A Bodie By Any Other Name...
| Meta | |
|---|---|
| Title: | A Bodie By Any Other Name... |
| Creator: | [J C] |
| Date(s): | June 1997 |
| Medium: | |
| Fandom: | The Professionals |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
A Bodie By Any Other Name... is a June 1997 essay by [J C]. It was printed in Discovered In A Letterbox #2, a Professionals letterzine.
"Why does The Professionals fanfic have such a preponderance of wotthehell-mehitabel stories?"
Some Topics Discussed
- AUs and Historical AUs
- The Professionals
- some Pros fanfiction as examples: No Unicorns, Waiting to Fall, Never Let Me Down, Heat-Trace, Arabian Nights, Professional Dreamer
From the Essay
What makes a person an individual?
Are Bodie and Lewis Collins the same person?
How is it that two writers can each write a precisely canonical Professionals story, and in the two stories Bodie will be instantly recognisable as Bodie, no one else, and yet Bodie in "No Unicorns" is an utterly different Bodie from "Never Let Me Down"? Well, creating a character on the printed page who is recognisably the same person as the character in the TV series is a matter of several elements.
First, to get the voice right to make the character in the story speak as the character in the series does. The same construction of sentences, the same chaiacteristic vocabulary, the same stress-patterns. Second, to get the actions right to make the character in the story react to situations in the story in the same way that the character in the series would. Third, of course, the visual element (and in media fiction, the least important): to describe the character's physical appearance so that someone reading the description in the story would recognise the character in the series at first sight.
But those are external. What about the characters thoughts? Well, in a way, a writer has more freedom to play with the thoughts than the voice or the actions. We can't know what Bodie was thinking when Cowley held a gun to his head, or what Doyle thought when Ann Holly got into the car and drove away, or what Cowley thought when he went off alone to track Quinn. We have to guess.
But in mediafiction, the internal life of a character - what they think and feel - is almost entirely governed by the external life, what they say and do and look like. Essentially, where you describe what people are thinking you are free to assume what you like, but you are bound by how credible you can make your assumptions.
No one would be convinced that Bodie or Doyle or Cowley were bubbling over with happiness and suppressing little giggles of delight in any of the three situations described above because that's not what they look like, though I can imagine situations where it might be so: Bodie is in a secret S/M relationship with Cowley, and one of their most-cherished rituals of love involves Cowley holding a gun to Bodie's head and forcing him to go down on it, and Cowley's public use of the ritual is, to both of them and to Bodie's delight, a public avowal of their mutual love and trust. Or Doyle secretly loathed Ann Holly and himself for succumbing to her, and when she walked out on him he felt really good because now he was free to pursue the lovely but deadly Amanda (from The Hitman) instead. Or Cowley had terminal cancer and a deep-held wish to die at the hands of someone he loved, and he and Quinn had been lovers before Quinn was sent on the mission that ended in the Lubyanka and then in Repton.
But now we're in the realms of a/u, alternate-universe stories, and this is where I wanted to be all along. I want to talk about a/us.
There are three types of a/u.
First, what one might call the Schrodinger a/u: make one change, small or large, to one of the parameters o the series and go on from there. "Waiting to Fall' is a good example of a wide-ranging Schrodinger a/u - make one change, assume that Doyle, instead of making a successful drug bust and coming to the attention of Cowley for CI5, was shopped by one of his colleagues on the Drug Squad and spent several years in jail Or "Heat-Trace", in which Doyle never joins CI5 but remains a copper. Or some people would say that all slash stories are necessarily Schrodinger a/us, because they believe that Bodie, Cowley, and Doyle in the series are heterosexual, and therefore making any of the three of them gay or bisexual is a change to the parameters of the series. Needless to say I don't believe this; I offer it as an example of what Schrodinger a/us consist of. The series, our bedrock, is intact, but cracks have been made in the rock where they didn't exist before.
The second type of a/u is the crossover. Take one series and throw another series against it. Both then exist; two layers of bedrock intermingled with each other. As far as I remember, the Professionals has been mixed-and-matched with Starsky and Hutch, Dirty Harry, Blake's 7, Star Trek (and no doubt others which I can't remember right now, three days before deadline) plus multiple novels ranging from Tanith Lee to Jane Austen and taking in Georgette Heyer on the way.
But the third type of a/u, the wotthehell-mehitabel, the anything-goes hysterical-historical future-historical just-dump-them-in-it, that's the sort which has not so much flourished in Profs fandom as spread across the lawn, buried the car and climbed up all the neighbouring lamp-posts. Bodie and Doyle and Cowley are living in Britain 200 AD. They're escaping from France in 1792. They're flourishing swords and lace ruffles in a Regency romance. Doyle's an elf (Too often) Bodie's a prostitute. (Not often enough. Cowley's a leather-clad Top flourishing a whip. (Not nearly often enough) Doyle's a vampire and Bodie his willing victim and fledgling. (No change there then) Bodie is the sheikh of a tribe of Bedouin and Doyle his frail yet fiery captive. Cowley's an agent, Bodie's a writer, Doyle's a dopey librarian.
Sometimes, of course, wotthehell-mehitabel, produces a travesty that is scarcely recognisable as a Profs story. The problem lies in the elements I described at the start of all this: voice, actions, physical appearance, thoughts. To make Bodie recognisably himself, you are bound by all four elements, most tightly by the first, and in increasing freedom to the last, which one may think of as a rather long leash. There are things Bodie would never think (though I can't tell you what they are until I see someone trying to make me believe he does think them) but where you throw Bodie into an a/u, you have that much more liberty to make him think and feel appropriately to wherever you have thrown him.
Throw Bodie into a Georgette Heyer novel, for example, and your first problem is this: Bodie's voice isn't that of a Georgette Heyer character. Change Bodie's manner of speaking to fit the novel and Pro& fans will know there is something wrong with Bodie. But make Bodie's voice true to the series, and anyone who knows anything about the early 19th century will justly scream, "Anachronism!" (Actually, I'm not sure if it is possible to scream "Anachronism!' at all: perhaps we could experiment at WriteOn this year and find out?)
The second element, that of actions, isn't quite the acute problem that voice is. One can believe that Bodie would belong to the Four-Horse-Club, the silver Capri of the Regency period He would drive fast, well, and with total arrogance. Bodie in the 1970s is a racist; Bodie in the 1770s would not be, or at least not in the same way - because racism has mutated wildly over the past two hundred years. Kipling was a racist, but an entirely different kind of racist from a British Nationalist thug. But you can make Bodie-in-the-18th-century react very much as Bodie-in-the-20th-century would react, with only such anachronism as a real historian would notice.
The third element, physical appearance, is one that no one ever seems to have any trouble with. Somehow Bodie always manages, however improbably, to look exactly like Bodie. (The name issue is one I only had real trouble with when Bodie was a Bedouin or when he was a 2nd-century Briton...)