!!!! AVATAR. WTF. also, writing meta!
So spreadnparanoia invited me over tonight for food and more of Avatar: the Last Airbender. We are now at the end of Season 2. I AM DEAD. What. what!!!!!! ZUKO. and my ship. and Zuko. and my ship, damn it. aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!
and Season 3 is not out on DVD. I AM SO FULL OF ANGST.
okay. flailing aside, I was commenting on some stuff to mad_rex tonight and it reminded me of one of the drunken conversations I had with Mike on Saturday, so now I have writing meta. As usual, this is being written stream-of-thought, and may not end up where I think it will.
I forget how we actually got to this topic, but there was some kind of conversation going on about relationships and communication and resolving issues that way, and I got started talking about how I write relationships, as opposed to how I deal with them in real life. (Well, it may not so much be a case of opposites...) In the past, I have found it very very hard to conduct discussions about relationship issues; either I don't know how to express what the issue is, or I avoid it and hope it will go away. I have been much better about this sort of thing this go-round, and we do talk things out pretty extensively and work toward finding a resolution that can suit both of us. I'm not going to get into a ramble about why that is (at least not on a public entry), but I did realize that that fact really informs the way I write characters and their relationships.
I really don't like happy-ever-after stories about my pairings. I also tend not to choose pairings to obsess over that can end in happy-ever-after. To a certain extent I'd like to have happy-ever-after myself, but also not, becuase that implies that it is stagnant and no longer evolving and changing, or rather that the persons involved have become so, and I never ever want that. Besides that, the characters for whom that sort of thing is true just don't ping me at all. I have no interest in Cecil/Rosa, except as a counterpoint to Kain's obsessive desire. I don't like Cloud and Tifa, nor Tidus and Yuna. I want stories, and relationships, where there are lots of sharp edges on which the characters are very likely to cut themselves and bleed to death.
One of the things I really like to poke at with Kain, and that I'm exploring in Every Light, is what happens to him when the two forces by which he defined his entire existence (honour, and love/desire/obsession for Rosa) are taken away from him through his own action/inaction or the influence of one of those forces out-of-balance with the other. It is interesting to me because it is impossible, and I want to find the point at which Kain realizes this relationship is impossible, and what he does with himself at that point; how he rebuilds his life with different meaning.
Celes is the other character I particularly love to write about, mostly because she has no emotional context for anything. I'm a Locke/Celes shipper by inclination, but there is part of me that wonders if her affection for him is merely the first blush of a girlish crush, the like of which she has never been able to experience or indulge before (I will stop before I get into sixteen pages of meta about Celes and ice and the effects of MagiTek). Even if it's not, neither she nor Locke is particularly good at communicating, and both are prone to snapping and shutting others out. How do you build and maintain a relationship like that, especially with all the ghosts that spin between them like shattered mirrors?
These are the things that I like to explore when I write, and it's part of why I just don't like most pairing fic that is, as venefica_aura put it, "THE EPIC LOVE STORY OF BILL AND BOB." I'm much more interested in the type of thing that mithrigil puts together, where the characters more often trip on themselves and each other than ever manage to resolve anything. I don't want to see that lovely, crystalline moment when Locke and Celes find Twue Wuv and curl up on the beach. I want to see that moment when the gloves are off, the barriers have come down, and he's so tangled in his past that he loses the distinction between Celes-as-person and Celes-as-Butcher-of-Maranda, when she loses that distinction as well and becomes desperately angry about the collapse of that beautifully ordered world in which she knew exactly where she belonged and what she was supposed to be doing.
....Oh dear God, AU bunny, go away please. I'm busy here.
It is the conflict that fascinates me far more than the resolution. I think one of the pieces in which I made this most clear was Uncomfortable Silences (FF6, PG, Locke/Celes, spoilers through World of Ruin); the resolution of the fic is that the issue has been discussed. It has not been resolved; it has only been spoken. I like the tension of that kind of balancing-point, and I actually prefer that kind of drop-off to the neatly wrapped package in which everything turns out shiny.
This is probably also why I like ships in which the characters cannot be resolved, or involved, based on the canon. Balthier/Ashe, for example, just doesn't work in any permutation of Ivalice's reality, for anything more than a one-night stand or maybe a hidden fling during their journey. "I was the pirate, she was the queen/Sir Francis and Elizabeth, the best there's ever been/...So write your own ending and hope it comes true/For the lovers and strangers on Bay Avenue" (Jimmy Buffett, Love in the Library) Or, see also "All my friends are pirates/It's just who I am/I'm better as a memory than as your man" (Kenny Chesney, "Better As A Memory"). For them to be together, one of them must give up their identity completely. Neither of them would be willing to, at least not the characters that I saw when I played the game, YMMV. So what happens, then, and how do they each deal with it and set it aside? Or what kind of deeply traumatic and ridiculous event could possibly lead to the kind of gradual change where they could be together? (If your answer involves anything less than 100,000 words of in-depth fic, don't bother.)
So cycling back: it's the conflict, not the resolution, that interests me. This is probably why I am so fascinated with characters and just not letting them have nice things; I prefer them balked and frustrated and trying to find a way around it (or possibly just throwing up their hands, declaring me a relentless bitch, and storming off. That variation works too.)
