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extrapenguinSo, recentishly I read some meta, almost 15 years old, about (in essence) how much written-out emotion people like in their fic. Now, I don't think I'm a cold prickly who wants everything to be in code one has to decipher, or a warm fuzzy who's all about explicitly describing every emotion – but then again, if this is a scale from 0 to 100, I'm pretty sure everyone between 10 and 90 is convinced they're roughly at the middle. *g*
(More notes: there was a lot of talk about what slash is for, which to be is a bit nonsensical as a question – slash is a category of fanfic, and fic isn't for one single thing. This was an interesting generational divide!)
Then I thought some more about it, and I think I lost the intermediate stepping stones, but what I came at was: expressions of love. IDK how it is in America, but here, no-one says "I love you". Affection and care is turning up, cooking, talking about tractors. We are an emotionally constipated people.
Ah yes, now I remember the bridge for the donkey-cart of thought! It was related to the actions of characters versus the internal monologue. So: I guess that the line in the sand I draw is that the characters' actions remain as in canon, but the act of fic-writing for a visual medium is already decoding some of that everything. As long as the characters' actions are as in canon, the internal monologue can be filled in at will. (It's a bit different for text-based things that are from the canon narrator's POV. But there we have a clearer target to emulate.)
And because this is a post composed of thread-ends I can't quite weave into a blanket, let me bring in Guardian as well! Some of this is probably my personal cultural baggage, as I'm not Chinese, but I honestly never could believe the the whole "they didn't get together during the series" thing, because from my POV, by the end, they live together and have spent half the show saying "I love you" to each other. It might be fraught, but all new and newish and intense things are. They're also not stupid or incapable of listening to the other's words. (As for the timing, well, before the bomb scene, though something that comes before that might push it beyond even that.) The meta I linked above talked about coding; to me, there is no coding: the love is explicitly text.
(I am also part foreign. This means I have a huge, constant desire to verbalize my love and caring, but the words never make it to my mouth. I am reasonably certain this – conflict? is also present in my writing. But some things are never meant to be said.)
(More notes: there was a lot of talk about what slash is for, which to be is a bit nonsensical as a question – slash is a category of fanfic, and fic isn't for one single thing. This was an interesting generational divide!)
Then I thought some more about it, and I think I lost the intermediate stepping stones, but what I came at was: expressions of love. IDK how it is in America, but here, no-one says "I love you". Affection and care is turning up, cooking, talking about tractors. We are an emotionally constipated people.
Ah yes, now I remember the bridge for the donkey-cart of thought! It was related to the actions of characters versus the internal monologue. So: I guess that the line in the sand I draw is that the characters' actions remain as in canon, but the act of fic-writing for a visual medium is already decoding some of that everything. As long as the characters' actions are as in canon, the internal monologue can be filled in at will. (It's a bit different for text-based things that are from the canon narrator's POV. But there we have a clearer target to emulate.)
And because this is a post composed of thread-ends I can't quite weave into a blanket, let me bring in Guardian as well! Some of this is probably my personal cultural baggage, as I'm not Chinese, but I honestly never could believe the the whole "they didn't get together during the series" thing, because from my POV, by the end, they live together and have spent half the show saying "I love you" to each other. It might be fraught, but all new and newish and intense things are. They're also not stupid or incapable of listening to the other's words. (As for the timing, well, before the bomb scene, though something that comes before that might push it beyond even that.) The meta I linked above talked about coding; to me, there is no coding: the love is explicitly text.
(I am also part foreign. This means I have a huge, constant desire to verbalize my love and caring, but the words never make it to my mouth. I am reasonably certain this – conflict? is also present in my writing. But some things are never meant to be said.)
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Date: 2019-12-19 21:58 (UTC)Hee! <3
(But I don't think that equals emotional constipation! It's just a different, equally-valid-in-its-context way of expressing emotion -- like Shen Wei's cooking.)
*hearts*
This ties in with my aversion to endearments and pet names, actually, which I've been meaning to post about from a drama-canon-only perspective. To me, changing how they speak to each other in drama-canon fanworks feels like it's trying to "fix" something that isn't broken, and actually undercuts how absolutely together they are in canon, where they mostly call each other by name (plus Hei Lao Ge).
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Date: 2019-12-19 22:16 (UTC)I ... guess? (Hmm, I think I have some extra thoughts about how professional literature is more Cold Prickly while fanfic generally leans more into the romance novel tradition of Warm Fuzzy. I might be completely off-base, though.) Given that everyone reads canon differently, I don't think that's quite something we can use as a dividing line – I think everyone wants to make characterizations close to canon, so by that metric, everyone's a Cold Prickly!
