Meta: oh how I wish I was a trinity, pt.1

[lotesse]

Being a productive member of fandom, at least (assiduously not writing term papers). I've got meta!

A lot of this is runoff from my film theory course last term, in which I realized that we're throwing all sorts of words around without any idea what they mean. Bits have since straggled in from my thinks about h/c and idfic and Kristeva, through the twin lenses of my current work on Shelley!cest and the Boy's book.


I've been turning over a lot of thoughts on sadism/masochism in media and fandom--my (our) deeply visceral turn-on at the sufferings of our BSOs. The one thing I'm sure of, actually, is that it's not bdsm. H/c isn't the same thing as torturefic or literary painplay; I love the first, but can't abide the latter. The pivot, the key to the whole thing, is I think maybe the presence of the love-relationship.

Fandom's talked a whole lot, in the past, about the breaking of boundaries that suffering enables. Sam can't love Frodo until they've suffered together, and been thrust past their taboos against emotion and affection and sex. That's a big important thing, but I think there's more to it. The pain isn't just a mechanism like sex pollens or aliens who make you do it. The pain is a major part of the reader's pleasure. If fic were a sex act--and I do think that the emotional pattern of sex and stories are fairly similar--the structure parallel to orgasm is the moment of trauma, the moment of pain. Any sex that may come of it is textual afterglow, or maybe a second go-round after the post-coital haze has cleared.

Okay, so getting off on others' pain. Textbook sadism. Or, the rape-fantasy defense: I'm identifying with the victim, and I'm getting off on secondarily suffering. Both of these readings are rooted in identifcation, either with the one or with the other. But do we actually know how the hell identification works? There's a lot of fuzzy thinking around this subject--I think sistermagpie had a brilliant post where she said that when she played Robin Hood as a little girl, Robin was a girl because she was, not regendered but fluid. the words we're using don't mean anything.

You know that thing where there's a correct victim? Where sometimes in a pairing you want this one hurt but not that one? And when the wrong one goes down you feel pissed, like someone offered you a cookie and then snatched it away, like why are you sending him to the hospital and not the other one oh my god what's wrong with you? Okay, so maybe it's just me, but I have a right one and a wrong one, and the one I want to hurt tends to be the one I identify with/am in love with.

And there's the rub: identify with/am in love with. Which one? This, actually, is one of the interesting things that slash maybe does. Identification becomes more complicated than it might be with, oh, say Elizabeth/Darcy. In that het case, I think it's safe to say that most girls identify with Lizzie and desire Darcy. (Of course, het isn't always that simple, especially when you bring in bi-ness. I could never tell if I'd rather be Anne Shirley or kiss her. But ignoring that, concentrating on the more simple parts of het identification, where there's a specifically designated space for the female reader as well as designated objects of love and lust, where identification can be channeled easily through gendered narrative.) But slash manages to complicate the entire dialectic of identification and desire. Because which of the boys are we? Which is the friend of which, the lover or the beloved one?

I'm way more Sam Winchester than I ever could be Dean, so Sam is my identification character. But Sam's also the sort of boy that I tend to date, being in fact not unlike my SO. Which means that I'm also in love with him. In h/c fic, I wonder if we're--if I'm--not switching my identification for a moment to the other one. My Supernatural h/c of choice is Sam getting hurt, Dean's POV. I want to experience not Sam's pain but Dean's reaction to it. I want to be in Dean's head. Sam's in pain, and I get to be Dean and heal him and love him.

So there's the character that we see ourselves in, what's traditionally meant by "identification," but then we can be in the head of the one who loves our "avatar" character. There's a pleasure in seeing our "self" through the eyes of someone who loves him/us. If I'm identifying with Sam, it's intensely attractive to watch Dean loving him. Maybe because it translates into me being loved, but then again it's Sammy I want to take home at night. Dean's emotions are the ones I want. I want to hear all about how much he loves my self-figure.

I have pairings that go both ways, where I identify with both characters and don't mind the whumpage going the other way for once. Sam and Frodo, for me, are interchangeable, both the lover and the beloved one at once. But the question of where we are, physically, in "classic slash" (two guys, forbidden love, the whole shuttlecraft crash-pon farr thing) is open. There isn't a clearly marked space in those tets for the intended slashgirl reader. The hurt becomes oblique. We can't name our behavior as sadism or masochism because we aren't identifying strictly with one boy or the other.


I'll pick this up later, when I have more time. Right now, there's some Shelley calling my name.

Comments

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Here via metafandom.

I'm a male, but I ten to identify with female characters, which makes me a convenient mirror image to many in fandom. And it's females I find attractive, but I find that I don't find it anymore awkward to write het than femslash. The main part of my brain slips easily into the female character's POV and stipulates her finding the male character attractive, whereas presumably there's some part of me in the back of my mind which is identifying with the male character and getting off on the fact that the female character finds him attractive.

