Consonants and vowels all together, equally

(this post was originally a comment on ignaz's post)

There's an angry post over at f_p about how Rymon fans were … cheated.

And I just have to say, did you see the show I saw? Because I saw Ryan's refusal to leave the general vicinity of the judges' table for longer than a few minutes at a time; I saw the strange and wonderful sharing of breath mints in that way where they both decide that whatever they are doing together is more important that moving the show forward, as if they aren't being broadcast live to millions of people around the world but instead are just in Simon's car or something; I saw Ryan actually choke up as he handed the microphone to Simon and tilt his head as if to say, "C'mon, man, don't make me talk right now"; I saw the cameras cut away from what happened next not, I think, because of fear of the ho-yay (I mean, what show are we talking about here?) but because it was an intensely personal moment; and I saw Simon, after saying many things, go back to hugging Ryan as soon as he could.

I love them. We'll still have the radio; we'll still have pap shots after dinner and vacations in Barbados and probably no wedding to Mezghan and the continuation of this epic thing that they're doing, so epic that sometimes watching it feels like eavesdropping even though I'm actually just watching a television show and they are two of the most self-conscious people ever. It didn't fade, it didn't die, and honestly didn't go entirely unacknowledged in the various video tributes.

And to put on my tin hat here, I think the fact that they didn't pump it up in the packages while they went on at length about Paula is partially about the tribute that Paula herself never received and clearly should have, and also about how whether they are fucking or not, Ryan and Simon have a real, personal relationship that isn't just about clowning around for the cameras. As entertained as I am by their antics, and as much as their interplay has kept me watching this show even when the singers didn't particularly interest me or actively pissed me off, their relationship isn't there in order to keep me entertained. It's real. And for me, not having Simon Fuller do some bullshit package, which would have been couched in all the usual "it's just a bromance" crap, was actually a sign of respect.

Godspeed, Simon Cowell. See you next fall.

I requested Kim and Lindsay from Freaks and Geeks, and got TWO gift fics!

Growing Upside Down. Lindsay finally discovers the part of her she's been trying to find since high school. Femslash.

write her name in the sky. Kim broke up with Daniel for the last time three days after she and Lindsay got back from their summer adventure.

There were also two Rymon fics written for Yuletide this year, the first for ignaz and the second for delilah_joy:

And When It Was Good. There are shows when it's good, when they're on.

Where We're Going, and How to Get Back. There are things less like relationships.

Go, read, comment! Yayness!

I'm rather irritated that I won't have cable or internet at home until mid next week, among other irritating things, so I'm thinking about entirely silly things, like:

1. JKR maybe saying something sort of nice about H/Hr shippers. It isn't so much that her saying that makes me feel better about her, or the interview, or all that, but it does make me feel less like the OBHWF crowd had the "right" to push me out of fandom, which is how it felt at the time, and also makes me feel better about being able to post the story I'm writing without all my new Idol friends thinking I'm insane.
   
2. the blind items coming out about Simon Cowell's girlfriend breaking up with him, which hint that she's being paid off to not talk about what she knows. Hard not to be tinhattish!
   
3. Yuletide! I just filled out my request, and I can't say what I offered, but I requested WKRP (again), Charles & Caroline Ingalls, Liz Imbrie and Mike Connor, and, well, Rymon. I must say, I'm surprised that Idolfic is small enough to be on Yuletide—and that HIMYM is still small enough. I guess the threshold is higher than I'd thought! 2007 Yuletide was one of the best experiences I've ever had in fandom, so I'm really looking forward to 2008!

The Guardian tracks down teachers to find out what today's celebrities were like as children. The one I found most hilarious (of course):

Simon Cowell
Dover college, Kent, 1973-1975. Lorenzo Smerillo, former assistant housemaster
Simon was a very unhappy, nicotine-addicted, skinny, scruffy, dishevelled, pimply teen - rather like most boys at any school. I found him amusing in a quirky way. He quite often had some wisecrack or other on the tip of his tongue. He was admired by some of the boys after he left school with his O-level or two because he got a job as a mail boy at some London record company. He has become quite pudgy from what I saw once on the box, and still does not know how to dress, but his sardonic wit is leaven to the morass of TV idiocy.

I feel the pudgy comment will soon be used as revenge by certain parties.

So this is what I did:

Thursday night I watched SYTYCD with ali_wildgoose, honestys_easy, and sistermagpie as usual. I agreed with the eliminations this week, and jm_cats was totally right about the bottom three.

Friday sistermagpie and I saw Gonzo, the Hunter S. Thompson docu by the guy who did the Enron docu. The movie was fantastic and very appropriate to the holiday. However, SM was covered in butter due to fake butter dispenser blowback. Then we got pizza and a beer at an old pub nearby, where some young drunk was very loud and eventually left. The bartender was awesome, though.

