Ho Yay! or Heigh-ho?
...and the pusher nudges another one onto the main track...
(STARTED THIS BACK ON OCT 24, ARGH!)
1. A Gay Headmaster at a British Boarding School - Whoda Thunkit?
Dorian has been rounding up most of the posts out there on JKR's belated outing of Dumbledore at Comic Gays, and what is interesting to me is that they break down into not "pro" and "con", but "ack", "yay", and "meh."
What's also interesting to me is that not so long ago my own response would have been different, before reading enough GLBT bloggers explaining patiently why The Noble, Tragickal (& Chaste!) Homosexual Who Dies To Save The Straights is not really that positive a character depiction, even though it's better than The Evil or Comic-Relief Homosexual character. The underlying problem of "Magical Negro Syndrome" doesn't magically lose its problematic status when it's "Magical Queer Syndrome", really.*
I haven't posted anything about book 7, because frankly I found it too disappointing to think much about, on a great many levels and for a multitude of reasons. Thinking about it and even more, rereading it, in the detail necessary to do so was just too depressing to contemplate. But I'm going to have to bring up some of it, I see, in order to address why Rowling's "revelation" is so unsatisfactory, and why the excusers of it are wrong.
Firstly, the claims that "it would have been inappropriate" because either a) it's a children's story or b) it's from Harry's POV and he's oblivious to adult relationships or c) both, are to put it bluntly, all wet.
I mean, what does the argument "It's a children's book" even mean? The answer is that it can mean a lot of things, but what it usually unpacks to is "I think we should pretend to children that only heterosexuality exists, because Gayness Is Icky, unlike straight sex and childbirth, let alone syphilis and rape and forced marriage and adultery and bigamy and all that other good stuff that you find in even Victorian authors approved for juvenile consumption." (Don't believe me? Read Victor Hugo. Read Arthur Conan Doyle, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Hoo, boy!)
Now, I can see honestly saying, "Look, a lot of parents are likely to freak if you have an openly gay character in a book, so I didn't dare to spell it out, but yes I did think of so-and-so as queer when I was writing them," and frankly, that would be what I paradoxically call "honest cowardice" - and if it was something like "I put it in but my publishers made me take it out," then there's still less to argue with, from a "pro" standpoint. (I've always been certain that the characters of Tom and Carl, the neighborhood wizards in Duane's Young Wizards books, are and are meant to be read as gay, while never coming out and saying so; I don't know if I would have picked that up if I'd read them for the first time as a kid, but it's imo the most plausible reading of the texts.)
I can also see an author saying, "I just don't want to deal with it, I'm straight and I don't like to think of Alternate Lifestyles so I'm just going to pretend they don't exist today, even if I can't go to the mall and not see two men holding hands without closing my eyes, even if I have to pretend BBC-Wales doesn't exist" - you can disagree with this attitude, but it's an honest statement of intent, which Rowling's was not. (This is essentially what Chuck Dixon has said, making it worrying to fans when he's tagged to work on books with canonically queer charas, although he's hidden behind the shield of wanting to keep his offspring from knowing that there are GLBT people in the universe...good luck with that, and don't blame it on the media, dude! Kids were calling each other "fag" and "fairy" when I was in third grade, with only vague notions of what the insults meant, but having picked them up from their parents back in the mid-70's.)
In fact, there's more than a hint of disingenuousness in her saying (emphasis mine) ""If I'd known it would make you so happy, I would have announced it years ago!" Um, hullo? It's not like JKR avoided fandom for all these years. It's not like she bloody well could have been unaware of HP slash discussions, given all the 'shipping discussions she responded to these past five-some years.
And that's what discredits the b) argument, that there's no reason to mention it because Harry would be oblivious to it, that it wouldn't have affected him in any way. Oh, really? Harry lives in an entirely delusional state which nothing and no one can break through from the outside world? No, wait, that's not exactly right. None of the kids are aware that there is such a thing as sexual attraction, and that people feel this for each other? Ah, so that's why there's no mention made of the growing romance between Hagrid and Madame __, or their conflicts, and how this affects the main characters; that's why it doesn't make any difference to Harry to discover that his parents initially didn't get along at all, let alone that there was a derailed proto-romance between Lily and Severus; that's why none of the students date, or worry about dating, or make out, or have angst over who's dating or making out with whom; and why the word "snog" is not to be found anywhere in the pages of the seven volumes of the series!
