Hi f'list, how are you?

[sholio]

I haven't been around much lately. November has been a busy month. But I'm feeling happily accomplished; I've finished all my holiday gift-exchange fics and a handful of pending original projects (all I have left now is the story I signed up to write at lostcityfound, which isn't due 'till early January) and I did quite a bit of freelance this month as well (because fanfic, fun as it is, doesn't pay the bills). I'll be heading out of town on Friday, and I'm only working two days this week, so my plans for the week basically involve some semi-leisurely Christmas shopping, putting together my holiday boxes and getting them in the mail, baking stuff, and playing with my shiny new MacBook. *pets it*

A handful of recs and links:

Push Until It Holds by zillah975 (SGA, John/Ronon and mostly-onesided John/Rodney, NC-17, contains BDSM)
This is one of this year's sgabigbang stories (thus, it's long, about 50K words) and it's the current featured discussion story at sga_talk. I absolutely loved this story -- even though I don't really go for romance as a genre, I love how sex and attraction can, in a good author's hands, be used as a way of exploring and developing character and culture, and this story is a fantastic example of that. But aside from that, it's just a fantastic Atlantis story; it's as much of a team story as a slash story, and the character dynamics are well developed over two and a half slightly-AU seasons. I particularly loved the story's development of Satedan culture and Satedan/Earth sexuality, including the characters' own confusion about where they, themselves, fall within their own culture's norms.

Five Women Who Hate Fleur Delacour by snegurochka_lee (Harry Potter, gen)
I very rarely read HP stories anymore, but I came across this one somehow, and it's wonderful -- a really fascinating look at jealousy and isolation and how we see our own flaws reflected in other people; it made me view Fleur as a much more likable and complex character than I ever found her in the books, without whitewashing her faults.

Semi-nonfannish stuff: How Not To Write a Sex Scene - the short list for the winners of this year's Literary Review Bad Sex Awards: goddawful sex scenes from actual, published novels. And they are hilariously horrible.

The fiction research community little_details (to which I am addicted) has a recent, interesting (to me) thread on heterosexual male friendships; the OP asked how to depict close male friendship, and respondents chimed in with their own experiences or good examples of realistic male friendships from movies and TV (of which someone mentioned SGA ... of course!). It may be of interest to those who write such relationships to see real-life guys talking about their own close friendships with other guys. I was also intrigued by the link to this article on pre-modern same-sex romantic friendship and the way that the modern world has drawn a somewhat arbitrary box called "platonic" and plunked all non-sexual relationships into it; it ties into a recent conversation I was having with xparrot in interesting ways.

I thought I had more links, but apparently not ... perhaps I'll be back if I find more.

Comments

[jadesfire2808.livejournal.com]

Nice to see you! Half my Flist seemed to drop off the grid in November, so it's nice to know that everyone's still alive ;) I'm writing at lostcityfound too, but have sga_santa and Yuletide to get through first :S

Thanks for the recs - both the fics and the non-fic. I've seen 'Push Until It Holds' highly recommended elsewhere, so will put it on my Christmas reading pile. Of course, if that pile gets much higher it's going to fall over and crush me, but. *adds it to top*

The friendship stuff is interesting, thanks. I'm putting together a meta on Genfic at the moment, and having extra references to order my thoughts is very helpful. Staying calm and on-topic is proving trickier than I expected...

[sholio]

Meta eh? I'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with. :) It's an interesting topic but one that can easily explode, in all kinds of ways.

SO MUCH GOOD FIC AAARGH. My reading list has suddenly become much more manageable since, for various personal reasons, I'm really not reading John/Rodney at the moment unless it's a really extraordinary story, and it's so much of what's out there.

[flingslass.livejournal.com]

Hi, I'm good, reading the Harry Potter series (haven't got up to where Fleur comes back into it after GOF. I've been reading a couple of books on creative writing and got myself a writing journal \0/
We're making progress :D

[sholio]

Ah, Harry Potter ... I was genuinely fannish about it back in, oh, 2003 or so, but the fan crush didn't last very long. I still dip my toe into the fic occasionally when something comes along that looks really good, though.