I turn to fandom for a certain type of adolescent fantasy, even now that my own adolescence is several years gone, which means that many of the characters I write are teenagers I wouldn't personally find attractive, and who desire other teenagers I personally wouldn't find attractive. But young love is one of my big kinks. 'Cest complicates it even more, I think.

[lotesse]

ITA on young love, though my adolesence is likely much closer.

One of the conversations driving my interest in this revolves around gendered identification in cinema, and the question of Strong Female Characters.

[lotesse]

Also, I was metafandomed? I checked, and I didn't see a link.

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

Well, you seem to have posted this same post before, I memoried, we linked it today, and then were told that the post had been deleted...and here it is again. *shrugs*

This correct URL should be in tomorrow's...

[lotesse]

Oh! My computer fitzed and double-posted. Man, I deleted the double within seconds of its posting - we must have crossed exactly. What are the chances!

[emei.livejournal.com]

This is all very interesting! I have some thoughts, but it's all unconnected.

I'm not sure I got it right - do you mean that the presence of a love-relationship keeps something from being bdsm? I'm pretty sure that one can be a masochist/sadist and want to have bdsm sex only in the context of a love-relationship because that's the way one handles love. Or maybe you were talking only about if the h/c readers should be considered masochists/sadists?

I'm wondering - do most readers react to the pain the characters are going through, or to their reactions to the pain? I'd say that for me h/c is about the intense feelings, intense love, that the hurt forces to the surface. For me it's daydreaming, whisfulfillment. Darkfic or literary painplay works differently, and is more about the pain and hurt. It probably divides into masochism/sadism more neatly, too.

Identification is such a blurry concept. I was going to say something more about it, but then I realised you'd already said it so I'll just agree. Maybe I'll come up with something more coherent later, when I've thought a bit more.

[lotesse]

Oh, no no no on the bdsm, I completely recognize that it can be loving and healthy. I just don't think that it's quite what's going on - separate kinks, yu know?

I know what you mean about the reactions to the pain, but it feels a bit handwavy to me. I've been watching myself reading, and the moment of pleasure is most definitely the moment of trauma, not the aftermath. Though aftermath is also nice, but there's a big emotional peak at the actual incidience of pain.

[emei.livejournal.com]

Oh okay, right.

And I agree - the trauma is the emotional peak. I didn't mean to talk about the aftermath. I'll try to be a bit clearer. For me the biggest difference between h/c and darkfic/painplay is something like this:
-Darkfic: Watch character A get hurt. It's all about the pain.
-H/c: Watch character A get hurt and see how character B reacts at that precise moment. The knowledge that they love each other and that everything will be alright later somehow makes it more okay to like their pain instead of feeling shaken.

Also yes about wanting the right one hurt, I'm like that with some pairings too. If the right one goes down it works like h/c and becomes somehow pleasurable, but the other way around it's just an ordinary story.

[elspethdixon.livejournal.com]

*here via metafandom's delicious list*

You know that thing where there's a correct victim? Where sometimes in a pairing you want this one hurt but not that one? And when the wrong one goes down you feel pissed, like someone offered you a cookie and then snatched it away, like why are you sending him to the hospital and not the other one oh my god what's wrong with you?

Definitely *grins* I've never quite figured out what makes one character my "designated victim" and not the other (though, sometimes, as with my Marvel OTPs, it's because canon has already designated one of them h/c bait for me), but though any and all h/c is of the good, there's almost always at least one character per fandom whom I really, really like to see put through the wringer. They're usually my favorite character.

I've also found that you can generally tell which character a h/c writer likes the best by whom she has "sent to the hospital."

I want to experience not Sam's pain but Dean's reaction to it. I want to be in Dean's head. Sam's in pain, and I gt to be Dean and heal him and love him.

I'm almost the opposite--I'm far more likely to put myself in the hurt character's head while reading, even if the scene isn't from their pov, and for physical h/c at least, I generally like to have the scene from the hurt character's perspective. There are some kinds of emotional h/c where I do actively want the scene to be from the other character's pov, but that's generally because I identify strongly enough with the hurt guy/girl that I need some distance in order to get through the scene.

[lotesse]

Oh, wow. It fascinates me that we can have such completely different experiences of the same sort of thing--I love fandom!

Do you feel like being in the hurt character's head for the trauma functions for you like maschochistic fantasy, or do you feel lik it's something different?

explanation of terms: wrt masochism, I mean that very Freudian idea of the fetish as reenactment of trauma, that the need for the fantasy comes from experiences that we ourselves need to work through. Am I making sense, or should I clarify?

[elspethdixon.livejournal.com]

Do you feel like being in the hurt character's head for the trauma functions for you like maschochistic fantasy, or do you feel like it's something different?

