Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

Yah, that was not a "what freaks you out so I can do lots and lots of it" question. I'm just extremely squicked by a couple of things, and I'm wondering how typical my two are. We'll find out, I guess.

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Well.../you'll/ find out. Will you post later and tell us which ones are yours?

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Ayep.

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Is it possible to be regimental when not in a kilt?

Also, I forgot to include other term: Shameless Hussy. But that's mostly a joke.

How does one have blood, love and rhetoric concurrently, anyway? Chatty BDSM porn?

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Ooh, hey, do you have any of that?

Seriously, in "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," the Player King promises that they can do the blood, love, and rhetoric consecutively or concurrently. So clearly it can be done, because would the Player King lie to us? Oh wait. He would. But probably not about that particular subject.

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Well, those Ann Rice bondage novels are pretty close.

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I can do without more Anne Rice novels for the rest of my born days.

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Yeah, me too. :P Especially now that they're all about Jesus.

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Poor Jesus.

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It's not Jesus' fault the crazy lady is stalking him.

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Exactly. And if I ever thought there was something that would really make the Baby Jesus cry, it would be Anne Rice stalking him.

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It's not Jesus' fault the crazy lady is stalking him.

If I were the sort of person who went around quoting things, that would definitely be the sort of thing I'd go around quoting.

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Well, if I were the sort of person who got quoted, this is the sort of thing I'd be pleased to have quoted.

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flewellyn.livejournal.com

How do you think he felt about starring in Mel Gibson's bondage snuff porno?

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redbird

cattitude says that what's compulsory is rum, sodomy, and the lash, which gets you the blood and love, but not the rhetoric.

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Did you ask him just now, or is that what he generally goes around saying?

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redbird

I read the list of check boxes to him, and he said that those were compulsory (perhaps because "rum" was an option); I added the part about love and blood.

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ckd

I think that if you drink the right amount of rum, you'll produce rhetoric. (Too much, and you'll produce snoring.)

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buymeaclue.livejournal.com

I'm pretty hard to squick out in books, I think. Maybe an upside to being Not!Visual Girl?

That said, eye stuff can make me flinch like a flinchy thing, whereas my hand thing is more specific--anything going through the palms--but creeps my skin in a way the eye stuff does not.

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Hmm. I'm not! visual, either. So it's not as easy to squick me if you're drawing mostly on visual imagery. But smell/touch/taste/sound? Squick away.

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Writers so often forget how susceptible their readers are likely to be to such things. Sight is described in loving and usually original depth, while the same old copperytaste/scentofblood*, slippery gore, and sickening insert-onomatopoeia-here just keep on keeping on. If people put half the originality into describing the other senses as they do into describing sight, I think they wouldn't have to have anywhere near such extreme content to get the effects they want.

I'm talking mostly to myself, here, but hey. The thing is, I am not intensely visual, but I think I'm moderately so - but a good description which invokes other senses affects /me/ much more, too.

* Mind you, it is very much like copper. I'm not denying it. The first time I ever took a hammer to a piece of copper to beat jewelry out of it, I hit it half a dozen times and then stopped in amazement saying, "It smells like blood!" Honestly, aren't most of us more familiar with the sight/taste/smell/consistency of blood than of most of the things it gets compared to?

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buymeaclue.livejournal.com

I have been known to lick (clean!) copper-mouth horsebits by way of testing that comparison.

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What conclusions did you draw?

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sensational.livejournal.com

Tooth violence in novels or in movies always makes my teeth hurt. There is one scene involving mouth violence in one movie which I will not mention lest it come vividly to mind again (in my mind or anybody else's) that always makes my mouth pucker and my teeth hurt. It is absolutely the worst scene I have ever watched. Meh.

And eye violence is just squicky.

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scottjames.livejournal.com

There's a movie like that for me, too. It's early on, and I've never been able to see the rest of the movie. Freaks me right out.

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sensational.livejournal.com

Nope. It's this movie (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120586/), which I link rather than name because the scene really is painful to even think about and I'd rather not remind anybody of it if they don't want to be reminded.

Oh, and for what it's worth, I don't have a problem with gratuitous violence in movies if everyone's playing along (I like Tarantino just fine), but when there's graphic violence involving a defenseless (whether we're talking about socially, physically, or emotionally) victim, I get a little wigged.

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For me, whether or not I enjoy reading about violence, and also whether or not I'm disturbed by it, largely depends on context rather than the specific violence or even how it's described. There are some exceptions. Any sexualized violence to children (or subjects in a child-equivalent state of dependency) will push me right off the triggery, twitching deep end, even if only suggested; I'm predictable like that. And, as I answered in your poll, certain things will definitely strike me as more horrible than others, for nonrational reasons: eyes are mildly elevated above the generic, mouth much more so. Considering my injury of a year and a half ago, I'm very glad hands aren't in that category, though I suppose reality is always different anyhow.

(For your poll - I know at least one person for whom the hot-button was the spine.)

But what really bothers me, and I have no idea how representative I am in this (I think other people often feel somewhat the same way, but usually not as strongly as I do, but I don't really know), is violence perpetrated by a protagonist, someone the book has me identifying with.* I can take it up to a certain point if it doesn't seem gratuitous, especially if they are at a disadvantage - it's having a character I like and/or identify with being the agressor which squicks the hell out of me. On the other hand, I can tolerate - and, hell, enjoy - violence /toward/ the protagonist up to pretty severe levels.

I know, me and a million fanfic writers. It's not original or complex, but it's very strongly felt.

* I do know that there are books that don't really want the reader able to identify with any of the characters, but those are books I generally don't read.