[/snark] [/snark] [/snark]
Seriously, now. You can't pretend that there's no sex in the Potterverse - or that Harry, or any of his circle of associates - are unaware that it exists, that it's a possibility, that it complicates human relationships, where heterosexuals are concerned. So, okay, there's no mention of queerness, and no one depicted in same-sex relationships (or wanting them) - you can at least interpolate that they exist in Rowling's fictional UK, but that they just are not mentioned for whatever reasons of editorial or authorial timidity or squick. (There is no cannibalism in the Royal Navy!) Just as you could, if you so chose, slash charas who weren't paired off with the opposite sex - or at least until JKR rushed in to make them officially, overtly, and in some instances quite implausibly straight, straight, straight as an arrow.
But retroactively making Dumbledore gay - leaving aside all the complications of how he was portrayed, as someone led into political mortal sin by his youthful infatuation with a wannabe-Overlord, and pining away lovelessly ever after - makes everything problematic, all the authorial attention to telling us who's straight, canonically: is it now intended for us to read every chara not specifically indicated as being in a heterosexual relationship as queer?
I doubt that, not least because of Rowling's determination to tack on an utterly-out-of-nowhere romance apparently with the intention of quashing the R/S 'ship, a romance that made no sense in the books or out of them, and which managed to also very insultingly depower one of the cooler female charas before fridging her for real. It all felt like one of those old comedies where everybody has to be paired up at the end so it will end on a happy note, so even people with nothing in common or who hate each other end up matched together at the end.
Regardless, it raises all kinds of unpleasant questions, such as if JKR always thought of such a major character as Dumbledore as gay, then, given that she obviously wasn't just completely oblivious to the reality of GLBT people existing around her in the UK, nor gave no thought to the problems of depicting them, how come she chose not to include them visibly, nor to even allow any room for even moderately happy relationships among the circles of major characters? "Bring your own subtext," Joss Whedon famously said, and the producers of the Hercules and Xena shows deliberately played it coy and ambiguous to attract the largest possible audience.
And this works, on an unstated worldbuilding premise that It just doesn't matter in their culture, nobody cares who you sleep with so long as they're not cheating on someone else - which was what slashers could do (until the shotgun wedding, at least) with the HP stories. It ceases to be just not an issue with us who prefers whom, with the outing of Albus - because there's either no reason to have it never be mentioned in the story, or the reason for the non-mentioning becomes an issue, in and out of the story. (Are there wizardly equivalents of the old anti-gay laws still on the books, to encourage such rigorous closeting? If such a Thatcherite mentality is still in force, don't people protest about it? Speculate on who might be in the closet?)
And this brings me to the other, most common defense of the choice to keep Albus (and who else, we now have to wonder) closeted for the whole series - that mentioning the existence of queer wizards would have made the books "just about sex" - variations of which pop up every damn time someone complains about the rampant heterosexuality in the media these days. (And also, going back to my beginning, when anyone points out the starkly monochrome casting of H'wood, and of print genre as well, regardless of plausibility: you can count on any number of white fans loudly proclaiming that to be more inclusive, more diverse, would make the story "all about race" which apparently removing all the other ethnicities from SoCal or NYC or Baltimore or London does not.)
Is Star Trek: TOS "just about sex"--? What with James T. Kirk hopping into bed with every roughly XX-shaped humanoid that he meets, to the point where it's as much of a joke as Nurse Chappel's hopeless UST for Spock-- What about Hill Street Blues, or Spencer For Hire", or X-Files, CSI, or Battlestar Galactica, or pretty much any mainstream TV show you can think of, which had opposite-sex characters in relationships, or breaking them off, pairing up, or UST over who would or wouldn't end up together, where "together" means having sex and/or forming a more-or-less permanent pair bond, with or without children from it? Was Karate Kid all about the heterosex, what with its plot revolving around a hero who wanted to win The Girl, and all the heterosexual rivalry and making-out of the teenagers in it? Did anyone complain about how it was so in-your-face with its heterosexual agenda, all that kissing and handholding and dating, eh? How about King Kong, or Independence Day, or geez, all the Jurassic Park movies? What do you need even the implication of het shippiness in a movie about damn dinosaurs, I ask?
But nobody thinks of opposite-sex coupling behavior (including mention of grandparents, peeping toms, or divorce) as egregious, although people sometimes object to a particular romance in a particular movie feeling forced, or unnecessary; the idea that there is anything out-of-place by "unnecessarily" including the mere existence of het relationships, physical displays of affection, and (depending on the rating, implicit or depicted) sexual contact between characters in a story which is primarily "about" other things than romance would be justifiably laughed down as insanely prudish.
