sciatrix | Entries tagged with meta

For context, my day job involves studying animal communication, where I am a PhD student in evolution/animal behavior. I don't work on organisms that use non-standard sensory modalities directly, but I'm very familiar with the adaptations that electroceptive and echolocatory systems (mostly in bats, that latter one) generally require.

I also spend an awful lot of time watching my cat Dent, who has been blind probably from birth and definitely since he was about ten weeks old. (We're not entirely sure whether he can see light or movement, and he definitely can't see anything else.) Dent therefore has access to certain sensory modalities that are more sensitive than vision (cats can hear much higher into the ultrasonic than humans and have a wider range of olfactory sensitivities) without actually having vision to rely on, and thinking about what it is that specific sensory modalities actually bring to the table in terms of function.

What I am not is a blind person, nor have I lived or worked closely with someone who is. This is therefore going to be a discussion that focuses pretty heavily on "okay, let's assume Matty really does have ears like a bat--how does that constrain what he can and cannot do?" and less on the actual functional issues for someone who is, you know, a blind human--although if folks have comments on that, I would absolutely fucking love to hear them.
( TL, DR: radar isn't fucking magic, and neither is echolocation. And physics still matters when we get down into sensation, more than you might think. )

I like constraint in my headcanons, because it lets me plumb the unexpected boundaries of abilities, perceptions, and creates avenues for conflict and unexpected humor; if you don't--and the writers of Daredevil in all forms certainly don't seem to be particularly careful about this--seriously, by all means ignore me or pick out whatever you like and leave the rest. But I figured that this might be something folks here might be interested in, as far as meta goes, and anyway--it was certainly fun to write.

The first thing in my Pillowfort feed right now is a meta post discussing Girl Genius in the context of the genre of Rationalism Fic. While I first saw that post in the context of the Fandom Meta community, I'm not sure of the etiquette of posting this as a comment--not when the author didn't reblog the post to the community and seems to have written it for her own page--so I'm going to talk about it in my personal space. Besides, the conversation I want to have is quite orthogonal to hers, and it feels rude to derail it in comments. (And hey, I can crosspost from over there to DW that way--I like being here, too.)

Here's the thing: I loathe the genre of Rational Fic. I had several friends who were very enthused by Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, many of whom tried to get me avidly to read it. This... probably didn't work very well, because the attempts at realism in the story fell badly flat to me in the very first point: the characters seemed to me to certainly not be developmentally realistic for eleven-year-olds, and to a greater or lesser degree sympathetic protagonists appear to be... look, put it like this: the genre abandons emotional realism for me. I can't work out how this kid becomes this obnoxious, biochemistry professor stepfather or not--and I'm perpetually astounded by the absence even the emotional weaknesses I associate with highly logical gifted kids given their head in the context of academics.

Of course, this isn't surprising, given the conceits of rationalism: the idea that the emotional is the enemy of rationalism, that emotions are the primary source of mistakes in logic, and that pure dispassion would allow us to best understand and predict the chaotic world around us.

(I think this is silly. We know empirically what happens when you lose emotionality: you also lose the ability to make any decisions at all. I also find that the result of striving to minimize all potential emotional reasoning is to... muddy the water where emotions hide, making illogical decisions and behavior more likely than it would be if people would just acknowledge their emotional position outright and move on with asking whether those emotions are justified or ethical or whatever.

I would have so much fun yelling at Vulcans over the poor logic of their position, is my point. I love Vulcans, but I don't think they're right about the approach to emotionality and kohlinar, particularly.)

The big problem with this kind of "Rational Fic" is that I'm reading fanfiction heavily for emotional continuity. I don't think it's a surprise that the Fanlore collated criticisms of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality focus heavily on the contentions that the characterization is bad. Because many people explciitly enjoy fandom as in ways heavily focused on emotional continuity and characterization, of course a genre driven by a philosophy that totally fears emotional reasoning and engagement would mesh badly for many people.

But I do find it interesting and wryly amusing that I find this "hyperrationalistic" genre of writing so completely frustrating because I parse and perceive it as completely emotionally unrealistic and incoherent.

