Rec: Look At Your Renegade Time Lord

[x_losfic]

Hello all! I bogarted the last reccing period using my phenomenal modly powers (actually my living space is pretty reasonable, thanks for asking). Please direct all crying/cursing the unfairness of the dark cabal that is b_e to fandomsecrets (I did just pm the mod and sign up like a pleb, but the drama will keep us young

Comments

[tweedymcgee]

a large part of the eroticism of fanfic derives, for me, from the opportunity to fetishize the material reality of the original text

Hence all the up-against-the-console fics, scarf bondage, oh-hey-is-that-your-screwdriver (O_O), etc.?

No, seriously, I think that's interesting, and most likely a common thing, or at at any rate a Thing. I hadn't thought about it before, but yes, I think there is a tendency in fandom to fetishize the objects associated with the characters a little, to treat them like extensions of the characters themselves. And in that light, the "sense of material wrongness" about sex toys makes complete sense.

I think toys need to be fetishized in order to work. They're patently ridiculous objects -- even the words for them are silly. There's a mighty mental barrier to be overcome (IRL or in fic!) to transform some ridiculous blob of silicone that looks like the punchline to a joke at a bridal shower into an object of desire.

And what is that process of fetishization? Probably something like incorporating the object into your mental image of the person you're hot for, seeing it as an extension of their body or their will.

[x_los]

I think toys need to be fetishized in order to work. They're patently ridiculous objects -- even the words for them are silly. There's a mighty mental barrier to be overcome (IRL or in fic!) to transform some ridiculous blob of silicone that looks like the punchline to a joke at a bridal shower into an object of desire.

I think that's really true. Maybe we have initially the same reaction to toys in fic as IRL, a bit, where due to being conditioned to see penetrative sex with a Real Live Penis as the zenith of sexuality, and/or to value the human quality of sex above all, we're really discomfited by these things/feel them to be substitutes, or to be cold and non-intimate. Once you start to think of them as a tool used by someone to affect someone else sexually, and as part of that interaction, and no less valid than any other sex act, the whole thing makes more sense. Maybe the issue is that people sometimes write them AS these non-intimate, kind of brutalizing things for the kink-edge rather than as extensions-of-desire-and-will.

[tweedymcgee]

Maybe the issue is that people sometimes write them AS these non-intimate, kind of brutalizing things for the kink-edge rather than as extensions-of-desire-and-will

Too true. A big fat righteous WTF to that.

Though that's maybe a different issue from them just being fucking silly, which is maybe even more of a hotness-killer.

That particular kink cuts both ways. You can see a Detachable Penis as the ultimate sort of relentless, violently-intruding phallic object, because it FEELS NOTHING, RAWR. Or you can get off on treating it like a cock, on the perpetual unsatisfiability of the desire to feel nerve endings where there aren't any, the UST-laden almost-there-ness of it all...

Getting a little far afield from D/M here, I guess. Though, hell, they're aliens, anything could and might go.

[x_los]

That's a GOOD point, re: silly.

Nah, I think the tension you mentioned not far-afield, but just pretty primary to how we can think sex. In a post-scarcity world, the scarcity/conflict of the impossibility of knowing/having each other is still there, etc.

Though, hell, they're aliens, anything could and might go.

This is the other thing w/ toys--in scenarios with sex toys I think 'why are they using something I'd find at the store rather than redonk advanced shit with artificially bonding nerve endings?' But obviously that'd undermine the toyness of it all, seem a bit gratuitous, and demand a lengthy exposition? And there's something to be said for 'the dildo' having remained essentially unchanged for thousands of years/equal opportunity use of toys from all ages.

[elviaprose]

Once you start to think of them as a tool used by someone to affect someone else sexually, and as part of that interaction, and no less valid than any other sex act, the whole thing makes more sense.

Hmmm. This made me think. In thinking of all sex acts as equally valid, might we lose something rather interesting--namely, the significance of performing a particular sex act? How much of good sex writing is about will, and a desire to give pleasure, regardless of method, and how much of it is about the method, and what the method says about the characters?

There's a couple of issues, here. An author can give a sex act meaning by relying, unquestioningly, upon assumptions about what various things mean (i.e. penetration=THE SEX). This, I think, is not so good. But then there's also more character specific ways for sex acts to signify. Like in Crane Wife, where the Master is confused about whether he's internalized Gallifreyan patriarchal norms/what it would mean to violate those norms with Five, etc. A character's interpretations don't have to be conventional, but, it seems to me, things do get more interesting when they're clearly defined.

[x_los]

Well, okay, could we think of it as different/distinct, but equal, capable of doing the things you mention without doing violence to the specificity of a given act? (Because there's the associated queer theory thing about struggling to assign validity to not penis-vag sex and all that.)

Interesting, re: personal definitions vs. explicitly encountered norms, but at a certain point don't they become excess baggage/exposition? Just devil's advocating because I'm always afraid of writing Tolkein's Hobbit Policemen--the extra sociological detail/anthropological consideration that's not in service of the story but rather burdening and diminishing it. Why IS there a 10 paragraph description of policing in Hobbiton or whatever in Fellowship? Because he thought of it, ERGO IT GOES IN!! It's probably something a long-fic or a fic ABOUT this can bear better, but even so.

[elviaprose]

It's an interesting question. I'm not sure. I do think that it's hard to create a narrative that escalates, that seems to go somewhere, without some hierarchy wherein each gesture somehow trumps the last, or at the very least, if it's not every gesture, that's the general trajectory of the scene. Of course, a sex scene can play with this a bit, but I feel like typically we're working either with or against this model of escalating gestures, not working from another model entirely. I think this is part of why queer theory is so interested in temporality and the idea of history and progress these days, but I digress...

A way out of this, maybe, is to have the response to the gestures escalate, without the specific gestures themselves seeming to be the cause of this? But that seems strange to me. Why are the characters responding the way they are, if not because they're interpreting the gestures hierarchically? I don't feel satisfied with that idea. Idk. Maybe you can help me out here...I'm confusing myself.

The Tolkein point is a good one. It makes me think about how, often, I don't want to read fic about "being gay or queer," I want to read fic with queer characters. I feel it probably depends on how fresh and interesting the perspective you're developing for your character is, and also whether that perspective ratchets up the tension/the complexity of the scene. "Fat Ainley" (you know, the kink meme response) is another example I'd cite of a fic that does personal definitions _really_ well.

[x_los]

The Tolkein point is a good one. It makes me think about how, often, I don't want to read fic about "being gay or queer," I want to read fic with queer characters. I feel it probably depends on how fresh and interesting the perspective you're developing for your character is, and also whether that perspective ratchets up the tension/the complexity of the scene. "Fat Ainley" (you know, the kink meme response) is another example I'd cite of a fic that does personal definitions _really_ well.

I'd totally agree with that, and that's part of why that fic feels so FRESH and joyously raunchy.

I'd have to give more thought to the hierarchal-pacing question? I was thinking of it as a simple 'let's not say that anal sex, handjobs, etc. aren't SEX because only m/f penis/vag intercourse is SEX', but I think your point really interesting, and pretty related, just not something I've read or thought enough about?

[elviaprose]

Yes, this, everything about this post 100% percent. You've helped me understand my own thinking a little better with this comment.

[tweedymcgee]

Cool, thanks! I'm finding this whole thread rather salubrious for the thinky-bits.