"To love fully and deeply puts us at risk. When we love we are changed utterly."
Quote by bell hooks, from All About Love: New Visions.
In which I decide to make good on a terrible decision...
Right now I'm recovering from a case of fic burnout, which isn't the best place to be for me because I tend to get really depressed, moody, and full of self-loathing. So I decided to do something else to keep myself occupied until I feel ready to write again - write a ship manifesto.
...just kidding. It's not really a ship manifesto so much as it's me going meta on my own works (or just the Pilots & Poison 'verse and the Sam/Tron relationship in it) and wondering about how I wrote them, why I wrote them, and whether I succeeded or not.
I didn't claim that prompt with an agenda in mind. I just wanted to write something for post-Legacy Tron. And I don't believe in writing with an agenda anyway - preachy fiction is not fun to read at all (like this fucking book). But, if you're me and you have an intense hatred of modern-day k-dramas, then every relationship fic ever becomes an agenda. I have issues.
This 'verse? Went beyond agendas. I'm surprised I haven't lost my head trying to organize this not-mess into a coherent whole. But since writer!me is a bit bored with waiting out the burnout I might as well start picking apart these characters and their relationship. In essay format. Because I love writing essays.
I tried to write a ship manifesto before, but realized I didn't have what it took to write one and I didn't really read outside my own 'verse anyway so I couldn't link to resources and fics/artwork at the end of the manifesto. But I really want to sound smart talk in great detail about Sam, Tron, and the relationship I built up around them so I decided to give it another go... in my notebooks. And failed, multiple times. Until one sleep-deprived day in Art 201 I asked myself, "Do we want to know if we successfully wrote Sam as demi/gray-A?"
Now I'm waiting for my new copy of All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks to arrive for Amazon. I have printed copies of limyaael's rants next to my laptop. I'm looking through my memories and bookmarks for discussions/meta on sex. I am looking for references to quote in the essay. WHY.
About that question about whether or not I successfully wrote Sam as a demi/gray-A character...
So I just rediscovered this post from asexual_fandom @ DW about writing sex scenes in my bookmarks which makes me wonder just how well I wrote Sam as a demisexual. I didn't mean to write him as one - I was coming out of a fandom with a confident sexual main character (I was coming out of a couple fandoms with confident sexual characters) so confident sexual main characters became a default - but the more I wrote and the more I introspected the more I realized Sam just fit better as a demisexual. The movie/canon didn't give us a good read of his (non)sexuality (and I will never, ever stop talking about how happy I was with the movie's ending) and there was enough to go off of that I could write him as not just not-straight but also as ace/somewhere on the ace spectrum.
It was like a switch flipped in my head. One thing led to another like a five-year-old row of dominoes falling over and I was suddenly building this...thing that was everything I wanted to read/seen explored in fic since I was first introduced to bell hooks in the 11th grade. That is the reason why I am willing to write such a serious essay about Sam and Tron, because this ship is making me do all the things.
I guess the point of this entire post, besides serving as a kind of preface, is to ask this of people who read We Are Pilots and Le Disko:
Did Sam come off as demi/gray-A? Did I do it successfully? Or was there something I could've done better? Should I have made it obvious up front (even though this wasn't something I intended to do) or was keeping it subtle/understated a more successful route?
And this is the first paragraph I wrote in my notebook while running on a little less than three hours of sleep:
I don’t know if I succeeded in portraying a relationship with a demisexual/gray-A character. The sheer amount of porn suggests I only tacked on the (non)sexual orientation to force it to happen or because I want it to happen, but I never wrote Sam as anything other than a gray-A character. The kind of gray-A I chose to write is someone who needs an emotional connection/commitment to get physical, and the sheer amount of spoons needed meant that Sam would maintain very few close relationships with people. His relationship with Tron was borne from an emotional connection and he throws his whole weight behind it. I wrote in single lines and hints that he had tried with other people when he was younger but eventually gave up because they just didn’t work. He wasn’t connecting, he wasn’t interested, he didn’t find a reason to be emotionally invested in another person.
