I enjoyed this a lot, Natasa (of course, talking about Fearless Leader is so difficult for me as well :-)) A lot of it's so much better than frivolous moi could manage, but just a few words about: < In 'Fellow Feeling', Blake replies to Vila that the injustice done to him is in a way universal. He draws an analogy between altering historical records and erasing the memories of one's personal past. He recalls, for instance, a group of Federation officials present at Servalan's inauguration, who later became undesirables and were erased from the vistapes showing this event. 'They took the records and wiped out whole lives, Vila... like they wiped out whole lives in my mind, even my own. They changed you - they erased me... Are you so surprised I want to save others from that?' Mind manipulation, on a larger scale, parallels the Federation's manipulation of truth and history.>
Thank you sooo much - this last sentence *does* express what I was trying to put into that little scene :-) I have to admit, that bit of the story (which, for everyone else, is basically a shameless hurt-comfort born of my enthusiasm for what VftP *isn't*) was inspired by a book I'd just bought about how repressive regimes 'edited' non-persons out of the public eye, with heaps of fascinating photos showing the care with these people were cut or airbrushed out of official existence - it got grimly farcical in some cases (30s-40s Russia, in particular) where more and more ex-comrades were deleted until there were more ex's than comrades and heroic attempts were made to fill the spaces (because the PWBs still wanted the photos of the *not*-yet-exs).
I can so clearly see the Federation doing things like this - in fact, the attempt to turn Blake into a non-person *is* there, if very sketchily handled (mind you, having broadcast his unknowing recantation far and wide, they were in trouble from the start :-)) and there is also the indication that the same was tried with Servalan in S4 ... perhaps that links into the reason no one recognised her. Maybe people really did *make* themselves forget her to order, erase the ex-President from their consciousness as she was erased from public records (as people in Nazi Germany learned to believe - to *genuinely* believe - to order). But they had to tear Blake's brain apart to make him do it.
And on someone else's story (we all love our own babies best, I know) :-)
<Blake's not a survivor, Vila surmises in the same story. 'Avon and I are survivors. We just keep on going. Blake's exactly the sort to up and die and leave everyone else with too much to think about.'>
I did *love* that last sentence from the moment I read it - the bit about leaving everyone with too much to think about *did* strike me as both perfect Blake and perfect Vila. But would people agree that Blake *isn't* a survivor? When you look at the bald facts of the matter, he keeps managing to come back after repeated mental and physical savaging that defy imagination. Maybe parts of his soul get tattered in the process (I do think there's a clear increase in the stress and exhaustion you can feel in him after VftP, and - given that and his injury at Travis's hand - am of the opinion that after Star One he may have have suffered a complete physical and spiritual collapse for a while).
Then pulled himself back together *yet again* and kept going ... all the way to Gauda Prime.
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