Off the prompt "cuddles."

1. I finished watching Enterprise!

2. Alas, my love affair with the trashy holonovel is not over. I'm reading fic. None of it is what I'd call good fic, which is why I'm leaning heavily on comedy--a well-formatted comedy can live without a plot and with mangled characterizations, whereas drama with the same flaws make me stab the back button.

But my actual second comment was a related issue to the bad fic: I keep trying to figure out what woman on Enterprise Archer might be talking to who would be considered blonde (not T'Pol, surely not Hoshi), only to realize he's talking to Trip. You guys! Blonde with an e, girl!Trip. Blond without an e, boy!Trip. Continually referring to characters by their hair color instead of their name, so last decade.

niqaeli and I discussed it and girl!Trip is awesome and I want actual fic about her (as opposed to whoops, stop calling boy!Trip the blonde mmmkay?). She's totally queer. Like, not completely lesbian, about the same ratio of hitting on alien women and bonding in highly suspect ways with Archer and Reed as the next Trip--but she is queer, and self-aware about it, which means she totally calls Reed on his shit, Reed being the least self-aware queer in the history of Starfleet. Also, she's about ten times less ass-hatty about the one-night stand with T'Pol. In my head her name is still Trip which means she's probably actually also still Charles Tucker III because her father so desperately wanted a son to carry on the line that he gave his daughter massive issues to carry around. Fun times! Is there any chance this story has actually been written? Is there any chance it's any good?

I just went from being heart-warmed to being infuriated in three point one four seconds flat.

I watched this movie called Martian Child in which John Cusack plays a believably eccentric science fiction writer ("So instead of becoming a well-adjusted normal person, I became a sort of successful, deranged person. And I don't know which is better but it doesn't really matter because you don't get to choose," is one of the early lines, which is really so very true about being, well, any kind of fiction writer, I think). This writer adopts a kid who believes he's from Mars, and they have all sorts of touching life lessons about what it means to be human and how really, not going to float away, you are my son forever and ever.

It's sweet.

In the credits I saw it was based on a book by David Gerrold. I know David Gerrold's name, I recognize him as the guy who wrote that old Star Trek episode "The Trouble with Tribbles," I have a book on writing that he wrote that is full of the kind of that's so true of that line I quoted up there, like this method of expanding characterizations by imagining you're interviewing your characters, and this one time he didn't get much in the way of verbal response but his character did try to come over the table and knife him, which is certainly characterization information to explore. I haven't read as many of David Gerrold's novels as I'd like, but what I've seen of his work, I like. And I still do.

I wiki'd the movie to see what it had to say about the novel. It was, unshockingly, based partially on David Gerrold's real life experiences adopting a son. Here's the part that's pissing me the hell off:

David Gerrold is gay and out as gay and adopted a son as an out, gay man. There's two versions of his written story Martian Child: in the novelette, the protagonist's sexuality is not mentioned; in the novel, the protagonist is, like Gerrold, gay. In the movie? THEY STRIPPED THE GAY. They made the protagonist a widower, dead wife two years ago, plus a vague female love interest hanging around. They straightened him up! Polished the gay right off so they could make a fucking family-friendly flick.

FUCK YOU, HOLLYWOOD. FUCK YOU VERY MUCH. WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK.