sholio | Hi f'list, how are you?

Entry tags:

Hi f'list, how are you?

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.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

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...

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

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!

--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?)

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

-Helen

Even the article admitted that there's crossover, that some romantic friendships probably were homoerotic in nature.

What I find fascinating is that for a lot of "romantic friendships" in history, we genuinely don't know -- a whole lot of cultures and historical periods defined sexual orientation and what did or didn't "count" as sex very differently, and didn't prioritize the question of "but was this attraction sexual?" in the way that we do.

From what I've read of the historical discussions over this, there are documented romantic friendships where there's plausible evidence that there was sex (in modern terms) going on, ones where it seems likely there wasn't, and an awful lot where we really have no clue, because that wasn't what people were speculating about at the time.

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

- Helen

Well, "smarm" in the original fandom definition (http://home.netcom.com/~nobleone/smarmdef.htm) is the physical or verbal display of platonic friendship. A lot of the "romantic friendship" they describe in the article - professions of love, cuddling, even kissing - is found in the more gooey varieties of smarm.

(I've always loved smarm, but I am disturbed at times by the absolute denial of sexual attraction that "true" smarmers are supposed to subscribe to - at times there's a definite element of homophobia, the idea that sexual love between two men is impure, disturbing, wrong. ...Actually, as you can see in the essay I linked above, for some smarmers it's that all sexual love is seen as "impure"; that sexual desire by its very nature cheapens love, that sex is a selfish act of taking what you want from another person, rather than equally an act of giving. It's this extreme viewpoint that makes me wary to admit I'm a smarmer in public, for all I do love platonic friendship.)

I'm sort of inclined to side with the old-fashioned people who weren't speculating - I think deep, true love is possible in erotic and non-erotic friendships both, and the presence or absence of sex doesn't really matter. I tend to suspect that whether a romantic friendship is also erotic depends mostly on the participants - some people are more inclined toward sexual relationships, others more inclined toward "platonic". (In my experience, fanfic tastes go the same way - people who like smarm or who like slash are both into romantic friendships, but smarmers are people for whom sex is less important or meaningful than slashers...)

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.

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.

Hi~! ♥

And thanks for links! They look most intriguing.

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!

We-elllll.... the problem with the "it doesn't matter/don't speculate" point of view on historical people is that it does make a difference when it comes to describing and understanding pre-modern behavior accurately. And you end up with idiots like the "Ewww, Lincoln wasn't gay!" crowd; historical evidence does, probably, point to romantic friendship being mistaken through our modern lens for a sexual relationship in that case, but for a lot of people just the idea that Lincoln wasn't OMG STRAIGHT freaks them out.

I mean, to some extent yeah, it really doesn't matter -- but it matters in the same sense as knowing, say, what the Neanderthals were doing with those flowers in that cave in Iraq. In either case, of course, people are going to be applying their own prejudices and preconceived notions to the past in the process of trying to understand it...

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.

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.

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.)

I know; it really kinda highlights how much we don't know about pre-modern behavior because of the way that contemporary social mores affected what kind of information was collected and written down -- some assumptions were so obvious that they need not be stated, others were too taboo to say out loud, and teasing out the one from the other is a murky web indeed ... and of course, because of the way that our modern sexual binary and sexual prejudices, just trying to see the past without our cultural lens getting in the way is pretty much impossible.

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 ...

Ahhh, I put "it doesn't really matter" in a different category from "don't speculate" - I'm not really saying there's anything wrong with speculating, more that I think focusing too much on the nature of the love might be undervaluing the relationship itself. There's nothing wrong with trying to figure out whether or not Lincoln was actually buggering the friend he shared a bed with, but it isn't that important to understanding Lincoln the man. Except insofar as it could be an argument against homophobia, and yes, when it comes to using the past to understand the present, I agree that it could be important to know, in certain situations. But even if Lincoln was "gay" by modern definitions, it wouldn't have had the same impact on his life then; to try to define him as "gay" or "straight" paints a misleading picture of the man and his motivations.

...But then, I personally feel that not only is trying to categorize Lincoln gay or straight a mistake - but I kind of am opposed to categorizing modern people as gay or straight, either, because human psychology and history both indicate that such strict categories are misleading and inaccurate reflections of the human condition. I understand the politically necessities of describing "gay" as a minority, but in a lot of respects it's damaging to all of society ("gay" and "straight" alike) to be locking people in those boxes.

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 ...

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.

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.

Oh, very much so, for the most part - I think there is some slash that is in between, but most slashers subscribe to the love = romantic-erotic love paradigm of modern culture. But I find it interesting that some smarmers, while they enjoy platonic romance, are often vehemently against erotic friendship. Rather than going for the "open" continuum described in the article, where "romantic friendship" might or might not include an erotic element (it sounds like it was sort of DADT in certain historical periods) - the more impassioned smarmers insist on strictly platonic interpretations.

(I haven't read the fic in question, less due to the OTP aspect than because I'm not interested in John pairings; I get bored when Rodney's not the major focus ^^;)

... 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.

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.

I do find it fascinating that men will write h/c, with holding and begging not to die and the whole smarm shebang - as the article mentions, only under extreme duress, but I get the feeling sometimes that a lot of guys really do enjoy the smarm of, say, war movies. They don't feel comfortable with such displays except when forced to it, but they (maybe subconsciously?) actually do crave such affirmations...

ETA: ack, I need sleep! Wanted to add that there are two types of "sexual binaries" - interpreting people (this person is gay/straight) and interpreting relationships (this relationship is platonic/erotic-romantic.) Much slash defies the former (many slash stories have pretty much *everyone* being bisexual, in deference to canon het relationships) while supporting the latter (interpreting close 'romantic' relationships erotically); while as traditional smarm insists on strict interpretation of canonical sexual orientation, while reinterpreting the relationships romantic (though not erotic). Both slash and smarm are 'solutions' to the problem of romantic friendship, finding ways to explore the concept under the rules of modern society.

Edited 2008-12-01 20:17 (UTC)

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.

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!

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Page 1 of 3

Hi f'list, how are you?

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject