Exchange vs. Challenge dilemma (and more "What if?"s)

[brightknightie]

I posted the 2015 fkficfest/fkficfest pre-game poll results yesterday. I'm grateful for every answer we received! Hopefully, we can play in a fun way available to everyone interested.

However, we're in the peculiar position that exchange-style and challenge-style tied. On the one hand, the tie-breaker goes to exchange, because 3 of the 4 people who said they would "definitely" write voted for exchange. On the other hand, 4 people are nowhere near enough for a happy exchange game in a fandom as factional as FK. If you have insights into this dilemma, please share them! (Community conversation is underway on the DW edition of the results.)

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Just for fun, let's toss around some more FK "What if?"s! :-)

• What if Nick or Schanke had gotten promoted to Captain?
• What if they hadn't neutralized Vudu's bombs in time?
• What if Natalie and Richard's parents had lived?
• What if the asteroid hadn't been a hoax and had hit as expected?
• What if Frank wasn't Francesca's first (or last) reincarnation/haunting to seek revenge?
• What if Janette has more freedom than Nick because of something she knows about Lacroix?
• What if Natalie discovered the cure and decided to withhold it from Nick?

Comments

[greerwatson]

"•What if Natalie and Richard's parents had lived?"

Maybe they did. I mean, I know it's generally accepted fanon that they're dead; but I don't think it's actually said. Or am I misremembering dialogue?

(As a matter of minor interest, when I was working on the never-finished fifth season, i.e. FK5, I wrote an episode in which their parents came to visit Natalie and lamented having been out of the country on holiday when Richard died.)

[pj1228]

I agree, I think it's not said. The issues mentioned in Dead of Night could have happened during weekend stayovers or when the grandmother visited while the parents were at work or something.
However, I believe, had their parents lived, we would have seen them in the hospital when Richard was shot. However, there's just Sarah and Amy.
However, I've stumbled over several fics that include the parents.

Edit: I need to find another word for however. LOL

[greerwatson]

"Elegant variation" has its points ... up to a point.

Let's see, though. Mmmmm....

Still, had their parents lived, I believe we would have seen them in the hospital when Richard was shot. As it is, though, there're just Sarah and Amy. Mind you, I've stumbled over several fics that include the parents.

[brightknightie]

Yes, I believe it's only fanon that the senior Lamberts are dead.

But it's really a very strong interpretation of the available canonical evidence, as PJ points out. If they're indeed alive, yet never, ever mentioned by Natalie (or Richard or Sara or the ghost of Nana), and not in any pictures in her home, and never, ever there for her in all the things that happen to her (e.g. SD, OtLo, 1966, AMPH) and hers (e.g. Richard, Cynthia, Lora)... that's a different sort of story for someone to tell, I suspect! I mention my mother more often than Natalie does, and my mother died when I was ten.

(I didn't mean to suggest that these "What if?"s are wholly new and have never been written before! Some may be, but of course Marian G.'s "Forever Nat" series, written during the hiatus, was the first I ever recall reading in which Natalie's mother had been on an around-the-world trip when Richard died.)

[greerwatson]

"I didn't mean to suggest that these "What if?"s are wholly new and have never been written before!"

Ah, when you've been around for more than twenty years, like FK and its fandom, then there's nothing new under the sun; yet each time one does "nothing new" anew, one finds new in it. As you have pointed out....

As far as Nat's parents are concerned, one is really coming bump up against the primary/secondary world divide, i.e., what TPTB do or don't bother to employ in the basic characterization. Thus Schanke has a wife and kid who are mentioned often; but we never see them. Ditto on Tracy's parents, up to the point where they wanted her mother to appear in an episode, and—mysteriously!—we were told that she was an alcoholic and the two were just divorced.

Natalie's characterization revolved around the morgue and Nick. Her brother appeared in one episode, died, and ... she never apparently went to the funeral, her sister-in-law and niece were never mentioned again, and the death seemingly affected her not at all in the long run. Same with her goddaughter. Same with her grandmother.

We, of course, are left to explain it. Given the family I live in, I would say that she is simply not the type to have pictures out (for I don't, though there are a couple of albums around); that she has other things to discuss at work than family no one has met; and that, in talking with Nick, she wants to focus on him rather than herself—her attempts at a cure, their feelings for each other, his mysterious past, etc. Which, sadly, is the sort of advice her mother may have given her: talk to a man about the things of interest to him, don't natter on about yourself.

As for "never, ever there for her", my take on it is simply that the Lamberts don't live in Toronto. There is therefore a lag time on everything, since she's hardly going to phone them in the middle of an emergency; and they won't, therefore, even know that she needs support unless it makes the evening news. Take "Only the Lonely": Natalie was attacked at the climax of the episode: for all we know, her parents drove in to town in the wee hours to be by her side; but, by then, the end credits had long since rolled.

When I did my virtual season(s), I wrote Natalie as coming from one of the towns in southern Ontario. She could drive there (at the end of the Christmas episode in FK4) and her parents could come into the city to see her (as in the FK5 episode, which had a flashback to her childhood). It would be quite logical for two small-town children, being ambitious, to move to the big city.

Fanon isn't canon, obviously; so interpretation can happily depend on the eye of the beholder.

Hence the plethora of plot possibilities!