in an attempt to re-start my writing mojo

[lotesse]

a meme from musesfool: Pick any passage of 500 words or less from any story I've written, and comment to this post with that selection. I will then give you the equivalent of a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what's going on in the character's heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else that you’d expect to find on a DVD commentary track.

Comments

[anthimeria]

“Sorry about what?” Steve manages. “I'm the one who shoved you.”

“Sorry for not reacting the way you expected me to,” Tony says. His voice is flatly inflected, level and low. “Nothing you ever asked for. I'll just -” and he makes as if to leave, squirming out of Steve's startled grasp and dropping to the ground, trying to push past Steve's bulk.

“Tony.” The word is a command. Steve doesn't want Tony going off in a huff, he's been trying to do better at being friends with him, and if Tony slinks off after this to lick his wounds in private everything's going to be wrong again between them. He has to explain, to tell Tony that it's okay, he's not mad, they don't have to have a big fight. Steve is glad to see, as Tony suddenly goes still and silent, that he has not lost the ability to make men jump with nothing more than his tone.

But then the moment is stretching out like taffy candy between them, slow and sweet as molasses, and Steve realizes that he has no idea where to go from there, that he doesn't know what he's doing, or what Tony's doing, or why he doesn't entirely want Tony to stop doing whatever it is, or why this moment in time feels so ridiculously overheated and supercharged. Tony, breathing hard, looks up at Steve. Steve doesn't manage to think before he speaks, and so what he actually says is, “Strip.”

I have to admit, it's that last line I'm most interested in. How did that pop out of Steve's mouth?

[lotesse]

So a lot of what I wanted to do with that story was to explore changes in Steve that he'd remained unaware of - the movie showed him dealing with the physical stuff, but sort of implied that he was still "the same guy underneath" - which doesn't jive with the way I see body and mind connecting. I don't think you can radically transform a body without radically transforming the consciousness "inside" it.

One of the things that I love about Steve is the way his story is about getting body and mind into alignment. I read him as a very toppy person, even when he's little - all that moral righteousness! But when he's little he's struggling to manifest that authoritative identity, because the people around him always seem to assume he's going to be meek and easily pushed around. Even Bucky does it to some extent. But when his body becomes outwardly authoritative, I think that's got to have been really freeing at a level that Steve doesn't acknowledge in the text, that he's got to find a lot of pleasure in suddenly being too big to get pushed around. And - I think he enjoys pushing other people around.

So at this moment, and it's the pivot of the whole fic, really, Steve's got his authority kick going on, but being Steve he hasn't really connected authority-pleasure to sexual pleasure. And, of course, Tony HAS. Tony knows all about his own power fetishes and buttons, knows all the different ways it can be fun to play. Tony reacts to a sexual subtext to the power balance between himself and Steve, and that clicks the whole thing over into sex for Steve as well. But it's a thing that, in the first moment of feeling, his body knows better than his mind - hence the lack of verbal control. It takes his mind a little longer to put the pieces together; he ends up needing Jarvis and research and Foucault for that :)

[anghraine]

Ooh, awesome. You pretty much singlehandedly converted me to my now-favourite OT3 with this fic, and particularly this passage:

But Leia chafed against the restrictions caused by their shared secret threeness. She was desirous of too much. She wanted to kiss Luke and not care who was watching. She wanted to go to parties and events with two escorts, one for each arm. It was probably just as well that she not acknowledge Luke publicly as her brother – that taboo was one more than she felt like tackling – but plenty of lifeforms mated polyamorously, and the backwardness of human sexual mores frustrated her. In the new universe they'd made, where everything was still new and complicated and difficult, loving the two of them had been the only sure and easy thing.

She tried, sometimes, to envision their future. Both Han and Luke would make better parents than she ever would. Han's twisting humor would deliver the heart of any child to him instantly and forever, and Luke – she caught a sudden image, dim and blue, of Luke lying on his back on an unmade bed with a four-months baby prone on his chest, the two of them silently communing via matching sky-blue eyes. A Force-vision? Maybe. Luke assured her she had the gift, but it was tangles and briars for her, where for him the unseen road curved pale and straight. Either way, it struck her like a bolt of longing. It was something she wanted desperately.

[lotesse]

Yay conversion!

It seems to me that there are two ways to do sibcest stories - you either handwave the sib relationship, or highlight it. And I've read and enjoyed both sorts, but when I write I tend to go for the second option - because what really, really turns my crank about sibcest narratives is the doubled intimacy. Sibling relationships are intimate in a way that I don't think exogamous romance can ever be. Your sibs are the beings in all the world most like you, on a genetic level. And instead of backing away from that, I like to stack sibling!intimacy on TOP of romantic intimacy, pushing the intensity of the connection.

