[LMB] Re: Slash (was OT) now Bujold Romance/Slash Meta

[Elizabeth McCoy]

At 12:32 AM -0600 1/3/07, Lois McMaster Bujold wrote:
>I'm still scratching my head over an entire sub-genre or trope (crossing many fandoms) of slash about male pregnancy.  Why take all that stuff out, and then turn around and put it all *right back in*?  What are these writers *thinking*?  And why?

Hmm. Possibilities.

* Dark and malicious revenge. All those fears about getting pregnant and
being punished for having sex? Off-loaded onto the hapless male who is
usually the one who can theoretically get away scott-free. (E.g., Stupid 
Sunny...)

* Humor value. Sort of like Three Men and a Baby, only with morning 
sickness and "OMG, my FIGURE!" thrown in for amusement. This may also
count as "Light and malicious revenge."

* An honest xenophiliac curiosity as to what would happen if a _guy_ 
had to cope with all that stuff, and trying to "get into his head" to do
it.

* Playing around with the mindset of Being Pregnant and Having A Baby,
only in the "safe" context of one's favorite male protagonists. Since
it could be dang scary to play around with that in one's own.

* Playing with gender-bending concepts, in general. Strip away "what makes
a guy a guy, what makes a gal a gal" and see what the personality is at
bedrock. Arguably, hermaphrodites (Betan or otherwise... O:> ) do something
similar, but unless it's done with surgery or magic, being a herm is 
something someone's born with, and has years to adjust to.


On livejournal, Daegaer has a series that started out with a bunch of
MPREG silliness in a team of assassins... and sort of turned into 
a much deeper bit of fluff with actual relationships and the various 
fathers' impact on their various offspring. (One was un-explained, save
as Virgin Birth; one was a clone, one was impregnation by aliens; one
was claimed to have been grown from a swallowed apple seed...)

So, hm...

* Having a relationship with a child which doesn't include the sticky
distractions of a relationship with the mother.
-- 
--Beth, arcangel at io.com     http://www.io.com/~arcangel/