Ahh, another day, another seme (this time in 'Motto Midara ni Shitsukemashou', a BDSM-ish sorta manga) that is 'strange and kind of cold' towards his uke for some unknown reason (he wants more BDSM?? I'm guessing). And it got me to thinking about how yaoi is partly (maybe even mostly) so addictive to me because it (like most shoujo) has these cold-ass frozen-hearted boys that do inevitably melt at least a little from the amazing powah of the uke's TWUE LOFF. *___* I mean, yeah, I know what a pathetic cliche that is, and I know how badly done it is most of the time in fanfic with characters that don't fit the mold at all (like Snape or Draco in HP, Brian in QaF), but....
The thing is-- the thing is, it's hard to really even talk about the classic idealistic view of romantic love without talking about How Love Saves Us. I think it's like, the variants of the Icy or Thorny/Lonely Heart (tm) really just make the saving more literal and more dramatic. Meaning, while love can and does save anyone and there are as many ways to need its so-called healing power as there are people, there's something pure (in the sense of Platonic forms and Agape love) about the person needing to be saved because without love, they're literally lost or they've either never really experienced romance/love before or have turned their back on it consciously.
It all started when I was little, and my favorite fairy-tale love-story was probably Andersen's 'The Snow Queen' (and maybe still is, though it's a toss-up depending on my mood & which one I'm thinking of at the time). I think that's actually one of the only times -ever- I've read something that uses this trope in a way that's literarily defensible. That scene at the end where Gerda weeps and literally melts the ice in Kai's heart (in one translation) has permanently stuck with me since the first time I read it. I think Andersen had a way of writing about deep emotional truths without being overly meta or preachy or stuffy, which only left the reader with that pure, transcendent sense of eucatastrophe Tolkien wrote about in his famous 'On Fairy Stories' essay. Ever since then, perhaps I've been trying to recapture that feeling of joyous release in stories with somewhat similar themes (and mostly failing).
In any case, most of the time the whole idea gets a bad rep because most of the time it's not written anything like Andersen.
( and so on and so forth... -.- )
The thing is-- the thing is, it's hard to really even talk about the classic idealistic view of romantic love without talking about How Love Saves Us. I think it's like, the variants of the Icy or Thorny/Lonely Heart (tm) really just make the saving more literal and more dramatic. Meaning, while love can and does save anyone and there are as many ways to need its so-called healing power as there are people, there's something pure (in the sense of Platonic forms and Agape love) about the person needing to be saved because without love, they're literally lost or they've either never really experienced romance/love before or have turned their back on it consciously.
It all started when I was little, and my favorite fairy-tale love-story was probably Andersen's 'The Snow Queen' (and maybe still is, though it's a toss-up depending on my mood & which one I'm thinking of at the time). I think that's actually one of the only times -ever- I've read something that uses this trope in a way that's literarily defensible. That scene at the end where Gerda weeps and literally melts the ice in Kai's heart (in one translation) has permanently stuck with me since the first time I read it. I think Andersen had a way of writing about deep emotional truths without being overly meta or preachy or stuffy, which only left the reader with that pure, transcendent sense of eucatastrophe Tolkien wrote about in his famous 'On Fairy Stories' essay. Ever since then, perhaps I've been trying to recapture that feeling of joyous release in stories with somewhat similar themes (and mostly failing).
In any case, most of the time the whole idea gets a bad rep because most of the time it's not written anything like Andersen.
( and so on and so forth... -.- )
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