(no subject)

[katallison]

nifra_idril has a wonderfully smart entry about Vecchio and Fraser, how well they work as friends, and how much Fraser would need to have a friend who doesn't see him in a sexual light. And I really dig that, because -- I mean, with Kowalski, that erotic vibe is right there from the get-go, they're flirting right off the bat, and that's hot, and it's cool, but it -- hrm. It makes it easy to miss those parts of Fraser that (to my mind) want and need the kind of distance that's possible within friendship. Vecchio allows him some boundaries--*reinforces* those boundaries, even, in some ways--while Kowalski is in no sense a boundary respecter. His galvanic, white-hot, lava-spewing quality is part of what draws a lot of us to Kowalski, sure -- but it would be scary in some ways too, to have in a relationship. And it makes it easy for us as writers to go straight to the smokin' hot sex, while eliding the difficulties of maintaining boundaries within an intimate relationship, which I think is something that would matter to Fraser.

I find myself thinking that *friendship* is harder to write than passionate erotic connection, maybe, just as happy marriage is harder to write than angsty breakup. I mean, sure, slash is all about finding the erotic possibilities within male friendships, male emotional connections, and actualizing them in physical sexual connections. And there is for sure an erotic vibe of sorts between Fraser and Vecchio -- that *ping* of attraction between matter and antimatter, the familiar self and the strange, alien *other.* But the real beauty of Fraser/Vecchio (to me, I mean, in my own conceptualization) is that it *doesn't* get actualized in any overt way, that it shimmers and glimmers and then is backed away from, as the two of them see their differences and take their different paths. The friendship is always there, and it's stronger, in a way, because they won't ever entirely meet each other's needs. There's always that gulf, that respect for the integrity their differences, the sort of formality of their standard jibes and snarks and the roles that they play with each other. They had to *create* their connection, it wasn't just a matter of hormones and passion, and the ease that it acquires with time is a product of ... um, effort, or accommodation, or learning, it's not click-spark-*boom*. And I dig that, but ... garrgh. I need to somehow get this in a story, I'm not making much sense trying to explain it.

And in other matters, I'm sad today because due to RL vexations I've had to cancel out on a planned fannish get-together this weekend. *le sigh* I shall, perhaps, get some writing done instead, and take care of RL business, and be wistful, and hope that my buddies are having a fabulous time, even though I can't be there.

Comments

[laurashapiro.livejournal.com]

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?

::hopes devoutly for more of such fic::