30 Kisses fic, and a related contemplation
Deadline met with a few days to spare--"The Map of Her Body" is up in this post. This one, as you may have gathered, has been in the works for *months* . . . which is a bit sad, since it clocks in at only 640 words. (I can't remember whether the title clicked for me first as a name for this piece, or for this icon, but I know it's been many months since Bonnie made the icon for me. *loves*)
Bonus randomness: the line is from an improv. intro to Tori Amos' "Seaside", and I only just got around to hunting down a copy of the performance; if anyone wants it, you can download it here.
***
I write a couple of different kinds of fics for these characters, and this kind--short, present tense, not terribly plot-focused--have a couple of recurring themes that I'm aware of, and which are fairly central to my view of the characters.
(There is actually a non-fandom-specific bit that I'm leading up to, if any of the non-Furuba people clicked and aren't sure they wanted to. ^^)
One of those things is that Rin is--according to dialogue and assumption, rather than something that's accentuated in the art--deathly thin, at least sometimes. She canonically Does Not Eat, left to her own devices; not because she shows any sign of having the kind of body-image issues that result in deliberate starvation *for* weight loss, but because she can't be bothered or because it hurts too much, physically or emotionally. And there is something of the anorexic need for control over *something*, even if--or maybe especially if--it's only one aspect of her own body, which she has repeatedly lost control over in other respects.
I don't tend to write about her perspective on it much, largely because I think it's something that's so ingrained in her that she doesn't think about it much. What I find interesting to play with is Haru's reaction to it (my idea of his reaction, obviously); he has a fairly constant awareness of her health in the series, and I tend to write him as aware of how unhealthy it is, and not specifically attracted to it, but fascinated by it in spite of himself. There're quite a lot of references to bones in my work. (And now that I'm writing this out, part of me is saying that I can never write about it again, because I've laid it out too explicitly and no one will care anymore. *laughs*)
I kept touching on this in Alive Through the Dawn, which was an interesting balance to play with, because that piece is set at a point in the series when Rin is horrifyingly ill; trying to juggle Haru's attraction to her, and his awareness of how sick she was, got tricky in a story that dealt so extensively with their sexual dynamic. But again, I think her perspective on the whole thing only came up *once*:
His fingers lingered on the edges of her bones wherever they showed through her skin; she knew her thinness worried him, but it was also obvious that he was fascinated by it, by the evidence of her body's inner workings.
And I think I still have much the same take on it as I did then; I constantly use the word "addiction" to describe their relationship, and am fairly convinced that on some level they regard each other's bodies as a means to an end *and* as something that's in the way (which, given the 12shi bond, isn't as flaky as it sounds).
Anyway, what made me think about this so consciously is that, while I was tweaking the piece, I was also reading a few posts relating to yet another article about body image and Hollywood and the idea of weight that the media is trying to enforce. (The first post I read was this one, on feministe.) And I can't seem to track it down again, but somewhere in the comments on a connected post, someone mentioned that in university, a fairly normal guy had summed up why he was attracted to extremely thin girls. His comment was that it "turned [him] on to know that [he] could snap her wrist like a twig if he wanted to".
And while that's definitely not something I think is going on in what I write, it still gave me an extra shudder on top of the gut reaction of being pretty disturbed by the comment. Physical weakness, and people's reaction to it, is a factor that a lot of people seem to overlook when discussing extreme thinness (when it's not natural--heaven knows there're people whose natural body weight is extremely light. My brother is alarmingly thin no matter how much he eats). And that *is* something my subconscious apparently thinks is important.
As often happens, this is something I'm writing about because it's on my mind, not because I have a conclusion or an answer or whatever. So I hope that made sense, I guess.
Bonus randomness: the line is from an improv. intro to Tori Amos' "Seaside", and I only just got around to hunting down a copy of the performance; if anyone wants it, you can download it here.
***
I write a couple of different kinds of fics for these characters, and this kind--short, present tense, not terribly plot-focused--have a couple of recurring themes that I'm aware of, and which are fairly central to my view of the characters.
(There is actually a non-fandom-specific bit that I'm leading up to, if any of the non-Furuba people clicked and aren't sure they wanted to. ^^)
One of those things is that Rin is--according to dialogue and assumption, rather than something that's accentuated in the art--deathly thin, at least sometimes. She canonically Does Not Eat, left to her own devices; not because she shows any sign of having the kind of body-image issues that result in deliberate starvation *for* weight loss, but because she can't be bothered or because it hurts too much, physically or emotionally. And there is something of the anorexic need for control over *something*, even if--or maybe especially if--it's only one aspect of her own body, which she has repeatedly lost control over in other respects.
I don't tend to write about her perspective on it much, largely because I think it's something that's so ingrained in her that she doesn't think about it much. What I find interesting to play with is Haru's reaction to it (my idea of his reaction, obviously); he has a fairly constant awareness of her health in the series, and I tend to write him as aware of how unhealthy it is, and not specifically attracted to it, but fascinated by it in spite of himself. There're quite a lot of references to bones in my work. (And now that I'm writing this out, part of me is saying that I can never write about it again, because I've laid it out too explicitly and no one will care anymore. *laughs*)
I kept touching on this in Alive Through the Dawn, which was an interesting balance to play with, because that piece is set at a point in the series when Rin is horrifyingly ill; trying to juggle Haru's attraction to her, and his awareness of how sick she was, got tricky in a story that dealt so extensively with their sexual dynamic. But again, I think her perspective on the whole thing only came up *once*:
His fingers lingered on the edges of her bones wherever they showed through her skin; she knew her thinness worried him, but it was also obvious that he was fascinated by it, by the evidence of her body's inner workings.
And I think I still have much the same take on it as I did then; I constantly use the word "addiction" to describe their relationship, and am fairly convinced that on some level they regard each other's bodies as a means to an end *and* as something that's in the way (which, given the 12shi bond, isn't as flaky as it sounds).
Anyway, what made me think about this so consciously is that, while I was tweaking the piece, I was also reading a few posts relating to yet another article about body image and Hollywood and the idea of weight that the media is trying to enforce. (The first post I read was this one, on feministe.) And I can't seem to track it down again, but somewhere in the comments on a connected post, someone mentioned that in university, a fairly normal guy had summed up why he was attracted to extremely thin girls. His comment was that it "turned [him] on to know that [he] could snap her wrist like a twig if he wanted to".
And while that's definitely not something I think is going on in what I write, it still gave me an extra shudder on top of the gut reaction of being pretty disturbed by the comment. Physical weakness, and people's reaction to it, is a factor that a lot of people seem to overlook when discussing extreme thinness (when it's not natural--heaven knows there're people whose natural body weight is extremely light. My brother is alarmingly thin no matter how much he eats). And that *is* something my subconscious apparently thinks is important.
As often happens, this is something I'm writing about because it's on my mind, not because I have a conclusion or an answer or whatever. So I hope that made sense, I guess.