Advance the plot, foo'!
Jan. 30th, 2008 12:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousficKen Begg of Jabootu once said that you can tell the intended audience of a movie by the trials they face. Men’s movies tend to have the heroes put through intense physical hardship, whereas women’s movies have the heroes (or, likely as not, heroines) go through intense emotional hardship before obtaining their goal. I think that’s true, but incomplete. Men aren’t that shallow. The best action sequences are ones that have an emotional component, that use their action to further the story… usually by exploring character, as sort of an update on their emotional arc. To use some blunt examples, we could see a hero going from weakling to confident action man, or from coward to hero. They mingle physical hardship with emotional hardship.
Batman not only goes through the physical pain of getting set on fire by Scarecrow and having his house burned down, but he goes through the emotional trauma of reliving his parents’ deaths and having his mentor chastise him. A simultaneously great and poor example is The Matrix trilogy. In the first movie, Neo goes from ineffectual noob to messiah in action sequences. In the very next movie, there’s a fight between him and Seraph that is utterly pointless (and separated by another pointless fight with Agent Smith, in which Neo could’ve flown away at any time, by a big dull monologue by the Oracle). It doesn’t reveal anything about the characters and it doesn’t advance the plot. It is, in cinematic terminology, pure PRETTY ‘SPLOSIONS!
What occurs to me now is that fanfic uses sex scenes in much the same way. I should stop here and note that this doesn’t necessarily have to be sex scenes, although that does seem to be the prevalent metaphor… I saw one McShep fic that used McKay’s guitar playing as one huge metaphor for intimacy (although that had McKay being forced to play his guitar for alien captors as a metaphor for rape. Ummm… yeahhhh).
This comes in very handy when deciding what sex to gloss over (the (infamous?) fade to black) and what sex to go into detail with. We wouldn’t want to miss Neo’s climactic showdown with Agent Smith because it’s delivering on the promise the film’s been giving us… Neo is the One, his emotional arc is paying off, and the villain who’s been invincible the entire movie is now getting his comeuppance. But a random scene in which Neo uses kung-fu to stop some muggers or has a second training session with Morpheus (unless they imparted information that wasn’t covered in other scenes) would be tedious and have audiences checking their watches, no matter how good the choreography was.
Similarly, it may be important to the plot that, say, Spike is having a number of one night stands because he can’t be with Buffy, but going into detail would be pointless unless the scene underscored that this isn’t a substitute for the real thing. A generic “OH GOD, YESYESYES!” sex scene would drag the whole fic down.
Of course, just as there are some movies where action scenes are the entire point, there are PWPs where sex is the name of the game. Predator or Commando don’t exactly feature scintillating Campbellian journeys, but there are PRETTY ‘SPLOSIONS. A fic with Batman and Superman spending the night in a no-tell motel would be just as erotic with or without ten thousand words leading up to it (and, of course, if it’s a PWP, there’s a chance the audience will be saying “JUST KISS ALREADY!” and not in the good way). Sometimes you just really want to read about some boning.
So, sex scenes as action sequences: Reveal character or die, mofo.
Batman not only goes through the physical pain of getting set on fire by Scarecrow and having his house burned down, but he goes through the emotional trauma of reliving his parents’ deaths and having his mentor chastise him. A simultaneously great and poor example is The Matrix trilogy. In the first movie, Neo goes from ineffectual noob to messiah in action sequences. In the very next movie, there’s a fight between him and Seraph that is utterly pointless (and separated by another pointless fight with Agent Smith, in which Neo could’ve flown away at any time, by a big dull monologue by the Oracle). It doesn’t reveal anything about the characters and it doesn’t advance the plot. It is, in cinematic terminology, pure PRETTY ‘SPLOSIONS!
What occurs to me now is that fanfic uses sex scenes in much the same way. I should stop here and note that this doesn’t necessarily have to be sex scenes, although that does seem to be the prevalent metaphor… I saw one McShep fic that used McKay’s guitar playing as one huge metaphor for intimacy (although that had McKay being forced to play his guitar for alien captors as a metaphor for rape. Ummm… yeahhhh).
