 2016 watching Viktor and Yuuri skate together in Yuri!!! on Ice. I cried. A lot.

I understand the emotion fueling the very, very bad decisions being made. In the simplest possible terms, the people who repeatedly harass the Voltron cast and crew are people who want a thing and are prioritizing getting that thing over the mental health of real people. I think it’s a symptom of internet detachment. When one is flinging words into a void, one doesn’t have to see how they’re received. Their actions––if I haven’t made it clear––are objectively harmful, and I don’t condone them.

But what I want to say––what I wrote this whole thing to say––is that Voltron isn’t a terrible fandom, and it isn’t the first fandom to have loud, overzealous fans who cross the line and make people inside and outside the fandom alike think, Yeesh they’re/we’re all lunatics. Voltron fandom is not The Worst, because I guarantee you if The Ray Wars were happening today, there’d totally be people on Twitter attacking Callum Keith Rennie directly for daring to replace David Marciano. It could have been so, so much uglier than it was, and it was already Bad.

In 1997, the fourth wall still more or less existed, and LGBT content––let alone respectful content––was scarce to say the least, so Fandom Discourse at the time remained generally contained to fan-on-fan unpleasantness. Today, that fourth wall is utterly gone, and I think all fandoms have to adapt to that and learn a whole new code of etiquette. LGBT rep is important, but there are respectful and effective ways to get it that don’t involve harassing the cast and crew. The voice actors and creators and crew of Voltron deserve basic human decency, and to be seen as people first and content creators second. It’s entirely possible for the majority of fandom to interact respectfully with the creators––it’ll just take time and patience, like most things that last.

So listen, everything’ll be fine. Try to have patience with each other. To quote a manga I’ve been translating: “There will be times in your life when you won’t be able to avoid being angry. Don’t make little things bigger than they have to be. Laugh and forgive.” Or, in this case, laugh and ignore. If you like a thing, awesome! Tell people! Or don’t! And if you don’t like something, carefully consider the consequences of what you do after you realize, I don’t like this. I don’t ship sheith at all, but for the last two years I’ve managed to leave alone the fans who do ship it and not send Shiro’s voice actor and his family angry, threatening messages. It wasn’t even difficult, guys. I just, like, read some klance fic instead.

I felt compelled to make this because I keep seeing posts from Voltron fans calling Voltron fandom a raging garbage fire and sure, there’re people playing near dry kindling with flamethrowers more than is advisable, but Voltron fans have created and will continue to create some beautiful content and friendships just for love of a show, and that’s lovely as fuck. If you’re feeling ashamed of your fandom and you haven’t done anything wrong, remember that you’re fandom, too. Keep being respectful, kind, and good. The terrible people won’t go away, but they won’t define the fandom for you unless you let them.

Be kind to each other, and things will improve.

And if anyone tells you your ship is bad, don’t talk to that person anymore, because that person probably has some dry kindling and a flamethrower.

And hey, if you’re at the end of this post and you’re like: Wow, this was way too short, and I would like to read more things this person has written, there’s always my Team Voltron-in-Japan AU. It has klance and Nyma/Allura and I enjoy writing it.

Wow, I’m hungry. Bye! :D/

[vashti-lives]

Due South Reversi AU

So I was telling @sweetfirebird last night that I really want a historical AU where Fraser is a mountie among mounties but instead of being “the last of his kind” or whatever he’s absolutely in his element at the hight of when his skills would have been needed. Meanwhile Ray K is an ex-pinkerton who goes to Canada hunting down the man who murdered his father and then stayed for reasons that are none of your goddamned business. 

So you have Fraser as a man who is in his element (and yet, at heart, still an outsider) while Ray is the fish out of water in the wilds of Canada who’s methods may be strange and new fangled (and occasionally perhaps overly violent) but they may have their merits in the end. 

So I was thinking all this over and I was wondering where Ray V fits into all of this when I realized. In the AU Bob Fraser isn’t dead. In this AU when Ray enters the wilds of Canada he doesn’t find Benton Fraser first thing. 

No in this AU he finds Bob. Bob who is a decorated officer past his prime, stuck in what his superiors assured him was a comfortable desk job in what passes for a city in the wilds of Canada (Ray scoffs). His son is off, doing what he used to do and by all accounts doing it very well. At this point pretty much all their interaction consists of infrequent painfully polite letters. 

And so in the midst of this he finds Ray, angry and grieving for a father he didn’t even like in life, disillusioned about the direction the Pinkerton’s have gone in, and with an extremely interesting mystery on his hands. Of course Bob would be instantly hooked. Ray is young and dynamic and in him Bob sees the chance to mentor a young man in the way he regrets not being able to do with his own son.

And thus for several years the two of them would solve a lot of crime and probably cause a lot of trouble while Ray gets used to Canada. And then Ray goes back to Chicago (Stella has met someone and finally wants their years long separation to be official. He can’t say no so though it breaks his heart he signs the divorce papers.)

AND THIS is where I think I would start the story. Ray is broken hearted with nothing left tying him to the States returns to Canada. He strolls into the station to greet Bob and what does he find?

Another man sitting at Bob’s desk. An exceptionally handsome man sitting at Bob’s desk. An exceptionally handsome man who is giving him a look of stern disapproval. Because while Ray was gone Bob Fraser fell ill and Benton Fraser came to take care of him and has thus gotten a more urban post. 

At first Ray and Fraser are wildly jealous and dismissive of each other but there’s crime to solve and they have to team up and then eventually they fall in love. 

It would be fucking great you guys.

[crosmopolitan]

tagged by @chocolatechipcookiesplease

rules: answer these 20 questions and tag 20 amazing followers you’d like to get to know better!

name: tannis

nicknames: tae, tani

zodiac sign: cancer

height: 5′6″

orientation: bi

nationality: hella canadian

favorite fruit: pineapple, or really ripe mango

favorite season: fall

favorite book: mmm, probably something by Mary Stewart or Susanna Kearsley

favorite scent: damp air of a cedar forest above a waterfall

favorite color: deep green

favorite animal: wolves, moose, and horseshoe crabs

coffee | tea | hot cocoa: i was raised by scandinavians; i bleed coffee.

average hours of sleep: 6

cat or dog person: both, but hubs is allergic to cats. so we’re searching for a dog that can handle being in an apartment.

favorite fictional characters: benton fraser. merlin.

number of blankets you sleep with: an amazing light but still very fluffy duvet

dream trip: so many places omfg. i’m super jealous that hubs is going to prague without me. 

blog created: this blog, probably a couple, three years. first blog was probably ‘99/’00ish?

number of followers: couple hundred

random fact: i almost drowned as a child, but our friends’ labrador saved me

tagging:  ehh, if you wanna feel free *handwave*

[sammaggs]

The fact that Fraser could, at ANY point during Odds, tell Ray what he’s up to and what he suspects, but CHOOSES not to for absolutely no good cop reason, proves that he is doing it specifically to see if and how Ray will get jealous. In this essay I will