World Enough and Time

Over dinner, maaseru and maaboroshi and I started watching the recent Babylon 5 movie, The Lost Tales. Now, many of my my friends were more into Babylon 5 than I was, and though there were things I loved about it - including some of the characters - after the fifth season, I felt horribly betrayed by the show, rather as I felt with X-Files, though I cared about X-Files infinitely more. One of my more successful slash stories was about Babylon 5 characters (Garibaldi and Sinclair), and that alone gives me fond memories.

But The Lost Tales was ghastly, or possibly several steps beyond ghastly. Static scenes without backgrounds, talking heads using pompous cliches and a storyline that was stale twenty years ago - what happened?

The odd thing is, I was reading a story by J. Michael Straczynski today and thinking how good it was. The story was in Spider-Man #544, "One More Day" part one of four. Straczynski writes Spider-Man extremely well, and I found this story to be an interesting development following from the Civil War storyline, including a confrontation between Peter Parker and Tony Stark. Good pacing, good dialogue, good concepts. Now, some of this - the plot in particular - may well be due to the editors (Joe Quesada and Axel Alonso) and the artist (Joe Quesada), again. Or maybe Straczynski is simply more interested in Spider-Man these days. Or maybe he needs strong editors.

Galen had been one of my favourite characters in the Babylon 5 universe and I'm a big fan of Peter Woodward, but by the time we got to him I could bear no more: the dialogue wasn't improving. Was Straczynski trying to set a record for number of cliches per minute? Galen's first scene turned out to be the same as recently done in Heroes, but done there so much better. We bailed.

Instead, we watched Okane ga Nai, which was lots of shameless fun. I should probably call it a guilty pleasure - if I was ever guilty about pleasures. It's anime, the story told from the point of view of a ruthless and wealthy magnate named Kanou, who buys a beautiful young man he once knew, Ayase, in a sex-slave auction run by ruthless gangsters. The sweet and delicate Ayase was drugged and sold by his evil cousin. Much of the story is Kanou's angst-ridden ruminations as he wonders how to win Ayase's love after he has raped him and refused to let him go. Eventually he strikes a deal with Ayase to let him buy off what he cost by paying him for sex. But Ayase, of the big liquid eyes and the trembling whisper is so little, cute and pet-like that Kanou tries to learn how to tame him by reading a book about keeping small pets like hamsters. And Kanou also acquires Ayase's evil cousin by making a deal with the gangsters, and winning a game of Russian roulette. By cheating. But that's okay, because of course the gangsters were cheating too. And the characters I liked best were Kanoe's identical twin assistants, who are watching these events with fascination.

Imagine George R.R. Martin at his most twisted, writing m/m sex comedy....