So this post popped up again in my feeds and I got extremely excited, except that I actually sat down to read the comments and got depressed by the, ah, discourse in them.

Which is a shame, because the distinction between the types of stories I would classify as slashfic versus queerfic are not necessarily about what kind of story is necessarily sufficiently good and didactic or even sufficiently representational. It's not a distinction about whether the story is important or whether it's worthy of existing or whether it's even necessarily realistic. So instead of commenting on a two-month-old post full of really irritating infighting (which seems to be the case for the OP, too!), I want to maybe start a new discussion.

Let me reiterate for my space: this ain't a question about whether slashfic is worthy, or what kind of story is only created by appropriating straight women, or whether this distinction should exist. It's a question about whether this genre distinction applies to the stories within the broader genre of fanfiction.

( To me, it's a question of focus. )

[Posted originally to Pillowfort.]

I am tired of soft lesbians. I would not mind them, but they are everything I can find.

Give me hard lesbians: women who have suffered, and women who have caused suffering. Give me survivors. Give me women who know what it is to live in a world that is unforgiving and know how to make love in that world anyway.

Give me broken lesbians: women with scars mental and physical, who are stretching their cut tissue into something functional. Give me women who know what being broken looks like and who know how to put themselves back together again. Give me women who don’t know they are broken and who are trying to fix themselves anyway. Give me women who make bad decisions because they are in pain or never learned how to do better.

Give me experienced lesbians: women who have had sex before and like it (or don’t), women who know what they like and what they don’t, and women who negotiate different opinons on what is good. Give me women who know that they have sensitive nipples (or not) and who prefer stimulation (or not) of different types; give me women with strong opinions about strap-ons, and penetration, and vibration. Give me women who have sex, because that ain’t just something that men do.

Give me conflicting lesbians: give me women whose relationships are imperfect, and messy, and complicated. Give me women who fight about silly things or looming, massive things. Give me women whose relationship is tense sometimes. Give me women who are unhealthy, women who need to break up, and women who have already mentally checked out and are looking for the next place to land.

Give me inexperienced lesbians: give me women who make obvious errors in interpersonal relationships. Give me women who don’t know what they want or how to become acquainted with their bodies. Give me women who don’t know how to be supportive of others, and give me women who don’t know how to care. Give me women who are greedy.

Give me f/f with one lesbian or even no lesbians at all: f/f with bisexual characters, or pansexual characters, or asexual characters. Give me f/f with people who have a variety of experiences, backgrounds, and tastes. Give me f/f with women whose tastes do not match up completely, women who negotiate different orientations or different preferences, and show me how they reach a comfortable medium.

Give me all of these things, because I need them and I want them.

I am tired unto death of soft lesbians. There are only so many iterations on specific well-trod f/f themes that I want to engage in, and soft dollies that sit next to each other and gaze emptily and softly into each other’s eyes is not enough. I want women with personality, with flaws and strengths and sparking character. I want women who step off the page or out of the screen and impress their realness onto my mind. I am greedy for them; I will consume them and roll their lifelike words into my skin.

Why is that so hard to find?

…a thing I’m chewing over is how the hell I integrate Meredith onto the Eclector, particularly long-term, without adding her in to play the role of Wendy to the Lost Boys.

I always hated Wendy. She never got to have any fun of her own, and she was always having to do all the scut work: mending and teaching and mentoring and being Pretty–a thing I hated as a child–and doing all the the things that make life a lot better to live, really, except that the Lost Boys never fucking bothered to get off their asses to do them.

And at the same time, in a lot of ways the Meredith I’m writing is a hell of a lot more experienced emotionally and socially than the remaining Ravager crew around her; she’s unwilling to put up with the level of filth around herself that they are. She’s unwilling to put up with the lack of respect that they might be. She’s generally much more clear about her boundaries and better at being aware of emotional undercurrents without having to translate them through a fog of toxic masculinity first.

