Blakes7

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Morgan
by Judith Proctor 17 Jun '01

17 Jun '01

I've decided to make it two pounds to charity rather than one for copies sold of 'Morgan'. One pound wasn't enough. Judith PS. If you want an incentive to get a copy, it's far and away the best fan story I ever wrote. -- http://www.hermit.org/Blakes7 - Fanzines for Blake's 7, B7 Filk songs, pictures, news, Conventions past and present, Blake's 7 fan clubs, Gareth Thomas, etc. (also non-Blake's 7 zines at http://www.knightwriter.org ) Redemption '03 21-23 Feb 2003 http://www.smof.com/redemption/

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Re: [B7L] Re: Duel
by Ellynne G. 16 Jun '01

16 Jun '01

On Fri, 15 Jun 2001 21:47:36 -0400 "Dana Shilling" <dshilling(a)worldnet.att.net> writes: > Is too! Is too! The next guy probably won't have as much personal > interest, and may be from the first team or the Junior Varsity. > Besides, > Travis is a willing participant in Federation tyranny, not just some > poor > bastard of a draftee (a faceless group that Blake seems to have *no* > problem about killing). Oh, now here's room for thought - what reasons might Blake have that he either doesn't realize he has or doesn't want to admit to for not killing _Travis_? 1) Class prejudice? an Alpha not wanting to kill an Alpha? 2) Leftover conditioning? It seems like it would easier to make him gun shy towards something real he could actually remember (nearly killing a specific Federation officer) than abstract, faceless troopers he hadn't fought against at that time. 3) The hard fact that Blake knows this is something he _can't_ do, not and remain true to himself? He wants to kill Travis almost as badly as Travis wants to kill him. Maybe it's necessary and maybe it's smart - and maybe it shouldn't cost more than any of the other deaths, but it does. Like when Travis let go his concern for Maryatt, a man who was already dead when he got the news and who would have been beyond his power to save. Nothing he could do would make a difference, yet it made him different to choose to do nothing. 4) Some kind of guilt? What if, somewhere in his lost memories, Blake had been friends with Travis? A sort of Avon and Blake friendship, perhaps, the two of them always arguing and never agreeing, but it all seemed to have an underlying respect. Until. Blake may have been conditioned to forget it but, somewhere inside him, he still knows. For this to work, I'd guess both of them have either been a bit confused about what actually happened or are not mentioning parts (quite possible in both cases). After all, Travis seemed uninterested in hunting down Citizen Blake when he was a good and law abiding zombie. Hmm. OK, it's a stretch, but just because of the new wrench it throws into Blake's relationship with Avon, I'm going to think about it. 5) I know this is another stretch, but what if Travis isn't Travis but somebody they conditioned to _believe_ he's Travis? Hence, the injuries that don't quite fit the story. Blake, with his swiss cheese memory, may not consciously know - but this does put him and Travis in a very exclusive club. Maybe he unconsciously recognizes the symptoms. Oh, speaking of swiss cheese memories, for anyone who hasn't read Anne Perry's Monk books, the main character is an amnesiac who had the great disadvantage of knowing exactly who he is - sort of. As the author put it, we judge ourselves more harshly than we would other people. That's how Monk judges himself but without remembering the reasons and justifications for the actions (in the first story, he's investigating a murder and starts building a case against himself). I wonder if Blake ever does that? Condemns himself for the things he did and didn't do without knowing why he made those decisions? Ellynne ________________________________________________________________ GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/tagj.

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Re: [B7L] Re: Duel
by Natasa Tucev 16 Jun '01

16 Jun '01

Dana wrote: > Maybe, like Cathleen ni Houlihan selling her soul to the >devil to buy bread for her tenants, he should have been willing to >undergo the corruption to prevent mass deaths. Dana, you must have some Auronar blood, because I was thinking about Countess Cathleen the other day (in relation to Blake, of course). After all, Yeats dedicated his play to a woman who (in his opinion) sacrificed the purity of her soul by engaging in a political struggle for a Cause. Another literary parallel I had in mind was from Osborne's Look Back in Anger: "They all want to escape from the pain of being alive... It's no good trying to fool yourself. You can't fall into it like a soft job, without dirtying up your hands. It takes muscle and guts. And if you can't bear the thought of messing up your nice, clean soul, you'd better give up the whole idea of life, and become a saint. Because you'll never make it as a human being. It's either this world or the next." In a way, this sums up Blake for me. He did not want to escape from the pain of being alive. He could have chosen to remain a saint, never hurt a living thing, etc., (and I think he had such a potential), but he wilfully gave this up. He wanted to act and change something in the world he lived in. Which inevitably implies messing up your soul. N.

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Re: [B7L] Re: Duel
by Sally Manton 16 Jun '01

16 Jun '01

Susan Beth wrote: <What if the Feds run a version of Raiker's threat on a larger scale? "Surrender yourself or we pump poisonous gas into some Dome full of thousands of innocent farmers/workers"?> <grin> I spent some time trying to work out in my own mind what he would do if someone tried to use innocents (say, a spaceship full of children, and a self-destruct button) against him. Came to the conclusion he'd give himself up fast enough (from the evidence of Horizon) but the Liberator -? I still *haven't* quite made up my mind on that one (which says a lot for how the white-hat hero got greyed in Boucher's and Thomas's hands). _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.

