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grav_ityBecause I should. I really, really should. Tesla describes him in season three as a stone cold killer, and that's just not true. Stone cold killers don't have that kind of rage. John is something else, and he's really kind of terrifying.
But I'm not scared of him. I imagine it's because Helen is not scared of him (well, at least she's not scared of what he might do to her).
There is one very important thing to keep in mind when you thinking about John. I've seen it get overlooked in fic from time to time, but I believe it is one of the absolutely necessary parts of his character. It's also a spoiler, so this will be the place where we go under a cut.
John, you see, spends over a century believing that The Source Blood awoke some kind of monster in him that was already there. In fact, that's what they all believe. That the power of the blood brought out the darkness that was in his soul and unleashed it on the world with a bonus new super power to make killing even easier for him. And he tried to fight it. And he tried to compromise with it. And then he tried to just survive it. But the whole time, he thought it was him.
We get hints, leading up to "Haunted" that this is not the case (starting with "The Five" and our first encounter with Tesla), and later we'll see a parallel in Adam Worth who was also misdiagnosed because people didn't understand things that could go wrong in people's brains, but basically when John wakes up on the table after Helen revives him, we are meeting him for the first time. I am aware that this "cop out" bugs some people. Because humans are capable of Great Evil on their own, and don't need tag-alongs to do it for them, and if this was the show of the webisodes, I'd agree.
In the webisodes, John is horrifying. He gets WAY too close to Ashley (and Helen, if we're being honest), and he's definitely more of a "stone cold killer" than he is in the actual show. If they were setting him up to be The Big Bad, they were certainly doing their job right. After the webisodes, I don't want Helen and John within a hundred years of one another (and I don't want Ashley in the same millennium). But the show went a different route, I think, because the show explores what happens when you alter your own nature.
And that's exactly what Helen did. And she did it to four other people. And three of them are comparatively harmless. And two of them are really, really not. But she manages them. She effectively neuters Tesla (and don't think for a moment that he takes his meds because he doesn't want to kill people. He can replace his suits if he gets bloodstains on them. No, he doesn't kill people because Helen doesn't want him to). And when John gets ill, she injects him with even more Special Blood to help cure him.
This is what I think happened: I think that somewhere between 1886 and July of 1888, after they inject the source blood (preferably as close to July of '88 as possible for reasons I'll discuss below), John teleported and picked up the energy being. Then he got very sick, because the being was killing him. To save him from death, Helen injected him with her blood effectively making him the perfect host. Then he started killing people under its influence, possibly after fighting it off for no small amount of time.
[Someone has written an AU where John was teleporting with Helen or James or someone else and they picked up the being instead of him, right?]
And that is John Druitt's tragedy. Not that he lost Helen and his friends, not that he barely knew his daughter, not that he wants redemption in the most incalculable way and will probably never get it...but because something took advantage of him and made him believe that he was evil to the core.
(So when John thought he was fighting his own nature, he was actually wrestling with a completely different thing.)
This brings me firmly up against my biggest squick in terms of shipping Helen/John (which I do, btw, even though I write multi). I cannot abide when someone has sex with someone who is actually someone/thing else. This would not be a problem if I didn't watch so much science fiction, I'd imagine, but there it is. There's a scene in Battlestar Galactica where Boomer and Helo have sex (and Helo thinks Boomer is Athena), and I just screamed at the TV while it was airing, and then had to go and vomit. I haven't watched Fringe in MONTHS because of what's going on there. I can't stand the idea of John and Helen having sex unless they know about the Energy Being.
This basically limits me to nothing below the waist from August 31, 1888 (at the latest) until "Haunted" when it comes to reading fanfic. It also means that Ashley was almost definitely conceived when John was not himself, and the idea of that makes my skin crawl. Once they know about the being, I am a little bit more comfortable with fics like the amazing I'll Leave With Every Piece of You, because everyone knows who (and what) they are getting into bed with.
