Fanfiction and "Feminizing" My Media Prosumption

After a not-so-restful Winter break and a severely stressful deadline season, my recent piece on The Simpsons has signalled (somewhat) my return to posting incessant nonsense. Over that Winter break though, I managed to produce something I have very conflicting opinions about: my first ever piece of fanfiction. I'm, of course, familiar with Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way, but this was really my first sincere engagement with fanfiction. It was a part of a wider project, one that I want to take the time to discuss a little: my personal attempt to disrupt the ways I engage with texts as a fan.

Prompting this is the increasingly widespread sentiment that women, in fan communities, often have to assimilate to male-dominated paradigms and spaces. This is the idea that women, in entry to fandom, are not only changing the products they consume (transitioning to needlessly male-dominated franchises and genres, such as Sci-Fi or Superhero, from the likewise needlessly female-dominated franchises, such as Romance stories or Young Adult fiction), but the way they produce and give back to fan communities. Engaging with this idea as a male prosumer (producer/consumer) turned into a project where I've sought to perform the inverse. Where women are expected to transition from feminine space to masculine ones, I, as a man, would transition from masculine to feminine. The prime avenue for this has been in finally exploring the world of fanfiction, no longer disregarding it as a petulant, juvenile thing (an outdated sentiment held over from my experiences as a teenager engaged with fandom).

You can read the fanfiction here. Frankly, the quality of the story isn't something I'm particularly happy with. I find capturing the voice of someone else's characters remains incredibly difficult, regardless of how much time you've spent immersed in the fictions they're from. It's kind of a punishing sensation, as it never really reflects the research you've done to finish your writing and, in that sense, it's far more of a challenging instance of fanwork than what is purported as its masculine equivalent: the fan theory. Where fanfiction creates new stories, the fan theory intends to further explain or develop existing stories; yet, the word "theory" belies its inherently fictional nature. Whilst these theories are derived from the existing fiction the fan is engaged with, these fictional facts, truths and histories experience much the same kind of mutation as the characters of fanfictions do.

This isn't to say that either fiction or theory are necessarily masculine/feminine pursuits, but rather this is meant to elucidate the gatekeeping that occurs around the conventionally masculine spaces of fandom compared to the relatively more open feminine spaces. Fanfiction community is certainly a (cyber)space which emerged in response to the gendered politics of masculine fandom; the splits of these communities can be traced back to the ideas of geek culture as a sphere inherently for men. Can we not say that the fan theory, as masculine counter-part to the feminine fanfiction, is rooted in this gatekeeping? It abandons character and emotional intuition for methodical, in-depth knowledge of lore, demanding a almost ideological purity from its participants. The discord between supposed feminine and masculine fan spaces can be seen through the response to Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Particularly, in its final duel between (female) protagonist Rey and antagonist Kylo Ren.

The comments section of that video is representative of the majority male response. Masculine fandom seems generally more focused on the laws of the storyworld: Kylo receives training in the magic system, this training allows for better skills with the lightsaber and, therefore, he should not lose to the comparatively untrained Rey. The response of feminine fandom was different,  generally more focused on character: Kylo is at a disadvantage in the duel due to some post-patricide emotional turmoil and, therefore, has to lose to the comparatively focused, survivor Rey.

(On Star Wars, is it not telling that the male response to their disappointment in Star Wars: The Last Jedi was to seek funding for someone else to produce their fanfiction ideas? There is such a disdain for feminine elements of fandom, both in its texts and its practices, that the majority of male fans can't even conceive of engaging with the conventionally feminine spaces.)

So, in my work, one thing I was really keen on doing was to move my engagement away from feats, power levels and so on, instead taking a look at emotional, character-driven conflict. I felt it would be counter-intuitive to engage with the fanfiction space and not with its sentiment. Keeping in mind that I don't think I did a particularly good enough job on it, my fanfiction was primarily concerned with what happens to someone's relationship when their preferred method of communication is taken away from them (in that I was writing in response to a superhero text, that method was telepathy).

Something I'm particularly interested in is what I call Critical Fanfiction. Simply, fanfiction that works to change elements of its mothership text to pursue a author/audience resolution. On one level, sure, this is a pretty arbitrary and meaningless term. Most fanfiction serves as this: a fan may prefer Lord of the Rings if it was set in a coffee shop or if it had a crossover with the Game of Thrones franchise, for example. But there are deeper questions to be asked when the fanfiction goes beyond a fan's wish fulfilment and starts to resemble a form of fictionalised criticism of the text. When does slash fiction cease to be fantasy and morph into a critique of the author's heteronormative writing? When does the submissive reader morph into a critical one, and what does it say that this transformation occurs within the immersion of the text itself? A personal favourite discovery of mine has been the Harry Potter Becomes A Communist fanwork; is this not valuable as a response to the politics of J.K. Rowling and the ideas she injected into the franchise?

In our era of ubiquitous communication, this is reaching new, more torrid depths. Where the author once responded to fanfiction with hefty lawsuits, the author is now responding directly to criticism through social media, seeking to retroactively assert their own authorial primacy. Fanfiction is, I think, then a useful tool not merely to interrogate and view fan cultures and communities, but as an act with merit itself. It is caught in battles both between reader and author and between segmented communities. Moving between these masculine/feminine communities and being critical of the distinctions and separations can not only help transform fandom away from its toxicity, but could also see the return of fan praxis. Not the fan activism that seeks to pressure production companies into providing them with more content to consume, but an actual grassroots reclamation of intellectual labour and property. This, and fan studies/IP in general, is something I want to write about in more depth at a later date.

