liquorandptsdvarietyshow:

coreomajoris:

 

Yes, a lot of S2B2 stuff is absolutely very invested in characters. And that _does_ tend to make it feel good to write. I know that some of the authors have had a lot more experience with the romance genre than I’ve had, though I would make a case that the few Vampire Chronicles books I have under my belt were similar in some ways. I just… didn’t want to read romance based on what I inferred from the covers of what my classmates were reading in school, and yet I remember wishing there were the sorts of partnership, friendship, and romance that I _did_ like, when I was a school kid who was digging through whatever fantasy and sci-fi I could stand. I remember being deeply disappointed in the sexuality in whichever of Asimov’s full length robot novels I read, and being far more enthralled by Ender’s relationship with Jane in “Speaker For the Dead” and in “Xenocide.” 

I didn’t discover “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” until years later, and at the time, I was like “WHY ARE YOU MAKING ME READ SOMETHING WITH PLURAL MARRIAGE EWW” to Ben and he was like “SHUT UP AND KEEP READING YOU WILL LIKE THIS BOOK” and now, boy howdy, has that book influenced the way I write the dynamics of groups of friends who are in a movement. And you can trace some of these chains back from authors I love to authors they clearly love: how Connie Willis and Lois McMaster Bujold and Audrey Niffenegger make clear nods to Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, for instance. How a CRAPTON of people nod to the relationship between Holmes and Watson, for another, and that’s not just authors. It’s FASCINATING that we live in an era where there’s a fairly queerbaiting platonic male friendship version on TV, an avowedly homoromantic comedy between a straight man and a “butch homosexual” in a recent film version, an amazing friendship between a female Watson and a male Holmes on another TV show, and don’t get me started on House and Wilson. I MEAN WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE.

And don’t even get me started on all the versions of Tony and Steve, because holy CRAP. I’ll say that again: what a time to be alive.

Feelin’ this. Speaking of, have you ever read any of those god awful nerd forum debates about how women are ruining science fiction by putting their romance feelings into the creation and reception of SF? I first encountered it when I was writing about BSG. Anyway, they address precisely the sort of stuff you’re referring to here (by which I mean distinguishing “proper” hard SF, for example Asimov, from this diluted “soft” SF like the Ender series). Women and their feelings, man, is the gist, just ruining all the fun to be had in clear, clean, conceptual SF. Never mind that Orson Scott Card is a man.

Lots of feelings authors are men. Some of whom are terrible, but hell, my favorite authors include Kurt Vonnegut Jnr, James Baldwin, Junchiro Tanazaki, Joseph Heller, Albert Camus, and many other human men who have lots and lots and lots of feelings and are very interested in minute human interactions, which men also have, and write about, and have done forever (sometimes awfully). But there’s a vocal segment of the SF reading community that is adamant it’s all about ladies being soppy. For me character interaction is what I am interested in and what I like. That’s the stuff I like. I’m not hugely interested in anything when I can’t see it directly shaping and flowing through human interaction.   

I have a lot to say about Anne Rice’s VC as having that “fanfic feeling” – I’ve been known to wank on about it at length but here are the two short bullet points about why I agree with you: 

1) Firstly, Rice revisits, repeats, and draws out her characters, often returning to them many times. Whether that’s good or bad is your call, but she does, and it does have a kind of… doing fanfic on herself thing going on, you know? Going back to a text and delving with is common in fic (and long running sequential properties more generally, of course, but the line gets fine between those two things anyway);

2) This is the big one for me: One of the things I specifically like about fanfic, and a big factor in the works I choose to make public, is that I think fic engages with or can engage with a particular mode of psychological reflection. I react to a text, I have an emotional resonance with it, and fic allows me to think that through, to think about why that is, to interrogate it. Rice’s characters are psychological archetypes, frozen in the moment they turn. They’re psychological costumes that are easy to pick up and put on. They read like fic characters not only because of what they are in the text, but because of how they read as open to adoption.  

(Pictured?)

That isn’t explained very well, because I’m tried and a bit dopey, but yes, basically. Yes I agree. 

And agreed. What a time.