neadods | (no subject)

You'd think I'd learn not to talk about RPS after last time... but here I go. Since this wasn't directed as a question for the non-RPS folk I'm not going to go stir the shit on the original post or in the community. However, I just can't pass without comment.

carlanime posts a question to RPS readers/writers on

fanthropology linking back to this post about how she started looking at people differently after RPSing them as a joke. I don’t mean to suggest for a second I agreed with any of his views or shared any of his motivations; in fact, the more of his speeches I read, the more opposed to his views I became. But, nevertheless, I was taking him seriously in some sense I hadn’t before. It was as if the process of ficcing him had somehow forced me to acknowledge his humanity.

Leading to this comment to the post that really blew my brain: This happened to me too. I looked and went, "Oh my GOD. That's actually a living, breathing, eating, sleeping person!"

Yes. It is.

Which still leaves me with my question about the whole damn genre - Why do you have to turn them into your fictionalized characters before you grasp that a human being is a human being? In all the flood of commentary when I first got my butt kicked for discussing this on LJ, I never got an answer to that that made any sense to me. Why in hell should it be a revelation that the actual person you're writing about is indeed a living, breathing, eating, sleeping person, and why only after writing about them do they become someone whose humanity now can be acknowledged?

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I have real problems with slash in general. It puts forward the notion that you can't have love without bed romping and that platonic relationships are somehow weak and unfulfilled.

I get angry about this in hetero couples, too. Angel and Cordelia are the perfect example. I loved that they adored each other, were willing to kill-or-die for each other, WITHOUT the necessity of being in luuuuuurve. Surely extremely close and lasting attachments are capable without passionate love being involved.

I apply the "romantic gesture" rule to a lot of slash couples; if it would be unequivicably seen as romantic gesture if the pairing was m/f, then it remains a romantic gesture if the pairing is m/m or f/f. Best example off the top of my head is in Master & Commander: Far Side of the Ocean. When Captain Aubrey breaks off pursuit of the enemy ship to go back to the Gallapagos Islands so that Maturin can recover from a gunshot wound (and study the wildlife), if it had been in a romance novel and Maturin had been a woman, it would have been a major WAFF (warm-and-fuzzy-feeling) moment. Is it any less because the two characters are male?

Angel and Cordelia are the perfect example.

Scully and Mulder are an even more perfect example. I loved it when they had a professional relationship, and I thought their partnership got some interesting dynamics when it seemed to me that he was slotting her into the place in his life where his sister had been.

But then they had to go Be In Lurve and bang and angst because they had interlocking genetilia. And all the other possible dynamics, more intersting possibilities, and any breath of originality (not to mention professionalism) went right out the window.

Why Love != Sex is a whole different rant with me.