For A' That (Blake's 7 story)

Fanfiction
Title:	For A' That
Author(s):	M. Fae Glasgow
Date(s):	1989
Length:
Genre:	slash
Fandom:	Blake's 7
External Links:
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For A' That is an Blake's 7 Avon/Blake story by M. Fae Glasgow.

It was published in Oblaque #3 and has been archived online.

Reactions and Reviews

MUSE OF FIRE RESPONSIBLE: M. Fae Glasgow

HAS POOR VILA BEEN DRAGOONED INTO THIS SHITSHOW? Vila

WHY ARE BLAKE AND AVON DOOMED THIS WEEK? Because Avon has some on-going thing with Vila and Blake is too posh for life–yes, the same Blake that every other fucking fic in this nice of the fandom wants to call a rough simpleton compared to shining, classy Avon, because Oblique wants to have its cake and eat it too like it’s a fucking human centipede. It always feels so opportunistic and convenient when Oblique fics decide that Blake is posh and out of touch with Real America, given that this isn’t their normal reading at all, they just used it as yet another damn thing to be annoyed with Blake about. It’s like idiot manchild/Machiavelli Blake: the inconsistent yet persistent dichotomy all over again.

EDITOR’S NOTE: cutesey/every time this zine mentions the Incredible Scottishness of Author (who I think may be like, Californian irl), I think about Celtic Fetishism as an 80s/90s wave and how inherently dodgy it is

PROSE: well–better than usual with Glasgow, maybe, but I can’t shake the feeling that the way it wants to use dialect is classist (and of course when Blake shows up he speaks NOTHING like himself)

OVERALL: * Right, so this is part II (the earlier part had no Blake, but I read it) of a novel, basically. I read the first half of p1 and skimmed the rest, and then I skimmed this, because I–was not having much fun with it. This temporal set-up is actually GREAT? Post-Control, stuck on earth–very unusual! We end up with Avon and Vila hiding out in Vila’s family/hood, pretending to be married. The Celebration of Delta Life actually feels classist?You get INCREDIBLE DELTAN FIDELITY, which, ok–how does the commonality of prostitution interact with marriage respectability? Not saying this can’t be a cohesive social system, more–I’d like to see that. Sometimes you can feel narrative kink, and I feel like this is sort of–getting off on the Dickensian shambles-ness? Idk, IS that any ideologically creepier than Revisiting Brideshead with all this fandom’s Alpha fetishism? But it does feel odd, like reading The Chimes as kink. And Avon and Blake are from the Edwardian era.

• Some good points: Avon makes houses look dirty, hah. Old people should pat Avon on the butt more often.
• In this part I can feel a ‘Blake sucks’ coming in the air tonight, oh lord, but like, if Deltas are routinely harvested for organs the system must burn and I’m pretty much 10000% pro-Blake in that case. Idk, these fic twist themselves in /knots/ trying to have their cake and eat it too–incredibly oppressed Vila, incredibly sympathetic woobie Avon, incredibly wrong Blake. A lot of the time these preconditions render the other state impossible? You can’t have these things co-exist by WANTING them all. SURE ENOUGH, later Blake is like, omg fucking up the Great Planned Delta Revolution… somehow. And yes there are conflicting factions in any revolution, and yes class, intersectionality, etc etc. But this doesn’t feel like a story that’s actually interested in that interplay, so much as a story willing to use pretty much anything to construct Blake as clueless and shit. Which is a bit equivalent to Chosen Savior-ing, in that it renders the underclass merely a means of proving a point about the outsider? Here a negative one, which makes the gesture potentially less toxic, but.
• That said: this is at least a fairly committed story, in general. The OCs, atmosphere and arc all do more work than a lot of these. I respect that effort. HOWEVER, Avon generally Knows Shit about how the Federation works (‘These are crack troops’ on Albion–how the *fuck* would he know? ‘Le Grande is one of the honest ones’ –what’d you do, read the wiki?). You could claim that’s unearned, but it is canon. I’d need the lacunae in his knowledge better-defined herein in order to believe that, given his otherwise being well-informed, he doesn’t know the basics of Delta living conditions.
• ‘The burning rain and the poisonous mists out-Dome’–but we SEE rebels drinking the water in Way Back? This isn’t how a water system works? Maybe there’s some localized Silent Spring bs. And why is Vila so surprised about organ-harvesting in S3 if it’s really common where he’s from? Does this fic generally suffer from having little access to the canon?
• The great Moral Moment of Vila lecturing on p9 could be carried off better. Idk, it can feel like bullying to ask Glasgow why she’s not Lovett or something. Avon’s not sufficiently conscious in this story of how a lot more people are dying because there are more raids, so thus because of him. He’s responsible, indirectly, for the child’s death, and he’s strangely–unaware of that? No feelings/thoughts on that score? He’s not stupid, so idk why. It’s like the story fails to quite follow through here. There ARE arguments to be made that his life IS more important because of what capturing him would result in (the Federation having access to two new kinds of tech, for example), but they’re not being made.
• Avon’s weirdly passive in P1. Sure, that’s his situation, but also I feel like he’d be /doing something/. I guess that happens so that he can buck the trend a bit in this installment, but even so. All through P1, though, I wondered who the fuck do Deltas steal FROM in this arrangement, and how? (Why’s the *ship* described as Alpha?) Gamma privilege? What? Also–we have not seen any Deltas employed in work thus far? Idfk. This wants to be a story about class and economy, but this economy ultimately works about as well as the one in Harry Potter, so maybe choose a different focus, because I have so many questions.

* The end with Blake is kind of–simultaneously extra crap and weirdly nice.