This whole segment of the story is blowing me away. Be honest Neal, you promised Dexter that there would be some boobs in this story, didn’t you? This section of the story is to make up for a dearth of boobs in the earlier sections.
Quite the opposite, actually. We were both rather shy about it. With me, I was worried about estranging or exploiting women, and I was afraid of scaring off everybody.
But, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the confrontation of the self involves looking at our bodies, and that without that, and without a suitably nutty and intriguing device to segue into that, it WOULD be exploitative. Believe me, I thought about it a LOT, and almost cut it a number of times, but no bravery equals no progress, in my book. (He said, snug in the position of not having had anyone hand him is ass for the storyline.)
It also sets up a number of things for year three.
To be fair, though, I wrote this over a year ago, so I’ve known for some time it was coming, and talked it over with Dex way before it came to pass. Right now I’m on page 51 of year three, heh.
Honestly, I don’t think you have to be too worried about the storyline itself being exploitative. That everybody is going in to these encounters happily and willfully ‘makes’ it okay.
That said, everybody is mysteriously attractive, which could be construed as assigning worth, but I think that’s probably taking overanalysis too far.
That’s probably not overanalysis. We did talk about it. In the end I had to weigh the fact that people tend to go into things looking for idealized people as a standard against the fact that people (myself included) want reality in depiction where possible. We tried to strike a balance. There’s portly cop, but even he looks proportional, as often portly people do in comics or on TV, even. If I have the librarian Nerd gets with, for instance, be large, there is the fact that it will draw more attention to what I’m doing and perhaps assign intentions that aren’t there, pulling you out of the story, rather than if I go with the typical “everyone is beautiful!” facade and just lament it for what it is, but let the story move on.
It’s a tough line to walk, and I’m frustrated that I have no real answers as to what should or should not be, but I feel okay in it being what it is, in that I’ve addressed and looked at that concern personally, and I know in my heart that my intention is not to say that beauty is the ideal and needs to be emphasized (nor does the story mean to say that), but more that I’m deferring to a trope so as not to pull people out of the narrative for my own personal soapbox, that being beautiful is not as important as substance. My duty to keeping you in the narrative outweighed the pratfall of idealizing bodies, which sadly is so customary it’s near rote.
It’s like movies. You can, perhaps, cast a woman without makeup and a guy with a potbelly in main roles, and it will be more realistic to life, but the audience, so conditioned to idealistic plastic people, will be so distracted by the fact that it’s not Leo and Kate that they may be pulled out of the story. It’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t. But it is NOT, importantly, unconsidered.
Bettie Page Municipal Library? LOL!
Best. Library. Ever.
Glad you dig it. Very glad. 🙂
Go Nerd, go!
This whole segment of the story is blowing me away. Be honest Neal, you promised Dexter that there would be some boobs in this story, didn’t you? This section of the story is to make up for a dearth of boobs in the earlier sections.
Quite the opposite, actually. We were both rather shy about it. With me, I was worried about estranging or exploiting women, and I was afraid of scaring off everybody.
But, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the confrontation of the self involves looking at our bodies, and that without that, and without a suitably nutty and intriguing device to segue into that, it WOULD be exploitative. Believe me, I thought about it a LOT, and almost cut it a number of times, but no bravery equals no progress, in my book. (He said, snug in the position of not having had anyone hand him is ass for the storyline.)
It also sets up a number of things for year three.
To be fair, though, I wrote this over a year ago, so I’ve known for some time it was coming, and talked it over with Dex way before it came to pass. Right now I’m on page 51 of year three, heh.
Honestly, I don’t think you have to be too worried about the storyline itself being exploitative. That everybody is going in to these encounters happily and willfully ‘makes’ it okay.
That said, everybody is mysteriously attractive, which could be construed as assigning worth, but I think that’s probably taking overanalysis too far.
That’s probably not overanalysis. We did talk about it. In the end I had to weigh the fact that people tend to go into things looking for idealized people as a standard against the fact that people (myself included) want reality in depiction where possible. We tried to strike a balance. There’s portly cop, but even he looks proportional, as often portly people do in comics or on TV, even. If I have the librarian Nerd gets with, for instance, be large, there is the fact that it will draw more attention to what I’m doing and perhaps assign intentions that aren’t there, pulling you out of the story, rather than if I go with the typical “everyone is beautiful!” facade and just lament it for what it is, but let the story move on.
It’s a tough line to walk, and I’m frustrated that I have no real answers as to what should or should not be, but I feel okay in it being what it is, in that I’ve addressed and looked at that concern personally, and I know in my heart that my intention is not to say that beauty is the ideal and needs to be emphasized (nor does the story mean to say that), but more that I’m deferring to a trope so as not to pull people out of the narrative for my own personal soapbox, that being beautiful is not as important as substance. My duty to keeping you in the narrative outweighed the pratfall of idealizing bodies, which sadly is so customary it’s near rote.
It’s like movies. You can, perhaps, cast a woman without makeup and a guy with a potbelly in main roles, and it will be more realistic to life, but the audience, so conditioned to idealistic plastic people, will be so distracted by the fact that it’s not Leo and Kate that they may be pulled out of the story. It’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t. But it is NOT, importantly, unconsidered.
In case you can’t tell, I overthought this, heh.
And it’s all the better for it, in my opinion.
Nerd said it correctly, but you misspelled it? LOL
Oh, man! GREAT catch! Fixing now.
That’s a lady-person Hank’s with, right?
So goes my theory of HankxLeo >_>
To quote Urkut from House of Cards (and I may be butchering that name spelling): You might say that, but I couldn’t POSSIBLY comment.
There are surprises and twists aplenty coming.
I do love some House of Cards quoting.
Also with you Neal I always expect a twist.
It’s okay Rika, if my “they’re all bisexual” theory holds, then Hank can make out with the random lady AND Leo.
Let’s keep our fingers crossed–our ‘ship hasn’t sunk yet, lol.
I do love that Cura now has a fandom with shippers for relationships.
That makes two of us… especially since the relationships woven into the story will be complex and surprising, I hope.