trying to explain due South to people is weird because they’re always like “hmm, haven’t heard of it, must be a niche little fandom” and like. Yes but also Very Much No.
all I know about the canon of Due South is that it expected me to believe that a series of red and white purebred huskies were a) the same dog and b) an actual, legitimate, no-fucking-around Canadian wolf living in Chicago, and also there were two guys who were both named Ray for some reason and one of them was pretending to be the other one for a while??
but like… yeah, between this and The Sentinel, these are just pure fossilized 90s megafandom.
(It’s especially interesting reading the back archives because the takes on sexuality and sex and how it works and how affection works and how characters respond to homophobia and what people expect characters to encounter and familiarity with queer culture is just–
in some ways it’s like peering back in time in a way I find really, really interesting, with a very different lens than you’ll find in traditionally published mainstream fiction outside of the queer presses. Like, don’t get me wrong, there’s stuff in there that’s just a damn Mess, but imagine the perspectives of the best writing you can find in modern fandom, from writers who are using slash fic to tell stories that incorporate a queer experience and point of view…
…and now think about the best of that, and pull it back twenty years in the past, and think about how you can use that to learn things about how people thought and acted and expected other people to think and act thirty or forty years ago.
The past is another country. They do things differently there. And you can get a surprisingly good sense for that from old Due South and Sentinel fics.
y’all if we’re fossils then I call dibs on being stegosaurus
I call dibs on the Caudipteryx!
I’m a Kowalskisaurus.
*unfossilizes long enough to point out that Diefenbaker is a half-wolf at best*
*refossilizes, laughing about the DS Anon Troll being added to the second graphic*
I call Loch Ness Monster, somehow still surviving as a dinosaur even now!
