December Daily: Bender & Brian

[resonant]

clevermanka - "How are Brian Johnson and John Bender are doing these days?"

Mmm, nice one!

Let's see. Bender and Brian were in high school when I was in college, so they're at or near fifty now.

I can't help feeling that I gave all the life-changing realizations to John, and that Brian's due for some kind of big difficult emotion. Kaneko's Most Likely To does such a nice job taking him through the ups and downs of the dot-com boom that my mind has latched onto it as pseudo-canon. "Don't worry," John says. "Guys that get educated just need to make sure they have a dropout to support them when times get tough."

John and Carlinhos buy Wysocki out, of course, and maintain his long tradition of having an eagle eye for anyone who's queer and knows their way around an engine. The way employees of Shermer Import Auto Service keep leaving to open their own places, eventually John's going to discover that he can do a giant road trip across the country meeting up with alumni of Wysocki's Shelter for Bent Delinquents. So he does. It's what he and Brian do instead of going to their 25th high school reunion.

(There's bound to be a mini-reunion of the Breakfast Club itself at some point. I started thinking about Andrew blowing his knee out and becoming a coach, and had a nice little daydream where he survives a couple of shallow marriages before shocking everybody by winding up super-happy with the mom of one of his athletes, a widowed farm wife ten years older than he is. Let him be the trophy spouse for a change.)

Right now John's pouring a possibly unwise amount of money into outfitting the garage with the latest and greatest in electric car charging stations. "You watch," he says.

I think he and Brian get married. Illinois started trying to legalize same-sex marriage in 2007 and didn't manage it till 2014 -- they'd have been in their forties. I think each of them would have privately said, "It's not that big a deal to me; I'm doing it for him," but the guest list kept getting longer and the flower budget kept getting bigger and the toasts kept getting more sentimental. It's impossible for John to ensure the deletion of every cellphone photo of him crying.






Specify a date if you want; otherwise I'll just answer them whenever.

This year, in addition to the usual kinds of questions, I'd also love to get storyish prompts. Storyish meaning you never know what you might get: two sentences of a story, or a description of a story that will never exist, or a love song about how much I like that trope, or a rant about my pet peeve about that trope, or I know nothing about that canon except what I see on social media and here's what I think it might be about, or Ten Reasons Why I Love/Hate/Am Indifferent To that character, canon, or trope, or ...

As always, I'd love to hear about it if you're doing the meme too.

4. pauraque - "Something fannish (a character, a ship, a show, a trope) that you initially disliked, but that grew on you. What changed?"
5. terminally_underwhelmed - "What's a popular trope that doesn't do much for you, and an unpopular one you love?"
6. runpunkrun - "something you recently learned about yourself"
7. muccamukk - "Favourite power couple(s) and what makes them work so well together. Can be storyish or not."
8. armadillo1976 - "I'd appreciate a few words about navigating the issues of kids growing up and having the "mommy writes fanfic, mainly erotica, and mommy's using this word just because it sounds better than porn" conversation. My kiddo is only 5 now, and I have only written one story and am in the middle one the second one, but I see myself writing more, so I've been wondering how this conversation goes."
9. coffeeandink - "You took a break from fandom for a few years. Now that you're back, what's changed and what's stayed the same?"
10. mific - "what about crossovers? Have you written any?"
11.
12. marginaliana - ghost stories
13. runpunkrun - "a new thing you tried "
14.
15. china_shop - Guardian as described by someone who only knows it via social media
16. kiezh following up with - "What have you heard about MDZS/The Untamed, and what did you think of what you heard?"
17. ride4ever's birthday prompt - "Storyish prompt: for any due South fic you've written, write a prequel or sequel snippet for the fic or meta about the before-or-after that can be imagined about the fic's story arc."
18. mific - "the genderswap trope where a character's gender is changed. Yes? No? Maybe?"
19. runpunkrun - "fake dating: yes or no"
20. minoanmiss - "One of my favorite tropes is Then Let Me Be Evil. What do you think of it/have you explored it/so on and so forth?"
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24. runpunkrun - "John and Rodney in 2020"
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Comments

[kass]

OH, I love this a lot. Also thank you for that Kaneko link, which is lovely.

[resonant]

Of course I had to read it again too. It's a little fandom, but it has some classics.

[mific]

Aw, sentimental toasts and electric car charging stations FTW!

[resonant]

"Sometimes I miss the days when everybody was afraid of me." "Do you really?" "... no."

[clevermanka]

Okay well now I'm crying, so thank you for this. It's beautiful. And thank you so much for linking Most Likely To. It's been ages since I read it.

[resonant]

Me too!

I wonder why they don't reboot some of those John Hughes movies. I would definitely enjoy an update.

[clevermanka]

I'm leery of reboots, tho, especially after what they did to Heathers.

I don't know that I trust many people to re-envision those stories without the casual misogyny (or, in the case of Sixteen Candles, actual rape) and racism (and probably homophobia but I can't think of any off the top of my head).

Actually, on reflection, I'm not sure how many John Hughes movies outside of The Breakfast Club hold up...hm.

[resonant]

And honestly I'm not sure how the Breakfast Club holds up, either. So maybe what I want is for someone to write something like that only better.

[clevermanka]

I went to a 30-years screening of it in 2015 and it held up surprisingly well. I think largely because Hughes let the actors improvise a lot of it, so there wasn't as much of a chance for his own issues to creep in.

[barkley]

aww, lovely!

[resonant]

:)

[runpunkrun]

Nice.

[resonant]

<3

[virtual_particle]

Ahhhhh, John and Brian! I adore this story, and these glimpses into their future. :D

[resonant]

When I get requests to look in on a pairing in the present day, I'm always shocked to discover that when time passes people get older.

[virtual_particle]

It is the weirdest thing, isn't it? I am not generally a fan of the spacetime continuum :P

But on the other hand, seeing queer folks from the 80s and earlier--even fictional ones!--grow older and be happy makes my cynical and shriveled heart grow several sizes.

[reginagiraffe]

Awwww. <3 <3 <3

[resonant]

:)