a ball of yarn that does not a sock make

[extrapenguin]

So, 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.)

Comments

[rosefox]

I have this icon because to me love is a thing you build and craft. I like the words, but there's a lot more to it than the words.

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.

[extrapenguin]

I, too, am fond of the notion that love is a thing you do, or build. An action, rather than a steady state. (And uhh yeah good job resisting that officiant's idea of adding love as a contractual obligation into your vows.)

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.
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