Thought on "After Farpoint"

[grayarcadian]

Gods 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.