so many amazing comments on pele's hair that I think this fic deserves another post!
i’ve been thinking a lot about why i wanted to call this fic "pele’s hair" For anyone who doesn’t know, pele’s hair is a real volcanic phenomenon. These are long, fine strands of volcanic glass that form when molten lava gets stretched and pulled by the wind. It's beautiful, delicate-looking, almost hairlike (hence its name), but it’s also literally spun out of heat and violence. it comes from eruption. and if you touch it, it can hurt you. if you breath it in, it can cut up your lungs and your throat.
i kept coming back to heat as a motif. Mack burning up in basically most of the fic; hunger as both bodily emergency and desire; the sense that he is becoming more vivid, more incandescent, more alive precisely as he is crossing into something inhuman. and then on will’s side, the heat of being chosen, of being wanted with that kind of total and frightening focus, of realizing that his own desire is not cleanly separable from the monstrosity in front of him. it isn’t just mack is wrong, it’s also will is recognizing parts of himself through that wrongness.
that’s where the volcano stuff came from too. not just “fire = passion,” which is too easy, but the idea of pressure and something building underground for a long time before it finally ruptures. i wanted their desire to feel geological. not newly invented, but long-buried. ancient. dangerous. inevitable. hence a lot of references back to the predator/prey instincts way back when. so much of the fic is basically about attempts at and failure of containment, the body failing to contain hunger, the self failing to contain want.
and as for Jennifer’s Body being inspiration, I’m really interested in monstrosity not as a theme or subject, but as a scalpel, something that reveals and distorts and releases what was already latent there. Appetite, trauma, repression, longing, power. in this fic, mack’s transformation makes him more dangerous, obviously, but it also creates the conditions under which will can no longer keep himself at a safe emotional remove. it gives shape to a desire he’s spent a long time refusing to name. which is tragic to me, because it means that in this world their desire doesn’t get to arrive “normally.” it comes braided up with blood and fear and body horror and hunger. monstrosity is almost the price of entry.
and that’s what i liked so much about pele’s hair as a title: something lovely looking and lethal, filament-thin and born of eruption, something that looks soft until it’s in your torn-up hands and you realize. oh shit, I'm bleeding.
