a passing thought

[kindkit]

I've just read a very good fic that demonstrates (among other things) that consent and good communication can be extremely sexy indeed.

But (and this is not a criticism of that fic, to be clear), it occurs to me that in every fic I've seen do that, the communication is always ultimately yes, and the consent is always ultimately given. Maybe there are issues, maybe someone's traumatized about something or just plain nervous, and overcoming that to get to a place of joyous consent and pleasure is the point.

What I don't think I've ever seen--and I admit I haven't been looking for it, or indeed reading much fic at all for a long time--is a fic that's focused on communication and consent, but where the communication is no. No, I don't want to do this specific act. No I don't want this, I don't enjoy this. And (this is the key part) where the result is still good joyous loving consensual sex. (NB I'm not talking about fic where a character is asexual and doesn't want to have sex at all. That's its own category; I mean characters who want to have sex together but where certain things are off-limits.)

No doubt it exists, because everything exists somewhere in fanfic. But I'll bet it isn't nearly as common as the other kind.


By the way, the very good fic in question is this one. It takes a premise I absolutely do not believe, that I think is implicitly but strongly contradicted by canon (Stede as sexually experienced with men) and makes it work. (The fic is from Ed's POV; it would have been a lot harder to make it work in Stede's POV, I think. But Mia_ugly writes Ed amazingly well, and I can believe inexperienced Ed from her even though my read of Ed in canon is very much the opposite.)


Buttercup (13819 words) by mia_ugly
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Our Flag Means Death (TV)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Blackbeard | Edward Teach/Stede Bonnet
Characters: Blackbeard | Edward Teach, Stede Bonnet
Additional Tags: Porn with Feelings, Mutual Pining, Bad Sex, But Then Better Sex!, First Time, Inexperienced Ed, Experienced Stede, how the turntables, Pirate-typical violence, Blackbeard-Typical Angst, post-reunion, terms of endearment, Happy Ending
Summary: The thing is, when you’re Blackbeard you’ve got kind of a reputation to uphold. When you captain a ship, when you lead a crew, when people look up to you, tell stories, build a legend – parts of that legend are always more accurate than others.

And maybe you just let it slide, some of the things people say. Some of the things they assume. Maybe you swagger around and wear black leather and are a handsy bastard and let the stories tell themselves.

Maybe you don't want to talk about it.

Comments

[sovay]

No, I don't want to do this specific act. No I don't want this, I don't enjoy this.

If it survives into the finished novel, I have read a quite good sex scene with explicit off-limits (and not traumatically so), but the novel in question is still in progress and therefore I can't point anyone to it. I agree with you that it seems less common to me than the alternative, because so much of the pattern is the assumption that with the right person, everyone wants everything.

[kindkit]

the assumption that with the right person, everyone wants everything

Yes, exactly. And I do see the appeal of that as a trope--it's very romantic. But I'd also like to see fics take on the romance of accepting and respecting a no.

Part of me also thinks it would be interesting to see fics where things are dealbreakers. Sometimes people are just sexually incompatible, even if they love each other, and I've never seen a fanfic touch on that, as far as I remember. (Actually I've just remembered one, sort of. A m/m fic where the two men really love each other, but they're genuinely both straight and when they try to have sex together it fails miserably. They end up stuck in a kind of limbo, where they love each other too much to break up, but every time one of them has sex with a woman, the other is jealous and miserable. It's not a happy story.)

Mind you, I'm not saying I'd enjoy reading that for any pairing I ship. I want my happy ending at least as much as the next fan.

[sovay]

But I'd also like to see fics take on the romance of accepting and respecting a no.

Agreed. It's an important part of a relationship that works. And also it's normal for people not to want to do everything even with the right person, which means statistically it is owed better representation in fiction.

Sometimes people are just sexually incompatible, even if they love each other, and I've never seen a fanfic touch on that, as far as I remember.

I don't think I have, either, although I have certainly seen it nonfictionally.

A m/m fic where the two men really love each other, but they're genuinely both straight and when they try to have sex together it fails miserably. They end up stuck in a kind of limbo, where they love each other too much to break up, but every time one of them has sex with a woman, the other is jealous and miserable.

(What was this, the Mary Renault Memorial Platonic Disaster?)

Mind you, I'm not saying I'd enjoy reading that for any pairing I ship. I want my happy ending at least as much as the next fan.

Happy endings don't have to be perfect bang out of the gate, though, and romance conventions dictate so much that they should be, anything that acknowledges the complications of reality is interesting. There's a kind of soft, blameless angst that a lot of romances throw in the way of the relationship that isn't like the problems that real people have, either.

[kindkit]

the Mary Renault Memorial Platonic Disaster

*snickers* It was a due South fic. A good one that made me very sad and that I never want to read again. I can't remember the title or anything, but I think the author might have been Cherryice, who (at least in dS fandom) specialized in stories where the main pairing broke up or was unhappy.

Happy endings don't have to be perfect bang out of the gate

Exactly. I said below to rydra_wong that my biggest fic complaint is when every problem is solved by half a conversation and a sex scene. I really like problems that get better but are still ongoing, conversations that have to happen more than once, happy endings that aren't 100% perfect. I admit that I do like my fic to be easier and happier than real life--I don't want to read about people who start out adoring each other and ten years later they're fighting bitterly over whose turn it is to take out the trash and who never stacks the dishwasher properly--but I like a little salt in the sugar, I guess.