As with Tesla and his medication (which was never a plot point, which I think is funny because as soon as Helen said "Are you taking your medication?" I was all "And file that one away for season two!"), Helen effectively neuters John (or as close as possible) by inspiring his complete loyalty. He allows himself to be leashed by her, not because he think she can control him (she can't, but then neither can he really), but because she will end him if she has to. Or at least lock him up behind a shield. It sounds ridiculous and cliché, that he's held in check by the power of love, but it's also true.
(That's really where "Piece of You" hits home with me...along with another fic I can't remember the link to where John and Helen try to make a go of it after he gets cured and it's just REALLY AWKWARD, and, amongst other things, he can't teleport into her bedroom because he's never been there.)
Also, they almost never touch. Which kills me.
All of this means that when they do sort of start to loosen up in season three (particularly in "For King and Country" and in "Vigilante"), I'm caught somewhere between desperate hope and this terrible and quiet revulsion (admittedly, the revulsion might be a hold over from their scene on the bridge in the flashback which I don't understand at all because WHY WOULD SHE GO OFF ALONE WITH HIM?). It's confusing.
What I'm left with is possibly the most complicated romantic relationship I've ever had to deal with on television. It's taken me nearly three weeks to write this, for example, and I've been 'shipping them since the pilot. And the weirdest part is that I shouldn't like it at all.
I have a well documented history of not liking this type of relationship (see also: Logan/Veronica, Buffy/Spike, Elena/Damon, Sookie/Eric, Kara/Lee, etc), and that's before I account for demonic possession or body switching. But when Logan describes his relationship with Veronica as "[...] epic, you know? You and me. Years, and continents. Lives ruined and blood shed.", he is looking to the future and hoping that this will be his story. Helen and John have already lived it (and I think that no small part of my love for them is that neither of them is even remotely close to being a teenager, eternal or otherwise), and they are too smart to want it to stay that way forever.
And that, I think, is the key difference. They have both done terrible things, though admittedly he's done a lot more than she has, and her terrible things typically have a silver lining to them. But they have this weird balancing effect on one another, and they've gone so far past love that it's not even a question of if anymore. Heck, I'm not even sure it's a question of when.
It's how. And that is ten kind of compelling.
But I'm not scared of him. I imagine it's because Helen is not scared of him (well, at least she's not scared of what he might do to her).
There is one very important thing to keep in mind when you thinking about John. I've seen it get overlooked in fic from time to time, but I believe it is one of the absolutely necessary parts of his character. It's also a spoiler, so this will be the place where we go under a cut.
John, you see, spends over a century believing that The Source Blood awoke some kind of monster in him that was already there. In fact, that's what they all believe. That the power of the blood brought out the darkness that was in his soul and unleashed it on the world with a bonus new super power to make killing even easier for him. And he tried to fight it. And he tried to compromise with it. And then he tried to just survive it. But the whole time, he thought it was him.
We get hints, leading up to "Haunted" that this is not the case (starting with "The Five" and our first encounter with Tesla), and later we'll see a parallel in Adam Worth who was also misdiagnosed because people didn't understand things that could go wrong in people's brains, but basically when John wakes up on the table after Helen revives him, we are meeting him for the first time. I am aware that this "cop out" bugs some people. Because humans are capable of Great Evil on their own, and don't need tag-alongs to do it for them, and if this was the show of the webisodes, I'd agree.
In the webisodes, John is horrifying. He gets WAY too close to Ashley (and Helen, if we're being honest), and he's definitely more of a "stone cold killer" than he is in the actual show. If they were setting him up to be The Big Bad, they were certainly doing their job right. After the webisodes, I don't want Helen and John within a hundred years of one another (and I don't want Ashley in the same millennium). But the show went a different route, I think, because the show explores what happens when you alter your own nature.
And that's exactly what Helen did. And she did it to four other people. And three of them are comparatively harmless. And two of them are really, really not. But she manages them. She effectively neuters Tesla (and don't think for a moment that he takes his meds because he doesn't want to kill people. He can replace his suits if he gets bloodstains on them. No, he doesn't kill people because Helen doesn't want him to). And when John gets ill, she injects him with even more Special Blood to help cure him.
