[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

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

If you get to generalize, then so do I! If I get to weigh in on the great mystery of gender, I would say that boys are just more interested in the masks that they wear, the roles and games that they play, than in the messy and unreliable personality that lurks somewhere underneath;

Now this makes me think of...well, lots of things. One is the Sandman story which I am suddenly unable to remember the title of, where the girl creates her own dreamworld that comes to get her later. Anyway, there's a character that talks about the basic fantasy of boy and girl and...wait, I have the silly book nearbyu, let me find it. Aha! The character says, "Boys and girls are different, you know that? Little boys have fantasies in which they're faster, or msarter, or able to fly. Where they hide their faces in secret identities and listen to the people who despise them admiring their remarkable deeds. Pathetic, bespectacled, rejected Perry Porter is secretly the Amazing Spider. Gawky, bespectacled, and unloved Clint Clarke is really Hyperman, yes? Now little girls, on the other hand, have different fantasies, much less convuluted. Their parents are not their parents. Their lives are not their lives. They are princesses. Lost princesses from distant lands. One day the king and queen, their real parents, will take them back to their land and then they'll be happy for ever and ever. Little cuckoos."

It just...uh, seems to relate. In one fantasy it's about trying on masks, the other is about the "true self." And I think in terms of growing up and initiation that's usually stressed. Girls are about "being." They naturally are initiated through menstruation where they become a doorway for someone else. Boys have to be wrestled into a role, symbolically wounded etc. They are about "doing" rather than "being" so it's a mark of maturity for them to find their role. Girls are more seen to have it passively handed to them through biology-even if they never actually have children.

A friend of mine has this awesome photograph of two children playing with one being totally boy and the other being totally girl. It's funny because I loved the picture and interpreted it the same way she did-both kids are fantasizing, in their own world. Another person didn't like it because immediately saw the girl as being dominated by the boy! I can't quite make that story relate but I had to bring it up.:-)

[scoradh.livejournal.com]

This whole comment -- thank you. I had a sociology lecture on men and medicine today and I was struggling to find my own opinion on the socialisation of men versus women in the shifting tides of pure, utter, unmitigated boredom ... and now I have. Cheers!

[yourpoison.livejournal.com]

...Man, when I read that bit in Sandman, I definitely thought 'omg, I'm a typical girl, so predictable it actually hurts' (with a side of 'omg, NEIL IS GOD', but that's neither here nor there). But that really is a brilliant illustration! I've always had tons of fantasies about my 'secret identity', except it was always my 'real self' at the same time-- it was never an -ability- and always a sign of who I really was (like, even if I get a power, it would be a power that'd reflect on my identity, y'know? I couldn't imagine myself with say, fireball-throwing powers, because it just wouldn't -fit- me; it'd be 'archetypally wrong').

Omg, the 'symbolic wounding'!! Especially in 'Wolfskin' (as in many ancient societies & male coming-of-age stories within them), maaaan, it was utterly literal-- the boys wounded each other as a pact of manhood! They pressed their scars together and swore they were brothers-- or rather, 'became' brothers as an oath. A girl and a female selkie from the same book, on the other hand, 'recognized' their sisterhood-- it's unimaginable for girls to have to wrestle and wound each other, somehow, to realize they're 'blood of one blood, flesh of one flesh'. It's an intuitive process; a girl would 'know', somehow, would 'acknowledge' the pre-existing sisterhood that was already there. And yeah, a boy 'becomes' a man through some struggle and trial whereas you can argue a girl 'turns into' a woman through 'flowering' into selfhood. Hm.

All this (predictably) makes me sad, like we've been making a practice of psychically wounding our boys all this time. I mean, I can't find an excuse for it, a way it's 'better for them' to pretend. I dunno. Roles. I like them as play but can't help but think their usefulness is limited in reality and only healthy if one is self-aware. Ahh, maybe I'm just missing a boy's insight :>

[black-dog.livejournal.com]

This is really interesting stuff. Definitely, I think the idea of "authenticity" is less directly comprehensible to boys -- they're less likely to have fantasies about who they "really are" and more likely to think "it would be cool to do this or this or this." Although I suppose that everyone, regardless of gender, experiences the same rush of feeling when a role or vocation is "right" for them, when it clicks for them. But I wonder if there are differences even here? I think for guys that experience feels like a suit of clothes that finally fits, perfectly, or at least well enough to be fully comfortable for once. And it's not the only possible role, it's just one that feels empowering, feels like something you can work with, and after all you have to pick something. Is it the same or is it different, over on the other side of the great divide?

