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

[Paula Lieberman]

[catchup mode...]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Azalais Aranxta" <tiamat at tsoft.com>


> On Thu, 4 Jan 2007, Rachel Ganz wrote:
>
>> Isn't one of the difficulties about having young children
>> (especially for women) that it is much more difficult to
>> believe "the world well lost for love". You must either
>> sacrifice your lover to your child(ren) or you child(ren) to
>> your lover. Even if it's only a question of how you're going to
>> spend your Saturday night. It's possible, but it's a lot more
>> complicated.
>
> Yes.  But the only reason this is not a problem in slash is that
> so many male leads in adventure stories are single people who
> have never had children.  Gay men in the real world often have
> children, because even people who are exclusively gay once they

Hmm... the gay males I know, don't tend to have children.  I can think of 
one lesbian couple who raised children, but even there, the others I can 
immedaately think of (Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman,  Patricia whose last 
name does not stick in my mind and her wife, Melissa Scott and her late 
partner Lisa Barnett) don't, either.  I do remember hearing a tale long ago 
of a gay man who the arranging went, that he was declared to be the father 
of a baby on the baby's birth certificate so that he would be the legal 
custodial parent of a child to raie.

> realise their preference often try heterosexuality out first
> (there is a lot of pressure to do so) and some of them actively
> want children and go to a good deal of trouble to get them,
> regardless of their favourite flavour of sex or romance.
> Children aren't and never have been exclusively a female problem;
> what's changed is that we no longer live in a world where it's
> thought that they *should* be one,

Or rather, that less of the world believes there, there are still huge 
numbers of people who believe that, and the backlashes have gotten 
worse--was it in here, or someone else, that someone pointed  at a URL of a 
business selling baby attire with pink and "I am not a boy" and blue and "I 
am not a girl" embroidered on the attire...

[Hmm, I wonder what Bel would say...   WWBS...

"alien" viewpoints in SF have always been useful as distanced somewhat 
disinterested views of culture.  Cordelia on Beta is Other, Ethan of Athos 
off Athos is Other  Miles is other.

Fawn and Dag aren't really other--they're -somewhat- alienated from the 
cultures that produced them, but I think in the case of Dag, it's because of 
his having been widowed, and in the case of Fawn, it's her youngest and 
female status in a household full of older brothers, and her 
naivetie/idealism/geekiness (in some ways she acts likes a classic example 
of geeky female), rather than being Alien Beings.

If Lois writes a book about Ivan, that would be interesting and a major 
change in the sense that Ivan really is a fellow of Barrayar and other than 
having blown it regarding picking a complaisant Lady Vorpatril when there 
was a pool of eligibles still available of Vor women of socially default 
acceptability age, is comfortable and always has been, in his culture.

> so the "I must get a woman to
> take care of my kids" flavour of romance story is less popular,

> And
> and the "I will find a way to stick two guys in a romance story
> with kids even if I have to resort to MPREG" flavour is more so.
>
> I've read some very amusing slash stories about characters who
> canonically have kids, but whose heterosexual relationships were
> more-or-less over in canon, or which ended because of the gay
> relationship.  I don't read MPREG (male pregnancy) but I don't

Real world the relationships apparently sometimes continue or can...

> like pregnancy in stories much anyway.  Just not something I
> personally want to read about much, at least not if the author's
> going into all the Messy Biological Details, and MPREG authors
> always do.

Moral Tales revised, perhaps?   Or, retribution for millennia of Old Wives' 
Pregnancy Scare Stories told to pregnant women?!

>> And the fictional children are often inordinately well-balanced
>> and well-behaved, with only the occasional cute moments of
>> embarrassment.
>
> Well, a lot of times this is because children in romances are
> really there as a plot device and the story is not about them, so
> they show up when the writer wants them to.  In real life if you
> have children they are around all the time, but most stories are
> not much like real life.
>
>> I've wondered how well Nicky would actually cope with his
>> mother's remarriage - to someone who might have murdered his
>> father, no matter what Gregor says. Maybe there's a later plot,
>> where he turns against Miles, and possibly even attempts to do
>> nasty things to the twins.
>
> It really all depends upon how he felt about Tien.  Not all
> children are as intensely loyal to both parents in every case as
> the world would have you believe.  I prefer my stepmother to my
> mother because she is a) a better mom; b) not a b*tch or a drunk
> and c) cares more about ME than her fantasy of me.  It is
> entirely possible that Nikki prefers Miles to his memories of
> Tien.  I have never, ever, ever not loved my stepmother more than
> I ever loved my mother.  NEVER.

I remember at teenager  the child of divorced parents, at a convention who 
was annoyed at having to leave the convention which the custodial parent was 
at, to attend the other parent's second wedding  The teenager said the 
teenager didn't EVER want to see that parent again, and indicted strong 
unhappiness about having to go to the wedding.

>> But that is a side issue. And fiction is fiction. The attaction
>> of opposties, and the attraction of hate is a well-trodden
>> trope (tropes are squashed all over the place). If one lets
>> sexual attraction creep into all the areas where friendship
>> stood before, you have yet another set of complications to deal
>> with.
>
> But nobody does that, either as a writer or as a human being.
>
> People really can't choose not to be sexually attracted; they
> either are, or they aren't.  And just because one is sexually
> attracted to one friend (or enemy), doesn't mean one is to all of
> them.  For that matter you can be basically gay or straight and
> yet find yourself wildly attracted to a single solitary member of
> your non-preferred gender and end up involved with them.  As much
> as I hate the "I'm not gay I just love YOU" trope in older slash
> stories, that was my second husband--he was gay as Christmas
> apparel, he just loved me.  It didn't work out for us, but
> sometimes it does.
>
> Many heterosexual romances are about friendships, or emnities,
> that turn sexual.  Nobody uses this as a justification to say
> that romance writers disrespect friendship.  Of course just as
> some people want to see all same sex friends as buddies, forever
> and always, some people refuse to believe men and women can be
> friends without a sexual tension.  But that's not true either.
>
>> And it seems that there is some huge biological wall that once
>> you have penetrated it, it is a long and dangerous trip back to
>> the lands of friendship. Why, I don't know. In my experience,
>> once you have been to bed with someone, of either sex, it is
>> very difficult to remain friends. But maybe I've never gone to
>> bed with the right people.

There are other issues at work... that when people get involved with a 
permanent partner, they may drop their old friends from their single days 
out of their lives....

> In general, that's true for most people, which is why it's a
> really bad idea to have sex with a long-time friend unless you
> and they are sure of the feelings--if it goes wrong, it will take
> a long, long time to repair the friendship (I've done it, but in
> both cases it took years).

There however can also be the "hmm, that didn't work, did it?"  "No." 
"Okay, we're not meant to lovers, obviously!"

> OTOH, one of the problems for me is that if the platonic love is
> very deep and the sexual attraction insufficiently strong, I
> never get to the point in a friendship-turned-sexual where I am
> "in love" and can or am willing to forsake all others; and this
> would be okay, except that I do poly very badly, because I *want*
> to be willing to forsake all others and when that person comes
> along, people Get Hurt.