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I got side-tracked by violence and forgot the other subjects of discussion.

Love: I require love to be handled with a light touch, and prefer it if the writer will be so unHollywoodish as to suggest that they actually know what they're talking about. (Though since I'm mentioning movies, I can illustrate this by saying that, out of all the unceasing, churning morass of romances that I witness every year, seeded into every other kind of story, if I try to think of a relationship that I find truly delightful and warming in a movie, one of the first things that comes to mind is Walter Mathau and Glenda Jackson in Hopscotch.) (If you've never seen the movie and don't mind one of the goofiest - but gently goofy, not raucous slap-stick - spy stories in existence, I strongly recommend it.)

Stories which can't seem to tell the difference between lust and affection, or think that only the former is interesting, stories which assume certain features in romances are preordained - the number and gender of people involved, the manner in which they express themselves, whether they would actually be any good at living together no matter how much they love each other, etc. - and thus beyond question, challenge, or even thought, and stories which will *not* give up until every sympathetic character has been paired off will torque me *right* off. I like romantic love plenty, but I admit that I'm more likely to be deeply moved by some other kind. Romantic love has lost its impact in overuse, for me. If I went for a year encountering only stories in which non-romantic friendships, family bonds, mentoring relationships, hero-worship not fated to be converted into True Love, and so forth, were the only kinds of love at work, I might be more open-minded about romance again.

I mean, I write about characters who love and/or are in love, myself, but I'm working on learning how not to.

Rhetoric: I love good rhetoric with a passion equalled only by that of my hatred for bad rhetoric. I'll take realistic or beautiful or both - but if it's not realistic, it really *needs* to be beautiful.

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I like non-romantic loving relationships in my fiction, too, but I have been working on not avoiding romantic relationships. It's hard for me.

I am happier writing books where at least some of the characters like each other, genuinely like each other. I think this is part of why The True Tale of Carter Hall is so much fun and such a relief to write -- they banter, they mock, they roll their eyes at each other's foibles, but they would skate through hell and back for each other. In some ways, Janet and Tam are the weakest of the three bonds: Janet and Carter have been plaguing each other since the third grade, and Tam and Carter have been teammates, roommates, and genuine friends for some time now.

Hmmm. This is one thing that bothers me about some slash: I acknowledge that homoeroticism is sometimes present as a subtext, and that homosexual relationships are probably underrepresented in a lot of fiction. But I also think non-sexualized friendships are underrepresented, too, and when "they clearly love each other" gets mapped to "they must be having sex," that bothers me. It bugs no matter what the genders are, but especially if men are involved. Men's affection for each other is woefully misunderstood/underrepresented. Male/female friendships are often canonically sexualized, but male/male friendships are caricatured into grunting nonexistence. Female "best girl friend" type relationships or "big sister/little sister" or etc. may not be as widely shown as I'd like, but at least they exist.

I also get frustrated when people assume that the interesting part of a relationship is the courtship phase (either in a romantic or in a broader friendly sense). Long-standing relationships develop, too! They have conflict and tension! They're interesting, dammit!

On the bright side, one thing I love about Kate Wilhelm's Barbara Holloway books is that the central relationship is not romantic -- it's Barbara and her father. It is one of the best adult daughter/father relationships I have ever read in my life. I love those books. If you haven't read them, do give them a try.

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zunger.livejournal.com

That reminds me of one of my old Classics professors talking at length about eros, agape, and philia, and how philia has essentially dropped out of the modern discourse on love in favor of an obsession with the others. But the Greeks didn't agree; they saw philia, especially in the form of the tight relationships that formed between comrades in arms and similar friends, as the key form of love which every man should experience.*

Oddly enough, that's making me think of a webcomic, Something Positive (http://www.somethingpositive.net), which lately has been working on these ideas a lot: the balance and shift between the three varieties of love, especially the love between friends, and how complex a relationship one can form, even between a man and a woman, without it being at all romantic or sexual.

* And yes, I'm quite familiar with the Theban Legion and with just what "Platonic Relationships" would literally mean. I'm just saying that the Greeks didn't really consider eros to be that central to life, even when they were playing silly buggers with one another.

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I think I have a different discomfort point in regards to violence and main characters. A good deal of it is personal honesty. I would much rather have main characters who are the aggressors than main characters who are absolutely sure that every one of many, many instances of violence in a long series of action novels is fully justified and in every way acceptable -- especially when the authorial voice seems to agree with the character's assessment.

I mostly want main characters to sometimes be wrong, and I mostly want main characters to sometimes consider that they might be wrong. And I definitely want the authors to do so. Writing a character with a big blind spot? Just fine. Sharing the blind spot? Not so good.

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Writing a character with a big blind spot? Just fine. Sharing the blind spot? Not so good.

Very, very much with you on this. Wanting to be able to identify with a character doesn't mean I want the book to think the character is perfect. Rather the reverse, in fact.

I think there's a big overlap between your discomfort and mine.

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Almost certainly.

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ysabel.livejournal.com

I would be/have been most freaked out by a book with (non-sexual) graphic violence to the...

...mind.

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markgritter.livejournal.com

I can't recall having been squicked out by violence much, but I found the plague of green stars at the end of "Absolution Gap" pretty creepy. I think "violence to solar system or galaxy" counts.

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Geek.

Love you.

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ysabel.livejournal.com

…violence to solar system or galaxy…

Wow.

Yeah, that'd squick me if done right.

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kalmn.livejournal.com

knees. definitely knees. i think this is because mine are bad, so i have that kinesthetic experience to draw from in imagining knee violence.

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