A mild rant

[leethet]

So I was dipping a toe back into reading the vast quantity of MFU stories I’ve missed while being absorbed in the other fandom for the last two years, and I read a story.

Disclaimer: What follows is opinion, not attempted edict, despite the tone it may take at some points.

There’re these things we do in fandom (at least, in the two I’m involved in, and I think also in others). For lack of a better term I’ll call them artificially accelerated intimacy scenes. Or cheats. Exemplae gratias:

1. Locked room

2. Truth serum

3. Hypothermia or other illness involving naked contact

4. Muscle cramps and resultant massages

5. Bed sharing

These leap to mind. I’ve no doubt there are more. Now, we writers use them (and I guarantee I do too, so I’m not pointing fingers) because we like them (I admit to a fondness for both locked room scenes and truth serum bits) and because, let’s face it, they’re easy. They’re cheats. They force intimacy.

Now, used sparingly, they’re fine. In fact, in MFU there’s nothing outre about locked rooms or truth serums. But when a fic uses these contrivances one after the other, they start to really stand out. Worse, a reader (well, this reader) realizes that, overused, they result in an intimate relationship based on … well, contrivance, rather than a more natural development of the relationship through solid storytelling. The story becomes rather a house of cards.

Which leads me to the realization I came to, and point No. 5:

I don’t want to read a story where the guys have to share a bed naked, wake up with hard ons (“Oops!”), have a passing thought along the lines of “they had been moving toward this moment for a long time” (and, dude, I’m sure I’ve used that line, so again, I’m not picking on others) and then boom! Détente, denouement, de end.

I want to read a story in which they’re in separate beds, preferably separate rooms, and one or the other, after long hard thought about what he’s feeling and what it means, gets off his ass, gets out of the bed, goes into the other room and says, “Illya, we need to talk.” In other words, a conscious, deliberate act that results (we hope) in that ultimate intimacy.

I realized that I need characters to take responsibility for their actions. I loathe people who don’t, and I really want to love Napoleon and Illya. I don’t want them making love accidentally, as it were, or as the result of cheats. I want them to fucking mean it.

Again (and again): This isn’t me on some high horse saying other writers suck. I have no doubt I’ve used these cheats (though I hope not a bunch of them in one story … I’m a little afraid to go back and look), and I know my fics aren’t perfect. What this really is is me spouting an essay about something I realized I want to read in others’ fics, and that I want to try harder to write in my own.

I’m interested in other views here. Debate, demur, deplore, declaim, delovely, delightful.

Comments

[gilda-elise.livejournal.com]

Amen! There can be good stories that use these cheats but so often I find myself rolling my eyes. Napoleon and Illya have been partners for five, seven, sometimes ten years and all of a sudden because of some odd circumstance they end up getting it off with each other?! And it takes that for them to know they're in love or, worse, that they're gay? No, give me a deliberate realization that they want to be together anytime.

[dinahmt.livejournal.com]

Yikes! Why is your writing so big, Lee? Or is it just me?

Hee

[leethet.livejournal.com]

It's big because I composed it in Word (which is formatted how I like it) and then pasted it. I forgot how huge it looks in LJ. It doesn't look that huge in a Word doc, honest!

[leethet.livejournal.com]

Better now, Di? ;)

[dinahmt.livejournal.com]

Better now, Di? ;)

Oh yes, you're no longer shouting *g*

[leethet.livejournal.com]

I would hate to shout at people. :)

[leethet.livejournal.com]

Yup, I strongly suspect that I've done the dreaded "gee, they'd never realized before!" kind of thing (no wonder it seemed so familiar as I ranted about it), but I don't care for either rushed or accidental intimacy (so I'll try to never do it again!). I don't mind one of those "cheats" in a story, because then it is just a moment and the story must still rely on getting the guys together one step at a time. Too many of those moments reads, to me, like a list of what to avoid when trying to realistically (ha! realistically!) bring the guys together. If your advances in intimacy hinge on such artificial scenes, the story has a false feel to it, to me at least.
It's probably happened to other writers, too, that they read something, go "Gee, I don't care for that," then realized "Hell, I did that 6 months ago in XYZ Story!" Our preferences change a bit over time, I guess.:)