Briefly, I want to return to my place in this process though (and I do consider it an ongoing process). To the end of disrupting my gendered media consumption/participation, tonight I intend to finally sit down and watch Twilight. From its release and time in the spotlight to its eventual fading away, I participated in the vitriolic male response that held it in such disdain without ever seeing it. I think it's wrong to suggest this solely came from a disregard for media texts intended for young women (certainly, women themselves partook in Twilight-bashing), but I also think it's wrong to overlook the significance of it (Lindsay Ellis did a great video on this that you can see here). Do I expect to like it? Not particularly. I'm a long-time Buffyverse fan and have a very specific imagination when it comes to vampires because of that. Nevertheless, it will be valuable to finally form my own organic opinion about it and be able to move somewhat away from the reactionary frameworks that have oft clouded my perspectives as someone who at least pretends to engage with media critically.

"Homer Loves Mindy": Desire At A Distance In "The Last Temptation of Homer"

Keeping in the spirit of working through heady, philosophical topics through episodes of The Simpsons, I want to analyse the fifth episode of season nine, "The Last Temptation of Homer" through Lacanian desire. The character of Mindy Simmons, a new employee at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant (voiced by Michelle Pfeiffer), performs as such desire for Homer; threatening to disrupt his model nuclear family and his marriage with Marge. Since Lacan's writings on desire is quite a hefty topic and I envision this post to be on the shorter side, I want to look particularly at how Mindy, as the object of Homer's desire, exhibits Lacan's objet petit a.

Whilst the episode's B-Plot sees Bart transition from cool kid to bullied nerd because of some over-zealous private practitioners, the A-Plot of "The Last Temptation of Homer" launches from a safety mishap in the Nuclear Plant. This inciting incident, caused by a masculine disregard for safety protocol, characterises working at the plant as a sort of 'Men's Club'; setting the stage for Mindy Simmon's hiring and her intrusion on the masculine space. Homer, Lenny and Carl gather to lament their incoming castration, fearing that the arrival of a singular female worker will so totally disrupt their workplace atmosphere that certain masculine freedoms will be removed from them (be it taking off their pants, spitting on the floor or peeing in the water fountain). That male anxiety is soon abetted by her seamless integration into the workplace, but whilst the rest of his co-workers move on quick from this new element, Homer is smitten. For him, his encounter with Mindy is a moment of pure desire upon first sight and it is accompanied by humorous hallucinations.

"Hey, Homer, you're hallucinating again!" "Not a good sign."

The hallucinations (and later in the episode, dreams) are important to how the episode communicates Homer's desire for Mindy. It is within them that we see what the objet petit a is: an intangible, extra-natural quality that is the actual point of what we desire. Caviar, for example, is not desirable to us because of its intrinsic qualities, how it looks, how it smells, how it tastes, but is instead only desirable because of the multitudes of meanings that its physical form belies: if you eat caviar, you will have social status, you will be a connoisseur, a person of taste and so on. The objet petit a, though, is an entity that is permanently absent. In Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, when discussing the Freudian character of the butcher's wife, who tells her husband that whilst she loves caviar, he must never buy it for her, Lacan wrote:

“You love mutton stew. You’re not sure you desire it. Take the experience of the beautiful butcher’s wife. She loves caviar, but she doesn’t want any. That’s why she desires it.” (1998: 249)

Importantly, the objet petit a does not actually exist. This is why when we finally attain what we desire it loses the metaphysical, theological quality, the objet petit a, which made what we desired desirable in the first place. Homer's hallucinations represent the fantastical excess of the objet petit a: his first feelings of desire towards Mindy are not grounded in material reality, but are rather concerned with such untraceable, intangible qualities.

"Ain't you never seen a naked chick riding a clam before?"

Later in the episode, an interjecting dream sequence depicts Homer's Guardian Angel (who takes the form of Colonel Klink from Hogan's Heroes) showing the difference between the world where he stays with Marge and the world where he instead pursues a relationship with Mindy. Rather than this being a undesirable world though, it is quite the opposite. Not only are Homer and Mindy together, rich and happy, but Marge is the President of the United States, and her "approval rate is soaring". Here we see Homer's unconscious fantasy, that his affair would not only bring him a selfish, short-term happiness, but long-term happiness for himself, Mindy and Marge. But it is a fantasy of which there must be no attempt at realisation. Homer's desire for Mindy is based on the idea that his life, and that lives around him, would improve. To bring that to reality would only expose his desire as a farce, as reality can never live up to the fantasy.

 "Think unsexy thoughts. Think unsexy thoughts."

One of the great strengths of this episode is how Mindy is never shown to be some kind of disruptive, evil woman, a seductress with the explicit aim of destroying the nuclear family; she's given a nice bit of humanity. Meanwhile Marge has very little presence in the episode and even in the dream sequence exposing her potential, alternate life as President, she's only heard from off-screen. Unlike an episode like "Colonel Homer" (S3E20), where a conflict between Homer/Marge is clearly apparent, the story here is not a story about how awful Homer's life is and how he needs an outlet to assuage his mid-life crisis, but rather a story that is concerned with those tumultuous, sudden moments of desire that simultaneously manage to feel essential to our being and completely alien from us.

In Lacan's formulation, the act of desire is not a desire for just one thing (be it a person, food or whatever item you may desire), but is always a desire for desire itself. It's a wholesome sight when Homer returns to Marge at the episode's end and the relief an audience feels is made all the more tangible by how close it seemed Homer had come to pursuing a life with Mindy, instead of persisting with his marriage. Yet, can we not say that this was actually the true calamity? In that, were he to pursue his relationship with Mindy, he would realise she lacks that objet petit a and would realise that his fantasy did not exist in reality. That he returned to Marge has meant that, whilst he ostensibly loves his wife, he has also liberated himself to fantasise about Mindy ad infinitum. In this sense, Homer doesn't want what he thinks he wants, rather he wants to sustain the very act of wanting. By returning to Marge, he frees himself up to desire and fantasise about Mindy with no fear of reprisal. That is, on one level, he no longer has to concern himself with the deterioration of his marriage because of Mindy, but, further, his decision to keep his object of desire at a distance means that he never has to worry about the destructive convergence of his fantasy and reality. By not committing adultery on that one night, Homer frees himself to wander, lust and cheat on Marge every night, in his dreams and unconscious fantasies.