--Although it would be interesting to imagine just how far you'd have to bowdlerize most literature in order to do so - a lot of books would have to go altogether, because there's not much plot left once you take out all mention of heterosexuality from, e.g., A Tale of Two Cities, or Hamlet, or the Ramayana, or Genji, or the Iliad (never mind the Odyssey!) just to name a few. What would be left, if you had to remove all mention of husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, parents, children, love, jealousy, lust, and desire? Aside from making it seem as if humans really were found under cabbages, there would be a curious lack of motivation in most art throughout the world.** Grand Opera just has to go completely, at least if performed with lyrics.
So why is it forced and unnecessary and egregious to do so in re the existence of gay people in a modern setting? If having any out GLBT wizards or Muggles as characters, or even mentioned and existing, would be "making it all about sex", then I'm afraid the series already was all about TEH SEX, and it was Rowling who made it so.
So my "meh" comes from a sense that it's too little, too late, and neither brave nor bold, but a little bit opportunistic, and yes it may piss off some bigots, but it doesn't accomplish much in itself; however the conversation may be helpful, but that's going meta to the statement itself.
2. Well, if you're voluntarily limiting your audience to the subset "prejudiced straight boy" it makes a certain amount of sense...
Another interesting fannish tidbit was the admission by DC that they're essentially just pandering to the straight sexist dude sector with their inclusion of Renee Montoya, and any other lesbian charas, these days. That was the message of this interview, regarding the recent bedroom scene which aroused a fair bit of hubba-hubba-ing comment from readers, especially when the un-censored pencils (which were too sketchy imo to be very stimulating, but mileages vary) were released.
I find it very amusing that all the "naughty" pictures that "serious" illustrators have done (that I've seen published, at least) of their charas all entail heroines being displayed for the imagined straight male viewer, either being "naughty" where that means pleasing men, or being (even worse) "surprised" and thus virtually victimized by the peeping-tom audience, with nary an Actaeon-fate to follow, and never any of their heroes in pin-up style...Oh yeah, real daring, guys!
--One thing which not getting around to finishing this post for over a month means that I can comment on the "revelation" that there was a romance between Admiral Cain and the mole Gina on Pegasus in BSG: Razor, which comment in sum total is "No shit, Sherlock, really?" Didn't everybody figure that this was the case, and the explanation for the extreme savagery of Cain's reaction? I know I read enough discussion where this was bruited about at the time. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about them running the episode with a disclaimer, so to speak - "No, we don't REALLY think lesbians are evil torturers/enemy spies!" - because that's how running an anti-bigotry PSA during it sort of comes across to me, at least as described, since I didn't see the episode and the PSA as it ran during that timeslot.
Again, kinda "meh" - not exactly a shocker of a revelation, and not exactly challenging stereotypes (golly gee willikers, who'da thunk of jackbooted dominating military women being scary torturing lesbians? That's never showed up in the history of pulps, has it? Or who'd imagine that the pathetic, sweet fluffy girlfriend might turn out to be an undercover agent of an enemy superpower? Gee, no way that's the base assumption of J. Edgar Hoover and friends in the Fifties, is it?
Heigh-ho...
Feeling grumpy about all this, I figure most everyone can appreciate this hilarious 'Bad Yaoi' cartoon, not just applicable to anime/manga fanfic, since the only thing better than badfic so bad it makes you snort your drink is good snark on the subject.
OTOH, Kat Allison here has managed to pull off something I so far have not seen: well-written Due South slashfic which is both highly-literate and does not involve character rape (and yes, making either of the Rays or Ben a rapist is character rape) altho' most of them are pretty dark, but even then they only play up the dark edge that was always there in the show, and which kept it from being utter fluff as it would have been without it. I can't say how canon-faithful the Highlander stories are because I never watched it, but I expect they're pretty good too. (Hey, she got plausible Gerard Manly Hopkins refs in there! Score!)
* In this case, and in all fantasy settings, "Magical" must be understood metaphorically, where as in Realistic fiction and Magical Realism, the "Magical" descriptor is usually (tho' not always) more literally meant.
** Here's a free plotbunny for adoption: genderless alien overlords conquer Earth, demand that all our lit be Orwellized to fit their sexual mores; hilarity ensues.
