Bad Wolf. Very bad wolf.
Jul. 21st, 2008 03:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gementContinued from previous post on A Companion to Wolves.
3:01 a.m.: Not a win. It's four hours after I went to bed. I talked it out, sobbing, with J, giving him more details than I have ever given about my own work (he squicks easily) because I couldn't stomach it alone. It was so clearly painful for me that he was too busy being comforting to squick, which is saying something.
I tried his suggestion of reading the last page to break the book's suspense, tried his suggestion of reading something else (got 5 paragraphs into![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rm's newest Torchwood fic and just couldn't focus, which is a very very bad sign), and went back to bed still buzzing.
I approached my dearest fictional sadist, Aldo, for a fix of all-consuming consensual torture to rock me to sleep. I even approached his masochist for help, told my long-suffering chewtoy that every indignity he has ever suffered has been my fault and that there would be no consequences for getting his own back, not even on his conscience. He'd never remember because it wouldn't be canon. And that I wanted it, which he needed to hear, which even Aldo needed to hear, because I wired them both that way.
It didn't help. They tried, but I kept getting flashbacks to what my brain keeps perceiving as irretrievable, sickeningly cloaked non-con in the book. I finally went to sleep, snapped awake a little while ago, tried again. Still couldn't focus on them, still couldn't wash the nastiness out of my brain.
My loyal readers, when I told you that I was cautious about sharing Gerard's trial by fire with y'all? When I told you that I was self-conscious about even writing down that kind of non-con? This is what I meant.
(I've also written down proper, brazen non-con, but that doesn't keep me up because it's presented unambiguously as such, perpetrated by villains (or once by Aldo again making a terrible mistake), and by the time I wrote it down I was bullet-proof to my internal critic's opinions on socially unacceptable fantasies.)
And in the end, as you have all carefully explained to me, Gerard consented. He's leashed, but he's the one that handed Aldo that leash. I keep trying to tell myself that this boy handed his wolf that leash just as willingly, but something's just different and I can't explain and maybe there's no difference. After all, this boy can even walk away. He has that choice, which Gerard does not.
Maybe that fear is what's keeping me up.
Edit: And perhaps the difference is, Aldo apologized. Aldo recognized it as a mistake. No one ever apologized to this boy for "a bad first mating frenzy" that left him delirious with shock and pain for two days, when he did everything he was supposed to, was a good boy, didn't fight. That left him no longer able to meaningfully say that his relationship was worth it, only that it was what it was. WHICH IS ABUSIVE, by my lights.
That was the betrayal. I was waiting for them to resolve it, that either he'd panic and fight and a bad experience would be what he needed to break through to acceptance or he'd do it right and they'd do it right and he'd learn that it wasn't that frightening. That was what they'd built up to with all their "we wouldn't throw a virgin boy into that" and their "you'll work up to it slowly with one boy your own age that you trust." That still wouldn't make the overall dynamics okay for me, but that the reward for doing it right was a life-threatening worst night of his life, that was author betrayal.
Sorry, I'm babbling. I'm going to go see if Gerard's come up with something cruel enough to distract me.
4:15. I keep reading and rereading these two posts and adding more clauses instead of going to sleep. Trying again. Thank you, those of you patient enough to read through this, for helping me process. Any thoughts either supporting my interpretation or giving me a way to think about it that doesn't make me nauseous would be appreciated.
3:01 a.m.: Not a win. It's four hours after I went to bed. I talked it out, sobbing, with J, giving him more details than I have ever given about my own work (he squicks easily) because I couldn't stomach it alone. It was so clearly painful for me that he was too busy being comforting to squick, which is saying something.
I tried his suggestion of reading the last page to break the book's suspense, tried his suggestion of reading something else (got 5 paragraphs into
rm's newest Torchwood fic and just couldn't focus, which is a very very bad sign), and went back to bed still buzzing.I approached my dearest fictional sadist, Aldo, for a fix of all-consuming consensual torture to rock me to sleep. I even approached his masochist for help, told my long-suffering chewtoy that every indignity he has ever suffered has been my fault and that there would be no consequences for getting his own back, not even on his conscience. He'd never remember because it wouldn't be canon. And that I wanted it, which he needed to hear, which even Aldo needed to hear, because I wired them both that way.
It didn't help. They tried, but I kept getting flashbacks to what my brain keeps perceiving as irretrievable, sickeningly cloaked non-con in the book. I finally went to sleep, snapped awake a little while ago, tried again. Still couldn't focus on them, still couldn't wash the nastiness out of my brain.
My loyal readers, when I told you that I was cautious about sharing Gerard's trial by fire with y'all? When I told you that I was self-conscious about even writing down that kind of non-con? This is what I meant.
(I've also written down proper, brazen non-con, but that doesn't keep me up because it's presented unambiguously as such, perpetrated by villains (or once by Aldo again making a terrible mistake), and by the time I wrote it down I was bullet-proof to my internal critic's opinions on socially unacceptable fantasies.)
And in the end, as you have all carefully explained to me, Gerard consented. He's leashed, but he's the one that handed Aldo that leash. I keep trying to tell myself that this boy handed his wolf that leash just as willingly, but something's just different and I can't explain and maybe there's no difference. After all, this boy can even walk away. He has that choice, which Gerard does not.
Maybe that fear is what's keeping me up.
Edit: And perhaps the difference is, Aldo apologized. Aldo recognized it as a mistake. No one ever apologized to this boy for "a bad first mating frenzy" that left him delirious with shock and pain for two days, when he did everything he was supposed to, was a good boy, didn't fight. That left him no longer able to meaningfully say that his relationship was worth it, only that it was what it was. WHICH IS ABUSIVE, by my lights.