As a final point, I'd look to the scene where Homer and Mindy are eating dinner together at a fancy, romantic Chinese restaurant called Madame Chao's. After dinner, Homer opens a fortune cookie, it read: "You will find happiness with a new love".

"Hey, we're out of these "New Love" cookies." "Well, open up the "Stick With Your Wife" barrel."

This is a notion that Lacan would reject. Rather, we find happiness within our very distance from the objects we believe will make us happy. Desire is a Sisyphean phenomenon where the actual attainment of what we desire is one of life's most morose experiences. That Homer rejects the cookie's advice is telling; we will not find happiness with a new love.


Lacan, J. (1998). The four fundamental concepts of psycho-analysis. London: Vintage.

The Amber Burning

I don’t know why I’m writing this, anyone who reads this is going to think I’m insane. Maybe I am. Damn it. So I’m just going to write it down. Because if I don’t I’m pretty sure it’s going to violently burst out my head. I need this out my brain.

So, first, I guess I should say writing isn’t my strong suit. I kind of hate it actually. How full of yourself do you have to be to just sit and write? It’s all vile and conceited really, when you get down to it. I like reading though. And I like reading about wizards. Everyone has an opinion on wizards. I don’t care. I like wizards.

I’ve been trying to die since I was 13. But I’ve always been too afraid. And I always found that kind of funny. I don’t want to live, I don’t want to die, I’m caught in some purgatory between them, never really trying too hard at doing either. Anyway, between living and dying, there are a few strange quirks you pick up along the way. When I was 15, long after I had broken a light trying to hang myself with my school tie but not so long after I’d tried cutting myself and got scared from all the blood, I started walking to the train station. One day I was going to throw myself on those tracks. Not in front of a passenger train, but one of those massive freight trains that speed right through the station and look like they couldn’t stop even if they wanted to. But, of course, that’s just a bit too terrifying. A few steps off the platform and I’m gone. I don’t know why being nothing scares me but whatever little, worthless, shit I count for always kept my feet on the station and my head from being turned into bloody pulp.

Still, I started to go to the train station. Every day, eventually. And I’d just stand there, watching the trains rush by. After a few weeks, I started sitting instead. Making judgy comments to myself about the commuters. And then some weeks after that, I started bringing my books. It was Autumn, in the afternoon, and I was sat reading. I’d not looked up at the trains in some time, I was somewhere far, far away from them. But, when I wasn’t looking, a train had pulled in. Off its passengers came, though I saw none of them except for one old man. He sat next to me and I realised something very strange. I’m 19 now. This man must have been in his 70s. Possibly older. But there was a strange kinship between us. Hell, he looked like me. But, with the twisted distortions of time, I realised it was yet another one of the universe’s mockeries. Every facet of my face that I hated, each one that I had pored over with disgust in the mirror, was amplified here tenfold on the face of a haggard, decrepit old man. He was me, if my chin had disappeared far into my neck, if my hair was thin and straggly, grey instead of black, and if my nose had never stopped growing.

We were sat together for a while, I soon returned to the land of wizards (though it had now lost some of its escapist appeal); he just sat. We said nothing to each other. That was until the old man stood up suddenly and, glancing at my book, said, “Do you want to know how it ends?”

I met his eye, looked at him directly and said, “No.”

“Yeah, I never found out either.”

And then he just walked off. But I noticed the train he’d got off was still here. And the carriage door was still open. And I really can’t tell you what was going through my mind in that moment because, for some reason, I jumped on.

As soon as I was aboard, the doors closed. It was like I jumped in at the last second, but I got the feeling that if I hadn’t got on board it would have waited longer. The carriage was mostly empty, though I could spot some tops of heads. I found a nice window seat, on the left hand side, and the train started moving. I really had no idea where to. There were no trainline infographics and no driver announcing our next stop. Realising I’d left my book behind, I started to fiddle with the chair in front of me. Then, I fiddled with my hands. I soon realised that I had nothing to do but stare outside the window as the train left the station. It wasn’t until after about an hour, when we had long since abandoned the concrete signs of human living, that there was the first sign that this wasn’t just a ghost train. A message came up on the passenger information display. It simply read: “APPROACHING: THE AMBER BURNING”.  

It was the strangest thing. The train never stopped, it never pulled into any station, but the world outside my window seemed to transform. Over a dense forest, the sun came to the horizon; its orange rays melting the leaves on the trees, mixing their colours together like a paintbrush swiping through a freshly painted vista. I took a moment to take in the vision. And then I started crying. Emotion washed over me. It was the same sunset I’d seen a thousand times before, but, for some reason, right then, it was the single most beautiful sight of my life. It was everything I needed, the answer to every unanswerable question. So I cried and I didn’t try and stop it. I didn’t wipe the tears away and I didn’t hold them back. I can’t be certain, but I think everyone else in the carriage was crying too.

A tone came through the train intercom, jaunting the carriage back to reality. The world was normal again and we'd left that enchanted rift. But the air we were breathing was different. We'd taken some of the magic from that place away with us. We sat, silently basking in the experience we'd shared, for the rest of the journey.

The train started to slow down and, wherever we were, I knew it was my stop.

