![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
All the little Jessie/Lance ficlets, necessarily slice-of-life pieces (which, in and of itself, may possess an irony I won't get into here), have been charming me to no end at all. I love that he seems to have been embraced by such a large faction of fandom, and at least enough so that he's not marginalized or vilified in fic.
What's interesting, though, is that the pairing is not romanticized.
There's something compelling to me about fic written from an outsider's point of view or somehow involving an outsider in a large role. An outsider being someone either late to the scene, having a job to do, or just separated to some greater or lesser degree even if it's only that he/she is not One Of Them. Especially when they were still together all the time, but even now, I can see them all being in the same room and dynamics shifting, them becoming slightly different people so outsiders would be suspicious but to each other, they're the most real like that. There's a Gestalt that emerges in their collective as well as individual natures when they're together.
So to have an outsider so deeply entrenched in one of their lives, seeing the other guys through him and having them react to him, one of the boys having someone new to bring home whom his parents haven't known for the past ten years, having someone who understand you differently, see you not as you were (the awkward kid, the little brother, the mentor, etc.) but as the person they met - the confident, self-assured man. Which allows Lance to be different, to be that person instead of the best friend or the shy one or the mediator or the producer or the pseudo-manager - he's Lance. I like to think he didn't meet Jessie under business pretenses, through contracts or contacts or industry parties, that Jessie wasn't a fan and has maybe heard Bye Bye Bye but couldn't name the artist much less recognize the boys. That they know each other as Jessie and Lance, real people.
And that is pretty darn romantic.
What's interesting, though, is that the pairing is not romanticized.
There's something compelling to me about fic written from an outsider's point of view or somehow involving an outsider in a large role. An outsider being someone either late to the scene, having a job to do, or just separated to some greater or lesser degree even if it's only that he/she is not One Of Them. Especially when they were still together all the time, but even now, I can see them all being in the same room and dynamics shifting, them becoming slightly different people so outsiders would be suspicious but to each other, they're the most real like that. There's a Gestalt that emerges in their collective as well as individual natures when they're together.
So to have an outsider so deeply entrenched in one of their lives, seeing the other guys through him and having them react to him, one of the boys having someone new to bring home whom his parents haven't known for the past ten years, having someone who understand you differently, see you not as you were (the awkward kid, the little brother, the mentor, etc.) but as the person they met - the confident, self-assured man. Which allows Lance to be different, to be that person instead of the best friend or the shy one or the mediator or the producer or the pseudo-manager - he's Lance. I like to think he didn't meet Jessie under business pretenses, through contracts or contacts or industry parties, that Jessie wasn't a fan and has maybe heard Bye Bye Bye but couldn't name the artist much less recognize the boys. That they know each other as Jessie and Lance, real people.
And that is pretty darn romantic.
