We Can't Rewind, We've Gone Too Far

Title: No Thinking for a Little While
Rating: T
Universe: Marvel Cinematic
Characters: Clint Barton, Natasha Romanov
Summary: Five times Natasha tried to sleep with Clint and one time Clint slept with Natasha.
Warnings/Enticements: Platonic Bed Sharing, Male-Female Friendships, Unwanted Sexual Advances, Hurt/Comfort, PTSD
Word Count: 600

On AO3

So I saw this tweet*:

No one’s looking forward to work tomorrow, but at least you won’t be arriving by carriage for a new position at a manor house only to see the ghost of the previous governess glowering from a third floor window

— Mave (@MavenofHonor.twitter) June 24, 2019

And went "But that'd be great! Ghosts are neat and then you'd have someone to talk to other than the children!" And then of course I had half a gothick novel plotted.**

I assume that this and the harsh-satire-of-superheroes idea I had last week are evidence that my writing brain is coming back after the overexertion, but currently I am just remembering that all long form writing projects eventually end in exhaustion and hating everything you've written, so I'm not exactly in the mood to start either of them.

*I am not actually on twitter, I just look at other people's twitters.
**Yes, Harold, of course they're lesbians.

1. I have one more paragraph to write on this thing. It'll probably happen tomorrow.

I'm looking at the denouement here, and my brain is going "no, you can't stop here, there's all this work to do digging up the conspiracy and figuring out who was working for them!" Which A) would be a lot of writing, B) is not the kind of plot many people find interesting, and C) is contrary to my stated policy on this project. So I'm not writing it.

Unless the sequel shows up, which is isn't going to because I don't actually have the canon knowledge to write it anyway.


2. Putting the (NSFW) link here: This Is What It's Like to Have Sex With Hearing Loss


3. World map shirts! I have no idea what the quality or business is like, I just saw them and I really want one and I can't buy one right now so I am telling you about them instead.


4. Have two quotes from Central Asia in World History by Peter B. Golden, since I'm not sure if I will end up finishing it before it needs to go back.

Archaeological excavations of cities such as Taraz (in Kazakhstan) and Samarkand show that the designs on the products often catered to the stylistic preferences of the neighbouring nomads as well as the local urban population. For example, seals on gemstones from ancient Samarkand (the archaeological site Afrasiyab) have two different styles: one depicting a bull with wings, reflecting the mythological subject matter preferred by the townsmen, the other a goat in flight with an arrow in his neck, an example of the scenes of the hunt so dear to the nomads. (p 19)

The Uighurs, hitherto predominantly nomad pastoralists, began to settle, taking up urban and agricultural pursuits. Like their mentors, the Sogdians, they developed a rich commercial sulture as Silk Road traders and a complex spiritual life in which Manichaeism, Buddhism, and Christianity were all represented. In the eastern steppe zone, they replaced the Sogdians as culture-bearers. ... The post-imperial Uighurs produced a rich literature, largely religious in content, for a population of which perhaps one-third was literate. The shift in the role of the Uighurs is reflected in a phrase from an early tenth-century Arab historian, Ibn al-Falqîh, who called them "the Arabs of the Turks." (p 47)

This book is made more difficult by the fact that the maps are all the precise opposite of the one in "The Hunting of the Snark."


5. Pride was two weeks ago and I am still finding random glitter.

The nice thing about having the last ...almost six years, wow, of my writing schedule conveniently charted is that I can look at a time when, to take an example completely at random, I have hit my writing quota three days in the last four weeks, and go, "Well, it's not nearly as bad as last April." And the last time this happened was in October, right before I had a great writing month.

...which was also right after I'd basically finished a really long project, gee, I wonder if that might be relevant.

We are going to a talk on local drag queen history at the library, and my hold on West Coast Avengers has come in!

Okay, so I am half a chapter away from having a rough draft of this thing, or at least an "it's called a draft because it's full of holes" draft. But this half-chapter is hard, a lot harder than the other half of the same chapter, and I think it's because for this one I have a section of text that is wrong.

