Random Pros Read - Plague House by Asymphototropic

[byslantedlight.livejournal.com]

I decided I deserved a break from work before my lunch break today, and that a proper random at the Circuit Archive for the Pros Random Reading Challenge would help me get into a Pros-y mood. That'll teach me...

It turned up The Plague House by Asymphototropic, which I think was her first Pros story. I'm as puzzled by it now as I was then - I like the premise (half of CI5 out with flu, and quarantined all together - it'd never happen, but fun to imagine if it did!), but it all falls apart with the characters, who bear absolutely no resemblance to the Bodie, Doyle and other agents I love so well. The story's pretty much all in dialogue, but it's nothing ever heard on Pros, and reads like some strange in-joke that very few people are going to be in on.

I think if this hadn't been presented as a Pros story, it would have its own kind of charm (if you can work your through to understanding more than half of it), but because it's pretending to be people that it just plain isn't, it stops working at all for me.

So... a story that's very hard work, just when I was hoping for something relaxing! I'll have to try again later... *g*

Comments

[loxleyprince.livejournal.com]

I confess they lost me at the 5th line.

[byslantedlight.livejournal.com]

Yeah, me too... She's got others that are much more readable, though!

[heliophile-oxon.livejournal.com]

Eh, Asy has something in common with M Fae Glasgow, to my mind - sometimes they do great stuff, and sometimes they just seem to be having so much fun playing around with words and so in love with the wordsmithing itself that anything remotely resembling the lads has long since gone by the board!

[byslantedlight.livejournal.com]

Oh, interesting - I never get that from M. Fae Glasgow, or at least not to the extent that the lads entirely vanish. She stretches them out sometimes, I grant you, but not nearly as much as Asymphototropic does here (or in lots of other other fics, though I think this is the most... ... nope, can't get around it, bizarre is the word I'm looking for!) Glasgow manages to be word-clever, and sometimes it reads as self-conscious, but I always understand what's going on without having to work too hard to find the in-joke. But I do seem to remember that this is the most extreme example from Asymphototropic!

[miwahni.livejournal.com]

I remember reading this fic when I was very new to Pros, and devouring the Circuit Archive from the As on - it puzzled me, but I assumed that due to my newbie status I was missing the joke.

[byslantedlight.livejournal.com]

No, it was the other way around, I think..!

[solosundance.livejournal.com]

Asymphototropic's Bodie and Doyle dialogue here is wonderfully barmy and off the scale. I can enjoy it for what it is in others of her fics but here I agree it's just that bit too impenetrable! Interesting to re-read one of hers again though.

[byslantedlight.livejournal.com]

I need to go and read more of her later stories now, too, and see how I feel about them. I think I would have liked this kind of barmy dialogue much more as original fic, but it was a bit off-putting trying to imagine it coming out of our lads' mouths!

Asymphototropic

[fiorenza-a.livejournal.com]

I have a small theory which runs along the lines that you can judge a lot from someone's pseud (clearly, I developed this theory after picking my own pseud). So Rab C. Nesbitt's cousin M. Fae Glasgow is going to enjoy the odd bit of word based prestidigitation and is as unlikely to sell you a fluffy story as any of Rab's hard drinking mates.

Equally, anyone who calls themselves Asymphototropic is not unlikely to spell Christ 'Kyree-iced'.

And there is a corollary which says that anyone who spells Christ 'Kyree-iced' is not going to get the lads banter nailed.

However, it's a valiant attempt at barracks humour circa 'It Ain't 'Alf Hot Mum' - which is a bit odd since CI5 pulls as regularly from the police as the army, as far as we can tell - and that sort of humour would have been fairly moth eaten by 1978.

The vibe I get from this, is that it's a bit of nonsense dreamt up at a con, which raised a few giggles within context (and since nearly all the generally accepted colloquial spellings are mangled, I wonder if that was the game) and then found its way into the Archive. The way folk now post their bits of stuff to AO3 - the difference there being people tend to add a bit of context. (Which some do, to be fair, for the Archive - but not here.)

My favourite bits are: Bodie 'Unfolding his cambric to stifle the next impending expulsion' and Doyle's photographic exposition 'Capture a thousand word equivalent or three' - I'm also giving bonus points for his 'high-poor-phthisis'.

RE: Asymphototropic

[byslantedlight.livejournal.com]

Interesting vibe obtained - though I can tell you it was definitely not drummed up at a con, but was written for Pros on lj, posted to a Pros comm, and the author was happily involved in the Pros community for quite some time afterwards!

The difference between the Circuit Archive and AO3 is that the Circuit was always an archive, not an interactive forum like A03 is. The archivist was purely archiving the stories, and she alone decided which notes she'd include. People now seem to use A03 as a place which needs all that information, and I suspect it often does, because otherwise it's a big amorphous blob of general fandom writing. With the Circuit Archive, people pretty much knew where they were to start with, once they'd found it...

RE: Asymphototropic

[fiorenza-a.livejournal.com]

I have a huge soft spot for the Circuit Archive :0)

Sometimes I think people put too many notes, can't say I see it much in Pros, but in some of the other fandoms you get a diary's worth of chat and then little more than drabble. (I might be exaggerating, somewhat -.but it is a phenomenon - although having said that, one of mine will have about a page worth of notes when it goes up, but I think the circumstances of it will entirely mitigate that - oh, and it's slash!).

Also, after I'd written my comment I remembered an episode (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068396/) of Columbo where the alleged cockney spoke very much like the gang in Plague House. A complete cultural misunderstanding of the cockney love of idiom.