lanalucy | Meta on the Kara & Zak pairing

This week's

bsg_epics meta question was on pairings.

What interests you about them? What draws them together and makes them work for you? What kind of stories do you love to read or write most about them?

plaid_slytherin asked me about Kara/Zak.

Zak is an easy character to pair Kara with. There’s so little canon on him that I can make him do anything and be anyone, and there’s not really anything to contradict me. I have fun exploring how Kara might have been different with him - as far as canon goes, he was her first taste of romantic love, and most people assume from her broken heart that he was good to her.

That Kara’s freer, more likely to want sex to be fun and uninhibited. She’s more likely to indulge some of her kinks (or explore new ones) with Zak than with anybody else. Her relationship with him, prior to meeting Lee, was uncomplicated and relatively easy.

kdbleu prompted me a couple of weeks ago to write a story based on headcanon that Zak was using Kara to get through Basic Flight - basically that he’d targeted her as a means to an end. I also enjoyed exploring that - there’s nothing in canon that says he wasn’t. If he was, Kara didn’t know it, but there’s nothing to say that he wasn’t. Of course, that idea presupposes that Zak wouldn’t have passed on his own, or didn’t believe he would. In the back of my head as I’m writing that story, I explore the idea that Lee was in on it. That their thing on the dining room table was about giving Lee something to “blackmail” Kara with. If she didn’t fall to Zak’s charm, maybe threatening to out her nearly frakking Lee would be enough to make sure Zak passed. Because I do not wish to be excommunicated from fandom for writing dark!Lee, I probably never will, but in my head, Lee’s thing for Kara could totally have originated from a less soulmates! place.

I like writing the different ways Zak finds out about Kara and Lee, and the myriad of ways he could have reacted, from positive “Oh, let’s share!” to “This is really not okay!” to leaving Kara and moving to another planet.

My K/Z stories are mostly fun - they’re my go-to pair when I want a feel-good early Kara story.

As for reading K/Z, I love reading any stories about this pairing, though I am of course partial to smut. :D I'm sure everyone's shocked. lol

Also, there are spaces between my paragraphs in the entry. I don't know why they're all running together in the posting. :/

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You know what's funny about that bit a headcanon I gave you about Zak and Kara, it really isn't the headcanon I'm most committed to in their relationship... that's the idea that Kara never said yes when Zak proposed. When Bill guesses that was Zak's announcement, Kara goes with it, becoming Zak's fiance as a penance.

That their thing on the dining room table was about giving Lee something to “blackmail” Kara with. If she didn’t fall to Zak’s charm, maybe threatening to out her nearly frakking Lee would be enough to make sure Zak passed.

What I find most difficult about that is not Lee's actions, but Kara being played the victim. Well, that and the idea that Kara and Lee aren't complicated by attractions beyond their control. Although that adds an interesting twist more than it prohibits Lee's change in initial motivation.

For that scenario to really work, Lee would have to have been affected differently by his father's neglect and his mother's supposed alcoholism. He grew up all 'truth, justice, and the Caprican way' but I know, from personal experience, that adult children do not always end up that way. Some of them are way beyond frakked up.

Writing it would mean writing Lee convincingly as a man who'd embraced a different set of values than the Lee we know did.

I don't think Kara was head-over-heels for Zak, but I do believe she loved him and took his affection at face value. If he'd been using her, she'd never have seen it coming, and if both boys had double-teamed her, so to speak, she would have been devastated by their betrayal. But at that particular moment in Kara's life, I think she was less suspicious/skeptical than she was as we got to know her.

Had it happened that way, she would never have let it happen again. She'd have gone the way of Helena Cain post-Gina-betrayal - cold, hard, unemotional, cruel.

Heh. You wouldn't be excommunicated for writing dark!Lee. Lots of people have written him that way: Elzed, Innibis, Sci-Fi, Romanticalgal, Foxrayne...I'm sure many more too! (I even had him kill Helo in a fic in cold blood. I really like to make Lee kill people actually. Lol.)

But, that being said, it'd be hard to buy a Lee that was okay with blackmailing someone to help someone else cheat on a test. Even if that second someone was his brother. Because one of the big tenets of his character is his love of fairness and justice.

But hey, he could be a different, more corrupt AU Lee I suppose. I do think it's harder to make an AU work/be believable when you change the core of their character rather than just the setting/environment/circumstances though. Kind of like doormat!Kara--tough to buy that. You need to include a lot more justification and setup for why they are that way generally because it's so opposite to their canon character.

Edited 2014-02-20 02:47 (UTC)

I've read that fic. I could see it being a decision Lee made.

Well, all things considered, it'd be more than cheating on a test. It's Zak passing Basic Flight and qualifying for Vipers. The Lee we know wouldn't do it. But a Lee who had grown up taking different lessons from his parents could be one who put loyalty to his kid brother ahead of what was fair and right. Lee had to learn the traits he embraces from someone (someone probably not his parents). If whoever he learned them from hadn't been in his life, he could have gone a different way. Writing it and making it believable would be a challenge.

Making Kara more of a doormat would require, in my opinion, going back to her childhood and making it different. She learned to survive her mother, and therefore is not a person who lets people push her around. I can see the scenario RDM went with happening to canon Kara. I cannot see her passing Zak if he pressured her to do it. Canon Kara would have pushed back and told him to frak off. But because he didn't ask, she did it for him. Subtle difference in circs.

As for dark!Lee, even in the little time I've been in fandom, I've seen some of the comments people make. I've seen people take down stories because of what other people said. I'm not interested in that kind of drama, so I'll keep those stories to myself. No one who reads my stuff wants to read about that Lee, anyway.

Really? You don't seem like the sensitive type who would flounce/pull a fic because someone didn't like it. I think if you're feeling it, that's all that matters. You have to write to amuse and challenge yourself first and foremost. (Also not sure there's enough activity in this fandom still to lead to drama. We had someone recently leaving pretty rudely phrased comments all over old fic because he thought Kara was an asshole. You either respond, ignore or delete the comment. It doesn't really result in much "drama." )

Since I haven't written it except in my head, it's a moot point. There are plenty of other stories to write. :)

Oops. the anon reply to this in your queue is me. My cell phone didn't retain my password and I couldn't remember it. Lol.

I hate it when I can't remember my password. lol

Happened to me twice today! And I'm positive I entered the right password both times! Different computers too, so it wasn't just me being an idiot and having capslock on or whatever. Grr.

lj does that to me sometimes - signs me out then doesn't let me back in for a little while. I think it's just having hiccups.

You know, it's interesting to read the perspective of someone who writes Zak as an adult. I don't think I've ever written him past age six. I guess that's predisposed me to assume he was sweet and innocent. :D (That and my canon impression of K/Z is just that he was - had no idea she might pass him when he didn't deserve it etc.)

Heee! I've never written him as a child - don't see him that way.

I enjoy the stories you write where Zak is a kid. He's so inquisitive and fun.

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