Clean Slate (Blake's 7 story)

Fanfiction
Title:	Clean Slate
Author(s):	M. Fae Glasgow
Date(s):	1995
Length:	30 pages
Genre(s):	slash
Fandom(s):	Blake's 7
Relationship(s):
External Links:	Clean Slate
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Clean Slate is a Blake's 7 Avon/Blake story by M. Fae Glasgow.

It was first published in Bene Dictum #2 and has been archived online.

Reactions and Reviews

Speaking of which - wherever it's deemed appropriate, can we discuss recent Oblique slash? If Blake is too damn crazy, or too damn evil, I have the same reaction; I don't identify as closely, I pull back, and it diminishes the impact. But in "Clean Slate" M. Fae gets sneaky and gives us a sympathetic Blake, and so I got dragged right through the middle of everything, and was at ground zero for the ending. I hope there'll be more like that...

Aha, you've been reading BENE DICTUM: HALF 'N HALF. I just got that one on loan from a friend. Yeah, I've read a couple of (borrowed) Oblaque zines and found I didn't care for them either. Unlike you, though, I did quite like Clean Slate in BD. Well, except for the ending, but even that was better than I gather most of M. Fae's usually are.

MUSE OF FIRE RESPONSIBLE: M. Fae Glasgow

HAS POOR VILA BEEN DRAGOONED INTO THIS SHITSHOW? —

WHY ARE BLAKE AND AVON DOOMED THIS WEEK? Avon’s lost his memory, though that’s honestly not that much of a problem as it happens—it’s every ‘Because Blake loves the revolution, and even though Avon finds the Federation’s abuses soooooo deplooooorable, he doesn’t want to do anything about them. Or anything.’ fic ever. (Tell you what, I have a stored up rant about liberal politics, aesthetics and Avonistan in light of the reprise of fascism.) Essentially the whole long set-up plays no real role in the fic’s crisis.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Straight up TELLS ME Glasgow is normally amaaaaazing at voices so I should pay attention here to how a mind-wiped character sounds and how different it is from his normal voice. Ho I will tell YOU if I think this woman is ‘a master at putting those voices on paper’, and if they’re ‘finely constructed’. You may have to wait a while.

This is (I think?) the edition editor, too, being praised like this by a co-worker in her own venue—screamingly awkward, imho. I know fandom now involves recs and comments, but that feels so different to me from the story being framed by this detached, nameless editorial assurance appended to the document and forever preceding it. Like having a waiter come over while the first bite is hovering at your lips to flatly declare it’s delicious. You are going to enjoy that steak. It is perfectly cooked, and if you don’t think so, that’s on you brother. Or as a friend said, “your steak tonight: those dripping red juices remind all of the senses of the darker side of culinary desire—our chef has outdone himself this evening, with a concoction to satisfy your worldly hunger for haute cuisine and your animal passion for blood and flesh”. Her Oblique is on point and we’re no longer speaking.

Norms change: I’m glad this one isn’t current.

PROSE: Before starting I knew this did not need to be 31 pages long. UPDATE: I spoke no lies. You’d lose nothing but ‘fewer readers’ by brutally compressing the initial pages. And really the whole fic.

A ‘piss you off’ from Vila. Competent prose, in general, but not notable. A jarring POV shift on page 10: too late in the game, and too unmarked. Followed up with more such. At one point in the sex scene Blake gets called Bodie. Says it all, really.

OVERALL: I must admit it took me many tries to complete this quest. It was one of my ‘reds’: the last remainders. Essentially Avon loses his memory in an accident, but the amnesia is also kind of voluntary and selective. More could be done with the parallels with Blake’s memory loss, but the point is no-memories Avon eventually gets back to work, eventually bangs Blake, and eventually leaves the Liberator out of disdain for the violence involved in said work.

The plot does an odd little ‘Orac could give us a successful revolution where we’re not directly involved in the violence and you choose not to take it’ detour, which is potentially conceptually interesting as a fix-it, but as Bryn Lantry said in the notes to one of her B/A fics when she tried something similar on a more thought-through and plot-important level, tech solutions are cheap. I really feel they should only be employed when you’ve got something GOOD you want to do that justifies or necessitates this, or when you’re going to spend a lot of plot energy making the hand-wavium meaningful and important.

Crusader imagery, with Blake killing Avon—Willa has something very like this, also in a dream sequence. I wonder who borrowed from who? Good physicality with Blake on page 7—we’re very much not in his POV, until we are. This is one of Glasgow’s better Blakes, and I think limited POV probably plays a role in that.

Obviously this is a negligible-prep no-lube anal, but that’s in keeping with the bulk of era production, so I can’t eyeroll too hard.

I don’t hate the story necessarily for the typically-Oblique ‘but it can never be!’ of the end. This is somewhat more justified than many of them, though it needs a bit more to land it. Why now and not before? I have some thoughts, but the story doesn’t meaningfully engage with the reasons, and as we’re in a close Avon POV—that’s frankly weird.

I do hate this story: it’s a drudge, and the whole thing we’re drudging for ends up really doing nothing. I could FEEL the two-page version of the first twenty pages, at least as effective, hovering around my temples like an impending migraine. Everything feels repetitious: I want a storyboard, and to figure out what parts this NEEDS, and to fix it on that level, and to give it more interest throughout.

What this story might be succeeding in doing, that I don’t have access to, is hurt/comfort shit. That’s a real kink for some people, a whole suite of pleasures and weighting that happens to have limited frisson for me (it was decidedly more important in this era of fandom, too—not sure why). I can’t say whether the extended wake up, fall unconscious again hospital scenes would do it for you if this was your bag, baby, but I feel I ought to nod to that. If this is functioning as hurt-COMFORT, that’s a slightly unusual step for Glasgow and Oblique.

This is what AU should be but so often isn't--take canon, change it just a little, and follow the consequences of that change. Here the consequence is that an injured man comes around from a coma, and finds that he remembers nothing, not even his name--Kerr Avon. He has to slowly rebuild his life in the face of post-traumatic amnesia, discovering who he used to be from the way his shipmates react to him. It's an emotionally intense tale, looking at Avon's relationship with his crewmates, but also using his exploration of his world to examine the evil that is the Federation, and the moral dilemma that Blake faces in fighting it. M Fae Glasgow's skilful control of language paints a picture of a man who is not quite who he used to be, thanks to selective memory loss--and who doesn't regret it. It was published in Bene Dictum 2, available on Oblique Publications' website. As with Oblique's other zines, it's in PDF format, so you'll need Acrobat Reader or another PDF viewer to read it. The rest of the zine is well worth reading--my other favourite is one of the Pros stories, "The High Road."

Stunningly sad AU. Well, we've all seen stories where Blake's memory problems are the main cause of angst, but what if Avon and Blake were still together, and still sort-of lovers, after Star One, but Avon had got hit on the head (as seems to happen so frequently to him) and has forgotten who these strange people are and even how to act like a complete bastard. A wonderfully tragicomic (but ultimately sad) view of a less-defensive Avon discovering how he must have behaved from the words (and silences) of other people. Even the typo (Bodie's name instead of Blake's in the sex scene) jars but doesn't put me off this excellent story.