Thought on "After Farpoint"
Apr. 3rd, 2020 11:09 pmGods help me. I hate one-night stand narratives. Yet, my favorite ship in my formative fandom? One-night stand. My favorite song? One night stand narrative. New current favorite song? Yes, one of those, too.
So why do I hate one-night stand narratives? Because most of them kind of suck. While a one-nighter can be very meaningful, it's also limited. There's only so much you can get to know someone in a day. If it's between friends, then you have to re-establish rules and then it either goes back to status quo land or moves onto another style of relationship. One-night stands are great for a short story or as part of the landscape of a novel, if done with a modicum of care. They are the backbone (or something else) of porn, but as a story unto themselves? Usually it's snore central, because stories I like are about emotional impact and normally emotion is not the point there.
And yet...here I am writing about an emotionless android and someone that was enacting a bad porn script and this was literally the whole damn set up. They don't even kiss on screen. Ro and Riker got a damn kiss and this did not. Ugh. These two deserve better.
Both these characters deserved so much better than they got - and they got each other for a few moments on screen.
That's the beauty of missing scene fic. You can fill it in. You can make this have a build up, a relationship. Maybe if I shimmy it the right way a romance.
I do plan on making quite a few sideways references to "Encounter at Farpoint," throughout this series beyond the characters talking about the events here. Let's see who spots them.
Fic here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23390329 and Crossposted to Fanfiction.net.