What do I want from femslash? I want partners.
havocthecat wrote this great post: What do I want from femslash? I'm in it for the characterisation..
I've read that, and thought about how brilliantly she wrote about what she liked and wanted to do my own because I so rarely think about why I like the things I like. I know there's a specific type of fic that draws me in like nothing else and as I grow more comfortable with femslash being my favourite (I like het the way I like meat in my diet, a rare treat: wonderfully prepared).
I want women to be in love. Skip aheads to committed relationships are some of my favourite femslash. I like curtain fic, pregnancy fic, baby fic, kid fic, fic where they go to parent teacher conferences and kid one's been burning things in magic class and kid two just wants to play kickball all the damn time. I like huge expansive world building fic where you have to fight dragons on your way out to buy curtains. (this may actually be my favourite type of fic). The world shapes you. Makes you who you are and who you are in a relationship is you, but it's a different you.
I like who women are when they're in love. Not that they're not them, but it's a facet of their personality that speaks to me. It's not my life. I am not, nor have I been in love. I have no children. (I have some adorable cats.) It's the part of life I don't have, that I haven't experienced, that fascinates me so. What is it like to wake up next to the same person every day? Does she love her partner's hair when it's messed up? Does one of them snore? Does she forget to wash the dragon blood off her armour when she gets home late?
Domestic world building. Is this a thing? It's the little pieces that make a world. The way no one drinks coffee because it hasn't been discovered yet or the way the trees smell. Little pieces make worlds feel real to me. (thanks
lanna_kitty). I like falling into a world, even if its simply a magical one, or one where the holodeck is your standard first date. This works for all kinds of couples, but there's a worldly flavour of femslash that's my favourite.
Two of them against the world, or saving the world, making the world better: I like when they're united against the odds. I like when their abilities mesh so together they're a little bit better and dealing with whatever they have to deal with.
Women who fall in love are my weakness. It's the state of being in love, where they're just a little bit more than themselves. The impact a person has on those in her life is what fascinates me. The little courtesies like bringing each other coffee in the morning. My life has always been so individual. What I want from fic is the sharing. Crawling into bed next to each other, watching the birds outside of the window. When women are talking or not talking, sometimes simply being together in the same space: that's what fascinates me.
The permutations of that and how things grow together between two women are what draw me in. I'm not a stickler for canon, or certain interpretations of the characters. I think every writer makes a world unique, complete with the characters as that writer chooses to construct them, and there are some who just pull me in like gravity. Some stories have so much passion, such rich and complex emotions that I sit back from them and know that this is humanity, spread naked on the page.
It fascinates me so because there are levels of what I don't know in myself and don't know in others that are there and I feel like I get it, in a way I never do on my own. Perhaps it relates to the way I process emotions (a little off), but something about women's emotions as it relates to women they love just fills me with a kind of joy that I don't get from anything but femslash.
I love men, and occasionally one will touch me in a story, but rarely the way fics about women do. Two women, talking to each other, about each other or avoiding each other is the crack of fic for me. There's an indulgence to sinking into a fic that's deep and emotional that's like a warm bath. This kind of it, like lavender bubble bath, is my absolute favourite. (yes, other kinds are out there and they exist but damn...is femslash is the height of it for me).
There's the physical side to, how when they touch its everything that I like and am attracted to and it's all right there. (perhaps this is how some women feel about slash?). Femslash where they talk and then have sex and then cuddle, or just lie in bed next to each other, listening to each other breathe. Togetherness, in a world where they exist as a partnership. That's what I want. They can fight and struggle but I like to know they will be together at the end of it.
Posted in the mirror verse at http://oparu.dreamwidth.org/327077.html with
comments.