Why I love Big Valley

[ladyjanelly]

Ah, The Big Valley, how I love thee.

1)Horses!  Okay. So I grew up with horses and loved anything western or horse related, period.  

2)Awesome family dynamics, one of the things that got me into SPN.  That bond of brotherhood, that "fuck with my family and I will hurt you."  

3)Victoria Barkley, matriarch of the Barkley family, probably in her 50's.  Still a beautiful woman, sweet, gracious and hard as fucking nails.  She can take a man down a peg or twenty with a word and a tone, and if you hurt one of her kids, she'll shoot you with a fucking rifle from 20 feet away.  Seriously.

4)Nick Barkley, cowboy and middle son.  Likely to fly off the handle, think with his fists and yell stuff he doesn't mean.  Also likely to give a sincere apology when he's been an ass.  And yeah, he might be harsh around the edges, but don't think the boy's dumb.  He sees more than you think.

5)Jarrod Barkley, lawyer and 'man of the house.'  He's all "We'll need to get an injunction" or "I assume you have a warrant?"  and when that doesn't work, he says "Silas, bring me my gun." and goes out to shoot a fucker.

6)Audra Barkley, little sister.  Half horse-riding wild-child, and half civilized young lady of society.  She has an uncanny knack for falling for the bad guy, and rejecting good guys.  Favorite tactic for dealing with trespassers: Riding up to them on her horse and beating them about the head and shoulders with her riding crop.

7)Last but not least, Heath.  Oh, Heath.  He's had about a rotten a life growing up as any hero on TV, ever.  When introduced to someone new, there's a 50% chance this person has hurt Heath or left him for dead or both at some point.  He loves his family and would do just about anything to please them, even when what they ask is some form of emotional torture.

Anyway, that's what I'm doing with my time during the WGA strike and the holiday season.  If you're bored and want a blast from the past, check it out.

 

Comments

[embroiderama]

I saw my first BV episode ever this weekend! Browsing around the guide on my new digital cable, and OMG BIG VALLEY! I still have your BV story open to read in a tab, and I'm so glad to have visuals now. I did like the show a lot, so I'll probably watch some more eps as I can.

[ladyjanelly.livejournal.com]

Heh. That's awesome. I've got season 1 and volume 1 of season 2. It's dirt cheap at Amazon.

[realpestilence.livejournal.com]

Every time you post about this, I keep hearing the intro "THE BIG VALLEY!", bouncing through my head...*laughs* I was too young to get into it when it was on, but I remember it vaguely.

You've given enough info that I might not need to see any eps to get into it. I read your fic...be getting back to you on that soon.

Has SPN lost you to the cowboys? *bites nails*


You know, from your synopsis, Dean's sort of Heath & Nick combined.Interesting.I guess that makes Sam, Audra. *snorts*



Pesti

[ladyjanelly.livejournal.com]

Sam=Jarrod. Smart and lawyer and Okay, I gotta shoot you now.

No, SPN hasn't lsot me to the cowboys, just taking a mini-vacation.

I wasn't even born when the show came out, but I saw it in syndication. I think they show it on some cable channel now.

[realpestilence.livejournal.com]

Naw, c'mon! Can't you just see pretty Miss Sammy up on his high horse, eyes sparking with feisty pride, whaling away with his riding crop at that insolent rogue of a neighbor boy, Jim Bob, who can't keep a respectful tongue in his oh-so-attractive mouth? It's like foreplay! *cackles*


Alas, I don't have a tv. If I ever manage to get my new computer hooked up, it can play both cd's & dvd's on it...not anytime soon, I'm betting. I'm scared of it & I'm lazy. Not a good combo!


A break is good. I'd love to see you branch out into various other fandoms-smaller ones who need writers...like Dark Angel, The Dark is Rising (which deserves a better movie!), Vorkosigan, Narnia, Fastlane, Coldfire (fantastic trilogy of books but you can't really be *good* at it unless you've read them)...*sighs*

I think sometimes that small fandoms can be more fun than hugely active ones...less bleed-over & stereotyping/caricaturization. But much harder to *get* people to do anything. This is why I love the Yuletide exchange-we get new fics for these fandoms.


Oh, I just thought of an author you might like-Cap Iverson. He did a series of gay Westerns some time back. I had the first...2 or 3. I liked them very much, because they had good stories & not just sex (though the sex didn't *hurt*, mind you. *smirks*)I looked for the info on-line to pass to you, but don't see it easily...my books are boxed up & not easy to get to, but I guess I could, if needed...*eyes closet with dread*


Pesti

[ladyjanelly.livejournal.com]

I have been non-bookish for like the past year. In a serious way.

A long time ago, I read a book called "The man who fell in love with the moon" which was a gay cowboy story. Absolutely awesome. I'll see if I can find it.

Hey, I wrote fanfic for Rollerball. That's as micro as you get (I think I was the first, actually). :)

Small fandoms are free-er, but more work, I think. Creating those tropes for myself, figuring who the characters are without other people's lenses to see them through.

