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I don't like pity threesomes.
I don't like pity threesomes.
It's funny because I used to be all over anything that was supposed to be a threesome. Alpha males Wufei and Heero are competing for Duo's sweet uke ass? Well, they ought to just share, Duo is worth it. Sakura isn't such a bad person? Sasuke and Naruto can let her join in.
I don't like it anymore.
I like "Male 1 and Male 2 have awesome, intense interaction that throws sparks everywhere! Hot!". I don't like it when it's combined with "Male 2 is canonly in love with a girl, even though he shows less intensity or determination toward her than toward Male 1 and that's less interesting to watch/write to me" (the lack of interest comes through in the fic!) or with "Male 2 has a canon girlfriend who is a pretty nice person and they seem pretty steady and committed as a couple so breaking it off for the sake of hooking them up with someone else means dilemmas -- likely Female 1 being painted as a bitch or their relationship as wrong somehow, or Male 2 looking like a heartless/fickle/heartbreaking asshole -- so that means I can't break them off!"
No, actually, I like it -- as a basis. A starting point. Something to progress away from.
There's kink threesome stories where all that really matters is the porny hotness, not the repercussions, and mary-sue stories where B and C compromising because having half of A is so much better than nothing and totally worth it only adds to the "yes, A *IS* that awesome" which is the biggest appeal of the story in the first place. They're not supposed to be convincing as to how stable the arrangement would realistically be.
Then there's the stories where I'm not sure why there's a threesome at all. Not that a threesome needs a better justification to be added to a plotty fic than any other kind of pet ship ("I'm the writer and I enjoy it, thanks" is good enough), but sometimes it's a fic where I'm *told* all three characters enjoy deep, important bonds, but the narrative impact/importance/depth is all placed on one of them... and then I start thinking, except for the porn this character could be a good friend of the couple and nothing would really change. Save that one or both of the other characters would have had to come out and say "sorry, I moved on."
I wish stories would just go with either other facets of polyamory then -- "I do not feel sexual attraction or romantic love for you but I understand that the person I love *does*, so let's be friends -- or at least treat each other with respect -- and agree on a way to share which will work best for everyone", for example -- or that they would go with the more painful but smarter choice of, yes, choosing one pairing and cutting the other side of the triangle loose.
It doesn't make a character inherently evil to have to reject people. And from a purely writer's craft point of view it injects some layers into the characters, something more nuanced than "omg if he broke her heart then he'd be a piece of shit, no way I can write about him as a good person anymore, so this must not happen!". It's hard and it's painful to have to inflict pain, but being unable to say "I like you; I like B more" and letting them believe otherwise is not all that kind, it's closer to cowardly. Most of the time it's not the author's intent to put out that kind of message, to make it clear that character A has a preference, but it seems to be the author's feeling because it's what the subtext keeps saying. "I like you a lot, no really, so now since I said it I'm going to spend a dozen chapters obsessing about B and it'll still come off as balanced."
I want stories that make me believe "I'm in love with you both and it's tearing me apart to think I might have to choose." Hell, I even want stories where someone WILL come out and say "I love B more strongly than I love you/if I have to choose it'll be B, but I still love you" and C will be "well, I'm okay with being your secondary relationship, because for X reason (I also have a primary relationship elsewhere; I'm not placing romance as my n°1 means of fulfillment, that's my job/my hobby/my family; I'm not that strongly romantic/social; ...) this is enough for my emotional needs."
I dislike reading about love triangles being solved by one of the sympathetic choices "losing" (urgh) or being rejected (ouch), but I sure hate it less than thinking, as I read a story, "oh god, none of them is fulfilled here, they're all settling for half their beloved's heart and living day-in day-out with the wearying thought that they're not enough or being taken for granted. This is going to end in tears and emotional exhaustion a couple years down the road." Or worse, "what an asshole A is being, all happy because he can have his cake and eat it too, while his two loved ones compromise with each other for his sake."
I hate reading a fic and thinking "character C is only onboard the hotsexy train because the author seems to think it's sufficient for C to be taken in because A and B like that person and find them fuckable, even though their most interesting, character-defining, plot-moving interaction consistently happens with each other." It's like, okay, you convinced me you LIKE person three, maybe even that you LOVE them, but are you in *love* with them?
More importantly, is it even plot-relevant? Is it more than the narrative giving lip service to the threesome idea while a pattern forms that shows otherwise? Is Zack being used as a shallower, kinky facilitator for the harder-to-start yet more interesting, deeper, more *real* interaction between Cloud and Sephiroth? Is Wufei tacked on to the Heero/Duo OTP because he's another hot Asian boy and he hasn't got any yaoi ship of his own amongst his peers? It's that disconnect, I think, which is the biggest issue I take with pity threesomes.
