~~readings using Andersen's eucatastrophe romance cliche

[reenka]

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.
    
But anyway... then I moved on to girlish crushes on distant and 'cold' love objects like Sherlock Holmes & Spock, and in my adolescence I don't remember any particular romance out of all the ones I read that really stuck with me. Well, unless you count a tiny bit of shoujo anime (more precisely, Please Save My Earth, which made an extreme impression on me at 17 or so).

I do think there's something tempting in seeing this emotional arc in stories not explicitly cut out for it the way yaoi/shoujo manga often is; there's a reason 'silly fangirls' don't just stick to their predictable custom-made romances, and it's because of that 'predictable' part. In reading something like a yaoi manga, generally we know the melting is merely a matter of time, willy-nilly, the seme can't escape our collective clutches. The Power of the Uke compels him!

It's only when watching a show or reading a story not explicitly guaranteed that the transformative magic really happens (the way Andersen's stories weren't because he was a writer who wasn't afraid of tragedy, but also the way QaF or HP or ms_manna's Administration series isn't guaranteed because it's not 'pure romance' and also because Toreth is so seriously emotionally handicapped). Something implicit within the melting-heart scenario requires that moment of truth, that overcoming to be genuine and therefore against all odds. The odds have to seem against it for it to seem near-miraculous when the iced-over character melts (or starts on the road to meltage), so romance genre (or yaoi manga) stories have an intrinsic handicap & 'normal' stories with more 'stand-alone' or realistic characters an immediate advantage.
~~

So I guess I want to defend fannish readings using that cliche (even though it so often leads to ridiculous badfic and OOCness), because-- well, because I personally do empathize and because the nature of the beast requires quite a bit of twisting that's really hard to do in any kind of story.
    Also, I want to defend the validity of 'wishful thinking' sort of readings just because I think it's an innate and natural part of the experience for a certain [idealistic] temperament of reader. Fiction exists to be taken subjectively, so on one level arguing for the 'true' interpretation of a character (beyond factual debates) seems wrongheaded; note, I'm not denouncing the existence of ICness as a concept and not saying I suddenly support OOCness, 'cause you know I don't if you know me at all. :> Ideally (...heh) you should be able to support your reading using canon as a springboard, but here we're talking about the -quality- of a particular reader's writing in terms execution rather than the theory of such response itself.

I mean, okay, imagine if 'The Snow Queen' was a popular fanfiction/original fic online serial being put out today (haha). I'm sure a lot of the more 'canon-whorish' readers would defend to the death their reading of Kai as irredeemable-- like, look, he just is the way he is, and if you're writing him as transformed by the power of Gerda's innocent love(!!) you're just being a silly OOC-writing fangirl.
    And okay, um, in that sense 'The Snow Queen' isn't the best example 'cause actually the whole story does build up to the ending & Gerda's whole quest involved 'saving' Kai (she just had no real idea how and it was more that she just wanted to find him & get him physically away), but the point is that it's -supposed- to be dire and it's -supposed- to fool you. That's why people seem like utter fanatic believer freaks-- because in that sort of story, faith is what gets rewarded, and the rationalists who say 'but that's how he is [now]' get their come-uppance.

Obviously, I mean, part of the reason 'The Snow Queen' can work and your average (more realistic) fanfic/theory about Brian/Toreth/whoever doesn't is that in the end, Gerda succeeded through magic as well as 'Teh Powah of Pure LOFF'. The whole thing was suffused in metaphor, symbol and just-- magic, so a more 'normal' narrative isn't going to get that kind of suspension of disbelief or leeway in general. Even I admit that I want to see -how- things work out in fanfic, and not just be handed a deus ex machina type transformation where everything's suddenly okay after all the dire build-up literally 'by magic'. To me as a 'sophisticated' adult(??!) reader, rational explanations come off as respecting my intelligence while glib platitudes or magic tricks just annoy me as though they cheated.

So I guess the situation is, my tastes become more discerning and demanding as my basic desires about what I want to see remain unchanged since I was but a wee little girl who really identified with Gerda. Oh man, did I :>

Comments

[discordiana.livejournal.com]

But from that quote, it sounds like they dislike it (which is an emotion) not reject it in its entirety.

I admit I don't remember the Snow Queen all that well, but if it has self-sacrifice and healing from woman to man, I can see why people would find it harmful or a symptom of harmful cultural myths. The cultural myth is what's addressed, the fairy-tale is just a tool, and feminism sees it as such. I think we're framing it differently because you want feminism to concern itself with eucatastrophe and it's not its deal, which is what I meant by saying the absolute fairy-tale doesn't exist in the analysis of society->art->society dynamics.

You imply the existence of the absolute fairy-tale (with no attached interpretation and no attached cultural myth) and inside a feminist reading that doesn't exist. The critic may very well concede the eucatastrophe power (which impacts the person) and the proceed to analyse the myth (which impacts the society). No absolute fairy-tale can exist in feminist theory but then, no feminist theory can exist in an eucatastrophe oriented readings. They're at the same time mutually exclusive and not, because they address sepatate issues.

(Now I actually think that the absolute fairy-tale can't exist anywhere, but that's a separate lit crit issue.)

I feel like feminist readings and marxist readings always meet a lot of resistance from people who are very defensive because they feel feminism and marxism want to deny any legitimacy to the art they enjoy, but this isn't the case.

