SEXUAL HORROR: another Manifest
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So here I am, waiting for a train (a train that will take me far, far away from here, namely back to the city after a surprisingly lovely Rosh Hashanah dinner with my parents--happy new year, everyone! I've got eight days to get mine back on the right foot). And I recall that the other day, in my post about fightsex and why it is awesome, I also mentioned the possibility of writing a similar post on Sexual Horror. I can't put it in quite the same way--Sexual Horror is not awesome the way fightsex is awesome, in the sense of being undeniably fulfilling for the characters involved and titillating for the reader if the reader shares that kink--but it occurs to me that I can unpack the genre, what it means to me, and some of the things it implies. Frankly, I should write this post, because if fightsex, to me, is the kink that keeps on kinking, Sexual Horror and its cousin-totally-cousin Ghostsex are the ingratiating, parasitical kinks that get their mandibles into everything and consume and quite possibly have come to define me and things I have written. I provide examples! Some of them are funny.
This is going to be a much more personal post than the Fightsex post. I hope that's okay. It's also going to be even thinkier, but I promise there will still be things in it that are fun and funny.
This post also gets a warning label. I don't warn for discussion of fightsex beyond warning for violence because in fightsex, the violence and sex are consensual, and it's a self-warning term. But you can't always give explicit and unadulterated consent to someone who isn't there, or isn't human, and so I will give a resounding Warning for positive-within-narrative discussion of dubcon and related issues of consent. Also, though this is technically self-warning, there is some really disturbing horror under here.
All right, the first thing I need is a definition. By necessity, this is going to be an extremely subjective definition. For me, sex and fear are linked concepts. There are several extremely logical and medical and social reasons for the association, but it essentially boils down to that I perceive sex as an invasive act. I know not everyone thinks of it as such, but for whatever quirk of culture that has afflicted me, I fling myself into this camp. Physically, you are allowing someone else to affect your body on tangible and even chemical levels, and most probably affecting that person in the same way; mentally, you're passing that power exchange and consent and complacency back and forth, informing that person that your body is being affected, and taking responsibility for that decision. Responsibility causes anxiety, and while you might not always be acknowledging that on a conscious level, you can't ignore it instinctively. The blushing virgin and awkward first time and moment of epic alignment all feed into this trope, especially in narrative erotica. In sex, you let someone into you, only sometimes literally but always chemically.
If that's the case, then why isn't all sex Sexual Horror? Well, for one thing, people overcome that fear! I did! Sort of. Seeing people comfortable and happy and sharing themselves is extremely gratifying, whether it's as a participant or as a reader. Most sexual encounters address but dismiss the moment of fear: A, taking it for the first time, describes it inwardly as an invasion but gives himself over because of his trust in B; C asks D if she is sure, D gives consent, a good time is had by all; E is surprised that F's attention to the area behind his knees is so arousing but writes it off and will ask about it later when it feels less good. In some cases, that moment of fear contributes to the characters' arousal, whether in its own right, or in the capacity of pride at overcoming it. But in most consensual erotica, that fear is a small fear, a diminished fear, and challenging it is a matter of trust and acceptance.
But what if the fear is more evident, more present, than abstract insinuations of imbalance and vulnerability? What if the danger amounts to more than just letting someone in? What if overcoming or facing that fear isn't as easy as opening your heart and your legs?
Sexual Horror is when the process of overcoming or encountering fear becomes as important, narratively and sexually, as gratification. The fear in question is greater than just "but won't it hurt?" or "but can I trust you?"; ideas like "are you even actually here?", "but you're literally falling apart!", and "what are you?!" introduce extrasexual elements into the equation, and emphasize the instinctual human fears of vulnerability. In doing so the ideas call into question the ability of the participant to continue, even if he initially consented or continues to consent. And the best part is, if the character still wants to continue, he has to either compartmentalize or integrate his desire and his fear, and that, my dears, is why I love this trope.
So here are some ways in which you can achieve this dilemma:
1) Sex with people who aren't there, a.k.a. Ghostsex
Eames is jacking off in front of a mirror, having forged Arthur's body. Eames is alone, but Arthur is, in Eames' mind, an active participant in the sex, to the extent that Eames lets go of himself almost entirely and dissociates from the encounter out of denial for his obsession.
Ashe is lying on a camp bed in the desert with a fever, plagued by memories of a man she killed many years ago and terrifying thoughts of what he may have become, in a world rife with ghosts. Vossler comes back to her, parrots back her own words and the words of her memories, and fucks her into the sand. In the morning, she wakes up, and knows she needs stronger walls to keep the shades away.
Subaru is washing Seishirou's blood off his body after sitting mired in it for two days. The blood and water literally take Seishirou's form and Subaru begs for the creature, whatever it is, to take him with it.
Hans Landa is playing tennis with Aldo Raine, in the dark corners of his mind. Aldo is wearing tiny white shorts. Sometimes Hans lets himself lose.
Ghostsex is when the character cannot be sure if it's all in his mind. The fear, here, is that either the character's mental faculties have been compromised, or there is some serious supernatural fuckery going on, and neither option is particularly copacetic. If there really is an absent party, if Arthur really has infiltrated Eames' dream or Ashe has really just had sex with a ghost or Subaru just got jerked off in the shower by two-day-old dried blood, we have serious logistical problems here to consider, and even more serious ones because Eames and Ashe and Subaru actively consented to the invasion. And if it's all in their heads, if Eames is just obsessed and Ashe is just dreaming and Subaru is just crazy, well, they still have problems, but at least their entire worldviews aren't corrupted. Right?
