#slorses

[soldhissoulforrocknroll]

Friends the slorses big bang is kicking my ass 😔 BUT I'm starting to get into the groove of it i think

[lizziemothman]

sometimes i can still hear his voice......

[ceruleanvulpine]

first slow horses fic: silly torments for river

second slow horses fic: i keep writing lamb dialogue and then looking at my phone like 😬

[ceruleanvulpine]

my own Posting has deranged me sufficiently that i'm like 'it's crazy that there are only two fics on ao3 tagged catherine/river'. girl they barely talk

[ceruleanvulpine]

getting a lot of mileage out of the slow horses soundtrack this week because 1) daniel pemberton is really good! and 2) it's really funny to be listening to "Slough House (Strange Game).mp4" while standing at a bus stop stewing about my incompetent coworkers. like yeah I bet you are you dumb fucking horse. and then it snaps me out of it because it's silly

[ceruleanvulpine]

(reflectively) i would recommend slorses so much more widely if lamb lost more. it is just not that interesting to me if he's the one guy whose plans are rarely undermined by the stupidity and volatility of spy work. as it is, my ability to enjoy the character hinges on how fun it is when he's insufferable about winning, which has a lot less staying power

[ceruleanvulpine]

we climbed this whole mountain! (of slow horses seasons 1-5.) yeah yeah river cartwright whatever. the note i am happily leaving on is lamb, without even having to try very hard, manipulating standish into walking into a hostage situation and getting taken hostage, directly telling her as he sets it up that this only works because she gets a thrill out of being involved in espionage. yay 🥰

[ceruleanvulpine]

like umm elaborating on that last post despite my ongoing difficulty in forming sentences. when book!catherine is kidnapped and reflecting on lamb's habit of offering her a drink, she privately fantasizes about the day he'll offer her a drink and then need to reclaim it to drink it himself. ("that was going to be sweet [...] that, too, would be a kind of victory. though of course, to aim for victory would be to admit she was playing the game.")

this literally happens in the denouement of book 4. it changes nothing. in the intervening time she quits, then she dreads the inevitability of coming back ("was this what her future held?"), then when she doesn't stop lamb from interrogating cartwright sr she reflects that she'll never get out. so she comes back. she found out partner was a traitor but she has yet to find out lamb killed him, so she remains suspended in this extremely fragile status quo.

and like. not to overanalyze this series (to some extent it's just because it's an episodic narrative .. with a status quo.. and the comfort zone of the books is lamb making alcoholism jokes. literally how would we fill page space without em. slash derogatory). but this does make sense to some extent bc being stuck like this is just how the narrative thinks about addiction. and it's gonna keep alternating between tragedy and jarringly callous comedy about it