On Day's End and Dinner

Fanfiction
Title:	On Day's End and Dinner
Author(s):	M. Fae Glasgow
Date(s):	2000
Length:
Genre(s):	slash fanfiction
Fandom(s):	Star Wars TPM
Relationship(s):	Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan
External Links:	Bene Dictum V: Nanshoku, scroll down to pg 125 (zine numbering), pg 20/37 (pdf numbering)
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On Day's End and Dinner is a Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan story by M. Fae Glasgow.

Recs and Reviews

I am so going to get flamed for this, but here goes.

First off, I'm not refuting the fact that M. Fae is a good writer. Okay? Good. What I *am* saying is that many of her stories profoundly disturbed me, because of the subtext evident in the stories themselves. I should have known that a zine of Q/O stories written by an author who denounced chanslash TPM writers as sick and perverted (she did this at Escapade in February of 2000 - I know, I was there) while the title story of her zine *was* a very pro-chanslash story was going to demonstrate some very contradictory and illogical positions.

But ultimately, it isn't the polemical nature of the stories in this zine that bothers me the most. What upset me was the complete twisting of the characters I know and love into dark shadows of their former selves. My Qui-Gon wouldn't allow Obi-Wan to suffer horribly for months on end just because of a law that the Council wouldn't break - he'd snarl, "Sith take you all!" and leave the Jedi if he had to for the sake of *any* apprentice of his, but *especially* for Obi-Wan. My Qui-Gon wouldn't act jealous and immature when he saw Obi-Wan merely having fun training with another Jedi, and he certainly wouldn't be cruel to Obi-Wan and publicly humiliate him for it. My Qui-Gon wouldn't calmly end a tender love relationship with Obi-Wan just because the Council ordered it. He'd either meet Obi-Wan in secret, or leave the order. I don't see either of them having a love so easily put aside.

M. Fae's Qui-Gon is docile and obedient, doing just what the Council says. Hardly the rebel canon and fanfic proclaim him to be. She also writes him as sometimes emotionally unstable, and immature. Can you see such a person being 'the greatest warrior of the Jedi'? Nope, me neither.

But the most disturbing thing is what she does to Obi-Wan's character in one of her short stories. Obi-Wan, after being brutally gang-raped while on a solo mission for the Council, calmly returns home, tells Qui-Gon to stop fussing over him, and then informs Qui-Gon quite coldly that he needs to violently fuck Qui-Gon to get over his experience. Ick! I mean, I've read h/c stories where a rape victim needs tender loving afterward with someone they trust to get over it, but I've never seen a story where said victim decides to rape their beloved to 'recover' from the trauma. Rape victim becomes rapist. I cannot begin to tell you just how much this story disturbed me. This is Not the Obi-Wan that I know and love. This is a monster who sounds more like Maul or Vader, to tell the truth. {shudder}

So these characterizations were just unpalatable for me. Maybe I just think too much about what I'm reading. I don't know, since the reaction to this zine has been far and wide one of delight and praise. I don't pretend to understand it. I guess I'm just weird that way. I like fanfic stories to be about characters I know and love, not ones so different from canon and fanfic that I don't recognize them at all. And this zine isn't even supposed to be an AU - M. Fae says at the beginning that she wrote her stories so that they could all fit within the movie canon. I'd hazard a guess that M. Fae was so eager to uphold her theories about the Jedi, that she sacrificed realistic characterization to achieve her goals. The result is that I feel like I'm reading propaganda, not Q/O fanfic. Bummer.

I've gone on long enough here, but you can read more about what I have to say about this zine, including detailed spoilers, on a page of my first reactions to 'Nanshoku'.

One last note to the publishers who printed 'Nanshoku': Please, don't use weird fonts that are hard to read. I couldn't even read the title of the zine on the cover, and had to read it on the table of contents page. And *especially* don't use a weird font to start each opening paragraph of a story section and then print it in pale light gray on white paper. Hard-to-read-font + pale gray text on white paper equals frustration at inability to decipher much of zine. Also, this zine wins the award, hands down, for 'Most Confusing and Indecipherable Table of Contents Page'.

Let's begin with [a story] which had a slight bit of controversy when it was first published, in a single-author TPM zine called Nanshoku. [...] I love virtually everything M. Fae has written in TPM, even though I violently disagree with the premises behind some of it - and if that isn't the sign of a good writer, I don't know what is :) She's sexy, angsty, contemplative, and enamoured of the tragedy of Q/O. In a zine with two other stories that rank in my regular re-reads list, this very short piece stands out for the economy and ease with which it paints a picture of what it might actually mean to be somewhat more than human - a Jedi. [...]

Oh, give over - you want to know about the controversy, right? M. Fae herself has ruffled the feathers of various MA-ers with her strong anti-chan views (which give an extra layer of depth to the first, titular, story in the zine). Aside from that, though, this story came in for an especially strong dose of disapproval from raonaid, who had issues with the zine as a whole, many of which I echo. But I disagreed strongly with her when she said:

Most disturbing of all to me was one of her short stories (On Day's End and Dinner), where Obi-Wan, sent out on a mission alone where it was all but assured he would get raped, and he did, returns home to Qui-Gon all calm and composed about his experience, but decides he's entitled to violently fuck Qui-Gon to get over it. The cold calculation in his words... I've seen Vader and Xanatos depicted more warmly. {shudder} And you can tell from the writing that M. Fae isn't writing this as a 'dark fic' -it's status quo to her. {another shudder}

Now, I loved this story. I think it was a much needed antidote to the endless round of wailing, raped Obi-Wans who collapse in little heaps, unable to function again after their violations. It showed the strength of the man - of both men - and the strength of the system which has trained them to face horrors much worse than rape. M. Fae makes a very deliberate contrast between the reactions to this crime of ordinary people (the men who rape Obi-Wan; the doctors who attend to him afterwards) and the Jedi (Qui-Gon; and Obi-Wan himself). I do like stories which remind me that the Jedi are not ordinary, are that little bit closer to Supermen, no matter how much I enjoy watching them in their weaker moments.

And I also thought the warmth and affection between Qui and Obi was wonderfully brought across, given how short the story actually is - I don't see any way of reading this Obi-Wan as coldly calculating. (Nor do I think violently fucking Qui-Gon is necessarily a bad thing [veg]). I'd love to hear how other people react to it, though. And, to be fair to M. Fae, you should probably read a couple of the other Scottish Trifles, at least, to see how this story fits into her general view of the Jedi.