[hero/shadow = still #1 OTP. le sigh]

[reenka]

I've just finished 'Wolfskin' by Juliet Marillier, and while it's interesting and I like the main characters (one of which is the Plucky and Strong Yet Fragile and Feminine Heroine), I can't help it... the most intriguing part of the book is the bond between the straightforward, kind yet quick-to-anger warrior boy and the snarky, cunning, needy, lonely yet ruthless sociopathic boy whom he shared a blood-oath of friendship with during their childhood. Mmmm. The warrior-boy's denseness and simplicity and loyalty set against the other's insecurity and need to prove himself and sheer single-minded desire to get what he -wants-... oh, it's like music to my ears.... And yes, I admit, in its basest elements it's really proto!H/D to me.
    And much as I understand these two are 'straight' both by author intent and common sense in context of their times and history, I can't help it-- I can't help but feel -this- is the more striking love-story, no matter how honestly heterosexual the warrior boy may be. This is the archetypal relationship between Hero and Shadow, and to me, nothing could really equal it in meaning or intensity, since it represents the basic union of Light and Dark of everyone's nature.

It occurred to me that the reason I'm so very fascinated strikes to the very heart of the reason of why I slash, why close male friendship means so much to me-- and the emotional stuntedness and closed-in inability of the latter boy to communicate his real self sort of underlines the 'normal' situation. It's almost like-- almost like -all- boys are a little sociopathic compared to ourselves (the girls, I mean); it's like they're often this closed in and verbally eloquent about everything but what lies in their hearts, so scared and insecure and ruthless in their defensiveness.

It also reminded me of the exchange I recently had with fictualities about being able to see the surviving 'half' of a pairing happy after the 'end'-- in a situation like with Frodo and Sam, where Frodo had little left to give before he'd finally departed and Sam had his wife and children. In my natural inclination, I'd say 'settling' is bad, even if the person is unaware they're settling for something 'lesser' or not as intense and deeply vital. I'd rather a character be miserable with the one they can't bear to love or lose than content with the one who merely makes them uncomplicatedly happy. But then, I'm rather perverse. -.-

I was thinking (with some chagrin), of how friends normally tend to make you uncomplicatedly happy, especially female friends (in my experience). If a friend isn't monumentally messed up, your relationship isn't likely to be fraught or angsty in terms of betrayals and secrets and overall tragedy, though clearly misunderstandings and resentments are normal. Uh, this is all 'in my experience'. And so, perhaps this is only the life of a relatively tame, easy-going female like myself-- men are much more likely to hold things back, to be eaten up by ambition and divided loyalties and duties, to be rotted from the inside with feelings they simply -can't- express, to be-- emotional basketcases, basically. And of course... of course, that's why I love them.
    More to the point, that's why I love to slash them, leaving aside the hot boysex for a sec.

I can't really imagine a healthy relationship here, and can't guarantee this rift in the boy's soul can be mended with the love and faith another clueless boy can offer, but oh-- oh-- the very idea. The possibility. It is like the dream of somehow bridging the gulf between Self and Other; more desperate and dark than any mere love-story, but also more painfully close to the heart, perhaps.

Comments

[fictualities.livejournal.com]

The situation at the end of LotR is a little complicated, and made even more so by the fact that what happens in the end to Sam happens outside the main text of LotR as we have it. This is going to get a little detailed, but I think it speaks to your overall point, because the text we're left with is one that seems almost designed to divide its readers into at least two camps, depending on how much they value evidence of domestic happiness or evidence of the sort of love that is a little more like the hero/shadow sort of relationship you're discussing here.

Okay, the canon: in the original final chapter, which Tolkien deleted only because everyone he knew told him that it omg sucked, we see Sam and Rosie and their children living happily in the Shire and basically doing some rather turgid exposition work explaining the final fates of all the other characters. At any rate, in this chapter it's pretty clear BOTH that he loves Rosie (and his many children) and misses Frodo.

That got cut. What we have in the published book is the main text, which ends with Frodo leaving and Sam returning to Rosie and his first baby, and a note in one of the Appendices about what finally happened to Sam: he became Lord Mayor and had thirteen children; Rosie died after they had been married for sixty years. Sam, then 102 years old, went over the Sea -- though whether he met Frodo there (Frodo would have been 116) is never stated.

In any case, what this means for someone writing the F/S pairing is that they have to decide how to address those sixty years of marriage -- no fly-by-night commitment, that -- and the debate among fans really has been all over the map and quite, erm, lively at times. What's interesting about these debates is that they are at bottom debates about what people value in a pairing, about what seems like a fulfilling relationship to them, about whether you can classify one or the other of Sam's loves as "lesser." And on that question, to judge by this debate, people's mileage most definitely may vary.

Also, hmmm:

It's almost like-- almost like -all- boys are a little sociopathic compared to ourselves (the girls, I mean); it's like they're often this closed in and verbally eloquent about everything but what lies in their hearts, so scared and insecure and ruthless in their defensiveness.

