Bertie, and fan-casting Raymond
Jul. 30th, 2024 12:45 pmSo I've been enjoying the Bertie-love that ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ysande and sweetsorcery have been promoting over the last couple of days, sparked by ysande's lovely ficlet. I adore Bertie. I adore all kinds of Bertie. I love him when he's a silly ass, I love him when he smuggles dynamite down his trousers, I love him when he's the first one to point out when a plan is likely to have Unacceptable Enemy Casualty Rate, I love him when he can unexpectedly go undercover in fluent Marseilleise dialect. He is wonderful. But I've never read much Bertie fic. (Which is probably because I tend to gravitate straight to the Biggles/von Stalhein, hem hem, so no one much to blame but myself.) But. BUT. I would like to broaden my reading! So, do any of you have any Must Read Bertie recs? Does the fandom have a classic Bertie 'this should be canon' fic? Who, if anyone, do you pair him with?
Tangentially related: fellows, do we do fandom Gimlet here? If I have a regular pairing for Bertie, it's probably Gimlet - they have something of the same vibe as Bertie + Biggles, but Gimlet is much more into high explosives and fast cars, so he and Bertie at least should have plenty to talk about. Also they canonically look after puppies together, so there's that. I've never written up any fic for them, but I've scribbled a couple in my notebook heap of doom - would anyone be interested if I posted them?? Gimlet is...a bit niche.
UTTERLY UNRELATED THANK GOD, except that Raymond makes a very brief appearance inysande's fic above and that set me thinking about it - has anyone else seen Biggles: Adventures in Time? It is literally as bad as it sounds, possibly even worse. They stole the flying sequences from (I believe) Aces High, so those at least are quite nice, but every else is truly truly awful. BUT. It utterly implausibly has Peter Cushing as Colonel Raymond, in his last film role (god, what a way to end an amazing career.) And ever since then, Peter Cushing has been my unavoidable mental casting for Raymond. Say, early Frankenstein era Cushing for WWI stories, working right the way up to Grand Moff Cushing for the later Air Police. His precision, his gravitas, his enormously sympathetic air combined with his ability to project 'but I would still let you be killed if I really had to, I'd just regret it' just...really informs the way I think about the character.
Anyone else seen it? If you haven't - probably best not to. But Peter Cushing is amazing.
ETA: ( A picture of Peter Cushing as Raymond! )
Look at him! He is so sad! He has waited literally fifty years just for the chance of maybe seeing Biggles again because of time travel absurdity! Also sad because he has to be in this terrible film, boooo.
ysande and sweetsorcery have been promoting over the last couple of days, sparked by ysande's lovely ficlet. I adore Bertie. I adore all kinds of Bertie. I love him when he's a silly ass, I love him when he smuggles dynamite down his trousers, I love him when he's the first one to point out when a plan is likely to have Unacceptable Enemy Casualty Rate, I love him when he can unexpectedly go undercover in fluent Marseilleise dialect. He is wonderful. But I've never read much Bertie fic. (Which is probably because I tend to gravitate straight to the Biggles/von Stalhein, hem hem, so no one much to blame but myself.) But. BUT. I would like to broaden my reading! So, do any of you have any Must Read Bertie recs? Does the fandom have a classic Bertie 'this should be canon' fic? Who, if anyone, do you pair him with?Tangentially related: fellows, do we do fandom Gimlet here? If I have a regular pairing for Bertie, it's probably Gimlet - they have something of the same vibe as Bertie + Biggles, but Gimlet is much more into high explosives and fast cars, so he and Bertie at least should have plenty to talk about. Also they canonically look after puppies together, so there's that. I've never written up any fic for them, but I've scribbled a couple in my notebook heap of doom - would anyone be interested if I posted them?? Gimlet is...a bit niche.
UTTERLY UNRELATED THANK GOD, except that Raymond makes a very brief appearance in
ysande's fic above and that set me thinking about it - has anyone else seen Biggles: Adventures in Time? It is literally as bad as it sounds, possibly even worse. They stole the flying sequences from (I believe) Aces High, so those at least are quite nice, but every else is truly truly awful. BUT. It utterly implausibly has Peter Cushing as Colonel Raymond, in his last film role (god, what a way to end an amazing career.) And ever since then, Peter Cushing has been my unavoidable mental casting for Raymond. Say, early Frankenstein era Cushing for WWI stories, working right the way up to Grand Moff Cushing for the later Air Police. His precision, his gravitas, his enormously sympathetic air combined with his ability to project 'but I would still let you be killed if I really had to, I'd just regret it' just...really informs the way I think about the character. Anyone else seen it? If you haven't - probably best not to. But Peter Cushing is amazing.
ETA: ( A picture of Peter Cushing as Raymond! )
Look at him! He is so sad! He has waited literally fifty years just for the chance of maybe seeing Biggles again because of time travel absurdity! Also sad because he has to be in this terrible film, boooo.