And the "wounding" thing is a fascinating issue -- it makes me wonder if boys need some experience that forcibly limits them, that makes them choose among what seem like infinite and arbitrary possibilities.

[yourpoison.livejournal.com]

Okay, so I've been reading up on INFP stuff, and I like the idea that Gandhi was an INFP, right, and I was looking through Gandhi's quotes (http://members.aol.com/macvjv/docs/Gandhi.htm) and it seemed he really stressed the idea of authenticity and resistance-through-being-yourself, which is an idea deeply intuitive to me (and apparently 'my type' of person). Um so perhaaaaps, boys are either a) less likely to be INFPs (seems reasonable) or b) more likely to be conditioned out of it through the societal threat of that being 'too gay' or 'not manly enough' or what have you.

I mean, I'm both female and the Idealist-Healer/Romantic type, so of course I'm uber-focused on self-actualization to the max. I think most people, male or female, tend to 'do what's expedient' or 'what everyone else does', especially if they're extraverted and not too intuitive. The more introverted and intuitive a person is, the more they're probably concerned about the 'real' nature of their occupation and its effect on them. A person who's more 'surface' oriented (in terms of affecting others or controlling others or perceiving the world through the senses, not as in 'being shallow') would naturally care about the 'hidden significance' or truth value less, and accept it as 'one possible well-fitting role'. For an INFP/female, the point isn't to have a role but to grow into your soul, y'know :>

I think the 'wounding' thing is actual Jungian psych stuff, not sure....

[black-dog.livejournal.com]

More contrarianism: I am reluctant to see Gandhi as typifying anything, precisely because his significance as a spiritual leader would likely be his ability to cut against the grain of people's ordinary habits of mind. So he may well embody INFP, but it would be a sort of turbocharged INFP and its significance might lie in the "something extra" rather than in the INFP perspective itself.

By its very nature, wouldn't the Myers-Briggs typology beg our basic question here, because it's based on a gender-neutral set of cognitive styles? And that might be empirically correct, I just don't know enough about M-B methodology to know what I think of it. I mean, the significance of gender might be how it mediates, statistically, the appearance of certain M-B types. Or it may be an entirely separate dimension, a scale that crosscuts M-B. I don't honestly have a useful opinion here.

I'm not sure I see any contradiction between introversion and role-playing -- ask Walter Mitty! Or that "healer" or "empath" couldn't be a role one chooses to play. Or that extroversion couldn't be a spontaneous expression of one's innermost nature. I feel diffident about writing this, because I feel like I'm barely getting a handle on the issue, but I'm wary of some of these distinctions -- they don't feel compelling to me at first encounter.

I've done one of those online MB tests and I come out as INFP as well (sometimes INFJ), though almost exactly on the borderline for all four measures, so apparently I am very close to being totally the opposite! Which may be why it doesn't feel very diagnostic to me. :) But I would love to read more about the underlying theory, if you've got good links.

[yourpoison.livejournal.com]

I think I brought it up because we were talking archetypes/personalities and I feel this is probably a more complex/detailed axis than male/female, which does impact one's development, but I'm uncomfortable with using it seriously too much. I think certain extremes are more statistically likely in girls than boys & vice versa, but that's about as far as I'm fully comfortable going :>

I didn't mean to imply a contradiction between introversion and role-playing per se (lots of introverts become actors -because- the distancing allows more social freedom), but certain kinds of emotional introverts... I dunno, actually, because in a way writing/reading/day-dreaming the way I do is also 'role-playing', it's just that I'm still -after- The Truth or whatever. It's more about the process than the arrival; more about the awareness that this-and-this is *not* true than the certainty that *that* is. Heh. But yeah, this is all rather fuzzy :D But wheee, I like me some fuzzy :D

