snowynight

Challenge #4

In your own space, add something to your fandom’s canon. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

My headcanon for Star Trek: the Original Series

- When Spock was in Starfleet Academy, he went all out in experiment with his human side. He worked hard and played hard, including a lot of casual sex. He was a scientist. The biggest fear came from the unknown. Only through experimentation we improve (or disprove) our theory. He could only control himself better through knowledge. It was also strategic to know more about humans than people realize. This was when he picked up some popular culture like Halloween celebration. He didn't talk about this like he never brought up his parents.

- Spock is an anti-hero figure who never quite fits the social expectation, a trait shared by his mirror counterpart. He will be very happy to have Jim by his side in a community that accepts him for what he is. Meanwhile, Jim's dream is have Spock by himself in a never ending adventure. They are such a good pair.

For a very long time I'm mystified by my response to hurt/comfort stories. While I like some of the related tropes, the typical beat of hurt comfort stories doesn't hit me perfectly. I don't like story only with hurt, because of my very strong squick about characters broken into pieces and stuck in a hopeless situation. While comfort is nice, I don't exactly want to dwell on how the hurt characters to be comforted by their loved one (or not-so-loved one).

Then I realize that what exactly hits my id is stories about adaptation. The characters get hurt or lost something that is often irreversible, and they still have to live with the side effect of the loss, but they manage (or not quite manage) to live with the loss and pain. They have to pay the price demanded by their duty or morale, but they do it constantly because the needs of the many outweighs the needs of few.

Sometimes they have support from their families and friends. Sometimes they hide it so well that the people they know don't realize it. They may bear their loss and pain stoically or emotionally. They may never recover completely but they survive another day.

Characters with such storylines/backstories usually become my favourite. In Star Trek: the Original Series, James T. Kirk is generally cheerful, but he has to constantly bear the demand and responsibility of being a Starship captain and the trauma of his past. The movie canon is practically how he has to live with loss and change. Spock is reserved and stoic, but he has to deal with the problem that arises from his dual heritage.

Remus and Sirius in Harry Potter canon era both have to deal with the loss. The best years of Sirius is spent tortured and framed for murder in prison. Remus has to deal with the war, death, perceived betrayal and his own dangerous secret.

In Marvel comics canon, Steve Rogers needs to deal with the shock and loss of waking up decades late while Tony Stark needs to deal with alcoholism, heart issue and his many demons.

John McClane in Die Hard series is a rare action movie hero who needs to deal with the heavy cost of his heroics. In Live Free or Die Hard, my favourite fics are all about how both John McClane and Matthew Farrell have to deal with the injury and change brought out by the movie events.

In a milder extent, Benton Fraser has to deal with living in Chicago far from home, and Ray Kowalski isn't the most adjusted person either.

It's difficult to find fics that fit my id, because there are no easy keywords to stand for. Here are some recs:

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Disclamier: I don't have a medical background. What I know about medicine I know from Internet research.

Injuries and illness are very important, if not essential to include in a hurt/comfort story, but what happens when you want to hurt your characters, while you don't have a medical background to figure out which bone and nerves may be affected by the gunshot wounds they so beautifully endure for your plot's sake? While the degree of realism in your story's canon may not coincide with that in real life (See: CSI science), it won't hurt to get solid information so you can make an informed choice in this matter. This's an attempt to create a cheat sheet out of the questions and answers about medical issues on the fact finding community on livejournal: little_details . Some are direct quote from the answers.

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Grief is a powerful primal emotion. Hardly anyone hasn't experienced grief in that we all faced some kind of loss. However, writing about grief can be one of the hardest things to do because it is so easy to slip away and use convenient cliche instead of facing the grief. This's my attempt to discuss how  to write about grief in fan fiction..

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I don't want to type any more. Even effort to make me lift my fingers to type seems to be too much for me. But there're thousand miles to go, thousand miles to go. My brain yearns for a shut down. But no, even yearning takes too much effort. I'm totally apathetic to everything around me. Nothing matters any more, any more.

Exhaustion can be mental or physical. Your muscles refuse to perform any more, even when your brain will it. You hear a cry for help, but you have been saving and losing people for too long, you just don't care any more. The cause of exhaustion can be undersleep, intense physical or mental exercises or diseases. Rest can relieve fatique, but usually our beloved characters never get a break from it any way. It's a miracle most have the energy to open their eyes, face the next morning and think of the tasks they need to do. It can also be used to great effect in hurt/comfort fic, to examine the real consequence of the continuous stress they endured in canon, to make them feel more real. After all, we all feel exhaustion some time in our lives.

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"I jump into the mid-air, launching a kick at the opponent's head, and then when I land, I immediately do a guard position to prepare for a counter attack."