Saturday I went to erinfinnegan's and read a great deal of yaoi, and then was recorded for a podcast talking about it. Some of it was good, some inexplicable, and some was obsessed with jewelry. We also ate cake and baked potatoes and watched the first episode of the Antique Bakery anime, and now I want an icon of the cgi cat. Ali stayed over as emsariel was out of town.

Sunday Ali and I had brunch with friends and then wrote quite a lot and ate gazpacho.

Re writing, I've been working on two long projects lately and thinking about a third. One is the endlessly talked about sequel to EWFS, which went in a rather long wrong direction during planning and was pulled back from the brink by excellent suggestions from ali_wildgoose, and so has life and spark and lots of things and is fun to write and move forward, especially thanks to lots of help from sisterpandora. (And yes, I do plan to finish the Seamus/Dean fanfic100!) The other is a new Idol AU, Rymon-centric, which is probably slightly past the halfway point right now, and I want to have it all written before I start posting it as it's a fairly complicated story and I do keep going back and putting little things into earlier chapters. I have a third fic, for Avatar: The Last Airbender, percolating in the back of my brain, but I'm waiting for that canon to close before giving it serious thought. But a look at my icons would likely tell you which character it would focus on.

Things that amused me this week:

• The new E! Network promo, which ran 245 times during this weekend's Top Chef marathon on Bravo. (If anyone can find it online, I will love you a dozen times.) It's set at a carnival and has everyone you want to see, plus a lot of Ryan—first shot, many transitions of him looking at other people, and the final shot of him toasting us with champers—that only proves that he does, in fact, own the network. ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
  
• Ryan on vacation this week, fill in the blank of why I find that amusing. Though you know wherever he is he's sweating the numbers on the Denise Richards: It's Complicated premiere. Bummer that cable doesn't have overnights, Ryan, but you want the demos anyway.
  
• David Cook trying to get Ryan to say "chicks, man."
  
• Top Chef, for Richard's admission of past failures. He's such a grown-up, and that's fallen a little too far out of fashion now-a-days. I also love Stephanie's steady professionalism and positive demeanor, and Antonia's fun-loving sass and refusal to bring up her kid until the challenge where they worked with kids. Any of them are fitting heirs to Harold's crown, which neither the punk Ilan nor the bitter Hung were.

I am so glad that at this time tomorrow the LJ election will about 40 minutes from being over because I'm sort of done with watching people on my f-list screaming over it. Like any other election we sometimes find that we have different priorities than our friends and that can lead us to a different candidate. And again, like any other election, it's about making the decision that feels best for you and not worrying overly much about the choices that other people you know are making—which is why I'm not saying who I voted for. I do hope that as many of you vote as possible, whomever you vote for.

One of the peculiarities of writing Ryan/Simon is that Simon, in all his grouchy, hairy, pushing-fifty ridiculousness, scares away the fangirls. It's a downside because it means the audience for Rymon is limited. This might seem odd from the outside—Ryan and Simon are back every season after all, and their interaction is the most overtly flirtatious on the show, so overt that it's the source of jokes on other shows. But your average teen doesn't want to read about Simon, his reflexive obnoxiousness, and his chest hair, when they can read about the latest singer, who is younger and more marketed to them in the first place. So Rymon fandom is small, the little engine that just keeps on going, but never gets all that large.

But the upside of this is that the whole "but do you really think they're doing it? are you a TRUE BELIEVER?" conversation also doesn't happen. I hate this question myself because first of all, it literally does not matter at all; you can write a story about people that you don't think are fucking in real life. It is called fiction after all. But the larger reason I hate this question is that the only answer possible is: I don't know. Because we don't know. Even if I were buddies with them I wouldn't know. One of the things I learned from my long friendship with BFF C____ is that no one knows what is going on inside a relationship except the two people having it. This might be why we gossip so much, because we don't know.

RPF speculation is like FPF ship wars, really. There's nothing actually good about it, it generally leads to wank, and what happens if you're right? Do you get a fabulous new car? A dinette set? No? Then what is the point?

So thank you, flaming_potato, for being awesome once again. I heart my Rymon buddies.

So I just zoomed through those first two eps of Idol and seriously, what has happened here? Simon puts someone through because they're positive? This isn't just me; he seems awfully happy. And why, exactly, did he suddenly decide to eat better and work out? My favorite quote:

You know what's amazing about this country, is that you're genuinely happy when someone you know does well. The idea of me knowing somebody, they get good news and celebrating with them? I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it.

I also just listened to Simon on Ryan's show and oh, pocket calling is love, isn't it? Simon's back in LA this weekend but Ryan will be busy with what is looking like the one red carpet he'll get to produce for E! this year, the SAGs, which are on Sunday.

Ugh, I hate having anxiety attacks. *does busy work that needs to be done anyway*

X Factor girls to cover up

You old lech! We love ya, but see what happens when you're left to your own devices?

So after I whined, eilujspark sent me a youtube of Ryan talking about driving Simon's car, which, love, and then one of the two videos linked after it was done playing was this one. So I think I'm going to just sit on my red couch and have a cooky. Enjoy!