Last Days: Things That Bug Me
I was originally going to post this when, you know, I'd actually finished the fic, but I ran out of patience and decided that I might as well post commentary as I go along.
I'm using a nuclear war as a background for a love story, sort of.
Yeah, that's... Not terribly tasteful, Scarlet.
At least I didn't use a real tragedy as a background for a cheesy romance, but, erm, I still feel a bit... weird about it sometimes.
---
Dan's sexuality
From chapter 7: 'It could have been due to the fact that he was a kinky bastard...'
A few weeks after I wrote this, I looked back on this line and thought, 'OH GOD. THIS SMELLS OF 'KINKY BISEXUAL' CLICHE. That's... really not what I wanted to write, at all. Dan is not a kinky bisexual. He's has kinks (in canon), and he's bisexual (in the fic, at least), but he is not a Kinky Bisexual.
'Kinky' is a bit of a tricky concept. It's one thing to say that someone has a 'kink' (that is, a sexual/emotional preference for something), but it's another thing to say that a person is 'kinky', because it usually infers that they're a deviant. Deviance can be sexy; lots of people like breaking taboos, but... I'm not very keen how sexual behaviors tend to get separated into categories of 'normal' and 'not normal' and all the positive/negative cultural baggage that goes along with that. (See: Good People Have Good Sex.)
That said, Dan might view himself as a Kinky Bisexual, having internalised some of society's attitudes to bisexuality. But that didn't cross my mind when I originally wrote that sentence. It was really just a throwaway line, and then I looked at it some time later and thought, 'Uh....'
I have a crapload of other issues about my ability to write queer male sexuality as a slasher, but I don't feel like picking them apart right now.
---
Rorschach's issues.
When I started writing the fic, I really didn't want to sugarcoat Rorschach's problems, or Daniel's perception of them. Let's be fair: Rorschach is almost your stereotypical Scary Crazy Person. (He even gets a mention on the Automatically Violent trope page.) He's aggressive. He's got a reputation for being unpredictable. He flouts social norms. He looks like a mess, and pays little attention to hygiene. He's not the sort of guy you'd want to sit next to on public transport.
In the comic, when Dan first finds Rorschach in his kitchen, he looks horrified. He's nervous around him. Later, when Dan discusses Rorschach with Laurie, he doesn't exactly sound as if he's filled with empathy for the guy. ('I mean, look at Rorschach, the condition he's in. He was normal once. Sure, he was quiet, he was grim, but he still had all the buttons on his over-coat.') Pity, maybe, but not empathy.
Initially, I sided with Dan. Rorschach was the Scary Crazy Person, an untrustworthy liability. As the fic progressed, though, I began to see how ableist this whole attitude was. I'm not without my own prejudices towards mental illness, and I've only recently really started to examine them. It was... problematic, to say the least, to view Rorschach as some sort of broken monster. For a start, he's an abuse survivor, and he's really been through the mill; he's certainly not irrational, although his rationality might not always be obvious to a 'normal' onlooker. Hell, even if some of his problems were just the result of messed-up brain chemistry*, it's still incredibly dodgy to see him as an inhuman freak.
There's a whole mess of issues surrounding perceptions and portrayals of mental illness, and I'm not exactly the best person to write about them. But, y'know, Rorschach got me thinking about it, and I wish I'd handled the subject with a bit more sensitivity from the start.
Of course, that doesn't mean that Dan is suddenly going to become a bastion of understanding. Dan's fairly tolerant of Rorschach, but he's no saint.
* Speaking as someone who does have messed-up brain chemistry that sometimes impedes my ability to function normally: if you view me as an inhuman freak, then I shall just assume that you are a fuckknuckle. There seems to be this persistent attitude that if a person is mentally ill due to abuse, then that makes it relatively 'okay' (note the word relatively, as abuse survivors still get a lot of shit from people)... But if you're mentally ill because you drew the short straw and got stuck with wacky brain chemicals, then that makes you a scary and/or pathetic monster. Fuck that noise.
---
Things That Don't Really Bug Me But I Want To Comment On Them Anyway
Rorschach's childhood and its impact on his sexuality.
I'm writing him as having been physically and psychologically abused, not sexually abused as such. (Although, the GN did say that he'd been 'exposed to the worst excesses of a prostitute's lifestyle', which leaves a lot of horrible stuff up to the imagination.) There's still a lot of crossover there, though. It's fanon in my brain that his mother would be especially cruel to him after she'd had a customer, out of resentment, so he associates sex with guilt. To him, recreational sex is something that people do as a means to exert power over each other, something degrading - basically, everything that's nasty about the darker aspects of the sex trade. (I imagine that he's slightly more okay with the thought of procreational sex between married men and women providing that they do it in the missionary position and don't enjoy it too much. To quote Butch Hancock, '...Sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love.')
Then there's his own homophobia, as if the poor guy didn't have enough issues to deal with already, and there's the fact that he grew up in a 1950s boys' home, which probably wasn't a very healthy, sexuality-friendly place to begin with.
---
I'm sure I'll find more to waffle about. In an ideal world, this post would have been a nice and tidy essay-thing... But this isn't an ideal world, and I just wanted to get some stuff out my system and navel-gaze a bit.
