Let's talk meme

[petronia]

From fahye:

Pick a character I write, and I will give you the top five ideas/concepts/other I keep in mind while writing that character that I believe are essential to depicting them accurately. This includes both original characters and characters about whom I write fanfic.Actually, you can extend that to any character I've read a lot of fic about...

Comments

[petronia]

This made me realize I almost never wrote Kagetora. XD It was always Naoe or Chiaki or someone else.

1) Doesn't ratiocinate. Is why I didn't write him, probably - I don't usually write out feelings so much as external actions indicative of emotional activity.

2) Abuse victim with no baseline for normal relationships. I wouldn't say he has borderline personality disorder, precisely, but he had the sort of background that creates BPD. Takaya gains friendships with a few genuinely nice people - Yuzuru, Ushio, et al - that are not warped irreparably by power dynamics, but he's not allowed to be saved by them.

3) That idea Mary Renault had about Alexander the Great, that a charismatic war commander has the same personality as a great courtesan. In Kagetora it's a dark trait, something like the seductive behaviour exhibited by sexually abused children. He's conflicted about it, naturally, so doesn't/can't always control it, and that makes it ten times as dangerous.

4) Extending that to the whole idea of the joousama uke... the thing that people do, right, is to take these nexuses of behavioural responses to female roles/stereotypes and isolate them so that there's no privilege differential, or the differential doesn't come from gender, and see what happens to them. Intentionally defuse them, I think, in a lot of cases. Like, a princess isn't a person, she's an object - of idealization, desire, resentment, markers of purity and defilement. But a prince is a person, so a prince can take up those weapons and put them down, for a happy ending. It's so you can play, not fight. Or just put yourself in the other person's shoes. The creepy thing about Mirage after a while is that it doesn't defuse. Kagetora's always in danger of being raped. And it reads prurient, like a fantasy. I'm not going to say this can't happen in reality, that a man can't be faced with pervasive sexual violence because he's somehow threatening, because one encounters analogous RL examples - sometimes it doesn't even have anything to do with queerness. It can happen to het dudes, that they get stuck in the queer/girl category. And it's not that Kagetora's desire is threatening, that's not the remotest issue - just, dudes have some kind of problem with him being in charge, like they would if he were a woman and they were horribly sexist. Because they can't separate Kagetora the person from the effect he has on their sexuality, so it's no longer about following orders or not, it's about bending over and taking it. I mean, that's the central tension of the books, really, because that's Naoe's problem, but it's nuts because WHY? There's no good answer. Everyone in the books makes a case for essentialism, that this is just how Kagetora is, it's his fault dudes cannot treat him like a dude. And the reader can write it off as self-justification, sure, but you're not presented with an alternative construct for making sense of the WTF. Instead, I got the impression you were supposed to enjoy it.

5) Do I need a 5? XD; He's a very narrow person, in some ways. Doesn't bother to learn stuff, doesn't bend. Nnnnngh you know I reread one of my old entries a while back, something re: how Kagetora's and Naoe's personalities affect ppl differently depending on gender, and why. I was really disturbed by how well it applied to the BBC version of Sherlock Holmes. XD;;; I had to go away and not think about it, basically.

[petronia]

Sure, go right ahead - I may not answer comments though, this week is really crazy for me. XD;