I have doubts that [a femslash meme] would be very long-lived

[frogfriend]

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Comments

Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

DA as the clusters got closer together everyone would pretty much be pan

But isn't that just the sf trope of what a gestalt is?

That... doesn't actually make the idea any less uncomfortable for me as a gay person. And I've gotta say, the amount of times I've encountered "but it's justified because x, y and z!" in response to people saying it's why they're not watching the show is deeply uncomfortable. OK, it doesn't bother you, that's fine and I'm really not judging you; but it bothers me and no amount of "but it's a trope! it's how the clusters work! it's about empathy!" is gonna get me to watch the show.

That said, unless I'm misremembering badly, the clusters making everyone pan thing was only a subthread of the FFA Sense8 wank thread, which was mainly about a sparkly dildo or something? It was a weird wank.

Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

da

Yeah, the sparkly dildo wank was...something. I can't even be arsed to remember exactly what was going on there (it confused me at the time tbh and was ridiculous on the face of it) but it was just weird generally!

Especially since (like the subthread OP said) there had just been some really enthusiastic, fun Sense8 threads on meme. I think it must have just been a different set of people commenting (anon meme, how could you even tell? :P) because it was one of those classic "I made this same comment a week ago and meme loved it, and now meme is jumping down my throat, what the actual fuck?" deals.

Weird.

Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, that was....something that sure was a thing, all right. It got so OTT I couldn't tell whether it was trolling or fun trolling or what.

https://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/319672.html?thread=1831987896#cmt1831987896

Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

This was the original HUGE wank which is....bad.

https://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/319403.html?thread=1830358955#cmt1830358955

Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

na I was looking at flatview and I almost hoped you were talking about the abc family show HUGE having wank, because then at least someone would have been talking about it lmao

Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

another NA

I realize this is completely unrelated to the rest of this thread, but: anon! I love Huge! I was just thinking the other day about breaking out my DVDs for a rewatch. Someone nominated a couple of Huge ships for femslashex, I'm hoping they request them so I can treat.

Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

ayrt Oh same! I've never done femslashex but I've shipped Will/Becca since day 1, ngl. Someday I have to get the DVDs so I can screencap it, since iTunes hates letting you use video files for that...

Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

Very very belated NA coming to this thread to say I loved Huge too and always wished it had a real fandom!

I remember shipping Becca/Chloe and their pining ex-friends angst the most, but I need to do a rewatch because I know I also shipped pretty much every combination of the four main girls and I would like to see what OT3s I can make work in my head.

Also, Athena as surely the trans girl or nb character we would gotten canon confirmation for (or at least more exploration of) in S2! I loved Athena so much. I remember friend 'shipping Becca/Athena more than ship-shipping it but I would love to see how I felt about them on a rewatch.

(frozen comment) Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

Just because a thing happens also doesn't mean it's necessarily suitable to be used as a grand symbol of something great. Trying to celebrate and portray the various forms of sexuality is a worthy cause, but imo picking a used sex toy with bodily fluids on it to symbolise love and unity is in very poor taste. As if it all centers around not love, but sex, and kinky sex toy sex specifically. It makes the carnality and the act of fucking itself the centerpoint, instead of the emotion and the love. In my opinion.

Probable asexy says what?

(frozen comment) Re: wank containment area: MODS

[(Anonymous)]

Not sure where the line on sexuality wank is in the wank containment area, but ^

(frozen comment) Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

Someone, I rather doubt the mods here are as eager to coddle the asmexies as they are on meme. Which is a point in their favor.

(frozen comment) Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

"Coddle"? Seriously?

Idgaf about asexuality politics, but this kind of categorical nastiness just for the sake of it was something I had kind of been hoping to get a break from over here. Like, there aren't even any self-identified asexuals involved in this? If the person in the quote had actually pulled out the "as an asexual I am being persecuted by the existence of sex" then the mocking would be warranted, but as it is, it sort of just feels like someone is derailing a completely unrelated discussion as a flimsy excuse to be performatively alienating.

(frozen comment) Re: wank containment area: MODS

[tardigradetreasurer]

Sexuality wank is allowed in the wank containment area as long as it's not nasty for the sake of being nasty.

Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

i wish it wasn't so taboo to talk about sex these days

it really feels like the pendulum has swung again towards conservative, anti-sex rhetoric and i feel that's unfortunate especially since sex ed hasn't gotten that much better in recent years

i hope we don't have a near future of sexually repressed young adults too terrified of exploring their sexuality to even talk about sex, especially if it's framed as something as "problematic" to talk about

(frozen comment) Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

Be fair. Equal odds that person is one of those homophobes who thinks showing gay sex is making the story all about sex, whereas het sex is an intimate act of love and closeness.

(frozen comment) Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

i've met more than enough asexuals that are also those kinds of homophobes

(frozen comment) Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

Being asexual =/= being a sex-negative prude.

