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lunasariel I've finally caught up with the rest of the world and seen Inception. It seems that I'm always one step behind the big important movie that everybody's talking about (I didn't realize that Iron Man 2 was probably pretty good until it was out of theaters), or I hear it's good, but I go to see something else instead (I could've seen Slumdog Millionaire, but I saw Gran Torino instead), or whatever, but this time it seems that I'm on the ball. It's a worthwhile movie, certainly, and I enjoyed it very much, but it's like The Dark Knight (another Christopher Nolan movie, probably a coincidence) in that I don't think it's worth the BIG SCREAMING DEAL people are making out of it. Yes, it's very definitely a good movie. Yes, it is far more intelligent that the average pre-digested summer blockbuster pap. And yes, it might even be Oscar-worthy, come fall. But to judge by the reactions on some of my comms, which are usually very multi-fandom, Inception is the biggest thing to hit genre films since Lord of the Rings got adapted.
This has, naturally, made me wary of it, but to my mild surprise, I liked it rather a lot. My brain got a workout, the writing was pretty damn good, and some of the fight scenes were nothing short of amazing. There were quite a few nice little nods to Nolan's other works, especially (and predictably) The Dark Knight. We saw a grandfatherly Michael Caine giving cautionary advice to a man not technically his son, but who sees him as a father-figure (advice which, incidentally, deplores the not-strictly-legal uses to which the main character has put his unusual talents, but tacitly approves his altruistic goals), Cillian Murphy getting a loose cloth bag popped over his head, and Ken Watanabe as a vaguely sinister figure with a perchance for cool gadgets and implied friends in very, very high places.
But all celebrity blah-blah-blah aside, I enjoy the characters for what they are. Most of the fandom seems convinced that Arthur and Eames are desperately in love, or at least fucking on a regular basis, but I just don't see it. I've flirted (no pun intended) with Arthur/Cobb, but, oddly enough for me, I do like them better as just friends. In my own little mind, they've got the same thing going on that Jason and Nathaniel from AB:VH do. They've been working together, depending on each other so long that they're like brothers, including the bickering, well-meant but not always well-received advice, and "MOOOOOOM!!!! (or in this case, ARIADNEEEEEE!!!!) HE STOLE MY [blank]! MAKE HIM GIVE IT BACK!" I admit that the idea of them smexin' is hot, but it has no emotional depth for me. Authur/Ariadne, on the other hand, is all about emotional depth, although I don't find it particularly spicy (at least, not beyond the norm). Cobb/Mal, similarly, is just too tragically, (literally) insanely beautiful for me to mess with.
To me, Arthur and Ariadne are less "old married couple" than "friends with benefits." They like each other quite a lot, they may even love each other, but they aren't all over each other, especially not on the job. For me, for this fandom, it's not about the epic true love that I'm sure is there, it's about the Team. Cobb and Arthur, first and foremost, but Ariadne, Eames, Saito, and Yusuf all have to be there too, or no go. Romance exists, certainly, but the way my fics are turning out, it's incidental at best. I know, it's unusual for me to write in a fandom with a large cast where there aren't at least two romances/wannabe romances/entanglements/love triangles/whatever. I'm going for a sort of Three Musketeers feel, but with more weirdo metaphysics, slightly more booze, and (probably) more sex. I'm keeping the swordplay and sexy spies, though.
EDIT: Upon consideration, I really am wavering between a platonic and romantic relationship for Arthur and Cobb. Both my head and my heart tell me it's platonic, but the way they've been acting in my fics, it's just not realistic for them to be "just friends." In this day and age, in my experience, two adult, heterosexual males don't have long conversations about their feelings, or hug (or, in fact, touch any more than is strictly necessary), or any of that. So I guess I'll just leave it ambivalent, a sort of open-ended question. I'll drop enough hints so that it can be read both ways, but in the end, I won't provide a conclusive answer.