[realpestilence.livejournal.com]

You may be the *only* one to write fic for Rollerball. *laughs*

I think the cowboy mythos is very homoerotic, just by itself. Manly men doing manly things together, in a rugged atmosphere...few women & the ones who were there had to be strong, too, & the life aged them all, fast. Anybody who can seriously think about *any* frontier culture & deny that, whether it's ye old pre-Revolutionary days here, Australian outback settlements, Siberian exile...whatever. I think it's a highly loaded situation-usually few women, men struggling to survive together while still needing to fight & establish pecking order, and the basic human needs for love & sex.

I do think small fandoms can be rewarding. I wish I wrote better, I'd be all over that. *sniffles* I think it's the very freedom from the "other people's lenses" that draws me-I get extremely tired of seeing one quirk about a character constantly bleeding over into fic after fic, as others adopt it. A character gets stereotyped by fanon preferences & it doesn't matter if it's *true* or not, that's how people want to see them. Like...Draco as an intellectual, for instance. We've NO CANON PROOF (!!!) that this is so-his dad even makes a crack about him needing to get his grades up; he gets high marks in Potions, but it's suspect because he's a kiss-ass & it's Snape. But you see it as one of his fanon characteristics, constantly. *seethes*

That's one of the dangers of reading too many fics & then trying to write...it does get absorbed & it's damn hard to avoid perpetuating the stereotypes, even when you're aware of what you're doing. *guiltily hides a certain Lucius fic from view*

Oh, and V! I just remembered that one. *laughs* Do you remember the tv mini-series & tv show based on it? Reptilian aliens trying to take over the world, so they could eat us? With a 5th Column resistance movement collaborating with human fighters? And human flunkies collaborating with the overlords? That movie scared the heck out of me at the time, though it wasn't really graphic, just suggestive-best kind of chills.

[tabaqui]

Ooooh, i loved The Big Valley!
I wanted to be Audra so bad, with her boots and her riding skirt and her *horses*....
*pines*

Yes.
:)

[ladyjanelly.livejournal.com]

And that first episode where she tried to seduce Heath after he saved her from ruffians. MmmHmmm.

[trexr1.livejournal.com]

I live in The Big Valley! Now it's called the Central Valley, but it's really the same one. I'm only about 45 min.-1 hour away from Stockton which is where their fictitious ranch is supposed to be. Stockton's not really all that interesting however. Nothing to warrant being somewhere called "THE BIG VALLEY!"

I just added the first season to my Netflix queue. You've gotten me interested now.

[ladyjanelly.livejournal.com]

Dude, that's awesome. That's hilarious.

The show's a classic. Sam and Kendra never really watched it before, but they say it's not bad when I force them to watch it.

[redheadforever.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah. I remember it being on every week when it came out (how old ARE you, anyway, you Old Bat? Yeah. That old. And a year older six days after Dean's birthday. But only chronologically. This fandom'll do it to ya.)

And Heath was so a forerunner of Dean. Sometimes I used to think Victoria shoulda had HIM for a Good Son instead of that pain-in-the-ass fiddle-dee-dee daughter. Who knew they'd grow up to be the Six Million Dollar Man and the second Mrs. Carrington? But he could really make your heart bleed for what he wanted so desperately; always thought Victoria shoulda adopted him formally and given him a true forever home once she accepted him on his own merits. It would have cemented his position in the family he was so hungry to have. Always thought Lee Majors was a vastly underrated actor, even younger than Jared he had the naturalness and the believable line readings.

Audra did The Bitchface to a T, except she didn't seem to have the emotional maturity and intellectual capacity of Sammy's gym socks some weeks. A really, really nice bleach job, though.

I find myself wondering and worrying a bit about what's gonna happen if this strike lasts as long as I think it will. Quite a few of the best SPN fanfic writers will probably move on. Heck, we'll be lucky if we get *SPN* back if it goes longer than 1988's five months, but I have enough things to keep me from sleeping enough for a gnat. So I'll just trust in The Kripke (and Ativan. And Celexa.) and hope Ostroff and Moonves go torment some other network.

Congratulations on getting more sleep!

Red

Happy But Sleep-Deprived Deangirl Angsting About Der Strike

[ladyjanelly.livejournal.com]

Wooooow. You were 10 when it first came out.

Heath rocked. So much man-pain. I thought he was really accepted as part of the family by the end, with a family vote and everything...maybe that's a fanon thing. He was so hungry for love, and family and a foundation. He wanted it and he was willing to bleed to get it. The things he let that family do to him...

Audra was cool in her own way. Sharp and stuborn and sometimes stupid but I love her anyways.

I dunno if they'll move on. I'm not following the strike, besides boycotting reality tv.

[jebbypal]

You left out the fact that Nick likes to wear leather pants and there's no one that wears jeans like heath!!!

[ladyjanelly.livejournal.com]

Oh yes. Tight pants and nice asses all around, and lots of manly-touching.