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

Re: Cheats or cliches

[leethet.livejournal.com]

They really will always be there, it's true. They're not so very farfetched in this fandom. But to use them as shortcuts to intimacy without actually taking any time to develop the just-as-reasonable nonshortcuts (you know, talks, time together, all that stuff...) just seems too easy and can lead the reader (this one, at least) into a feeling that their intimacy would never have happened had they not been, you know, chained together naked in a basement for three days. And I'd like to think there's more to their love than that. :) Their coming together shouldn't be the result of cheats. If it's the result of solid storytelling and time and common ground and all that other stuff, then I don't mind if the story uses maybe one cheat as a kind of firecracker. If the story's all cheats ... where's the actual relationship?

And again, this is just me spouting about the way I like things to be developed; mostly it was, as I indicated, that the story I read made me think about what I like and what I don't like, and why, and even where I've gone wrong in the past. :)

Re: Cheats or cliches

[tgabrielle.livejournal.com]

I think you are absolutely right. When I first started reading slash MFU fanfic I was amazed at the contrivances used to get the boys together. It just seemed so obvious to me they were close to begin with that it was hard to understand why all the drama involved in getting them to recognize the spark between them. This may be why, though I like first-time stories, they are not my favorites. I think the slash part is fairly obvious. I've always wondered more what happens after they have sex.