I've been working on the characters (ok, mostly Arthur) a bit, fleshing them out, giving them something resembling backstories. Arthur's last name is Randall. He has degrees in psychology and information science, and used to work at an academic library somewhere before he became an extractor. Ariadne is in her second year of grad school. She stays in touch with her family (mother, father, younger sisters, and three dogs), who live in the Midwest somewhere. She and Arthur are shacked up in Paris, to the disapproval of her parents, to whom living in sin, in Paris, with an older man is a recipe for disaster. Eames' first name is Chester. He flirts with Arthur because it make Cobb all overprotective and sputtery, Ariadne all jealous and bitchy, and, hey, Arthur is hot. Cobb lives in Maryland. His favorite authors are Agatha Christie (because everything is explained in the end) and H.P. Lovecraft (just in case). Miles might have more of a shady past than he lets on. Yusuf loves his cat, Princess Leia, more than anything in the world. He is, obviously, a huge Star Wars geek, and a fair-sized everything else geek. Saito is secretly into extreme sports, especially hang-gliding.
As far as fic goes, I'm working on two different angles: the government "retaining" (read: kidnapping) the team in order to extract, and possibly implant, thoughts from various high-level politicos' heads, and an elderly billionaire who believes that someone is trying to extract something from his head. If I go with the "elderly billionaire" idea, he'll have an asshole son who he thinks that he's Mr. Dangerous McBadass and hits on Arthur (of course) and/or Ariadne until one or the other clocks him. And if I go with the "shady government ops" idea, he'll be one of the agents in charge of them (because OF COURSE the CIA is doing this, don'tcha know), because I'm starting to like this character too much to throw away. I've even got a name for him all set out: Ben Schreoder. He's my favorite type of antagonist (which is why I'm writing him, I guess): arrogant, clever (but not as clever as he thinks he is), and just a wee bit obsessed.
As far as the elderly billionaire in the eponymous employer of the "elderly billionaire" scenario goes, he's undergone a few renovations. At first, he was unsound body and, as we come to discover, mind, and so has left the running of his Fortune 500 company to his asshole son, but I think this fandom has had enough of infirm tycoons spouting quasi-cryptic messages from their deathbeds.
Next, I went a bit too far the other way and made him a two-fisted, red-blooded, slightly blustering captain of industry, but that eventually devolved into a lampoon of itself.
Now I've got him as an idealistic old man, unwilling to give up the values that "made [blank] great" (I haven't come up with a nationality for him yet). He puts a great deal of value in things like personal honor and reputation (think Firefly's Adelai Niiska, but without the evil or the crazy), but can't stand the younger generation of corporate powerhouses, who he considers both dangerously soft-hearted and too clinical and detached from the running of their own businesses. Thus, he's left most of the day-to-day running of his as-of-yet unnamed business to Mr. Asshole Son, who is by now getting far too big for his britches. In fact, it might turn out that Mr. Asshole Son might be the villain all along, and that he's hired another team of extractors to re-create Cobb's feat of Inception, in order to convince Daddy Dearest to transfer controlling interest to him.
But Daddy Dearest cops to Mr. Asshole Son's ploy, and hires the original team (although he doesn't know it was them who performed the first [and second] successful inception[s]) to protect him...and now is this not only sounding waaay too much like the actual movie, but it's fundamentally flawed. When you get right down to it, why would they take this job on? At least one of them has officially sworn off both extraction and inception forever, and at least three more have homes and/or careers to get back to. Not to mention, it was implied that their last job left them all filthy stinkin' rich. Also, what motive would they have to include Saito? Last time they only brought him because A) he knew all the non-extractor players involved, and B) it's his money. This time, I'm thinking that either they're going to need his money and connections to blend in enough to get close to the mark (which I guess they wouldn't need, since they've been explicitly hired by Daddy Dearest, so that line of reasoning is right out), or the team's feat of inception has become something of a legend among extractor culture, if such a thing exists, and said legend paints Saito as a legitimate member of the team, although one whose purpose was unknown. Daddy Dearest probably heard of the team by word of mouth in the first place, so he could just assume that Saito actually is an extractor, and hires him along with the rest. But that brings me back to the original problem of motivation, which is where this particular plot kinda dead-ends.
