phantomtomato

Sunshine Challenge #4 this year is to create a list of ten things, and the subject currently on my mind is “men in books who should have been blorbos, but for lack of adequate shipping options.” Here are ten male characters where I read the book and went, oh my, he’s perfect, too bad about the lack of any I want to mash him against!

This was a fun exercise—I realized that I actually do have ships in some books (left off the list) and it’s simply that the fandom was too small/nonexistent for me to want to write fic for it. The ones who are left really felt like characters who were isolated in their original contexts, either for lack of other (male) shipping options, or because some dominant ship wasn’t for me.

1. Edmund Pevensie, C. S. Lewis’ Narnia series

Edmund is a lovely, awful child character whose primary shipping option is his brother or Prince Caspian, and I happened not to like either very much. I don’t think I even realized how much I enjoyed his character until I saw him in a crossover fic with one of my other faves, and that’s been the main way I’ve written him!

2. Clive Durham, E. M. Forster’s Maurice

My most favorite Forster character ever is locked into a story in which he has a terrible ill-fated romance with a character archetype that I really did not get along with, so I can’t even enjoy the bits of Maurice/Clive that are out there. I want badly for him to find someone else who is exactly the same type of prick that he is.

Honorable mention to all of Forster’s other queer men who never quite felt well-paired in their books!

3. Bunny, Mary Renault’s The Charioteer

There are a wealth of available gay men in The Charioteer, but none that I really love for Bunny! I’d read any combination of Bunny/someone else, just to see how it goes, but he really does seem like he’d be stuck having to grovel to make those options work beyond a single hookup. :( I want Bunny to be appreciated for his flagrant awfulness.

4. Frank Maddox, E. F. Benson’s David Blaize

An unfortunate victim of a book with a clear main ship that I do not like. David is a great friend to Frank, but I cannot see him as a good partner, and the book (and its sequel) is so invested in centering that relationship that no other boy gets the development to be a real option. Poor Frank! I love his gentleness and his intelligence and his angst so much; he needs someone other than David.

5. The Darkling, Leigh Bardugo’s Grisha series

Oh, Darkling. Burdened by being the evil leg of a love triangle in a fantasy series. Plenty of shipfic for him if you like the series protagonist, which I do not; no significant relationships with other men in the series. He is forever in my wishful-thinking pile. I would have loved to collect another dark wizard.

6. Dennis Knuckleyard, Alan Moore’s The Great When

I loved being introduced to this useless adolescent lump through a bad masturbation scene. That is perfect for me! He’s a great character but only plays off of one similarly-aged character, and that romantic potential is (very rightly!) shut down. At least this is the first of a series, and he might come back and we might see him interact with others/gain depth to minor relationships?

7. Leo Colston, L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between

I was so taken with preteen Leo’s growing awareness of adult affairs and concerns during his summer holiday. He reads to me as queer and I’d be very interested in watching that continue to develop, but it’s just not the purpose of this story, and neither is it a focus to develop his relationship with his peer. The Go-Between is about adolescent yearning, but the character would have been great to play with if his world were more fleshed out beyond that period of life.

8. Eric Ashley, Michael Campbell’s Lord Dismiss Us

Ashley’s novel comes with options, but no one meets his strength of character and self-knowledge. Just one other young teacher, or perhaps if we’d gotten a few scenes of interaction with his former school boyfriend…

9. Ernst Stockmann, Stephen Spender’s The Temple

I am still not over the treatment of this character! He was so symapthetic to me, in all of his awkwardness. His stiff inability to be carefree ended up wrapping back around to make him one of the more genuine characters in the novel—he never actually pretends to offer something he cannot, or to not have the history that he does. I love him for that, even if the book won’t. Of course, that no one else in the book likes him makes it awful to contemplate pairing him with anyone.

10. Mark Daubery, Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent

This new addition is what’s got the subject on my mind. I love a wealthy middle-aged Brit who is not good news! He’s so honest about that, while simultaneously being a mysterious, oily bastard, and I adore a character who cannot be trusted from the start but who still manages to shock. Again, he’s hampered by the narrowness of the cast: half of the secondaries are students, half are much older colleagues, and although the protagonist does sleep with him, I am rooting against her actually staying with him. I would love him being charmingly devious to someone who matches his energy.

I love reading old posts about new-to-me fandoms. It’s the first thing I do when I finish a new canon and have fannish, shippy feelings about it: what have people said in years past? What sorts of fic and art did they make, and what discussions did they have, and what were the disagreements within the fandom? Especially when the fandoms are decades old and there are cycles of this, and enough time has passed for some of those posts to be people reflecting on their experiences of fandom years after they were very active in it. (My meta-fandom is fandom history.)

Anyway, I have been happily doing so this week and thinking again about what attracts me to shipping villains. It’s not the ‘problematic’ nature of the ships, or the ability to write dark tropes like abuse, consent issues, and tragedy. It’s not kinks like age gaps, D/s, possessiveness, or obsession. All of that is fully orthogonal to why I’m into them, often actively squicky, but the villains draw me in over and over again despite what should be a hurdle. (And is a hurdle—wading through fic written to very different ends in order to sate that hunger for the ship isn’t fun.)

I’ve seen a lot of that in the discussions I’ve been reading. To paraphrase some comments:

> A murdered B's family, why would you want fluff for the ship?

> ‘Don’t you know A/B is abusive?’ Yes, that’s why I like it!

I don’t know how to relate to those. I’m reading the same canon, feeling the same chemistry between the characters (or potential, if I attach strongly to only one character). Still, the urge I get is to fix: I don’t believe he’s emotionless, I think he’s repressed and lying to himself; what does it take for him to acknowledge his own feelings? Nothing is unforgivable, because figuring out how to bridge that hurt (including family murder!) with forgiveness and understanding is the appeal of the ship.

I think this is rooted in some of the same interests as those that drive darker explorations of these sorts of characters and ships, but I want to put the effort into writing towards happiness—whatever that looks like for them. It’s not fluff, though it might not be dark in the expected ways. But, then, that’s why I’ve always struggled with these genre distinctions! I still keenly feel the lack of language for categorizing the sort of villain fic I enjoy.

Then again, that’s what makes diving into an older fandom so preferable. It’s old, and dead, and these discussions and disagreements have long since been rendered irrelevant; I don’t need to suffer that ill-fit as an active member of a current fandom.

I take issue with the concept of “out of character” (OOC).

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Originally posted on tumblr, reposted here for archival purposes.

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