Interesting wide theory starting points would be this interview (http://www.innerexplorations.com/catpsy/a.htm) and this theory article (http://creativity.chaosmagic.com/custom.html) that sort of gives a grounding in the components that go into the creation of 'types' (ie, Jungian psych). To sort out whether you're INFP or INFJ, there's actually a whole in-depth informative website (http://members.aol.com/macvjv/INFJorINFP.htm); the same person did a whole extensive type overview (http://www.typeinsights.com/) website, which context/history/archetypes/etc, though I haven't explored it as much as I could. ^^;

Basically, this all started with Jung classifying consciousness into perception, thinking, feeling & intuition, and people added extraversion/introversion as another axis early on. It works because... well, that seems like a good way of modeling/understanding personality/individual consciousness to me, I guess. But I mostly like it 'cause it -fits- even if people fool around and put on masks and aren't aware of their true 'type' (which definitely happens). Besides that, it's clear some people are just more integrated than other (ie, actively learning to be more extraverted, pay attention to their senses or intuitions more, etc). The 'type' thing is merely innately preferred mode of operation, nothing too determinant. It is also typical of INFPs both to resist this categorization and to be interested in it as a pattern :D

This (http://www.cognitiveprocesses.com/infp.html) was, I thought, a fascinating breakdown into inner-persona symbolage of INFP/others (and you can see we *do* contain all modes of functioning within ourselves, they just serve different functions). This (http://www.teamtechnology.co.uk/mb-types/infp.htm) is a helpful summary/bulletpoint overview of how you'd recognize an INFP/other types and how they'd appear in stress or to others. Other 'profiles' of INFP I liked (just to see if they fit, because I can't judge as closely for other types) is this (http://www.murraystate.edu/secsv/fye/INFP.htm) and this (http://www.typelogic.com/infp.html), the latter because it creates categories/names the relationships between each type (ie, mentor, anima, complement-- which I find an interesting jumping off point). This (http://www.ranshawconsulting.com/infp.htm) seemed interesting for a completely corporate/work-related view of types, though this book excerpt (http://www.psychometrics.com/downloads/pdf/samplefiromb.pdf) goes into much more leadership-profiling detail for the INFP type.

[black-dog.livejournal.com]

this is all rather fuzzy :D But wheee, I like me some fuzzy :D

Hee! Me too. :) I didn't mean to jump all over this, it maybe sounded not fuzzy enough so it alarmed me!

And thank you for the multiple links. I will probably read them tomorrow since I am running on far too little sleep right now (which is also liberating when it comes to the fuzzy stuff, happily). But I have to laugh when you say that INFP's resist being categorized as INFPs, so maybe that's my problem! Though I went to the links at your Gandhi site and apparently I misstated a little bit because I had misremembered -- I mostly score INFP but sometimes INTJ, not INFJ, and E/I is somewhat of a close call for me, but N on S/N is probably the most marked tendency. FWIW.

[yourpoison.livejournal.com]

It seems like a lot of people who have only a passing familiarity with this whole system make the basic mistake of trusting the testing too much, or even thinking that it's -all about- the testing, whereas I think the test is just a tool you may or may not choose to use. Personally, I came out INFP several times, but that'd mean little to me if I didn't -know- I was INFP (those times when I'm not pretending I could also be INTP); however, the types are -so- different in such basic ways (meaning, it's not just switching letters around, it's major restructuring of the whole psyche's 'energies' with each shift).

Perhaps the most concise starting point for the theory behind it so far is actually this link (http://www.teamtechnology.co.uk/tt/t-articl/mb-dynam.htm), from the same site as with the bulleted lists I mentioned :> I have a weakness for bulleted lists, but this is also rather visual and clear-cut seeming (even though it's actually a pretty fuzzy issue, but you may as well start out from clear-cut & work towards fuzzier).

You should also trust me not to thrust something overly certain at you :D I'd rebel myself way before I'd learn much about it if it was actually like that, ahahah. My 'feel' is that you seem INFP, whatever skills and integrated qualities you also possess, but that's my fly-by estimate, of course; to look into your soul I'd haveta charge :>