Three Day Weekends Are a Cruel Juest

[itsallovernow]

Whenever we get a three day weekend, it just makes the following week all that more exhausting. I'm just sayin'. For those of you who didn't get it off, take some comfort in that. (Not too much, because I'd be lying if I didn't say I loved me some three day weekend, even if it was full of obligation).

I continue to be allergic to the furnace, and when I called Sh. to tell her this and she asked why I didn't just get it cleaned, or vaccuum it out (neither of which makes sense to me logistically, although I realize that both or either are possible), I was forced to admit that the furnace and the tiny room/closet that houses it reminds me too much of the boiler room in The Shining and I feel better just leaving well enough alone. She loves me, did not laugh, and agreed that the closet (she lived her too, before I did) has bad juju. But I should still clean the furnace.

While I'm still two eps behind (technically three, but I saw 1x04 and not 1x03), I'm still so excited to see people talking about and loving The Sarah Connor Chronicles. A show with women! About women! And robots! And the future! And the apocolypse! What's not to love?

It reminded me, as many things do, of how important it is to have female role models. This thing happens when we talk about the way that we as fandom can disenfranchise women, the way we both expect more of female characters and also condemn them. The double standard we lay on them of having to fullfill all our own desires, and simultaneously never being good enough for our beloved, flawed male characters. It makes me angry, and yet I get it. Hell, I do it. I am not a huge fan of Sam Carter as written, but I'll stand behind Sam as a character despite the flaws because she is a woman in a man's world and she mostly rocks it. (Plus, truthfully? I find Jack and Daniel so hard to take that Sam tends to shine in comparison. It's just that I'm not a huge fan of blondes:) Or the military:)

I get a little angry when I put forth my "if there are no women" in the story hypothesis and get the "it's about the story not the gender" argument in return because the truth is that we as a society constantly strip women from the story. We as storytellers strip women from the story, and as viewers and readers, when we accept that, we're complicit. We allow mothers to be absent, lovers to only exist in context with the men in their lives, women to exist at the edges of the story and not at the heart.

I have this student, 16 or so, bright, funny and lacking in sort of interest in pushing herself forward. If there's no guarantee that she'll succeed, she doesn't even bother trying. And you know, it's not even a contest for her, not even a dilemma, not even... she doesn't even think about it? Language class too hard? Drop it. Science class too much work, drop it and get the easy A in summer school. And I finally lost it, told her that being afraid to fail, never pushing yourself was never, evern going to serve her well. She needs to see women out there, girls out there, who struggle and risk and succeed. She needs something or someone with a hand on her back and a boot to her ass telling her to have a little fucking faith in herself, to not accept the easy road, to not be proud of it.

We tell these stories, and we, in fandom, celebrate these stories of women, but we also deny them in equal measure everytime we write them out of the narrative. Everytime we say that it shouldn't be about gender, it should be about story because your story is tied intimately to who you are, the twists and turns of your DNA as much as your heart and mind.

I realize I'm not making a logical arguement connecting these things, but I... mostly I'm just thinking in my head that the "genderless" arguement doesn't work for me.

I've got other things to say about why it's disingenuous (this is not the word I mean. Well it is, but not in the context in which it's coming across. Maybe "fair" is what I mean. cofax7 called me on the word, and C is many fabulous things and never, ever disingenuous) to condemn fandom for its interest in sex and sexually driven stories, but that's a post for another day. We follow our biological imperitive, all the way down to our stories, and fic is largely about getting off - for some it's the emotional orgasm of plot or characterization or more time spent with those characters that make us swoony, but for the rest of us it's the actual getting off, the physical release, the breathlessness of fucking that happens in combination with a certain type of vulnerability. We know these characters, their wants and desires, we inhabit them in our heads and when they get some, in a way, we're getting some - and it's... easy. It's safe. It's satisfying. It's always fucking gratifying. And how often can you say that about real life sex?

