The Tradëscan Codex

So this post by havocthecat implies that Sanctuary fandom is big on incest? Now, I'm a fan of both 'cest fic and Sanctuary but for some reason the idea of the two together surprised me, and I began to figure out just how many 'cest combinations were possible in that fandom (although of couse, only one has to catch on--the most plausible striking me as Druitt/Ashley). There's actually more than I realized at first (at first, I could only think of Helen/Ashley): two father/daughter pairings, one mother/daughter, one brother/sister, and one grandfather/granddaughter. Unless there's more I'm just not thinking of?

Still doesn't really speak to me, though.

I was catching up on the recent xkcd comics, and there's a Peter/Valentine strip! Okay, not particularly 'cesty in and of itself, but I love those two whenever they're together, so squee.

(N.B.: Portions of this letter have been lifted from last year's letter.)

Thank you for signing up to write a story for me! You're one of 7 people (one of whom was me) who offered to write for Tom Sawyer, one of 9 people (one of whom was me) who offered to write for The Secret Garden musicalverse, one of 9 people (one of whom was me) who offered to write for Heinlein's multiverse, and/or one of 9 people (one of whom was me) who offered to write for Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego?, and I love you for that alone.

If you check out my userinfo, you'll find a 'thon policy which implores that you be true first and foremost to the prompt and your muse, and to consider whether I'd like a story as, at most, a secondary concern. I stand by that, but I also recognize there is a sense that a yuletide story is explicitly a gift in a way which most 'thon fics aren't, so feel free to surf through this journal to get a feel for me, and here's a little bit more, if you are interested, to help you understand how I relate to the specific texts and characters in the fandoms I've requested and what I might like.

I'm drawn to what I call will-to-poweriness, the adolescent fantasy, the desire to exceed oneself that also draws me to things like superhero comics (one of my fandoms is, indeed, X-Men) and fantasy shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which is my main fandom). My especial kink is children and teenagers who prove themselves to be the equals (or betters) to adults because they are just that awesome. All of this comes through in my requests, I think, although not quite so much as in years past. There is a clear will-to-poweriness in Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego?, most of all in Carmen herself, of course, beyond good and evil, doing whatever she wants whenever she wants because she can, stealing things for no good reason except as an expression of her superiority, the former ACME agent engaged in a perpetual game of cat and mouse. But also, on one level, in Zach and Ivy, the young (!!) ACME agents who pursue her, and on another level, in Player, just as much a teenager, radically empowered within the world of the game she plays and manipulates, Carmen's eternal antagonist.

Likewise, Laz and Lor always get the better of their elders. Mary Lennox is one of my paradigm cases of a radically autonomous female child. And what is the appeal of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn if not as part of just this type of fantasy?

This, actually, is where my interest in incest comes from: with these radically autonomized figures no real problematization of consent is possible, an argument I make more fully in this post from 2006. But don't feel like you have to write incest if you've matched up with me on Heinlein or Twain; I'd much prefer experiencing the characters as you see them behaving in-character as you see them than twisted out of shape to force them into bed with each other. The most important thing is to preserve the canon dynamics--I have my trusty 'cest goggles for everything else. Although if you throw me a bone in making it subtexty, that's wonderful too.

Although, really, Laz/Lor is pretty much canon, no? But there is a way in (my corners of, I don't know whence you hail) fandom that we use sex as a metaphor for emotional intimacy, so that twincest becomes the deepest, strongest type of interpersonal communion imaginable--and this is the dynamic I'm looking for with Tom/Mary and Laz/Lor and even Mary/Neville, the way their strongest bond is to each other, and if you feel most comfortable providing that bond in a non-sexual way that's still absolutely wonderful.

( more on where on earth is carmen sandiego )

( more on tom sawyer )

( more on secret garden musicalverse )

( very little about r.a.h. )

Thank you again for writing a story for me. Be true to your own muse, and I'm sure I'll love the result!