I've done less work on the "shadowy government ops" scenario, but at least for the time being, it seems promising. Motivation is definitely a non-issue, since "do what we say or we'll shoot you in the head" seems like a pretty good motivation to me. The big question I have here is whether to portray the jobs themselves positively or negatively. Will the team be sniffing out the locations of hostages and terrorist cells, or will they be brainwashing political opponents and keeping a lid on the Commander-in-Chief's dirty laundry (btw, when I reference the President in this scenario, I mean a whacko warmongerer like Bush, although not Bush himself)? And if it turns out to be the latter, how far will they be willing to go before taking a stand? And if they do take a stand, how will they keep their black ops buddies from just shooting them, or more likely, their loved ones?
This has, naturally, made me wary of it, but to my mild surprise, I liked it rather a lot. My brain got a workout, the writing was pretty damn good, and some of the fight scenes were nothing short of amazing. There were quite a few nice little nods to Nolan's other works, especially (and predictably) The Dark Knight. We saw a grandfatherly Michael Caine giving cautionary advice to a man not technically his son, but who sees him as a father-figure (advice which, incidentally, deplores the not-strictly-legal uses to which the main character has put his unusual talents, but tacitly approves his altruistic goals), Cillian Murphy getting a loose cloth bag popped over his head, and Ken Watanabe as a vaguely sinister figure with a perchance for cool gadgets and implied friends in very, very high places.
But all celebrity blah-blah-blah aside, I enjoy the characters for what they are. Most of the fandom seems convinced that Arthur and Eames are desperately in love, or at least fucking on a regular basis, but I just don't see it. I've flirted (no pun intended) with Arthur/Cobb, but, oddly enough for me, I do like them better as just friends. In my own little mind, they've got the same thing going on that Jason and Nathaniel from AB:VH do. They've been working together, depending on each other so long that they're like brothers, including the bickering, well-meant but not always well-received advice, and "MOOOOOOM!!!! (or in this case, ARIADNEEEEEE!!!!) HE STOLE MY [blank]! MAKE HIM GIVE IT BACK!" I admit that the idea of them smexin' is hot, but it has no emotional depth for me. Authur/Ariadne, on the other hand, is all about emotional depth, although I don't find it particularly spicy (at least, not beyond the norm). Cobb/Mal, similarly, is just too tragically, (literally) insanely beautiful for me to mess with.
To me, Arthur and Ariadne are less "old married couple" than "friends with benefits." They like each other quite a lot, they may even love each other, but they aren't all over each other, especially not on the job. For me, for this fandom, it's not about the epic true love that I'm sure is there, it's about the Team. Cobb and Arthur, first and foremost, but Ariadne, Eames, Saito, and Yusuf all have to be there too, or no go. Romance exists, certainly, but the way my fics are turning out, it's incidental at best. I know, it's unusual for me to write in a fandom with a large cast where there aren't at least two romances/wannabe romances/entanglements/love triangles/whatever. I'm going for a sort of Three Musketeers feel, but with more weirdo metaphysics, slightly more booze, and (probably) more sex. I'm keeping the swordplay and sexy spies, though.
EDIT: Upon consideration, I really am wavering between a platonic and romantic relationship for Arthur and Cobb. Both my head and my heart tell me it's platonic, but the way they've been acting in my fics, it's just not realistic for them to be "just friends." In this day and age, in my experience, two adult, heterosexual males don't have long conversations about their feelings, or hug (or, in fact, touch any more than is strictly necessary), or any of that. So I guess I'll just leave it ambivalent, a sort of open-ended question. I'll drop enough hints so that it can be read both ways, but in the end, I won't provide a conclusive answer.
I've been working on the characters (ok, mostly Arthur) a bit, fleshing them out, giving them something resembling backstories. Arthur's last name is Randall. He has degrees in psychology and information science, and used to work at an academic library somewhere before he became an extractor. Ariadne is in her second year of grad school. She stays in touch with her family (mother, father, younger sisters, and three dogs), who live in the Midwest somewhere. She and Arthur are shacked up in Paris, to the disapproval of her parents, to whom living in sin, in Paris, with an older man is a recipe for disaster. Eames' first name is Chester. He flirts with Arthur because it make Cobb all overprotective and sputtery, Ariadne all jealous and bitchy, and, hey, Arthur is hot. Cobb lives in Maryland. His favorite authors are Agatha Christie (because everything is explained in the end) and H.P. Lovecraft (just in case). Miles might have more of a shady past than he lets on. Yusuf loves his cat, Princess Leia, more than anything in the world. He is, obviously, a huge Star Wars geek, and a fair-sized everything else geek. Saito is secretly into extreme sports, especially hang-gliding.