That was the betrayal. I was waiting for them to resolve it, that either he'd panic and fight and a bad experience would be what he needed to break through to acceptance or he'd do it right and they'd do it right and he'd learn that it wasn't that frightening. That was what they'd built up to with all their "we wouldn't throw a virgin boy into that" and their "you'll work up to it slowly with one boy your own age that you trust." That still wouldn't make the overall dynamics okay for me, but that the reward for doing it right was a life-threatening worst night of his life, that was author betrayal.
Sorry, I'm babbling. I'm going to go see if Gerard's come up with something cruel enough to distract me.
4:15. I keep reading and rereading these two posts and adding more clauses instead of going to sleep. Trying again. Thank you, those of you patient enough to read through this, for helping me process. Any thoughts either supporting my interpretation or giving me a way to think about it that doesn't make me nauseous would be appreciated.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-21 01:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-21 12:14 pm (UTC)I'll be tired at work, but hopefully not twitchy, and you contributed to that. Thank you.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-21 01:28 pm (UTC)Bear has posted in her LJ about why they wrote the scenes the way they did, if you're interested. She's
no subject
Date: 2008-07-21 04:29 pm (UTC)Anyway, my take which led me to not realize, in my glee, that it might NOT be the sort of thing to run around recommending to people:
I did, honestly, find it more *obviously* consensual than Aldo/Gerard, and certainly more than a lot of the stuff around the sidelines of your story, and I didn't find almost-any of the sex in it sexy, and didn't expect to. It wasn't about being sexy, this book, I didn't think it was meant to be sexy at all... well, almost never anyway. It was about a) Viking society actually SUCKED in a lot of ways; b) the logical consequences of *really* being emotionally tied to an animal that experiences sex in a far far different way than we do, an anti-Pern manifesto sort of a thing..., c) people trying to flourish in the most fucked-up possible circumstances. I think.
Anyway, I went *in* to the story knowing those things, expecting those things to be what was important, and thus expecting it to be EVEN bleaker and EVEN darker than it was. I actually put off reading it for a long time because if it was just going to be angry and bitter and bleak with nothing else, well, sometimes I like that sort of story but not that often. So the presence of SOME joy and SOME pleasure-in-being-honorable and SOME feeling that life could be improved, that life could improve, and then lots of humanity and characters I gave a crap about even when they did awful things, and etc ... *without* compromising on the principles in the a/b/c list so that really everything remained a hugely painful trade-off that the circumstances of society made necessary and that really almost NO ONE would ever want to experience ... I was hugely impressed. And, personally, I could get that everything-except-sex was so hugely wonderful and important and morally-crucial-to-society's-survival that sex could be the thoroughly wrong-and-awful crucible that it was, and the whole enterprise would still be worthwhile. I can see adopting that mindset in those circumstances, and as someone who ISN'T an author, I was only interested in whether the characters' actions made sense given what I knew of them, and the setting they were in, and whether the setting was internally consistent and resonated with the historical sources that were being drawn upon ...
I wasn't comparing the sex that happened in the pack to my ideals of sex, but to the sort of nonconsensual rape that was all-too-common in wartime for most of human history, I think - to my concept of 'sex during pre-medival wartimes' rather than 'sex as I as a modern civilized person prefer it'. And so, contextually, it made sense and was only important to the story as a marker of emotional trauma, growth, pack dynamics, etc - for the most part, sex during an oestrus, was a different kind of FIGHTING, not any kind of making love, and I experienced it that way emotionally so didn't get traumatized sexually by it - because I wasn't thinking about it as sex.
Meh, I am rambling in vague hopes that something I might say would revise your experience of the book and I think that even if I COULD do that, rambling in your LJ comments (and talking about my emotional reaction to a book way more than I normally would in public) is probably not the best way to do that.
Once again, if you read it because of what *I* thought you would like about it ... am very very sorry.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-21 05:11 pm (UTC)As with the very very bad frenzy, no one really expected that. I didn't have the same context, because I only had two recommendation-ishes. Yours, which came with a snippet from someone else's that did say it would be violent, and Erin's which wasn't so much a recommendation as a snarky comment that I found sexy and asked for the source.
If I had walked in expecting a Nordic crucible, yes, I would have been much better off. The cover and blurb led me to believe it was a Furry romance novel along my own lines. And it is, on its face, more consensual than my work. But yes, given all that, I expected him to come to enjoy it, not resign himself.
[Edit: Not that matings would ever be a bed of roses. But that they would be a bearable gauntlet, that the sobbing would be manly sobbing that masochists comprehend as a purifying flame rather than third degree burns on your face, and that it would be the intensified magnification of something that, under normal circumstances, he found enjoyable and brotherly and stuff. You know. Pack bonding. The good kind.]
The bit where he was willing to accept his uncle if necessary... No, the man didn't take him up on it, because, duh, pack dynamics say an unhappy queen is a bad idea, but he would have, and he felt obligated to say it would be all right when it really really wouldn't ever be all right. And in my world, that's how men go all flat in the eyes, resigning themselves to that kind of shit.
It sounded hot. From any description anyone could have given me short of point-blank telling me "he's really not into men, and he never learns to enjoy it," I would have thought it sounded hot even if they explicitly said they didn't find it hot. Some land mines we just have to step on for ourselves.
Your book recommendations are still worth it. ;-)
no subject
Date: 2008-07-21 07:55 pm (UTC)Still feel pretty rotten, but have learned some of the signposts to consider in the future.
*hugs*
no subject
Date: 2008-07-21 09:01 pm (UTC)You apologized. You recognized I needed some taking care of. See the difference?
Also, I wrote, within the last week, a voluntary gang-marking of a straight man.
There is NOTHING externally dividing what I write from the appeal factors of this book. Give up on the signposts. I presumed even 1/3rd of the way into the book that it would be entirely my bag, baby.