---
By this rant, I'm not saying somehow I'm magical and my fics are exempt from that mindset and therefore I can sit on my chair and judge other writers. Walking the Tightrope was a clumsy, early attempt at dealing with that issue -- by making Wufei and Heero, already in love with Duo but only tolerating each other, discover and fall in love with each other as well. In doing that, Duo himself more or less fell by the wayside and was mostly there as a prop and an excuse for Wufei and Heero to interact. When I started writing Teamwork it was mostly because I was in love with narusasu but still in the flush of my "oh how could i have been so awful to Sakura, i'm gonna make it up to her by allowing her to join in on the hotness" shame. (woohoo the asuka was a sakura-hating yaoi twit in her early days.) After that I was so busy trying to build her bonds with the boys that I forgot to build their bonds with each other, so now it's gone from Sakura being a pity fuck while the boys had the real tension to the boys tolerating each other because they don't know who got her pregnant. Just because it's in my fics as well doesn't mean it's a trend I hate less in there. Teamwork, at least, is still in progress, so it's still an imperfect relationship, a situation that can be fixed.
---
But well... I don't like pity threesomes. I'm willing to be convinced that this or that poly ship is truly a ship, a viable relationship, with love and nookie and all those good things, guys. I am soooo willing to be convinced. It's just...
Don't just tell me that they're in love, that they're solid. Show me. Show me the specific dynamics and the way they play off each other and the pitfalls and how they're unique and how they're working as an item. I think that's an issue that shows up everywhere, and with the same solution too.
... and I tried to explain this post to a friend and managed to summarize the whole thing in two lines WHY DID I TYPE SO MANY WORDS FOR THIS. DX
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askerian: you know, the stories where A and B have awesome interaction and C mostly seems to be there because they like him/her okay and cutting them out would seem sexist/mean
askerian: like being second best or taken for granted and as a second class citizen in your relationship is better than being broken up with
It's funny because I used to be all over anything that was supposed to be a threesome. Alpha males Wufei and Heero are competing for Duo's sweet uke ass? Well, they ought to just share, Duo is worth it. Sakura isn't such a bad person? Sasuke and Naruto can let her join in.
I don't like it anymore.
I like "Male 1 and Male 2 have awesome, intense interaction that throws sparks everywhere! Hot!". I don't like it when it's combined with "Male 2 is canonly in love with a girl, even though he shows less intensity or determination toward her than toward Male 1 and that's less interesting to watch/write to me" (the lack of interest comes through in the fic!) or with "Male 2 has a canon girlfriend who is a pretty nice person and they seem pretty steady and committed as a couple so breaking it off for the sake of hooking them up with someone else means dilemmas -- likely Female 1 being painted as a bitch or their relationship as wrong somehow, or Male 2 looking like a heartless/fickle/heartbreaking asshole -- so that means I can't break them off!"
No, actually, I like it -- as a basis. A starting point. Something to progress away from.
There's kink threesome stories where all that really matters is the porny hotness, not the repercussions, and mary-sue stories where B and C compromising because having half of A is so much better than nothing and totally worth it only adds to the "yes, A *IS* that awesome" which is the biggest appeal of the story in the first place. They're not supposed to be convincing as to how stable the arrangement would realistically be.
Then there's the stories where I'm not sure why there's a threesome at all. Not that a threesome needs a better justification to be added to a plotty fic than any other kind of pet ship ("I'm the writer and I enjoy it, thanks" is good enough), but sometimes it's a fic where I'm *told* all three characters enjoy deep, important bonds, but the narrative impact/importance/depth is all placed on one of them... and then I start thinking, except for the porn this character could be a good friend of the couple and nothing would really change. Save that one or both of the other characters would have had to come out and say "sorry, I moved on."
I wish stories would just go with either other facets of polyamory then -- "I do not feel sexual attraction or romantic love for you but I understand that the person I love *does*, so let's be friends -- or at least treat each other with respect -- and agree on a way to share which will work best for everyone", for example -- or that they would go with the more painful but smarter choice of, yes, choosing one pairing and cutting the other side of the triangle loose.
It doesn't make a character inherently evil to have to reject people. And from a purely writer's craft point of view it injects some layers into the characters, something more nuanced than "omg if he broke her heart then he'd be a piece of shit, no way I can write about him as a good person anymore, so this must not happen!". It's hard and it's painful to have to inflict pain, but being unable to say "I like you; I like B more" and letting them believe otherwise is not all that kind, it's closer to cowardly. Most of the time it's not the author's intent to put out that kind of message, to make it clear that character A has a preference, but it seems to be the author's feeling because it's what the subtext keeps saying. "I like you a lot, no really, so now since I said it I'm going to spend a dozen chapters obsessing about B and it'll still come off as balanced."
