...blaaaaaaah

[reenka]

So far in my adventures with yaoi manga, I've realized that one of my favorite things is when the uke is... well... non-ukish-- like, non-submissive, which is weird 'cause recently in HP fandom I've gotten a little too invested in who tops and so on, which is actually funny to me now. I don't know... it's just my luck that recently I keep reading mangas where the bottom boy is all tough-assed and violent and sulky and so on, while the top is gentler and more love-love and such. Ahahaha it's so great. Sometimes it's pretty emotionally unrealistic, but who cares? I love seeing the tough guy be all, *mewl!!1* no matter how much he resists, heeeee. (*sekritly mean*)

Okay, that was random. Also, it seems like one of my greatest joys in manga, if not in life, is witnessing the obligatory (dark-haired!) Expressionless Icy Cool Boy (who's annoying as hell in HP, but let's not go there) get all 'omg, you TOUCHED MY PENIS!! I BLUSH NOW!!'. That's beautiful. It seems like a lot of the High School stories are about the Uber-Cool Cucumber meeting Sunny Naive Dork boy (who is sometimes violent). And I know I said no manga meta for me, but this isn't meta, it's... er... silly commentary, so there.

I played a bit of Final Fantasy X for the first time recently. Okay, no slash yet, but... see, I'm branching out in my dorkishness. Brings out the full-bodied flavor... or something.
~~

The thing about fandom is... it's implicitly about sharing things you're understood to see in a similar way with people, right? You all like something together. I suppose it's easy to feel you understand things together, too, like... suppose other people see the characters the same way I do if they ship them, but this doesn't seem true. Then again, that's what subjectivity is all about.


It doesn't work that way for me, at least. It feels like the roots and the heart of my fannishness are very personal... and its flowers may attract attention, but aren't capable of sustaining me.

I think my base inspiration lies in images and symbols-- in feelings-- in inner associations between words and memories and emotions. It's not about any two people-- it's not about a pairing. It's about the constant fascination with reaching out into the abyss, with needing the thing you cannot have, with desperation and despair and obsession and violence.

What it comes down to is that I don't care what pairing it is... what fandom it is... I don't care, as long as it's telling a version of that story in my head-- the one that haunts me. And in a way, I think there's only one story I'm ever after, telling or wanting others to tell... that story changes during different times in my life, but H/D, for instance, represents something like this fic snippet by jadedroses. I suppose this is about my love-affair with, well, love, and my tendency to want it to be near-impossible, almost to escape it even as it draws near.

In my head, Draco is always saying he hates Harry, and he means he wants him (to pay attention). He is impotent yet constant-- this is why I always thought ghost!Draco made such perfect sense. He is a ghost-- you cannot truly kill the idea of him, or stop his pain, or even really change him, perhaps. He is everything bright and hopeless, the pretty boy suicide. He's the idiot in me, wanting things too much, never being enough, not seeing the truth until it's too late, clinging to childhood past reason, succumbing to jealousy, living in circles of self-fulfilling prophecies.

I sort of see this boy, and it doesn't matter what his name is-- and he's reaching out, so desperately-- he's reaching out and his eyes are shut and his fingers are cold and there's nothing there anymore but winter wind.

Comments

[yourpoison.livejournal.com]

I wasn't even referring to the stupid stereotypical girly ukes, and I carefully didn't use the word 'sassy'. As for stereotypes, lots of things are stereotypes (that is, commonly used and not subtle), but still enjoyable. I wasn't talking about sassitude-- whatever that means. I was even trying not to use the word 'uke' more than once, so as not to trigger responses to that word. I obviously wasn't referring to characterizations that make anyone look like a retard as far as I could tell-- since I don't tend to like stories about retards. So I shouldn't have used the word 'uke' at all, I guess, though I -was- talking about yaoi.

I had several particular mangas in mind, but I've forgotten now. Basically, it goes way beyond 'sassy', which isn't what I said I liked (was it?) because that's a word synonymous with 'cheeky'-- whereas I like mangas where the bottom is like... tougher acting than the top. That is what I thought I said, nothing about sassiness.

[malafede.livejournal.com]

Yes, I was just sharing my own experience.