Aw, thank you. Though people have remarked that I have a ludicrously stiff upper lip. (And online, it seems everyone has to at least try to mold themselves to the US emotional expression norm, lest they be seen as unfeeling or Wrongity Wrong or whatever. Though idk how much of that feeling is just general autism stuff.) (It's also way past my bedtime, so I'm probably being even less coherent than usual. *g*)
Me too, actually! I'm also 100% convinced that Shen Wei has a minor kink for Zhao Yunlan saying his name, and Zhao Yunlan absolutely loves saying it. So switching from "Shen Wei" to "beautiful" would be a downgrade for both of them. Now, I can imagine Zhao Yunlan being facetious and using a variety of descriptors/nicknames for Shen Wei, but if it's romantic or actually serious? Shen Wei. (Exceptions can be made for xiao-Wei, solely based on Shen Wei's reaction to that.)
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Date: 2019-12-19 22:46 (UTC)Oh yes, good point. It's how much you allow the emotions to be subtextual vs textual, isn't it? I probably do the spelling-out-in-narration a fair bit (and probably the characters-actually-saying-stuff more than I think I do, for that matter).
One of the things I was thinking, when I said I leaned Cold Prickly, is that I enjoy the low-PDA subtextual-declarations-of-feelings culture of Haixing, and having the characters constrained by that and working within it. I get more of a kick out of them stealing subtle meaningful touches in public than I would from them casually kissing. But that might have nothing to do with Julad's framework at all... (And of course, ZYL doesn't so much steal touches as wholesale appropriate them. *g*)
I know what you mean. It can feel kinda performative at times, I find. And particularly when leaving feedback on fanworks, I sometimes feel like if I'm not enthusiastic enough, it's going to read as insincere or insufficient or something. (Not that the enthusiasm isn't genuine, but I don't think I'd express it like that outside of a fannish context... I have to dial up the saturation. /has been making icons all morning)
Yes! And yes to xiao-Wei, too, though that generally works best for me if it's used sparingly.
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Date: 2019-12-20 10:12 (UTC)Yep! (My general preference is "foreshadowed with subtext, brought up as text when necessary, but the emotion-text shouldn't take over the story"; it's probably noticeable that I generally prefer genres that don't depend on emotion-text but rather have something else going on.)
Ah, and here we get the cultural baggage! By my standards, everyone is super cuddly, and Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan's PDA is on occasion blatant. (All those shoulder grabs! They sort of hug at one point!)
But yeah, there's sort of a ... quietness? to Haixing's culture around this, as opposed to the loudness of what Hollywood pushes. Stolen handclasps, kissing in private, a meaningful smile, all meant only for the person receiving it, rather than what seems like a performance to an audience.
This. Instead of "Not bad. Aspect X was very apt." it feels like half of everyone is expecting a keyboard smash of "ASDFKDHAADLJFKA;; THIS IS SO GOOD I HAVE NO WORDS" (oh gods I feel so fake just typing that out), like their emotional intensity dial goes up to 11 and all the numbers from 0-10 are invalid for feedback, while my dial's been capped at 6.
Yes! (Counting, I think I used it twice in 70k in For No Cradle Lasts Forever. I do think someone could stand to use it more often than once in 35k, but it's definitely something to be used for emphasis, not all the time.)
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Date: 2019-12-19 22:09 (UTC)Half my family is from West Texas, where you talk around things if you talk at all. You're supposed to know what it means when your cousin spends the first half of your visit silently working on your car.
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Date: 2019-12-19 22:26 (UTC)Either you mentioned there was something wrong with your car and it's hard to fix, or you wore a sexy red dress to their mother's funeral last week? *g*
I mean, I understand that even the US is vast and contains multitudes, but Finland/my extended family seems to be enough of a deviation from the global average that the US all seems to be in one direction of us, albeit to varying degrees. (And that direction is "talks about feelings" and "more drama". We have our grudges, but the general reaction is avoidance of the person grudged about, not passive aggression.)
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Date: 2019-12-19 23:47 (UTC)The main thing is that American media has swung very heavily in the California/low-context communication direction. There are entire subcultures here where people barely speak about anything that's important to them (that's how you know it's important), but they make sure you have hats when it's cold and always have your favorite beverage on-hand even if they personally hate it.
It's easier, online, to go along with that shift to emotional performance and over-explaining. So there's even less representation of people who communicate in a high-context manner.
