Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

Be impressed with me, Internet, Alleirat just cracked 50K.

@c-foley tagged me in this meme - share a line/paragraph/excerpt from your current WIP (fic or otherwise), so here’s a chunk of stuff from Alleirat out of context.

One was a girl, younger than I’d been when I first came to Alleirat, and she caught my hand fearlessly as I passed.

“Sena,” she said in a clear voice, and I looked down in surprise, meeting her dark eyes. She stared back, her skin darkening with a flush, until finally sweat broke out on her forehead beneath her curls and I shifted my gaze to her cheek.

“What can I do for you, meilali?” I asked, crouching down to be on a level with her.

“Is it true?  My mama says that the Fireheart died in battle against the White Wolf,” she said with all the self-import of a young child assured of her own knowledge, “but Merra’s mama says that she heard from her wife’s amiasa that you’re really her.”

“I, ah.”  I looked up at Krei, helpless, and she held out a hand, as if to say it was up to me.  I turned back to the little girl, who reached out to touch a lock of my hair where it had tumbled over my shoulder.  “Yeah, meimare,” I said quietly.  I hoped that meimare was still an endearment people used—little fish, uncommon in inland areas but popular in Dase in my time.  “It’s true.”

“Wow,” she said, eyes wide, and she looked up into my eyes again, the flush rising on her beaming cheeks again.  “I’m Lillet, sena.”

I grinned a little.  “Ilna nai, Lillet,” I said, offering a hand, and she bounced on her toes as she clasped my wrist, excited to be treated like a grown up.  “I’m Brenneth.”

I’ll tag @littlestartopaz​, @wildehacked​, @aethersea, @skymurdock, and anyone else who wants to do it.

idealai asked: I just saw your tags concerning Shape of Water, completely agree with every beautiful word you say. <33 But I wanted to ask, since you're far cleverer than me (and since you are my writing role model), what would you say separates female desire from male desire? Essentially, what seperates a female fantasy from male fantasy? Just curious and keep being brilliant! :D

notbecauseofvictories:

Well, obviously there are lots of different female fantasies, even if we’re just/primarily talking about straight women. (People get weird about different stuff, news at eleven.) But I do think there’s a certain specifically female bent for monster romance that can be differentiated from men’s. 

I mean, look at the ur-monster romance, the fairytale of Beauty and the Beast. One of the major issues BatB struggles with no matter which adaptation, variation, or retelling you’re talking about is that there is something almost disappointing when the Beast transforms back into a human. In fact, in French playwright Fernand Nozier’s 1909 version, Beauty complains: “You should have warned me! Here I was smitten by an exceptional being, and all of a sudden my fiancé becomes an ordinary distinguished young man!”

The monstrosity of the Beast is the point, not a bug but a feature of the monster romance genre. And I hardly think it’s accidental that women keep being drawn to these stories—even going a step beyond, into monster romances where there is no transformation, like the Creature from the Black Lagoon (which del Toro is obviously drawing from), or the Phantom of the Opera; some adaptations of Dracula. 

(Not that the modern craze for werewolves and vampire isn’t inspired by the same weird, fervid longing, but it’s been largely watered down. A proper monster romance requires an unequivocal monster, not a human-plus-fangs.)

Pick a cryptid, pick an eldritch abomination, pick an anthropomorphized concept or an elemental or a weird non-humanoid thing, pick a fantastical fictional creature and I promise you there is a woman who has thought about it. We all, in our hearts, want to fuck the fishman, or if not, then one of his monstrous cousins. Even if we’re not quite sure how that’s going to work—we kind of want to find out. 

…contrast this with the narrative that dominates male-gaze monster romance stories. Here, the monstrosity is a thing to overcome, an obstacle to the romance itself, and if/when the female beast transforms, it is unequivocally positive. Sir Gawain is always delighted when he finds out his loathly bride is beautiful at night. The little mermaid’s tail is a hindrance to her becoming properly human, not an illicit draw. Despite a wealth of imagination, video games and feature films seem to be unable to move beyond female aliens as essentially a beautiful actress with green skin.

(It is genuinely hard to find monster romances where the monster is female! All searches keep straying into “beautiful woman is revealed to be a secret monster, how dare she be beautiful and a monster!” which is…the exact opposite of monster romance, tonally.)

But that, I think, is the main difference between the female fantasy of monster romance and the male fantasy of monster romance. For women, the strangeness of the monster is the point, and the deviance of the romance and the object itself is why we’re drawn to these stories. For men, the romance dies in the face of too much monstrosity, and the strangeness of the beast must be transformed before it can be loved.

#THREE CAVEATS     #one: I am distinguishing monster romance from the straight-up bestiality like that found in greek myths     #leda and the swan pasiphae and the bull….they’re animals not monsters     #call me back when someone fucks the minotaur     #two I think there are a lot of intelligent things to be said about gay men and monster romances     #(given howard ashman and cocteau I think it’s a very important conversation to have)     #but I’m not really the one to have it     #there’s a lot of ink spilled about monster romances and queerness so I suggest you check it out if interested     #and third: I think this majorly ties into how women are taught to think about desire and their bodies     #in the public conversation women’s bodies and sexuality is still largely a map with “here be monsters” scrawled along the edges     #so it makes sense to me that well……there are monsters there     #it turns out if you tell women a bunch of contradictory nonsense junk about what they should want     #and then tell them not to talk about it and act like the subject is a baffling mystery every time it comes up     #they’re gonna wanna fuck fishmen and lizard people and genies with pits of fire for eyes!!!!!     #who knew!!!!