Res ipsa loquitur

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.






( Prompts and How To Leave One - behind cut )

wolfshark, "what is your favorite story to reread of your own stuff? what was your favorite story to write?"

I think still, after all these years, I'd have to say my favorite to write was Broadway Hotel, a Due South story from omg 2001. It was a level-up for me, more subtle than anything I had ever taken on up to that point, with more emotion that required more careful handling. I remember the writing of it as a thing of joy, though I'm sure at the time I had periods when I would have said, "This is a nightmare! Why do I do this shit for fun?"

At the moment, my favorite one to reread is Higher Education (the Breakfast Club one), maybe because the fandom is so small that there's no baggage, no difficult memories associated with it. Or maybe just because Bender's voice is so much fun.

james asks: Is there a tv show or movie that you would pay a billion dollars to get either a re-working of an episode or a sequel to? (It might not cost that much. Millions.) Because sometimes fanfic isn't enough, you just need to see it on-screen.

Wow. Where even to begin?

All respect to Maggie Smith and Alan Rickman, but I'd like to see the Harry Potter series done with the teachers cast at the correct ages. I believe we have canon that Snape, Lupin, and Black should all have been in their early thirties at the start of the series. The HP wikia gives McGonagall a birth date of 1935 and puts her leaving Hogwarts in 1957, making Maggie Smith about the right age, but I don't know where those numbers come from; she's described with dark hair, and I pictured her in her early fifties.

But if I only have enough for one thing, I'm not sure I'd squander it on that.

No, you know what I'd spend it on? A reboot of "The Breakfast Club," that's what! Update the stereotypes (in the 21st century you'd have to have at least one character gay, for one thing, and an all-white cast would not fly) ... the parenting issues and the school problems probably wouldn't need any changes ... if I have my preferences, the nerd character won't be stuck doing everybody's homework while everyone else pairs off ...

I would so watch that!





Go here to add your own question.

( The questions thus far are under here. )

This is just the sort of thing I can't resist, and just the sort of thing that adds to my list of Stories That Will Probably Never Be Finished, but ... (taken from torch):

Pick a trope from this list and provide a fandom/pairing and I'll tell you something about the story I'd write for that combination (i.e. write a snippet from the story or write not!fic or tell you the title and summary for the story I would write)

1. genderswap
2. bodyswap
3. drunk!fic
4. huddling for warmth
5. pretending to be married
6. secretly a virgin
7. amnesia
8. cross-dressing
9. forced to share a bed
10. truth or dare
11. historical AU
12. accidental-baby-acquisition
13. apocalypse fic
14. telepathy
15. High School / College AU

I'll take any of the fandoms I've written in plus ... let's see, in the past year I've seen all three Men In Black movies, plus seasons 1-4 of Buffy and the first few eps of Angel (yeah, so late to the party that the house isn't even there any more).

(meme from hesychasm)

Ask me what happens after the end of any of my stories. (Or tell me what you think.)

I rented "The Breakfast Club" and watched it -- first movie I've rented in ages, and it was good to see that Molly Ringwald really was as pretty as I remembered, and that, yes, there actually was a time when Emilio Estevez was good-looking and Judd Nelson, while not good-looking, was hot.

Now I want speculation and Benderslash. (Yes, I've enjoyed kaneko's The Supper Club and shrift's A Lobotomy and Some Tights.)

1. What's y'all's guess as to how old these kids are? The actors are all older than they ought to be, which confuses matters, but clearly they're not seniors. I'm wondering if they might even be sophomores -- I mean, what on earth would prevent Bender from dropping out the very microsecond the law allows?

2. How does Brian come to be on a first-name basis with Carl the janitor?