#they deliberately choose to maintain that affectionate dynamic and work for it

[umbrellajam]

thinking about the swathe of Tim & Dick disagreements that can be broadly patterned, "Dick is more openly distraught and ends up chewing out Tim before stalking off, while Tim's left standing there like 🧍‍♂️"

New Titans #61 (A Lonely Place of Dying, Part 4) Gotham Knights #26 (Bruce Wayne: Murderer? Part 10) Nightwing (1996) #110

and the sort of opposite, where Tim is more openly distraught and they end up physically fighting each other

Nightwing (1996) #139 (The Resurrection of Ra's al Ghul, Part 6) Red Robin (2009) #4

anyway no deep thoughts, I just love them and I'm rotating their arguments in my brain at all times, lol

(bonus: the direct reverse of the first category, with Tim more openly distraught with and chewing out Dick before stalking off, leaving Dick standing there like 🧍‍♂️)

Red Robin (2009) #1

[leahazel]

More about my morally-grey heroines and their messed-up relationships

I wanted to elaborate on this post I wrote about D&F and BFS, but it turns out that adding readmore links to reblogs is a PITA, and I just now that this is gonna turn into a fucking novelette. 

So here we go.

Time to go into some detail about this!

Let’s define our terms:

“Decline and Fall” is my 120K+ series of loosely chronological, interconnected short fics, set in a tiny fandom for a visual novel that’s been in alpha development since 2015. For the record, the word count disincludes unfinished drafts, and stories that I’m holding back because they’re based on canon spoilers.

“Blood from Stone“ is my 100K unfinished Skyrim WIP, which began as a response to a kink meme prompt, and is not so much a rarepair as a non-existent one.

Both of these stories centrally feature young female protagonists and their sexual relationship with a much older man. Both heroines are... “grey” to say the least.

Let’s compare our fandoms, shall we?

Skyrim is a juggernaut fandom for a super-popular RPG which is part of a 30-yo franchise. The setting is moderately dark and casually sprinkled with murder cults, cannibalism, secret police death squads, and the prison industrial complex. The player character can be a thief and a murderer and everyone just learns to be okay with it because the only alternative is a fiery apocalypse. They also rob graves for the lulz.

Seven Kingdoms: The Princess Problem is a pinkie-toe-sized fandom for a hybrid RPG and dating sim where attractive young people flirt and date for the purpose of brokering world peace. The setting is one where you can actually broker world peace effectively. The player character can perpetrate a fair amount of proxy violence, but maintaining a good reputation dishonestly is legitimately difficult.

Now, let’s compare our heroines:

Corinne is a 24-year-old bounty hunter who became a folk hero, a soldier, and a cult assassin. She’s living alone and working for a living since she was 18. She’s never been in love, but she’s had multiple sexual and romantic relationships in the past. I deliberately wrote her as being very sexually confident and self-assured. She also has combat training, magical training, her special Dragonborn powers, and an incalculable amount of social clout. By every metric, she’s a powerful character. Though she can talk her way out of a tight spot (all my favorite characters can), she can also fight her way out.

Verity is (at the beginning of D&F) not yet 18 years old. She’s a princess from a very conservative kingdom who was raised to become a barter bride in a diplomatic marriage. The values that were passed to her were duty, tradition, and absolute obedience. Her primary skills are social, charisma, eloquence, and persuasion. Then she was dropped into the deep water of a diplomatic summit and had the weight of future history put on her shoulders, without ever having been taught how to make her own decisions or live with her regret.

To sum up, we have one hyper-competent, confident, and independent badass, universally recognized as powerful and dangerous, and then we have someone who’s basically a deconstruction of a traditional fantasy princess.

Okay, what about the more specific setting within the game world?

BFS is set in Markarth, arguably the most corrupt city in Skyrim, and the site of a localized war, on top of the 2-3 other wars that Skyrim has going on. The city is controlled by the cartel-like Silver-Blood family, and their enemies are swiftly and brutally eliminated. The rule of law is a joke. When the player character arrives at Markarth, they witness a chain or murders and are drawn into a conspiracy that sees them sentenced to life in prison for a crime they didn’t commit. The ruling elite suppress the native underclass by a variety of inventive methods. The roads into the city are controlled by the remnants of a violent but failed uprising, and this uprising is actually the origin story of Skyrim’s entire civil war storyline.

D&F is set in Revaire, explicitly the most violently war-torn of the seven kingdoms. Once the epicenter of a conquering empire, it was a country full of arts and culture, until a bloody coup slaughtered the entire royal line and instituted a new and more brutal regime. The new regime is on shaky grounds and foresighted people predict its imminent fall to rebel forces. So much, so canon. In D&F, I made a point of developing the new royals and their small coterie of supporters, as well as illustrating their constant struggle to conceal how widely reviled they are by the populace, and most of the former nobility. Their apathy to the plight of the common people is underscored in contrast to Verity’s compassion, which is ridiculed as a sentimental feminine affectation.

I’m attracted to certain themes, as you might have noticed.