As far as fic goes, I'm working on two different angles: the government "retaining" (read: kidnapping) the team in order to extract, and possibly implant, thoughts from various high-level politicos' heads, and an elderly billionaire who believes that someone is trying to extract something from his head. If I go with the "elderly billionaire" idea, he'll have an asshole son who he thinks that he's Mr. Dangerous McBadass and hits on Arthur (of course) and/or Ariadne until one or the other clocks him. And if I go with the "shady government ops" idea, he'll be one of the agents in charge of them (because OF COURSE the CIA is doing this, don'tcha know), because I'm starting to like this character too much to throw away. I've even got a name for him all set out: Ben Schreoder. He's my favorite type of antagonist (which is why I'm writing him, I guess): arrogant, clever (but not as clever as he thinks he is), and just a wee bit obsessed.
As far as the elderly billionaire in the eponymous employer of the "elderly billionaire" scenario goes, he's undergone a few renovations. At first, he was unsound body and, as we come to discover, mind, and so has left the running of his Fortune 500 company to his asshole son, but I think this fandom has had enough of infirm tycoons spouting quasi-cryptic messages from their deathbeds.
Next, I went a bit too far the other way and made him a two-fisted, red-blooded, slightly blustering captain of industry, but that eventually devolved into a lampoon of itself.
Now I've got him as an idealistic old man, unwilling to give up the values that "made [blank] great" (I haven't come up with a nationality for him yet). He puts a great deal of value in things like personal honor and reputation (think Firefly's Adelai Niiska, but without the evil or the crazy), but can't stand the younger generation of corporate powerhouses, who he considers both dangerously soft-hearted and too clinical and detached from the running of their own businesses. Thus, he's left most of the day-to-day running of his as-of-yet unnamed business to Mr. Asshole Son, who is by now getting far too big for his britches. In fact, it might turn out that Mr. Asshole Son might be the villain all along, and that he's hired another team of extractors to re-create Cobb's feat of Inception, in order to convince Daddy Dearest to transfer controlling interest to him.
But Daddy Dearest cops to Mr. Asshole Son's ploy, and hires the original team (although he doesn't know it was them who performed the first [and second] successful inception[s]) to protect him...and now is this not only sounding waaay too much like the actual movie, but it's fundamentally flawed. When you get right down to it, why would they take this job on? At least one of them has officially sworn off both extraction and inception forever, and at least three more have homes and/or careers to get back to. Not to mention, it was implied that their last job left them all filthy stinkin' rich. Also, what motive would they have to include Saito? Last time they only brought him because A) he knew all the non-extractor players involved, and B) it's his money. This time, I'm thinking that either they're going to need his money and connections to blend in enough to get close to the mark (which I guess they wouldn't need, since they've been explicitly hired by Daddy Dearest, so that line of reasoning is right out), or the team's feat of inception has become something of a legend among extractor culture, if such a thing exists, and said legend paints Saito as a legitimate member of the team, although one whose purpose was unknown. Daddy Dearest probably heard of the team by word of mouth in the first place, so he could just assume that Saito actually is an extractor, and hires him along with the rest. But that brings me back to the original problem of motivation, which is where this particular plot kinda dead-ends.
I've done less work on the "shadowy government ops" scenario, but at least for the time being, it seems promising. Motivation is definitely a non-issue, since "do what we say or we'll shoot you in the head" seems like a pretty good motivation to me. The big question I have here is whether to portray the jobs themselves positively or negatively. Will the team be sniffing out the locations of hostages and terrorist cells, or will they be brainwashing political opponents and keeping a lid on the Commander-in-Chief's dirty laundry (btw, when I reference the President in this scenario, I mean a whacko warmongerer like Bush, although not Bush himself)? And if it turns out to be the latter, how far will they be willing to go before taking a stand? And if they do take a stand, how will they keep their black ops buddies from just shooting them, or more likely, their loved ones?
