Moonlight of the Red Dwarf variety
Going back over old Red Dwarf posts and man, I forgot how much…the actual show sort-of-but-not-quite shipped Rimmer/Lister. Or kind of? (I mean, there was a kiss, fake though it was.)
Honestly, of all the situations I expected to find myself in this month, “suddenly hardcore shipping the two main characters of a comedy TV show you’ve loved for ages but never considered that way (while the world is in the middle of one of the worst crisises in decades)” is… not one of them. Ah well. What I do really miss is being In Fandom, I guess. Having a sort of fandom central hub (LiveJournal and then Tumblr used to serve this function) where you could just run in and shout “I LOVE THIS THING” and get a chorus back of “WE ALSO LOVE THIS THING.” I suppose Twitter is sort of the fandom central hub now but Twitter just doesn’t work as a platfom for me because you can’t have long conversations.
Anyway, it also so happens that Red Dwarf continuity looks like this:
except even more nonsensical, so I’d be really bad at being a Proper Fan of it. (I still haven’t actually watched Back to Earth since… heck, probably since it first came out. What the smeg was that?)
Throw into that the fact that I guess I’m sort of too old for Shipping now anyway, and… well, I’ll just be here on the sidelines, reblogging all the lovely Promised Land meta and fanart and jazz to secret side social media accounts and so forth.
But, man Promised Land told such a beautiful story. I’m an absolute sucker for “characters who are two halves of the same whole whether they like it or not” relationships, and I never realised there was one right under my nose for going on a decade. Whaddya know.
I think when Rimmer says to Lister at the end, “There’s a moon here, Listy, that wouldn’t mind some sunlight,” what he’s really saying is “We’re about to die. Please be with me,” and ouch, my heart.
I really do love this thing.