(There's no helping Hans, though.)
The appeal of Ghostsex lies, for me, in the ambiguity between those two questions. Obviously each of the characters has a preferential option between "I'm crazy" and "that dead man just fucked me". Eames would prefer to be neither, really; Ashe would rather be dreaming; Subaru genuinely would prefer to have just fucked a blood-demon (that man is fucked up); Hans wants the Aldo in his head to conform to the real one. But that question of is this real during the sex is part of what spurs them to continue even as the fear forestalls an end. It could be extremely gratifying if it fulfills their desires! Or upon fulfillment, the revelation could crush them. Really, it's orgasm denial, except one of them is dead.
Then there is also the issue of Posessionsex, in which the present character may actually have been taken over by the absent one, and doesn't feel as if he is in control at all during the scenario. Some fics with Sydney and Hardin from Vagrant Story come to mind, because of Hardin's issues with compulsion and Sydney's issues with having knives for hands, but that's a unique circumstance, in which both Sydney and Hardin are definitely living and Hardin is surrendering control of his limbs and his mind to Sydney. It has a different element at core than Ghostsex, which is the attachment to something that very definitely isn't there.
The other base appeal of Ghostsex is the nature of consent. You can't consent to someone who isn't there, but you can't deny consent to yourself! If you didn't want this, you'd stop, right? If it was all in your head, you could make it go away. You could put down your hand and put away your fantasy and think of pink elephants and Margaret Thatcher and pickled herring. So the nature of the reality of the encounter actually changes the level of consent. If it was all a dream, you don't have anything to worry about. But if it wasn't, you still consented...didn't you?
2) Where the fuck are your arms?!, a.k.a. Sexualized Body Horror
Heat is a cannibal demon, that's no secret. Heat is a cannibal demon with an oral fixation and an extremely limited sexual education. So when Subaru asks Heat to devour him, Heat says yes.
Speaking of Subaru, there was that one time when Seishirou summoned electrical wires and threaded them around under Subaru's skin, and danced with him in the wreckage of a six-car pileup in Roppongi.
France always had a fondness for the grotesque, he will make no pretenses about it, and a particular fondness for England being dead. So when England's revenant corpse walked out of the sea, France wrestled it to the beach and kissed it, to make sure England could still fight back. He even tasted like the sea, how appropriate.
Amaryllis knew it was a dream, because she and Graeme were having sex at all. But Graeme seemed to want it so much, and he kissed her and held her even though he was bleeding all over, and he told her she could have everything. So he gave her everything. First his blood. Then his fingers. And then it all started coming apart...
Sexualized Body Horror is when the character encounters a very physical and ordinarily disgusting obstacle to continued pleasure. Vore, gore, turing people into stone, and various stages of IMPENDING DEATH fall into this category (though necrophilia itself doesn't qualify, but occasionally overlaps, so France only counts half the time).
Basically, if you can make it a status ailment in a video game, and want to include it in sex as an element of horror and not fetishization, it falls into this category. It's not sexual horror if the participants both like the circumstances unconditionally. That's why fightsex isn't immediately sexual horror--in fact, that overlaps rarely--and why necrophilia and consensual sadomasochism and edgeplay don't count either. Heat doesn't initially want to eat Subaru; Subaru resents being turned into a puppet with wires for veins; France finds it much more interesting when England is only mostly dead; Amaryllis wants Graeme whole and healthy but she really wants him, and she can't stop.
Sexualized Body Horror runs especially explicitly on the progression-despite-fear that I was discussing earlier. The characters involved keep going not because of but in spite of a very real physical adversity, be it a time limit or an unwelcome pain or a grotesque invasion, that they cannot ignore. Usually it's a case of wanting to finish too much to stop. Wanting to finish too much to stop is an iron-clad kink, people. That loss of control in the face of desire is even more palpable to me when the characters are up against things that are plain unsexy. If Amaryllis and Graeme want each other so much that they can't stop kissing even as Graeme's body is coming apart, just think about what that says as to how much they want each other, and I find that fucking hot. Disturbing. But hot.
So Ghostsex is for the mental horror, and Sexualized Body Horror is for the physical horror. But for the horrific horror, we have...
X) The better to eat you with, my dear, a.k.a. Horror With a Twist
Farnese is straddling Guts' sword. No, that's not an innuendo.
Corkus is fleeing for his life, when he decides, no, this isn't real at all! Griffith would never betray him. He must be dreaming. Look, there are the lovely ladies he's dreaming of! One of them wraps her arms around him and pulls him in, to rest his head between her breasts. Another rips his legs off at the waist.
Two examples from Berserk, go figure.
Guildenstern and Samantha share a passionate kiss on the cathedral roof, and he tenderly caresses her jaw before stabbing her in the abdomen. "I love you, Samantha, as God is my witness," he says, and she tells him she thought so too before she plummets to her death, spinning after she hits a lower grating.
Kara kills Leoben, again. This time, she uses her chopsticks from the dinner table, shoves him down and straddles him just the way he seems to want her to and stabs him to death. He'll be back in a couple of hours, she knows, in a new body that doesn't have any of her scars, but that's fine, she'll get rid of the next frakking toaster too.