"My palm sweats and I'm afraid any time I won't be able to hold the knife any more. The thought of cutting into human flesh makes me get sick."

Combat fascinates people, judging from the popularity of action and war films. There's something satisfying to see your hero giving a good fight. Blood and sweat makes a scene more powerful and dramatic. A good fighting scene can make or break an action story. However, different stories call for a sliding scale of realism in portraying a fight.

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While the concept of apocalypse has been nothing new since the biblical time, the World Wars II has cemented the true fear in people that humanity now has the capacity to destroy itself, and there seems to be nothing that can stop it. Popular culture has been obsessed with the death of civilization as we know it ever since then, and created a lot of good and not so good work, so this post may be useful when you write your story.

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Opinions? Questions? Suggestions?

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Hurt/comfort is a genre that involves the physical pain or emotional distress of one character, who is cared for by another character.  It's a very popular in fanfic. I enter hurt/comfort as keyword in del.icio.us and gets 14441 results. However, the trope is not highly represented in femslash. Using AO3 as an example, there're only 269 story tagged as hurt/comfort which contain femslash pairing. Why the disparity?

I don't have concrete answers. But I have hypothesis.

1. Hurt/comfort usually requires adding and extrapolating the hurt endured by a characters. Unfourtunately, in most of the canons, the female characters suffer, lose their power, are deprived of their agency too many time that we don't feel comfortable writing or reading additional hurt piled on the female characters.

2. Because our canon don't necessary pass the Bechtel's test with flying colour, there's often no other female characters that are reasonably available at these points of the hurt character's life to provide comfort. It can be bypassed, but there're effort.

3. As a lot of femslash writers are identified as female, there's not much distance between the hurt on the characters and the writers themselves. It's easier to identify with the character being hurt and thus harder to fetishizes the hurt.

4. In popular narrative, women are supposed to suffer. As their stories're considered not so important by the society, we're less likely to be trained to acknowledge and expand on the woman characters' suffering. 

Take me as example, if hurt /comfort exists along on a spectrum, I 'm more inclined to hurt the characters and withhold the comfort because I enjoy characters who stoically and bravely endure the bad things in life. However, for some female characters I love, their life basically are bad. Marvel superhero Carol Danvers experienced enough rape as drama, depowering, addiction problems and such that I admire her for being a surviver, but it hurt me to read the canon myself, not to mention creating fanwork based on it. It's harder to provide comfort because Carol's female friends are often not literally available. I'm also less likely to indulge in hurting female characters  because it makes me guilty, as if I were joining the canon writers in depowering the female characters.

It's my hypothesis. What's your opinion?

Written for month_of_meta
By virtue of a large characters cast, there are a lot women characters who are interesting or have potential to be interesting in Marvel comics. Sadly, Marvel doesn't have a good record in treating their female characters well. Digging through the 50+ years of canon can be frustrating and down what depressing. However, there're still good writing to be found and I want to talk about what's so amazing, what's so frustrating, and what's down right ugly.

Good
( Must Read )
 
Bad
Do you notice that most of the solo titles mentioned above are cancelled? Yeah, Marvel has a habit to cancel female characters' solo titles.

Ugly
( Just don't )

Further Reading: Ms. Marvel, a History of Refrigerators, and the Modern Day Fridge

 

Disclaimer: As I am no way an expert in the subjects about to be discussed; I’ll be grateful if you can point out the problematic aspects in the following.

What is asexuality?
According to AVEN, an asexual is someone who does not experience sexual attraction.₁ Asexuality is a sex orientation that exists along a spectrum. Some feel romantic attraction. Some don’t. Some masturbate. Some have sex. They are all different.

What problem does asexuals face in real life, and in fandom?
If homosexuality is the love that dares not say its name, asexuality is the orientation that doesn’t even have a name. In daily life, there is nearly to none awrareness of asexuality. The media is full of story lines of people becoming fully grown through sex. If people say they’re not into sex, they are often taken to mean avoiding the matter and not taken seriously. In a personal anecdote, one was told it was just because zis biological clock hadn’t clicked yet. The sex-obsessed society puts a lot of pressure on asexuals. They were seen as immature or inhuman. Sexless relationship is described as neutered relationship. People can only get to be more human through sexual relationship.

