Smut4Smut 2023
Apr. 26th, 2023 07:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
phantomtomatoAnd At First Meeting Loved
My Mysterious Mademoiselle, Uncle George/George Jr., 8k, Explicit
A holiday at Deauville with a beautiful wife.
Second time writing for MMM! I definitely need to give it a break for a while, but it’s a great canon. Meta ramblings about the fic below the cut.
The title is taken from Abraham Solomon’s paintings of a first-class Victorian train coach. There’s two versions, because the first was so controversial for showing an unchaperoned lady talking to a strange man. It’s a very apt comparison point for George and George Jr., who, after all, meet when Jr. is pretending to be an unchaperoned young lady on the train!
I adore the title of these paintings. “And at first meeting loved.” That’s the feeling I get from the original short story, George Jr. disguising himself to get a measure of this unmet foreign uncle and finding himself helplessly infatuated from the start. It’s why this ship appeals to me so much!
I’m not particularly predisposed to incest ships. They’re fine, just not usually what grabs my attention. However, I love reunions as a trope: characters who have never met but have some existing relationship, or who haven’t seen each other in many years, coming back together and falling in love is my thing. An incest ship can grab me if, like this one, it offers a chance at a reunion. Georges Vane are indelibly family, through a sister/mother, and so their meeting in My Mysterious Mademoiselle lands to me like a reunion rather than a first encounter. They ultimately bond over their love of this shared family member. Young George being struck by how caring, and protective his uncle turns out to be is a wonderful opening to believe that he might develop a fancy—and it helps that Uncle George isn’t shy about describing himself as handsome and romantically successful. The story is so light (frothy!) that the age gap and incestuous nature of the pairing don’t feel like heavy topics that one must address in order to have a serious focus on the romance of the ship. At least to me, I should disclaim.
I think there is a version of this ship which kinks more readily on the
uncle/nephew part or the age gap. I mean only that, as those aren’t my
kinks, this is a canon which makes it shockingly easy to focus on other
kinks. Quite probably that’s because of the crossdressing, which can amply
fill any space you give it. George Jr. wears a dress like nobody else, and
I was so glad that sheeon requested “receiving a blowjob while wearing a
dress” as a kink. My god. Yes, of course. A natural pairing. But I also
gave Jr. a frilly little nightgown, and obviously he had to have stays, and
a bustle, and a shawl and a wig. Crossdressing is a kink that I love, and
more than that, historical dress is another one of my hobbies. George Jr.
is just so happy to be subversive in everything that he touches that as an
author, I can show that subversion through crossdressing and
(in)appropriate public behavior rather than things I might prefer less.
So when it comes to the relationship dynamic between the two Georges, my interests lie in the tension between practical, stolid, English Uncle George and romantic, impetuous, French George Jr. They adore one another. Their fondness shines off of the page. I do what I can to capture that in my own writing, and I think I’ve mostly been successful, but it is fully to the credit of the original. George Jr. would legally become Mlle. Georgette and marry her Uncle in an instant, but Uncle George can’t reconcile a solution like that with the damage he feels it would do to George Jr.’s life: his social prospects, his career, his ability to move through the world freely. The first time I wrote them, George Jr. was younger, his mother had died from her illness, and Uncle George’s focus was on getting his nephew through school and resisting the come-ons entirely. That was a lot of fun, but I didn’t want to repeat the “First Time” trope again—it’s a natural thought for the ship, just not something I wanted to belabor in such quick succession. Taking on an established casual-sex relationship and asking how it would transition to full romantic commitment was much harder. In the first story, romance and sex can happen together! In this, I needed to build up Uncle George’s doubt that anything between them had a chance at lasting so as to motivate why someone who had already been fucking his nephew for years might balk at the comparatively-small hurdle of professed romantic commitment.
As I type that, I wonder if I’ve written the dreaded miscommunication plot. Not quite, I think; they never had communicated about this in straightforward terms, as Uncle George refused it and George Jr. most likely tried to sneak it in the back (lol).
Some other things I love in this ship:
George Jr.’s independence! I can never make him sexually monogamous before he has a romantic commitment from his uncle. It’s a key part of what makes this relationship feel relatively equitable to me, despite the age gap—the younger George isn’t discovering either sex or romance purely through this relationship. He won’t sit around and pine idly. He pines quite actively while fucking other men! And nonetheless, he is petty and jealous about all of Uncle George’s other partners. <3
The romance! These two are so romantic. They just adore one another with Big Feelings about every single thing the other does, whether that manifests as dramatic sulks or late-night mooning over one’s nephew’s pretty face or soppy declarations after making love. I’m into shipping to feel giddy about how much two characters love each other, and that really fits the tone of this canon.
no subject
Date: 2023-04-27 02:56 pm (UTC)And the painting which inspired the title is lovely, too-- and very thematically appropriate! I love those sort of Victorian slice-of-life paintings.
no subject
Date: 2023-04-28 03:34 am (UTC)