It was a conversation that went here when I thought the climax went one way, and then I realized that didn't work at all, so I cut that out and rewrote the climax from scratch, and in the process included some but not all of this conversation that was formerly in the denouement. And now I have the rest of that conversation, and because it's there but it doesn't fit there, I can't put in the rest of the scene around it like I usually do. (The other problem is I have to cross reference the whole time I'm writing this with the earlier part of the climax.)

So I cut that bit out, and then immediately went to Chicago for 36 hours and am now kind of drained, so I don't know if it worked. I was hoping for writing to happen in the car, but it didn't.

I have spent May trying to be pretty singularly focused on this project, and on the one hand see above re almost done, but on the other hand it's ... tiring. My brain is now popping up occasionally with unrelated bits of prose, which is nice in the sense that things are still working in there. But that prose voice is not quite the one I need to have ready for this scene, and ... I don't know. zzz.

So I don't usually do Reading Wednesday but this week I want to geek out about Runaways.

Also finished in the last week:

Road Through Time: The Story of Humanity on the Move by Mary Soderstrom.
As a history of roads this was an interesting summary; however I hoped when I took it out of the library that it would be more of a history of immigration, which is really not what it was trying to do. And I still want that book, although it would be really really long.

Runaways: The Complete Collection, Volume 2 by Brian K. Vaughan et al.

OMG this is amazing.

I have been reading Runaways since December--actually I picked up the first volume of Rainbow Rowell's new series first, which was great but also I am now spoiled for everything. So if that matters to you don't start there.

But the first series--it is actually making me really sad for my younger self that I didn't read it when it first came out because, um, that kid could have used it. But it is so great now. And it has Nico and I love Nico SO MUCH.

Nico Minoru is a sad bisexual Japanese* goth witch and she is trying so hard. And not exactly succeeding. And all I want is for her to be happy and she is really really bad at being happy. Like, even if her life was not exploding she would ... not be good at it. And I love her so much.

Here she is when her best friend comes back from space:


And then:


Always great when your space girlfriend comes back from space and you missed her so much and you're so happy and ... then it turns out she also brought her actual girlfriend. Who is ... not you. Because you fucked it up. Right. Awkward. (Also, this panel contains three queer women, two of whom are women of colour (though technically Xavin in the centre is genderfluid). Just casually. Talking about plot.)

Vaughan paces things brilliantly--in among the supervillain fights are little quiet moments of characters talking about religion, or mourning ... everything, or going shopping, or having nightmares about turning into their parents. And I love the story structures and the antagonists, and in this volume he does something that authors very rarely do when talking about the internet (especially in 2006) and remembers that people use the internet to make friends.

I watched the first episode of the Hulu series over Christmas and it was pretty cool, but I'm bad at getting motivation to watch TV shows even when I actually have easy access to them, so I haven't seen the rest of it.

Currently Reading:

Central Asia in World History by Peter B. Golden.
This is pretty textbooky but I wanted a general introduction so that's a good start. Also when I showed it to Pixies the first time she read the title as "Central USA" and now I'm thinking about the Mongol conquest of the central United States.


*I noticed reading Silk** last year that I had been really feeling the lack of Asian characters without even noticing it. This isn't about representation for me--I'm not Asian--but maybe representation of my environment: I grew up in north Toronto and therefore contexts full of white people feel fundamentally wrong to me. In my head there should be lots of Asian people around, because that's just what the world is supposed to look like--my high school was probably about 75% Asian--and the contrast between that and most Western media, or the actual small midwestern city I am living in right now, is very weird.

**Incidentally, I'm still annoyed that after 4+ years on Tumblr I found out about Silk--and Runaways, for that matter--by randomly browsing at the library. If Tumblr isn't going to tell me about awesome Asian spider-girls then why was I even on Tumblr?

There's a thing in a lot of Captain Marvel fic and art where Monica calls Carol "Mom." And fans state, absolutely, that Monica has two moms.

But Monica doesn't call her Mom in the movie. She calls her Auntie Carol. And it's so clear, when she's running toward her the first time she sees her, that "Auntie Carol" is a deeply important person to her who was hugely involved in her life.