(frozen comment) Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, we know, thanks to the large number of of asexies who have more sex than most so-called "allos".

(frozen comment) Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

FFS, people, can we at least save acewank until we've got more than 2k comments?

(frozen comment) Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

It's 1947 at this writing. SOOOOOON.

Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

That... doesn't actually make the idea any less uncomfortable for me as a gay person. And I've gotta say, the amount of times I've encountered "but it's justified because x, y and z!" in response to people saying it's why they're not watching the show is deeply uncomfortable.

Argh, I'm sorry. I didn't mean that you should be less uncomfortable about it, and definitely not that you should watch the show because other people aren't uncomfortable. I totally get why people would hate that Word of God is that everyone would be moving closer to pan, not remaining bi or gay. Probably ignoring Word of God and going for what's onscreen is the best thing, since that also supports the idea of gestalt in some examples like Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness or Sturgeon's More Than Human where the gestalt isn't necessarily sexual but the individuals remain separate for the most part. Anyway I do apologize.

Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT Thanks, nonny, I honestly appreciate that.

It's been years since I read LHoD - what was the gestalt in that? Do you mean the heat-type thing (which I can't remember the name of), or was there something else I've forgotten? I don't remember the heat thing involving anything other than sexual/physical stuff, but it has been a while.

Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

NA

I'm not sure what anyone here means by "gestalt," but in LHoD, people go into kemmer once a month and adopt either male or female sexual characteristics, usually dependent on the current sex of the person they have close physical contact first. So like, if a person going into kemmer gets a big hug from someone currently male, that person will become female for that kemmer. If the person gets pregnant during kemmer, then they'll remain female until the child is born. When not in kemmer, people lose their sexual characteristics. So most people are, IDK, agender most of the time.

Most of this comes out of a short story published separately, "Coming of Age in Karhide."

Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

da

For context on this, in the original book, it's mentioned that being near a male or female person can sway their kemmer, for example, Estraven kemmered as a woman because of Genly (a regular cis dude) being in the tent with him. At the time, that was a bit of worldbuilding to basically make it reproductively viable, since kemmer was a biological function for reproduction, and it would be unfortunate if a couple who wanted to reproduce just couldn't manage to kemmer into reproductive compatibility. But Le Guin was unhappy with the implication that it meant no one on Gethen was gay or bi! All this gender-transgressive worldbuilding, to create a world where only "het" sex can exist? (Insomuch as it could be considered het, since that's only physical sex--still, it implies those are the anatomical configurations forced on people.) Coming of Age in Karhide was an attempt to address that, saying that yes, kemmers are influenced by the sex of who's around you, but once you've kemmered as male or female, you're free to choose partners of any configuration that suits you, and follows a character who kemmers as female, tries male-kemmered and female-kemmered partners, and decides she likes f/f sex the best.

As for gender identities, while their bodies are physically neuter while out of kemmer, I don't think it follows that they're agender. A lot of what she seemed to be getting at in Left Hand was that they're both, rather than neither, so I would assume most Gethenians fall somewhere on the bigender spectrum. People who were permanently physically male or female were disdained and pitied and called "half-deads," implying that they were seen as having less gender/sex than the average Gethenian, not more, because they lacked the potential to become one sex. (They were also, however, called "perverts," for the implication that they're horny all the time. Gender in this worldbuilding is complex!)

The character in Coming of Age in Karhide, despite having a normal kemmer cycle, identifies as more female than male, and says that runs in her family. So it doesn't seem unheard of for Gethenians to lean more towards one gender or the other, but I think few ever lose that duality completely. So some might be 50/50 bigender, but some might be more like 90/10. I think one of the things Le Guin was going for with that is that the average person could not divorce themselves entirely from half of humanity, that there would always be some degree of empathy and shared experience. It's textual in Left Hand that Gethenians were created by the Hainish through genetic modification (the Hainish being aliens and the first humanoids, a high-tech society that existed at godlike tech levels lifetimes of stars ago and spread humanoids through the universe because they were lonely, with modifications here and there for funsies)as an experiment to see if sex-based oppression could be ended by making everyone both male and female. It was published in 1969, and I think exploratory fiction on ideas of gender and sex that were arising in feminist circles then. As exploratory fiction, she doesn't quite answer her own questions. The Gethenians have no war, but she attributes this to their inhospitable climate giving them a thin margin of survival as it is, not to their genital configuration. The book more just raises the question, meditates on it, and neither endorses nor condemns the possibility.

Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT No problem, at all.

Sorry, I was unclear -- I meant the Foretellers in the chapter about Faxe and how they form a unit and Faxe says "I am the filament," when Genly gets his question about whether Gethen will be a part of the Ekumen. Not the kemmer part. Although when I reread it just now there's a weird bit about the "Pervert" (single-gender man) and someone going into kemmer and the immense power of frustrated sex, so possibly it doesn't apply at all anyway.