This comes in very handy when deciding what sex to gloss over (the (infamous?) fade to black) and what sex to go into detail with. We wouldn’t want to miss Neo’s climactic showdown with Agent Smith because it’s delivering on the promise the film’s been giving us… Neo is the One, his emotional arc is paying off, and the villain who’s been invincible the entire movie is now getting his comeuppance. But a random scene in which Neo uses kung-fu to stop some muggers or has a second training session with Morpheus (unless they imparted information that wasn’t covered in other scenes) would be tedious and have audiences checking their watches, no matter how good the choreography was.
Similarly, it may be important to the plot that, say, Spike is having a number of one night stands because he can’t be with Buffy, but going into detail would be pointless unless the scene underscored that this isn’t a substitute for the real thing. A generic “OH GOD, YESYESYES!” sex scene would drag the whole fic down.
Of course, just as there are some movies where action scenes are the entire point, there are PWPs where sex is the name of the game. Predator or Commando don’t exactly feature scintillating Campbellian journeys, but there are PRETTY ‘SPLOSIONS. A fic with Batman and Superman spending the night in a no-tell motel would be just as erotic with or without ten thousand words leading up to it (and, of course, if it’s a PWP, there’s a chance the audience will be saying “JUST KISS ALREADY!” and not in the good way). Sometimes you just really want to read about some boning.
So, sex scenes as action sequences: Reveal character or die, mofo.
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no subject
Date: 2008-01-30 08:42 pm (UTC)Options a) and b) are not mutually exclusive, but in my reading of fanfic, I'd say that b) is often a strong driver, even for fanfic writers who believe they're simply carrying out a).
A quote I first heard in college was that "glamor is democracy frozen halfway," meaning that "glamor" can only exist when there is an inherent inequality in a society's beauty standards, but that this inequality can potentially be overcome by certain individuals (heavier girls are considered less pretty than thinner girls, but if they buy the right products and lose enough weight, they can be considered pretty, too).
In a sense, I'd almost say the same of fanfic, because it can only exist when a franchise is imperfect enough to have gaps that fans can fill in for themselves, but that franchise also needs to be appealing enough to inspire those fans to want to make such an effort. Citizen Kane is a great movie, but because it's so good, precious few people can think of anything that could be added to it. Likewise, Battlefield Earth needs all the help it could get, in order to make some sort of sense as a satisfying story, but if you were to try and fix everything that was wrong with it, you might as well write your own story, because that's what you'll have done anyway, by the time you're done.
How does this relate to sex in fanfic? Well, if fanfic is about filling in the gaps of franchise canon, then sex is the hugest elephant in the room, because it's one of the most primary and universal drives of humanity, and yet, it's one of the rarest to be featured explicitly in canon. You don't have to be a stereotypically sex-obsessed pervert to be curious; after all, if you're a longtime fan of, say, Batman, then you've probably seen at least 15 different versions each of every other aspect of his life, aside from whom he fucks and how he fucks them, which only serves to make such omissions more glaring by contrast.
So, even if you're a fanfic writer who's mostly motivated by a), it's not unlikely that you'd want to open the door to your favorite characters' bedrooms, so to speak, unless they're in one of the rare franchises that actually tackles sexual issues more directly. After all, if you're a fan of '80s kids' cartoons, it might be enough to revel in the novelty of simply showing those characters having sex, but if you're a fan of, say, Torchwood, sex alone isn't going to be as strong of a motivator to inspire someone to write fanfic, because if you want to see Torchwood characters having sex ... well, you can just watch Torchwood itself.
For more sexualized franchises, as well as franchises which play heavily with unresolved sexual tension, b) becomes a more prevalent motivator for sexual fanfic, since it's not just about the desire to see your favorite characters having sex, but also doing so in ways that you, as the author, believe would improve the treatments of sex that have been shown in canon. Taking the new Doctor Who as an example, the fact that fans like me felt that Martha Jones was treated badly by the in-canon stories was a boon to the emergence of Martha Jones fanfic online, much of which centers around the UST between her and the Doctor getting resolved in some very adult-rated ways.
I'm not disagreeing that sex scenes can be used as miniature versions of Campbell's "Hero's Journey" in fanfic, but what I would assert is that the motivation to write such stories is not merely borne out of the desire to take a character through a transformative arc, but often, is inspired by a perceived need, on the part of the authors, to correct the franchise itself.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-02 02:04 am (UTC)