GIP: Kaka / Cristiano Ronaldo

My brain has truly been chewed and digested by football insanity. My photoshop abilities are execrable but thanks to an ancient helpsheet from badgermonkey, I helped to fry my brain today by making a manipped Kaká/C. Ronaldo!kiss icon.

Portugal is two up, Mexico has one goal, I sit before the screen with t'ibook on t'lap. Cristiano Ronaldo not playing, of course, because coach is keeping all the players with yellow cards out of today's match. I do like Portugal's stylish wine-red (port-red!) kits. Sometimes I suspect that my decisions to lust after support one team and not another comes down to fashion and levels of teh cute.

Oh, and elegant play, of course. ;-)

ETA: omg, my nerves, it's a penalty for Mexico! And it DIDN'T GO IN! God, the drama. My poor heart.

FOOTBALL FICLET NR 2: Under a Brazilian moon (Kaka/Cristiano Ronaldo)

Ficlettino: Two pretty football players exchange shirts at midnight.

( Read your pretty-boy slash here. I promise that there is absolutely no plot here, and certainly no actual, um, soccer playing. )

more football vids: recpimp

I have gone completely insane. You have been noticing this, yes?

Today I roamed you.tube some more, on the prowl for ever new footballer vids. (I am actually watching and rewatching these. Even the ones where stickfigures mill in front of goal mouths!) They fascinate me in their man-to-manliness.

Today I hit the jackpot. A totally gay Kaká/Cristiano Ronaldo video! All in black and white, very 'arty'. And with nary a bit of football footage, just lots and lots of the pretty, including both of the pretty boys in suits, Kakáchen in a tie and Cristiano Ronaldo in a bow tie. *dies*

Plus: This absolutely hilarious video. 16-year-old Tandeep, trying to record C. Ronaldo speaking on the TV while his mother calls to him in the background. Oh, when boys love boys!!

SGA? What's that again?

rps, how are you so awesome?

...

Having forsooken the launde of the realle personne slashe and forayed into the realm of the fictional personnel, I just over the last two days wrote my first two rps ficlets in many a month.

My god, what a heady experience! Rps is truly something else. Writing it was vertiginous! It is such a charge! I'm remembering my first love.

Things that are heady about rps
• The canon is not narrative.
SGA, for example, is a TV sitromcom sci-fi drama. This means that there is always action and plot. Fanon must weave its clever way in and out between all the narrative that's already out there.

Rps has no plot. It lends itself supremely to the most delicious pwps. One can impose any plot one wants and invent freely.

• The canon is not made by someone else.
This is what seasoned TV fans, I believe, refer to as TPTB (the powers that be -- I hope I got that acronym right) and what is called 'JKR' in HP and 'JRR' in lotr fps. It means that the author, e.g. I, makes a fictional universe out of something that is already a fictional universe. In fps, we make something out of something made.

In rps, the canon is not made by anybody. Or only in the sense that it is out there in the form of media-mediated images, interviews and suchlike. But when we write, we make something out of something raw.

• There is no canon as such.
What, in fact, is rps canon? I've had dozens of conversations about this with various people. It is a very interesting issue. Fps canons are narrative, made by someone else and finite. Even JKR will one day stop writing HP (we hope!). And SGA, though we all await the new season, is for now and for fictive intents and purposes as of June 2006 a finished product with a finite set of episodes.

Not so rps. Rps evolves all the time. It is never finite -- unless a real person, god forbid, dies, I guess. And even so, rps canon is so patchy, that there will always remain unknown gaps. We get fed very tiny bits and pieces of people's lives. In effect, we know nothing about them. Fps allows you access to characters' secrets and emotional inner lives (even SGA! *g* to some degree) but rps characters remain, essentially, surfaces. Projection screens for fic.

Some implications
• Rps tends to be vocationally quite uniform. Popslash: everyone's a singer. Lotrips: everyone's an actor (unless they're a special effects designer, *g*). Football: everyone's a footballer.