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Trivia query re Duel
by tavia＠btinternet.com 16 Jun '01

16 Jun '01

Does anyone happen to know what kind(s) of bat we see in Duel? Tavia

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Re: Duel
by tavia＠btinternet.com 16 Jun '01

16 Jun '01

Ellynne wrote: >After all, Travis seemed uninterested in hunting down > Citizen Blake when he was a good and law abiding zombie. Hmm. I assumed that was during the period where Travis was up to his neck in slime and lasers somewhere far from Earth. He might not have known that Blake was alive until the authorities chose to inform him. Tavia

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Re: Duel
by Sally Manton 16 Jun '01

16 Jun '01

Dana wrote: < well, WHENEVER you have the chance to kill an implacable enemy who has been driven insane by a desire for vengeance on you... kill him!> I think there's an unknown Law of Nature at work here. Not only doesn't Blake kill his implacable enemy, but (leaving the question of *everyone's* sanity for the moment) Avon doesn't, Tarrant doesn't, Dayna doesn't, Travis doesn't (has to have time to gloat first, by which stage the Cavalry arrive), Servalan doesn't ... The entire *Federation* doesn't (they had Blake at the beginning - twice - and thought up excellent reasons to let him live. They then spend two seasons wavering between 'blast him out of the sky' and 'no, wait, we want that ship'!!!) It's like Stormtrooper's Disease ... _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.

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Re: [B7L] It's My Noble Nature (was Heros & heroines)
by Sally Manton 16 Jun '01

16 Jun '01

Ellynne wrote: <The lost soul is 1) Tormented (well, _I_ think so)> Yes, but does he normally enjoy tormenting others as well <g>? <8) [Attention, Avon droolers] Loves fiercely and hates just as passionately (just because he doesn't talk about it doesn't mean it isn't so)> You got me there :-) _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.

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Lost Causes
by Sally Manton 16 Jun '01

16 Jun '01

Ellynne wrote: <Avon is stuck with Nebrox, his adopted grandfather. > This may be the most appealing idea I've heard since Harriet's last Jarriere saga :-) I love it. <Is anyone being watched by their adoptive grandfather going to gun down a friend, especially when he hasn't been primed by Orbit?> and it gets even better. Of course not. Maybe he even told Grandad about the whole thing beforehand. In any case, Neebrox is a wily old thing, and might have kept his head when Avon was losing his mind in there ... _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.

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Re: [B7L] It's My Noble Nature (was Heros & heroines)
by Susan Beth 16 Jun '01

16 Jun '01

Otis Lou Bohr wrote: (and sorry for the duplicate copy. I'm an old dog, I can't seem to learn new tricks.) >At 05:33 PM 6/13/01 -0400, Susan Beth wrote: > >>In fact, Fox Mulder is given as one of the examples for The Lost >>Soul (Scully is a Librarian) > >...which you say corresponds with the male "Professor"...further fodder for >my (Avon == Scully) hypothesis! (;-p) Yes, I could see Blake and Avon as Mulder & Scully....of course, the plots would change a lot. Blake's not nearly as prone to mournful kicked-puppy-dog passive suffering as Mulder, and far more likely to aggressively go after the conspirators openly and publicly. Which probably would get him snuffed rather quickly. >Well, not having read the book in question, nor being particularly >well-versed in the Psychology of Avon, I hesitate to dispute this, even >though I feel inclined to (but I will argue that if delusions of morality >are a prerequisite for Lost Soulhood surely Travis is even *less* qualified >than Avon--Travis' motivation for revenge (against Blake, the Federation, >humanity) being "you hurt *me*"). I think I phrased that point badly. The 'morality' hasn't to do with what the Lost Soul himself does, it's that he feels the world/some set of it has broken the rules in dealing with *him*. He thinks he has suffered unjustly, had something stolen from him, been cheated out of what should have been his, and so on. This attitude comes out clearly in "Trial" -- Travis feels his actions were justified, right, what the military taught him to do and *wanted* him to do, but that they are now hanging him out to dry for reasons political and personal. He's aggrieved. [Is that almost a pun?] So the world/humanity has hurt HIM, so to hell with the world/humanity. I think it also applies to his feelings against Blake's crippling him. Sure, Blake was fighting back, but Travis was Just Doing His Job while Blake was the miscreant. Surely natural justice requires Blake to be the one to suffer/die/get maimed, not himself. (From Travis' POV, that is.) I don't see that attitude in Avon. He was consciously breaking the rules, and accepts that his punishment was deserved -- though probably more for his mistakes in relying on the wrong people and whatever he did/didn't do that got him caught, I don't mean he feels guilty over the attempted theft itself. He doesn't feel angry or betrayed by the system/humanity/whatever, just annoyed that he failed to played the game well enough to win. >Come on, some Avon expert out there, support my case. I mean look at me, >I'm talkin' about Avon! I'm this close to converting! Don't you want me on >your team? Huh? Huh? Hmmm. Okay, we'll take Penny, but that means you guys have to take the fat kid. Susan Beth (susanbeth33(a)mindspring.com)

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