Horror With a Twist uses sex to inflect horror, not horror to inflect sex. It's much more about adding a momentary wash of compassion or arousal or appeal before utterly shanking it and letting the fear take over, and leaving you, the audience, to acknowledge that ha ha you just found something about that sexy you sick fuck. But at Horror With a Twist's heart it still juxtaposes the sex and the fear the same as when the sex is in the higher proportion, and strikes me in the same place.
Honestly, of these three categories that I've brought up, Horror With a Twist is the one most commonly found in media in canon, whereas the other two show up much more often in fic. This is probably because it's easier to imply that Evil is Sexy than it is to sympathetically portray a consensual sexual horror experience. And also kind of because Sexual Horror is honestly not that common or marketable a kink. But I mention Horror With a Twist here because it's often extremely good fodder for extrapolation to the less diluted forms of Sexual Horror. Just think, what if Mal and Ariadne had ten more minutes while Cobb was stuck in that elevator? I know I was thinking about that (and I know Linden and Puel were too, because one of us is going to write it, that's for sure). Seifer had Squall on a cross and electrocuted him, and that spawned scads of fic back in the day. And let us say nothing for James Bond, naked and tied to a bottomless chair. Horror With a Twist is fetish fuel for those of us who want to push things a little further, or it can be, and often is, sexy in its own right.
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So, what kind of characters can engage in Sexual Horror? Remember, just like with the fightsex, it takes characters who comply with the guidelines to create a scenario that complies with the guidelines. But what are the guidelines? I was, up top, talking more about categories than guidelines. That's because Sexual Horror has fewer character requirements than Fightsex and is actually a more universally applicable trope! It's actually really easy to work Sexual Horror into a fandom, though some, namely ones that already have horrific elements in the canon, are easier than others. I wouldn't expect there to be a sexually horrific Hello Kitty fic out there, though now that I've mentioned it there probably is one, but odds are you can foist this kink on any canon or characters you wish and have it remain in character, as long as you understand your characters' fears.
Which means I will be discussing the guidelines by category.
1) Ghostsex is for characters who can't let go. Be it because of obsession, or grief, or unfinished business, Ghostsex requires that at least one party--either the present one OR the absent one, or even both!--have the need to resolve something through manifestation or contact. Characters who easily get over their issues are probably not going to be involved in Ghostsex, unless they are, at the start, unwilling or unknowing accessories to the other's desires. So yeah, one of them has to be hooked. The other, you can just reel in.
Ghostsex also lends itself really well to canons with themes of recovery and acceptance, not just things with a premium on death. Inception is an ideal canon for it, I have found--I really should go looking for some fic out there in which Cobb bangs his subconscious wife for the first few times and is totally not okay--and also Farscape, because John has all of Western Canon and also a half-Scarran half-Sebacean all-mindfuckery neural clone named Harvey in a Hawaiian shirt living in his brain. But there are less obvious but also very probable examples I would like to see: White Collar, however much I don't like Kate. Mad Men, mostly for Don and Rachel. New Trek. BACCANO! Why is there no Ghostsex in Baccano!? (yeah yeah, I know, because they tend to go the violent route instead.) Remember, the party doesn't have to be dead, just absent.
So yeah. In the case of Ghostsex, it's just a matter of finding some unfinished business, and characters who fear confronting it but really desire the confrontation.
2) Sexualized Body Horror is for canons that are already a little fucked up. Unlike with Ghostsex, you're going to have a hard time working unwitting characters up to having their coitus interrupted by a subdermal swarm of locusts and not running screaming down the street. Ew. Characters who can take Sexualized Body Horror all the way to completion tend to either have a lot of passion for the person they are dealing with, or high tolerance levels for the physically scary.
Of course, there's always room to dream! Nightmares can sneak into any fandom or any fic. But you really do have to keep close to the tones of your characters.
X) Horror With a Twist belongs anywhere you want it to. Especially your childhood.
But the key to all this is knowing your characters' (and audience's) fears and being able to exploit them. That's what allows you to get them to the points where you can balance, and then upend, the relationship between their fears and their desires to continue.
It's time for charts again!
Nonlethal ______________________________________ Lethal
Inexplicit _____________________________________ Explicit
Superficial __________________________________ Cathartic
Compartmentalized ________________________ Conflated
This is the same chart as the one in the Fightsex post, which says a lot about the versatility of these designations. But in the case of Sexual Horror, the correlations are not between violence and sex, but between fear and sex, as they have been throughout this manifest.
Lethality, in particular, has a lot to unpack. In fact, let's make three more charts to subdivide it.
Imagined _________________________________ Real
Physically Harmless __________Physically Harmful
Mentally Harmless ____________ Mentally Harmful
The kinds of damage Sexual Horror can do are a little more relevant to the outcome of the scene than in Fightsex. If the Sexual Horror scene is entirely imaginary, it will probably leave little to no physical damage, but oh, does the mental damage ever skyrocket. Likewise, if the scene is real, the physical damage could be debilitating while the mental damage might be less, though it's hard to conceive of a scenario for sexual horror in which both parties emerge mentally unscathed. Consider carefully the manner in which you are intimidating your characters (and your audience), and you'll be able to consider the damage. Put them all together and you get a plain Lethality measure, but it's more worthwhile to consider just what kind of damage is being done.
