Petrelli/cest: I catch him when he's strayin like any brother should...
As will happen, linaerys and I got to chatting about Nathan and Peter (and Sam and Dean, and BroYay and hotness generally... um, what? No one said we were being literary here) and family + slash dynamics.
Specifically, we were talking about Angela and the coding of her relationship with Nathan and Peter as including "bad touch." While I'd be comfortable, I think, writing her as either abusive or just a bad parent, linaerys raised the awesome point that if she's written as the icky incestuous abuser, it's going to generate a lot of "abused becomes the abuser" constructions of Nathan and Peter's relationship.
I sort of started there, but linaerys didn't. We speculate this may be because she got on board after about 5 episodes, whereas I came on at the beginning and had to be shown the softer side of Nathan before I could stop seeing him as the guy who used his brother's "suicide attempt" for political gain.
In any event, at this point, neither of us sees Nathan or Peter as emotionally crippled by whatever incest there was or wasn't with Angela. Both of us see them as taking refuge from bad parenting in each other:
Angela's alternately too affectionate or very very cold. This, to my mind, raises an immediate parallel with both HRG and Kaito. She has a very difficult time with the divide between just loving her children and seeing them as tools of destiny. Sometimes, she just wants to be a woman and mother and love them, and others she treats them like chess pawns. Because she's aware of how she treats them as chess pawns, she's overly affectionate to make up for it.
If Papa Petrelli was involved as well (which we know he was, from Linderman, Angela, and the graphic novels), it makes sense that a young Peter, not having his father's approval, would've taken refuge in the considerably older and hopefully more stable Nathan's affections. But because Nathan would've been affected as well, he really wouldn't be that much more stable.
As such, they tend to act out the poles of their mother's behavior: Nathan too cold, Peter too mushy. But inside, both of them have a need for affirmation and unconditional affection that makes those poles shift, lines cross and blur.
linaerys and to a lesser extent I think that Peter has Nathan wrapped around his little finger. linaerys thinks Nathan's main power over Peter is being the big brother. I tend to think Peter gives Nathan a lot of power because he feels safe and protected with Nathan around, viz his conversation with Claire. We're both agreed, though, that Peter sees that Nathan needs him and (when he's not being emo-whiny) and works to provide the same sort of comfort and stability for Nathan that Peter does for him.
From there, naturally enough, we started to get into the specifically slashy perennial top/bottom issue. Weirdly, it's not so much an issue in this fandom as elsewhere. Pretty much everyone seems to see Nathan as a physical top. But, with Five Years Gone and the advent of much!more!powerful!Peter, it's possible to see that dynamic shifting. That'll be very very interesting next year. Nathan lives! Shut up, he does.
And, to bring it back around to the beginning, the perceived or actual slashiness of their relationship seems intrinsically related to their family dynamic, which would, likely persist whether Angela was an incestuous abuser or not.
Aside: At the moment, I'm hedging towards: not when they were kids, but after the death of her husband, Angela's affections for Nathan in particular veer very very close to that Magneto/Wanda, let's rule the world together and make superpowered babies dynamic.
ETA: In comments, we begin discussing the permutations of top, bottom, topping, bottoming, etc. I wrote a long meta discussion about this a little while back. I'll be hitting the comments, but for convenience, the link is: Top, Bottom, Who's on First: Of Brass Tacks and Getting Down to Them. The premise of the argument is that the way these words are used generates a shitton of confusion that also causes negative real world consequences, and we therefore need to be careful about how we use them. The essay attempts to unpack top and bottom and related words; it is not an argument about Nathan and Peter, as I've only just now begun to sort through those thoughts and they are, lo, very complex.
How do you all see it? 'Cesty not 'cesty, slashy not slashy, top bottom switch? Let's talk.
Specifically, we were talking about Angela and the coding of her relationship with Nathan and Peter as including "bad touch." While I'd be comfortable, I think, writing her as either abusive or just a bad parent, linaerys raised the awesome point that if she's written as the icky incestuous abuser, it's going to generate a lot of "abused becomes the abuser" constructions of Nathan and Peter's relationship.
I sort of started there, but linaerys didn't. We speculate this may be because she got on board after about 5 episodes, whereas I came on at the beginning and had to be shown the softer side of Nathan before I could stop seeing him as the guy who used his brother's "suicide attempt" for political gain.
In any event, at this point, neither of us sees Nathan or Peter as emotionally crippled by whatever incest there was or wasn't with Angela. Both of us see them as taking refuge from bad parenting in each other:
Angela's alternately too affectionate or very very cold. This, to my mind, raises an immediate parallel with both HRG and Kaito. She has a very difficult time with the divide between just loving her children and seeing them as tools of destiny. Sometimes, she just wants to be a woman and mother and love them, and others she treats them like chess pawns. Because she's aware of how she treats them as chess pawns, she's overly affectionate to make up for it.
If Papa Petrelli was involved as well (which we know he was, from Linderman, Angela, and the graphic novels), it makes sense that a young Peter, not having his father's approval, would've taken refuge in the considerably older and hopefully more stable Nathan's affections. But because Nathan would've been affected as well, he really wouldn't be that much more stable.
As such, they tend to act out the poles of their mother's behavior: Nathan too cold, Peter too mushy. But inside, both of them have a need for affirmation and unconditional affection that makes those poles shift, lines cross and blur.
linaerys and to a lesser extent I think that Peter has Nathan wrapped around his little finger. linaerys thinks Nathan's main power over Peter is being the big brother. I tend to think Peter gives Nathan a lot of power because he feels safe and protected with Nathan around, viz his conversation with Claire. We're both agreed, though, that Peter sees that Nathan needs him and (when he's not being emo-whiny) and works to provide the same sort of comfort and stability for Nathan that Peter does for him.
From there, naturally enough, we started to get into the specifically slashy perennial top/bottom issue. Weirdly, it's not so much an issue in this fandom as elsewhere. Pretty much everyone seems to see Nathan as a physical top. But, with Five Years Gone and the advent of much!more!powerful!Peter, it's possible to see that dynamic shifting. That'll be very very interesting next year. Nathan lives! Shut up, he does.
And, to bring it back around to the beginning, the perceived or actual slashiness of their relationship seems intrinsically related to their family dynamic, which would, likely persist whether Angela was an incestuous abuser or not.
Aside: At the moment, I'm hedging towards: not when they were kids, but after the death of her husband, Angela's affections for Nathan in particular veer very very close to that Magneto/Wanda, let's rule the world together and make superpowered babies dynamic.
ETA: In comments, we begin discussing the permutations of top, bottom, topping, bottoming, etc. I wrote a long meta discussion about this a little while back. I'll be hitting the comments, but for convenience, the link is: Top, Bottom, Who's on First: Of Brass Tacks and Getting Down to Them. The premise of the argument is that the way these words are used generates a shitton of confusion that also causes negative real world consequences, and we therefore need to be careful about how we use them. The essay attempts to unpack top and bottom and related words; it is not an argument about Nathan and Peter, as I've only just now begun to sort through those thoughts and they are, lo, very complex.
How do you all see it? 'Cesty not 'cesty, slashy not slashy, top bottom switch? Let's talk.