I'm sure you're shocked, but I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with you (and most of your friends, it appears), that Fraser/Vecchio is not click-spark-*boom*. I'm sure many, many F/K fans enjoy the F/V friendship as merely friendship and find little or no erotic vibe in it.
Doesn't mean it's not there.
Fraser is a different person when he first comes to Chicago than he is when he meets RayK. Doesn't it stand to reason that that person would flirt, vibe, ping, and *boom* differently than the man he becomes a few years later?
I submit that there's plenty of pinging and booming going on in F/V, but the dynamic (as I see it) has always been beautifully defined in the shockingly unsubtle metaphor of the closet that one of them is always dragging the other off to. The closet, where the whispered conversations happen. In the dark. Where no one can see you.
I believe in and wrote a deeply closeted Vecchio, and a Fraser willing to follow him there (against many of his own inclinations) because he saw the prudence of it, given the circumstances. My belief in Vecchio as a man deeply ambivalent about his sexuality, a mostly-het guy who fears his attraction for men because it might make him weak or make other people disrespect him, is pretty near unshakeable, and to those who see him as unswayably straight, my argument is always that he is a man who protests too much, a man who overcompensates in order to throw others off the scent, and a man who is clearly head-over-heels in love with Fraser almost from the moment they meet.
Explain away leaping up from your hospital bed in a neck brace to fly to another country to give a clue to a man you've known a matter of hours, if you can. (:
None of this is meant to disparage your fine analysis of the Fraser/Vecchio friendship, and the richness it offers. There's plenty to love there, whether you see F/V as platonic or not. But the statement that this connection "doesn't get actualized in any overt way" is, I think, not totally accurate.
Besides, isn't Fraser's journey that much more interesting if he's had an erotic relationship with *both* Rays?
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branchandroot
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-13 04:38 pm (UTC)Doesn't mean it's not there.
Fraser is a different person when he first comes to Chicago than he is when he meets RayK. Doesn't it stand to reason that that person would flirt, vibe, ping, and *boom* differently than the man he becomes a few years later?
I submit that there's plenty of pinging and booming going on in F/V, but the dynamic (as I see it) has always been beautifully defined in the shockingly unsubtle metaphor of the closet that one of them is always dragging the other off to. The closet, where the whispered conversations happen. In the dark. Where no one can see you.
I believe in and wrote a deeply closeted Vecchio, and a Fraser willing to follow him there (against many of his own inclinations) because he saw the prudence of it, given the circumstances. My belief in Vecchio as a man deeply ambivalent about his sexuality, a mostly-het guy who fears his attraction for men because it might make him weak or make other people disrespect him, is pretty near unshakeable, and to those who see him as unswayably straight, my argument is always that he is a man who protests too much, a man who overcompensates in order to throw others off the scent, and a man who is clearly head-over-heels in love with Fraser almost from the moment they meet.
Explain away leaping up from your hospital bed in a neck brace to fly to another country to give a clue to a man you've known a matter of hours, if you can. (:
None of this is meant to disparage your fine analysis of the Fraser/Vecchio friendship, and the richness it offers. There's plenty to love there, whether you see F/V as platonic or not. But the statement that this connection "doesn't get actualized in any overt way" is, I think, not totally accurate.
Besides, isn't Fraser's journey that much more interesting if he's had an erotic relationship with *both* Rays?
::hopes devoutly for more of such fic::