Using examples again!
a) John Crichton is playing chess with Harvey, who exists only in John's head. Harvey wins, bends John backward over the table, and sucks him off so hard that other members of the crew overhear him and think that Scorpius has infiltrated the ship. The scene is imaginary, and physically nonlethal except maybe for the crick in John's back and the dent in his palm from attempting to shove the black queen into Harvey's eye, but it is a resounding reminder that John is not okay and impacts both his mental and social standing within the crew.
b) John Crichton is at the mercy of the real Scorpius this time, who has strapped John to a contraption and is messing with his body and his mind at the same time, trying to use sex as a distraction (and because Scorpy wants that anyway) while probing his mind for information about wormholes. The scene is real, physically less lethal than it could be but still damaging, and mentally pretty damned lethal because the real Scorpy's never done that to John before. This one is actually canon! Go figure.
c) John Crichton, once again, is at Scorpius' mercy. In addition to the rest of Scorpy's alien anatomy, there is of course the place in his skull where he installs his cooling tube... I don't have to say much else beyond the words literal mindfuck. Whether this one's real or imagined, it has lethal physical and mental repercussions.
Explicitness applies in this scenario to both the sexual and the horrific implications of the scene, and thus also has to be subdivided.
Inexplicit Horror _____________________ Explicit Horror
Inexplicit Sex __________________________ Explicit Sex
It is extremely important to balance these! If the horror is too low and the sex is too proportionately high, it won't read as Sexual Horror at all. If the sex is too low and the horror is too proportionately high, it falls into the Horror with a Twist category and might well be unsexy.
a) After meeting with Zoller for the second time, Shoshana dreams of him: it is Zoller, not Landa, who stays behind to question her about the history of her theater and her relationship with Marcel, and Zoller makes his advances on her explicit while saying the same truly awful things Landa said, smiling the whole way through. He runs his hand up Shoshana's skirt and she finds herself bleeding wherever he touches, and he asks if it is the blood of her family, dead beneath the floorboards. She lets him continue so she doesn't have to say yes. The scene is sexually inexplicit, but horrifically explicit, and doesn't read as sexy at all to Shoshana, or, frankly, to me. Horror With a Twist, not Sexual Horror.
b) After she shoots him, Zoller dreams that he survives not only long enough to shoot her, but long enough to climb on top of her and get what he wanted as she dies. He kisses her and watches the light of Nation's Pride flicker through her eyes, and fucks her as his death scene plays out offscreen, even as his character lives on. The scene is sexually explicit, and with almost equivalent horrific explicitness, and at least to Zoller he finds it difficult to stop even if he's disgusted with his dying dream. Or he would be, if he were living.
Catharsis still only requires one chart, here, because it still measures only the emotional investment and release. Again, if your Sexual Horror scene is nonlethal and inexplicit, it had better be cathartic.
Conflation, in the case of Sexual Horror, is the character's mental correlation between fear and desire. Characters who compartmentalize desire and fear will have different results in overcoming that fear than characters who correlate them. Honestly, I think the ones who correlate sex and fear have a harder time connecting with Sexual Horror than the ones who compartmentalize.
a) Arthur compartmentalizes sex and fear; Arthur compartmentalizes nearly everything. So when Mal corners Arthur in one of Dom's dreamscapes and, almost conversationally, gets on her knees and fiddles with his suspenders, Arthur is still thinking about finding a way out. She wants to flirt, and he knows this is a dream, he can ask Dom what she was up to if he gets out of it, and it's fine, it's fine, it's fine even if she starts doing things to him that she never would have done if she was alive. And then she puts a gun to his balls and her mouth on the rest. (See, Compartmentalization doesn't get in the way! Well. Until she shoots him.)
b) Kongming fears very little, but the fears he does have he cherishes, for they remind him that he is not a god, nor expected to be one. But the fear of facing Zhou Yu on the battlefield is real and acknowledged, and when it plays out in Kongming's head Kongming cannot imagine winning. He finds himself made captive, exploited before the conquering armies of Sun, and Zhou Yu exposing to all of his people just how much of a mortal man Kongming is. It is an image that Kongming cannot meditate away. (Partial compartmentalization, partial conflation--definitely hot scene, at least to me, because it sets up the conflict despite the balance.)
c) Albert is a hundred and thirteen years old and dying in his bed of poisoned wounds that Yuber has just inflicted, and he laughs, for perhaps the first time in two decades. His body is frail and failing him, but he can still feel Yuber touching it, still feel the demon's breath pounding in his blood. He takes days to die, convulsing and coughing and leaving parts of himself behind, and all of his last thoughts are on his pride and his shadow, the means by which he has affected the future. (Extreme conflation! Not quite sexy unless you're kinked on other things in the scene.)
So here's the part where I actually bring myself back into it. Connecting sex and fear is not the same as conflating them. I can maintain that fear and desire are separately motivated, but for me, the presence of one will often have a profound effect on the other. Most likely, the process of engaging those fears through fic is gratifying to me for the same reason that the scenes themselves are gratifying: I find the process of challenging and overcoming fear to be extremely sexy. Sexual Horror gets me in the same place and the same ways as challenge, adversity, and conflicts of control.
