#micelle

Baby Carrier Dad Micelle

Sorry this took so long, love. Had to think about it, then got caught up in dissertating, then self-absorbed by depression. Woke up today and realized it was time to respond. That being said, I’m not very good at this sort of meme — I clam up and say things wrong — so don’t expect too much. Would be very excited to see your own response to this one!

Give me a CHARACTER or a SHIP, and I will bold the statements that are true, and elaborate on my preferences and specific narrative kinks where I am so moved.

Do not want. Ptooey.

I am neutral, indifferent and serene. Send me a rec and change my mind.

I’ll enjoy anything as long as they’re in it.

I’ll enjoy anything as long as they get a happy ending.

Break them and make them bleed.

Swaddle them in fluff.

I’m mostly interested in gapfilling and exploring their canon interactions.

Throw the canon out the window; bae deserves better.

By which I don’t mean: throw the suit out the window.  If I’m invested in anything wrt Vader, it’s characterization that is committed to the suit and all the structures and problems and possibilities it creates. Stories where Vader can be returned to a baseline self/identity with the right treatment in a straightforward linear process are certainly given legitimacy through the Special Edition of RotJ; stories where Vader is basically unaffected by the suit have their merits (I liked a lot of things about the Soule comic, in which the suit was largely irrelevant). But when I am dreaming on my own I prefer things messy, gory, without easy solutions. I’m wary of models of the mind-body relationship that essentialize identity — I like things fluid and reflective. Basically, I come to fic and comics about Vader to explore the lack of a sense of self, to think about fragmentation, trauma, grief, damage, the uncanny, the amorphous nature of the mind. The suit is integral to that field of thought.

I … am struggling to talk about Padmé, because … not only did she ABSOLUTELY deserve better, there is a part of me that refuses to be reconciled to her death, even though I can appreciate the irony, the tragedy, the parallelism, etc. How to put this… I want stories where Padmé is more than a symbol, more than her relationship to Anakin or her children … I want to see her own trauma play out, her own cracked mirrors, her own shifting sense of self, her own fight with her body, mind, the structures she has created and was shaped in, the blind spots flaring open wide … for her own ambitions and complicity and power-lust to be factors … and you see why this meme took me so long to answer.

Here’s a different way of putting it. I’m old, so my understanding of Padmé was formed in that period before AotC when it was still uncertain whether she would go by Padmé or Amidala, when it still seemed like she would go into hiding with Leia on Alderaan, when she was surrounded by handmaidens and drowning in heavy robes, when she presented as a cypher who disappeared behind face paint or into a crowd, as someone whose identity constantly transformed. I loved this idea of Padmé as more than unaffected beautiful surface, as someone whose very surface creates an experience of friction. So I’m still super partial to stories based on Naboo (I have a fic rec list somewhere that lists some of these) that sort of confront that parallelism between a Queen who wore a painted mask encoded with symbols of grief and the Knight entombed behind a mask … you get the picture.

Many stories deal with the role of projection in this relationship — Anakin and Padmé both project a great deal onto one another, and there’s plenty to unpack there — and stories about them getting therapy, stories about them projecting even harder, etc are interesting to me. I adore how this is handled in that one Legends comic where Vader is taken down by flamethrowers and has had the mask taken away and is practically hallucinating from the lack of oxygen and is holding himself together with nothing but spite. If the comic is at first concerned with Vader’s excessive violence, with his weirdly detached reenactment of his own lung and heart trauma in horrific torture sessions, the best bits play out in his own head, such as when a witch projects Padmé at him. Padmé transforms before him into an accusing corpse and he accepts this transformation as real, as though he’s pictured her as a rotting corpse so many times that it’s all that he wants, all he has longed for, awaited, desired — her judgment — and when he realizes he wasn’t really speaking to Padmé’s ghost, that he’s lost her even in death, the ensuing devastation is kind of mesmerizing. The wild swings between grief and rage and madness and hallucination — between murder and attempted suicide — make for a damning, visceral portrait. The new comic does a variation on this, but it’s less clear that Vader is having a battle with himself, as it could be that the Dark Side is simply projecting an evil Padmé at him to tell him to “let the past die” or somesuch — anyway. I love the stuff that stares into the abyss and lets it stare back.

