Fannish Anomalies East and West

by Jeanne

1) The bandaid-ed penis

The stack of djs I grabbed in Tokyo last winter demonstrates a new-comer (well, new to me) in the ever-fascinating methods djka use to self-censor? fuzz? the unromantic male member. It's common now to put little white rectangles across depictions of the penis. I'm not sure what the rationale of this is. The white rectangle blocks off bits here and there- part of the shaft, part of the head- but leaves the details of the rest perfectly visible. As a censoring device, it's a touch inefficient. Maybe the thinking works along the lines of the common hentai 'extremely detailed penis seen through a condom or someone's tissue-thin silk trousers.' Ie if the penis is supposedly clothed then it's not a naked penis, even if you can see every throbbing vein in it. In this case, the idea would seem to be 'censoring part of the penis suggests the notion of censoring all of the penis, which can then be taken as censored.' As they put it in The Mikado, "When Your Majesty says, let a man be put to death, the man is as good as dead. Executing him is a mere detail." When a djka says 'I'm going to cover the naughty bits', the naughty bits are as good as covered and it would be superfluous to cover them all.

It's perhaps unfortunate that to the unpractised eye the rectangles look like little white bandaids (the smallest size, useless for anything but bandaging kids' fingers) that have been arbitrarily stuck onto the penis here and there. Fortunately, it doesn't take long to get used to the convention. And it does have one great advantage. Given djkas' drawing style and the sometimes confusing action of their pictures, the white rectangle tells you exactly where the naughty bits are to be found.

2) Anus as Vagina

I wrote a story recently in which one of my characters didn't want to have anal sex. I wrote it precisely so that the fact that he then agreed to have anal sex would stand as a mark of the sincerity of his feelings- the ultimate sacrifice and so on. You wouldn't believe how difficult it was to write that story. If I thought of my anime character as he was, and put him in this yaoi situation, he became at once his yaoi self and was perfectly happy to bend over for his buddy. Ii ja nai ka? my Hakkai said to me, blinking in mild surprise that I might want him to think it wasn't OK. In desperation I resorted to an extreme tactic, one I blush to disclose. I thought of a guy I know, very straight and very married, imagined him in Hakkai's situation, and then wrote his probable reaction as Hakkai's.

If I needed to have it brought home to me just how automatic the equation of anus = vagina is in yaoi, that did it. It's a convention I normally rather like. No tiresome discussion and macho heartburnings about what will happen if A lets B screw him. Pure matter-of-fact 'that's how it's done.' Talking about it, negotiating it, being reluctant to do it, only doing it as a major concession-- in a word, making a big deal of it-- is virtually unknown in Japanese yaoi. It would be like a woman saying to a guy 'What? You want to put it in *there*?? Uh no I don't *think* so.' I know it's possible and I know it happens, but most people's commonsense notion of m/f sex involves sticking a penis into a vagina. And most yaoi characters' commonsense notion of m/m sex involves sticking a penis into an anus. The assumption is that the woman and the uke both want to be penetrated, and by and large that assumption is so correct as not to need discussion. Just as yaoi has nothing that really parallels slash's popular trope of 'Oh God am I gay?', so it blithely ignores the similar 'I don't get fucked I don't I don't oh well maybe I do.' By and large yaoi likes to focus on the romantic twosome-ness of a situation. It wants to talk more about how the uke thinks of himself in relation to the seme (Does he love me? Could he love someone like me? Why doesn't he ever say I love you? etc), than about how the uke envisages himself as a man.

Now, making anal sex the default mode for yaoi copulation has many virtues. Those of us who like seeing guys screwing guys get as much of it as we can handle. Those of us who like to identify with the characters we read have an automatic reference point within the sexual action. It takes a leap of imagination to become a guy screwing a guy, but one can identify with the uke's situation automatically. He's doing what we do. That all djka questioned on the point said they identified with the uke is simple common sense. Of *course* they do. Atarimae deshou...

But spoiled yaoi fan that I am, I want to have my cake and eat it too. What I originally liked about m/m, long before I'd ever heard the word yaoi, was the necessity for one guy- them almighty always on top always sticking it in guys- to submit to the other guy at least to the extent of letting the other guy stick it into him. And however friendly or loving or romantically passionate the relationship is, this yielding, this voluntary taking on of the penetrated role, always had for me the frisson of noble sacrifice and all for love. This guy is actually giving something up for his beloved. In yaoi this yielding either isn't a sacrifice ('He wants it'), or it's an automatic and taken for granted sacrifice, as with those ukes who don't actually enjoy sex but do it anyway because that's what ukes do. And I wish that just occasionally and every so often some uke *would* make a big deal about it, just enough to make his seme realize that it's not as of-course as all that. Now God forbid we should have a rash of non-penetrative sex djs, or a vogue for showing oral sex. (Watching a guy giving head does nothing for me. Warui to the people for whom it does.) But a little more emphasis on the uke's noble sacrifice- or even a little more apprehension on the faces of the about-to-be-screwed, as in Minami Megumu's work- would tickle my kinks a fair treat.