Yours in La Mancha,

Episkopos Reverend Alixtii O'Krul V, TRL
Church of St. Jesu the Heretic, Discordian

( embedded video )

Some people on my flist have been passing around the Prince Caspian trailer and talking about the Narnia books in general. The topics are old chestnuts--discomfort with the Christian allegory, issues with the (lack of) purity of the adaptation--but it's been making me think about how much I enjoyed a movie I haven't really even thought about for about a year. How I still have the "Anna Popplewell is a Vampire Slayer" Will/Anna RPF fic started but unfinished on the harddrive of my desktop.

Also, I've been re-reading this post by cesperanza, on (among other things) identification and over-identification in fanfic, and especially chan fic:

My point is just that I think things are more complicated than theyseem when it comes to representation and identification. [. . .] I think that the whole process of writingfiction--giving a character interiority, backstory, emotional depth andpoint of view--is pretty much the opposite of objectificaton,however much we ooh and ahh over boys: it's personifying,characterizing, three-dimensionalizing, complicating.

Lots of good discussion in the comments, too.

In all, it's reminded me of my complication relationship with Susan Pevensie. You see, Anna was sixteen when the first movie came out, which is a bit young for me. But this didn't stop me from recognizing her as exactly the type of girl I would have been attracted to when I was, say, eighteen (William Mosley's age when the movie came out).

So Peter/Susan and Will/Anna ping me powerfully: I didn't kiss a young woman for the first time until I was 21, so reading and writing these pairings is (was? I haven't even thought about them in ages) in many ways an attempt to rewrite my own childhood, to put in the romance which was sorely lacking. (And keep in mind the way many of us in fandom, myself most certainly included, use sex as a metaphor for emotional intimacy!) So the fact is that I become incredibly invested in a pairing between two characters I don't even find myself, as the almost-twenty-four-years-old Alixtii O'Krul, particularly attractive; I nonetheless derive intense pleasure from imagining them in a romantic/sexual relationship. They're hot together--and I'm not even sure what I mean by that, but it's the terminology fandom has given to me to express myself.

Some of you might remember me trying to turn to the notion of "fictional desire."

So, in conclusion . . . when I was on YouTube looking for the Prince Caspian trailer, I looked for vid recs. Under the cut is the only one I found that I can rec with only one caveat (that it's black and white for no reason I can see).

( vid rec )

Via metafandom's del.icio.us links: poll on the relationship of fan's real-life siblings to interest in fictional sibling incest. "Fictional sibling incest" would, as I understand it, include RPF 'cest.

I signed up for Yuletide this morning. Three hours it took me, partly because I listed characters for all but like two of the fandoms I offered to write, and I offered a huge number of fandoms. And of the course the characters I offered to write probably aren't the ones most likely to be requested.

I mean, I want to stretch myself to write more male characters and more m/m, to challenge myself, but I don't think Yuletide is the best place to do it.

No one nominated A Little Princess this year? What is up with that? That was the most-offered fandom last year (although I believe it pulled in very few requests?), wasn't it?

Anyway, I went ahead and requested Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego? (Carmen/Player), The Parent Trap (Annie/Hallie), and Robert A. Heinlein's multiverse (Laz/Lor). (I was the one who came up with "World-as-Myth multiverse" last year as a name to label the threads I wanted, and l'm glad that people apparently understand what that means as people are offering to write it.) Which means that while last year 3/4 of my requests involved sibcest, this year it's down to 2/3 (as I didn't ask for Peter/Valentine on account of receiving it last year; other than that my requests are about the same), both being twincest of the f/f variety. Which means, since I asked for a female Player in my first request, that all three of my requests this year are femslash.

I'm glad we are having the authorial responsibility discussion (cf. metafandom), because "Isn't it contradictory to talk about a safe space for yourself, and then go on to render feminist criticisms of media (e.g., the Mary Jane statuette)?" is a not-stupid question that deserves to be mulled over and answered. Which is not to say that it is contradictory, because I don't believe it is, but being ignorant of the way that a contradiction could be seen to exist leaves our feminist arguments for what we are doing open to an objection that we could otherwise address.