And I don't think that this particular choice is just an attempt to paint over any possible queerness, because the movie is happy to say that Maria and Monica are Carol's family, in those exact words, that she was right there with them and they know all about her former life, they have all her possessions, this is never downplayed. The importance of Carol to them and them to Carol is made clear repeatedly. And she has that place as Auntie Carol.

And it makes me uncomfortable that fandom looks at this and immediately decides that as Carol is an adult who was in a parental role for Monica this means Monica has to call her Mom. Or that if Carol is in a romantic relationship with Maria then she must be Mom to Monica.

Or another example (because it's not the specific gender/family implications of motherhood that I want to talk about), Holmes/Watson fic calls them "husbands" all the damn time. They are husbands, spouses, this is a marriage--except.

Of course they don't call each other husbands in canon. But they call each other partners. All the time. "Dr. Watson is my friend and partner." (CHAS) They have a word for their relationship, a straightforward clear word that they can use in public and have understood, a word they use when describing the other's importance to them, and that word is partner. And partner has been used for romantic relationships for centuries. They don't need to call each other husbands for them to be in a committed long term romantic relationship.

What makes me uncomfortable is fandom looking at these relationships, that the characters have their own words for, and ignoring those words to call them something more familiar. It's saying, there is only one possible word for this relationship and it is my word, it's saying, the definition of "aunt" cannot possibly be stretched to include what I see here. It's sorting people into different boxes rather than realizing that your boxes are the wrong shapes.

Lots and lots of interesting case studies, not the best prose style.

From a letter to the editor of the Portland News, 1912: "This old story about more wages because she wears men's clothes is not the main part of the drama at all. There is many a good man who would marry such a woman as Nell Pickerell [aka Harry Allen], but she will not have it that way." (p 30) Would there actually be that many men happy to marry a woman who had served multiple prison sentences and given birth to an illegitimate child? I mean, maybe, there was a heavy gender imbalance in the American west.

"A quick search through this newspaper [the Idaho Statesman] reveals no fewer than forty stories related to cross-dressing appearing between 1890 and [1908]." (p 205 n33)

"Often western women sex-workers wore men's clothing as by custom it provided an indication to others of the wearer's occupation. Among such women were the nine prostitutes of the Williams Creek district of western Canada's Cariboo gold rush who, according to an 1862 news item, put on "great airs" when they would "dress in male attire and swagger through the saloons and mining camps with cigars or huge quids of tobacco in their mouths, cursing and swearing, and look like anything but the angels in petticoats heaven intended them to be."" (p 35) [emphasis mine] Note how class and gender are conflated here--the suggestion is not just that they should dress like women but that all women are naturally the innocent middle-class angel in the house.

M, an MTF case study in "Transvestism: A Contribution to the Study of the Psychology of Sex" by Bernard S. Talmey: "When "so dressed [as a woman], I can always think more logically, feel less encumbered, solve difficult problems in a manner next to impossible under any other conditions."" (p 61)

"By the turn of the twentieth century Americans had gained an international reputation for, as the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld put it, blaming "one or the other ethnic group for homosexuality."" (p 147) This is in the course of a discussion of how the Chinese Exclusion Act and various laws prohibiting interracial marriage prevented Chinese-American men from forming heterosexual families. (Canada was doing the exact same thing, incidentally.)

Chapter 5 spends a lot of time talking about "the apparent spread of prostitution, public indecency, and other transgressive sexual activities as the nineteenth century advanced" (p 168). Which, I assume, had a lot to do with the spread of literacy, urbanization, and the popular press, and makes an interesting comparison to how mass media, social media, and population growth now is making it look like the world is getting worse and worse, whatever your definition of "worse" is.

Also, wow, you don't realize how quickly Lamarckism was wrapped up into evolutionary theory to help out eugenics.
... In other words, we have reached the "fucking assholes" part of any history of sexuality. I may not have much to say about the rest of this book except swearing.

That said, "Viraginity and Effemination" should be the name of a queer bookstore. Or a zine.

Volume 2 of Clorinda Cathcart's Circle, A Man of Independent Mind, about my favourite Utilitarian philosopher, is out today.

You can read an excerpt at the link, though it contains spoilers for Madame Clorinda's memoirs. The later chapters are a wonderful series of romance and mystery-solving.