I can see the lines of Wendy forming. And normally I’d be going “fine, let her be as irresponsible as anyone else then!” It’s not like I have problems writing things like Nebula, Queen of the Emotional Dumpster Fire, or Mantis, Occasional Exploding Doormat.

Except unlike Wendy, Meredith is an actual parent aboard the Eclector with her kid, determined to make sure her kid… gets to be a kid and does kid things. Like his homework. And some of those things she’s doing for Peter are going to appeal heavily to Yondu, who is still new to his command and pretty exasperated with the level of mathematical literacy (for example) on his crew–and Meredith has worksheets! And experience tutoring! And knows formal ways to teach math! That aren’t just intuitive and hard to explain!

If I was Yondu, I’d want that skill on my crew. I’d want the skills of an experienced household runner, someone who knows how to make money stretch; I’d want the skills also of an experienced negotiator, someone who is as good at surviving in a non-combat capacity as he is. Someone taught Peter how to sweet-talk his way through the universe, and I don’t actually think it was Yondu–the man uses flirting to put people off balance, not necessarily to actually charm them, and I’m pretty sure Meredith was more effective than that. I can see him trying to convince her to do that work on his ship, because I can see him noticing that the effects would be good.

And on the gripping hand… well, she’s sure as hell not motivated to parent anyone who isn’t an actual child. And she’s wary of the dynamic she can see herself falling into, where righteously demanding that you don’t leave bottles of fucking piss lying around and basic standards of hygiene suddenly morph into Meredith being responsible for convincing the entire crew to act like goddamn adults.

I suppose I’m trying to lay out the dilemma that hits a lot of women working and living in male-dominated spaces, myself included: how much of the rope do you drop regarding shit like “keeping basic spaces clean,” and how much of the work do you throw a fit over? Where do you draw the line, and how much work do you let yourself do unacknowledged simply because it clearly needs to be done, and no one else is doing it… and everyone is automatically assigning it to you?

…because I’m still reading through a bunch of tabs my on my laptop, and I figured other folks might like the links.

Where’s my lesbian porn guide? by

amaresu, who always has some of the best meta on DW, asking where the resources and tools for writing this are five years ago. Responses are interesting, and include one link to longstanding LJ comm

lez_sex_tips, which isn’t exactly fandom oriented but does apparently have a whole lot of women talking frankly about f/f sex and how to make it good.

Someone attempted to put the guide together but apparently got distracted after the first entry. Shame, but the discussion’s good. Requested topics:

mechanics of particular acts, along the lines of “one finger, two fingers, three fingers, dick!” for anal sex, as well as “oh god that will hurt if she does that”

notes about nail trimming came up for fingering; it was pointed out that femme folks with long pointy manicures can and do engage in fingering and even fisting without cutting anyone’s vag to shreds via the magic of nitrile gloves and cotton balls; whether this is in character for any particular person you’re writing at any given time, eh. ehhh.

descriptions of variety and how to handle that for different characters

multiple orgasms: how does that feel?

what the fuck is a g spot and does it even exist? what is the feeling like?

what words can you use without being either too clinical or too, idk, explicit? people seem to get pretty vague; is this a bug or a feature?

strap-ons: how do they work, how do you negotiate the feeling of using one?

how realistic do you have to be, anyway?

More discussions on words to be used in smut. Unsurprisingly, this is a topic for femslash writers. (mons, man. Mons is a good word. Gotta remember that.)

Elsewhere, some anon threads:

What words do you use? I remain horrified at the concept of describing anyone’s “creamy core” mid sex scene, but there’s a lot of good discussion here. Personal takeaways: mons is a nice word, pudenda sounds great unless you, like me, speak enough Latin to know it literally means “the thing she’s ashamed of” or “the thing she should be ashamed of”, quim is just fuckin’ confusing, and I too kind of dislike “vagina” as a word for anything on the outside bits.

Why can’t a lot of femslash writers write good/hot/sexy porn? (Oh my god, nether pearl, no.) Contains a lot of good conversation, including “is femslash really that much more personal to y’all than dudeslash?” Spawned the discussions above.