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So here I am, waiting for a train (a train that will take me far, far away from here, namely back to the city after a surprisingly lovely Rosh Hashanah dinner with my parents--happy new year, everyone! I've got eight days to get mine back on the right foot). And I recall that the other day, in my post about fightsex and why it is awesome, I also mentioned the possibility of writing a similar post on Sexual Horror. I can't put it in quite the same way--Sexual Horror is not awesome the way fightsex is awesome, in the sense of being undeniably fulfilling for the characters involved and titillating for the reader if the reader shares that kink--but it occurs to me that I can unpack the genre, what it means to me, and some of the things it implies. Frankly, I should write this post, because if fightsex, to me, is the kink that keeps on kinking, Sexual Horror and its cousin-totally-cousin Ghostsex are the ingratiating, parasitical kinks that get their mandibles into everything and consume and quite possibly have come to define me and things I have written. I provide examples! Some of them are funny.
This is going to be a much more personal post than the Fightsex post. I hope that's okay. It's also going to be even thinkier, but I promise there will still be things in it that are fun and funny.
This post also gets a warning label. I don't warn for discussion of fightsex beyond warning for violence because in fightsex, the violence and sex are consensual, and it's a self-warning term. But you can't always give explicit and unadulterated consent to someone who isn't there, or isn't human, and so I will give a resounding Warning for positive-within-narrative discussion of dubcon and related issues of consent. Also, though this is technically self-warning, there is some really disturbing horror under here.
All right, the first thing I need is a definition. By necessity, this is going to be an extremely subjective definition. For me, sex and fear are linked concepts. There are several extremely logical and medical and social reasons for the association, but it essentially boils down to that I perceive sex as an invasive act. I know not everyone thinks of it as such, but for whatever quirk of culture that has afflicted me, I fling myself into this camp. Physically, you are allowing someone else to affect your body on tangible and even chemical levels, and most probably affecting that person in the same way; mentally, you're passing that power exchange and consent and complacency back and forth, informing that person that your body is being affected, and taking responsibility for that decision. Responsibility causes anxiety, and while you might not always be acknowledging that on a conscious level, you can't ignore it instinctively. The blushing virgin and awkward first time and moment of epic alignment all feed into this trope, especially in narrative erotica. In sex, you let someone into you, only sometimes literally but always chemically.
If that's the case, then why isn't all sex Sexual Horror? Well, for one thing, people overcome that fear! I did! Sort of. Seeing people comfortable and happy and sharing themselves is extremely gratifying, whether it's as a participant or as a reader. Most sexual encounters address but dismiss the moment of fear: A, taking it for the first time, describes it inwardly as an invasion but gives himself over because of his trust in B; C asks D if she is sure, D gives consent, a good time is had by all; E is surprised that F's attention to the area behind his knees is so arousing but writes it off and will ask about it later when it feels less good. In some cases, that moment of fear contributes to the characters' arousal, whether in its own right, or in the capacity of pride at overcoming it. But in most consensual erotica, that fear is a small fear, a diminished fear, and challenging it is a matter of trust and acceptance.
But what if the fear is more evident, more present, than abstract insinuations of imbalance and vulnerability? What if the danger amounts to more than just letting someone in? What if overcoming or facing that fear isn't as easy as opening your heart and your legs?
Sexual Horror is when the process of overcoming or encountering fear becomes as important, narratively and sexually, as gratification. The fear in question is greater than just "but won't it hurt?" or "but can I trust you?"; ideas like "are you even actually here?", "but you're literally falling apart!", and "what are you?!" introduce extrasexual elements into the equation, and emphasize the instinctual human fears of vulnerability. In doing so the ideas call into question the ability of the participant to continue, even if he initially consented or continues to consent. And the best part is, if the character still wants to continue, he has to either compartmentalize or integrate his desire and his fear, and that, my dears, is why I love this trope.
So here are some ways in which you can achieve this dilemma:
1) Sex with people who aren't there, a.k.a. Ghostsex
Eames is jacking off in front of a mirror, having forged Arthur's body. Eames is alone, but Arthur is, in Eames' mind, an active participant in the sex, to the extent that Eames lets go of himself almost entirely and dissociates from the encounter out of denial for his obsession.
Ashe is lying on a camp bed in the desert with a fever, plagued by memories of a man she killed many years ago and terrifying thoughts of what he may have become, in a world rife with ghosts. Vossler comes back to her, parrots back her own words and the words of her memories, and fucks her into the sand. In the morning, she wakes up, and knows she needs stronger walls to keep the shades away.
Subaru is washing Seishirou's blood off his body after sitting mired in it for two days. The blood and water literally take Seishirou's form and Subaru begs for the creature, whatever it is, to take him with it.
Hans Landa is playing tennis with Aldo Raine, in the dark corners of his mind. Aldo is wearing tiny white shorts. Sometimes Hans lets himself lose.
Ghostsex is when the character cannot be sure if it's all in his mind. The fear, here, is that either the character's mental faculties have been compromised, or there is some serious supernatural fuckery going on, and neither option is particularly copacetic. If there really is an absent party, if Arthur really has infiltrated Eames' dream or Ashe has really just had sex with a ghost or Subaru just got jerked off in the shower by two-day-old dried blood, we have serious logistical problems here to consider, and even more serious ones because Eames and Ashe and Subaru actively consented to the invasion. And if it's all in their heads, if Eames is just obsessed and Ashe is just dreaming and Subaru is just crazy, well, they still have problems, but at least their entire worldviews aren't corrupted. Right?