I think that, in the large, the people who are "for" authorial responsibility (and I think that some of them really see everyone who disagree with them as against responsibility, rather than simply disagreeing on what that responsibility entails, using the same pseudologic that leads pro-lifers to assume that all pro-choicers love abortion and want to have as many as possible) are ignoring the differing effects that context can have on what authorial responsibility requires. Which is ironic, because their argument is really all about context.

No, I do not believe that works are written or read in a vacuum. Indeed, according to the flavor of literary theory to which I subscribe, in a vacuum the very act of reading would be impossible. But I don't support the writing of incest (for example) because I don't think that fictional texts have consequences. I support the writing of incest fanfiction because I am cognizant of the specific context within which these works exist and are meant to be read.

I mean, I believe that fictional texts have real-world consequences. I believe that fictional texts should be critiqued and judged by consequences they can reasonably be expected to have (Heinlein did not expect Manson, nor should he have). Radical feminist, here. It's pretty much a corner stone of my world-view; I believe it at least as deeply as I believe anything else. I believe that much of mainstream media supports a mainstream patriuarchal ideology and should be called on the fact. These are pretty much tenets of faith for me.

But I believe fandom, even (or especially?) its incest fics, resists that ideology on several levels. (While possibly being co-opted by it on other levels. I'm a radical feminist, I can problematize anything, including the problematizations. But sometimes we have to go for the surface good and leave deeper systemic issues for later. Women's suffrage is more important than gender-neutral language or nonsegregated bathrooms, although they're all necessary.) That incest fic? It's on the side of the angels.

The consequences of a HP fanfiction, written within the community of women for the community of women, are different than the consequences of having Lucius shagging Draco in a Warners Brothers blockbuster. Which is not to say that I'd automatically condemn having Lucius shag Draco in the WB movie, or automatically condone the fanfic. But the rubrics I used would be pretty radically different in how they were calibrated.

For one thing, (online LJ media fanfiction) fandom is a community in which a community of readers is also a community of writers (and vice versa), a fact I have yet to have seen mentioned but which I think is deeply significant. Our defining feature is that we are not passive consumers of texts. We are not going to be affected by a fictional text in the same way as Joe Average. We recognize the possibiliy of ambiguity of meaning and unreliable narrators, and God knows we know how to read "against the grain" (a grain which is itself, to my mind, socially constructed) to give a text the meaning we want to give it.

( I've said a lot of this before, actually )

I'm just not convinced that, using the hermeneutical conditions brought to bear by the fandom community onto texts produced by that community, that a text could be read to be in favor of certain things which the fandom community agrees is wrong, such as rape. (Obviously, not everyone in fandom uses the same hermeneutic conditions, but when we're assuaging the damage a text could do, we're talking about trends.) Which is not precisely analagous to the question of whether such texts could affect us negatively (i.e., make us more accepting of rape) without being read as explicitly pro-rape, I suppose. But when read under those conditions I have no reason to believe that those sorts of texts will produce such a negative effect, and none of the interlocutors have given me any reason to believe such.

When I criticize, say, the movie Underworld (which drives me crazy with the way feminity is presented within it) I am doing so recognizing that a) its audience is not fandom, and will not in general read it subversively, and b) its producers (who were men) do not have the feminist cred that fan authors get. Same would go for the Mary Jane statuette, or Powergirl's cleavage, or Supergirl's anorxia, or the way that Stephanie Brown gets remembered, or whatever. (I mean, I hang out in femslash fandom. There's a lot of objectification of women going on around here. It's not the same.) (And note that none of the things above are intrinsically problematic, since I don't believe texts speak with a moral voice of their own. I'm sure there are big-busted people and skinny people on Krypton. It's the pattern within its social context--particularly that these unrealistic specimens of womanhood are made by and for het males--which is troubling.)

