Pros rantage: Fanon Bodie
I almost didn't post this. Then something hit my 'annoy' button, hard, and I was off running again.
The Professionals frustrates me. I don't think I've ever come across a fandom where I like the characters and universe so much, and the great preponderance of fanfiction so little. I mean, I love Bodie. Flat-out. No kidding. But, unfortunately, I ( Read more... )
The Professionals frustrates me. I don't think I've ever come across a fandom where I like the characters and universe so much, and the great preponderance of fanfiction so little. I mean, I love Bodie. Flat-out. No kidding. But, unfortunately, I ( Read more... )
I can read mild hurt/comfort but extreme versions -- that reduced characters to the level of children, infants practically, and usually fetishizing the process while they're at it -- I just don't get, on so many levels I can hardly talk about it, because I don't know where to start. Maybe it is just a kink like mpreg, that you either are born with or not.
The other place this issue has really forced itself on my attention is those BDSM-is-really-about-love fics you find in virtually every fandom, arriving with clock-work consistency; and then BDSM becomes the method writers use to strip down characters they come across with a tendency toward extensive internal privacy/solitude and impressive interpersonal barriers. And these fics are nearly guaranteed to annoy me. Leaving aside how people with serious trauma, deep psychological problems, and in some cases (like Pros, it's reasonable to assume) fairly deeply embedded training to resist torture (and just because it's consensual and isn't of course torture, doesn't mean it therefore can't possibly trip over some nasty, nasty conditioning, or that's my view at least) might be just as likely to shut down emotionally and psychologically as open up -- I still don't get why people want what these fics seem to be working towards -- the paradigm that's either tacitly endorsed, or in some cases held up explicitly as an ideal.
And also I can't help but think it's the Tru Luv syndrome, where there's one special person out there who's able to negate a lifetime's worth of defense and coping mechanisms. I actually wouldn't mind reading fic that featured this, as long as the character laid bare had some sort of complex reaction to it, instead of the usually meta-narrator's apparent assumption that this is a straight-forwardly good thing, something that deep down even the most damaged, self-protective or simply private people want.
Okay, I think I'm off and running again and had best get down from my soapbox; but this set of issues has been bothering me for a long, long time -- and frustrating me, too, since I couldn't quite understand what precisely I disliked and why my reactions were so strong.
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Have you seen hth's post about emo-porn? Because it sounds to me as though she's getting at the same maddening phenomenon from a slightly different angle: if I'm reading her correctly, what she's calling emo-porn is all about that kind of emotional opening-up. And her argument that it's a central fanfic aesthetic (if no longer the only one out there) certainly marches with my experience.
What I'd add is my own sense that for those who truly love it, emo-porn is indeed a heavy-duty kink, and that's where things get dicey for the rest of us. Where the rhetoric and structure of the source is matched to the emo-porn, as with Wiseguy (or, for that matter, the Kyoto Arc, I suddenly realize), the whole thing can work and have an extraordinary effect. But where the source's rhetoric isn't matched to it, which is definitely the case with S&H and Pros, fanfic that puts it there anyway will read as horribly off for readers who don't have the kink for it. (And possibly for readers who do, but one of the things about kinks that are your own is that you're usually happy to see them even when you know damned well they don't belong.) And by the very nature of this particular kink and the sources it interacts with, the results will look like feminization and bizarro flattening of character, while it's possible that to readers who really get the kink on a gut level, it doesn't read that way at all.
But I'm straying from the point that struck me, which is that Hth is suggesting that sources where the rhetoric is wrong for emo-porn are, paradoxically, the very sources most likely to attract fan writers who want to fix it by putting in the emo-porn the show didn't give them. So that instead of it being less prevalent in fandoms where I tend to wonder what show the author was watching, and why she picked the fandom in question to tell a story that seems so antithetical to who the characters are, it is those very fandoms -- Pros being a striking example -- where the stuff may be at its most unavoidable.
Or maybe not, because it isn't clear to me how this would account for The Sentinal. But there I'm no judge, having been unable to watch even fifteen minutes of it the one time I encountered it.
The other place this issue has really forced itself on my attention is those BDSM-is-really-about-love fics you find in virtually every fandom, arriving with clock-work consistency
-- And this is me being at once afraid to ask and almost uncontrollably curious. I think I've somehow managed to miss these, which is odd when you consider the stuff that I'd be writing myself if I ever did manage to write the actual sex, instead of figuring out ways to write around it. I take it that having missed them is a good thing, and I probably don't want to go looking out of unwholesome fascination intellectual curiosity?