Gimme crackfic.

Gimme all the tropes.

Subvert the tropes and set them on fire.

Fire in the story itself is always good too.

I am a simple soul: I’m here because they’re hot and sometimes naked.

Here is my OTP. Come between them and I will…ship and let ship, because I am a civilized fanperson, but CAN’T YOU SEE THEY’RE PERFECT TOGETHER??! (Or perfectly, fascinatingly, shippably dysfunctional, in certain cases.)

I have favoured and disfavoured ships. Convince me. Seduce me.

I’m not into ships for the romance / whatever, but for what particularly intense relationships can reveal about character. While there’s a part of me that insists Vader is a black swan, alternate ships (Obi-Wan, Ahsoka, Aphra, etc) can be fascinating.

I had an OTP once, but then this amazing author, [insert author here], seduced me. Goddammit.

Fandom bicycle, baby! \o/

I have no shippy feelings at this time.

tho tbh I've never actually read any defenses of kink as queer, even though I've heard plenty of people loudly declaim that it isn't

I mean, historically it kind of was, before LGBT activism swung towards seeking mainstream respectability. Whatever BDSM subculture has become in the intervening time, it has its roots in gay leather culture and the association used to be pretty damn tight before it got thrown under the bus.

Which is a big reason I kind of look askance at ace wank and hesitate to get involved in it. I'm generally of the opinion that more groups in the grand alliance is better for everyone, but right now you've got some groups under the main queer umbrella despite their often-divergent interests (gay, bi, trans), and other assortments of sex/relationship/gender deviants on the fellow-traveller fringes. If we want to shake up the arrangement, that's cool, but not without some critical examination of "why this group and not this other one?" And I suspect any attempt to have that conversation would dredge up both ugly history and ugly, very-current purity/respectability politics.

@preved-medved replied to your post:

I've def seen posts 2 the effect of 'in the beginning, all us deviants were Queer, because we were all equally likely to be arrested for it' (cont) and that bred a sort of unity, that has always been vulnerable to infighting & division (which is now reaching a feverish crescendo)

Instructions : Tag 10 followers that you wanna get to know

name: call me C

nicknames: "little bug" when I was little, if in my great-grandmother's language

gender: female

star sign: virgo

height: slightly over 5’6"

sexuality: that is a complicated question

hogwarts house: ravenclaw, but there was a time when I might have fought the hat on this

fave animal: the fox - you rarely see them, but an encounter is magical, calling to mind all those folk stories of shapeshifters and fire bearers and trickster figures that transgress

average hours of sleep: varies from day to day

current time: not dark enough

dog or cat person: very much dogs

blankets you sleep with: as many as can be hogged

dream trip: to see the Northern Lights

dream job: knowing the answer to this would save me a lot of trouble but I don't. currently I tell people "archivist"

when i made my blog: earlier this year

followers: 28

why i made a tumblr: tumblr is hard to lurk-follow, and there came a point when I was lurk-following too many people here to be able to track and store and organize all the ideas I liked. what started as a repository is still a repository, only that I now know how to abuse tags to preserve the occasional stray abstruse thought

reason for my url: this handle was made when I was a teenager planning to study archeaology. Set/Seth represents storms, the desert, rage, strangeness, foreigners, and, yes, evil in Egyptian mythology, and I'd wanted a real Egyptian name with him in it - for this handle was also my SW handle and I was as fascinated with Vader then as today. (Sethnakht was the name of a rather minor pharoah who happened to found a dynasty. The name literally means Seth is Strong - my past self also found this stupid, but somehow decided that Seth was primarily strong as a friend to desert life and the sun, like Anakin or sommat). That I ended up reclaiming the name now has more to do with mental exhaustion than anything; I suppose continuity at the risk of embarrassment - constant rupture gets tiring - was part of the appeal