flapping blackly down

...I was wondering about this. :)

trying to explain due South to people is weird because they’re always like “hmm, haven’t heard of it, must be a niche little fandom” and like. Yes but also Very Much No.

all I know about the canon of Due South is that it expected me to believe that a series of red and white purebred huskies were a) the same dog and b) an actual, legitimate, no-fucking-around Canadian wolf living in Chicago, and also there were two guys who were both named Ray for some reason and one of them was pretending to be the other one for a while??

but like… yeah, between this and The Sentinel, these are just pure fossilized 90s megafandom. 

(It’s especially interesting reading the back archives because the takes on sexuality and sex and how it works and how affection works and how characters respond to homophobia and what people expect characters to encounter and familiarity with queer culture is just–

in some ways it’s like peering back in time in a way I find really, really interesting, with a very different lens than you’ll find in traditionally published mainstream fiction outside of the queer presses. Like, don’t get me wrong, there’s stuff in there that’s just a damn Mess, but imagine the perspectives of the best writing you can find in modern fandom, from writers who are using slash fic to tell stories that incorporate a queer experience and point of view…

…and now think about the best of that, and pull it back twenty years in the past, and think about how you can use that to learn things about how people thought and acted and expected other people to think and act thirty or forty years ago.  

The past is another country. They do things differently there. And you can get a surprisingly good sense for that from old Due South and Sentinel fics. 

y’all if we’re fossils then I call dibs on being stegosaurus

I call dibs on the Caudipteryx!

I’m a Kowalskisaurus.

*unfossilizes long enough to point out that Diefenbaker is a half-wolf at best* *refossilizes, laughing about the DS Anon Troll being added to the second graphic*

I call Loch Ness Monster, somehow still surviving as a dinosaur even now!

I think I am some sort of cycad or fern. Never actually in DS fandom, but part of the ecosystem.

I have also read an absolutely ridiculous amount of due South fic, and to this day the only episodes I have ever seen are the ones @brofisting made me watch when I visited. They were very good!

My favorite thing about this is that these are all from the show, and looking at them you’d think these guys were unambiguously in a canon relationship. Which…looking at these, I’m not going to say they weren’t.

honestly has someone written an essay on due south and the figure of the closet because

LOOK i am just saying that people spend a lot of time… physically… in closets in this show. want to have a clandestine conversation about like, anything? closet. want to find out why your best friend has been replaced by a really really inaccurate pod person? talk to your not-boss in the closet. the closet is a fraught, fruitful space. it’s where secrets are exchanged. it’s where information is hidden. it’s where people talk when they do not want to be heard.

let’s add to that, the fact that fraser’s father… HAS A WHOLE ENTIRE CABIN… in fraser’s closet. he builds it. he sets up shop there. the closet is where he lives. which adds an extra frisson to all of his stories about buck frobisher, eh?

and look, i am just saying that bob fraser exists at least in part as a cautionary tale for fraser. don’t be like your dad: don’t spend your life running away from and ignoring the people you care about. or you’ll be dead and you still won’t be able to get out of the fucking closet.

anyway if you take all of this into account, the brief use of the word “closet” in fraser’s merry little word-association game is even funnier. because ray reacts like he’s been bitten. or like dief has stuck his tongue on his ear or something. “what kind of question’s that?”

fraser is blithe, unwilling to recognise that he knows that ray means… what does ray mean? ray means that he has the exact same association with the figure of the closet that i do: queerness. and it’s suddenly been sprung on him.

fraser, as ever, demurs. plays the naïf. he assures ray that he meant “nothing untoward.” but in that case, why does he say the word closet? is he asking a question? is he baiting ray? is this a first step out?

of course, it can be all or some or nothing of those things, as you choose. it’s just a throwaway joke. but… in the context of the show it tickles me. the closet is, to steal a phrase from sarah monette’s readings of due south, an over-determined space. it’s a real space for exchanging real information; it’s a real space for fraught, secret conversation. it’s a magical space where fraser can encounter his father. and it’s a figure that we understand implicitly — it’s a euphemism, a commonly understood code. “what kind of question’s that?”

and think back to the scene where fraser is physically inside his closet, talking to his father. it appears to him as a spacious, full cabin. it’s lifelike. he can move around.

thatcher hears fraser talking from the closet. intrigued, or just nosy, she opens the door.

suddenly, as soon as she opens the door, the space closes. suddenly, fraser is just alone, in a too-empty space. the closet is an odd space that can crush people if they stay in it; the closet also offers safety and space that other people crush.

closets. who’d have them? for much of due south, his father’s closet cabin is the closest fraser gets to home — the closest he gets to the truth of what he wants to be doing. and in some ways, the show ends with this closet being exploded. his father has gone; and there he and ray are, in actual canada. partners; even if they‘re not working together anymore, they’re partners. isn’t that a lot of what call of the wild works to establish?

“what kind of question’s that?” maybe, ray, you should have have taken the leap of faith sooner, and answered it. but you weren’t there yet.

Continue Reading.

ooohhhhhhh my goodness they’d got Mr. Dressup and Little Mosque on the Prairie and Degrassi and Are You Afraid of the Dark? and DUE FUCKING SOUTH

this is………….. wonderful. Maybe someday they’ll get Corner Gas and life will be complete.