I have no idea. I just know that it's what my brain does when I read h/c--and that well done h/c can be very cathartic (but only if there's a happy ending or at least a satisfyingly loaded-with-operatic-melodrama ending--otherwise it's depressing, not cathartic).

the need for the fantasy comes from experiences that we ourselves need to work through

Hm... That would explain my intense affection for those horrible "everybody has misjudged character X" fics (which almost invariably suck hard core, and yet I'll read them anyway).

[lotesse]

Much as I want to hate on Freud, he occaisonally has sort of a point. Mind, you have to dig it out from under all the sexist tripe, but meh.

Yeah, there's some sort of catharsis going on. When I want h/c, I tend to binge and read waaay to many in a row, because just one iteration of the fantasy isn't good enough. It has to be repeated.

[musesfool.livejournal.com]

Huh. I mostly just want to see the my favorite characters - usually put through the wringer in canon - happy and as whole as possible. I don't want Dean tortured. I want him loved and appreciated.

I tend to loathe most h/c fic, and it is not my preferred reading at all, and I've never really understood getting off on making the characters suffer.

I almost always split my OTPs into lover/beloved and I almost always identify with the lover, the one who pines, etc. and I almost always have one person in the OTP who isn't allowed to stray (e.g., Remus can sleep around but Sirius must be faithful, mostly because if Sirius is alive and not in jail, he better be with Remus), so I get that there is usually a favored one in any given pair, but I just do not get the joy of torturing the characters I love. I just want them to shag and be happy after the torture canon puts them through.

[lotesse]

This is what I'm trying to work through, because my instinctual response is hey, I don't get off on making them suffer! but yet I'm an h/c addict, and will read it for hours. I still don't think it's quite that simple, you know?

[musesfool.livejournal.com]

My problem is often two-fold - 1. I feel the suffering ladled on in fanfic is like piling on to characters who are already having a pretty shitty week/year/life, and it often feels gratuitous to me, even though, given the genre, it's the whole point of the story, 2. I really despise the magical healing cock that sometimes features in h/c stories, and 3. I find the loving, detailed depictions of the trauma inflicted (and the long slow road to recovery and/or application of said magical healing cock) a huge turn-off.

*counts*

Okay, so my problem is three-fold.

I think, in the end, it's just Not My Kink.

[executrix.livejournal.com]

Like musesfool, I don't like h/c either. I've often seen the Designated Woobie in a fandom described as "suffering beautifully," and I always want to yell that suffering isn't beautiful.

[lotesse]

But it's not really suffering, is it? It's a heavily aetheticized representation of suffering, not meant to work in the same way as the real thing. Ture suffering is horrible. BSO torture refers to something else, I think, something that I can't seem to name.

There is something problematic, though, in fannish appropriation of suffering. Things like rapefic, which I can recognize as the logical outgrowth of the stuff that I like but that I worry about because of RL politics - not that I'd every say don't write that, but just that I recognize western culture's messed up dialectic of noncon sexuality.

Whom Fandom Loveth, He Chasteneth

[executrix.livejournal.com]

And, as Michael Malone says in "Heroes of Eros," strip the hero in order to beat him = beat the hero in order to strip him.

Re: Whom Fandom Loveth, He Chasteneth

[lotesse]

Oh hee, that's fabulous. Yeah, there is that too.

[6beforelunch.livejournal.com]

Here via metafandom.

I'm torn on h/c. Sometimes I love it, sometimes I loathe it.

For me, the appeal of torturing a character (if that's the right way to put it) isn't seeing them suffer, it's testing their metal and seeing that they're made of. But since my favorite characters tend to be the ones who have been through plenty in canon, they're generally already pretty well tested. If I want them to angst (and I have a huge kink for emotional h/c, so I'll read/write my characters angsting any day), I can just point to one of the many tragedies they've already suffered in canon, I don't need to invent new ones. (Which isn't to say I won't do mean things to the characters, but it'll be for the sake of the story, not for the sake of seeing them suffer.)

On the other hand, I can appreciate h/c for the way it can break down emotional barriers between characters, so I do occasionally indulge in just plain old h/c, though I tend to choose the stories carefully. Too intense will ruin it for me.

As an aside, I wonder at the lack of m/f and f/f (I'm not speaking necessarily of romantic relationships, just relationships in general) h/c. It seems like male characters suffer disproportionately to female characters in h/c, but maybe that's just a skewed perspective.

[dknightshade.livejournal.com]

If you don't mind my jumping in,

As an aside, I wonder at the lack of m/f and f/f (I'm not speaking necessarily of romantic relationships, just relationships in general) h/c. It seems like male characters suffer disproportionately to female characters in h/c, but maybe that's just a skewed perspective.

