melannen: Commander Valentine of Alpha Squad Seven, a red-haired female Nick Fury in space, smoking contemplatively (Default)
melannen ([personal profile] melannen) wrote2021-09-12 11:37 pm
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100 days of enemy recs: 40. Eagle of the Ninth

Eagle of the Ninth is one of those books I read at a young age that was formative, so it was very exciting when the movie came out and it grew a fandom suddenly! Of course I still have not seen the movie (in my defense it was kind of hard to find), and it's interesting that for a movie that generally followed the plot of the book pretty closely, it changed a bunch of minor things that really altered the dynamic of the slash pairing. Starting with which one of them is the big strong one and which one of them is the pretty one! But also via.. making an already very very slashy story much more in-line with a standard fanon slash narrative? And it's not the only film to do that recently but it was the first one I really encountered. So I read a bunch of fic that seemed like it was for the book I remembered but it was all subtly off in a way that *felt* like OOC fanon but was actually just following movie canon. And then it all got mixed up in my head and now I can't remember what is book canon and what's movie canon and what's just good fanfic. Which made diving back in to find recs hard! Especially since so many of my favorite people wrote for it that I usually just go back and re-read their stuff when I get a hankering for the fandom.

And okay, I will confess: I still like Frontier Wolf better. I have re-read more Frontier Wolf than Eagle. A lot more. Alexios/Hilarion (and Alexios/Cunorix) keep all the delicious tension of Romans among the Northern tribes and mixed loyalties and ambivalence about the whole system you're supporting (from both sides), but the power dynamics involved are, uh, something other than outright slavery. But there is a lot more Eagle fic, and a lot of it is very good! And one thing the movie did was punch up the enemyslash aspects, a lot. I do still have a lot of affection for Marcus going North to find the Eagle and his journey with Esca along the way!

(Also: I blame Eagle of the Ninth and Frontier Wolf for why I could never really get enthused about ASoIAF. I kept wanting it to be Sutcliff's Romans at the Wall and it kept trying to be Wars of the Roses instead.)

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