No additional warnings for this scene.
There was this which justifiably caused a bit of firestorm on many LJs. One side issue that was brought up was the act of reading fanfic for a show/movie/etc. before actually being exposed to said show, and the corollary of writing for that fandom based only on the fanfic read, again without knowing 'canon' first hand. Which I did, for Life on Mars. In spades. I read "Steady as she Goes" and "Jabberwocky" (owwwwww) and the Hooker!verse series, among tons of PWP and day-in-life vignettes and ghod knows what else. After which I began drafting out a couple of stories…no, not jotting down ideas, actually writing them, and working on them, and fleshing them out.
Then I saw the series itself.
So it can be argued that I came into 'canon' with a skewed/warped/fucked up idea of the characters already.
Then there was this post about introspective!Gene which I have with great self-control not responded to. However it hit close to home because has recently been flogging me senseless questioning my tendency to force emo!Gene into my latest Undercover-AU fic, "Appearances." Because, simply, Gene is NOT emo. Ever. A fact I agree with intellectually, but still, I keep trying to make the man cry. WTF am I DOING???? (Drayce, you are not allowed to answer that.)
For one thing, I do not buy for an instant that Gene does not have a rich internal emotional life. The idea that, as donnaimmaculata states, "The whole emotional baggage people carry, including his own, is something that doesn't register with him" is, to me, rubbish. Now, that is obviously her perception of him and I want to make clear that I am not slamming her for what she chooses to think, but to ME, it is not true. When I read that sentence, I stopped dead. Then I wondered why.
Who do I think Gene is? I think the single most important factor to keep in mind is that I’m discussing this as a writer, as someone who likes to toy with Gene (ghod, would I love to toy with Gene…huh huh huh…oh, oops, wrong post…).
One argument was presented to me that Gene’s greatest weakness is also his greatest strength: his self-confidence. It makes him powerful but also makes it impossible for him to doubt or question himself, and indeed it is the reason why he would NOT be introspective. I can accept that, but again, it is not the Gene I write, perhaps because that idea makes him (almost) impossible to grow or change as a character without destroying the essential essence of who he is. You fix the weakness, you destroy the strength. Not that writing such a Gene cannot be done, but quite frankly I’m not good enough to successfully make a believable story out of that. Moving right along…
Drayce came up with a wonderful metaphor for Gene: SilverBack*, which, I think, is a glorious one. Much better than ‘alpha’ which she pointed out is simply the leader of a dog pack (not a lion pack pride, but let’s not go there…). A SilverBack is a complex social role in a complex social environment, and I think fits Gene beautifully. Of course the danger there is that such a metaphor basically makes Gene TOO perfect, practically a 'mary sue' of men (strong! gentle! protective! smart! big!) which, admittedly, is EXACTLY how I imagine him when he rings my doorbell and sweeps me off my feet ("Just a friend, honey! I'll be back soon, don't wait up!" *cough*) but that is not fun to write about. Boring, in fact.
BUT Gene is not someone you can just throw a bit of damage at as window dressing and have it work. Gene as…anorexic! No. Gene as…suicidal! No. (And I even wrote suicidal!Gene, in “Shadow Box”, but christinacasket I had to kill 40k words in a bizarre AU beforehand to make it work…gahhhhh…never again…) Gene as…love lorn! Oh, ghods, no. (I did that too, in “Uppercut”, and a lovelorn Gene is, actually, pretty damn violent. Please note: BAD IDEA.) So what to do? Or, more accurately, what am I doing?
I realized that lot of my ideas about Gene boil back to one, single, solitary fact: Gene is fucking brilliant.
Now I can't vouch for how canon that perception is, but that is how I choose to imagine him, as a very very smart man. And while there are brilliant oblivious people out there, they are usually the social misfits in the crowd, of which Gene is not one. He is very socially well adapted**, at least to his era, which makes me believe that he a brilliant, self-aware person. And if there was ever a recipe for internal carnage, “brilliant + self-aware” is it.
But that does not make it easy to write. The line I keep falling over like a stoned keystone cop is how to present a man who is very aware of his shortcomings (level of ‘damage’ dependent on the storyline, but you get the idea) and who spends time thinking about his actions and the consequences of those actions WITHOUT making him mopey and, yes, emo. There is the trick of using all that mental energy for justifying his actions/beliefs/etc. but at some point, a very smart self-aware person is going to go, “I’m lying to myself.” At that point they will either face facts and own up, or run screaming in denial, but like a genie out of a bottle (heh) once that self awareness is made, there will be fall out.
I don’t want to break Gene for the sake of breaking him, because I adore him. I just want to explore some of the emotional depth I know must be there, and the only way to explore that and keep it interesting is for breakage to occur or have occurred in the past. His drinking is a good target, and while in canon it is not a given that Gene is an alcoholic, it is a possibility, and it would be a hard core trauma-drama fic to explore that (I know a couple of fics out there which have tried, but it is a far under utilized subject). Likewise, he has a tendency to violence which could under the wrong circumstances be pushed too far (I’m still waiting for promised-for fic about Sam discovering that Gene is a wife abuser…a VERY ugly idea, but again, plausible, and especially since Gene and many of his contemporaries would not even perceive of ‘slapping the missus around’ as battery).