I'm using a nuclear war as a background for a love story, sort of.
Yeah, that's... Not terribly tasteful, Scarlet.
At least I didn't use a real tragedy as a background for a cheesy romance, but, erm, I still feel a bit... weird about it sometimes.
---
Dan's sexuality
From chapter 7: 'It could have been due to the fact that he was a kinky bastard...'
A few weeks after I wrote this, I looked back on this line and thought, 'OH GOD. THIS SMELLS OF 'KINKY BISEXUAL' CLICHE. That's... really not what I wanted to write, at all. Dan is not a kinky bisexual. He's has kinks (in canon), and he's bisexual (in the fic, at least), but he is not a Kinky Bisexual.
'Kinky' is a bit of a tricky concept. It's one thing to say that someone has a 'kink' (that is, a sexual/emotional preference for something), but it's another thing to say that a person is 'kinky', because it usually infers that they're a deviant. Deviance can be sexy; lots of people like breaking taboos, but... I'm not very keen how sexual behaviors tend to get separated into categories of 'normal' and 'not normal' and all the positive/negative cultural baggage that goes along with that. (See: Good People Have Good Sex.)
That said, Dan might view himself as a Kinky Bisexual, having internalised some of society's attitudes to bisexuality. But that didn't cross my mind when I originally wrote that sentence. It was really just a throwaway line, and then I looked at it some time later and thought, 'Uh....'
I have a crapload of other issues about my ability to write queer male sexuality as a slasher, but I don't feel like picking them apart right now.
---
Rorschach's issues.
When I started writing the fic, I really didn't want to sugarcoat Rorschach's problems, or Daniel's perception of them. Let's be fair: Rorschach is almost your stereotypical Scary Crazy Person. (He even gets a mention on the Automatically Violent trope page.) He's aggressive. He's got a reputation for being unpredictable. He flouts social norms. He looks like a mess, and pays little attention to hygiene. He's not the sort of guy you'd want to sit next to on public transport.
In the comic, when Dan first finds Rorschach in his kitchen, he looks horrified. He's nervous around him. Later, when Dan discusses Rorschach with Laurie, he doesn't exactly sound as if he's filled with empathy for the guy. ('I mean, look at Rorschach, the condition he's in. He was normal once. Sure, he was quiet, he was grim, but he still had all the buttons on his over-coat.') Pity, maybe, but not empathy.
Initially, I sided with Dan. Rorschach was the Scary Crazy Person, an untrustworthy liability. As the fic progressed, though, I began to see how ableist this whole attitude was. I'm not without my own prejudices towards mental illness, and I've only recently really started to examine them. It was... problematic, to say the least, to view Rorschach as some sort of broken monster. For a start, he's an abuse survivor, and he's really been through the mill; he's certainly not irrational, although his rationality might not always be obvious to a 'normal' onlooker. Hell, even if some of his problems were just the result of messed-up brain chemistry*, it's still incredibly dodgy to see him as an inhuman freak.
There's a whole mess of issues surrounding perceptions and portrayals of mental illness, and I'm not exactly the best person to write about them. But, y'know, Rorschach got me thinking about it, and I wish I'd handled the subject with a bit more sensitivity from the start.
Of course, that doesn't mean that Dan is suddenly going to become a bastion of understanding. Dan's fairly tolerant of Rorschach, but he's no saint.
* Speaking as someone who does have messed-up brain chemistry that sometimes impedes my ability to function normally: if you view me as an inhuman freak, then I shall just assume that you are a fuckknuckle. There seems to be this persistent attitude that if a person is mentally ill due to abuse, then that makes it relatively 'okay' (note the word relatively, as abuse survivors still get a lot of shit from people)... But if you're mentally ill because you drew the short straw and got stuck with wacky brain chemicals, then that makes you a scary and/or pathetic monster. Fuck that noise.
---
Things That Don't Really Bug Me But I Want To Comment On Them Anyway
Rorschach's childhood and its impact on his sexuality.
I'm writing him as having been physically and psychologically abused, not sexually abused as such. (Although, the GN did say that he'd been 'exposed to the worst excesses of a prostitute's lifestyle', which leaves a lot of horrible stuff up to the imagination.) There's still a lot of crossover there, though. It's fanon in my brain that his mother would be especially cruel to him after she'd had a customer, out of resentment, so he associates sex with guilt. To him, recreational sex is something that people do as a means to exert power over each other, something degrading - basically, everything that's nasty about the darker aspects of the sex trade. (I imagine that he's slightly more okay with the thought of procreational sex between married men and women providing that they do it in the missionary position and don't enjoy it too much. To quote Butch Hancock, '...Sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love.')
Then there's his own homophobia, as if the poor guy didn't have enough issues to deal with already, and there's the fact that he grew up in a 1950s boys' home, which probably wasn't a very healthy, sexuality-friendly place to begin with.
---
I'm sure I'll find more to waffle about. In an ideal world, this post would have been a nice and tidy essay-thing... But this isn't an ideal world, and I just wanted to get some stuff out my system and navel-gaze a bit.