Thoughts, if anyone bothered to read this far?
p.s. iTunes, your sense of timing is astonishing.
and Season 3 is not out on DVD. I AM SO FULL OF ANGST.
okay. flailing aside, I was commenting on some stuff to mad_rex tonight and it reminded me of one of the drunken conversations I had with Mike on Saturday, so now I have writing meta. As usual, this is being written stream-of-thought, and may not end up where I think it will.
I forget how we actually got to this topic, but there was some kind of conversation going on about relationships and communication and resolving issues that way, and I got started talking about how I write relationships, as opposed to how I deal with them in real life. (Well, it may not so much be a case of opposites...) In the past, I have found it very very hard to conduct discussions about relationship issues; either I don't know how to express what the issue is, or I avoid it and hope it will go away. I have been much better about this sort of thing this go-round, and we do talk things out pretty extensively and work toward finding a resolution that can suit both of us. I'm not going to get into a ramble about why that is (at least not on a public entry), but I did realize that that fact really informs the way I write characters and their relationships.
I really don't like happy-ever-after stories about my pairings. I also tend not to choose pairings to obsess over that can end in happy-ever-after. To a certain extent I'd like to have happy-ever-after myself, but also not, becuase that implies that it is stagnant and no longer evolving and changing, or rather that the persons involved have become so, and I never ever want that. Besides that, the characters for whom that sort of thing is true just don't ping me at all. I have no interest in Cecil/Rosa, except as a counterpoint to Kain's obsessive desire. I don't like Cloud and Tifa, nor Tidus and Yuna. I want stories, and relationships, where there are lots of sharp edges on which the characters are very likely to cut themselves and bleed to death.
One of the things I really like to poke at with Kain, and that I'm exploring in Every Light, is what happens to him when the two forces by which he defined his entire existence (honour, and love/desire/obsession for Rosa) are taken away from him through his own action/inaction or the influence of one of those forces out-of-balance with the other. It is interesting to me because it is impossible, and I want to find the point at which Kain realizes this relationship is impossible, and what he does with himself at that point; how he rebuilds his life with different meaning.
Celes is the other character I particularly love to write about, mostly because she has no emotional context for anything. I'm a Locke/Celes shipper by inclination, but there is part of me that wonders if her affection for him is merely the first blush of a girlish crush, the like of which she has never been able to experience or indulge before (I will stop before I get into sixteen pages of meta about Celes and ice and the effects of MagiTek). Even if it's not, neither she nor Locke is particularly good at communicating, and both are prone to snapping and shutting others out. How do you build and maintain a relationship like that, especially with all the ghosts that spin between them like shattered mirrors?
These are the things that I like to explore when I write, and it's part of why I just don't like most pairing fic that is, as venefica_aura put it, "THE EPIC LOVE STORY OF BILL AND BOB." I'm much more interested in the type of thing that mithrigil puts together, where the characters more often trip on themselves and each other than ever manage to resolve anything. I don't want to see that lovely, crystalline moment when Locke and Celes find Twue Wuv and curl up on the beach. I want to see that moment when the gloves are off, the barriers have come down, and he's so tangled in his past that he loses the distinction between Celes-as-person and Celes-as-Butcher-of-Maranda, when she loses that distinction as well and becomes desperately angry about the collapse of that beautifully ordered world in which she knew exactly where she belonged and what she was supposed to be doing.
....Oh dear God, AU bunny, go away please. I'm busy here.
It is the conflict that fascinates me far more than the resolution. I think one of the pieces in which I made this most clear was Uncomfortable Silences (FF6, PG, Locke/Celes, spoilers through World of Ruin); the resolution of the fic is that the issue has been discussed. It has not been resolved; it has only been spoken. I like the tension of that kind of balancing-point, and I actually prefer that kind of drop-off to the neatly wrapped package in which everything turns out shiny.
This is probably also why I like ships in which the characters cannot be resolved, or involved, based on the canon. Balthier/Ashe, for example, just doesn't work in any permutation of Ivalice's reality, for anything more than a one-night stand or maybe a hidden fling during their journey. "I was the pirate, she was the queen/Sir Francis and Elizabeth, the best there's ever been/...So write your own ending and hope it comes true/For the lovers and strangers on Bay Avenue" (Jimmy Buffett, Love in the Library) Or, see also "All my friends are pirates/It's just who I am/I'm better as a memory than as your man" (Kenny Chesney, "Better As A Memory"). For them to be together, one of them must give up their identity completely. Neither of them would be willing to, at least not the characters that I saw when I played the game, YMMV. So what happens, then, and how do they each deal with it and set it aside? Or what kind of deeply traumatic and ridiculous event could possibly lead to the kind of gradual change where they could be together? (If your answer involves anything less than 100,000 words of in-depth fic, don't bother.)
So cycling back: it's the conflict, not the resolution, that interests me. This is probably why I am so fascinated with characters and just not letting them have nice things; I prefer them balked and frustrated and trying to find a way around it (or possibly just throwing up their hands, declaring me a relentless bitch, and storming off. That variation works too.)
Thoughts, if anyone bothered to read this far?
p.s. iTunes, your sense of timing is astonishing.