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

Haven't read the linked thread yet but the article on romantic friendship was fascinating reading - I actually had thoughts along those lines when in the discussion with you, but didn't have anything to reference. Because really, I'm more interested in romantic friendship than erotic relationships - which is what "smarm" basically is - but I'm willing to accept the erotic-romantic combination of slash because it's more common, easier to find.

I do think this is why many fans find "smarm" difficult to understand; we don't have the social framework for it anymore. Smarm isn't "realistic" because modern guys don't usually act like that, are uncomfortable expressing their feelings - but that's thanks to modern social values more than any innate elements of human interaction. (You can see this in Japan - the teenage boys here are far more physically expressive than American boys. You'll often see them having tickle fights or feeding each other on the train, while American teenage boys would be too worried about being see as "gay" to do anything of the sort in public.)

This especially amused me:

Friendship, especially male friendship, became the preserve of a few harmless, restrained activities, such as clapping one another on the back. Strong demonstrations of love were only permitted between friends if an emergency arose, such as one of the friends being injured.

This article might as well be writing about fanfic!

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

--On the other hand, skimming the comments on the little_details thread makes me realize why many people fighting against homophobia would choose to interpret all "romantic friendship" erotically. Referring to slash fans as "demented"...yeah, there's still prejudice around, the implication in some peoples' minds that men loving each other romantically is less objectionable than loving each other erotically. Even the article admitted that there's crossover, that some romantic friendships probably were homoerotic in nature. I think myself that it's a mistake to deny either type; we're limiting ourselves either way...

(I also find it interesting that at least a couple of the close friendships the guys described were between a straight man and a gay man - because there was a homoerotic element? Or because gay men are more comfortable expressing love with other men, erotic or platonic?)

[wneleh.livejournal.com]

"Romantic friendship" == smarm? I'm going to have to go follow this.

- Helen

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

Additional comment to say HAAWWW to the bad-sex:

"He made her forget she was a Communist" is one of the funniest conclusions to a sex scene I've read!

[sholio]

I think slash is equally subscribed to the notion of a sexual binary, however -- just on the opposite end of the scale from "platonic" smarm. (Amusing to use "platonic" in its modern sense, in the context of this discussion, given where it comes from ...)

And that's what I loved so much about that story that's linked above, the top one, because it does address a little of that complexity -- the shifting lines between loving someone and having sex with them, the way that we try to make ourselves happy and end up being unhappy instead by trying to squeeze into a simple sexual binary. I think someone who OTP's John and Rodney in the sexual sense would be fairly unhappy with that story, but I really loved it in part because to me, it did reinforce the idea that love can transcend who you're having sex with.

I do think this is why many fans find "smarm" difficult to understand; we don't have the social framework for it anymore. Smarm isn't "realistic" because modern guys don't usually act like that, are uncomfortable expressing their feelings - but that's thanks to modern social values more than any innate elements of human interaction.

... but you do have to take that into account when you're writing, yeah? I mean, the social background and class status of the characters is going to influence the way that they act with each other ... as well as just their personality. My husband's family, for example (Wisconsin guys) are incredibly undemonstrative people; about the most physical affection I've ever seen between the boys in that family is a stiff, obligatory half-hug, and I truly can't imagine any of them breaking down in a smarmy sense even under extreme emotional duress. In a thirteen-year relationship, I've only seen my husband cry once. On the other hand, I have guy friends who cry at the drop of a hat and would totally hug another guy.

That last bit, bwahahaha, I know; my brain immediately went "Fanfic!" at that point ...

[wneleh.livejournal.com]

Been meaning to ask - are you planning on running a sga gen ficathon again this spring? (Hope, hope)

-Helen

[sholio]

I plan to, but I'm probably not going to start it up at the same time as last year. I figure that the time surrounding the airing of the show's last episodes isn't a good time to be simultaneously handling ficathon signups; I expect that everyone will be feeling a bit bruised, and there may be fannish implosions and other things of that nature. I'll probably shoot for doing signups sometime in March or April.

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

The little_details post was interesting, mainly because it made me really curious about female friendships (or male/female friendships) as they seemed defined there as somehow different from what was described. To me, the post just seemed to be about friendship, period.