I want stories that make me believe "I'm in love with you both and it's tearing me apart to think I might have to choose." Hell, I even want stories where someone WILL come out and say "I love B more strongly than I love you/if I have to choose it'll be B, but I still love you" and C will be "well, I'm okay with being your secondary relationship, because for X reason (I also have a primary relationship elsewhere; I'm not placing romance as my n°1 means of fulfillment, that's my job/my hobby/my family; I'm not that strongly romantic/social; ...) this is enough for my emotional needs."
I dislike reading about love triangles being solved by one of the sympathetic choices "losing" (urgh) or being rejected (ouch), but I sure hate it less than thinking, as I read a story, "oh god, none of them is fulfilled here, they're all settling for half their beloved's heart and living day-in day-out with the wearying thought that they're not enough or being taken for granted. This is going to end in tears and emotional exhaustion a couple years down the road." Or worse, "what an asshole A is being, all happy because he can have his cake and eat it too, while his two loved ones compromise with each other for his sake."
I hate reading a fic and thinking "character C is only onboard the hotsexy train because the author seems to think it's sufficient for C to be taken in because A and B like that person and find them fuckable, even though their most interesting, character-defining, plot-moving interaction consistently happens with each other." It's like, okay, you convinced me you LIKE person three, maybe even that you LOVE them, but are you in *love* with them?
More importantly, is it even plot-relevant? Is it more than the narrative giving lip service to the threesome idea while a pattern forms that shows otherwise? Is Zack being used as a shallower, kinky facilitator for the harder-to-start yet more interesting, deeper, more *real* interaction between Cloud and Sephiroth? Is Wufei tacked on to the Heero/Duo OTP because he's another hot Asian boy and he hasn't got any yaoi ship of his own amongst his peers? It's that disconnect, I think, which is the biggest issue I take with pity threesomes.
---
By this rant, I'm not saying somehow I'm magical and my fics are exempt from that mindset and therefore I can sit on my chair and judge other writers. Walking the Tightrope was a clumsy, early attempt at dealing with that issue -- by making Wufei and Heero, already in love with Duo but only tolerating each other, discover and fall in love with each other as well. In doing that, Duo himself more or less fell by the wayside and was mostly there as a prop and an excuse for Wufei and Heero to interact. When I started writing Teamwork it was mostly because I was in love with narusasu but still in the flush of my "oh how could i have been so awful to Sakura, i'm gonna make it up to her by allowing her to join in on the hotness" shame. (woohoo the asuka was a sakura-hating yaoi twit in her early days.) After that I was so busy trying to build her bonds with the boys that I forgot to build their bonds with each other, so now it's gone from Sakura being a pity fuck while the boys had the real tension to the boys tolerating each other because they don't know who got her pregnant. Just because it's in my fics as well doesn't mean it's a trend I hate less in there. Teamwork, at least, is still in progress, so it's still an imperfect relationship, a situation that can be fixed.
---
But well... I don't like pity threesomes. I'm willing to be convinced that this or that poly ship is truly a ship, a viable relationship, with love and nookie and all those good things, guys. I am soooo willing to be convinced. It's just...
Don't just tell me that they're in love, that they're solid. Show me. Show me the specific dynamics and the way they play off each other and the pitfalls and how they're unique and how they're working as an item. I think that's an issue that shows up everywhere, and with the same solution too.
... and I tried to explain this post to a friend and managed to summarize the whole thing in two lines WHY DID I TYPE SO MANY WORDS FOR THIS. DX
askerian: you know, the stories where A and B have awesome interaction and C mostly seems to be there because they like him/her okay and cutting them out would seem sexist/meanaskerian: like being second best or taken for granted and as a second class citizen in your relationship is better than being broken up with
no subject
Each of the issues you bring up - all of them can work really well if they are acknowledged in the fic and made a part of the story, rather than just left to the side as if the author is hoping the reader will ignore them and be distracted by the sexy.
Difficult relationships are realistic. Just because communication and equality/fairness is the poly ideal, it doesn't always mean it will be there. So maybe A is being an ass. Maybe B and C are fucking A cause of pity - if a writer acknowledges it, and the characters acknowledge it, it can make good fic and can even be hot (in that same way that fucked up twisted itasasu is hot.) But like you say, please don't tell me everything is shiny, when everything is clearly not.