This is what I think happened: I think that somewhere between 1886 and July of 1888, after they inject the source blood (preferably as close to July of '88 as possible for reasons I'll discuss below), John teleported and picked up the energy being. Then he got very sick, because the being was killing him. To save him from death, Helen injected him with her blood effectively making him the perfect host. Then he started killing people under its influence, possibly after fighting it off for no small amount of time.
[Someone has written an AU where John was teleporting with Helen or James or someone else and they picked up the being instead of him, right?]
And that is John Druitt's tragedy. Not that he lost Helen and his friends, not that he barely knew his daughter, not that he wants redemption in the most incalculable way and will probably never get it...but because something took advantage of him and made him believe that he was evil to the core.
(So when John thought he was fighting his own nature, he was actually wrestling with a completely different thing.)
This brings me firmly up against my biggest squick in terms of shipping Helen/John (which I do, btw, even though I write multi). I cannot abide when someone has sex with someone who is actually someone/thing else. This would not be a problem if I didn't watch so much science fiction, I'd imagine, but there it is. There's a scene in Battlestar Galactica where Boomer and Helo have sex (and Helo thinks Boomer is Athena), and I just screamed at the TV while it was airing, and then had to go and vomit. I haven't watched Fringe in MONTHS because of what's going on there. I can't stand the idea of John and Helen having sex unless they know about the Energy Being.
This basically limits me to nothing below the waist from August 31, 1888 (at the latest) until "Haunted" when it comes to reading fanfic. It also means that Ashley was almost definitely conceived when John was not himself, and the idea of that makes my skin crawl. Once they know about the being, I am a little bit more comfortable with fics like the amazing I'll Leave With Every Piece of You, because everyone knows who (and what) they are getting into bed with.
As with Tesla and his medication (which was never a plot point, which I think is funny because as soon as Helen said "Are you taking your medication?" I was all "And file that one away for season two!"), Helen effectively neuters John (or as close as possible) by inspiring his complete loyalty. He allows himself to be leashed by her, not because he think she can control him (she can't, but then neither can he really), but because she will end him if she has to. Or at least lock him up behind a shield. It sounds ridiculous and cliché, that he's held in check by the power of love, but it's also true.
(That's really where "Piece of You" hits home with me...along with another fic I can't remember the link to where John and Helen try to make a go of it after he gets cured and it's just REALLY AWKWARD, and, amongst other things, he can't teleport into her bedroom because he's never been there.)
Also, they almost never touch. Which kills me.
All of this means that when they do sort of start to loosen up in season three (particularly in "For King and Country" and in "Vigilante"), I'm caught somewhere between desperate hope and this terrible and quiet revulsion (admittedly, the revulsion might be a hold over from their scene on the bridge in the flashback which I don't understand at all because WHY WOULD SHE GO OFF ALONE WITH HIM?). It's confusing.
What I'm left with is possibly the most complicated romantic relationship I've ever had to deal with on television. It's taken me nearly three weeks to write this, for example, and I've been 'shipping them since the pilot. And the weirdest part is that I shouldn't like it at all.
I have a well documented history of not liking this type of relationship (see also: Logan/Veronica, Buffy/Spike, Elena/Damon, Sookie/Eric, Kara/Lee, etc), and that's before I account for demonic possession or body switching. But when Logan describes his relationship with Veronica as "[...] epic, you know? You and me. Years, and continents. Lives ruined and blood shed.", he is looking to the future and hoping that this will be his story. Helen and John have already lived it (and I think that no small part of my love for them is that neither of them is even remotely close to being a teenager, eternal or otherwise), and they are too smart to want it to stay that way forever.
And that, I think, is the key difference. They have both done terrible things, though admittedly he's done a lot more than she has, and her terrible things typically have a silver lining to them. But they have this weird balancing effect on one another, and they've gone so far past love that it's not even a question of if anymore. Heck, I'm not even sure it's a question of when.
It's how. And that is ten kind of compelling.
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Date: 2011-01-22 04:05 pm (UTC)Indeed. I'm not saying they have sunshine and roses in their future, heck I'm not even sure if they have light rain instead of a tornado...but that's not going to stop me from quietly cheering for them. Because I'm a dork.