100 days of enemy recs: 52: OUaTiM

[melannen]

Once Upon A Time In Mexico! The heady days of 2003, when I was still vaguely ashamed of the idea of being multifannish, when fandom thought Johnny Depp was the bee's knees instead of... not.

Part of being vaguely ashamed of being multifannish is that way back then I still thought it was necessary to to know all of canon before being into a fandom, so I have in fact watched the whole Mariachi trilogy. I watched the first one in Spanish, with no subtitles, for class! I don't know how much of the Spanish I understood, but I also don't remember it being a movie where the dialog was really all that necessary? I remember Desperado I quite liked, and also I still owe someone a fic from 3_ships 2004 which still haunts me with guilt.

Once Upon A Time in Mexico involved El Mariachi, the brooding loner who just wants his music but keeps having to shoot people, being recruited by Sands, a sociopathic renegade CIA agent, as part of a plot to do something involving the cartels and the Mexican government? El Mariachi walks out unscathed (except for trauma) as always, still a hero, but Sands loses hold of his plots and ends up eyeless, friendless and bleeding out in the street. Close curtain.

There was probably more to the plot that that? But literally every fanfic was about El Mariachi finding Sands after canon, and the two of them figuring out how to be people again with each other's help. (Also gunfights. There are a lot of gunfights.) I was basically in this fandom for a) enemyslash, b) OTT hypercompetence, c) what I call "recovery" fic, that's sort of like hurt/comfort except the hurt is canon and the comfort isn't all that comforting?

Anyway here's recs. I haven't re-read most of them in at least fifteen years, so if they haven't held up, go talk to 2004 me, not current me!

• La Canción de los Pistolas (65244 words) by auburn
  Fandom: Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003)
  Rating: Mature
  Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
  Relationships: El Mariachi/Sheldon Jeffrey Sands, Ramirez/OFC
  Additional Tags: Action/Adventure, Post-Canon
  
  El Mariachi finds Sands after canon, and the two of them figure out how to be people again with each other's help. (Also, they shoot some people who deserve it.)



• After the Dust Has Cleared (26859 words) by missbecky
  Fandom: Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003)
  Rating: Mature
  Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
  Relationships: Sands/El
  Additional Tags: Angst, Violence, Don't copy to another site
  Series: Part 1 of Still Standing
  
  El Mariachi finds Sands after canon, and the two of them figure out how to be people again with each other's help. (Also, they shoot some people who deserve it.)



• Wires (65065 words) by TiggyMalvern
  Chapters: 13/13
  Fandom: El Mariachi Trilogy (Movies)
  Rating: Explicit
  Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
  Relationships: El Mariachi/Sheldon Jeffrey Sands
  Additional Tags: Canon-Typical Violence, enemies to resentful allies to friends, or as close to friends as Sands will ever get, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Manipulation, Do Not Repost to Other Sites
  Series: Part 1 of The Wires Series
  
  El Mariachi finds Sands after canon, and the two of them figure out how to be people again with each other's help. (Also, they shoot some people who deserve it.)

Comments

[ivyfic]

OUaTiM I remember really really enjoying til the eye gouging then really really not. (I also then also watched the Mariachi trilogy.) I didn’t even know there was a fandom.

[melannen]

It was a sort of flash-in-the-pan movie fandom that was mostly spun out of Pirates of the Caribbean fandom? (For obvious reasons.) Although I think I got there as much because there were a couple of really good Highlander crossovers as from PotC.

I am pretty sure I looked away from the entire eye gouging scene in the movie, but there was generally not enough in the fic to bother me.

[hannah]

There's a wonderful theory about the Mariachi trilogy: they're all the same story. The first movie is what actually happened, all very low-key and fairly believable. The second movie is the story embellished and exaggerated as it kept being told, and by the third one, it's full-on urban legend.

[melannen]

It does make a fair amount of sense, the three stories have a lot in common structurally! (Mind you, it also makes sense as the same core story done as a self-funded indie film, a mid-budget spaghetti Western, and a star-studded Hollywood blockbuster.)

[hannah]

Watsonian or Doylist, it checks out both ways.

[pauraque]

Can I ask why you felt ashamed of being multifannish? I remember around that time I sometimes felt weird posting on LJ about "other fandoms" because I figured the vast majority of people who had friended me did so because they wanted HP content, even though nobody ever actually complained.

[melannen]

Well, vaguely is carrying a lot of water there! It's mostly that I had basically only been active in Harry Potter up until then (unless you count Keenspot, which was really its own thing) and Harry Potter was weird and insular, and most of the people I'd met there were also only Harry Potter, or at least monofandom, or at least serially monofandom. I'd wound a lot of my fandom identity into HP. But also as I poked my nose into wider fandom on LJ, the idea of a "fannish butterfly" was already out there and somewhat equivocal. And I was also starting my pattern of getting into fandom via the fanfic, and one of the ones I was getting into was Highlander fandom, which had some... tension about that. And the fact that I could already tell that my writing output would drop precipitously when I wasn't being monofannish, so I had all these WIPs in Harry Potter that I could feel myself losing the ability to finish... (I have since simply become resigned to that.) But it wasn't, like, super ashamed. I wasn't established enough to be worried about what my readers would think. And it certainly didn't stop me! I don't think I would have been comfortable doing a series of a hundred fandoms I have read, most of which I don't know canon for, though!

[out_there]

Part of being vaguely ashamed of being multifannish is that way back then I still thought it was necessary to to know all of canon before being into a fandom, so I have in fact watched the whole Mariachi trilogy.

I watched it with subtitles (but honestly the plot is so much like the next one that I bet you could mostly follow it without knowing the dialogue). I don't remember liking OUaTiM much, but I rewatched Desperado a month ago and it still stands up as an excellent movie. (With ridiculously hot stars.)