Still, while such issues are feasible, I again run into the idea of how to write Gene as being aware or becoming aware of his problems without making him OOC. Canon offers some useful moments, and I often return to 1.04 where Sam helps Gene confront his own corruption. I love this episode for presenting Gene as a genuinely flawed man who overcomes his failures (and yes, I perceive his ‘caving in’ as a young officer and accepting backhanders ‘just like everyone else’ as a major point of failure in Gene’s life…I think he does too). He has ALWAYS known what he is doing is wrong, it’s not like Sam surprises him with this revelation, Gene has simply justified it to himself and used the ‘perks’ to smother his guilt. This is a great example of who Gene is, the double-exposure of his life, and how he handles his failures/mistakes/limitations (you could argue: he doesn’t!). The bottom line is, if he has the opportunity, he will do whatever it takes to fix the problem. The two step process is 1) convince him that either there is a problem and/or it is the kind of problem he needs to confront and solve; and 2) convincing him the opportunity exists to solve it. SO, this leads to several ideas:
1. Gene has no idea that the problem he has is a problem (alcoholism, or spouse abuse)
2. Gene knows he has a problem but believes he already has a handle on it (again, alcoholism; or, for instance, his justification of his corruption; or perhaps issues with his homosexuality)
3. Gene knows he has a problem and knows it is serious and possibly out of hand but is simply convinced that the opportunity to ‘fix’ it will never happen/cannot happen/already happened but failed.
The first two options are pretty straightforward, and usually most fic that deals with “Gene has a problem” seems to fall into those two approaches. They lead naturally to Gene re-adjusting his perceptions (realizing he does have a problem, or (as in 1.04) that his handling of the problem isn’t working). However, dealing with the third approach basically means you have to utterly destroy Gene, and hope you can pull him out at the last second or at least make for a grand finale, because whatever he does, Gene IS a man of action and will DO something, not sit around crying in his beer.
For instance: About the only story I know of where the third approach was taken seriously was Some Days Nothing Goes Right, which dealt with Gene’s repressed homosexuality and ended with Gene murdering Sam during a drunken rage and then committing suicide. Rather a bleak take on it, granted, but realistic, IMHO, because at the point where Gene knows he is off the deep end and does kill someone he loves, he would figure the problem cannot be fixed. Gene is not one to beat his head against a stone wall, so even facing down a problem that is unsolvable (Sam is dead, and Gene murdered him) Gene will STILL try to find a resolution, even if there is no solution.
A good example of my failure in the quest to write a story based on the third approach is “Appearances,” where I originally started out wanting to write a very insecure Gene, one who was fatalistic about his relationship with Sam; I had him focusing on his age, and the limitations of a gay relationship in the era (there were many limitations, and outright dangers). Some of that worked, and it is still an interesting idea to explore, but what did NOT work was emo!Gene sitting around feeling sorry for himself. The story kept ending abruptly every time Gene realized he was being a great big sulking girl and he would either confront Sam directly or break up with him just as directly and oh look at that, the storyline just got wiped out by Gene’s ego…I know the boys are good at miscommunication (at least, they are in MY stories!) but I was twisting Gene into knots to keep them off step. Basically I was trying to hold off that moment when Gene realizes that the opportunity to have what he wants, to fix the problem etc., is there, because once he faces that crux, he will go one way or the other. Let us repeat: he IS a man of action. (The story did not come together until draycevixen beat me upside the head with her pokey stick and forced me to take emo!Gene out back and shoot him. The story now hinges around jealous!Gene and falls squarely into the realm of the second approach, so clearly, as a story based on the third approach it failed.)
Whatever may be happening to him internally, Gene simply cannot crack publicly or even privately, even if he feels like it. To put my concept of Gene another way: Gene thinks and feels a lot, he just does not DWELL on his doubts, worries, or fears, when/if he acknowledges them. So for me the line in the sand, with Gene, is how to present a man who is – and who perceives himself – as a man of action and firm resolve (a true Silverback) while still revealing his (I believe, anyway) rich and deep emotional life which is not always pretty or even balanced. Actions speak louder than words but still, it is the internal dialogue of Gene’s mind as he drives home from work and orders his first pint or walks up the stairs to his bedroom at the end of a long day that I would like to reveal, and so far I’ve done a damn poor job of it: thinking without dwelling. It’s a very fuzzy line, and one that you never have to worry about when writing Sam because he is simply by nature someone who dwells on problems, of his own or others. I am, actually, not a fan of emo!Sam but I think a lot of ‘emo!fic’ is borne out of Sam’s natural willingness to be a lot more introspective than, say, Gene. I mean, how the hell am I supposed to write a scene about a thoughtful, fatalistic Gene without him going OOC emo or just shooting himself????? Argh.
Yes, there is a deep layer that does, in fact, dwell on his problems but it is very deep indeed, and if I wanted to explore that darkness I could. Some Days Nothing Goes Right managed to mine that layer and combine it well with Gene’s need for action and resolution (and self-punishment) but that led to suicide, which on the whole I would prefer not to write. About the only option I see for me is to somehow peel Gene back artificially, which requires ramping up his alcoholism to toxic proportions or, somehow, cracking him so badly that he ends up on prescription meds. In the final analysis, Gene simply will not go there voluntarily, and when he does, all hell will break loose.
The real question is, would that be a Gene Hunt that can be fixed? Saved? Repaired? I am not inclined to write tragedy, on the whole. *faces conundrum, and it’s a draw*