I stood between the carriages, awaiting whatever lay on the other side. I was caught again, not between life and death, but between trepidation and excitement. The fear I felt of what I could meet at my destination was matched only by my desire to see it. The train started to slow down and I prepared myself. The button on the door lit up. I pressed it. The doors opened and I saw… that it was the same platform where I’d gotten on? The book I’d left behind was in the same position, on the same page, on the bench where I was sat. The sun hadn't even set yet. I can’t explain it. But, when I stepped onto the platform, I felt an ache between my shoulders. It was like the weight had come back onto them and was pushing down twice as hard. I felt dejected and had half a mind to walk out in front of the tracks before the train left again. Until I heard an announcement come from inside the train:

“See you tomorrow, Ben.”

And my shoulders loosened a little bit.

Simpsonian Status Quo in "The Mysterious Voyage of Homer"

The status quo, and a story's return to it, is often lambasted as a curse. In serial storytelling, few things seem to aggravate a media literate audience than the knowledge that, after this episode or this comic book, the characters and story will reset to where they were before the story's most recent conflict. It's limited whole genres, like the superheroes who everyone knows will inevitably reset to their most popular version, blockbuster film franchises like Star Wars which couldn't move away from a status quo for fear of impacting merchandise sales and, most notably, it has limited television and the sitcom. The downfall of The Simpsons is often attributed to the second episode of season nine, "The Principal and the Pauper", citing that both its deviation from and return to status quo pushed the core fanbase too far. Yet, it is in the realm of television where we can also find the great storytelling potential of the status quo. Not merely a mechanism for ensuring a reliable, popular structure for an audience, the status quo can be used as an effective tool to further immerse audiences into a character's perspective.

And The Simpsons' greatest success in this field came only eight months before its presupposed downfall.

If someone was to bring up the ninth episode of The Simpsons' eighth season, "El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer (The Mysterious Voyage of Homer)", you would expect the conversation to diverge into discussions of its psychedelic, hallucination sequence. With a Johnny Cash guest appearance (as a talking-coyote-cum-spirit-guide), it's certainly the headline attraction of the episode and the most memorable feature on initial viewing. Yet, the imagery is mostly either tame or derivative. Where I find the true appeal of the episode is in the emotionally resonant core that reassesses the Homer/Marge coupling and the success in this renegotiation relates directly to how the story deals with status quo.

The episode's story concerns Homer's disillusionment with Marge after a "Guatemalan Insanity Pepper" puts him face-to-face with the idea that his wife may not necessarily be his soulmate (expressed via space coyote). So Homer's search for a true soulmate is the story's emotional centre where, specifically, he searches for one who has a "profound mystical understanding" of his Real self. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the conceptual Mirror Stage refers to the first time our infant selves see ourselves in the mirror and first understand ourselves as a whole individual. From there, we are caught perpetually distressed by the dissonance between the Imaginary self we outwardly portray and our unintelligible Real self. This is the conflict facing Homer, when he realises that Marge actually has no "profound mystical understanding" of him. If Marge doesn't understand him, then no one can and suddenly Homer is faced with bitter reality- that we are all fundamentally alone.

The early tensions of the episode are drawn from the status quo itself; Homer's reliance on beer is established as having previously embarrassed Marge and any semi-regular watcher of the show can attest to this. A flashback is included, but is wholly unnecessary; Homer the drunk is well known to us. There is no new rift put between them, only the exacerbation of this established one. When Marge allows Homer to go to the fateful Chilli Cook-Off, it is under the condition of him promising not to drink any beer. He sees this through, though not without challenge, to find Marge angry with him regardless. Unfortunately for him, misunderstanding's abound and Marge believed his Insanity Pepper trip to have been the result of drinking. To Marge, Homer has broken his promise. The audience is privy to this extra layer of misunderstanding, so when Marge tells her children why Homer isn't leaving the cook-off with the rest of the family, "Your father decided he'd prefer to come home in a taxi... Or a police car.", it particularly grates. 

Post-pepper Homer returns home and, now believing that he can't find it in Marge (his argument with her and their difference in record collections cement his doubts), begins his search for a soulmate elsewhere. This categorically fails. For a moment, his saviour seems to lie in the lonely lighthouse keeper "EARL". EARL, of course, turns out to be the Electronic Automatic Robotic Lighthouse, a machine no more capable of "profound mystical understanding" than any human being. So Homer is caught in an untenable, but ultimately relatable situation, finally exposed to the true loneliness of our individual selves and, for a moment, seems to understand that he truly cannot be known by anyone. Marge turns up, just in time, to prove herself as the soulmate after all and to assuage Homer's (and our own) fears.

Johnny Cash's most significant mark on popular culture: Homer's Space Coyote.

It's an enchanting moment, as Marge shows that she does in fact "know" Homer, by listing off the "important" things she knows about him. But, what, then, constitutes the "important" things? Marge refers to her knowledge of Homer's opinion on public transport, his preference to walking downhill and his love of blinking lights. More so than a profound knowledge of Homer's real self, Marge professes an understanding of his idiosyncrasies. Can we not say that the "important" things Marge remembers about Homer in the story's finale are really no more (or less) valuable than the "unimportant" ones Homer encounters earlier on? The distinction is drawn between Homer's taste in records and his love for blinking lights, but I'd say there's little functionary difference between them.

One of the truly haunting moments of Homer's pepper-induced hallucination, a reinforcement of the rift Homer is now feeling between himself and his supposed "soulmate". 

So, after an episode's worth of conflict and separation, Homer and Marge reunite. We return to the same Simpson family status quo at the end of "The Mysterious Voyage of Homer" as we do in "The Principal and the Pauper", but instead of aggravating the audience, this time the return moves us. We are grateful to return to the status quo. The episode's ending has been lambasted for its melodrama (and it's not wholly innocent from this), but it would be wrong to say that the emotion we feel at the episode's climax is manufactured or artificial. It's moving to watch Homer realise that Marge has some deep, transcendental knowledge of his true self, and it's moving because it is the fantasy which we all desire: the fantasy that someone can and will finally know us. More than that, it's an ode to the lives we already lead; the status quo of our own lives. Homer finds sanctity, clarity and fulfilment within the same family model that he was disillusioned with. Perhaps we are meant to do the same.

