Heavy Artillery

I got bored, and was talking on one of the Discord servers about if Bohemian Rhapsody coming out had influenced the percentage of Sledgefu fic in The Pacific (originally sparked by ktredshoes's post: The Pacific Fanfiction Stats), so I decided to run all off fic from the airing of the show to 23 October 2018 v. all of the fic from 24 October 2019 to now.

Which led to the following dataset:

Total fic in The Pacific fandom on AO3: 1124
Merriell "Snafu" Shelton/Eugene Sledge: 61%
Andrew A. "Ack-Ack" Haldane/Edward "Hillbilly" Jones: 12%
Robert Leckie/Bill "Hoosier" Smith: 5%

Pre-Bohemian Rhapsody (1 April 2010 – 23 October 2018): 547
Merriell "Snafu" Shelton/Eugene Sledge: 45%
Andrew A. "Ack-Ack" Haldane/Edward "Hillbilly" Jones: 15%
Robert Leckie/Bill "Hoosier" Smith: 8%

Post-Bohemian Rhapsody (24 October 2018-27 September 2020): 577
Merriell "Snafu" Shelton/Eugene Sledge: 79%
Andrew A. "Ack-Ack" Haldane/Edward "Hillbilly" Jones: 9%
Robert Leckie/Bill "Hoosier" Smith: 3%

ETA: I have been informed that the period of time should be the same length, so, as an addendum:

24 October 2017-23 October 2018: 102
Merriell "Snafu" Shelton/Eugene Sledge: 48%
Andrew A. "Ack-Ack" Haldane/Edward "Hillbilly" Jones: 20%
Robert Leckie/Bill "Hoosier" Smith: 12%

24 October 2018-23 October 2019: 214
Merriell "Snafu" Shelton/Eugene Sledge: 80%
Merriell "Snafu" Shelton & Eugene Sledge: 10%
Andrew A. "Ack-Ack" Haldane/Edward "Hillbilly" Jones: 3%

To which I believe we can say that the release of Bohemian Rhapsody not only lead to an increase in the percentage of Sledgefu fic, but also led to a general doubling of fic for The Pacific.

But how much more? And then I had my spreadsheet open anyway, so here's some more numbers and some shitty graphs (thank you mathisfun.com).

( The Pacific Numbers and Graphs )

( Band of Brothers Numbers and Graphs )

If anyone wants the numbers, I'll dump them all in a text box. If you want to get them yourself, all I'm doing is filtering fic by year, taking out nothing on exclude filters.