Well, a lot of my favorite pairings, slash and het, work just that way. There's something fascinating to me about a love that dares not speak its name. But a) eee, the gender generalization here is pretty big, and b) hmmm, just because someone is more eloquent on topic X, does that necessarily mean that they are really being more open? Speech isn't always used as a means of opening your heart; sometimes just the opposite. Then again, I am the most Cynical Person on Earth, so perhaps you should just ignore me on this question.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Yup, that's a good sum-up of the LOTR situation. Though I'd add that the other thing is that Rosie simply doesn't really exist as part of the story. She's not set up in the beginning at all. Sam is free to follow his master. The one time she maybe is hinted at is when Sam is describing his vision from Galadriel where he imagines a house and a garden with...and doesn't speak the name. It's not even as obvious as Aragorn's moments of thinking about Arwen, which isn't much.

Then suddenly he brings her up just in time to go home--I tend to explain it as Sam having this great relationship with Frodo we're invested in and then he comes home and marries the girl he liked who worked at the local Dairy Queen. Perfectly respectable thing for him to do, but why should the readers care? In fact, one of the things I remember hating about that deleted chapter was Rosie claiming she knew Sam was coming back that day before she heard him, which just read to me like the classic Mary Sue being forced into the story as if she was somehow involved when Tolkien forgot to write her that way.

So the thing with Rosie is that whatever you imagine about her she's not just Rosie, she's a domestic life with children. It's no random thing, imo, that Sam already has Elanor when Frodo leaves, because his choosing Rosie over Frodo would be a very different thing than choosing Rosie and Elanor over Frodo, just because it would set up a triangle in a way the book very much avoids.

I mean, I've always felt--and I think this is one of the things I like about Mira's "Rain"--that Sam is naturally a domestic kind of guy in a way Frodo obviously isn't. At the root of their personalities Sam is a caregiver and natural family man and Frodo is naturally introverted and solitary. It's part of what makes their relationship so interesting. Sam and Rosie, by contrast, work because they are compliments of each other, very much the same. But Rosie could therefore be anyone. The personality we do see of her certainly works with Sam; there's something to build on there if you're writing Sam/Rosie. But frankly, she could still be anyone. Sam would have built the same kind of family bond with another girl had he come home to find Rosie married to someone else. Frodo was one of a kind for him. So when you're writing Sam "torn in two" that's always going to be there. When he misses Frodo he misses the person, when he misses Rosie she's tied up in sixty years of companionship and sharing children.

[yourpoison.livejournal.com]

I think it's actually because I understand Sam's motivation as being related to his own nature and predilection towards comfort/domesticity rather than passionate devotion that I feel this dissatisfaction with the *idea* behind um, actually choosing that as one's life. Like, if it's not perilous passion, I feel cheated on some level if someone's being left behind-- though at the same time, I still accept the character's (Sam's or the Wolfskin's) choices and natural inclinations. It's like our conversation about Ennis-- people's choices show us who they really are, and there's nothing that could really be done about that. But sometimes that bothers me, too :>

I don't want to force my values onto characters that don't share them, but at the same time grow dissatisfied with stories that support values I find bland, if that makes sense :> So I accept the character but resent the story :>

[yourpoison.livejournal.com]

In the end, I don't know how similar Sam and Frodo's situation is to Wolfskin, and it's not that I blame either set of characters for doing what came naturally and so forth. If I wish things were different, it's only because that's the sort of story I prefer to read or write, even if it may not be a better or deeper or more realistic story. In the case of Wolfskin, the love relationship had much time (in the text) devoted to it, but I still didn't feel it as deeply as the bond between those two boys, but that was me as much as the writing, I think. The het relationship had no real inner conflict, no sense of transcendence or achievement-- basically, the girl healed the boy when he was physically ill and had given up hope, and she showed him he could have a new life that wasn't that of a warrior. But even though the warrior boy was healed, I didn't think he *needed* healing quite as much as the other did, so I felt unsatisfied. In any case, at the end of this story it was also clear warrior-boy misses the sociopathic dark one, and that he's happy with and loves his girlfriend; basically, only the merest outline of the LoTR situation was probably reminiscent.

I don't think I believe of Sam's love for his wife as being 'lesser' at all, just different-- so it's a choice to be made, and as you said, of course mileage will vary. I also don't think it's really up to the reader to make that choice, but up to the character-- in that it's clear that Sam made the best choice for him, as did Frodo. He was happy, because he was always someone who wanted that sort of life, and then he got it; I imagine it was a just reward. It is only when the other person is unhappy that I feel bad, or when the happiness seems 'off' to me, like it's based on false premises. And all this is complicated by the fact that the sociopathic boy fits an archetype I'm obsessed with so I have my own 'plans' for his development, whereas Frodo is Frodo and Sam is Sam (probably the mark of deeper characterization, in other words) :>

It's true, also, that eloquence doesn't necessarily mean openness, but then, I don't think *eloquence* about what's deeply in one's heart is ever 'truth', because that sort of thing is always going to be awkward. It's just the difference between awkward and stumbling vs. practically non-existent (in certain kinds of uptight guys). I know that was a sweeping generalization though, which is why I hedged it with all those conditionals :> I do find it rather rare that a girl have that same pattern of complete incapacity for real emotional self-expression, though it could just show the limits of my experience. :>