philippos42's reading page

I have been reading fanfic this week between the Noisy bits.
... there are a Lot of Noisy Bits.

I keep reading fic where they didn't do it the way I would and this has an obvious solution.
At some point writing could happen.

But's it's stuff like crossovers that keep one half as a guest star who doesn't say much, when it was his fandom tag I was working through. I don't know what I would have Constantine say about Dresden Files but it would be something from his own point of view. We would know where in his canon he was. It would be distinctly relevant, given all the everything.

... also the argument you shouldn't tell a guy he is stories in your universe because he'll get mad at the writers
(which the fic made due to Dresden having read all of Hellblazer but just not dealing with that out loud)
doesn't really hold up because multiverse
(too many canons for one version to live, writers clearly not to blame for the existence of infinite possibility)
and also
https://screenrant.com/constantine-real-life-alan-moore-dc-comics/
https://www.vulture.com/2014/10/secret-history-of-john-constantine.html
of all people, he *knows*.

... I am aware of the logical reasons for the writers seeing a bloke in a trenchcoat, and yet.


I read some Labyrinth fic as well that was going well until it seemed to believe Jareth about Jareth.
*do as I say* / and I will be your slave
is not an offer.

So I would write that whole thing very much a different way up.

But then what is the attraction of it? If I'd only go there to change one character.
Tricky to then make it what anyone in the tag is even looking for.



Constantine and Jareth and Dresden are making me have a think about characters attitudes to women.
And what makes them interesting despite them.

Constantine is left the least problematic these days, pretty much because his canon is most recent (that I have read, I gave up on Dresden with Side Jobs apparently, and stalled on a reread lately on Fool Moon because that was not a point of view I was having fun in)(also I have the TV series but remember it not. Hmm, shouldn't have opinions on Dresden then.).

Reading one Hellblazer writer's attitude to John using up his friends and throwing them away... I mean apart from wondering why he wrote him that way if he didn't like it, I'd say that isn't what the Constantine TV show did, even when it was. They kept him more knife edge, so you could interpret him either way, like he was trying his best or like he was tricking his nearest into things. The ambiguity is part of what makes him compelling I feel. If he lands all good or all bad then he's not really Conjob any more, you know?
But the further away from original cultural context you get then the more it'll land different.
The balance tips without the story changing.

Also, fanfic is written by a different demographic than the original comics, mostly.

Things get spun different or rolled out in a new direction.



I do keep wanting to write the man but I also don't want to color inside the lines, so I have in fact got a new trenchcoat in mind and should give him a name.

Making Constantine a timeline sliding archetype is a big change. You can't get the specificity that way. I have complained before. It leaves problems as individual personal ones because the details of the politics and social conditions get stripped out. But that makes the politics slide in somewhat unexamined instead.

The 2014 TV show did not do well with race. I do not know where I would need to start to do well with race. But it needs doing carefully and consciously or all the horror cliches drag the old racisms along with them.



I have no conclusions yet, to thus post or otherwise.

But I am actually reading, and something that isn't Doctor Who or DC, so thoughts are being generated.

ish.