On one level then, Homer's return to the status quo is so easy to root for because of our own anxieties around our unknowable selves. We want to see Homer find his soulmate because it promises us that we also are capable of meeting someone with a "profound mystical understanding" of our Real selves. But, on another level, we can say that the resolution is so affecting because it not only reveals that the little, "skin-deep" differences are of no impediment to a successful relationship, but our lacking of the ability to understand each other is of no impediment either. And that, I believe, is the lesson to be taken from realising the loneliness of our individual selves. I cannot truly understand my Real self and, therefore, cannot expect any other individual to see through the Imaginary self I project and into my own reality.

Throughout this story, we are faced with our knowledge that Homer must return to Marge. The structure must be obeyed, the status quo must be restored. So the conflict of the story is directly concerned with this inevitable return to status quo and the tensions found within that. Why should Homer abet the return to his status quo if his world view, not only that Marge isn't his soulmate but that his true self is totally unknowable, has been flipped on its head? The inevitable return to status quo is on the minds of both audience and character and I think it is telling that an episode so concerned with status quo is also an episode concerned with married life.

It is worth noting that this usage of the status quo as an exploration of married life is not unique to this episode, it is seen in other lauded The Simpsons' stories, such as "The Last Temptation of Homer" (S5E09) and "Secrets of a Successful Marriage" (S5E22), but none quite reach the heights of Mysterious Voyage. That they don't tackle the fundamental rift between our selves and the unknowable nature of others is my suggestion as to why.

Perhaps we can argue that all further relationship problems Marge and Homer have in the series stems from the fact that they have never reconciled with this. They are perhaps doomed to an eternal cycle of believing and disavowing in their own profound, transcendental romance, until such a point where they break that cycle and declare that they can never be known in the way they desire (and change their behaviour because of it). But this matters little to how this particular episode's ending is so successful. We believe in the fantasy. We believe Marge can know Homer. Because we believe this, we can return to the status quo: a status quo treated with optimism and reverence. Here the status quo is left with no scratch or change, instead explored and addressed. Where status quo often creeps up like a phantom in a stories final moments to rob it of agency, "The Mysterious Voyage of Homer" allows the status quo its own narrative role and, in doing so, crafts a stronger episode.


That all being said, the episode does end with the Short-Shorts Song, so maybe I'm just overthinking it a bit.

Fantasy Story A

Imagine a castle. Tall, imposing and altogether fairytale, with colourful flags adorning each tower spire. It is unfortunate that we have visited this place on a thunderously miserable night. Rain strikes against an ornate window and behind it, you should imagine a King. Only a very sad King. With no beard, or round belly, or golden hair, but with dark, drab clothes and hair the colour of coal. He is resigned to his quarters, pointed against the window and brooding. He has this talent for brooding. A talent one can only acquire from years and years of practice. He takes  a glance to his side and lays his eyes on a small silver headpiece. It almost seems wrong to call it a crown. Crowns are golder, pointier, embellished with jewels and sometimes have a weird cushion bottom that I’m sure no one likes. Yet, crown it was and the burden of it was weighing heavy on our King’s mind. The thought of wearing it again was set to tear him apart, to cause him untold anguish and anxiety. He fell asleep in his chair soon after, but I’m sure it was a torturous, angst-ridden sleep.

You’ll be pleased to know the following morning was considerably more pleasant. The sun shone brightly through the King’s brooding window and woke him from solemn slumber. He dutifully put on that hated crown and moved himself towards the great hall. Today’s Kingly obligation was one of the most arduous. He had to attend his own party.

Walking past the portraits of his ancestors, each one of them a perfectly posed frame of the monarch and their partner, the King lamented the myth that had soured his childhood with false hopes and dreams. “An Unprecedented Era of Peace and Prosperity”. The family mantra would echo through his mind whenever he needed it least. According to the story, were his marriage to yield in a pure, unadulterated true love his kingdom would not only be peaceful and prosperous, but it would no longer be his kingdom. The promise is that on achieving true love, the monarchy would simply just fade away.

Load of bollocks obviously, but the King had tried absconding from a courtship party once and his mother tried to throw herself out the tallest tower. That’s the funny thing about family traditions. It doesn’t ever seem to matter how truthful or how useful they are. You just kind of get caught up with them, whether you want to or not. When the King at last entered the great hall, he did so with a sombre melodrama, and was met with the applause of local nobility. He was getting a reputation for eccentricity, but nobody really minds so long as you provide enough booze. Pleasantries and grand entrances complete, the only thing left was for the King to immerse himself in the party.

Now I’d like you to imagine again. If you find I’m asking for too much of your imagination, perhaps fantasy stories aren’t for you. I’m sure there’s some fascinating Wikipedia entries you could be reading or maybe you can watch one of those How It’s Made videos. I’d like you to imagine a woman. An elegant, noblewoman. A beautiful noblewoman, with long, shimmering blonde hair. Not just a beautiful noblewoman, but the most beautiful noblewoman you could possibly imagine. This woman, this awe-inspiring woman, was what stood before our King. He must have been so stunned by her beauty that he could not think straight, or form a sentence, because he walked directly past this woman. And then past the next inconceivably beautiful woman. And past the next. The hall was soon filled with a crowd of disappointed beautiful women.

Now I don’t want you thinking of our King as a shallow man. Or, at least, not shallow in the usual terms. It wasn’t the faces or the bodies of the women that repelled him, but their total ubiquity. Each one of them was otherworldly beautiful, each one of them was dressed in the finest gowns and each one of them curtsied in precisely the same manner. This was the one-hundred-and-fifty-seventh such party that he had attended since his coronation. The King had long abandoned any pretense of civility. He’d politely greet the women, of course, but no longer was he interested in hearing their carefully rehearsed marriage pitches. They were all the same anyway.

