So, there was a really good question on
OC Question Of The Day about what inspired your OCs. And I went and wrote
a whole damn essay about Laura, so I thought I'd crosspost it here as well, especially as mine was just a reply to an original post; it deserves a post of its own.
So, here we go. Slightly revised and updated.
Laura Erika Barring, of the
Devilry trilogy (in)fame:
This was little Lars-Erik in the original film (the 1941 version of A Woman’s Face).
Aaaand as you can see from the way Uncle Torsten behaves with the kid-Connie was one of those actors whose villainous ‘I want to murder you’ look was indistinguishable from an ‘I want to ravish you wildly’ look, and unfortunately, as you can see, he did not turn this off even with children or animals-there were so many layers of utter fucking wrongness here that… yeah.
But as toddlers are not really my game, I wondered how Torsten would behave if the kid (who stands in the way of his inheriting a fortune of millions, thanks to which Torsten wants the kid bumped off in the film) was an attractive, sexually mature teenaged girl instead. Well. Considering his entire (female-coded!) character is powerless, except for the dark hypnotic sexual dominance he can exert over women, to the point where they’d even consider murdering children to get more of his hot evil cock… well, of course he’d seduce the girl. Duh.
Of course, this was still deeply fucked up, but it offered all kinds of interesting possibilities, because fuck knows *I* was a horny and intelligent little bitch in my early teens. And as the whole creepy old man molester angle wasn’t appealing to me, and as I kept on seeing the whole seduction from the girl’s point of view, and the damned scene (that was to become the pier scene in the first chapter) kept haunting me, I just *had* to start writing it one day. (It was just meant to be that one scene. And then blew up into a three-novel exercise in “How Fucked Up Can You Possibly Get? Let’s Try It For The Hell of It,” but more on that later.)
So, yeah. I set out to do something that was so wrong but so right: that taboo concept of adolescent girls and their awakening sexuality. *But* I was, and am, sick of all kinds of sob stories about molestation *and* real life being full of example of men taking advantage of teenaged girls, and us only ever seeing just the dirty old man POV on these things. So I wanted to write out what that *girl’s* fantasy would’ve been, drawing on what my fantasies were like as a kid, and make that unfold as it never could unfold in real life. That was the whole point-exactly because girls *do* dream of these things, of all these rock stars and actors and fictional characters, of having wild adventures with them, having hot sex with them, and being shining bright together. Because I sure as fuck had these fantasies before I became sadly, brutally aware of how those guys’ POVs and treatment of girls and women was drastically different from what I’d fantasised about as a horny twelve-year-old. My fantasies weren’t aware of the inequalities of society’s gender bullshit when I was twelve-they assumed equality and respect from the men as default, because that was the logical, sensible thing for my kid brain to do, when she hadn’t yet been in contact with the crushingly depressing reality.
So when I created Laura Erika Barring, a lot of her was, in a way, a paean to this dark, sexual virgin state, the amoral innocence of childhood, of all the possibilities imagined up by an intelligent girl who’d developed early. (But with a very dark Gothic Romantic flavour; archetypally also not dissimilar to the concept of
Nimue the Virgin in Feri-the concept of
The Black Heart of Innocence was an influence.) That was the decadent-yet-innocent purity-in-debauchery that characterised the beginning of the first novel, and as Torsten took her away and the realities of life started to unfold for her, that’s where the knowledge of real life took those virgin fantasies by hand and started to spin out the tale. Because obviously, even if you had the ideal there-the girl getting the dark demon lover she’d always dreamt of, and that demon lover really being (much like Connie) so completely different to the patriarchal stereotype of a man-that could never last. But wouldn’t it be fascinating a tale to watch this pair of demons live out their darkest dreams and burn bright even as they burned themselves to death with their own, ever-rising pyre of debaucheries and evil? Hell yeah.
I didn’t really have a fixed face for Laura in my mind at the beginning. This was mostly because I spent so much time inside her head, and I’m not the sort of person who looks in the mirror that often or thinks of what she looks like all that much beyond “is there ketchup on my face,” so I just stayed in that cerebral, mental space whenever she was thinking of herself. So I sketched her fairly loosely at the start of the story (literally by having her look at herself in the mirror!), because I didn’t have a headcast for her-even if Bonita Granville had been one possible candidate from the start. Later, she became my firm, fixed idea of what Laura was like, because of all the actresses in that period, she was the only child/teenaged actress who had the level of intelligence and capacity for the *serious* fucked-up evil (at times far more fucked-up than what you’d see even in modern films!) that Laura required.