Fps, by contrast? Teachers, witches, astrophysicists, politicians, orcs, detectives, escaped convicts, the lot.

It was this rps uniformity that made me retreat more and more into AU towards the end of my stint in lotrps fandom. After a while, the 54th third-rate actor and the 786th hotel room/movie premiere/trailer on set do get a teensy bit repetitive.

• The pretty tends to be thicker on the ground in rps.
In my humble experience, anyhow. I think this has to do with the point above: rps is more narrative. Once you have a narrative, characters do stuff, have backstories and experiences. They also have specific roles and vocations. They have canonical lives. They don't need to be pretty boys because they can be manly geeks.

Rps characters have no canonical lives (see point about canon above). They are surface. And fanfic writers tend to glomp onto pretty surfaces rather than ugly surfaces.

I don't know about others but I drool over footballers to a degree that I do not drool over fictional astrophysicists. Writing Kaká and Cristiano Ronaldo reminded me of writing Dominic Monaghan and Orlando Bloom and Karl Urban: I had butterflies in my stomach and a degree of smitten-ness I do not evince for Dr Rodney McKay, 'awesome' though he is. I think this has to do with plot and narrative. With McKay, Sheppard and the wraith, and with Draco and Harry there is so much plot to be thinking about. Rps has no plot; it leaves the field wide open for pure, unadulterated drool.

Also, I wax more swoony and lyrical about the pretty boys. They move my with their innocence and the wonder of youth. SGA characters are full-grown, with experiences of their own. It's a different proposition.

• The seen and the unseen: Book canon
Of course, Draco, Harry and Dudley are young, too. But they are invisible. They exist in my head. If I want to drool, I need to find images to go with them (unless I do movie canon which I don't). This makes them more my creatures.

• Fps characters can be evil.
This was a discovery I made when I wrote my first lotr fps: Pippin/Orc. An orc is evil! A dementor is evil! A wraith is one hell of a badass! And the other characters: Draco is an unpleasant bully. Dudley is a fat bully. Harry makes problematic moral choices. Everyone in Atlantis makes dubious moral choices on a regular bases.

In rps, people are not complicated like this, and they are certainly not evil. They are only evil in AU. I feel a great reluctance in making rps people nasty because of a certain respect for the aura of the real person out there, and because it is so blatantly non-canon (so one may as well make it an AU). After a while, in lotrips, I felt there was something lacking if you can't have evil.

I certainly can't envisage writing an evil or morally ambivalent Kaká or Ronaldinho. Goodness, the very thought.

• They are real, fuckin' shit! 111 liek @-@
helenish once said that she found the thought of a real David Hewlett walking about the earth dizzy-making (or somesuch). This is an interesting thing I've learned in SGA: TV-based fandom separates the actor from the character (a novel concept for a veteran lotripper like me! *g*) while at the same time folding the actor into the character. SGA is not an unseen fandom (as is HP book fandom). Some people (incl. me...) even draw on the actors' previous films for spurious back-stories for the characters, certainly in the looks department (hey! Rodney had hair!).

But fps character always remain in their fictional narrative universe. Rps characters intrude into the real world at odd interval, and it is its own special brand of vertigo. (I remember freaking out when I sat next to Kiran Shah on the tube.) And during this World Cup, certain matches have become impossibly cathected sites because now there is the likelihood of glimpsing a character, come to life.

• Rps characters have an aura of Achilles.
Achilles was the great hero of Homeric myth. Just like Ronaldinho is the great hero of today's football. These people are larger than life. They have a heroic aura around them. The men who love men respond to this totally in their adoring songvids and their obsession with Rooney's legs. We tend not to choose for our rps the men next door or the local councillor. (Though this does exist, I believe!) I, certainly, have rps'ed people who were 'famous' in some way. Even the third-rate lotr actors had an aura of stardom about them. It makes them all a little bit awesome.


It plays with your head, this slash shit. But in a good way.

I think...


( pics of Ronaldinho nude and of Kaka/Robinho in a tender embrace )

Many more droolpics of teh pretty at my Football Gallery.