Our King was coming to the end of this round of prospective wives now. He’d almost stopped to talk to one redheaded woman, until he noticed that she was wearing a brooch shaped like a leaf and so, really, what was the point. He was ready to decrown himself and spend another evening lamenting his condition. It was then that something most peculiar happened. Just beyond his line-of-sight, there was a struggle within the crowd. Guards seemed to be in a fuss and the nearby noblewoman seemed mightily distressed. As the King marched over, the crowds split. The guards took to their knees and left in the centre of the commotion was a woman. Her skin was darker than her pale sisters. There was a tear down the skirt of her dress and her corset was on backwards. She quickly moved a stray strand of her hair off her face and met the King’s eyes. Time slowed. The King considered what to say. But decided against saying anything at all. He excused himself and walked back to his private wing of the castle.

In three weeks time, the two were married. For the kingdom it was Winter, but for them it was a great Summer. They talked unendingly about the most significant nothings, taking walks across the castle grounds and treading the first footprints in freshly fallen snow. The King loved her intelligence, they would often spend hours in the library mixing and matching characters from all sorts of books to create their own stories. She seemed to have no worry or responsibility and seemed to be making the most of every monarchical fancy or pleasure. She was kind to servants, even friendly with many of them, and had even convinced the King to take cooking classes with her under the castle’s head chef. Neither of them were very good, but their subjects naturally ate everything they were served and declared it the result of culinary genius. There could be no other response. The King wasn’t into decapitations, but he’d certainly give them a sinister stare. The two had a romance most of us only get to dream about (or read about in fantasy stories). They had an emotional connection, an intellectual intimacy. They had a unique bond. They had really great sex.

In Spring, the Kingly duties arose again. Grateful as he was to have completed his task of finding a wife, she had done little to absolve him of the boring matters of tax, diplomacy and whingy landlords. It was on a day where the King had taken Court that his wife took the time to meet his family. They were all dead, but one shouldn’t underestimate the power of oversized portraits and loneliness. She had a great deal of riveting conversations with her great-great-great-in-laws and promised to each of the painted couples that she would be the best wife she could be.

A servant, bringing along a replenishing fruit basket so the King’s wife could enjoy conversing with the long-dead as long as she pleased, noted that she seemed enamored with the paintings. The King’s wife said that it was because she was, she felt an odd kind of kinship with them. It was almost like they really were family, though she had never met them before tonight. She mentioned that she hadn’t known that her wedding ring had been passed on through so many generations.

The servant was shocked to hear this. They’d assumed, quite reasonably, that the King’s wife, of all people, would know the dynastic myth. But she didn’t. She hadn’t heard of it at all. It was much later that night, when she saw her husband again after his duties were completed, that she made her new discovery known. Unable to even look into her husband’s eyes, she soon burst into tears. His tiredness slipped away immediately. He asked what was wrong and pleaded to know what he could do to help.

So, she told him. About how on the day they met the guards were trying to throw her out the castle. That she had snuck in amongst the crowds. That she had stolen the dress she had worn. That, really, that wasn’t the first day they met. That really they first met years ago, when her company was passing through the kingdom. She had noticed his kindness, and his sadness, and all those gaudish rings. She had decided to stay in the hope of seeing the sad King once more. It all came out in a sputtering pace and the deeper she went into the story, the more lies that she uncovered, the more tears streamed down her face. She was okay with dooming a man. She thought that the worst that could happen is that she’d make a disappointing wife, and she was content enough with that, so long as she had the comforts of high society and one or two weeks of married bliss. She struggled a little more with dooming an entire people. She feared that her unwashed, innoble status removed any hope of the kingdom knowing that era of unprecedented peace and prosperity.

Her husband inhaled deeply as he weighed the news. Then, he responded:

“Back in the intercontinental wars, the King and Queen would spend all their days locked away in their chambers. Some historians figure they were trying to sex the war away.”

His wife gave a sad smile in response. The kind you feel obliged to give when someone makes a joke, but you’re not in the mood to laugh.

“Later, when the coffers ran dry and the crown found itself in insurmountable debt, the marriage at its head apparently couldn’t have been stronger. They were childhood rivals turned passionate lovers and their storybook romance just wasn’t good enough for the family myth.”

“Hell, that’s just the good ones. Even at the turn of this century, the throne has seen its perfect marriages grow sterile and stale. One Queen soon found that she was interested in far younger men than my grandfather. And the King and Queen before me? Well, if there’s was a love so gallant and true then perhaps my mother wouldn’t be living so vicariously through me.”

“The point is they all, at some point, thought they were in love. And if our thoughts are all we are then, I think, when you think you are in love, you must be. And even though you’re in love, sooner or later, it will all fall to shit and there’ll be no peace and there will be no prosperity and the Kingdom will wilt and the march of monarchy will go on and on and on.”

He stopped himself before continuing.

“This isn’t coming out right.”

“What I mean to say is, I don’t care. Wait, that’s not right either. I do care. I don’t care about some story or some idealised, magical, fairytale love that has never existed and will never exist. But I care about you. I love you.” He reached out and embraced his wife, pulling her onto his lap. “And you haven’t doomed us all.”

She rested her head on his chest, noticing that her eyes were drying and her mouth was smiling.

“Perhaps we were doomed from the start but, I mean, that’s hardly your fault. Am I getting this across?”

She looked up and met her husband’s eyes. The air in the room had shifted. They weren’t the words of a poet, but a poet’s words are often cold, heartless verses that promise beauty and bely artifice. No, these were his words and his awkward delivery assured his wife of their authenticity. Her fingers ran across his face, then through his hair and then she answered her husband with a kiss. And as their lips met, the rubies on their rings gave off the slightest bit of light…

Or, at least, that’s the way I heard it.