Otherwise interesting:

How do/should het writers (especially woman-centric het, for lack of a better term) interact with femslash writers? Interesting discussion, if edging into a bit wanky at times. Contains contemplation about whether het shippers and other fans interested in proactively enjoying and celebrating female characters should be paying more attention to femslash. Tends to lump het and gen together, which mildly aggravates me, but eh.

What should I do when I notice heteronormative stuff bleeding into my f/f? I want to be a good queer feminist! Personally, my answer is “breathe, don’t worry about being perfect, because no one is perfect and expecting that out of yourself is mostly just a way to silence yourself. Create what you create, and if you notice themes in your own work that make you uncomfortable, play with what makes you uncomfortable and turn that into art, too.

Because it blew my mind a bit, a perfect description of the stylistic shit that turns me the fuck off so much femslash, which is then attributed to what is apparently a very popular/cliquish femslash archive/LJ comm back in the day. Huh. There is a lot of complaining about this archive in the anon threads I have been browsing through, and frankly, if it’s the reason that the style described here is so fucking omnipresent in the fic I’ve been hunting for I can see why. Grump.

Potential prompt mining: favorite tropes as applied to femslash. This pleases me. I love tropey shit.

f/f writing gripe of the night:

the problem with having been wistfully deterred every time I tried aggressively to dive into femslash writing the first time is that I just have way less to draw on for scene structure than I apparently can pull from for m/m. Which is ridiculous: I’m not even limiting myself to standard human vulva-inclusive genitals, so why the hell is this hitting me so much harder than sex from a male PoV?

like, why is shit like “I would like clothes off, please remove” and “excuse me, please put your hand on my fucking clit now now now” and “I am nervy but I want to make my body feel good please and thank you” suddenly so much trickier from a female PoV than a male one? It’s not like I don’t have a ton of experience with the latter to draw on here. but okay, it’s intimidating, fine; I’m a baby writer, I am still learning this shit, practicing is okay. gotta think on it and chew a bit.

so I go looking for resources and advice. and…. there are none. fuck.

well, okay. that’s not entirely true. but what there is seems to be very focused on either anatomy, mechanics and safe sex (”how do lesbians do it, anyway?”) or on coming up with good words to use for genitalia in your porn writing. and. neither of those are my bloody problem here.

first, I am pretty well acquainted with the theoretical ways that you can get up close and personal with a cunt. tribadism and cunnilingus and fingering and fisting are not foreign concepts to me. I am aware of the difficulties with actually pulling off scissoring and frankly tits present all manner of possibilities, and all that assumes your characters have never heard of toys. I don’t need another list of dry descriptions of Possible Activities to do if you have two editions of Slot B.

hisses Scarleteen is a lovely resource but it is not particularly helpful as a guide to writing porn, thank you.

second, the wording thing people complain about is not usually what I’m bothered with. which: c’mon, folds? lips are right there, or rely on texture and sensation to describe things. obviously euphemisms like ‘love tunnel’ are Right Out, but I wouldn’t have been using those anyway. (also I’m gonna be honest: vulva is an appealing, velvety word. fight me. and cunt: also lovely. I can take or leave pussy, but cunt and vulva are buddies to me.)

besides, word choice normally wouldn’t bug me much–after all, I tend to not be someone who writes heavily on the anatomy references anyway, so

that’s stalling me just a bit, but it’s not actually the thing that keeps smacking me in the head as I try to write this scene and derail.

no, what I’m scrambling for is descriptions of sensation, of experience, of feeling… from the perspectives of actual people. And scenes with women fucking each other described in an interesting way that illustrates the vulnerability of the characters

and it’s not just me: cursory searches from my trawling through DW comms yields an anon femslash thread wherein the first comment when asked what people would not want to confess to off anon was people complaining about the paucity of anything but fade-to-black.

so is it something about the headspace? my internalized weirdness? what is going on with my head?

and gah, is there like a treasure trove of How To Write Good F/F Explicit Sex I’m missing somewhere? I’ll work up a bunch of links to all the best stuff I find in the morning as I trawl Dreamwidth and LJ comms, but I’m regretfully afraid of the possibility that there’s just nothing for it but to go hunting for the best f/f in my favorites lists, reread them, and brood.

oh, oh, the horror.