I agree with you that there are a lot more male characters suffering. And a lot of times there doesn't seem to be that much comfort in the h/c - more like hurt and hurt some more. ;-) But as someone who tends to write het h/c with the female more likely to be the one hurt, I definitely see that it's not done that way as much. People notice that I do it and point it out. And I sometimes feel nervous that I'm coming across as misogynist in my writing because of it (I try to carefully ration the h/c fic amongst other story types).

So um, yeah.

[lotesse]

I do the same - in my het h/c fantasies, the hurt is definitely on the female side. Because the female character is usually my favorite, and as emei noted above, the favorite tends to be the hurt one. I don't think it's necessarily misogynisitc. In fact, I could easily spin it and say that because my favorites are girls, hurting them is less misogynistic than boy-hurt. I'm not sure that that's the case either - just saying that both cases can be made.

Though I don't quite know where that leaves us wrt identification and masochism.

[dknightshade.livejournal.com]

I guess that's a case to be made, that it's the favorite character.

Identification and masochism, I don't know. I guess it depends on where the pay off is for the reader. If the pay off is the pain, then I guess it fits, but the reader, even if they identify with the hurtee, is still not actually feeling the pain.

[6beforelunch.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's misogynistic. Actually, since the person who's hurt tends to be the focus of the story, when the boy is hurt, you often end up with a injuried male hero/caregving female hero dynamic in het h/c. Which is fine, but can be a little stereotypical. When the female is hurt, you can have an injured female hero/caregiving male hero which lets the woman (often) be the focus of the story.

I wonder if there's any (gen or otherwise) h/c where both the injured party and the caregiver are female? I guess they'd be a dime a dozen in Xena fandom, but I can't think of any other fandoms where they'd be common.

[dknightshade.livejournal.com]

When the female is hurt, you can have an injured female hero/caregiving male hero which lets the woman (often) be the focus of the story.

That's an interesting way of looking at it. I tend to look at my writing and fear that it's just a bit too much damsel in distress-ish which is a stereotype in and of itself.

I wonder if there's any (gen or otherwise) h/c where both the injured party and the caregiver are female?

I'd bet there's Janet and Sam fic out there. *ponders* There's probably some in Firefly -- Inara and Kaylee or either of them with River -- but I can't say that I've actually seen them.

One thing that I think probably comes up is that in a lot of shows, there may only be one main female character.

Here Via Metafandom

[dknightshade.livejournal.com]

Interesting questions.

I'm a fan of h/c and I definitely like the character that I idenify with as closest to 'me' to be the one hurt. But for me the payoff isn't the trauma itself. For me the payoff is definitely the other character taking care of and comforting the hurt char. And it's interesting because being taken care of is not how I live my real life. I'm definitely more of an 'I can take care of it myself' type. So is it wish fulfillment if you don't have the wish? Or maybe it's the part of me that would like to fit into that fairy princess mode of having a Prince Charming to take care of me even though I don't ever really want to be that dependant. Maybe I'm trying it on for size. I don't know.

Re: Here Via Metafandom

[lotesse]

I'm interested in that RL thing, because while I'll admit to being cared for sometimes, I'm much more a take care of others sort of girl. I wonder if that's not why I want to be in the other character's head, if for me the fantasy is some odd inversion that allows me to care for myself the way I do for others.

I have no idea if that even made sense, as I appear to be getting a cold and am thus muddled.

Re: Here Via Metafandom

[dknightshade.livejournal.com]

That makes sense, that in a story you want to read your chracter being taken care of if you normally aren't. There's something to be said for trying on different fantasies and experiencing things differently from how you do in real life.

[nikojen.livejournal.com]

(Oh, I'm an absolute whore for h/c meta! Thank you!)

You know that thing where there's a correct victim? Where sometimes in a pairing you want this one hurt but not that one? And when the wrong one goes down you feel pissed, like someone offered you a cookie and then snatched it away, like why are you sending him to the hospital and not the other one oh my god what's wrong with you?

Oh, yes. And it's always such a clear line, too. I can usually tell within a character's first couple scenes whether he's going click in that way for me or not. My most common reaction upon discovering a new fandom is usually something like "Why didn't someone *TELL* me there was h/c potential in this?!?"


My Supernatural h/c of choice is Sam getting hurt, Dean's POV. I want to experience not Sam's pain but Dean's reaction to it.

Personally, I like to have it both ways. When I'm daydreaming h/c scenarios, they tend to start out from the hurt character's pov for the trauma, then flip over to the other character for their reaction to it, and then shifting back to the first character for his realization of how big an impact his injury had. Each of those moments is its own unique-ish pleasure point. (I prefer Dean-whomping, though :) )

(popped in from metafandom)

[lotesse]

Oay, yeah, that's precisely the right pov-set. Optimized for max angst, baybee!

(butbutbut, Sammy's got emo-visions!)

Oh how I wish I was a trinity

[(Anonymous)]

I once knew a gal who sang a beautiful song with those lyrics? Is she here? http://www.myspace.com/zerosareeverywhere