Friday night round-up
Dec. 2nd, 2005 11:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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hp_springsmut! W00t! That will be my third fic exchange this year, heh.
Roger Ebert on the Tonight Show, talking about the Harry Potter films: "For the seventh one, Harry will be 17. Do you think that one will be rated R?"
Jay Leno: "I'm not going there."
*grins*
We went to see the film of Rent tonight! It was a lot better than I expected, actually. It was weird to hear some of the song lyrics being spoken, though!
Mark: "December 24, 9 pm, eastern standard time. From here on in, I shoot without a script. See if anything comes of it."
It's just weird to be able to recite dialogue along with a film you're seeing for the first time! The music was "slicker", more produced, which was interesting, though I did miss the raw feeling of the stage version. I have seen the stage show at least a dozen times over the last nine (gulp!) years, and I cry when Angel dies, every time -- and I cried harder tonight than I have in a while. They did a good job with that storyline, I thought. I was worried they would go overboard and make it melodramatic, but it worked well. The funeral scene was heartwrenching, especially when Tom starts singing "I'll Cover You" by the coffin. *sniffles* God, I am SO in love with Jesse Martin right now! I need to find some Law & Order -- it's always on some channel somewhere, isn't it?
Is everybody enjoying reading all the holiday exchange fics? I know I am!
I have a question, though. I don't usually read a lot of het fic -- I don't have much time to read, and what I usually read is slash, so I typically only read het if someone I know recs it. So I haven't read a huge sample, certainly, but it seems that characters in het fic are much more likely to declare their love for each other during sex than are slash characters. And this is not just in established relationship fics -- I've seen a few lately where it was said prior to the characters having sex for the first time. Maybe I'm wrong, but that doesn't seem to happen in slash so much. And I'm glad, frankly, because it makes me uncomfortable, for several reasons.
(1) It reminds me of guys who thought saying that would get me to sleep with them. Ironically, I was more than happy to have no-strings sex with them before they said it, but their lying to me (whispering it in my ear while their hand was down my pants) pissed me off. It not only seemed creepy and manipulative, it made me wonder if they thought I was stupid enough to believe them. I'd thought we were on the same page about the sex, but no. So when a male character says that to a female character under similar circumstances, it reminds me of that, and it's a turn-off. (And that sort of goes with the whole "women like slash because it's a less personal way to explore their sexuality" theory, huh?)
(2) I fully believe that people should be able to just fuck each other if they want to. There doesn't need to be emotion involved, or commitment -- it can just be about lust, and that's fine. So when (just an example; this isn't from a particular fic) a fic has Harry and Draco snarling at each other one day, then declaring their love for each other the next just before sucking each other off, I have to roll my eyes. The message I get from that is that the author thinks it isn't okay to have sex with someone unless there's at least a pretense of a committed relationship. People have every right to believe that if they like, but it doesn't mean it's true for everyone. Some of the hottest sex I've had in my life was with men I didn't know, and whom I never saw again afterwards. It doesn't mean that I want to live my entire life that way -- I'm quite happily married now. But fan fiction is fantasy for me, and I have wonderful happy committed-relationship I-love-you sex in my RL. I prefer something else in my smutty fanfic, I guess. Those I-love-yous feel not only forced to me; they feel like a moral prescription, like the author is implying that it's only okay for them to have sex because they love each other -- despite the fact that they've never really spoken until today, right? I suppose it bothers me, because it seems like a restriction of a female character's sexual freedom. Why shouldn't Hermione/Ginny/Tonks/whoever be able to just screw a guy if she wants to, without there being twu wuv involved?
(3) This is entirely personal preference, but I'm not a big fan of schmoop. I've never read romance novels, and I have actually tried. Declarations of love, IMO, are better used in other ways in fic. I'd much rather it be said after one person has done something stupid and they're both laughing about it, than just before they have sex for the first time. That feels real to me, and those little moments are the stuff life is made of.
I really don't mean any of this as criticism -- it's just about what I prefer, which is nothing more than my opinion. Thankfully, there's a huge variety of fic out there and there's something for everyone.