One thing I fucking love about Holt is that the portrayal of an older, well-established gay man is absolutely pitch perfect, in the sense that–he is neither a one-dimensional Activist Who Cares About Nothing But His Community nor the other trap that middle-aged gay men tend to fall into on mainstream comedy, going “eh, fuck it, I got mine” and joking about fleeing the city for Pride and being faintly embarrassed by activism. Holt’s not a professional activist–he’s got his career and that’s his priority–but he also clearly cares about his community, and tbh as someone who has done the whole founding something because no one else cared enough to do it and then being challenged by someone who has better ideas for the organization… well, his response to the whole AAGLNYCPA thing is 100% on point. Fuck. I have so many feelings about him.

( tucked under a cut so as to not take up TOO much room )

I think that’s a huge strength of the show, and one that ought to be replicated more often: if you’re having a character stand in for one marginalized experience in your writing, make an effort to bring in a second character occupying a similar experience to play off of them with. Just one, and nothing you do with the character can escape the notion that you’re making a commentary on stereotypes or the dialogue between stereotyping and personhood and reality. But if you have two, you immediately can point to the places where their personalities respond to the expectations around them differently, and surprise: there’s a fully realized, human pair of characters that suddenly feel 100% more human and deeply realized than otherwise.

Man, I was just thinking this morning that I wish we had gotten more Yondu and Nebula interaction. Because a) the way he totally forgives her immediately without a beat is just, wow, but also more importantly b)…

Nebula does the same thing that Rocket does re pretending she doesn’t have actual feelings, just pissiness. She’s just more inclined to project physical threat than use emotional weapons and verbal needling than Rocket, I suspect partly because she’s actually even less emotionally intuitive than he is, and partly because her position as Thanos’ daughter and, I suspect, his blunter weapon gave her a lot of reputation along those lines to lean on.

But she spends that entire movie pretending she wants to kill Gamora more than anything, as well as the first one. She couches every request to be released in terms of tactical intelligence, irritation, and disgust at the lack of efficiency, not affection. Yet when you look at her actual actions given the intel she has to work with, literally everything she actually does with the exception of coming after Gamora to win is something that serves to protect the team as much as she can. For example, she has no way of knowing the Ravagers probably weren’t going to kill Rocket, Groot released her very late in the conversation and she almost certainly saw an opportunity to seize control and nabbed it.

When Rocket is almost murdered again by Taserface, Nebula steps in again and makes sure he’s kept alive at least until he can be surrendered for the bounty. There’s no evidence that Nebula has any reason to care about Rocket, so as far as I can tell she’s only looking after him for Gamora’s sake. She is angry about the constant fighting, and she’s the person who angrily says that the Guardians must not care about each other since they bicker so much. Nebula has some strong feelings about friendship and camraderie and protection despite also having, as far as we can tell from canon, basically zero experience having any of her own except in the context of growing up with Gamora.

Who doesn’t appear to believe that Nebula is redeemable in any way, by the way, judging by the way she treats Nebula and her planned place to deposit her in prison–something I read as sentiment on one level, in that she doesn’t want Nebula dead and will go to some lengths to keep that from happening, but on the other hand something that says she doesn’t trust Nebula as a person to be capable of anything but genocide. Gamora has nothing to say to Nebula that isn’t an insult, and yet Nebula continues, doggedly, to do everything in her power to keep Gamora’s team safe while she focuses on that goal of winning.

(You can compare and contrast that with Yondu’s relationship with Stakar, by the way, because that’s also pretty much how Stakar treats Yondu–you did the bad thing, I cast you out because you did, and I don’t believe you are ever trustworthy again–despite Yondu wanting desperately to atone and make things right and, I think, never having been heard out properly to begin with. But that is a rant for another day.)