In which I decide to make good on a terrible decision...
Right now I'm recovering from a case of fic burnout, which isn't the best place to be for me because I tend to get really depressed, moody, and full of self-loathing. So I decided to do something else to keep myself occupied until I feel ready to write again - write a ship manifesto.
...just kidding. It's not really a ship manifesto so much as it's me going meta on my own works (or just the Pilots & Poison 'verse and the Sam/Tron relationship in it) and wondering about how I wrote them, why I wrote them, and whether I succeeded or not.
I didn't claim that prompt with an agenda in mind. I just wanted to write something for post-Legacy Tron. And I don't believe in writing with an agenda anyway - preachy fiction is not fun to read at all (like this fucking book). But, if you're me and you have an intense hatred of modern-day k-dramas, then every relationship fic ever becomes an agenda. I have issues.
This 'verse? Went beyond agendas. I'm surprised I haven't lost my head trying to organize this not-mess into a coherent whole. But since writer!me is a bit bored with waiting out the burnout I might as well start picking apart these characters and their relationship. In essay format. Because I love writing essays.
I tried to write a ship manifesto before, but realized I didn't have what it took to write one and I didn't really read outside my own 'verse anyway so I couldn't link to resources and fics/artwork at the end of the manifesto. But I really want to sound smart talk in great detail about Sam, Tron, and the relationship I built up around them so I decided to give it another go... in my notebooks. And failed, multiple times. Until one sleep-deprived day in Art 201 I asked myself, "Do we want to know if we successfully wrote Sam as demi/gray-A?"
Now I'm waiting for my new copy of All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks to arrive for Amazon. I have printed copies of limyaael's rants next to my laptop. I'm looking through my memories and bookmarks for discussions/meta on sex. I am looking for references to quote in the essay. WHY.
About that question about whether or not I successfully wrote Sam as a demi/gray-A character...
So I just rediscovered this post from asexual_fandom @ DW about writing sex scenes in my bookmarks which makes me wonder just how well I wrote Sam as a demisexual. I didn't mean to write him as one - I was coming out of a fandom with a confident sexual main character (I was coming out of a couple fandoms with confident sexual characters) so confident sexual main characters became a default - but the more I wrote and the more I introspected the more I realized Sam just fit better as a demisexual. The movie/canon didn't give us a good read of his (non)sexuality (and I will never, ever stop talking about how happy I was with the movie's ending) and there was enough to go off of that I could write him as not just not-straight but also as ace/somewhere on the ace spectrum.
It was like a switch flipped in my head. One thing led to another like a five-year-old row of dominoes falling over and I was suddenly building this...thing that was everything I wanted to read/seen explored in fic since I was first introduced to bell hooks in the 11th grade. That is the reason why I am willing to write such a serious essay about Sam and Tron, because this ship is making me do all the things.
I guess the point of this entire post, besides serving as a kind of preface, is to ask this of people who read We Are Pilots and Le Disko:
Did Sam come off as demi/gray-A? Did I do it successfully? Or was there something I could've done better? Should I have made it obvious up front (even though this wasn't something I intended to do) or was keeping it subtle/understated a more successful route?
And this is the first paragraph I wrote in my notebook while running on a little less than three hours of sleep:
I don’t know if I succeeded in portraying a relationship with a demisexual/gray-A character. The sheer amount of porn suggests I only tacked on the (non)sexual orientation to force it to happen or because I want it to happen, but I never wrote Sam as anything other than a gray-A character. The kind of gray-A I chose to write is someone who needs an emotional connection/commitment to get physical, and the sheer amount of spoons needed meant that Sam would maintain very few close relationships with people. His relationship with Tron was borne from an emotional connection and he throws his whole weight behind it. I wrote in single lines and hints that he had tried with other people when he was younger but eventually gave up because they just didn’t work. He wasn’t connecting, he wasn’t interested, he didn’t find a reason to be emotionally invested in another person.