Sanity (Star Trek: TNG story)

Star Trek TNG Fanfiction
Title:	Sanity
Author(s):	Tiggy Malvern
Date(s):	2002
Length:
Genre:
Fandom:	Star Trek: The Next Generation
External Links:	online here (Wayback Machine)
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Sanity is a Star Trek: TNG Picard/Q story by Tiggy Malvern.

It has a sequel called Reality.

The story is set during the Dominion War arc of DS9; the pair explore realistic reasons why Picard might resist Q's advances, despite feeling attraction.

Reactions and Reviews

Picard wants Q and he knows Q knows he does, but it's not that simple. This one's all UST, and has much, much better reasons for keeping Picard away from Q than "he doesn't know he's attracted to Q", and the combination of a Picard who knows what he wants and still feels his duty doesn't allow him to indulge what he wants is more in character than most other Picards in P/Q fic I've encountered.

Reactions and Reviews

The classic form of the romance involves obstacles to the two main characters' love. Without obstacles, a story can be a PWP, or it can have a plot that *isn't* the classic romance plot and involve the romance on the side, but for a story to be about how two people began a relationship, there must be obstacles to that relationship.

Slash fanfic often uses obstacles such as "I never knew I was gay/bisexual", or "I never knew I was attracted to so-and-so". These work fine for characters under the age of 30. It is, however, really hard for me to imagine that a 50-something man in a quasi-utopian society where there are no prejudices against homosexuality doesn't know by know that he's bi and doesn't know that he's attracted to certain people. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, any guys who might be reading this, but unlike how it is with women, where you can actually confuse passionate dislike with passionate attraction because you have no physical signs one way or another, men know who they are attracted to because they get erections. Therefore just because a man dislikes another character is no good reason for him not to know that he's also attracted to that person.

Also, stories where the obstacle is "I didn't know I was attracted to that guy" are resolved easily by the discovery of the characters' true feelings. Lust equals love, and discovering you physically desire someone removes all barriers standing between you and hot sex with that person. The complexity of wanting someone and not wanting to want them is ignored.

All this is by way of explaining what blew me away about "Sanity" when I first read it. Up until that point, P/Q fic always used as the primary obstacle that Picard did not realize he was attracted to Q (pretty much everyone reads Q as knowing he's attracted to Picard), or even failed to realize that he could be attracted to a man. Discovering an attraction to Q, in these fanfics, inevitably led to Picard and Q having sex. This always bugged me because, as mentioned, I find it hard to believe that a middle-aged man could be confused about who gets him hard without an oppressive society out to confuse him. In "Sanity", Tiggy Malvern cuts the baloney and gets right to it. Picard is hot for Q, he knows it, Q knows it, but he still won't get involved with Q because nobody trusts Q. Even after he himself has come to trust Q and feel a degree of friendship, he fears for his command, for the opinion of Starfleet, for the power dynamics involved when one becomes the love object of a god. This is so utterly believable and so much more realistic than the usual obstacles, I'm amazed no one came up with it earlier.

"Sanity" is the first of two stories (I will be reccing the second one today also). In this one, no one has any sex and the ending, from the perspective of romance, is either unhappy or unresolved depending on how you look at it. But it's more *real* than "oh, yes, we're both hot for each other so let's have sex!" There are a lot of reasons in the real world why lust is not enough to make a relationship, and I like enough realism in my escapism to enjoy fanfic that acknowledges this truth.