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Date: 2019-12-19 22:36 (UTC)(In my real life, though, I prefer people who say what they mean!) /American
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Date: 2019-12-20 09:30 (UTC)+1
Though I understood that the cold prickly/warm fuzzy divide was about the narration, and the quantity/quality of emotion expressed in the narration, rather than the dialogue? I walked away with the impression that a story where A pines madly for B (and the narration identifies that as pining) would be warm fuzzy, even if the only way A and B interact is by playing mail chess.
And yeah, IRL I prefer people to say what they mean, though as the Finnish national character is quite straightforward, I don't run into problems there.
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Date: 2019-12-19 23:26 (UTC)When I was a kid, I'd say "I love you" to my grandfather and he'd say "Thank you, darling" so I learned very early that you can love someone deeply and immensely, as my grandfather loved me, without ever saying it. I like saying it in romantic situations but am more circumspect with family, maybe because of that early training.
X will never let me live down the time early in our relationship when they fondly called me a big dork and I got really upset because they were insulting me. Affectionate shit-talking is their love language. It really, really is not mine. But over 15 years I've learned enough to be comfortable with it, and in return they make periodic attempts to be sincere. More often, we speak our own languages and enjoy the incongruity. A common exchange:
R: Thanks, sweetie. I love you very much.
X: Well you'd better, it's a contractual obligation!
(I stopped the City Hall officiant who was trying to put something about love into our wedding vows, because whether we love each other is none of the state's fucking business, so I do not have a literal contractual obligation to love anyone.)
We say "I love you" a lot to Kit, who almost never says it back. With us they are almost entirely nonverbal and subtle in their affection: rubbing their face on us like a cat, or briefly holding our hands while walking, or giving us very sweet smiles. At this age there isn't often much differentiation between loving someone and wanting things from them (comfort, company, cookies.), so those moments when Kit makes a point of showing pure affection are as precious to me as a hundred "I love you"s.
All that said, when they yell "LOVE YOU ALEX!" at the cat, I sometimes get a little envious. :)
A while back a colleague introduced me to the idea that "I love you" is the money shot of the romance novel, and I expect a lot of romantic fic uses that model. I'm developing a romance between two Regency-era Englishmen in one of my novels in progress, and they certainly aren't about to talk about their feelings—"Please know that I hold you in the highest regard" is about as far as I can plausibly go. But if they don't say it out loud, it's harder for me to convince readers trained to expect an "I love you" and a marriage proposal that a real romance is happening without either of those things. And of course the "I love you" + proposal + baby epilogue model doesn't fit a lot of queer relationships either, so with queer and non-American the weirdness compounds fast. When closeted queer people spent so much time developing codes, as you say, the codes become the text.
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Date: 2019-12-20 10:00 (UTC)Huh. That sounds accurate! (I've also noticed what appears to be a strong crossover between romance fic and romance novels.) I can see how managing that discrepancy between reader expectations and realism would be hard in a romance novel! I can thankfully sidestep that by just not writing genre romance/having any romance be a B-plot. :P
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Date: 2019-12-20 00:58 (UTC)I honestly never could believe the the whole "they didn't get together during the series" thing, because from my POV, by the end, they live together and have spent half the show saying "I love you" to each other
I agree with your POV! By the end of canon they're totally together in every meaningful way, and their love is explicitly text. But on the other hand, I could absolutely believe they never actually got around to having sex, and I think for a lot of people that's an essential part of getting together ...
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Date: 2019-12-20 08:53 (UTC)THIS! :D
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Date: 2019-12-20 15:16 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-20 10:20 (UTC)I suspect it's conflating a few things into the "how much description of emotions do you like" issue, including some different views on favorite genre and what experience people want from fic. (Though I don't know julad or their friend circle, so idk, maybe this is all about the get-together romance slash subgenre?)
Huh, this is odd! My general view is that since they lived together and were together for months (at least 3, even if one places the get-together during the blindness arc), they had ample opportunity for sex. They're also adults, so it's not like they were under contractual obligation to wait a year before banging. (And unless Dixingian biology was truly unexpected, they wouldn't have to do the contraceptives-and-conception thinking that slows het couples down a bit.)
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Date: 2019-12-20 15:22 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-20 15:36 (UTC)I mean, yes, I know, but to me this represents such ample opportunity that if they were interested in sex, they'd bone. The point at which they (first) bone might be something others might be able to have interesting discussions on, but given the literal months of time (even if there's no pre-blindness arc boning), "they want to have sex but didn't" is a no sell for me. (Ace headcanons or other variants of them not wanting to have sex are a different beast entirely.)
