#and i abhor epithets & smut is the only time i use epithets to avoid overusing names

[compacflt]

okay here to pick ur mind…i know you’ve alluded to it throughout WWGTTAI and debriefing but do u think bottoming is something that i’ve struggled with throughout his relationship with mav-especially if he enjoyed it-bc it may have been “more gay” in his mind and therefore harder to excuse due to the inherent misogyny wrapped up in men’s homophobia? it’s something we’ve talked abt in my gender studies classes so i just wanted to know how you think your ice may have approached that due to the repression of his sexuality so throughly and for so long!

as always with questions like this there’s a diegetic (in-universe) answer and a non-diegetic (writing theory) answer so I’ll start with the diegetic answer (not tagging this as nsfw but obv refer to the subject matter & discretion advised):

he isn’t thinking about it. I mean, he has to think about the mechanics of it, because sure there’s a lot of prep work involved, but he’s not really thinking about what it means, because no one’s telling him to. He knows it’s “wrong” —but the whole thing is “wrong,” anyway! The fact that he’s doing anything with Maverick is already wrong... I think he categorizes things as “not-fucked-up” and “yes-fucked-up” in his head, and any form of non-societally-approved contact with another man is “yes-fucked-up,” and there’s not really a sliding scale. Which is why Maverick’s weird extended hug thing right when Ice leaves TOPGUN (ch.4? I forget) is like literally the biggest deal in the world to him. I think Maverick could’ve actually groped him and he would’ve responded the same way. It’s all fucked-up, in his head. No difference between hugging/kissing/fucking/being fucked; it's all the same. There are the rules, and then there’s breaking the rules—no gray area in Ice’s mind (though note, in turn, Maverick’s analysis of Ice bending the rules—there is a gray area, just an unacknowledged one). 

So, yeah, he isn’t really thinking about the implications of the specific act. Maybe he knows that he enjoys it, and that thinking about what it means that he enjoys it would ruin it, so he doesn’t think about it. Also, he’s operating under the unspoken assumption that there’s something “wrong” with Maverick and not with him, because remember that Maverick already confessed to engaging in same-sex acts in ch. 4. There’s something fundamentally “wrong” with Maverick, so anything Ice does automatically looks better in comparison, because (he thinks) his transgressions are isolated incidents, whereas Maverick’s are a known pattern—even if Ice’s “transgressions” amount to literally being fucked by another guy. Hey, well, at least I’m not as bad as rule-breaker Maverick, who does this all the time, apparently! 

In Ch. 8 I was kind of trying to harp on that fact with the use of the word “resentment” during Ice’s discussion of choice/free will—there is kind of a sense that Maverick did this to him against his will, as in, he wasn’t “yes-fucked-up” until he met Maverick/this whole FWB-situation started, and maybe there is some deep-seated resentment about the fact that he might have been “normal” if it weren’t for Maverick (he wouldn’t have been, but he doesn’t realize that). I was close to having him just say this outright in Ch. 8, but as I’ll talk about below, their relationship is already pretty toxic, and there were some lines of toxicity I didn’t want to cross explicitly.

As for the non-diegetic answer, AKA the reason I wrote it this way: I’m kind of hesitant to politicize sociosexual (esp. “hierarchical”) roles in fiction, because I feel like it’s an easy way to betray your own political biases (as a writer) towards male sexual roles—it’s just too slippery of a slope IMO. Especially once you introduce ranks and professional/financial power dynamic differences, I feel like it’s all-too easy to portray the relationship as incredibly and toxically sociopolitically unequal. Yeah, I guess it would make more sense for very-closeted Ice to top 100% of the time, but he’s already “hierarchically” above Maverick 100% of the time anyway—politically, professionally, financially, in terms of social respect, etc. I didn’t want their dynamic to be skewed all the way towards one character having all the social/external/traditionally masculine power, so I didn’t write it like that. That in and of itself is a political decision that betrays my beliefs about male sexuality, and might not make sense in-universe, with characters this repressed, but…I personally felt uncomfortable with the alternative.

I think I’ve explained this a couple times elsewhere, but I wanted Ice & Mav to be true equals in this fic, because it reflects the equality they achieve in canon— “You can be my wingman anytime” vs. “Bullshit, you can be mine.” They are canonically equals. And, yes, of course in a sexual relationship you can be “giver” or “taker” and still be “equal” with the other person, but—like, you see how it would be different, right? If you’re only ever the “giver,” in our society’s traditional understanding of gender roles, you have an insane amount of power over the other person, and I wanted Ice & Mav to be equals when they’re with each other. It’s why I was hesitant having like an actual D/S dynamic with them as well—and the lack of that dynamic is itself a plot point. Ice in ch. 8 rebels against what he thinks their dynamic is—namely, that Maverick always leads/gives the orders, and Ice always follows. He portrays himself as submissive in that moment (“I’ve never had a choice”), but in reality he has just as much control over this relationship as Maverick does—i.e. he is just as “dominant,” and wants it just as bad, he just can’t articulate that. Which is the point of his whole character arc. Their equality is the point, not the transgressiveness of the act itself.

Also related to his character arc is the passivity of the act of bottoming as well, which is maybe why it's "overrepresented" in the story (sorry coming back to add this graf after doing the tags already &then Having A Thought). Like if Ice's whole thing is following orders/not having a choice, which makes him a great naval officer but a deeply flawed and confused person, then it makes sense that his narrative focuses most on the following/passive act of "taking," not necessarily the more leading/active role of "giving." These are simplistic terms obv but hopefully you can see what I'm getting at.