(There's no helping Hans, though.)
The appeal of Ghostsex lies, for me, in the ambiguity between those two questions. Obviously each of the characters has a preferential option between "I'm crazy" and "that dead man just fucked me". Eames would prefer to be neither, really; Ashe would rather be dreaming; Subaru genuinely would prefer to have just fucked a blood-demon (that man is fucked up); Hans wants the Aldo in his head to conform to the real one. But that question of is this real during the sex is part of what spurs them to continue even as the fear forestalls an end. It could be extremely gratifying if it fulfills their desires! Or upon fulfillment, the revelation could crush them. Really, it's orgasm denial, except one of them is dead.
Then there is also the issue of Posessionsex, in which the present character may actually have been taken over by the absent one, and doesn't feel as if he is in control at all during the scenario. Some fics with Sydney and Hardin from Vagrant Story come to mind, because of Hardin's issues with compulsion and Sydney's issues with having knives for hands, but that's a unique circumstance, in which both Sydney and Hardin are definitely living and Hardin is surrendering control of his limbs and his mind to Sydney. It has a different element at core than Ghostsex, which is the attachment to something that very definitely isn't there.
The other base appeal of Ghostsex is the nature of consent. You can't consent to someone who isn't there, but you can't deny consent to yourself! If you didn't want this, you'd stop, right? If it was all in your head, you could make it go away. You could put down your hand and put away your fantasy and think of pink elephants and Margaret Thatcher and pickled herring. So the nature of the reality of the encounter actually changes the level of consent. If it was all a dream, you don't have anything to worry about. But if it wasn't, you still consented...didn't you?
2) Where the fuck are your arms?!, a.k.a. Sexualized Body Horror
Heat is a cannibal demon, that's no secret. Heat is a cannibal demon with an oral fixation and an extremely limited sexual education. So when Subaru asks Heat to devour him, Heat says yes.
Speaking of Subaru, there was that one time when Seishirou summoned electrical wires and threaded them around under Subaru's skin, and danced with him in the wreckage of a six-car pileup in Roppongi.
France always had a fondness for the grotesque, he will make no pretenses about it, and a particular fondness for England being dead. So when England's revenant corpse walked out of the sea, France wrestled it to the beach and kissed it, to make sure England could still fight back. He even tasted like the sea, how appropriate.
Amaryllis knew it was a dream, because she and Graeme were having sex at all. But Graeme seemed to want it so much, and he kissed her and held her even though he was bleeding all over, and he told her she could have everything. So he gave her everything. First his blood. Then his fingers. And then it all started coming apart...
Sexualized Body Horror is when the character encounters a very physical and ordinarily disgusting obstacle to continued pleasure. Vore, gore, turing people into stone, and various stages of IMPENDING DEATH fall into this category (though necrophilia itself doesn't qualify, but occasionally overlaps, so France only counts half the time).
Basically, if you can make it a status ailment in a video game, and want to include it in sex as an element of horror and not fetishization, it falls into this category. It's not sexual horror if the participants both like the circumstances unconditionally. That's why fightsex isn't immediately sexual horror--in fact, that overlaps rarely--and why necrophilia and consensual sadomasochism and edgeplay don't count either. Heat doesn't initially want to eat Subaru; Subaru resents being turned into a puppet with wires for veins; France finds it much more interesting when England is only mostly dead; Amaryllis wants Graeme whole and healthy but she really wants him, and she can't stop.
Sexualized Body Horror runs especially explicitly on the progression-despite-fear that I was discussing earlier. The characters involved keep going not because of but in spite of a very real physical adversity, be it a time limit or an unwelcome pain or a grotesque invasion, that they cannot ignore. Usually it's a case of wanting to finish too much to stop. Wanting to finish too much to stop is an iron-clad kink, people. That loss of control in the face of desire is even more palpable to me when the characters are up against things that are plain unsexy. If Amaryllis and Graeme want each other so much that they can't stop kissing even as Graeme's body is coming apart, just think about what that says as to how much they want each other, and I find that fucking hot. Disturbing. But hot.
So Ghostsex is for the mental horror, and Sexualized Body Horror is for the physical horror. But for the horrific horror, we have...
X) The better to eat you with, my dear, a.k.a. Horror With a Twist
Farnese is straddling Guts' sword. No, that's not an innuendo.
Corkus is fleeing for his life, when he decides, no, this isn't real at all! Griffith would never betray him. He must be dreaming. Look, there are the lovely ladies he's dreaming of! One of them wraps her arms around him and pulls him in, to rest his head between her breasts. Another rips his legs off at the waist.
Two examples from Berserk, go figure.
Guildenstern and Samantha share a passionate kiss on the cathedral roof, and he tenderly caresses her jaw before stabbing her in the abdomen. "I love you, Samantha, as God is my witness," he says, and she tells him she thought so too before she plummets to her death, spinning after she hits a lower grating.
Kara kills Leoben, again. This time, she uses her chopsticks from the dinner table, shoves him down and straddles him just the way he seems to want her to and stabs him to death. He'll be back in a couple of hours, she knows, in a new body that doesn't have any of her scars, but that's fine, she'll get rid of the next frakking toaster too.