Insofar as fandom's specific context has been recognized by these authorial responsibility interlocutors, it has mostly been to say that, no, fandom is not a unique special snowflake. Which, you know, is a strawman argument. For an example, take cofax7's (who is on my flist and whom I love) formulation of the following "unstated assumption":

2. That as a members of a mostly-female community we are entitled to privilege our desires over any other concern because we've been oppressed in the past with regards to our creativity and sexuality.

First off, I don't care in the least what happened in the past--the past is past. Fandom's identity as a community of women for women earns it special status not by virtue of the oppression women may have suffered in the past with regards to their creativity and sexuality but because of the oppression they continue to suffer to this day. I'll be a post-feminist in the post-patriarchy, dude.

That said, "we are entitled to privilege our desires over any other concern" is absurd. I won't say that no one has argued that, because I'm sure someone somewhere has, but I certainly don't think it is an "unstated assumption" monolithically behind the entirety (or even majority) of one of the sides in the debate. Saying one (I suddenly feel uncomfortable, as a het male, using the first-person plural in this context, because it isn't my, i.e. Alixtii O'Krul's, desire which should be privileged per se) is entitled to privilege one's desires over this specific concern does not mean that one feels that one is entitled to do so with regards to any possible concern. As I've said before, fandom's Get Out of Jail Free card only goes so far.

In particular, I trust fandom on racial issues about as far as I can throw it, although that's still more than I trust the mainstream media. The SGA wank aside, the most frequent meta discussion on race seems to be variants of "Why don't we talk about race more?" No one's saying "Why don't we talk about sex more?" (Okay, actually, they have. The mind boggles.) We talk about sex all the times, and as far as I'm concerned fandom's earned its cred as far as sexual politics go. Not so on race. It still has a long way before it earns its ghetto pass, so to speak.

Conclusion: Claiming fendom as a safe space for women's fantasies does not mean that one does not acknowledge that fiction has consequences. Also, you should totally go write for my Incest/Cross-Gen porn battle. Or sign up for the 'Cest-a-thon. Or, if that sort of thing squicks you, don't. Either way I'm good.

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It's time! The prompts are below, under the cuts (and are frakking amazing). Post your ficlets in the comments to this entry, with the prompt you're using in the subject line, plus the rating of your ficlet. Readers should be advised that there will be (un-?)healthy amounts of cross-gen, incest, and underaged sex in the comments.

( Alias )

( Andromeda )

( Anne of Green Gables )

( Angel )

( Arrested Development )

( Artemis Fowl )

( Baby Sitters' Club )

( Battlestar Galactica )

( Biblefic )

( Big Love )

( The Blues Brothers )

( Buffy the Vampire Slayer )

( Carnivale )

( Charlotte's Web )

( Clueless )

( Contact )

( Dark Angel )

( DC Comics )

( Doctor Who )

( Dukes of Hazard )

( Ender's Game )

( Fairy Tales )

( Farscape )

( Firefly )

( Global Frequency )

( Gone with the Wind )

( Grey's Anatomy )

( Harold and Maude )

( Harry Potter )

( Heroes )

( His Dark Materials )

( Keeping Up Appearances )

( A Little Princess )

( Little Women )

( L'Engleverse )

( Lord of the Rings )

( The Manchurian Candidate )

( Matilda )

( My Summer of Love )

( The Muppets )

( Narnia )

( NCIS )

( Nip/Tuck )

( The Parent Trap )

( Peanuts )

( Peter Pan )

( Pirates of the Caribbean )

( Prison Break )

( Profit )

( Real Person Fiction )

( A Room of One's Own )

( Sandman )

( The Secret Garden )

( Shakespeare )

( Stargate )

( Supernatural )

( Sweet Valley High )

( Tamora Pierce )

( To Kill a Mockingbird )

( V for Vendetta )

( Veronica Mars )

( The West Wing )

( Wicked )

( The Woman in White )

( X-Men )

( Crossovers )