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Pros: Gentle on My Mind
May. 13th, 2011 04:52 pmI was poking around Fanlore the other day, and hit the entry for Gentle on My Mind, a very long* Professionals h/c slash story about a brain-damaged Ray Doyle and his journey to recovery, by Kathy Keegan (aka Jane of Australia). (There's also a sequel by Joana Dey, but I'm not talking about that here, having never read it.)
It's a relatively long entry, but one-sided: skimming through it, it turns out it consists almost entirely of flyer blurbs for the various chapters, with a link offsite to one review, which happens to be glowingly positive, written by someone who loves the zines. Which is fair enough; lots of people absolutely adore these stories, and rec them whole-heartedly.
But. Many other people do not adore them, and it's just weird to me to see the only writeup being Jane saying that some fans are interrogating this awesome text from the wrong perspective, and a single positive review. In my experience of the fandom, pretty much everyone had an opinion about it (whether they'd read the stories or not, just based on the fairly detailed discussions), and the conversations about roamed all over the place, in all directions.
This is how history vanishes, without anyone even realizing it; have newer fans even heard of the zines, or about the controversy surrounding them? (You can still find some of the later convos on Pros-Lit, fwiw.)
To try to stave off that vanishing a bit, I figured I'd try to dig up some of my reactions from years ago and whap them into some sort of publicly postable form that could be linked to, to add another point of view to the Fanlore entry.
So here's my cobbled-together review, pulled from a few different private and list emails back in 1998 and again in 2003 and rewritten a bit to smooth things out.
In sum: I didn't like this story.
( Gentle on My Mind summary )
The author wanted to tell a story about how brain damage may change people, but it doesn't make them useless, or turn off their emotional or physical needs. They're still capable of being vital members of society and of having relationships. And that is the story she tells -- it's very clear that she wants that message to get across, and it's one that resonates for a lot of people.
The story she shows underlying that is very different, focusing heavily on Ray's new "youth" and adult Bodie's strong attraction to it, to a degree that many people find very uncomfortable. /putting it mildly.
( Gentle on My Mind review )
So in the end, while I appreciate the story she was trying to tell, about brain damage not meaning dead or nonfunctional, I was far too squicked by the underlying attitude to enjoy the story at all.
* "Very long" here means three novel-length zines and two novellas, each considered to be one chapter of the overall story. back to top
It's a relatively long entry, but one-sided: skimming through it, it turns out it consists almost entirely of flyer blurbs for the various chapters, with a link offsite to one review, which happens to be glowingly positive, written by someone who loves the zines. Which is fair enough; lots of people absolutely adore these stories, and rec them whole-heartedly.
But. Many other people do not adore them, and it's just weird to me to see the only writeup being Jane saying that some fans are interrogating this awesome text from the wrong perspective, and a single positive review. In my experience of the fandom, pretty much everyone had an opinion about it (whether they'd read the stories or not, just based on the fairly detailed discussions), and the conversations about roamed all over the place, in all directions.
This is how history vanishes, without anyone even realizing it; have newer fans even heard of the zines, or about the controversy surrounding them? (You can still find some of the later convos on Pros-Lit, fwiw.)
To try to stave off that vanishing a bit, I figured I'd try to dig up some of my reactions from years ago and whap them into some sort of publicly postable form that could be linked to, to add another point of view to the Fanlore entry.
So here's my cobbled-together review, pulled from a few different private and list emails back in 1998 and again in 2003 and rewritten a bit to smooth things out.
In sum: I didn't like this story.
( Gentle on My Mind summary )
The author wanted to tell a story about how brain damage may change people, but it doesn't make them useless, or turn off their emotional or physical needs. They're still capable of being vital members of society and of having relationships. And that is the story she tells -- it's very clear that she wants that message to get across, and it's one that resonates for a lot of people.
The story she shows underlying that is very different, focusing heavily on Ray's new "youth" and adult Bodie's strong attraction to it, to a degree that many people find very uncomfortable. /putting it mildly.
( Gentle on My Mind review )
So in the end, while I appreciate the story she was trying to tell, about brain damage not meaning dead or nonfunctional, I was far too squicked by the underlying attitude to enjoy the story at all.
* "Very long" here means three novel-length zines and two novellas, each considered to be one chapter of the overall story. back to top
