Balancing on one wounded wing

zero_gravity and I were talking on Monday night, in our marathon "not writing" evening, and the subject of Firefly came up. She'd never gotten into it (something about cows in space bothered her at the time) and the conversation led me to describe my appreciation of fiction that deals with Invented Families, or Families of Choice. In Firefly, the characters are drawn into their own familial unit, and us against the universe type of thing. Each for their own reasons chooses to throw in their collective lot and approach life as a "team". It's a theme that runs pretty strongly through Joss Whedon's work. Buffy and the Scooby Gang were united in their secret battle against the Hellmouth critters.

It wasn't until we were talking that I put it all together in my love of this kind of story. Tales of the City, X-Men, the novel of Chocolat, Buffy, Firefly, Doctor Who and its extensions, Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures. They all have that same underlying motif of Us against the World (Hellmouth, Evildoers, Conformity, Authority or whatever) The focus is as much on the relationship of the group and the bond they have formed in the face of their tasks, as it is on the tasks themselves.

As much as I enjoy Criminal Minds and used to enjoy the original CSI, while they do have some character driven elements, they don't have that Invented Family thread running through them. The appeal for me is in other things. Something like Bones, however, does have some of that, with the various characters being closer and more interrelated in their personal lives (Tempe and Angela are best friends, Angela and Hodgins are a couple. Tempe and Boothe are just biding time until they get horizontal) There's a sense that there is more than just co-worker mutual respect going on.

It intrigues me that these type of stories appeal so much to me, considering that I have a really quite good relationship with my family. We have always gotten along pretty well, no big fights or long silences. But in my late twenties, as I was sorting out the whole liking boys in the Canadian equivalent of the Bible Belt thing, I felt somewhat disconnected from my heteromarried, house owning, garden growing blood family. I still loved them, but wasn't sure any of them "got" me. The friends I made and the Barbary Lane-esque pseudo family we created in that apartment building allowed me to start figuring out where I fit in the world. The loss of that was the hardest transition when I moved here to Toronto. It's what I'm still trying to recapture somehow and what still eludes me.