In the media, they ‘re either inhuman, evil, or socially clueless. We have Doctor Who, who’s an alien. Shelden in Bigbang Theory, who is described as an alien. Sherlock, who’s a sociopath. Dexter, who’s a serial killer.₂ Even among the LGBTQ movement, asexuality is like a unicorn. The fandom didn’t fare better. The slash debate last year demonstrated a double erasure of asexuality.₃

Common Challenge faced by asexuality and female sexuality.
Patriarchy enforces a male-dominated heteronormative paradigm that every sexuality representation is under its scrutiny. Female sexuality has always been an issue. It has been molded, shaped, and controlled by the patriarchy. Women were punished for just having a sexuality. They were either imagined as chaste virgins or greedy devouring monsters. Despite strides of feminism, discourse about female sexuality is still dominated by male gaze. Freud was notorious for introducing penis envy to show the inferiority of women, that they were “jealous” of men. Modern women face a double-bind situation. If they refuse sex, well, no never mean no. If they welcome sex, they are demeaned and judged as not deserving the protection of patriarchy. Hence the rape culture. Female sexuality is seen as subjugate to male sexuality, largely defined by altruistic notion of traditional femininity. Females were historically desexualized by the society.

The challenge of asexuality comes from its pervasive invisibility. Because they defy safe definition of heteronormative sexuality, their sexuality are deemed as a disease, a phase, unreal, unhealthy. Their romantic relationships don't count. They are included in the DSM. However, their struggle “don’t count”, even in the context of LGBT movement. ₄

Oppressions on female sexuality and asexuality do not happen in a vacuum. Rather they both exist in an interrelation network which oppress minority equally. They needed to be understood and (destroyed) together.₅ Females and asexuals are not mutually exclusive groups.

Why asexuality in femslash?
Asking this question is somewhat like asking why to introduce disability, bisexuality and female homosexuality, people of colour into fiction. Because it is a part of human life. Because the more representation of minority in fiction, the bigger step it is pushing for acceptability and normalization of the minority. Femslash has always been seen as a step to accept female sexuality, and it can definitely go a further step toward addressing the reality of fluidity of sexuality.

How can femslash reflect the reality of asexuality?
Femslash is often defined as a story that depict two or more canonically female-identified people in a sexual or romantic relationship. But relationship is a loaded word. In recent days, intimate relationship is always an euphemism for sexual relationship. But it doesn’t have to be like this. We have to be aware that there is a spectrum along relationship, including particularly close friendship, traditional but not sexual coupling and other unique combination. "It can be just about women making a deeper connection to each other that's erotic, but not necessarily sexual," as spoken by jazzypom.

Research is always important. Just like writing about any minority, proceed with respect and humility. Be prepared to back down.

What’s femslash with one or more asexual female-identified characters like?
There’s love, humour, angst, or just like other femslash. Except that one or more of them is not into sex. The resolution of a story doesn’t always result in sex. Femslash with one or more asexual characters are still uncommon, and I only found 3 labelled as such on AO3 as I'm writing. They are:

Title: Don't Want to Know What I'll Be Without You
Author: torachan
Fandom: Aoi Hana
Summary: Akira's seen that look before. It makes her heart ache to remember Fumi-chan's quiet despair when she told Akira she liked her that way. She'd do anything to keep Fumi-chan from looking like that again.
Read it on AO3.

Title: A Country That Has No Language
Author: language_escapes
Fandom: St. Trinians
Summary: Because really, how can you explain a polyamorous relationship consisting of an asexual domme, a lesbian sub, and a vanilla bisexual? They fit. They love each other. Isn't that enough?
A Country That Has No Language

And the last one from me:

Title: Treasures
Author: snowynight
Fandom: Disney
Summary: Another chapter of Belle and her companions' expedition to a lost ancient city, and Belle discovers something more too.
Treasure

Reference:

1. "Overview." Asexual Visibility and Education Network. Asexual Visibility and Education Network, n.d. Web. 23 May 2011. <http://www.asexuality.org/home/overview.html>
2. pippin, . "FONSFAQ post -- asexuality in fiction." N.p., 26 004 2011. Web. 23 May 2011. http://pippin.dreamwidth.org/95781.html
3. kaz, . "Some words are rather unpleasant to read in this context...." N.p., 14 001 2010. Web. 23 May 2011. http://kaz.dreamwidth.org/215605.html
4. mirielenfield , . "LGBT Community." asexuality. N.p., 21 009 2010. Web. 23 May 2011. http://asexuality.livejournal.com/766364.html?thread=13612956#t13612956
5. Harris-Lacewell, Melissa. "Intersectionality." The Kitchen Table. N.p., 16 003 2009. Web. 23 May 2011. http://princetonprofs.blogspot.com/2009/03/intersectionality.html

Further reading:
Asexy Sex Scenes 101
Asexual information and perspective
FONSFAQ: Asexuality


Questions:
How do you explore asexuality in femslash? What’s the joy/challenge of writing about it?
What do you think can be done to make femslash fandom more friendly for asexuals?