[yourpoison.livejournal.com]

But. Harmful cultural myth-- so the whole thing's harmful; no specifying a 'part' is harmful, no if/then/but, so I assume it's some sort of 'whole package' deal. Anyway I hate getting bogged down in logistics/semantics arguments... -.-;;;

Anyway, when feminism gets extended to saying love itself (which can easily be self-sacrificing, devoted, rescuing, healing, persistent in the face of coldness-- all these things)-- that is somehow 'unfeminist', I just get pissed. Romance isn't unfeminist, 'cause people are people and women are women. No one's being exploited or treated unfairly because of their class/gender/social status here, what the hell. She just loved Kai since they were children, and then Kai became a bastard because of the slivers of ice from the broken mirror of distortion, and she believed in him so she went to the ends of the earth (literally) to find him. Because she loved him. And... y'know, she was the hero. She rescued him. That's the very opposite of unfeminist, so any application to having a political issue with this story just sticks in my craw!! People really don't know what they're talking about sometimes & get carried away -.-;;;

There's no absolute fairy-tale; every fairy-tale is fractured and specifically culturally contextual, which I've actually talked about several times. I think the archetypal level and the specific cultural interpretation exist simultaneously, but neither is equivalent to the 'cultural myth' based on the story. Like, there are at least 3 'major' tellings of Sleeping Beauty-- Perrault and Brothers Grimm being two-- and that's what I mean by specific interpretation 'cause no retelling is 'absolute' in that sense. However, there's an archetypal Story behind the story-- the meta-story-- that's pretty unchanging & is the thing all these retellings have in common, but is definitely not the same as the current 'cultural myth' based on that fairy-tale, whatever that might be.

The funny thing is how much room there is for awesome feminist retellings of fairy-tales; there's a book called 'Kissing the Witch' is literally all about retelling the fairy-tales from the feminist/lesbian pov and it works great, both subverting and celebrating the nature of the tale. It can be done and it's fully legitimate! The problem isn't the subversion or the twisting/re-accessing the old tale, it's just labelling it as 'problematic' in a blanket fashion as if that totally addresses it enough to dismiss it. People who love the stories can do anything with them as far as I'm concerned, but I get protective when I see crit from people who don't truly understand & love the stories as they are before critiquing them in any type of reading, feminist or any other.

[discordiana.livejournal.com]

... so about that non-combative listening thing...

[yourpoison.livejournal.com]

I may be starting to get defensive but I'm still listening -.-;;;

[discordiana.livejournal.com]

Okay, I know why you're being defensive because I've seen it played out so many times before. What you have to understand is that the semantic/logistic distinctions are important because they reflect important distinctions in focus.

If I made a marxist criticism of HP, would you feel attacked? I wouldn't delegitimize HP the story (and all the reasons why people enjoy besides the classist ones) because that story exists together with the story of class in it.

Let's go back to Cinderella (because the way you talk about Snow Queen it doesn't seem anti-feminist at all). These categories you use: the archetypal Story, the specific cultural interpretation and the cultural myth. They're important and they're all attached to the fairy-tale but an attack on one doesn't mean an attack to the other. You get angry at feminists because they attack the cultural myth (and not the other two levels) but you also concede the cultural myth is problematic. My instinct is that you don't really want to separate the three levels because you don't want any of it criticised (because that's usually the way people react to these readings. In a way, "It's just for fun!" is the same as saying "It's just an eucatastrophe!")

Feminism doesn't say love is antifeminist (?), it's when sacrifice is gendered (and simultaneously the gender gets defrenchised) that the story is anti-feminist. This is not the case with Snow Queen, right?

[yourpoison.livejournal.com]

Well, I wasn't really getting angry 'with feminists', hahah, 'cause in any case most feminists don't bother with arguing with fairy-tales; the closest I've seen is them appropriating them in retellings (like 'Kissing the Witch' and 'Women Who Run With the Wolves', though that's more Jungian, it's also feminist). My real initial issue was really dragging 'The Snow Queen' into its larger reflection on the cultural myth(!) of girls loving icy bastards or whatever (that I was talking about). Even then, I don't see what's so politically incorrect; it's just lame and unrealistic, it's not like it's got a larger-scale movement behind it. People aren't lining up for emotionally challenged assholes, even though 'bad boys' are popular, but that's a subtly different stereotype & anyway I don't wanna get into that too.... Suffice it to say, I don't see anything you could really pick on with 'The Snow Queen', so any consecutive comparison to 'Cinderella' gets therefore confused and sullied by that ambiguity.

I don't know if I want to unite all three levels (even in my head, I don't feel any particular attachment to the 'cultural myth' aspect, which is really the issue-- it's not that I wanna unite all three and more that I often feel the cultural myth part is optional, at least for me). So because I feel it's somewhat secondary, it's more frustrating that the criticism centers on it while seemingly 'ignoring' the story in its cultural/archetypal context, but it'd be okay if I was really certain the criticism is -only- of the cultural myth part (which I wasn't).

I don't like gendered sacrifice either; in many fairy-tales, the guy's the one undergoing the Hero's Quest and going through hell for love, which I feel is more sexist 'cause it's more common (and the woman is a symbol/reward and therefore disenfranchised, perhaps, whereas neither Kai nor Gerda were treated unfairly so wtf) so I like it when girls are the ones going through the adventure and trials and effort. Anyway, I just felt the disapproval seemed diffuse/ambiguous, so I wasn't sure anymore -what- was being 'attacked'; then I started nitpicking to show why I really did think the emphasis wasn't clear and by the time I nitpick I always feel defensive :>