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Date: 2019-12-20 15:40 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-20 08:52 (UTC)I'm not sure that this is emotionally constipated, just that emotions get expressed differently? Why privilege speech over action?
(Have an icon where expression of love consists of a gift of two fat, stolen chickens.)
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Date: 2019-12-20 10:40 (UTC)Wasn't the meta about narration, rather than characters expressing things? So the cold prickly narration would have no mentions of romance feelings, while the warm fuzzy narrative would write them out. Unless I misunderstood the meta? *g*
(I'm also more and more unsure of where, exactly, I fall. Probably not on the warm fuzzy end, if only due to my genre preferences?)
Because we also don't go for Big Actions? Quietness over loudness in emotional expression, etc. (Not that I claim to know the precise definition of emotional constipation. We do seem to be unable to get the emotions out.)
Hee! :D
emotional explicitness in slash fiction
Date: 2019-12-21 16:49 (UTC)Anyway, I am entirely with Julad! For me, too, the degree of emotional expressiveness the characters portray in canon will generally determine how expressive the narrative from their POV is. I would definitely class myself as a Cold Prickly, but I do like emotional explicitness in slash - I insist on it being packaged in a way that I feel is appropriate to the characters, though. And many of the characters I love *are* emotionally constipated, so. ;-)
When characters are canonically expressive of emotions, I think I can enjoy it more in stories, too. It's just a vanishingly rare phenomenon, at least for my personal reading list of slash pairings. And with characters where it seems non-canonical to me, it tends to break my suspension of disbelief incredibly quickly. (Even with origfic, most often I feel that a character of this type just would not be that expressive about their emotions... so, yeah. Cold Prickly. *g*)
When it comes to writing, I've actually worked on becoming a bit more expressive, because a long time ago, I realized (in an online rpg game, interestingly enough) that I expected readers to pick up *way* too much from little hints in the text I wrote. Often, things I thought were incredibly obvious - absolute anvils in terms of heavy emotion concealed inside the POV narrative - were actually so obscure nobody picked up on them at *all*.
Re: emotional explicitness in slash fiction
Date: 2019-12-21 17:38 (UTC)Huh, now I'm wondering whether I misinterpreted the scale – I thought Cold Prickly vs Warm Fuzzy was "are the emotions described in text"; everyone here seems to say they're Cold Prickly and then say that that's about keeping with canon. *g*
(I guess I am a Cold Prickly after all? Or just mostly interested in reading and writing about things other than characters experiencing emotions, which manifests as Cold Prickliness?)
That's interesting! I've been told to write about the emotions more, too, and ... I guess the advice stuck? But my personal experience with readers is that no matter how explicitly you write something, there will always be someone who didn't get it and is confused.
Re: emotional explicitness in slash fiction
Date: 2019-12-21 17:59 (UTC)Don't know about anyone else, but that's not what I meant! :-) It's two separate things for me, although I did smush them together confusingly in my reply. I want the emotional expressiveness to suit the character - that's the first thing. AND since I can't even think of a character I like who would be very emotionally expressive, this conforms with my general preference for the emotions to be coded into the narrative more than openly stated - which preference makes me a Cold Prickly in Julad's terms. ;-)
It'd be interesting for me to read a story about a character who *is* canonically emotionally expressive, and have the narrative not echo this trait...
no matter how explicitly you write something, there will always be someone who didn't get it and is confused
Oh yes, absolutely. That's inevitable, it's impossible for any narrative to be entirely clear to each and every reader. But there's also such a thing as the writer being so indecipherably vague and mysterious that hardly any reader can deciper the narrative in the intended way. The middle ground is the way to go here, I'd say.
Re: emotional explicitness in slash fiction
Date: 2019-12-21 18:18 (UTC)Ah! (Now I wonder whether this is what the other people were getting at, too...)
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Date: 2019-12-22 21:21 (UTC)Luckily, Bai Yu is a very romantic person, and I just can't believe he would NOT say what he feels at any opportunity. So basically I can have my Chinese cake and eat it too. :)
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Date: 2019-12-23 11:40 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-23 13:32 (UTC)The way the caring is shown is often non-consensual, and that annoys me a lot. Nothing wrong with actually caring for the other one, if it's mutually beneficial.
(I also have an RL example in mind which just made me climb the walls each time I saw it, so I may be a bit overly sensitive to that kind of thing.)
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Date: 2019-12-23 16:31 (UTC)Huh, I always just saw those as failure states/obsession, rather than the typical mode (seen e.g. in more mainstream cdramas and such). I do think priest has her own narrative kinks that show up a lot, and obsession/OTTness is one.