[marginalia]

That's such a great question, and I can only recall seeing anything like it once (in a genderswap modern AU with a lot of gender exploration, & the no was related to that iirc.)

But I'd absolutely like to see more of it. More "no" & more "stop" that was respected & ended happily. Also, and this is more because a lot of my fandoms these days are university and 20something characters, more initially bad sex. There's one I think of a lot that included a lot of messy, figuring-it-out, and more of that would be good. Probably like above, but also with both inexperienced.

I get that it's so often about the fantasy (and like sovay says above, the idea that with the right person...) but there's also so much to explore with characters in how they handle boundaries and more.

[kindkit]

in a genderswap modern AU with a lot of gender exploration, & the no was related to that iirc

It makes sense that gender issues would be the place to find actual no's in fic. I generally can't read fic like that, because it cuts too close to my own issues, but I'm curious now about whether there's more acceptance of a hard no when it's about gender vs. purely about sexual pleasure, or whether the general trend of "with the right person" still holds.

initially bad sex

*nods* I bet the standard shipfic structure (a lot of pining, a confession of love, happy awesome sex, the end) plays into that lack. Often there is no second sex scene, so everything has to be earth-shattering the first time.

[resonant]

I've seen a lot of "I'm not ready for that yet," "I've never liked that before but I'm up for trying it," "I had a couple of ugly experiences with that so let's work up to it slowly and have a panic button handy," "I don't do that with just anybody but I'll do it with you," "Aw, nobody likes that, we all just do it so someone will return the favor ... what, really?" -- but you're right, it's uncommon to read "That's not for me so let's do something else." I'd love to see it done well. Saying no is really intimate.

[kindkit]

Yep. And all of those things you listed are things I love a lot. Some of my favorite tropes, in fact. But yeah, I'd love to see the alternative done well. "Done well" being the hardest part. I'd like to see fics where, yes, someone's no is respected, their trust is cherished, etc., but where the other partner isn't necessarily instantly fine with it. Because "oh dear, this is a sexual thing I like but the person I love hates, how do I feel about that?" is also legitimate.

[rydra_wong]

This is a very good thought -- I'd love to see more fic that hits this spot and I've only seen odd pieces that get near it.

The closest I can think of off the top of my head is this RQG Zolf/Wilde piece, in which Zolf is the kind of grey-a person who's extremely not into being touched sexually himself but, they establish, into doing the touching:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/29742129?view_full_work=true

[kindkit]

It's not common. And I have to be honest, I do really love all the variations on "we'll slowly work up to a yes." "This no actually, permanently means no" is a lot harder to make romantic, and I think the character and relationship development a fic would have to do to make it plausibly romantic and good is hard. I don't want to come away from a fic like that thinking "This is going to last 6 months before the other partner starts to feel deprived and like maybe this isn't worth it." (Unless that was the intention, of course, but the kind of fics I really have in mind here are straightforwardly romantic ones.)

The fic you linked to doesn't quite work for me in that respect--we're in Wilde's POV, but I don't think we really see what he goes through emotionally, how he comes to accept that a lot of sexual stuff he's used to and enjoys and values is off limits. It's sort of taken for granted from the beginning that the trade-off is worth it to him, and he just has to convince Zolf to believe him. But, like I said, given how big the off-limits territory is, I wasn't convinced that it would be that quick and easy.

To be fair, I have that complaint about a lot of fics: problems are too easily solved with half a conversation and a sex scene.

[lilacsigil]

I have seen it, but not very often - the characters in question had a previous relationship, one of them got magic amnesia and doesn't really recover much, and when they resume their relationship there's a fair bit of negotiation. A lot more fic with the same couple either has him remember things in time or be very enthusiastic anyway.

[kindkit]

It's interesting how little there is of this type of fic even when canon seems to set it up.

[silveradept]

I feel like the space you're describing might be well-served by people writing kinkier romances, with the caveat of needing the author to have a good grounding of how it works with humans in our reality. Since romance and fic often move toward making fantasies happen, they're not always interested in no as much as yes.

(I think the closest I've ever gotten to what you're looking for is a situation of "two first-timers trying something and having a good read of each other so that when one freezes, the other knows to back off, and they stay friends afterward." So no satisfying sex, but definitely a situation where a firm no comes out and is respected.)

[kindkit]

That makes sense--kinkfic would be the logical place to look for hard no's, and I'm really not a kinkfic reader.

I've written one fic with a hard no implied--one of the characters seemed canonically, to me, like he would not enjoy penetrative sex (either giving or receiving). But it was never explicitly stated, because these two characters barely managed to talk about the fact that they were having sex at all, so it's very possible that readers didn't get that and assumed penetrative sex would happen eventually.

[silveradept]

The romance arc and the fic arc are often both looking for progressing from no to yes, where yes turns out to be extremely satisfying, sometimes even over previous scars and hangups, as the payoff for that narrative arc, so for something to end in no breaks the expected structure. It might take some finessing to find the way of keeping the momentum of "people who definitely like each other and are going to have mutually fulfilling sex/relationships" going when there are going to be spots where certain possible branches get closed off or end up having to be negotiated. It's what happens in reality all the time, but it also takes lots of energy out of the situation.

People can write "Characters A and M explore together and learn their limits and hard nos" fic, but I feel that with the demands of the HEA/HFN, that's going to structure the work such that those things are seen as stepping stones asking the way, rather than hard nos and conflict spaces.