Moar Persian meta
Aaaaaaaaaaah!
15 000 words of Byzantinebatch porn down. And Jaffar hasn't even come yet! Omfg. Bear in mind that Of Roses Unfurling and The Secret Orchard were both around 16 000 words. WHY ARE MY FICS GETTING LONGER AND LONGER?
And it's just fluffy PWP, too. Not the epic dark heavy poetic stuff that the Falconverse is. In fact, some of the descriptions sound almost mechanical in comparison because the narrator is different and everything. Byzantinebatch's voice is quite interesting and I'm enjoying being inside his head. He is very sensible and not crazyemo like Jaffar/Princess have been in the Falconverse, which is *such* a relief. No more Sam Tyler-level bursting into tears every five minutes! It's simple, happy PWP and I'm so relieved to write it for once. I'm also glad to be writing some slash again, so it's spicing up the mix quite nicely.
I also realised that as much as I hate euphemisms ("the blond man") and whatnot, I keep using "the king" and "the queen" and refer to them as husband/wife all the time, but that that comes from Byzantinebatch's perspective. He's not on first-name terms with them yet because he's there as a guest, as the ambassador rather than as a friend (although, obviously, this changes soon enough), so he isn't calling them Jaffar and Yassamin yet. So in his letter to his brother (which the entire fic consists of), he calls them by their titles. And also the husband/the wife because he's keenly aware of their relationship, for obvious reasons.
It's also interesting because this is the first time I've written a guy being anxious about fancying another guy--in properfic, at least. But the main twist, considering their respective cultures and the times, is that not that M/M desire in and of itself is bad. It's just that a grown man fancying another grown man (instead of a teenaged boy) is bad. Christianity had been crushing the ancient manlove customs of Antiquity for several centuries by the time the story is set (vaguely in the early 800s), but there was still some of that stuff going on in Byzantium. And man/boy love was all the rage in Persia. But god forbid if you fancied a man who was old enough to grow a beard. So Byzantinebatch has a tiny bit of Christian sinner angst but it's not as big as his "Oh god, does me fancying a fortysomething guy make me somehow womanly? Is being like that somehow bad?" angst. It's also ironic in that the dirtiest kink Jaffar and Yassamin learned in this 'verse came from the Byzantine side, so even if this story is told from the outsider perspective of a Christian guy, it's the Persians who think he's a filthy bastard!
Of course, that perspective makes things Problematic (TM) as it's also the first time I've written from the POV of a non-Persian, and I bet some arse is going to think that it's the good old "Westerner goes to the East and omg they are so weird and different and also sexy" sort of Victorian Orientalist thing. *le sigh* I'm trying to basically keep that stuff to a minimum and also make zero value judgements about the customs Byzantinebatch observes--in fact, in half of them, I try to even make the point that the Persians were way ahead of the rest of the world when it came to all kinds of things. Although I'm sure some kneejerky person can find racism in it if she wants to, no matter what I write. It's a bit how in Ghazal, we wrote the Shaykh as a concerned, stern guy who was basically the local equivalent of a stern, concerned Christian archbishop, but we were worried that some people would read him as a mad mullah or something because he just happened to be a Muslim. Even though the Shaykh was a good, honest man at heart, even if fairly stuck-up--in a normal Who story, the Shaykh would've been the local leader who would side with the Doctor against aliens. So even if you deliberately set out to write outside the stereotypes, they are so well-ingrained into popular culture *and* liberal hair-trigger suspicions of oppression that it's really hard to make people see past those stereotypes. They kind of get shoved into those slots before you've even had the chance to explain who the characters really are (and it's not like you can pause to go on a ramble about what you meant or make the character tell everyone who he is and what he's like. I'm not Susannah Clarke with her endless fucking short story-length footnotes or Chinballs with his "hi, my name is this and let me tell you what my job is and what I am like as a person" dialogue). That'd just be poor writing.
Oh, and there is genderfuckery about, again. Because it's one of my fics. Of course. But in that, too, just as in my other stories, I try to approach it through a very medieval understanding. So that a grown man's homosexual desire would be seen as something feminine and that this is how both Byzantinebatch and Jaffar see it, and that some of the Princess's tomboyishness is seen as a, well, boy thing. I bet some folks would want to find something to whine about that, too, but again, like fuck am I going to inject postmodern post-gender queer identities on medieval people. They'll be seeing it through masculine/feminine polarities, but I like to take those and mix them up a bit, so that even if that duality exists, it's not fixed to one physical sex and I'll have both men with femme aspects and a woman with some boyish aspects. It's not as crazy as with Wilderness, where I went completely into the deep end with the mystical ideas of those dualities being first stirred/aroused/heightened so that they could explode and merge and dissolve (as is still done in Baul and Tantric mysticism), but yeah. I like a bit of genderfuckery in my het.
...I've rambled so much again, haven't I? I really should get back to actually writing the fic. My main point is that I can't believe how much this stuff is making me develop as a writer--taking writing conventions and even cultural ideas I don't subscribe to and then writing them anyway, but with a twist. It's very educational!
