An Ace discussion.

[roadstergal.livejournal.com]

Nessa mentioned pulling this out into a new thread, and I think it's a dandy idea.

We see four Aces in Red Dwarf. We see DJ-Ace, who is supposed to be the original, or one very like the original. We see Emohawk-Ace, who is Rimmer with his negativity sucked away. We see Reformed!Ace, who is a Rimmer much like our Rimmer after some time as Ace. And, of course, we see our Rimmer as Ace.

Here are some of my rambling thoughts.

The first Ace was meant to be The Man, the Marty Stu to end all Stus. And like any good Stu/Sue, a lot of people find him to be a real pain in the ass. He's brave and heroic, but he's also self-centered, pompous, and pretty shallow.

The second Ace was our Ace without his negativity. It's important, for me, to note that this is Rimmer before the events of Rimmerworld and Out Of Time, which I think were events that fundamentally changed Rimmer. The Emohawk could suck away Rimmer's negativity, but it could not give him anything he didn't have - like a general respect for life and consideration for others. He was kind to Lister, yes, but he was pretty darn quick to jump onto the idea of killing the Cat without his knowledge.

The third Ace was, in many ways, the best of the lot. He was all heroic and shit, but he was also kinder and more understanding, both of Lister and of Rimmer. He didn't bowl Lister over; he befriended him. It's as if his time as a soft-light hologram, his humiliation, and the lousy things he did all gave him a past that tempered the whole Ace-ness, making him a better person than Ace was.

And, of course, our Ace. I like to speculate on what happens to him, but it's rarely good. The Ace who recruited him abandoned Lister, Kryten, and Cat to die, and was trying to atone for that. Our Rimmer got pushed into the Ace thing by Lister, and I can't help but think that will affect what kind of Ace he becomes, and how he passes on the role (hence the fic I'm writing).

Comment? Add? Disagree heavily?

Comments

[nessaancalime.livejournal.com]

In a way, the original Ace makes me think of all the male chauvanists that were heroes before feminism reared its head again.
And amen to that... My idea is that this is written by men, and Ace is a type of man that men admires and think women admire, while women would just as easily go for the insecure git, who would need them.
Given that the crew have been in deep space for far too long, without any human (or even humanoid) female company (Holly doesn't count, being a computer), I wonder how much of that would have been knocked out of our Rimmer?
Lister berated Rimmer for his male chauvinist attitudes, but that appeared to me like mostly coming from uncertainty and lack of experience - macho is easy to hide behind. He was certainly not like that when he met someone who really liked him (Nirvanah).

[cyber-moggy.livejournal.com]

*nods* Good point. At the risk of pointing out the obvious, much of it was also caused by Dear Old Mother. In the few shots we see of her, she looked very much like a stereotypical pre-feminist housewife (and child!Arnold was also dressed in that kind of outfit...). It's almost as if the whole feminist revolution just passed them by, somehow.

[nessaancalime.livejournal.com]

Well, there are people like that around us today, and no reason to think they will not be there in the future. If he grew up in a colony (Io) such "frontier" places tends to get much more conservative, something a lot of people used in fics already. I think this is a good explanation for a lot of the stuff that seems to be a rather old fashioned class-conscious British background for the 23 century.
Where Lister gets his working class stereotypes from is a bit more difficult to explain - but we can always postulate that the British society are not gonna change one iota the next 300 years ::g::

[roadstergal.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think it's interesting to catch those glimpses of Rimmer's past. I mean, he's perfectly set up to be a closeted-to-everyone-including-himself gay man. You get the feeling that his family would highly disapprove of anything 'abnormal' (to them) like that, and that attitude would permeate the family. And you look at how Rimmer turned out - incapable of forming relationships with women, seeing sexual relationships with women as a symbol of manliness rather than an expression of affection, and, of course, his oddly pervasive homosexual jibing. Almost as if he's afraid of something. :p He loved Nirvanah, yes, but as said above, it's because she's the only person in his 'life' to that point who out and out said she liked him. (Ain't that sad?)

[nessaancalime.livejournal.com]

I thought the jibes at Ace was funny for three reasons:
- He is actually accusing himself of being homosexual ::g::
- He is using it to create a distance to himself, that this person is something that I am clearly not - which clearly comes in the "doth protest too much" category, and
- He immediately suggests that any homesexual version of himself would be interested in Lister...

[roadstergal.livejournal.com]

Damn skippy! Hmm, you know, all of the people involved talk about how the characters are based on the actors, and we've noted how Chris tends to dig himself in when talking about any aspect of the Evil Thing - well, is that reflected in Rimmer?

[nessaancalime.livejournal.com]

I am not sure what you are getting at. You mean when he talks about the kiss? There is actually an issue around the documentaries on the kiss that I wanted to raise, but possibly again better for a new thread rather than wandering off in yet another direction here ::g::

[cyber-moggy.livejournal.com]

I think that the fates of his brothers has a bearing here as well (I was watching the season 6 cut scenes last night) - the fact that all three of them had gone insane and destroyed their ships and crews (and, presumably, themselves as well), I think, scared him. Maybe that's also helping to hold him back from passing his astroengineering exams...?

I agree with the closeted gay idea. The only other real options he'd seen so far were the trophy wife and the bitch queen wife. For him, forging a loving relationship with a woman would be possibly impossible for him to initiate (although he could probably find himself in one if the woman was dragging him in the right direction.).