Advance the plot, foo'!

Ken 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.