[sholio]

Yes; I think actually, one of the interesting things about that post to me is how male/male friendships, as described there, seem to be behave just like the close female/female friendships that I've participated in -- the social "rules" may be different for some guys in some walks of life (and I know men for whom that is definitely true) but it definitely reinforces the idea that once you scratch the surface, we're all emotionally more or less the same.

[anniehow.livejournal.com]

That article on romantic friendships was fascinating! I've never really considered the issue, but reading it really highlighted for me how today people throw around neologisms like "man crush" or "bromance" like they're these twenty-first century-only concepts when really, we're only just beginning to go back to being comfortable with a certain level of PDA between friends (and not necessarily just same-sex ones, either!).

Thanks for linking.

[sholio]

I know; I was aware that the language of friendship was different in pre-modern times, but I think the article lays it out in a very interesting way. It's interesting that viewing sex as a heritable binary is, on the one hand, a good thing for combating social prejudice, but on the other hand fails to describe the complexity of human behavior ...

[naye]

Hi~! ♥

And thanks for links! They look most intriguing.

[sholio]

Hiiiiii! ♥ I'm afraid I haven't really been commenting on your Japan posts ... but I've been reading them! (And I plan on trying to be a little more commenty ... at least until I leave in, um, four days.)

[greyias.livejournal.com]

I started reading that article yesterday -- and it's fascinating! Some of it is stuff I'd had thoughts on before, but sort of helped put into words some of my own feelings on it. I love the idea of the different spectrums, romantic vs erotic vs sexual -- that just makes so much sense to me that it's not a rigid "either/or" kind of thing.

And the "How Not to Write a Sex Scene" both scares me and amuses me at the same time.

[sholio]

I know! I think that in real life, relationships are still much messier and harder to pin down than the ideals that we have for them. I know people in stable polyamorous relationships, people who used to have a sexual relationship and ended up platonic friends, people who are mostly platonic but get together for sex sometimes. Trying to capture the messiness of real life in fic pretty much blows gen/het/slash categories all to heck. *g*

I was reading the horrible sex scenes link a couple of days ago and emailing choice bits back and forth with my sister. Some metaphors just don't belong in the middle of a sex scene, that's for sure!

[trystings.livejournal.com]

I will read the male friendship article more thoroughly tomorrow (00.30 am, I'm beat), fascinating read though.

Meanwhile, thanks for the Potter rec. It was excellent. I really should get out of SGA fandom more often.

[sholio]

There is some really brilliant fic in Harry Potter fandom -- unfortunately the fandom is so huge that the good-fic-to-dreck ratio is ... kind of intimidating. *g*

[less-star.livejournal.com]

That article was very interesting, thanks for linking. And it's so good to hear someone else is addicted to little_details, I was beginning to think I was weird!

[sholio]

Hee! It's too addictive, isn't it? (And I find it amusing how often SGA seems to crop up in either the questions or the answers, like the one just recently who was looking for help at realistically torturing Sheppard into a quivering wreck. Poor Sheppard.)

[wneleh.livejournal.com]

Definitely - which is one reason why so many folks turn to slash, I think. John & Rodney, being products of their time, would probably never be that comfortable with open expressions of platonic friendship, but if they are gay you can write them cuddling and admitting love and not have it be that OOC, as they do soften somewhat in the romantic/erotic relationships we've seen them in.

Yeah, John and Rodney drive me crazy; some of what I've written that I've meant to be gen has ended up reading even to me as slash. Doesn't help that John's sexuality confuses the heck out of me.

[sholio]

At least some of it *is* in the eye of the beholder; I've read things that were labeled as slash where I couldn't for the life of me see the slash, and written things (like "Old Soldiers Die Hard") that I knew could be easily read as slash between the lines.

[aelfgyfu_mead]

I had to look at "How Not to Write Sex Scenes." The first couple were just bad and not funny, I thought, but after that--my gosh! People write stuff like that on purpose? And not as a joke?

Thanks for the link!

[sholio]

They read like parodies of sex scenes, don't they?

[zillah975]

Eeeee thank you so much for the rec!! When I have time I'm going to explore some of the things you linked to, but time is in short supply these days, alas. But there's always time to say thank you!! *cuddles*

[sholio]

Awww, you're welcome! It's an excellent story and very deserving of a rec. :)