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 ( spoiler for the first half of the movie ) 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.

( Details )

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.

I read a 100K Inception fic on Friday. It'd been months since I'd read any fic other than sporadic updates of snookiescookies' Pretty Woman AU Paper Things and toomuchplor's Steinway!verse, both also Inception, but for whatever reason, the desire struck me and there was this student/teacher high school AU I hadn't read among the fics ranked by most kudos on the AO3.

It was - well, on a sentence level it needed work (to paraphrase the opening of one section: 'He groaned, jaw dropping, the blood rushing both from and into his face as his brain tried to decide whether to blush or go pale in mortification'), all adverbs and redundant descriptions and a weird mix of italics and all-caps for emphasis, and there were some "that would never happen" moments as well as idiosyncrasies born of a British author depicting an American school year, etc., but it was paced well and the cresting and ebbing emotions resonated, and I was glad to have read it by the time I went to bed.

All that by way of mentioning two things:

One

I know fandom loves its tropes, but I'm tired of the conceit where the [ETA: neurotypical] character with the desperate crush refuses to see the signs that the object of said crush returns the attraction. I like the tension when it's uncertain whether the feelings are reciprocated, and the pining when it seems there aren't and won't be any indications of same (even if there ends up being a happy ending), and the shift from pining to joy when the one with the crush begins to hope or to understand that it might be mutual. But this thing where character A likes character B, and character B indicates in numerous ways that they like A as well, but A explains it all away, and then characters C and D tell A that A is being ridiculous and obtuse, but A also rationalizes their comments away, followed by a string of deliberate misunderstandings and a near blowup before the climactic epiphany and celebratory sex... not a favorite.

I mean, I get that someone liking a person can be more obvious to outsiders than to the person themselves, but so many stories take it too far (for me) and I wish writers would respect their characters and their readers enough to spend less time on the misunderstandings phase and more on the "can this really be true," "how do we make this work" parts OR drop fewer obvious hints and let the pining feel as acute to the reader as it does to the character instead of leaving us to facepalm because we see the signs of affection as clearly as their frustrated friends do. Well, no, it's maybe not a lack of respect so much as a love for the structure that you see so often in romantic comedies. A love that I share less with each passing year.

Maybe I'm just reading the wrong stories.

Two

Must have been the influx of ficciness after a drought, but I had this dream Friday night involving three men with (on reflection) Eames' body type as described in the story, hard bodies, heavily muscled, tattooed, naked, exuding sex and power in a way that defied what I'm usually attracted to. Have been trying to pin down what the main one looked like, slick black hair and olive skin; can only come up with something like Sukar from the TV show Defiance, except that's not quite it.

In the dream the three of them were recovering from some kind of energy blast like being hit with a phaser and one had taken it really hard, was groaning and shaking as though he were having a seizure, wrapped around a radiator to try to ease the aftershocks, only when the other two pried him away from it he had these huge gouges in his flesh that had been burned away from the heat, down to muscle and bone.

So.

Domestic day today, methinks, after a busy one yesterday at the Head of the Charles and out on a bike ride. There's a vid to poke at and pumpkin bread to be made.

I like reading fics with virgins. Virgin sacrifice, sweet first-times, noncon hurt/comfort, amnesia stories, stories like Lacey McBain's Lost in Waiting that I can't categorize, anything where one or more of the people involved is experiencing something new about sex. This applies to a lot of the fic I adore. Gender swap, body swap, and slash stories where one or both of the guys hasn't been with another man before (or femslash where the girl hasn't been with another woman), are in essence about characters having sex for the first time. Trying new things. Being excited or hesitant. Being sensitive to the sensations. These things work for me. They make a tired act fresh. Same when experienced partners try a new kink or position, although that's somewhat tangential.

But it makes me sad when, in an otherwise lovely story, someone makes a comment about how they can't believe the other character is still a virgin at age such-and-such. Tonight I read two Star Trek XI fics, responding to the same prompt, where Kirk was 23 and 26 and hadn't slept with anyone, and McCoy was just flabbergasted. Unironically. Even aside from his surprise that came from learning this in the face of Kirk's reputation as a ladies' man. And in no replies to those stories did anyone bring this up. I don't know what the average age of initiation is these days, not to mention that whatever it is, statistically half the people will be above it, but it's a shame that not having had sex by—what, college?—invites jokes, shock, questions about what happened, or speculation about what's wrong with the person. (See also: The Thirty-Year-Old Virgins.) Even if the person is far above the magic age, it doesn't seem polite to react that way. And fandom seems like a place where both proud and de facto nonconformists congregate and celebrate diversity in innumerable ways, so this comments thing disappointed me. There have to be readers, of any age, who were put off, or who found it funny that these exclamations were taken at face value by the characters and commenters alike. Or is it just me? Is 23 or 26 remarkably late to bloom these days?

While we're on the subject, sort of, since this is something I've seen again recently in friends' journals, it also makes me sad—no, actually, it makes me angry—when fans deride terrible sex scenes by talking about how the author clearly has never had sex. I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here, but doesn't it occur to them that plenty of people who've had sex can't write it believably for their lives, and plenty of people who haven't had sex are writing some of fandom's best steamy scenes? There's no need to insult those with less experience.

