NCIS

[ivyfic]

I have started being sucked into NCIS fandom. Despite having only seen a dozen or so episodes (it's a procedural—not like there are major plot arcs I am unaware of), I have already discovered a few things:

- Though I am very OTP already (DiNozzo/Gibbs – bastards FTW!), the fandom has quite a few dominant pairings, far more variation than you find in most fandoms.
- Despite the fact that the show is a procedural, there is a ridiculous amount of Tony apologist fic. You know, the kind where Tony's underappreciated and cuts himself and everyone realizes how awful they've treated him and has to beg his forgiveness and he has so little self-worth that he doesn't believe anyone could love him… Really, fandom? Have you seen the show?
- I've now run across three fic that were over 100 pages long that started out with a major conflict/misunderstanding between Tony and Gibbs that was resolved with mutual declarations of love and shmoopiness less than halfway through. I can only conclude that the rest of the fic was them going on dates and making moony eyes at each other because I stopped reading. Don't people understand that once you've resolved the major conflict, the story is over?

I've found a few really excellent stories (mostly revolving around Tony having an unhealthy obsession with earning Gibbs's approval and Gibbs being completely uncommunicative) but far more fic of the bad variety. It's like Sentinel fandom all over again. Anyone want to rec me NCIS fic/writers/rec lists?

Comments

[bigscary.livejournal.com]

I can't recommend any fic to you as I haven't read, but I can ask you a question about it -- leaving aside questions of relationships (the only one I have any opinion about is McGee/Abby) to what extent do fandomistas engage with the more-than-usually-important-in-procedurals character arcs or changes. I refer here to Kate v. Ziva timing, and major character arcs (especially last season).

I ask because it would be basically impossible to engage with either the character of Gibbs OR DiNozzo without engaging with either the first's first marriage or the later's recent undercover experience.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Well, McGee/Abby, from what I can tell is at least tangentially canon, and I tend to have very little interest in canon pairings in general.

I'm not quite sure what you mean, but you seem to be asking about the interaction of fanon and canon. As someone who's only see the first six eps of season one and the last three of season six, you'd think I'd be missing some vital information with respect to fic, but it doesn't take reading a lot of fic in a fandom to discover what the important plot developments are. So I know Kate died suddenly, Tony went undercover and was completely screwed over by the director, Gibbs lost his memory and handed over command to Tony for four months, and that Gibbs has been married multiple times and lost one wife (and daughter?). I don't know how all these things happen, so I will still enjoy the episodes when I get to them, but for fic, all that matters is knowing that they did happen.

Even if I'd seen every episode of the show, when starting to read the fic, you still go through a process of learning the fanon for the show (Fanon is anything not explicitly in the show but accepted by the general consensus of the fandom. For example, in Sentinel fandom, it's generally accepted that Blair directs Jim to control his senses by "dialing" them up or down, even though the dial metaphor was only used once on the show. icarusancalion put together a list of Stargate Atlantis fanon for season one, (http://icarusancalion.livejournal.com/783104.html#cutid1) to show how the fan vision of the show differs from the canon.) So there's always a process of learning what the fandom considers the pivotal episodes—sometimes these are obvious, sometimes not so much.

If you're asking do people address these things in fic? Of course. If not directly (and I've been avoiding episode tags since I'd have a harder time following those), then in how they conceive of the characters and the state of their relationships. But NCIS is a show with relatively little canon you need to know to read fic. It's pretty different for a fandom like, say Supernatural or (god forbid) Heroes, which have massive, complicated on-going arcs.

[bigscary.livejournal.com]

Hmm, interesting. Because I watch NCIS almost entirely for the character drama (everyone, even Ducky, seeking Gibbs' approval endlessly, to use an example that seems to have made the jump to fanon), and my impression of fandoms that stick is that they typically have strong character relationships. To give an example, I can only imagine that if one were to slash Gibbs/Tony, it would only be made more interesting by engaging with the former's almost pathological need to protect and nurture the women around him (indeed, his need to do so consistently overwhelming any desire for or chance at romance), and the latter's similarly extreme need to "pick-up" (but not retain) almost every woman he meets (to call back to the dawn of the pastime, Cpt. Kirk).

I'm making the case that NCIS canon is perhaps more relevant to fanon (especially romance-oriented fanon), than that of, say, Supernatural, in that in NCIS the circumstances remain similar, but the character's relationships develop, while in Supernatural, the circumstances develop, but the core relationship has remained fundamentally the same over time (not to say that the relationship does not drive the show).

Oh, and McGee/Abby is canonically liminal and over, but called back to periodically in interesting ways, mostly dealing with McGee calling back to it, if not pining.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I'm going to have to disagree with you strongly that the relationship in Supernatural has not changed. It is between the same two people and they already had a relationship prior to the show, thus circumventing the normal "getting to know you" progression, but their relationship has changed substantially since season one, as have they as characters. It's not just circumstances that have changed. Supernatural, by putting the characters into untenable situations for their season-long arcs, also fosters a huge amount of fic that addresses those issues directly. (Last season, for example, there was a ton of fic about Dean's deal.) In that way the fic in the fandom is far more tied to canon than what I've seen of NCIS, which tends to more often use canon occurences as background for the character's emotional state rather than using them directly as plot points.

You would perhaps not be surprised to learn that slash fic in general often does not address the characters' relationships with and attitudes towards women. If it does, how the characters treat women is often used as subtextual evidence of the characters' bisexuality. And believe me, there are several metric tons worth of meta about how slash fic marginalizes women and how inherently problematic that is, so I don't really want to get into normative statements about this aspect of slash; I'm just saying that it is a feature of slash.

Though, in NCIS fandom, from what I've seen, since the show has quite a few strong and popular female characters, fic tends to treat them fairly well, Abby in particular. (Kate, on the other hand, seems to get the lion's share of the character bashing, at least in fic written prior to her death on the show.)

You are also absolutely right that the shows with more character interaction tend to be the shows with bigger fandoms. Hence NCIS and CSI being fairly large fandoms, and Bones also having a (much smaller) fandom, but the Law and Orders, though extremely similar in format, having almost no fandom at all. This isn't the only factor in which shows have fandoms, though, otherwise there would be no way to explain things like popslash, which essentially has no canon at all.

[bigscary.livejournal.com]

OK. I haven't been following Supernatural since S1, so I guess I was wrong.

re: slash and women, that was sort of my point. Just off the top of my head, I would say that engaging with the female relationships of the major male characters of NCIS would be useful precisely for "subtextual evidence of the characters' bisexuality." (in Tony's case, were I a slash-writer, I would jump right past bisexuality and posit that his aggressive-but-frequently-unsuccessful-due-to-incredible-aggressiveness attempts at womanizing are excellent evidence for being a a certain kind of closet case -- combine this with a older, wiser, and long-term bisexual Gibbs who wishes to nurture him into a healthy relationship with McG.... LOOK WHAT YOU HAVE ME TYPING WHAT AM I DOING).

aaaanyway. I really like NCIS, and really like the characters, and though I don't see what you see unless I put the special queer-theory tint on my litcrit glasses and go to town, I'm happy someone else likes it.

[bigscary.livejournal.com]

I blame you for this. Watch "Frame-Up", and you'll know what I mean by "this".