And she just happened to be blonde and have larger than average breasts, just like Laura-I did not even know this when I started writing, only having seen her in Escape, and she had been made to look so plain in that film that it fooled me for a long while. Laura had never been meant to be *super*-beautiful, but the sort of fairly normal/average-looking cute girl but who could be made to look really glamorous with the right sort of clothes and makeup, but who might come across as plain without-Bonita was this as well. (I guess dudebros would call this “an 8.” :P) But once I saw her in The Beloved Brat and other films where she really got to show off her precocious hyperintelligence, her amazing talent and her spine-chilling, even shocking capacity for evil, I knew she was perfect.
Bitch wiped the floor with the grown-up actors in nearly every movie she was in. Speaking of which, she had great chemistry with Connie in Escape (and I’d shipped them in that already), so I knew those two would make a great pairing.
Yes, you’ve seen that gif a million times before and I’ll stop posting it once they stop being oh-so-wrong but oh-so-right.
And of course, the whole moral outrage against darkfic and the Problematic themes and all the other stuff involved just made me even *more* eager to write about something like this. Exactly to prove the point that fiction=/=the writer’s or the reader’s own morals, and secondly, from a sex-positive feminist POV because the sexual-moral policing culture in fandom (after fandom became mainstream) really pisses me off. Because it’s important (vitally so!) to explore these things, to see boundaries being pushed, especially in the safe medium of fiction. The whole experience of talkie era Connie himself is very much about severing any remaining lingering traces of a definite connection between being able to enjoy something in fiction and being able to enjoy something in real life.
The very fact that every single person who’s ever talked to me about the fic in detail begins with “these aren’t my kinks, and this is fucked up, but…” is testament to that fact that such stories are needed. What’s more fucked up and morally dubious: the fact that there are fictional characters who are immoral, or the fact that we, especially those of us brought up as female, have to slap that disclaimer in front of everything we enjoyed just to point out we were not infected by it, tainted by it? Instead of the idea that we might actually have brains in our heads, and that we are able to discriminate-pick and mix what we reject and what we’re influenced by according to our moral faculties, said moral faculties already having been hammered into us, guilt-tripped into us by female culture to the point where we’re fucking moral hysterics-being taken for granted?
So, yeah, Laura became very much a vehicle for that. Pushing boundaries, making wrong things right for the hell of it, just to see what’d happen. I deliberately set out to write characters who were crazy and evil *but* interesting and relatable, because those are the sorts of characters I find most interesting myself-the same thing with all the extreme kinks they engaged in. Many of the kinks they had were deliberately outré and there was a lot of craziness in there, or just stuff that’s rare, but it was an exercise to see how people might come to have those kinks and how they might feel for them, from the inside. What goes on inside the head of a girl who fancies her uncle? What’s her logic there? What goes on inside the head of a feminine man who, with women, is the dommiest dom that ever lived (something you rarely see in erotic writing/media)? What the hell do they get out of toilet kinks? “Would Torsten really touch that dog there? Oh no, he would, wouldn’t he…“
As to further sources of inspiration, Anaïs Nin’s diaries-particularly her description of her incestuous relationship with her father when she was in her thirties and he in his fifties-were a huge push forwards for me into crossing that threshold between me thinking about something and writing about it. I remember thinking “Fuckit, if Anaïs can write about having done this in real life, and has the ovaries to admit it was enjoyable to her at the time, I sure as hell can write about it in fiction.” Same with Lana Del Rey’s tales of fucked-up relationships: another refreshing example of (very, IMHO, necessary) girls gone wrong and insights into how that happens.
Both have been torn to pieces and lambasted by other women, from slut-shamers to feminists for being Problematic. But the critics forget the most crucial fact about both: that whether you like it or not, women really *do* think and feel and do these things, whether it’s ugly or not, whether it’s fucked-up or not, and there’s *gasp* no such thing as a fully politically correct person or someone who could be held up as a feminist paragon. People make mistakes and people are fuckups and sometimes that person can be a *gasp* modern woman. And equally crucially, studying these things helps us understand how these things work, without any condoning of fucked-up things having to enter into it. I’m really not surprised I’ve had at least half a dozen people compare Laura to some of Lana’s protagonists, because of that whole Lolita fetish of hers, her ironic, pornographic raunchiness and all those daddy issues she’s got going on. (Although I do hope my writing of Laura comes across as more intelligent, since my POV is more feminist than Lana’s. In that she’s admitted she doesn’t know much about how various types of gender-based fuckups work, but when I write about any of my characters, there’s an awareness of those fuckups behind them. So when I write about a girl not being a paragon, that’s a deliberate choice rather than something stemming from ignorance.)