Oh, cultural assumptions. How people do grow confused and astonished when you're defied. *shakes head*

Or not. I was going to make this a poll with radio buttons—"Which of the following embarrassing sentences did bironic not write once upon a time"—but you know what? I had too much fun picking out passages. So: All of the following come from stories I wrote between the ages of about 13 and 18. Hope you enjoy.

Warning for indirect references to noncon. Also bad writing.

( Vampire Chronicles, Star Trek, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Stargate movie and original fic. Oh, my darling Mary Sues, angst and artsy run-on sentences. )

(I wish I had my other laptop with me. There's a lot more on there.)


The moral: Although it may happen on what feels like a geologic timescale, our writing does change and improve as the years go by.

---

Despite the above, I do want to say that I still read my old writing, that most of it is better than these excerpts suggest, and that every single story in those archives on my computer still has something I love—something that's true to me and/or to the characters, something that still moves me after all these years, after all the growing I've done. There's something much more personal in these stories than in a lot of my posted fanfiction, because they were written at a time when I didn't have an audience; they were for me (and very rarely for very close friends, with one big exception), and I wrote about what I wanted to, no matter how angsty or depraved or silly or clichéd or egotistical or anything. It didn't matter if the girl was an idealized stand-in for myself. Most of the time that was the point; or I realized what I'd done halfway through the writing process, or even years later. The situations were exploratory, reflective, deeply personal, sometimes scary, sometimes thrilling, always honest. It didn't matter if the story never got finished, once I'd written the part(s) I wanted to. It didn't matter if the story consisted of multiple disjointed scenes that contradicted one another. It didn't matter if I repeated themes from one story/universe to another.

There's a reason I reread these stories far more than I reread my posted fic, even though it's the latter that I'm more proud of.

Fanfic—or more accurately, posted fanfic, fanfic on LJ—is another sort of creature for me. These are complete stories, with a beginning and middle and end; Mary Sue-free; emotionally subdued or understated; mundane rather than melodramatic; short; written in the third person; very carefully constructed; often gen or slash rather than het (would any of you have guessed that the majority of what I used to write, and still sometimes write when I revive the desire to write something just for myself, is kinky Mary Sue het noncon?). These have to have a point to make about the characters. They have to be good. They're going to be seen by other people, and I'll be judged by them. If they're going to be about me and/or my desires, they have to be constructed in a way that perfectly suits the canon characters. Goes my thinking.

This was what I was getting at the other week when I mentioned that my creativity has been stifled for a few years in part because of audience problems, whether real or imagined. What I meant was this: When I try to write fanfic for posting now, all the LJ fandom people and their stories and comments are in my head with me. This causes two problems: one, when I sit down to write a story, it's hard to tune out the background noise of other people's ideas and characterizations and find my own; and two, I'm thinking about what people's reactions to the writing might be when I finish and post, which makes me nervous about phrasing and originality and maturity and—just about everything, and can shut me down before I've gotten very far, or as I get near the end. It affects the kind of stories I write, too. PWPs tend to die ugly unfinished deaths, if they even reach birth. I've become self-conscious about posting stories whose main point is sex, as if I'll be respected less for it. (Which is stupid; I know this; I read plenty of PWPs and love them and their authors; but there it is.) And it has affected my stories-for-myself writing. People are still with me in my head when I open up those old files or a new document, and when I do manage to clear them away, it's still hard not to think things like, "Well, if I like this when it's done, maybe I can post it," which brings back the audience-reception nerves. I've never gone so long without writing my own stuff as I have since joining the LJ community. Overall, LJ has been an unquestionably positive influence—for one thing, my writing has improved in many ways, and I don't think anyone wants to write snippets of Mary Sue stories for their entire lives—but I've also lost what used to be my greatest outlet. One of the things I want to get back to this year, as school decimates my online time and pushes me back into myself while upping the stress levels that once led to writing, is the for-my-eyes-only stuff. Maybe relearning how to do that will rekindle the fic-to-be-posted "muse"; maybe it won't; but I would like to get back in touch with that part of myself that has lain dormant for so many years.

After a week's recess I finished the Bunker book -- anticlimactic after the mess of suicides, and more melodramatic than I remembered when I jumped back in, unless O'Donnell's tone changed when writing about the breakout. But it did boast a quote featuring, bizarrely, some sex advice from Hitler (e.g. "below the umbilicus, all men are goats or satyrs"), as well as a petty catfight between Hans Baur and Albert Speer. I don't mean that last bit to sound silly, though I did chuckle at it. Actually, I do mean it to sound silly, but I don't mean to make light of the men themselves. They and their actions shouldn't be reduced to a joke about bickering Reich officials, but at the same time they were men, people, humans, who had the same urges and flaws and strengths and stupid disagreements as anyone else.

( About the dangers of dehumanizing the perpetrators. )

On the other end of the spectrum, I was sifting through LJseek results for "Thomas Kretschmann" and found not only actor slash (Kretschmann/Brody after "The Piano," for instance) but ( Nazi RPS. )

Thoughts, please?