2010: 27 Merriell "Snafu" Shelton/Eugene Sledge: 33% Andrew A. "Ack-Ack" Haldane/Edward "Hillbilly" Jones: 41% Robert Leckie/Bill "Hoosier" Smith: 4% 2011: 43 Merriell "Snafu" Shelton/Eugene Sledge: 40% Andrew A. "Ack-Ack" Haldane/Edward "Hillbilly" Jones: 12% Robert Leckie/Bill "Hoosier" Smith: 7% 2012: 76 Merriell "Snafu" Shelton/Eugene Sledge: 39% Andrew A. "Ack-Ack" Haldane/Edward "Hillbilly" Jones: 8% Robert Leckie/Bill "Hoosier" Smith: 7% 2013: 33 Merriell "Snafu" Shelton/Eugene Sledge: 48% Andrew A. "Ack-Ack" Haldane/Edward "Hillbilly" Jones: 15% Robert Leckie/Bill "Hoosier" Smith: 18% 2014: 32 Merriell "Snafu" Shelton/Eugene Sledge: 44% Andrew A. "Ack-Ack" Haldane/Edward "Hillbilly" Jones: 13% Robert Leckie/Bill "Hoosier" Smith: 0% 2015: 92 Merriell "Snafu" Shelton/Eugene Sledge: 50% Andrew A. "Ack-Ack" Haldane/Edward "Hillbilly" Jones: 14% Robert Leckie/Bill "Hoosier" Smith: 7% 2016: 66 Merriell "Snafu" Shelton/Eugene Sledge: 64% Andrew A. "Ack-Ack" Haldane/Edward "Hillbilly" Jones: 11% Robert Leckie/Bill "Hoosier" Smith: 3% 2017: 108 Merriell "Snafu" Shelton/Eugene Sledge: 31% Andrew A. "Ack-Ack" Haldane/Edward "Hillbilly" Jones: 17% Robert Leckie/Bill "Hoosier" Smith: 10% 2018: 89 Merriell "Snafu" Shelton/Eugene Sledge: 62% Andrew A. "Ack-Ack" Haldane/Edward "Hillbilly" Jones: 15% Robert Leckie/Bill "Hoosier" Smith: 11% 2019: 215 Merriell "Snafu" Shelton/Eugene Sledge: 78% Andrew A. "Ack-Ack" Haldane/Edward "Hillbilly" Jones: 4% Robert Leckie/Bill "Hoosier" Smith: 19% 2020: 343 Merriell "Snafu" Shelton/Eugene Sledge: 74% Andrew A. "Ack-Ack" Haldane/Edward "Hillbilly" Jones: 12% Robert Leckie/Bill "Hoosier" Smith: 4%
2010: 69 Lewis Nixon/Richard Winters: 42% Carwood Lipton/Ronald Speirs: 9% Babe Heffron/Eugene Roe: 3% Joseph Liebgott/David Kenyon Webster: 3% 2011: 103 Carwood Lipton/Ronald Speirs: 32% Lewis Nixon/Richard Winters: 23% Babe Heffron/Eugene Roe: 10% Joseph Liebgott/David Kenyon Webster: 7% 2012: 112 Babe Heffron/Eugene Roe: 22% Lewis Nixon/Richard Winters: 17% Carwood Lipton/Ronald Speirs: 11% Joseph Liebgott/David Kenyon Webster: 9% 2013: 143 Lewis Nixon/Richard Winters: 29% Joseph Liebgott/David Kenyon Webster: 25% Babe Heffron/Eugene Roe: 24% Carwood Lipton/Ronald Speirs: 22% 2014: 96 Lewis Nixon/Richard Winters: 26% Babe Heffron/Eugene Roe: 18% Joseph Liebgott/David Kenyon Webster: 17% Carwood Lipton/Ronald Speirs: 8% George Luz/Joseph Toye: 3% 2015: 295 Lewis Nixon/Richard Winters: 29% Babe Heffron/Eugene Roe: 27% Joseph Liebgott/David Kenyon Webster: 23% Carwood Lipton/Ronald Speirs: 12% George Luz/Joseph Toye: 3% 2016: 412 Joseph Liebgott/David Kenyon Webster: 33% Lewis Nixon/Richard Winters: 28% Babe Heffron/Eugene Roe: 14% Carwood Lipton/Ronald Speirs: 14% George Luz/Joseph Toye: 13% 2017: 624 Joseph Liebgott/David Kenyon Webster: 20% Lewis Nixon/Richard Winters: 19% George Luz/Joseph Toye: 18% Babe Heffron/Eugene Roe: 18% Carwood Lipton/Ronald Speirs: 11% 2018: 299 Lewis Nixon/Richard Winters: 35% Joseph Liebgott/David Kenyon Webster: 18% Babe Heffron/Eugene Roe: 16% George Luz/Joseph Toye: 12% Carwood Lipton/Ronald Speirs: 11% 2019: 588 Lewis Nixon/Richard Winters: 29% Babe Heffron/Eugene Roe: 22% Carwood Lipton/Ronald Speirs: 12% Joseph Liebgott/David Kenyon Webster: 12% George Luz/Joseph Toye: 7% 2020: 554 Lewis Nixon/Richard Winters: 19% Babe Heffron/Eugene Roe: 16% Carwood Lipton/Ronald Speirs: 14% George Luz/Joseph Toye: 12% Joseph Liebgott/David Kenyon Webster: 11%

Title: Deeper in the Dream I'm Dreaming
Fandom: The Pacific
Relationship: Haldane/Jones
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Some violence, but not very explicit.
Word Count: 9,200
Notes: Written for looselipssinkships prompt: "Andrew 'Ack-Ack' Haldane/Edward 'Hillbilly' Jones, On leave in Melbourne and there's only one bed."
Summary: On Guadalcanal, Eddie tries to figure out what to make of the new lieutenant. Later, in Melbourne, Andy worries if his attention is welcome.