But it’d be too simplistic to compare Laura to just a girl gone wrong, a Lana heroine, or to reduce her to just a taboo on legs *or* just a thorn in the side of political correctness, because she’s all those things and more-she turned out surprisingly complex. There are sides to her that-in order for me to even remain interested in writing about such a character-are perfectly relatable to many intelligent and kinky and Different women, which is another thing that really seems to have struck a chord with readers. So while I don’t share her proto-Satanist (but typical for the WWII era) hellraising morals (where, if sex is evil, she and Torsten declare evil is delicious, because it was pretty much the only way to take pride in being horny and queer back then, this kind of relishing of one’s debauchery and “immorality”), there’s still a lot in her that I can understand. The psychology of the sexually submissive (I’d personally rather use the term “bottom” or “receptive”) woman, the bisexual woman attracted to feminine people and androgynous, bisexual, gender-atypical men-that’s something that mirrors my own experiences, because I find it easiest (and hottest) to write about.
And since I’m writing erotica, I want to make it as hot as I can and I want to get off to it myself-therefore, that was the orientation I chose, because I knew it intimately. Even if, again, we have major differences in how we perceive sexuality and gender: she was situated in a world where second-wave feminism and Stonewall hadn’t yet happened. (Thank God. Another good way of being able to remove a hell of a lot of postmodern neuroticism from her). And because there is *so* little good BDSM porn out there that I could read without groaning or laughing in disbelief, and so little of it intelligent, and so little of it presenting kinky sub women as making their own choices and describing what happens inside their heads in a way that I could actually relate to at all. So that was another hole I wanted to fill, just as eagerly as Torsten filled all of hers.
And Torsten himself was the kind of guy who you don’t get enough porn of (where *is* all the explicit, quality porn of androgynous, yet dominant bisexual men?!?), and whose sexual potential wasn’t shown to its fullest in the original film (obviously, because it wasn’t a porn film), and I wanted to see what he was like in the bedroom. If he’s such a good fuck that you could *kill a child* for him, how can you not want to find out what the *hell* it is that he does, and does so well, in the bedroom? But as Anna’s tale was pretty much complete in the original film, I had to create a new female character to experience Torsten through. So that was yet another reason to create Laura, and yet another aspect of her-I needed a vehicle for the fangirl to get the most out of this amazing, amazing figure that was Torsten. So she became the character we experience him through.
And by the time The Fall of Angels started to roll out, Laura’s character was also addressing the violence perpetrated upon women and queers by the medical/psychiatric authorities, and addressing the mind-boggling misogyny of Dr. Segert, who’s portrayed in the film as a heroic character. (His job is to make “abnormal” and “monstrous” women *Normal.* Brr.) So while Laura *was* batshit crazy and evil, just like her uncle, that evil also came in handy for some very fucking cathartic writing where they took out all their grievances on a guy who represented The Establishment and its brutalities, in a *very* visceral way that, I quote, “outdid Hannibal.” And that worked, IMHO, in that it would’ve been really fucking boring to write some morally superior character and a saint-it was really gratifying to write characters who just fucking punched The Man the way he needed to be punched because they weren’t bound by hand-wringing morals or anything. Sometimes you don’t want moral purity; sometimes you just want to see a guy who castrates and lobotomises gays and “nymphomaniacs” eviscerated.
And that’s not even all. I’m sure there’s way more in there that I haven’t listed yet, but this post is half a mile long already. I know, I know. And I also know this turned very much into a rant about justifying her, but as fandom and society can be stupid about these things (and anything relating to women, especially when it comes to pleasure), it’s all worth pointing out.
But, yeah, Laura’s quite possibly the most complex character I’ve ever written, the crazy little bitch. Even if I ever met her, I’d run the fuck away from her… she still haunts me to this day. And if you’ve made it this far, and have read the story, I’d like to thank you for having shared her journey with me. From the bottom of my heart and from the heart of Torsten’s bottom.
Daddy is pleased.