(STARTED THIS BACK ON OCT 24, ARGH!)
1. A Gay Headmaster at a British Boarding School - Whoda Thunkit?
Dorian has been rounding up most of the posts out there on JKR's belated outing of Dumbledore at Comic Gays, and what is interesting to me is that they break down into not "pro" and "con", but "ack", "yay", and "meh."
What's also interesting to me is that not so long ago my own response would have been different, before reading enough GLBT bloggers explaining patiently why The Noble, Tragickal (& Chaste!) Homosexual Who Dies To Save The Straights is not really that positive a character depiction, even though it's better than The Evil or Comic-Relief Homosexual character. The underlying problem of "Magical Negro Syndrome" doesn't magically lose its problematic status when it's "Magical Queer Syndrome", really.*
I haven't posted anything about book 7, because frankly I found it too disappointing to think much about, on a great many levels and for a multitude of reasons. Thinking about it and even more, rereading it, in the detail necessary to do so was just too depressing to contemplate. But I'm going to have to bring up some of it, I see, in order to address why Rowling's "revelation" is so unsatisfactory, and why the excusers of it are wrong.
Firstly, the claims that "it would have been inappropriate" because either a) it's a children's story or b) it's from Harry's POV and he's oblivious to adult relationships or c) both, are to put it bluntly, all wet.
I mean, what does the argument "It's a children's book" even mean? The answer is that it can mean a lot of things, but what it usually unpacks to is "I think we should pretend to children that only heterosexuality exists, because Gayness Is Icky, unlike straight sex and childbirth, let alone syphilis and rape and forced marriage and adultery and bigamy and all that other good stuff that you find in even Victorian authors approved for juvenile consumption." (Don't believe me? Read Victor Hugo. Read Arthur Conan Doyle, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Hoo, boy!)
Now, I can see honestly saying, "Look, a lot of parents are likely to freak if you have an openly gay character in a book, so I didn't dare to spell it out, but yes I did think of so-and-so as queer when I was writing them," and frankly, that would be what I paradoxically call "honest cowardice" - and if it was something like "I put it in but my publishers made me take it out," then there's still less to argue with, from a "pro" standpoint. (I've always been certain that the characters of Tom and Carl, the neighborhood wizards in Duane's Young Wizards books, are and are meant to be read as gay, while never coming out and saying so; I don't know if I would have picked that up if I'd read them for the first time as a kid, but it's imo the most plausible reading of the texts.)
I can also see an author saying, "I just don't want to deal with it, I'm straight and I don't like to think of Alternate Lifestyles so I'm just going to pretend they don't exist today, even if I can't go to the mall and not see two men holding hands without closing my eyes, even if I have to pretend BBC-Wales doesn't exist" - you can disagree with this attitude, but it's an honest statement of intent, which Rowling's was not. (This is essentially what Chuck Dixon has said, making it worrying to fans when he's tagged to work on books with canonically queer charas, although he's hidden behind the shield of wanting to keep his offspring from knowing that there are GLBT people in the universe...good luck with that, and don't blame it on the media, dude! Kids were calling each other "fag" and "fairy" when I was in third grade, with only vague notions of what the insults meant, but having picked them up from their parents back in the mid-70's.)
In fact, there's more than a hint of disingenuousness in her saying (emphasis mine) ""If I'd known it would make you so happy, I would have announced it years ago!" Um, hullo? It's not like JKR avoided fandom for all these years. It's not like she bloody well could have been unaware of HP slash discussions, given all the 'shipping discussions she responded to these past five-some years.
And that's what discredits the b) argument, that there's no reason to mention it because Harry would be oblivious to it, that it wouldn't have affected him in any way. Oh, really? Harry lives in an entirely delusional state which nothing and no one can break through from the outside world? No, wait, that's not exactly right. None of the kids are aware that there is such a thing as sexual attraction, and that people feel this for each other? Ah, so that's why there's no mention made of the growing romance between Hagrid and Madame __, or their conflicts, and how this affects the main characters; that's why it doesn't make any difference to Harry to discover that his parents initially didn't get along at all, let alone that there was a derailed proto-romance between Lily and Severus; that's why none of the students date, or worry about dating, or make out, or have angst over who's dating or making out with whom; and why the word "snog" is not to be found anywhere in the pages of the seven volumes of the series!