Horror With a Twist uses sex to inflect horror, not horror to inflect sex. It's much more about adding a momentary wash of compassion or arousal or appeal before utterly shanking it and letting the fear take over, and leaving you, the audience, to acknowledge that ha ha you just found something about that sexy you sick fuck. But at Horror With a Twist's heart it still juxtaposes the sex and the fear the same as when the sex is in the higher proportion, and strikes me in the same place.
Honestly, of these three categories that I've brought up, Horror With a Twist is the one most commonly found in media in canon, whereas the other two show up much more often in fic. This is probably because it's easier to imply that Evil is Sexy than it is to sympathetically portray a consensual sexual horror experience. And also kind of because Sexual Horror is honestly not that common or marketable a kink. But I mention Horror With a Twist here because it's often extremely good fodder for extrapolation to the less diluted forms of Sexual Horror. Just think, what if Mal and Ariadne had ten more minutes while Cobb was stuck in that elevator? I know I was thinking about that (and I know Linden and Puel were too, because one of us is going to write it, that's for sure). Seifer had Squall on a cross and electrocuted him, and that spawned scads of fic back in the day. And let us say nothing for James Bond, naked and tied to a bottomless chair. Horror With a Twist is fetish fuel for those of us who want to push things a little further, or it can be, and often is, sexy in its own right.
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So, what kind of characters can engage in Sexual Horror? Remember, just like with the fightsex, it takes characters who comply with the guidelines to create a scenario that complies with the guidelines. But what are the guidelines? I was, up top, talking more about categories than guidelines. That's because Sexual Horror has fewer character requirements than Fightsex and is actually a more universally applicable trope! It's actually really easy to work Sexual Horror into a fandom, though some, namely ones that already have horrific elements in the canon, are easier than others. I wouldn't expect there to be a sexually horrific Hello Kitty fic out there, though now that I've mentioned it there probably is one, but odds are you can foist this kink on any canon or characters you wish and have it remain in character, as long as you understand your characters' fears.
Which means I will be discussing the guidelines by category.
1) Ghostsex is for characters who can't let go. Be it because of obsession, or grief, or unfinished business, Ghostsex requires that at least one party--either the present one OR the absent one, or even both!--have the need to resolve something through manifestation or contact. Characters who easily get over their issues are probably not going to be involved in Ghostsex, unless they are, at the start, unwilling or unknowing accessories to the other's desires. So yeah, one of them has to be hooked. The other, you can just reel in.
Ghostsex also lends itself really well to canons with themes of recovery and acceptance, not just things with a premium on death. Inception is an ideal canon for it, I have found--I really should go looking for some fic out there in which Cobb bangs his subconscious wife for the first few times and is totally not okay--and also Farscape, because John has all of Western Canon and also a half-Scarran half-Sebacean all-mindfuckery neural clone named Harvey in a Hawaiian shirt living in his brain. But there are less obvious but also very probable examples I would like to see: White Collar, however much I don't like Kate. Mad Men, mostly for Don and Rachel. New Trek. BACCANO! Why is there no Ghostsex in Baccano!? (yeah yeah, I know, because they tend to go the violent route instead.) Remember, the party doesn't have to be dead, just absent.
So yeah. In the case of Ghostsex, it's just a matter of finding some unfinished business, and characters who fear confronting it but really desire the confrontation.
2) Sexualized Body Horror is for canons that are already a little fucked up. Unlike with Ghostsex, you're going to have a hard time working unwitting characters up to having their coitus interrupted by a subdermal swarm of locusts and not running screaming down the street. Ew. Characters who can take Sexualized Body Horror all the way to completion tend to either have a lot of passion for the person they are dealing with, or high tolerance levels for the physically scary.
Of course, there's always room to dream! Nightmares can sneak into any fandom or any fic. But you really do have to keep close to the tones of your characters.
X) Horror With a Twist belongs anywhere you want it to. Especially your childhood.
But the key to all this is knowing your characters' (and audience's) fears and being able to exploit them. That's what allows you to get them to the points where you can balance, and then upend, the relationship between their fears and their desires to continue.
It's time for charts again!
Nonlethal ______________________________________ Lethal
Inexplicit _____________________________________ Explicit
Superficial __________________________________ Cathartic
Compartmentalized ________________________ Conflated
This is the same chart as the one in the Fightsex post, which says a lot about the versatility of these designations. But in the case of Sexual Horror, the correlations are not between violence and sex, but between fear and sex, as they have been throughout this manifest.
Lethality, in particular, has a lot to unpack. In fact, let's make three more charts to subdivide it.
Imagined _________________________________ Real
Physically Harmless __________Physically Harmful
Mentally Harmless ____________ Mentally Harmful
The kinds of damage Sexual Horror can do are a little more relevant to the outcome of the scene than in Fightsex. If the Sexual Horror scene is entirely imaginary, it will probably leave little to no physical damage, but oh, does the mental damage ever skyrocket. Likewise, if the scene is real, the physical damage could be debilitating while the mental damage might be less, though it's hard to conceive of a scenario for sexual horror in which both parties emerge mentally unscathed. Consider carefully the manner in which you are intimidating your characters (and your audience), and you'll be able to consider the damage. Put them all together and you get a plain Lethality measure, but it's more worthwhile to consider just what kind of damage is being done.
