loved the part in the ep where they plugged Walter back into his missing bits of brain (...oh show...) and he became the old Walter Bishop, bearing and voice and everything
Oh man, I know -- leaving aside the "science" of it, he did such an amaaaazing job at shifting to his other self in that episode ... and at that point, you don't really know how evil Walter used to be (I remember at that poin in the series thinking that he was a lot more of a flat-out bad guy in his youth than he turned out to be), so it's really spine-tingling chilling, too, when you see him switch gears like that, and wonder if we've just lost the "new", sympathetic Walter ...
I think it also helps that the relationships are more atypical, like you say - Walter & Peter especially, who have a dynamic that defies any standard definition. The son-as-caretaker is unusual anyway, but with the AU aspect...and yeah, the moments that the love comes through are beautiful.
Yes! I have realized over the years that one of my bulletproof narrative kinks is "relationships that defy categorization" -- characters who either can't be pinned down to ANYTHING in the standard set of society-approved relationships, or at the very least, perform them in a way that is really different from the social norm. And Walter and Peter hit that exactly. Their inverted power dynamic, plus their twisty and deeply complex history, plus Peter's powerfully mixed feelings towards Walter, and then add Walternate into the mix ... *heartflutter*
... I think this is one of the reasons I'm enjoying Homestuck so much, too! Not just the troll shipping quadrants, but also the human characters as well -- the slipperiness of their relationships, the way some of them have had to reconcile their adolescent flirting with the discovery that they're related, and some have turned out to have different sexualities or genders in their alt!versions (while still having a similar dynamic with each other as the original opposite-sex pairs) ... it just totally hits that kink as well.
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winterfish
no subject
Date: 2012-04-13 09:23 pm (UTC)Oh man, I know -- leaving aside the "science" of it, he did such an amaaaazing job at shifting to his other self in that episode ... and at that point, you don't really know how evil Walter used to be (I remember at that poin in the series thinking that he was a lot more of a flat-out bad guy in his youth than he turned out to be), so it's really spine-tingling chilling, too, when you see him switch gears like that, and wonder if we've just lost the "new", sympathetic Walter ...
I think it also helps that the relationships are more atypical, like you say - Walter & Peter especially, who have a dynamic that defies any standard definition. The son-as-caretaker is unusual anyway, but with the AU aspect...and yeah, the moments that the love comes through are beautiful.
Yes! I have realized over the years that one of my bulletproof narrative kinks is "relationships that defy categorization" -- characters who either can't be pinned down to ANYTHING in the standard set of society-approved relationships, or at the very least, perform them in a way that is really different from the social norm. And Walter and Peter hit that exactly. Their inverted power dynamic, plus their twisty and deeply complex history, plus Peter's powerfully mixed feelings towards Walter, and then add Walternate into the mix ... *heartflutter*
... I think this is one of the reasons I'm enjoying Homestuck so much, too! Not just the troll shipping quadrants, but also the human characters as well -- the slipperiness of their relationships, the way some of them have had to reconcile their adolescent flirting with the discovery that they're related, and some have turned out to have different sexualities or genders in their alt!versions (while still having a similar dynamic with each other as the original opposite-sex pairs) ... it just totally hits that kink as well.