Reconciliation of Trope in Convenience Store Boyfriends

2017s Konbini Kareshi, also known as Convenience Store Boyfriends, is not a particularly revolutionary series. It's not, really, even a very good one. Yet as I watched this "slice-of-life" anime for the first time recently, I couldn't help but find it extremely interesting. Here we have a show that is harangued by trope and cliché, yet is also desperately trying to find a way to reconcile anime and slice-of-life genre tropes for a modern audience. It, in no uncertain terms, fails.

Convenience Store Boyfriends is the anime adaptation of the B's-Log Comic mixed-media project, having first been realised in prose and audio drama. It is this cynical, detached approach to storytelling that I think has caused the production to concern itself with the modern sensibilities of its audience. It is a series that appears to have been designed by committee, looking to utilise its high school genre, setting and character, to best appeal to, not only the romance anime fan, but a younger, more socially aware generation. It is in the conflict between these two demographics that we see the failure of Convenience Store Boyfriends' reconciliation. In one of the focal romantic relationships, between the character Honda, a popular soccer player, and Mihashi, the stalwart "Class Rep", we see the struggle between playing into safe generic tropes and appealing to an audience that has long moved past them.

As it has been said that Japan is still some time away from its "#MeToo" moment, it is noteworthy that, at least for a little while, Convenience Store Boyfriends put issues of consent and harassment right at the forefront of its depiction of this relationship. Honda is berated for his retrograde attempts to impress and romance the Class Rep, who often makes it clear that these are unwanted advances. It is in the return to trope where this all falls apart. Due to its nature as a romance anime, and its unwillingness to make any major diversions from its tropes, the Class Rep soon gains the confidence to accept the previously undesired advances. Issues of consent abound in the discussion of the anime trope, "tsundere", used to refer to female characters who disguise their true feelings behind layers of animosity, that the male protagonist must strip back in order to pursue the desired relationship. It's a female character seen across not just anime, but throughout all of literature, but it is the anime tsundere who is most well-known for their predictable behaviours and for promoting morally dubious wish fulfilment narratives. This is the character archetype that the Class Rep is forced to become because of Convenience Store Boyfriends' need to fall back on trope.

Yet those early moments, where it does seem like the series wants to offer us something interesting, were extremely exciting. Not just as viewers of television, but as citizens; for its, otherwise unimpressive, early episodes seemed to suggest that serious social change was taking hold and that the dangerous romantic tropes of yesteryear were being cast-aside for a new look at how modern relationships can, and should, be formed. So when this was done away with, Convenience Store Boyfriends' actually yielded from me its biggest emotional response. My sense of disappointment was palpable.

So, what does the failed reconciliation of trope then tell us? Is the failure to reconcile the tsundere trope with modern sensibilities down to the quality of this production or is it due to the irreconcilable nature of these tropes? I would argue that it is a little of both. Certainly Convenience Store Boyfriends' is no major piece of revisionary work. For example, the tsundere is not the only trope to be promised subversion and then remain unchanged in Convenience Store Boyfriends' (though it is certainly the most prominent and worthy of inspection). The step-sister romance, the strict household impeding romance, the school festival, the one that got away and so on, all make an appearance in this series that wants to play it by the numbers that no one uses anymore. The series has some very weak, uninspired storytelling, that means they can never get across their new perspective on tired tropes. More than that though, I would say that the attempt was doomed from the start. Even if the studio behind Convenience Store Boyfriends' wanted to pursue a new approach to the romance genre, they could never do so while still attached to tropes like the tsundere. I'd like to see an expectation-subverting story, where the person who thinks they are the romantic lead is shut down for misogynistic behaviour, but that show simply wouldn't be a romance show any longer. The tropes and genre effects are simply not fit for use when it comes to creating romantic stories for modern sensibilities.



The show does have one really nice song though. And a plot twist that I'm sure the whole board room were patting themselves on the back for.

Return of the SeX-Men: "Fixing" A Franchise

Despite an industry-wide decrease in sales and popularity of superhero comics on the whole, it's always the X-Men franchise which garners the most commentary on how it needs "fixing". Is this because X-Men's film franchise is perceived as limp and incomparable to its contemporaries, thus making the brand as a whole look disproportionately weaker? Is it because it's a franchise that has some of the most dizzying highs in the format, yet has also seen some of its most dire lows? Is it, perhaps, because the franchise peaked in the 90s, leaving only a core, militant audience behind? Whatever the case, proposed solutions proliferate, with every fan regularly filling forums, social media and direct lines to creatives in order to express their master plan to restore vigour to the ailing superheroes. Some of the most notable proposed solutions include: getting rid of the dorky costumes, bringing back the dorky costumes, keeping characters dead, bringing dead characters back, less time-travel, less politics and, of course, more guns. With this post, I don't intend to solve this argument for good. Rather, within this frame of "fixing" the X-Men, I want to point out a key element of the mutant's stories that has long gone forgotten.

That is, their rampant, unabashed sexiness.

Already, I have to backpedal and clarify. By sexiness I do not mean the conventional sexiness oft associated with the comic book superhero genre. Rather than exploitative, hypersexual super(model)heroines, what I'm talking about is sex and sexuality as an explicit subject. Grant Morrison's New X-Men run was unashamedly about sex, even whilst his artistic collaborators, such as Frank Quitely or Igor Kordey, were depicting the usually glamorous superheroes as increasingly ugly and grotesque. Similarly, I'm not talking about some puerile, monogamous copulation between longtime sweethearts. The torrid, lustful, angst-driven sexual relations that truly define the X-Men against their contemporaries is what's of interest to me.

