Interview 2, Part B

[labyrinth2015]

And, the continuation of my responses to motherendurance's Awesome Interview of Win. I've been having entirely too much fun, answering this - which surprises me, as I'm really somewhat reserved and formal IRL. 

(Sings: "...Find/one song/One last refrain/Glory/From the pretty boy front man/Who wasted opportunity...")

 

5. What led you to Cookleta slash in particular? How did you decide to look for it? Or did you stumble on the pairing? Enquiring minds want to know!

 

The starting point for me was actually falling head over heels in love with Cook off of AI 2008. I know, right? It was initially kind of horrifying – he was, like, ten years younger than I was, although he was funny, extremely smart (and kind of smart-ass), and a vocabulary geek, and phenomenally talented (all of which are pretty much guaranteed to make me hot under the collar). I said this in my journal:

 

My settled mental image of myself is one of a still young woman with a particular penchant for the charms of an older, intellectual, worldly man – check out my hot older spouse, and my long-standing admiration for my hot senior partner – and yes, I would definitely prefer being pursued to pursuing (it is much more dignified. Also, I am lazy.). So my love of David C is somewhat of an aberration.

 

Embarrassingly, I fell in love with Cook in the episode where he’s transformed into “total cougar bait” on Dolly Parton Week. Prior to that, Cook was a perfectly ordinary-looking, pale-skinned indie rocker wannabe, with his long, red-streaked hair and too-cool-for-school grungy T-shirts – he gave off this scruffy alternative rock vibe, full of street cred and angst; and I was primed to, and did, totally dig the edgy, dirty hotness, primal scream and grungy, cocky swagger in his rebooted Hello and Chris Cornell’s electrifying version of Billie Jean.

 

AND THEN, in Week 7, stylists attacked him with guyliner and cut his hair, sculpted him some manly stubble, and put him in a sharp white shirt, string tie and dark vest, and suddenly there he was, all big dark eyes, chiseled cheekbones, flawless skin; suddenly, absolutely, brooding and gorgeous, and he sang the elegant, restrained rearrangement of Dolly’s Little Sparrow in his gravelly, nuanced, storyteller’s voice – and all across the world, women fell off their chairs in a collective swoon, including, damn it, me.

 

The transformation (sadly) did remove some of the dirty, swaggering rocker hotness, but it thrust into focus how deeply in touch with his emotions Cook actually is, underneath the goofing off and the snark - as highlighted in the mesmerising footage of the winning moment, where Cook embraces Archie (hotly!) and bursts into tears on worldwide TV - he’s so overcome with weeping, Seacrest has to pat him on the back and give him a chance to compose himself before he does the customary encore song - and when his mom and his brother rush onstage, he flings himself into his mom’s arms and cries into her hair, in the exact unrestrained way my little son does (okay, except without the hotness).

 

I must also say that I fell in love with the way he clearly loved his mother. On Neil Diamond week, he sang The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face in a higher, searingly beautiful register; I totally got the shivers as he sang – and the camera lights on his mother’s proud and beautiful face, and then he’s singing to her and her alone:

 

“The first time ever I saw your face/I thought the sun rose in your eyes

And the moon and stars were the gifts you gave

To the dark and the empty skies, my love,

To the dark and the empty skies.

…

And the first time ever I lay with you

I felt your heart so close to mine

And I knew our joy would fill the earth

And last till the end of time my love

It would last till the end of time my love

The first time ever I saw your face, your face, your face, your face.”

 

Amazing, purely intense sentiments, which many mothers, if they’re being honest, would want their sons to hold for them – maybe it’s just me, but I feel that, out of all relationships, it’s Hamlet-Jocasta which most closely mirrors that of lovers, and I know I feel most intensely that joy that fills the earth with my own innocent baby boy. (To his credit, this time Cook didn’t cry, although his mom totally did.)

 

Hotness? Smarts, humour, niceness, emo-ness – boom, head over heels, baby.

 

Fortunately for me, because I don’t think my self-image could have taken it, I did NOT fall in love with David Archuleta, the boy prodigy who sang like an angel and who looked like he was prone to bursting into tears at any given moment, but had in fact hardly cried at all during the season (as opposed to Cook’s several episodes of rumpled, adorable man-tears).

 

Sweet, innocent Archie, with his sooty lashes, his huge doe eyes, his rosy lips, was SUCH a beautiful boy, and my goodness, when he sang hearts and flowers floated from his mouth, and whole worlds burst into being, and collapsed in on themselves when he stopped. On Week 10, Andrew Lloyd Webber week, he sang this amazing boy-band version of Sarah Brightman’s Think of Me, and I kept watching it over and over again and kept being amazed by his sheer brilliance (and didn’t realize until afterwards that this song was the perfect book-end to Cook’s selection of Music of the Night, which Cook sang that week, awesomely, straight up).

 

 

And of course there was the finale, and Cook and Archie opened with this amazing duet of Nickelback’s Heroes, and their voices soared and blended, one twining around the other, making this most beautiful whole, like fire and water coming together, in a flashfire construct of increasing beauty and complexity; and I would have completely given into the slashy love there and then if I had been paying more attention.

 

As these things happen, I clearly wasn't paying enough attention; after Idol, the love went and sat on the back burner owing to the intervention of Real Life.

 

Then, after Cook and Archie released their debut albums, I eventually meandered out and bought them earlier this year. And remembered why I loved them, because the songs were AMAZING – Cook’s album went straight to my hindbrain, from the anthemic, all-out Declaration to the lyrical mastery of Life on the Moon; from the ache of Lie to gorgeous, stripped-bare Permanent. Archie’s album seemed pitched to demographic that was, ahem, not the one in which I usually feature, but his album was great, too – his voice was unbelievable, particularly on Crush, You Can, his cover of Angels.

 

So I of course rushed to re-watch all their Idol performances on Youtube, and blow me if there wasn’t an entire TON of video-age of the most explicit slashy moments between our two heroes, taken from the show and the Idol tour that followed.



There were the joint interviews in which they spoke so glowingly of each other, the supportive commentary and declarations of bromantic love, the unabashedly smouldering looks, the physical horsing around, the incessant hugging – it all spoke of the easy connection between the both of them, a connection that ran white hot through the photos and the vids and fan-art. It was as if they belonged together, pure and simple.

 

And, really, there wasn’t any force in the known universe that could have stopped me from hunting down Cookleta slashfic on the internets, although it had been many years and one child ago that I had stopped shipping the hotness that was Spangel and lurking in the craziness that is internet fandom.

 

I was ready to run away, of course, in case the Cook/Archuleta fic was horrible, because, gee, Real Person Slash? Not something I was used to or entirely comfortable with.

 

And, instead, I happened across some incredible fic: from adorable and completely IC AU (Archie as Sleeping Beauty, Cook as Prince Charming!), to the hilarious (David had no idea what Cook meant. At this point he just wanted to lean back into Michael's jackets, close his eyes and wait out this nerve-wrecking experience. Unfortunately, he felt hands on his waist, and a body pressing against his, and... oh my gosh, Cook had not been kidding about being "worked up"), to the hot and achingly intimate (Cook took in the vision of Archie sprawled wantonly on the sofa and whispered, “I wish you could see yourself right now. You’re… I don’t even know what to say.”).

 

I'm not exaggerating when I say that the Cookleta fandom just completely took me by surprise: young, cohesive, smart as all hell, and most everyone wrote so well, there was nary a tortured participle in sight, and it took no time at all to plunge back into fandom’s waters and fetch up on interesting shores - where I'd never thought I'd visit.

 

And so here we are ;D Much more than enquiring minds wanted to know.