15 000 words of Byzantinebatch porn down. And Jaffar hasn't even come yet! Omfg. Bear in mind that Of Roses Unfurling and The Secret Orchard were both around 16 000 words. WHY ARE MY FICS GETTING LONGER AND LONGER?
And it's just fluffy PWP, too. Not the epic dark heavy poetic stuff that the Falconverse is. In fact, some of the descriptions sound almost mechanical in comparison because the narrator is different and everything. Byzantinebatch's voice is quite interesting and I'm enjoying being inside his head. He is very sensible and not crazyemo like Jaffar/Princess have been in the Falconverse, which is *such* a relief. No more Sam Tyler-level bursting into tears every five minutes! It's simple, happy PWP and I'm so relieved to write it for once. I'm also glad to be writing some slash again, so it's spicing up the mix quite nicely.
I also realised that as much as I hate euphemisms ("the blond man") and whatnot, I keep using "the king" and "the queen" and refer to them as husband/wife all the time, but that that comes from Byzantinebatch's perspective. He's not on first-name terms with them yet because he's there as a guest, as the ambassador rather than as a friend (although, obviously, this changes soon enough), so he isn't calling them Jaffar and Yassamin yet. So in his letter to his brother (which the entire fic consists of), he calls them by their titles. And also the husband/the wife because he's keenly aware of their relationship, for obvious reasons.
It's also interesting because this is the first time I've written a guy being anxious about fancying another guy--in properfic, at least. But the main twist, considering their respective cultures and the times, is that not that M/M desire in and of itself is bad. It's just that a grown man fancying another grown man (instead of a teenaged boy) is bad. Christianity had been crushing the ancient manlove customs of Antiquity for several centuries by the time the story is set (vaguely in the early 800s), but there was still some of that stuff going on in Byzantium. And man/boy love was all the rage in Persia. But god forbid if you fancied a man who was old enough to grow a beard. So Byzantinebatch has a tiny bit of Christian sinner angst but it's not as big as his "Oh god, does me fancying a fortysomething guy make me somehow womanly? Is being like that somehow bad?" angst. It's also ironic in that the dirtiest kink Jaffar and Yassamin learned in this 'verse came from the Byzantine side, so even if this story is told from the outsider perspective of a Christian guy, it's the Persians who think he's a filthy bastard!
Of course, that perspective makes things Problematic (TM) as it's also the first time I've written from the POV of a non-Persian, and I bet some arse is going to think that it's the good old "Westerner goes to the East and omg they are so weird and different and also sexy" sort of Victorian Orientalist thing. *le sigh* I'm trying to basically keep that stuff to a minimum and also make zero value judgements about the customs Byzantinebatch observes--in fact, in half of them, I try to even make the point that the Persians were way ahead of the rest of the world when it came to all kinds of things. Although I'm sure some kneejerky person can find racism in it if she wants to, no matter what I write. It's a bit how in Ghazal, we wrote the Shaykh as a concerned, stern guy who was basically the local equivalent of a stern, concerned Christian archbishop, but we were worried that some people would read him as a mad mullah or something because he just happened to be a Muslim. Even though the Shaykh was a good, honest man at heart, even if fairly stuck-up--in a normal Who story, the Shaykh would've been the local leader who would side with the Doctor against aliens. So even if you deliberately set out to write outside the stereotypes, they are so well-ingrained into popular culture *and* liberal hair-trigger suspicions of oppression that it's really hard to make people see past those stereotypes. They kind of get shoved into those slots before you've even had the chance to explain who the characters really are (and it's not like you can pause to go on a ramble about what you meant or make the character tell everyone who he is and what he's like. I'm not Susannah Clarke with her endless fucking short story-length footnotes or Chinballs with his "hi, my name is this and let me tell you what my job is and what I am like as a person" dialogue). That'd just be poor writing.
Oh, and there is genderfuckery about, again. Because it's one of my fics. Of course. But in that, too, just as in my other stories, I try to approach it through a very medieval understanding. So that a grown man's homosexual desire would be seen as something feminine and that this is how both Byzantinebatch and Jaffar see it, and that some of the Princess's tomboyishness is seen as a, well, boy thing. I bet some folks would want to find something to whine about that, too, but again, like fuck am I going to inject postmodern post-gender queer identities on medieval people. They'll be seeing it through masculine/feminine polarities, but I like to take those and mix them up a bit, so that even if that duality exists, it's not fixed to one physical sex and I'll have both men with femme aspects and a woman with some boyish aspects. It's not as crazy as with Wilderness, where I went completely into the deep end with the mystical ideas of those dualities being first stirred/aroused/heightened so that they could explode and merge and dissolve (as is still done in Baul and Tantric mysticism), but yeah. I like a bit of genderfuckery in my het.
...I've rambled so much again, haven't I? I really should get back to actually writing the fic. My main point is that I can't believe how much this stuff is making me develop as a writer--taking writing conventions and even cultural ideas I don't subscribe to and then writing them anyway, but with a twist. It's very educational!