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reenkaAll right, I know this'll sound stupid, but bear with me:
I was rereading bits of Prufrock's Levity series, and even reading little snippets of `Levity' hits me where it hurts (and by that I mean: it kills me), and I was actually surprised. Just because I care so much and it's not that I'm as obsessed and fixated on the pairing as I am with H/D, so a part of me thinks it shouldn't be able to hurt me that much.
I mean, I'm not addicted or anything-- I can go months without a single S/R fic, so you'd think I wouldn't be this sensitive, y'know, just because the writing is gorgeous and the characterizations are unbelievable and the emotion is palpable. Right. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Pru is bloody brilliant, of course. All I can say is, thank god for the happy of `Vector' and `Gasp', which I hadn't actually read before today, and ohhhh how happy did it make me?? SO HAPPY. LIKE THE VERY GOOD CRACK, I tell you.
And then it hit me (duh!)-- love is universal.
It's always the same thing, the same emotion being tapped, no matter who the characters are. Love is universal. It seems painfully obvious, but it's so easy to forget, in fandom, among all the ship debates and the way one starts to -identify- with a (one true) pairing to the point that it's like there needs to be a formula to touch one's heart. Take Character A, add Character B, and you have "investment" and therefore (vicariously) "love". And of course we will always have our individual favorites-- but underneath it all-- well, there's the truth, and the truth taps into... well, us. The same source.... Which is why one starts to care about the love lives of original characters one has only 'known' for like, 10 pages. And by 'someone' I mean me. It can't be the -character- alone, precisely.
Of course one cares about some characters more than others, and fact is, some pairings allow a writer to explore certain themes more than others, which some readers may be most drawn to-- but even so, whether one's writing Harry/Hermione, Sirius/Remus, Lucius/Narcissa or Harry/Draco, the journey may be different in each case, but what you have is the same destination-- the human heart. If one steps back, one can sort of see it-- how easily love can be recreated in each case with only that initial leap of faith that one makes, believing in the possibility. Really, understanding the emotional center of a love-story is a bit like falling in love all by itself-- it all starts with a leap of faith. You allow yourself to believe-- you let down your barriers and... fall in love with their love.
That essential moment when something is created from nothing through a sort of metamorphosis of vision. Where before there were only two people, on the brink-- now there are two people falling, the earth dropping away beneath them. That 'moment of seeing' that Aja talked about as being central to the nature of an H/D fic-- I really think it's central to all romance.
It's not who they are. It's how they feel.
It's... it's all the same story, really. I mean, I knew that. But still, funny how one can forget, isn't it?
I was rereading bits of Prufrock's Levity series, and even reading little snippets of `Levity' hits me where it hurts (and by that I mean: it kills me), and I was actually surprised. Just because I care so much and it's not that I'm as obsessed and fixated on the pairing as I am with H/D, so a part of me thinks it shouldn't be able to hurt me that much.
I mean, I'm not addicted or anything-- I can go months without a single S/R fic, so you'd think I wouldn't be this sensitive, y'know, just because the writing is gorgeous and the characterizations are unbelievable and the emotion is palpable. Right. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Pru is bloody brilliant, of course. All I can say is, thank god for the happy of `Vector' and `Gasp', which I hadn't actually read before today, and ohhhh how happy did it make me?? SO HAPPY. LIKE THE VERY GOOD CRACK, I tell you.
And then it hit me (duh!)-- love is universal.
It's always the same thing, the same emotion being tapped, no matter who the characters are. Love is universal. It seems painfully obvious, but it's so easy to forget, in fandom, among all the ship debates and the way one starts to -identify- with a (one true) pairing to the point that it's like there needs to be a formula to touch one's heart. Take Character A, add Character B, and you have "investment" and therefore (vicariously) "love". And of course we will always have our individual favorites-- but underneath it all-- well, there's the truth, and the truth taps into... well, us. The same source.... Which is why one starts to care about the love lives of original characters one has only 'known' for like, 10 pages. And by 'someone' I mean me. It can't be the -character- alone, precisely.
Of course one cares about some characters more than others, and fact is, some pairings allow a writer to explore certain themes more than others, which some readers may be most drawn to-- but even so, whether one's writing Harry/Hermione, Sirius/Remus, Lucius/Narcissa or Harry/Draco, the journey may be different in each case, but what you have is the same destination-- the human heart. If one steps back, one can sort of see it-- how easily love can be recreated in each case with only that initial leap of faith that one makes, believing in the possibility. Really, understanding the emotional center of a love-story is a bit like falling in love all by itself-- it all starts with a leap of faith. You allow yourself to believe-- you let down your barriers and... fall in love with their love.
That essential moment when something is created from nothing through a sort of metamorphosis of vision. Where before there were only two people, on the brink-- now there are two people falling, the earth dropping away beneath them. That 'moment of seeing' that Aja talked about as being central to the nature of an H/D fic-- I really think it's central to all romance.
It's not who they are. It's how they feel.
It's... it's all the same story, really. I mean, I knew that. But still, funny how one can forget, isn't it?
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Date: 2004-10-25 12:25 am (UTC)But. Er. *coughs*
Yesh, you are right, as of course you would be, since you are so one of my love gurus, you know that, right? *laughs* That is such a wacked out thing to say, and I think my burst of 'deep thought'...ness has somewhat evaporated seeing as it's after 3am, etc. But yes, you totally said what I sort of hinted at except didn't articulate because I was lazy :D :D! That is the best sort of feeling. I do think we're all attracted to different stories, which is why I said that about 'stepping away'-- I do think one needs to let go of ego a bit before one can see underneath one's preferences of vision to the uniting thread and so on. Because of course we're all going to have different 'buttons' and reactions to stories-- and I myself am clearly heavily biased towards H/D of all sorts-- but there's still something... there. Like a secret ingredient that links it all together, or something, and makes it... make sense.
Perhaps it's also significant that to me, one of the major elements of attraction has always been the -way- the story's told (with humor, banter, intensity, subtlety, a flare for language) as much as the characters involved, so I can sort of fall in love with the telling, too. That's really always been how I was able to write all the non-H/D pairings (which I still can't read)-- because it's like, the way -I- tell it, it's also my story, just like H/D is, though there's no guarrantee that anyone else will see it the same way. If -I- told a story about a pairing I'd normally dislike, it'd be... tailored to me, and I think any two characters can be approached in the 'right way' to work for the -writer- in theory, if not the reader, but then it's more like the process of writing original fic, more creation/fusion rather than extrapolation.
Wah. It's that basic contradiction-and-yet-not, about how our stories are one and yet so many & always changing, yes; like a single precious stone with an endless number of facets. ♥