ETA: It isn't that I don't get the desire to tell a story that is "story" driven, that's ultimate satisfaction is in the care and weave and weft of the characters and their journey. Nor do I think that's any less of an imperitive to writers in fandom, nor should it be. It's more that... the questions of WHY sex is so prevalent in fic seems to me fairly obvious, and not something we should be ashamed of. I love a good story. And I love a good story with good sex. And I don't read romance novels anymore because I'm rarely interested in the story of a romance unless it's got an extra... something that intrigues me (and honestly, I'm usually just turned off by the tropes, but the characters and their genres, and this... tonality that the women characters have even in newer books that makes them come across as... softer and I don't know, weaker, somehow than I want them to be. I'm actually kind of happy that "erotica" is now becoming more mainstream (although some of that still takes the same old silly tropes but uses "cock" instead of member, but I'd still rather read about a cock, I guess:) I guess I just want to do a little championing of the fucking in our fic. Which shouldn't be in opposition to "gen" fic. But should rest happily side by side, complementing it:) (I'm usually happy for the gratuitous sex scene, I must say. I don't understand readers who skim the sex scenes. I should, and I don't condemn them, but I just don't understand it.) However, as I do think that fic largely serves a different purpose for the reader (if not always for the writer) than regular books do, I do realize it's totally a case of YMMV and reading fic for what you want to get out if. Again, it's kind of like sex. You go into it saying, " I want to read X, Y, and Z", and when you get those things, you're generally pretty satisfied, and sometimes when LMNOP gets thrown in to, it's like your birthday and Christmas and the Feast of St. Vigius all rolled up into one:)

I get story porn. I get characterization porn. I get plot porn and casefile porn and emo porn. And mostly, really, really get porn porn:) (Also, please keep in mind the narrow, shallow pool of what and where I read - my primary fandoms either had stellar authors, sex in canon, or intensive recs list that kept me away from most of the crap. I know for a fact that art and sex can exist together, and maybe me being spoiled is what's got me defending fandoms interest in sex writing. And again, I'm not defending it against gen. I'm all for Gen. Just giving it a little of it's own.)

Comments

[thassalia.livejournal.com]

Which is problematic when you're in it for the psychological realism--and I understand that's a minority interest in this land.

I'd say this? Is definitely true. I love when I get this from fic, but I don't expect it. I think there's a lot of fic - gen or sex based - that I drop because it doesn't present me with any sort of realism, any sense of characters as I see them. But I also think that I'm not really looking at fic to explore more of the character's psyche. Mostly, if I don't see enough of their psyche on the screen, I don't get invested enough to care about fic.

But fanfic romance blows it out of proportion (all romance does, to my mind, but that's neither here nor there), and more fundamentally it erases the web of mechanisms, the structure that makes sex a component of a whole, and because a story is subject to the same systemic constraints as anything else, that distorts the characters as well.

I would agree with that as well - I think it's a fine line to do a long piece, one with plot and depth and have a romance become a natural part of it, one that makes sense in the context.

[samdonne.livejournal.com]

Mostly, if I don't see enough of their psyche on the screen, I don't get invested enough to care about fic.

I like filling up people.

That comes out wrong, doesn't it?

I think it's a fine line to do a long piece, one with plot and depth and have a romance

I'm not sure it's a factor of length, necessarily. By whole, I don't mean a plot, bells and whistles--I mean a whole character. A whole person. We're not just sex drives on legs, even the sex compulsives among us. One doesn't need an action/adventure novel to convey that, though sometimes it makes things easier. But I've got whole anthologies of short stories on my shelves that manage to be about full people, even when the stories are about sex.

That's where we get into the nebulous discussion of 'fanfic aesthetic', I guess. As one who's been told on more than one occasion that her stories fail as fanfic (and took it as the compliment it wasn't meant to be), I'm probably not qualified to circumscribe what that aesthetic is.

[thassalia.livejournal.com]

By whole, I don't mean a plot, bells and whistles--I mean a whole character. A whole person. We're not just sex drives on legs, even the sex compulsives among us. One doesn't need an action/adventure novel to convey that, though sometimes it makes things easier. But I've got whole anthologies of short stories on my shelves that manage to be about full people, even when the stories are about sex.

I think, for me, my own understanding of a character is something I bring to a piece of fanfic. Where in litfic, or an original piece, I want and need to understand that person in all of their forms, with fic, I know who I think that person is. I want a story that meshes and matches with that, and if it introduces me to a new facet, helps to form a new idea, that's great. And if not, if it tracks with my view and vision of the character, that's enough. If it doesn't, I stop reading.

I really do want different things from fic than from original work, and I think that informs a lot of my reading and my expectations, and it isn't simply about the sex or romance, but about what I want from the experience, from the process of taking in words and stories.

[samdonne.livejournal.com]

Yup, I totally get that. I started where you are. I don't know what happened that my requirements changed like this. Perhaps it's as simple as an overdose, which turns tolerance into allergy.

[thassalia.livejournal.com]

I think that's probably true:) For me, it's meant that I stopped reading fic almost entirely.