[/snark] [/snark] [/snark]
Seriously, now. You can't pretend that there's no sex in the Potterverse - or that Harry, or any of his circle of associates - are unaware that it exists, that it's a possibility, that it complicates human relationships, where heterosexuals are concerned. So, okay, there's no mention of queerness, and no one depicted in same-sex relationships (or wanting them) - you can at least interpolate that they exist in Rowling's fictional UK, but that they just are not mentioned for whatever reasons of editorial or authorial timidity or squick. (There is no cannibalism in the Royal Navy!) Just as you could, if you so chose, slash charas who weren't paired off with the opposite sex - or at least until JKR rushed in to make them officially, overtly, and in some instances quite implausibly straight, straight, straight as an arrow.
But retroactively making Dumbledore gay - leaving aside all the complications of how he was portrayed, as someone led into political mortal sin by his youthful infatuation with a wannabe-Overlord, and pining away lovelessly ever after - makes everything problematic, all the authorial attention to telling us who's straight, canonically: is it now intended for us to read every chara not specifically indicated as being in a heterosexual relationship as queer?
I doubt that, not least because of Rowling's determination to tack on an utterly-out-of-nowhere romance apparently with the intention of quashing the R/S 'ship, a romance that made no sense in the books or out of them, and which managed to also very insultingly depower one of the cooler female charas before fridging her for real. It all felt like one of those old comedies where everybody has to be paired up at the end so it will end on a happy note, so even people with nothing in common or who hate each other end up matched together at the end.
Regardless, it raises all kinds of unpleasant questions, such as if JKR always thought of such a major character as Dumbledore as gay, then, given that she obviously wasn't just completely oblivious to the reality of GLBT people existing around her in the UK, nor gave no thought to the problems of depicting them, how come she chose not to include them visibly, nor to even allow any room for even moderately happy relationships among the circles of major characters? "Bring your own subtext," Joss Whedon famously said, and the producers of the Hercules and Xena shows deliberately played it coy and ambiguous to attract the largest possible audience.
And this works, on an unstated worldbuilding premise that It just doesn't matter in their culture, nobody cares who you sleep with so long as they're not cheating on someone else - which was what slashers could do (until the shotgun wedding, at least) with the HP stories. It ceases to be just not an issue with us who prefers whom, with the outing of Albus - because there's either no reason to have it never be mentioned in the story, or the reason for the non-mentioning becomes an issue, in and out of the story. (Are there wizardly equivalents of the old anti-gay laws still on the books, to encourage such rigorous closeting? If such a Thatcherite mentality is still in force, don't people protest about it? Speculate on who might be in the closet?)
And this brings me to the other, most common defense of the choice to keep Albus (and who else, we now have to wonder) closeted for the whole series - that mentioning the existence of queer wizards would have made the books "just about sex" - variations of which pop up every damn time someone complains about the rampant heterosexuality in the media these days. (And also, going back to my beginning, when anyone points out the starkly monochrome casting of H'wood, and of print genre as well, regardless of plausibility: you can count on any number of white fans loudly proclaiming that to be more inclusive, more diverse, would make the story "all about race" which apparently removing all the other ethnicities from SoCal or NYC or Baltimore or London does not.)
Is Star Trek: TOS "just about sex"--? What with James T. Kirk hopping into bed with every roughly XX-shaped humanoid that he meets, to the point where it's as much of a joke as Nurse Chappel's hopeless UST for Spock-- What about Hill Street Blues, or Spencer For Hire", or X-Files, CSI, or Battlestar Galactica, or pretty much any mainstream TV show you can think of, which had opposite-sex characters in relationships, or breaking them off, pairing up, or UST over who would or wouldn't end up together, where "together" means having sex and/or forming a more-or-less permanent pair bond, with or without children from it? Was Karate Kid all about the heterosex, what with its plot revolving around a hero who wanted to win The Girl, and all the heterosexual rivalry and making-out of the teenagers in it? Did anyone complain about how it was so in-your-face with its heterosexual agenda, all that kissing and handholding and dating, eh? How about King Kong, or Independence Day, or geez, all the Jurassic Park movies? What do you need even the implication of het shippiness in a movie about damn dinosaurs, I ask?
But nobody thinks of opposite-sex coupling behavior (including mention of grandparents, peeping toms, or divorce) as egregious, although people sometimes object to a particular romance in a particular movie feeling forced, or unnecessary; the idea that there is anything out-of-place by "unnecessarily" including the mere existence of het relationships, physical displays of affection, and (depending on the rating, implicit or depicted) sexual contact between characters in a story which is primarily "about" other things than romance would be justifiably laughed down as insanely prudish.