Title: And Lay Our Bones to Rest
Fandom: The Pacific
Characters: Burgin, Haldane/Jones
Rating: Teen
Warnings: Homophobia.
Word Count: 5,900
Notes: Written for looselipssinkships prompt: "Andrew 'Ack-Ack' Haldane/Edward 'Hillbilly' Jones, They both survive the war and build a life together. Years later, they attend a K/3/5 reunion together to the surprise (or not) of the surviving men from their company."
Summary: Attending K/3/5's first reunion in 1980, Burgin's not sure how he feels about seeing all the old faces again. He's even less sure when he begins to work out that his former officers are not who he thought they were.

This is the 1957 memoir by the US Marine Crops machine gunner/scout Robert Leckie, who many of you will remember as "that fuck up with way too many sex scenes from The Pacific."

The memoir is one of the three tent poles the series is based on, and the one written closest to the war. As opposed to Burgin's book, which came out after the tv show went to air, Leckie's was started in 1951 and is meant as a work of creative non-fiction. That is, it's not just a war record, or setting the record straight (though apparently it started because he was grumpy with the musical South Pacific), but is meant to actually be a book people want to read, as written by a professional author, not a soldier with a helper-writer.

Having read a lot of the soldier/helper writer books that came out after the series (Winters x2, Guarnere/Heffron, Malarkey, and Burgin, plus Chester Nez), I will say that the professional author angle was a nice change. The prose in this is snappy, funny, full of life and character. It's very much what you'd expect from someone who did sports reporting in the 1950s. You get a lot more life and personality out of descriptions, and there's an actual narrative structure to the thing. That said, it also felt over studied in places, and I wondered if even during the events he was trying to find a way to put the war into words, and contextualise his experience through language. Some of it feels like he's worked on phrases so much they don't feel real any more, but like an image of what he thinks the feeling should be. And there were times I missed the more stripped down simple storytelling of a soldier as told to...

The book strictly covers the war, from Leckie signing up after Pearl Harbour to the Japanese surrender, including training, Guadalcanal, Melbourne, Cape Gloucester, Pavuvu, Paleliu, and various military hospitals along the way. No real names are used, and I enjoyed all the silly nick names he gave people. He is a lot more open and frank about the ups and downs of military life, the cruelties and the crimes, the stolen joys, the imperfections than a lot of the other authors. I vaguely feel like he and Burgin may have been in different wars.

On the whole, if you want a war memoir that's actually a pleasure to read on its own grounds, I'd pick this one of the bunch I've read so far, so long as you don't mind vaguely pretentious my classical allusions let me show them to you, etc.

In terms of successful adaptions, there are a couple things that I'm glad they changed from the book, and a couple things I wish they'd kept their hands off.

In terms of positive changes: I think keeping Leckie with his group of friends throughout, and making him get injured while trying to find help for Runner, worked really well. Having him stay a scout would have meant including a whole new set of people, and the show had too many people anyway, so simplifying Leckie's career was a good choice. I also liked that they gave him a few moments where he stands up against the casual cruelty of the other Marines. It's maybe a bit sanctimonious, but I think it helped show his more thoughtful and compassionate side, which comes through in his writing, but would be hard to show in the show without that. Adding the letters to Vera was also good, and the bits with Vera at the end.

I wish they hadn't given him the silly romance in Melbourne. In the book he was casually seeing a number of women, and all of them were a lot more interesting than the made up story we got on screen. I'm also kind of baffled why they decided he needed to lose his faith. Granted he was an irreligious type in actions by his own admission, but the whole speech to Sledge in the library and not praying at the end felt like an odd addition to someone who maintained his Catholicism throughout all the horrors of war, and never seems to have doubted it. It feels like a rather shallow story about religion: that all cynics must also be atheists.

I'm curious to watch the show again now that I've read this (and hopefully recognise Hoosier at least once), but I think overall it didn't really add a lot to my appreciation of Show!Leckie, who I'd rather liked from the get go, and probably still like mildly more than the guy presenting himself in the book.

Title: As Seen Through a Fog
Fandom: The Pacific
Relationship: Haldane/Jones
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Trauma recovery, angst around disabilities.
Word Count: 10,000
Notes: Written for Spicy Advent prompt: "I'm Invisible." I feel like I've wandered both off brief for the fest AND off prompt.
Summary: The first thing Andy does when he gets back to the US is make sure Eddie comes up to Massachusetts. He only wishes the rest of it were that simple.