Proud Infiltrator & Cat of Many Coats

Tags for blocking: personal, the vaguest of vagueblogs, star wars, star wars thotz, my meta, indpol, living that capitalist lyf, god gave rock and roll to you, silm, tolkien, lotr, silm thotz, politics, current events, long post, wank for ts, my fic, my fic meme

craft/technical/language textual pleasures - this to me is the sheer pleasure you get from encountering a passage that is just beautifully put together, so much so that you feel that you're watching a virtuosic performance crescendoing to its grand triumph. but its also about like, the broader cleverness of form and structure and style the author is working with, which may not always be immediately available to the eye - and which are sometimes that much pleasurable for not being easily accessible, sort of like completing a puzzle to access the prize. in this particular fic, one of the things that gives me great pleasure is the disjuncture between the narration in finnu's voice, which recalls to me the wry restraint of older english novels, juxtaposed against the dialogue which has the cadence/rhythm of malayalam translated into english - which Z has also very specifically talked abt as a very specific regional dialect of malayalam. its a very sort of cerebral but also playful joy in seeing how someone deliberately wields language to create the character's field of view for us. plus there are a lot of really beautiful passages/sentences. take this perfect little sentence: When it came to public punishment, perpendicularity was the point. elegantly, pithily constructed and both beautiful to hear and say. there is something very pleasurable in prose that has been refined to its sharpest point.

encountering ideas/concepts - i don't even think this has to be new ideas to oneself necessarily, but even just a rearrangement of thinking, or a joining of dots that hadn't been joined before. in this particular fic there are so many ideas/thoughts: of the forms of abuse that take the form of instilling perpetual shame in a child, of the way this form of turning a child into the sin-eater of the family is replicated at the state level in the way in which india turns its muslim citizens into sin-eaters for the state. again, another very cerebral pleasure that feels more like a puzzle slotting into place: its a very conscious and aware pleasure.

intertextual relationships - this to me is one of the key cerebral pleasures of fanfiction that original fiction can't always deliver on i.e. the transformations of meaning that takes place in having a work of fiction interact both with a source text and possibly even with other texts. there is a pleasure in this fic in tracing the ways in which fingon's rescue of maedhros is repeated (fingon gets maedhros out of prison) and then also subverted (maedhros rescues fingon from his family) and the sort of ways in which politics and romantic sentiment sort of shift around bc of the repetition and subversion (fingon saves maedhros and saves a protector; is this an act of selfless romanticism or selfish love? what is the difference?); or in the ways in which feanor and nerdanel "make" their children, and feanor especially molds them to a self-destructive political cause etc. but!!! Z has also talked abt the influence of the saki story Sredni Vashtar on the story and that also makes a difference to how i read the fic and also sredni vashtar when i revisit it - the fic generates new meaning both for the silmarillion and this other story, which is i think one of the very unique cerebral pleasures fic can do that published works can't.

novelty - ok so the funny thing abt this one is that i don't think fic has to deliver on this textual pleasure and fic is effective precisely bc of the act of repetition it delivers... but there ARE pleasures in reading a new version, a new take on a story: in this case a new take and exploration of religious christian homophobia, one which focuses less on the standard... let's call it the boy interrupted form of homophobia, and more on the form of homophobia that presents itself as a gentle love that simply wants their child to have a happy life, free of suffering - while being the primary agent of that suffering.

which brings me to the less cerebral pleasures of reading i.e. everything going on in the id -

emotional catharsis/stimulation - one of the great powers of fic more so than published works is that fic is almost exclusively oriented around strongly emotion-driven narratives & journeys (which is what people mean, i think, when they say they love character-driven narratives, but are uninterested in litfic which is very character-driven). sometimes this is through the language deployed, which is highly emotive, or constructed to arouse strong emotions in us. but its also a more structura thing. the big fic genres and tropes are in some ways charting emotional journeys for us - some kind of internal or external emotional confrontation, forced on the character through a confluence of structural circumstances, followed by resolution of some sort. this particular fic does not hew to standard fic tropes, but it delivers a very classic form of triumphant emotional catharsis when maedhros shows up on his motorbike to rescue fingon from the public humiliation ritual being inflicted on fingon. the reader is pulled into the vortext of fingon's emotions first, both his deep sense of shame about himself, but also his deep and giddy love for maedhros culminating in a very deeply romantic encounter in the eponymous folly, before hurtling towards the disaster. we experience fingon's devastation along with him, but also the moment of liberation and elation - and that movement in emotion does deliver a very specific charged pleasure! i always feel like john bender punching the air at the end of the breakfast club when i reach that particular scene y'know?

which brings me to the really personal stuff -

fantasy - fic particularly is good at i think a process that some forms of therapy are really good at (e.g. narrative therapy), which is allowing you to experience the same sequence of emotions over and over again in a safe and controlled way, because the outcome is predictable - the fake dating ends in real dating, the enemies become lovers etc - and so it is safe. bc of the often highly structured form of fic, it allows you to engage with these complex and difficult to articulate fantasies of intimacy, being loved and cared for, of escaping shame, of healing, of confrontation, of self-destruction and to do it safely bc of the predictability - and to do so without having to speak these thoughts out loud to a therapist, where you might have to encounter both your own shame and their complex emotions. of course this is not always a safe process - and this is where the paranoia about experiencing the "wrong" pleasure is most visible. e.g. are you experiencing this incest fic in the right way? are you experiencing this noncon fic in the right way? what is the pleasure you are finding? how dare you?