3) Epithets Rampant: The red-haired half-youkai and the wine-dark sea

Way way back in my newbie days in the early 90's, I came across an invaluable piece of advice for writers. It was in the old APA Strange Bedfellows, where many of slash's heavier heavyweights used to meet and thrash out theoretical questions about the nature and practice of the genre. Someone was bemoaning the classic m/m writer's quandary, to wit:

1) When you write m/m your pronouns don't tell you who is who as they do in m/f. 'He put one arm around his neck and another around his waist and laid his lips on his throat' simply doesn't cut it.

2) English abhors repetition. 'Zechs put one arm around Treize's neck and another around Treize's waist, and laid his lips on Treize's throat' doesn't cut it either.

So how do you disguise all those repeated names? Tried and true usage is to use an epithet: 'Zechs put one arm around Treize's neck and another about the commander's waist, and laid his lips on the older man's throat.' The APA moaner in this case thought, correctly, that the epithets weren't disguising anything at all- that they were, in fact, acting like blinking neon signs to call attention to the fact that the writer was trying to avoid saying her character's name yet again. But what else can you do?

An old hand gave her the out. 'Names are invisible,' she said, and proceeded to demonstrate by taking an epithet-laden paragraph from a slash story and rewriting it using only the names. It's true. The names (Bodie and Doyle in this case, IIRC) sank to the level of pronouns, which you can use as many times as you like without sounding repetitive; but pronouns which- hallelujah!- told you clearly who was who. I've followed this advice religiously ever since and passed it on to others.

But now I find myself reading fanfic where the epithet is a stock- indeed, almost a necessary- part of fan writing. It still grates on me enough that I tend to stop reading a story after the first 'blonde-haired monk' or 'wine-haired youkai prince.' The problem with epithets is that most fanfic is written in the intimate third person. You speak of your character as he, as if you were an omniscient narrator, but you present the world only from his point of view, never entering anyone else's head. Your 'he' effectively acts as 'I'. John Gardner decried this as bad writing, by the way. If you're going to do unmoving POV, he said, write the thing in first person. Well, I'm no fan of Gardner's writing itself; and the fact is that first person just doesn't read the same. (Besides, it's infinitely harder to write.) Intimate third is ideally suited to fanfic writing. It gives you just the right distance from characters who aren't after all your own, but whom you want to hear thinking as if they were.

But the problem with the rampant epithet in intimate third person narrative is that it destroys the illusion that you're hearing the character's own thoughts. People think of their friends as 'Gokuu' or 'Gojou', not 'the yellow-eyed youth' or 'the red-haired half-youkai.' If someone tells me 'Gokuu looked up at the older man' when I'm supposed to be hearing eighteen year old Gokuu's thoughts about twenty-two year old Hakkai, I wonder just how old this Gokuu is supposed to be. Eleven? 'Ojisan, dare?' 'O-nii-san deshou?'

Even less do people think of themselves in terms of their exterior physical traits. Hakkai thinks of himself as 'I' (or 'boku', to be precise, and I'll do yet another parenthetical moan about English's all-purpose unisex pronouns that don't distinguish between a boku and an ore.) For sure he doesn't think of himself as 'the green-eyed half-youkai' any more than I customarily think of myself as 'the brown-eyed Canadian.' "Hakkai smiled tenderly up at the red-haired kappa. How he loved this old friend of his, with his scarred face and his wistful eyes. 'Would you care to share my bed?' the green-eyed half-youkai invited." Unh-unh. At points like this I'm irritably aware of the author elbowing her way back into Hakkai's pseudo-viewpoint and nudging me in the ribs- Look, he's a green-eyed half-youkai! (He's not, BTW.) Look, he's a red-haired kappa! (Neither is he.) Look, he's a bad-tempered blond monk! (Well yes, he is.) And my response is 'I know that, already. Now go away.' Such alienation devices are fine in certain stories- gag, for instance, where it's amusing to have the narrative voice interfere in the action and talk directly to the characters it's supposed to be describing. In a weepy wallow fic it's ridiculous.

But on the other side, it must be said that an epithet does give texture to a passage. If the repeated Gojou... Gojou... Gojou... is no more repetitive than he... he... he..., neither is it any more colourful. An appropriate epithet- one that reflects the speaker's view of the person being described- brightens up a text wonderfully. It's just, appropriate epithets aren't always there for the having. After all, if Gojou is going to think of Sanzou as anything but 'Sanzou', it'll be something on the lines of 'old sour face.' But 'Gojou looked deeply into the sour-faced monk's lavender eyes'? This gets us much too close to gag. What to do?

Maybe in the end one should just consider these stock epithets as exactly that: formulaic stylistic devices, ornamentation, the exact equivalent of Homeric epithets in the Iliad. The sea in Homer is always 'wine-dark.' (Actually, it's 'wine-faced', but you can't say that in English and expect to be taken seriously.) Achilles is always 'Achilles of the bowel-loosening war-cry' (which you can't say either.) And so Gojou is always 'the red-haired half-youkai' or 'the erotic kappa.' Whenever an author talks about 'the cockroach-headed water spirit', simply substitute 'Gojou' mentally and all will be well.

But for my next rant, I'll have a word or two to say about literal translations of Japanese insults...