Using examples again!
a) John Crichton is playing chess with Harvey, who exists only in John's head. Harvey wins, bends John backward over the table, and sucks him off so hard that other members of the crew overhear him and think that Scorpius has infiltrated the ship. The scene is imaginary, and physically nonlethal except maybe for the crick in John's back and the dent in his palm from attempting to shove the black queen into Harvey's eye, but it is a resounding reminder that John is not okay and impacts both his mental and social standing within the crew.
b) John Crichton is at the mercy of the real Scorpius this time, who has strapped John to a contraption and is messing with his body and his mind at the same time, trying to use sex as a distraction (and because Scorpy wants that anyway) while probing his mind for information about wormholes. The scene is real, physically less lethal than it could be but still damaging, and mentally pretty damned lethal because the real Scorpy's never done that to John before. This one is actually canon! Go figure.
c) John Crichton, once again, is at Scorpius' mercy. In addition to the rest of Scorpy's alien anatomy, there is of course the place in his skull where he installs his cooling tube... I don't have to say much else beyond the words literal mindfuck. Whether this one's real or imagined, it has lethal physical and mental repercussions.
Explicitness applies in this scenario to both the sexual and the horrific implications of the scene, and thus also has to be subdivided.
Inexplicit Horror _____________________ Explicit Horror
Inexplicit Sex __________________________ Explicit Sex
It is extremely important to balance these! If the horror is too low and the sex is too proportionately high, it won't read as Sexual Horror at all. If the sex is too low and the horror is too proportionately high, it falls into the Horror with a Twist category and might well be unsexy.
a) After meeting with Zoller for the second time, Shoshana dreams of him: it is Zoller, not Landa, who stays behind to question her about the history of her theater and her relationship with Marcel, and Zoller makes his advances on her explicit while saying the same truly awful things Landa said, smiling the whole way through. He runs his hand up Shoshana's skirt and she finds herself bleeding wherever he touches, and he asks if it is the blood of her family, dead beneath the floorboards. She lets him continue so she doesn't have to say yes. The scene is sexually inexplicit, but horrifically explicit, and doesn't read as sexy at all to Shoshana, or, frankly, to me. Horror With a Twist, not Sexual Horror.
b) After she shoots him, Zoller dreams that he survives not only long enough to shoot her, but long enough to climb on top of her and get what he wanted as she dies. He kisses her and watches the light of Nation's Pride flicker through her eyes, and fucks her as his death scene plays out offscreen, even as his character lives on. The scene is sexually explicit, and with almost equivalent horrific explicitness, and at least to Zoller he finds it difficult to stop even if he's disgusted with his dying dream. Or he would be, if he were living.
Catharsis still only requires one chart, here, because it still measures only the emotional investment and release. Again, if your Sexual Horror scene is nonlethal and inexplicit, it had better be cathartic.
Conflation, in the case of Sexual Horror, is the character's mental correlation between fear and desire. Characters who compartmentalize desire and fear will have different results in overcoming that fear than characters who correlate them. Honestly, I think the ones who correlate sex and fear have a harder time connecting with Sexual Horror than the ones who compartmentalize.
a) Arthur compartmentalizes sex and fear; Arthur compartmentalizes nearly everything. So when Mal corners Arthur in one of Dom's dreamscapes and, almost conversationally, gets on her knees and fiddles with his suspenders, Arthur is still thinking about finding a way out. She wants to flirt, and he knows this is a dream, he can ask Dom what she was up to if he gets out of it, and it's fine, it's fine, it's fine even if she starts doing things to him that she never would have done if she was alive. And then she puts a gun to his balls and her mouth on the rest. (See, Compartmentalization doesn't get in the way! Well. Until she shoots him.)
b) Kongming fears very little, but the fears he does have he cherishes, for they remind him that he is not a god, nor expected to be one. But the fear of facing Zhou Yu on the battlefield is real and acknowledged, and when it plays out in Kongming's head Kongming cannot imagine winning. He finds himself made captive, exploited before the conquering armies of Sun, and Zhou Yu exposing to all of his people just how much of a mortal man Kongming is. It is an image that Kongming cannot meditate away. (Partial compartmentalization, partial conflation--definitely hot scene, at least to me, because it sets up the conflict despite the balance.)
c) Albert is a hundred and thirteen years old and dying in his bed of poisoned wounds that Yuber has just inflicted, and he laughs, for perhaps the first time in two decades. His body is frail and failing him, but he can still feel Yuber touching it, still feel the demon's breath pounding in his blood. He takes days to die, convulsing and coughing and leaving parts of himself behind, and all of his last thoughts are on his pride and his shadow, the means by which he has affected the future. (Extreme conflation! Not quite sexy unless you're kinked on other things in the scene.)
So here's the part where I actually bring myself back into it. Connecting sex and fear is not the same as conflating them. I can maintain that fear and desire are separately motivated, but for me, the presence of one will often have a profound effect on the other. Most likely, the process of engaging those fears through fic is gratifying to me for the same reason that the scenes themselves are gratifying: I find the process of challenging and overcoming fear to be extremely sexy. Sexual Horror gets me in the same place and the same ways as challenge, adversity, and conflicts of control.
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