in this particular fic, well to put it very baldly: this is as close to a pure id fantasy for me because i was that child in the parental torment nexus. in many ways i am still that child. so when i read finnu here, i read my own thoughts, my own anxieties and fears mirrored at me. and then i achieve some kind of fantastical catharsis: maedhros rescues finnu and i experience the fantastic pleasure of having been rescued by someone who cared enough to look beyond the overt "kindness" of my parents, to what actually was being done - who cared enough to "see" me, but also to act and rescue me, so that the child could still continue circling around the difficulty of parental love producing parental cruelty and still survive. this is not a pleasure that could have been produced by any other kind of sequence of the telling. of course i read garrard conley's boy interrupted and while there was some level of catharsis there, there was no real room for that kind of intrusion of the fantasy child self because it was an experience so different and yet also so tangibly "realer" than my own bc it lacked that plausible deniability. this fic touches on exactly that plausible deniability and how the plausible deniability is part of the cruelty of it all through its association with love and the process by which shame is placed as a burden on a child. and part of the pleasure is being able to stick a middle finger up and walk away from that mess and to be liberated and loved in equal measure - rather than the hard reality of having to walk away to possibly precarity and loneliness.

and like, there are other ways this pleasure plays out right? my fic also holds these fantasies in one way or the other, narrated and structured through various different means. but the specific pleasure of fandom is that against all the odds you might find a work that runs around that specific fantasy and delivers something that you weren't able to articulate for yourself otherwise. but it also means that any disjuncture in expectation can be felt and experienced as life-threatening - which is exactly the point at which many of these moral crusades begin and also where many of their hypocrisies lie.

erotic - it feels really funny to come to this after those very intense sections, but like, this is also something fic is really good at bc ao3 anglophone fic especially is so centred on the erotic. sometimes this is a little and specific detail: "I was almost afraid of the hollow ache between my hips, a spiritual womb, feeling as though I might die if I did not cleave or was not cloven unto." and sometimes it is specifically the point at which erotic pleasure and fantasy pleasure intersect and become one:

“Unburnt,” he said softly, his hand running up my thigh. “The folly is unburnt, Finnu. The mark of the love between the Zamindar and the Marakkar, to this day stands unburnt.”  Unburnt, yes. And I loved it, and I loved him. I loved him so much I could have wept, but I laughed, shameless, uncaring as to the fact that we were, technically, out in public. ... “Unburnt,” Russo reminded me again, quietly, kissing the nape of my neck as he draped himself over me. “It remains unburnt.”  “Because they were the very best of friends?” I asked again, twisting the question so I could hear the answer anew. I had let him in, and he was holding so perfectly still, so the moment would last. His deepest breaths were mine. “Is that why, Russo?”  “Because they loved each other,” he corrected me as he started to move behind me. He was everywhere at once, his teeth grazing just under my ear as he took me in hand. “Because they loved each other like this. Like us, Finnu. Like—oh, just like us, Finnu.” 

in this case the specific erotic fantasy pleasure of: shame does not need to exist and there is a person like me who is genuinely loved and genuinely desired and cared for, who can be fucked and not be destroyed or damned; a child who can be seen and held and who can still be considered perfect, rather than ruined and destroyed and despicable, bound for hell.

(see also: the erotic fantasy pleasure of the rape fantasy as means of achieving agency over rape or the anxieties around it; or the erotic fantasy pleasure of enemies to lovers as the specific libidinal catharsis of trying to piece together what to do with the person or thing that keeps hurting you. frankly, maybe all of this is the substance of all the darkfic fantasies that so upset people for doing "reading" the wrong way: experiencing a pleasure and fantasy that is not morally condemnatory alone, but in the process unsettling society because it reveals the failures of social structures in themselves...)

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anyway, reading this fic aside, i do think a lot of anxieties in fandom about "pleasure" in reading are really about what people are enjoying: are they enjoying this work in the right way, as an edifying and moral piece of literature? or are they experiencing libidinal fantasies, erotics or even worse erotic fantasies through it? if they are experiencing these pleasures, does that render the text rotten? if they are experiencing these libidinal pleasures while reading an ai generated fic, does that mean these libidinal pleasures are rendered even more childish, immature and bad? and like. i cannot stress enough. these are 18th century anxieties. we have been having these same anxieties since the advent of the novel, especially abt experiencing its joys in the wrong ways and taking away the wrong, corrupting, libidinal pleasures rather than the right edifying pleasures. and in fic fandom we try to launder these libidinal pleasures thru the cerebral ones, but like, the power of fic is precisely its power to dig deeply into these libidinal pleasures.

and like, the libidinal pleasures are not divorced from the intellectual/cerebral ones, which is i think what also generates a lot of anxiety. that all that beauty, intertextual pleasure and deep thinking could be harnessed towards these fantasies of the id and the erotic and produce something that is meaningful on that level and not just on an assumed sterile literary plane...

but of course, that is the pleasure of the novel and how we've been enjoying novels for centuries and exactly what ye old 18th century moralists were morbidly terrified about. so you know. plus ca change and all that.