wallwalker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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personalapocalypse2011-12-04 11:33 pm
wallwalker) wrote in personalapocalypse2011-12-04 11:33 pm
Entry tags:
Meta Month 4: Love Letters to Aliens
(Okay, this one isn't exactly explicit, but it does reference sex. So if you're not into that sort of thing you might want to skip today.)
---
Zapp Brannigan: ...However, I did make it with a hot alien babe. And in the end, is that not what man has dreamt of since he first looked up at the stars?
[pause]
Zapp Brannigan: Kif, I'm asking you a question!
[Kif groans.]
- Futurama, Ep. 1x04, Love's Labours Lost in Space.*
Given some of the experiences that I've had, I should probably give you a definition of what I'm talking about before I get very far into this. I'm not using the strict dictionary definition. (Xenokink is probably a better term for this? I'm not sure.)
Anyway, what I'm talking about is portrayals of intimacy between vastly different sapient individuals, with a heavy erotic focus on the differences between them. There's a lot of variation in how different the individuals have to be in order for the portrayal to ping me; it really just depends on the creator's skill at really bringing the differences between them to the forefront and describing/portraying them. I've seen some brilliant fics that played up small differences and made them really work for me, while others essentially portrayed them as "human," but with different skin colors or whatnot... which often makes little sense. Anyway, there's a lot of room for interpretation with this - aliens, fantasy creatures, anthropomorphic creatures (or non-anthropomorphic creatures with intelligent sapient minds,) sapient machines...
It's probably no surprise that I ended up really enjoying xenophilia, once I actually discovered it, considering several of the things I grew up reading. There's this certain long-running fantasy series where some of the traditional fantasy races canonically came about because of magical springs, where if a male and a female both drink, they instantly fall in love, mate, and have at least one child - no matter what species the two of them are. Same author wrote a series (although I've only read the first book) which had a plot that revolved around a human who was being transferred into the bodies of aliens, with predictable results in a couple of cases. And I admit, I reread those chapters. A lot. (It heavily influenced one of my NaNo attempts early on, which.... was not extraordinarily well-received by my regional group at the time. I got a lot of "Well, that's creative!" out of it, but nothing that you could really call encouraging. I can't claim to be surprised, though.)
I'm sure that it largely boils down to both a love of variety, and of relationship meta. I love speculating about relationships of just about any sorts, romantic or no, and it's particularly fascinating to think about relationships with beings that are very much unlike humans both in experience and in physiology. And as far as variety goes, well, humans are all very different creatures, but in the end we all have the same basic physiology. If we want something new and different, we have to go outside of that. It's an interesting exercise, and a fun one. And this might not be the biggest consideration, but it's definitely a plus, for me - xenokink celebrates the difference between characters, instead of being leery of them. And that's something that there needs to be more of in general.
One thing that I tend to have trouble with when I write it, though, is making it All About The Humans. There's a lot of xeno - good stuff, I'm not saying otherwise! - that basically uses humans as baseline in much the same way that, say, tabletop RPs like Shadowrun and D&D use humans as baselines in terms of stats. Not surprising, and in fact it's hard to avoid - we're human, obviously, so it's a handy way of making a point of reference for the reader. It's a lot harder to, say, describe a human from an alien point of view - it requires getting into their heads and thinking about exactly what the differences are, and what first thing they would notice. Those are the kinds of details I love to see.
(Hm, there's an idea that just came to me - I've seen a fair amount of "Human somehow possesses alien body and experiences alien mating," but I've never seen it done the other way around....")
I'll make a rec post for this later (I need to make one for a community anyway,) but I've rambled enough and I need to call it a night. So, yes. This is one of the tropes/kinks I have the most fun with, so I had to make a post about it at some point.
There's so much irony in that quote that I couldn't resist. Not just the bit about Leela that we learn much later in the show, but the fact that Kif's the one who gets into a relationship with a hot Martian babe later. ;p
---
Zapp Brannigan: ...However, I did make it with a hot alien babe. And in the end, is that not what man has dreamt of since he first looked up at the stars?
[pause]
Zapp Brannigan: Kif, I'm asking you a question!
[Kif groans.]
- Futurama, Ep. 1x04, Love's Labours Lost in Space.*
Given some of the experiences that I've had, I should probably give you a definition of what I'm talking about before I get very far into this. I'm not using the strict dictionary definition. (Xenokink is probably a better term for this? I'm not sure.)
Anyway, what I'm talking about is portrayals of intimacy between vastly different sapient individuals, with a heavy erotic focus on the differences between them. There's a lot of variation in how different the individuals have to be in order for the portrayal to ping me; it really just depends on the creator's skill at really bringing the differences between them to the forefront and describing/portraying them. I've seen some brilliant fics that played up small differences and made them really work for me, while others essentially portrayed them as "human," but with different skin colors or whatnot... which often makes little sense. Anyway, there's a lot of room for interpretation with this - aliens, fantasy creatures, anthropomorphic creatures (or non-anthropomorphic creatures with intelligent sapient minds,) sapient machines...
It's probably no surprise that I ended up really enjoying xenophilia, once I actually discovered it, considering several of the things I grew up reading. There's this certain long-running fantasy series where some of the traditional fantasy races canonically came about because of magical springs, where if a male and a female both drink, they instantly fall in love, mate, and have at least one child - no matter what species the two of them are. Same author wrote a series (although I've only read the first book) which had a plot that revolved around a human who was being transferred into the bodies of aliens, with predictable results in a couple of cases. And I admit, I reread those chapters. A lot. (It heavily influenced one of my NaNo attempts early on, which.... was not extraordinarily well-received by my regional group at the time. I got a lot of "Well, that's creative!" out of it, but nothing that you could really call encouraging. I can't claim to be surprised, though.)
I'm sure that it largely boils down to both a love of variety, and of relationship meta. I love speculating about relationships of just about any sorts, romantic or no, and it's particularly fascinating to think about relationships with beings that are very much unlike humans both in experience and in physiology. And as far as variety goes, well, humans are all very different creatures, but in the end we all have the same basic physiology. If we want something new and different, we have to go outside of that. It's an interesting exercise, and a fun one. And this might not be the biggest consideration, but it's definitely a plus, for me - xenokink celebrates the difference between characters, instead of being leery of them. And that's something that there needs to be more of in general.
One thing that I tend to have trouble with when I write it, though, is making it All About The Humans. There's a lot of xeno - good stuff, I'm not saying otherwise! - that basically uses humans as baseline in much the same way that, say, tabletop RPs like Shadowrun and D&D use humans as baselines in terms of stats. Not surprising, and in fact it's hard to avoid - we're human, obviously, so it's a handy way of making a point of reference for the reader. It's a lot harder to, say, describe a human from an alien point of view - it requires getting into their heads and thinking about exactly what the differences are, and what first thing they would notice. Those are the kinds of details I love to see.
(Hm, there's an idea that just came to me - I've seen a fair amount of "Human somehow possesses alien body and experiences alien mating," but I've never seen it done the other way around....")
I'll make a rec post for this later (I need to make one for a community anyway,) but I've rambled enough and I need to call it a night. So, yes. This is one of the tropes/kinks I have the most fun with, so I had to make a post about it at some point.
There's so much irony in that quote that I couldn't resist. Not just the bit about Leela that we learn much later in the show, but the fact that Kif's the one who gets into a relationship with a hot Martian babe later. ;p