Elvex Dreams

+ green +

The San Francisco Examiner, California, March 15, 1936

in the late 1790s it was in style to wear earrings depicting the execution of louis xvi.

THE END

another character created almost entirely from fandom wholecloth, since his actual part in the movie was like five minutes long.  like. they’re SO MUCH the same? with the combination kinky/prudishness (prudish til you get him in bed, whereupon he is The Most Kinky), the charmingly repressed rage, the Love of Research and Order, the way lust/interest/affection is coded into irritation at The Neat and Tidy World being All Roughed Up by the hot mess of the other half of the ship? I would bet actual money that you could C&P “hux” for “arthur” in a baker’s dozen of inception AUs and the character is like…pretty much the same?  and, well. I’m pretty sure that arthur isn’t the first time I met this guy, this crowdsourced tight-lipped furious perfectionist with his neat clothes and his scowling defensiveness and his biting sarcasm and his embarrassed desire to have a dude who is both sweaty and emotional take him apart. I know I’ve seen him before, in lots of different places, wearing lots of different hats, most often slipping into characters that barely take up space in the canon at all, or revising canon characters years in the future, etc. (Draco, in all those fics where he grew up into someone eerily like Hux and Arthur and Erestor and Carlos in all those fics written before Dylan Marron was cast. For one.)  and without shitting on kylux OR arthur/eames at all–because I’ve read and enjoyed both of them, and also the heart wants what the heart wants, and I get that–I think it’s maybe worth. I don’t know. considering why it is that we gravitate towards This One Crowdsourced Dude. The familiar fanon ghost who leaves one shell behind and drifts into another, like a poltergeist. Or, like, a copy of a copy of a copy, dragged from harddrive to harddrive. a familiar ghost we drag around to install in fresh new bodies. I think it’s especially worth considering why we’ve collectively/subconsciously resurrected this dude in a fandom mostly lacking in white guy/white guy ships. because he wasn’t THERE. I just rewatched TFA yesterday, and I can confirm: fanon hux is not in the building. a lot of loving effort went into imbuing canon hux with fanon hux. thinking about why we a) established that effort, and b) why we gravitate back to him, Our Fanon Guy, when there are other objectively more developed and interesting canon characters to fall in love with? 

While yes–opposites attracting is a common trope, and Spock and Sherlock definitely bear a familial resemblance, what I’m interested in is actually the more specific thing of fandom picking up a very minor character and filling him up with ALL of these traits. It’s not the character himself–the character qua the character can be and has been written really wonderfully–it’s the fact that we resurrect him in the shells of minor characters at all. Hux–a very minor character who barely appears in the movie Arthur–a MUCH smaller character than fandom would suggest Erestor–literally had like two lines Draco–was canonically a child, but all the fic was about him as an adult, some ten to fifteen years in the future, when he grew up into This Very Particular Character. This isn’t fandom picking up on opposites attracting within the canon. This is fandom CREATING a specific character to be opposite someone else.

Firstly, I cannot argue with your Spock analysis! (Also, I adore Spock! I have a Spock tattoo! I promise that I love him truly.)  Now that I have said this piece, I’m gonna go on a long clarifying tangent, because it is a running theme in the tags on the post/the asks I’ve been getting. But know that the tangent is not directed at you, defender of Spock! I’m just reblogging this version because it collected the fragmented pieces of the discussion into one post, for context’s sake. :)  ANYWAY. The point I want to get to is that character archetypes totally exist, and that is not a) a problem, or b) what I am talking about.  Spock and Sherlock and Jeeves all more or less share a type, which is just a thing that happens when people tell stories, both consciously and subconsciously. That doesn’t mean the characters are identical or interchangeable, but you can see how they bear a kind of family resemblance to each other. For example– “it would have cost me my soul” and “it was worth a wound" and “there is a tie that binds” are rhyming moments of Great Import to all three characters, although they refer to moments that are specific to their canons. The characters ARE different, but when you put them together in a iineup, it’s easier to see how they’re similar. That resemblance, imo, is neutral.  What interests me about the fandom ghost isn’t that he is an archetype, or that many characters are very similar to each other. What interests me is that this is a character type that fandom periodically yanks out of the drawer and dresses up in the clothes of a minor character.  That’s a very specific thing to do. It’s not something we are inheriting from any canon. It’s something we are doing, collectively, as the great migratory fandom thing we are.  We (collective fandom we) have imbued minor characters with these traits so often that I can trace it as a type the same way that I can trace Sherlock Holmes as a type. That is a) VERY interesting to me, from a nerdy Henry Jenkins-style crowdsourced-story “the people talk back to the culture” way, and b) EVEN MORE INTERESTING GIVEN THAT THIS GUY IS HERE ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY TO GIVE US A WHITE GUY SHIP WHEN THE CANON DOESN’T HAVE ENOUGH WHITE GUY SHIPS READY MADE FOR US. When we talk back to the culture, sometimes we speak bullshit.  Again, I don’t think any individual person is Wrong or Bad for liking or writing the ghost (I have liked the ghost! he can be very likeable!) but I think the fact that we keep resurrecting him and resurrecting him and resurrecting him IN FANDOMS THAT DO NOT HAVE HIM AS A PRE-EXISTING CHARACTER tells us something about what we as Fandom want. It’s a symptom that tells us something about the state of Fandom, the way a bechdel test fail does not tell us whether a movie is good or even feminist, but DOES tell us something about the state of hollywood.  TFA isn’t an incredibly diverse movie, but unless you pump up the empty balloon of Hux’s character with the ghost the only other white guys to pair Kylo Ren with are his blood relatives and Supreme Commander Gollum. This is in a movie where he and Poe snark at each other with Poe on his knees; where he ties Poe up to a table and digs into Poe’s brain, where he looks at Finn from across a crowded massacre and Feels A Literal Magical Tug, where he and Rey basically mindfuck each other for agonizingly long minutes. There are Other Opportunities here, is what I’m saying.   Kylux is the most popular pairing in TFA fandom. Expanding Hux’s character is a choice that fandom made. Kylux is a choice that fandom made. The fact that Fanon Hux came canned and prepackaged for us–our ready made mayo sandwich–is SOMETHING TO PAY ATTENTION TO.  It’s not the character of the ghost, or his origins, or the canon characters that bear a family resemblance to him that really matter, imo. It’s the fact that WE, FANDOM, keep resurrecting him when we aren’t seeing a familiar enough white guy ship in the canon cast. That’s a canary collapsing in a mine, is what I’m saying. 

just the same. // quand même.

“Honestly, am I the only person who’s ever bothered to read Hogwarts, A History?”

Adrienne Rich, from An Atlas of the Difficult World (via kuanios)

Li-Young Lee. (via kuanios)

- Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

my kind of no-fun parade-raining woman tbh