Now, we get to talk about love interests.

Thongvor Silver-Blood is rather anemically characterized in Skyrim’s canon, so much of the information that I include in BFS is inferred. From his limited number of dialogues in the game, we know that he’s politically ambitious, a Stormcloak supporter, easily angered, and that he has one legitimate friend in the city. Like most Skyrim characters of his age bracket, he served in the Great War. He’s defined by his relationship to his generational cohort. In BFS, he’s def8ined in contrast to his brother. Thonar is comfortable being thought of as a villain. Thongvor still needs to believe that he’s the good guy. And I’m gonna get more into that in later chapters, too.

As a love interest, he’s initially in awe of Corinne, and always genuinely adoring, but more than a little jealous and possessive. BFS is not a story about love redeeming bad men (don’t get me started), but Thongvor shows different sides of his personality to different people, and the side that Corinne gets to see is much nicer than what most people do.

Hyperion Asper is a character of my own devising, whose existence in 7KPP canon is purely implied. We know his children, Jarrod and Gisette, and we knew that he organized a coup to seize the throne. I posit him as a tyrant and unrepentant child-killer (not directly stated in D&F, at least not yet). He’s ruthless and manipulative and his sole purpose is maintaining a sense of personal power. I structured him as the bad example that Jarrod tries -- and fails -- to live up to.

As a love interest... look, he’s a man who’s cheating on his wife with his son’s wife. He seduces Verity and manipulates her, and takes a special delight in pushing her buttons. All his compliments to her are mean-spirited and back-handed. He’s also jealous and possessive... which is especially pathetic, since he’s jealous of his own son, whom Verity doesn’t even like. His rage is a constant implied undercurrent in the narrative.

And the relationship dynamics themselves?

Corinne kisses Thongvor, proposes marriage to him, and then sleeps with him before riding off into mortal danger. She’s fond and affectionate, but she shies away from intense emotions, whether negative or positive. Since they spend most of their time apart, their marriage has been defined by Thongvor yearning like a sailor’s wife, while Corinne ran around doing violence and crime. They only just had their first fight. It will change when they get to spend some more significant time together... but on the whole, their marriage is fairly happy, and the emotional dynamic favors Corinne -- so far. It’s not a pure gender reversal, but that element is definitely dominant.

Hyperion starts seducing Verity on their very first meeting, and relies on a combination of magnetic attraction and Verity’s inexperience in life to keep her coming back, against her better judgment. Their relationship is mutually defined by a combination of attraction and resentment of that attraction. The danger of the situation is an essential element, to the point where it’s hard to imagine their affair would survive without it. It’s a puzzle and a battle, a source of fascination but not of comfort. There’s lust involved, and curiosity, but not a shred of love or even like. The closest thing to genuine affection is when Verity briefly imagines that there could be a version of Hyperion she actually liked, cobbled from his various, hidden good qualities. Any trappings of a genuine relationship are deliberately discordant.

I have tried, more than once, to imagine an alternate universe in which these two could be happy. It can’t be done. they are a study in dysfunction.

So where’s the similarity, with all these differences outlined?

Corinne’s choice to marry into the Silver-Blood family makes her complicit in their rule of the Reach, corrupt and reactionary as it is. Her reluctance to accept being called by their name reflects a reluctance to confront unpleasant truths that’s fundamental to her character. Choosing to be one of them affects and will continue to affect how other people see her, mostly negatively, and mostly without her being aware of it. Being Thongvor’s wife has gained her enemies. The fact that she doesn’t share his more reactionary views is something that they’ve both chosen to elegantly ignore, but the rest of the world won’t be so generous.

Verity’s choice to marry into the Revaire royal family makes her complicit in their violence against the forces rebelling against them, albeit in a more subtle way. Her personal dislike of Jarrod and the fact that their marriage was purely political will not absolve her in anyone’s eyes. Neither will her compassionate and charitable character, which can only be seen as a fig leaf to the Revaire royals’ general brutality. She has lost at least one good friend -- who will never see her the same way, since she chose to throw her lot in with his enemies. She will go down in history as an Asper wife -- but if she’s lucky, not just as that.

Both Corinne and Verity choose to accept some of the violence of the system that they live under, in order to serve their own lofty, long-term goals. Both of them are more image-driven than they care to admit, and though they are genuinely caring and compassionate, they will readily sacrifice compassion in service on their goals. They are queens (or queen-like figures), one-degree-of-separation members of the ruling class, implicated but not directly in control.

And their relationships serve to highlight what they are willing to accept, even though it goes against their conscience.

Is there a conclusion to be drawn here?

Sort of. I want to write about power, compromise and complicity. For whatever reason, it turns out that yw/om relationships are... a really good vehicle for exploring that. I can’t really explain why that is, just yet. I just... have had these thoughts floating, unstructured, in my head for months on end. I needed to get them out on paper, and give them some semblance of order.

I don’t even know why anyone but me would read this, as long and meandering as it is. But having it accessible might be of use to me.