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Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's a good thing, since these fics are basically BDSM, but without any meaningful consideration of power dynamics and their effects -- and, usually, served with a large helping of jarring, unexamined romanticism on the side. They almost always rewrite the characters to fit pre-defined roles (which often don't fit at all), have a fuzzy, self-indulgent, disconnected-from-reality feel -- and well, my list of complaints is longer, but perhaps this is reason enough already?
I've somehow managed to miss the whole emo-porn meta string. And now I feel dense since I don't quite get it. Is the identifying requirement merely intensity? (And what is 'purity' anyway? 'Unmixed' with what?) Or is there a certain characteristic kind of explicitness involved -- that, whatever the mode of communication, the characters are acknowledging their feelings, and, however tangentially, the relationship is being treated with on a meta 'relationship-qua-relationship' sort of level? Or is it that emo-porn is in some way necessarily unverisimiliar -- guys expressing emotion in 'guy-like' ways vs. un-guy-like emo-porn sort of ways? (Would that scene on the rooftop after Starsky shoots the perp who might know the antidote he needs count as emo-porn? Because it is extremely intense, yet doesn't actually cross the bounds of socially acceptable guy-on-guy behavior.)
...You know, some days I really hate my brain.
But to drag myself back to the point, this is creeping into the area of another rant that I keep toying with and not posting: I've always been drawn to characters with a lot of interiority -- this impression that there are spaces and thoughts and pieces of themselves that exist outside the context of whatever privileged relationship(s) the show or fic revolves around, and (here's the kicker) ultimately even beyond what is directly accessible to the audience. So, yeah, having emo-porn of the total-emotional-transparency variety is going to wreck this, especially if there's a high degree of explicitness involved, whether verbalized between the characters or provided directly by the narrator.
And I guess it is just a clash of aesthetics: I love these private, inward, inaccessible spaces -- they fascinate me on a lot of levels, how they can exist only by implication; subtext, the unspoken and all that jazz -- but there's this giant movement in fandom that seems to feel trampling all this is a very desirable thing, which wants to try to peel back and expose all the layers of a person; vivisect them, really -- which I can't help but think is sort of like splitting the lark to find the music. But I wonder if that is one of the big psychological urges behind a lot of these rather baffling genres -- extreme h/c, "loving"/"positive" BDSM, maybe even certain kinds of emo-porn -- this urge to break down all of a character's natural barriers, to take them apart and "see how they work." Isn't that what authors of this stuff say, I love to break them and see who they are when they're pushed over the edge, etc etc?
But hey I'm prejudiced and I know it. And if I keep talking about this, I'm just going to get snarky.
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Well, you know, I always appreciate snark. But making you crabby as you contemplate the ickiness is a whole different thing; I would be sorry to inflict that on you. So I should probably shut up until the moment I give up and post a rant of my own. And in a moment, I even will.
The problem with that emo-porn thread isn't your brain; it's that Hth really is (or so I think) flailing as she tries to nail down something she recognizes when she sees, but hasn't quite managed to put into analytical terms. I found her examples, and the thread where other people ask her what she means, helpful in teasing out what I think she was getting at: at one point somebody actually brings up that rooftop scene from S&H, giving her the chance to say specifically that no, that's not what she thinks of as emo-porn, because while the emotion is there it is indeed expressed in cool, reserved, culturally masculine ways. (Which is, as you know, what I liked about it.) As opposed to the Wiseguy scene, which is notorious precisely because it might as well be fanfic, and fanfic of the gaudiest and most over the top possible flavor.
But I've been thinking about all of this way too much over the past week or so, as little things pile up to remind me how relatively strange my core tastes and kinks are. I really shouldn't even get started on that thing about I love to break them and see who they are when they're pushed over the edge, etc etc, which I know perfectly well is a kink and therefore has nothing to do with any rational argument about whether people are in fact more themselves when pushed over the edge. Let alone the transparency of character thing, which bothers me at least as much as it bothers you.
I shouldn't get started, but I just bet I will. And then I'll have to hope that I manage not to inadvertently offend anyone I care about.
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Please, rant away.
* Which once again shows how irrational this impulse is, since I'm almost positive none of the people who actually read my journal even knows Pros, let alone reads it.
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I hope you don't mind my barging in on your journal here, but I've read through this discussion and found it very interesting and agree with a lot of what was said even though I don't know Pros (but I am Pros-curious!). I'm always looking for interesting fandom discussions involving people who are not Stepford Fans (fans who agree agree agree with the majority viewpoint). Would you mind if I friend you? You don't need to feel compelled to friend me back.
--Gail
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Cool! Looking forward to reading more...
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