I guess my question was whether this sort of thing was more common in het than in slash. Anybody know?
hp_springsmut! W00t! That will be my third fic exchange this year, heh.Roger Ebert on the Tonight Show, talking about the Harry Potter films: "For the seventh one, Harry will be 17. Do you think that one will be rated R?"
Jay Leno: "I'm not going there."
*grins*
We went to see the film of Rent tonight! It was a lot better than I expected, actually. It was weird to hear some of the song lyrics being spoken, though!
Mark: "December 24, 9 pm, eastern standard time. From here on in, I shoot without a script. See if anything comes of it."
It's just weird to be able to recite dialogue along with a film you're seeing for the first time! The music was "slicker", more produced, which was interesting, though I did miss the raw feeling of the stage version. I have seen the stage show at least a dozen times over the last nine (gulp!) years, and I cry when Angel dies, every time -- and I cried harder tonight than I have in a while. They did a good job with that storyline, I thought. I was worried they would go overboard and make it melodramatic, but it worked well. The funeral scene was heartwrenching, especially when Tom starts singing "I'll Cover You" by the coffin. *sniffles* God, I am SO in love with Jesse Martin right now! I need to find some Law & Order -- it's always on some channel somewhere, isn't it?
Is everybody enjoying reading all the holiday exchange fics? I know I am!
I have a question, though. I don't usually read a lot of het fic -- I don't have much time to read, and what I usually read is slash, so I typically only read het if someone I know recs it. So I haven't read a huge sample, certainly, but it seems that characters in het fic are much more likely to declare their love for each other during sex than are slash characters. And this is not just in established relationship fics -- I've seen a few lately where it was said prior to the characters having sex for the first time. Maybe I'm wrong, but that doesn't seem to happen in slash so much. And I'm glad, frankly, because it makes me uncomfortable, for several reasons.
(1) It reminds me of guys who thought saying that would get me to sleep with them. Ironically, I was more than happy to have no-strings sex with them before they said it, but their lying to me (whispering it in my ear while their hand was down my pants) pissed me off. It not only seemed creepy and manipulative, it made me wonder if they thought I was stupid enough to believe them. I'd thought we were on the same page about the sex, but no. So when a male character says that to a female character under similar circumstances, it reminds me of that, and it's a turn-off. (And that sort of goes with the whole "women like slash because it's a less personal way to explore their sexuality" theory, huh?)
(2) I fully believe that people should be able to just fuck each other if they want to. There doesn't need to be emotion involved, or commitment -- it can just be about lust, and that's fine. So when (just an example; this isn't from a particular fic) a fic has Harry and Draco snarling at each other one day, then declaring their love for each other the next just before sucking each other off, I have to roll my eyes. The message I get from that is that the author thinks it isn't okay to have sex with someone unless there's at least a pretense of a committed relationship. People have every right to believe that if they like, but it doesn't mean it's true for everyone. Some of the hottest sex I've had in my life was with men I didn't know, and whom I never saw again afterwards. It doesn't mean that I want to live my entire life that way -- I'm quite happily married now. But fan fiction is fantasy for me, and I have wonderful happy committed-relationship I-love-you sex in my RL. I prefer something else in my smutty fanfic, I guess. Those I-love-yous feel not only forced to me; they feel like a moral prescription, like the author is implying that it's only okay for them to have sex because they love each other -- despite the fact that they've never really spoken until today, right? I suppose it bothers me, because it seems like a restriction of a female character's sexual freedom. Why shouldn't Hermione/Ginny/Tonks/whoever be able to just screw a guy if she wants to, without there being twu wuv involved?
(3) This is entirely personal preference, but I'm not a big fan of schmoop. I've never read romance novels, and I have actually tried. Declarations of love, IMO, are better used in other ways in fic. I'd much rather it be said after one person has done something stupid and they're both laughing about it, than just before they have sex for the first time. That feels real to me, and those little moments are the stuff life is made of.
I really don't mean any of this as criticism -- it's just about what I prefer, which is nothing more than my opinion. Thankfully, there's a huge variety of fic out there and there's something for everyone.
I guess my question was whether this sort of thing was more common in het than in slash. Anybody know?