Bring that over to Yondu. He clearly has very good insight into people who mask their affection and their desire to connect with violence, threats, and attacks; after all, as he says to Rocket, you’re me. He has an extremely good reason to be angry and mistrustful of Nebula, but in fact he sizes her up about as quickly as he sizes up Rocket and the next time he sees her he grins, settles in, and exchanges a quick joke as if they’re old friends.

I firmly believe that if Yondu had lived, at some point he would probably have tried to mentor Nebula in the same way that he tried to mentor Rocket about fixing that, and that he liked Nebula for who and what she was and what she was trying to do. I think he recognized the ways Nebula is trying despite a hell of a shitty childhood, and I think he saw himself in her. And I just–I think that would have been good for all of them. I think there’s something really healing in the idea of Yondu sort of adult-parenting Nebula and Rocket into how emotions actually work and how they can keep themselves safe without unsolicited attacks or threats to test the waters, especially a Yondu who is still learning himself as he goes along, but who has exactly the right kind of experience to tell them what they’re doing and why.

Sevi007 said:

"You know, I’m a really peaceful, pacifistic person and consider myself rather forgiving and patient…

But everyone who reads my tags under every last post that has Ego the living planet in it will probably disagree with all of the above. Um."

I don’t know, at some point peacefulness and pacifism have to have a limit or else you run into other moral questions about inaction and tolerating injustice. If there is no limit past which pacifism is no longer viable, that raises questions about whether the moral desire to remain clean of anger or violence cancels out the sin of allowing evil to proceed unmolested.

And if you look at Ego’s actions actually are, he kind of personifies evil deeds borne of entitlement. Let’s start with raping a woman–because what he did with Meredith, having sex with her for a reason she didn’t have the opportunity to give informed consent to, that is actually rape. He did that a lot–almost certainly many times for each of the skulls on that cairn of bones.

Then let’s talk about the fact that he did this multiple times for the sole purpose of impregnating women, probably not with their informed consent re becoming pregnant at that time. Whatever you think of pregnancy and parenthood, it’s a major life decision and ideally should only be embarked upon with eyes open and a thoughtful choice. Add on that he did that having zero intention of helping to parent or even financially support the resulting offspring that he chose to “put inside” those women. Peter’s mom clearly loved him and didn’t resent him for suddenly making her life a lot more difficult, but that’s…. Not how every woman who unexpectedly has a child in very stressful and precarious situation responds, so he’s also deliberately leaving children in situations that are poorly equipped to look after them.

Then we can talk about how he did all this explicitly planning to abduct these children from their actual parents, the adults looking after them, once the hard work of raising a child was over. He did it but planning to steal the wills and, effectively, life force of any and all of these children at the equivalent of age eight if he could–assuming that of course they had skills useful to him. If they didn’t, he simply killed them. He didn’t bother to return them to whoever might have missed them; easier to murder a child and discard it, absorbing it into your cavernous body.

And then we return to the reason he did all of it in the first place, his Glorious Purpose: replacing all life with extensions of himself like a kind of pan-universal cancer. It’s no wonder he killed Meredith with a brain cancer, because Ego is himself as much a form of cancer as anything else. There are in fact independent cancers in nature that spread from affected individual to individual, in at least three species I know of: and at least one of them, that lives mostly in feral dogs, is at least a thousand years old. Ego is simply the same thing on a larger scale, except worse: Ego is sapient. Ego had a choice about who he was and what he intended to become, and he chose that.

If Ego does not break the line at which one can no longer tolerate peace or pacifism and must act to stand against him, those words are meaningless. He is never shown or even implied to take the personhood or consequences to anyone else into his account when he considers any potential action.

Ego is a fundamentally irredeemable character. He makes an excellent villain, but the sheer scale of the harm he perpetuates in the service of his ultimate goal of universal genocide makes him nothing more and nothing less than pure, absolute evil. And he’s all the better as a villain because his evil explicitly stems from the same fundamental petty self-centered entitlement as all the little evils we encounter around us, every day.