Sammymc's Space

painting-the-tardis:

That in the US QaF fandom the equivalent of Stuart/Nathan has become the big fandom ship, at least on Tumblr, while Vince’s US counterpart tends to be neglected to the point of erasure. On the UK tab, Stuart/Vince is the big thing and Nathan barely shows up. I admit to not being very familiar…

This is the quintessential DIFFERENCE between the US version and the UK version. In the UK version Nathan is 15, and while Stuart is attracted to him, he never really CARES about him. In the US version it is very different. Brian (Stuart) thinks of Michael (Vince) as more of a brother, he doesn’t find him remotely attractive, other than to shore up his self-esteem by calling him “hot.” He meets Justin (Nathan) who is 17, and Justin really DOES fall in love with Brian. I found that Nathan more wanted to emulate Stuart, to say he’d had him, who he considered the best lay around, again, rather than to really be with him. It was really all about sex. In the US version Justin ends up moving in with Brian, short lived though it is, and they continue to sleep together on a fairly regular basis through out the rest of the first season. In the season ender, Justin is gay-bashed at his senior prom, right in front of Brian, and Brian realizes he really has grown to care about the kid. They spend the rest of the series falling more and more in love with each other. While Michael ends up falling for an original character named Ben, who really and truly loves him. The Michael character is very different from the Vince character in my opinion. I’ve posted about it before. Vince is a sweet guy, who loves Stuart and accepts him exactly as he is, warts and all. Michael by comparison is fairly immature, and is so afraid of losing Brian’s affection that he is darn right cruel to Justin, and his jealousy is one of his major character traits. He doesn’t want Brian to change at all, in anyway really. A lot of Brian/Justin shippers dislike his character because of those jealous tendencies.

I recently watched the UK version over the course of a few days, and I could totally see why Nathan/Stuart didn’t work, and why it was aiming for Stuart/Vince from the very beginning. In the US version Brian/Michael doesn’t even feel plausible to me, and Brian/Justin fit much better together. This is partly because of the way CowLip changed the characters and storyline in the US version. When they expanded the series, they basically added on an additional 4 1/2 seasons. Getting Brian and Michael together would have taken a lot of the angst/drama out of the show. It made much more sense to have Justin, the young new guy, have to chisel away past Brian’s hard outer shell until Brian finally lets him in.

Other differences: Brian comes from an abusive background, while Stuart did not. This changed the dynamic somewhat. Michael and his mother, became in a way, a substitute family to him from 14 onward. They protected, nurtured, and loved him. So to Brian, at least in my opinion, they became FAMILY. You don’t have sex with someone you think of like your brother. The Justin character is 17, not 15, and is in his last year of school. In the Uk version it seemed like Nathan’s character was all about coming into his sexual freedom, and taking the reins from Stuart as the stud of the community. Justin is an artist, who is rejected by his parents, forced to leave home, get a job, and work to help support himself. He has to grow up, and fast. This is why he can work with eternal playboy Brian. They sort of grow up together.

While there are some fans of the US version who ship Brian/Michael, they’re much rarer than the Brian/Justin shippers, because just like Vince/Stuart (sort of), Brian/Justin is THE pairing of the show.