Threes and threes

[bironic]

As a cis het, I experience Pride Month as a more concentrated than usual opportunity to celebrate friends*; identification feels like appropriation. Still, I've enjoyed wearing my stealth gray-ace necklace, courtesy of deelaundry, more than usual in June.

*and family and colleagues and strangers, and to help lobby for compassionate treatment of queer people globally and listen and otherwise be an ally

One of these years I'll wrestle out the post that's been tumbling in the back of my head about the ways the "gray asexuality" label does and doesn't fit. It's hard to define something by a partial and possibly temporary, even if longstanding, absence.

*

Either way, the kink remains! Heh.

1) 4,100 words and counting on two nonconathon fills.

2) I finally watched Professor Marston and the Wonder Women and came out of it with a general response of ♥. If I'd known before festivids that it focused so much on long-term polyamory, kink and student/teacher relationships rather than being a straightforward biopic about a comics creator and the women who inspired him, I would have watched it sooner! Or maybe I did know at some point and then forgot, oops.

Of course, a Hollywood biopic is going to be prettier and narratively/emotionally tidier than reality. Curious about how closely it tracks to the actual people and events it purports to depict, I first checked out the NYT film review and the review of Jill Lepore's related book, The Secret History of Wonder Woman, that it linked to. Among the major divergences, it was disappointing to hear that William Marston was kind of a sleazebag and that there was another woman in the picture whom the movie never mentioned. It also appears to be a point of contention whether the real Elizabeth and Olive had a romantic and/or sexual relationship independent of William.

That said, I'm not invested in the film's historical accuracy and am fine with viewing it through the lens of "loosely inspired by." So those discoveries mainly gave me a greater appreciation for how the director, Angela Robinson (female, lesbian, black), chose to (re)shape the story. Such as William voluntarily taking a back seat so often, in life and in bed. The vehemence with which he defended feminism and non-normative aspects of sexuality; the sympathy with which the film approached same, albeit with a heavy hand. The intensity of the Elizabeth/Olive dynamics. The beauty of the shot in which William's blurry vision of Elizabeth and Olive resolves into two people. Etc.

One of many Q&As with Robinson digs into the tensions that arise from, for example, crafting a biopic that's more about your own artistic vision without consulting with surviving family members.

How many of you posted about the movie when it came out? Link me?

*

I'd been thinking again about student/teacher and other relationships involving authority figures in fic, which is what led to the above. What I continue to love all these years later about stories like Sickness and Shame by recrudescence (doctor/patient), Bend It by Nellie (coach/athlete) and Maybe I'm Already Crazy by foxxcub (teacher/student)—all Inception, Arthur/Eames, FYI right at the cusp of underage in the U.S.—are that they thread the needle between coming too close to reality and going too far into fantasy.

By which I mean, if you swing too far in the realism direction, then either the adult/authority figure comes off as creepy or outright abusive, like what happens in the vast majority of cases IRL—I'm talking about fic involving consensual relationships in this case; when you're reading or writing noncon, then of course that kind of characterization tends to be the goal—or else the characters talk or think around the ethical issues and don't act on their feelings. (Are there any fics in that second category? Hm. I've struggled with it when writing before. 'Have sex already!' 'But we want to be in character and/or sympathetic, so how do we cross this line?' ETA: Oh, right, that's how things shook out in an old Willow/Giles WIP.)

Whereas if you swing too far in the fantasy direction, then as soon as the characters realize the attraction is mutual, they slide down the magical erotica chute into passionate sexytimes, no bumps along the way. And that's not satisfying for me. I want the characters to confront the issues—the power imbalance, the trickiness of consent, the potential consequences—before finding a way forward together. As you may recall, the glossing over of this stage is what prevented me from fully adoring many of alethia's Michael Burnham/Christopher Pike fics (captain/crew member, Star Trek: Discovery), which are otherwise so close to perfect. IIRC, Dating Wrong and A Light Touch handle it pretty well.

What drove me up the wall about a long fic someone recced the last time I asked around for student/teacher stories, More Than Just a Pair of Sinking Ships by Robespierre (Merlin/Arthur), is that, while student!Merlin is depicted as crushing just as hard as teacher!Arthur, Arthur, the POV character, does soon come across as a creep and loses sight of what is appropriate, adult behavior. If only it hadn't taken those wrong turns (IMO), the pining and catharsis could have been gorgeous.

Forever chasing more of the good ones.