--Although it would be interesting to imagine just how far you'd have to bowdlerize most literature in order to do so - a lot of books would have to go altogether, because there's not much plot left once you take out all mention of heterosexuality from, e.g., A Tale of Two Cities, or Hamlet, or the Ramayana, or Genji, or the Iliad (never mind the Odyssey!) just to name a few. What would be left, if you had to remove all mention of husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, parents, children, love, jealousy, lust, and desire? Aside from making it seem as if humans really were found under cabbages, there would be a curious lack of motivation in most art throughout the world.** Grand Opera just has to go completely, at least if performed with lyrics.
So why is it forced and unnecessary and egregious to do so in re the existence of gay people in a modern setting? If having any out GLBT wizards or Muggles as characters, or even mentioned and existing, would be "making it all about sex", then I'm afraid the series already was all about TEH SEX, and it was Rowling who made it so.
So my "meh" comes from a sense that it's too little, too late, and neither brave nor bold, but a little bit opportunistic, and yes it may piss off some bigots, but it doesn't accomplish much in itself; however the conversation may be helpful, but that's going meta to the statement itself.
2. Well, if you're voluntarily limiting your audience to the subset "prejudiced straight boy" it makes a certain amount of sense...
Another interesting fannish tidbit was the admission by DC that they're essentially just pandering to the straight sexist dude sector with their inclusion of Renee Montoya, and any other lesbian charas, these days. That was the message of this interview, regarding the recent bedroom scene which aroused a fair bit of hubba-hubba-ing comment from readers, especially when the un-censored pencils (which were too sketchy imo to be very stimulating, but mileages vary) were released.
I find it very amusing that all the "naughty" pictures that "serious" illustrators have done (that I've seen published, at least) of their charas all entail heroines being displayed for the imagined straight male viewer, either being "naughty" where that means pleasing men, or being (even worse) "surprised" and thus virtually victimized by the peeping-tom audience, with nary an Actaeon-fate to follow, and never any of their heroes in pin-up style...Oh yeah, real daring, guys!
--One thing which not getting around to finishing this post for over a month means that I can comment on the "revelation" that there was a romance between Admiral Cain and the mole Gina on Pegasus in BSG: Razor, which comment in sum total is "No shit, Sherlock, really?" Didn't everybody figure that this was the case, and the explanation for the extreme savagery of Cain's reaction? I know I read enough discussion where this was bruited about at the time. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about them running the episode with a disclaimer, so to speak - "No, we don't REALLY think lesbians are evil torturers/enemy spies!" - because that's how running an anti-bigotry PSA during it sort of comes across to me, at least as described, since I didn't see the episode and the PSA as it ran during that timeslot.
Again, kinda "meh" - not exactly a shocker of a revelation, and not exactly challenging stereotypes (golly gee willikers, who'da thunk of jackbooted dominating military women being scary torturing lesbians? That's never showed up in the history of pulps, has it? Or who'd imagine that the pathetic, sweet fluffy girlfriend might turn out to be an undercover agent of an enemy superpower? Gee, no way that's the base assumption of J. Edgar Hoover and friends in the Fifties, is it?
Heigh-ho...
Feeling grumpy about all this, I figure most everyone can appreciate this hilarious 'Bad Yaoi' cartoon, not just applicable to anime/manga fanfic, since the only thing better than badfic so bad it makes you snort your drink is good snark on the subject.
OTOH, Kat Allison here has managed to pull off something I so far have not seen: well-written Due South slashfic which is both highly-literate and does not involve character rape (and yes, making either of the Rays or Ben a rapist is character rape) altho' most of them are pretty dark, but even then they only play up the dark edge that was always there in the show, and which kept it from being utter fluff as it would have been without it. I can't say how canon-faithful the Highlander stories are because I never watched it, but I expect they're pretty good too. (Hey, she got plausible Gerard Manly Hopkins refs in there! Score!)
* In this case, and in all fantasy settings, "Magical" must be understood metaphorically, where as in Realistic fiction and Magical Realism, the "Magical" descriptor is usually (tho' not always) more literally meant.
** Here's a free plotbunny for adoption: genderless alien overlords conquer Earth, demand that all our lit be Orwellized to fit their sexual mores; hilarity ensues.