And we can see that this sexiness, this seX-factor, penetrates throughout the franchise's history. The aforementioned Morrison has seen the promotion of his work, as having a "back to basics" design philosophy, scoffed at since its publication (as it featured, amongst other things, a malevolent germ), but the one "basic" he did return to was a deep sexuality. Not only was the familiar Cyclops/Jean Grey/Wolverine love triangle returned, but at the forefront of it all were questions of virility and progeny; as mutants declared themselves humanity's successors as the latter marched towards extinction. Tensions around the sanctity of sexuality abound particularly in the conclusion of this story, where a doomed future is averted because Cyclops, rather than sustain his infantile and sexless relationship with childhood sweetheart Jean Grey, opts to pursue a relationship with his sex therapist, Emma Frost.

Emma Frost occurs perennially in discussions of seXuality. She was introduced in the most defining X-Men run, Chris Claremont's, and as part of the beloved Dark Phoenix Saga (soon to be adapted, for the second time, in 2019's Dark Phoenix). There's a popular misreading that this story is a cosmic one, as it has some light science-fiction features. The reality is it's a grounded story and a deeply sexual one, as BDSM-imagery seems to clutter half the pages and the story itself is explicitly concerned with a destructive female backlash at the removal of sexual license and her transformation into a fetish object. Claremont used sexuality in his stories with reckless abandon, spanning topics from female puberty, body autonomy and dimensions of consent, to commentating on the AIDS-epidemic. The follow-up to Dark Phoenix Saga, Days of Future Past, for example, is literally about sexual license, as mutants have their breeding rights prohibited in a dystopian future.

Jean Grey in the Dark Phoenix Saga.

So, Emma Frost was a character created in an entirely sexual context. Yet now, detached from the time of her creation, Emma Frost is often the centre of a lot of reader anxiety. What you often seem to have is a sexualised character, wearing revealing, exploitative costumes, who appears in stories that are actually not about sex or sexuality. It would seem that reader anxieties around Emma Frost's depiction are located in this arena; she is a character about sexuality who no longer possesses (or at least professes) sexual license. Emma Frost is devoid of sexuality, allowed the kind of innocuous relationship with Cyclops that Morrison intended her to disrupt. She is a character who is sexual in nothing but her aesthetic. In this sense she is a microcosm of the superhero genre on the whole, the male-dominated genre (both in terms of creatives, audience and characters) which is caught constantly negotiating and renegotiating its opinion on sex, reaching a point where sexuality is simultaneously hypervisible and invisible.

Emma Frost.

Going back even further, we can highlight that sex was actually important as early as the Lee/Kirby collaborations at the title's launch in the 60s. It was subtextual, of course, thanks to the Comics Code Authority and general sensibilities of the time, but its presence was there nonetheless. Whilst revisionist readings of the X-Men's early years still stick to the idea that the franchise had always been a Civil Rights allegory, the reality is that those stories owe much more to Cold War narratives and the emerging youth culture of America's post-war economic boom. This generational conflict rears its head again in the Morrisonian interpretation of the franchise and in both realisations sexuality is important. It is more overt in New X-Men, without a doubt, but those early stories still concerned themselves with virility and sexual license, particularly with regards to Cyclops and Jean Grey (and the other bumps and tensions the relationship met along the way. Explicit sex was off the table in the 60s, Jean and Cyclops don't even kiss until the series is revived in the 70s, but what we saw in those early issues were normal, well-behaved children with acceptable American values lusting after each other.

So, why does the return of a seX-factor matter? It's because, as a concept, it unifies the Morrisonian, Claremontian, and Silver Age renditions of the book. Three wildly different, and popular (although people only seem to enjoy the Silver Age stories, retroactively, it was not a popular book at the time), interpretations of the same characters and core concepts. Even with widely derided, "cursed" runs on these books, such as Chuck Austen's Uncanny X-Men or Peter Milligan's X-Men, that sexual element ensured some slight success, though perhaps they went too far in some places. (It is worth noting that Peter Milligan and Mike Allred's X-Force/X-Statix professed sexuality in droves- and is widely lauded, in part, because of it).

With a recent influx of fan creators carving X-Books into their own images, we are seeing, once again, a return towards stories prominently featuring sexuality. Sadly, though, these only superficially deal with the subject, allowing a voyeuristic pleasure for the reader but never allowing sexual themes to permeate the stories. Kelly Thompson's Rogue and Gambit was a great horny start, but there also needs to be a move away from the "beautiful people" dimension of sexuality and this is an area X-Men stories have usually done well in. Stacy X, the snake-skinned sex worker who had a brief stint on an X-Men team in the early 2000s. I think it's telling that Stacy X has mostly been scrubbed from the franchise history and, on the rare occasion she is acknowledged, her snake-like skin is nowhere to be seen. Do ugly mutants, the Eye-Boys, the Maggotts and Thumbelinas, not possess the same sexual license as the glamorous ones?

Stacy-X.

It's important, as well, to note that simply existing in a sexual dimension is not enough. Like any other story element, there must be a reason, some justification, for a story's sexuality, lest it become glorified, softcore pornography. We don't want to return to the past of creating female characters whose explicit purpose is to allure the sexual attention of 12 year olds, so creating male sexual objects, whilst an arguably egalitarian pursuit, doesn't actually solve the meta-sextual void that superhero comics finds themselves in. The superhero has long been a fetishistic concern; the genre (and the X-Men) cannot move forwards without acknowledging this inherent quality. Yet this should not be implemented by the cynic, who sees this as yet another opportunity to insert perverted "realism" to the superhero genre, or a chance to again put infeasibly attractive characters in revealing costumes. Rather, the re-sexualisation of X-Men should come about by creators who believe in sex, who do not hold our cultural pretensions around "acceptable" forms of love.