I think this is particularly fun to do with Luke and Leia, because - for the Doylist reason that they WEREN"T ALWAYS GOING TO BE TWINS - they're often presented as dissimilar. But I don't think they are, or of they are it's yin and yang, halves of a whole kind of difference. And - I don't think I was necessarily doing this consciously - the idea of the baby is me pushing at the incest taboo, because that's the heart of the attached genetic paranoias, the sibcest baby, and because this is my ot3 happy ending I needed it to go all the way.

It was also a way for me to poke at Leia's Force talent, which I find a very contentious point of paracanon. I'm perfectly willing to believe that she has it, but the idea of her training as a Jedi nerfs me out. Maybe - this is a new thought - because I subconsciously read the Jedi as masculinist? You know I only really do OT Star Wars, and there's no question that in that limited canon being a Jedi is a thing that dudes do. Which doesn't mean that Leia couldn't, but I like her better on her own path - her mother's path, politics and justice and rhetoric. And of course you know she's used force powers throughout her senatorial career, unconsciously. I can see her learning to manipulate them more consciously, but I'm not on board with her sharing Luke's path in that way. Which comes back to the baby again - the twins are the same but not, and in the case of reproduction I'm pretty sure Luke's both more eager and more prepared. But with both of them together she can want it.

We've talked before about Han/Leia as containing some dangerously heteronormative potential - the Gone With the Wind reading, with the seductive scoundrel and the yielding, thawing Ice Princess. Han/Luke/Leia is one of my ways out of that trap, because it almost inevitably destabilizes gender roles between the three of them. Han stays pretty butch, but Luke is imo more femme in many ways than Leia - she's more outwardly performative, but he's got all the softness and relationality and emotional openness that characterize heterosexual femininity. In-story, I suspect that Leia is very aware of this, that she worried in ESB-era about submitting to a man, about losing her edge, about thawing. (my grr about RotJ!Leia, let me reference it.) If it were just her and Han, I can see her being much more trepidatious about reproduction, seeing it as a trap rather than as a possibility of joy continuing.

[theprimrosepath]

A week since, walking through a hall in his lodgings, he'd seen a scrap of paper fluttering on a fellow student's door, a girl reading Modernist literature who lived there with her girlfriend and cooked things that smelled amazing, all spices and saffron and peppery heat. On it was printed a quotation in a sans-serif font, bold and confrontational: “erotohistoriography: a politics of unpredictable, deeply embodied pleasures that counters the logic of development. against pain and loss, it posits the value of pleasurable interruptions and momentary fulfillments from other times.” Beneath that, in decisive slanting script, a hand-written addendum questioned: “How do you fuck the past?” His mouth had gone wry at it, then, but now it seemed to him the saddest sentence in all the sorrowing world. How do you fuck the past? How can you fuck the past? You can't, he told himself, and deep inside his heart someone began wailing, crying out a wild grief.

[lotesse]

AHAHA THIS IS THE QUOTE THAT SPARKED THIS ENTIRE STORY.

Okay, so I footnoted it in the fic - the quote is from Elizabeth Freeman's article "Time Binds, or, Erotohistoriography," which is one of the best things ever. "How do you fuck the past?" came out of a graduate seminar discussion of the article. Freeman's deal is, among other things, about looking at the queer and erotic attachments scholars form to their historical objects, about our desire for erotic connection backward through time with other queers and freaks. And that sparked HARD for me - the other writing that came out of my engagement with the article was a poem about my frustrated sexual desire for intimacy with the poet Edna St Vincent Millay - but also led me back to DiR, which often hovers around the edges of my consciousness, and particularly in relationship to historical research. Will is such an identity character for me as a scholar and an intellectual - feelings of loneliness and distance and difference, not belonging fully to either present or past, always watching never joining in. Waiting in the wings of time, watching other lives slide by.

Will/Bran works so wonderfully as a ship because, for a little while, neither boy is properly affixed to time - Will wanders it, Bran's been transplanted through it, and both belong to one another in their shared lack of belongingness to the world in which both physically live. But then Bran chooses not to step out of time altogether - in fact chooses very directly to rejoin time, to become fully a part of the human world in which he was raised. And Will can't make that choice, could never make that choice, because he's ultimately not human even though he thought for eleven years that he was. Bran, who felt like a freak but was really a hero, ends his story by reintegrating into contemporary society; Will, the ordinary boy who wasn't ever really either of those things, has to end his by giving up on the idea of integration, or even community: one go alone, right?

This passage also shows my inner font nerd coming close to the surface. I'm a graphic designer's child; I can't help it.