(no subject)

[jhameia]

Is there a name for the trope where the main character has to have sex in order to save the world? Aside from all the fairytale endiings where Heterosexual Love's Kiss or some declaration of Heterosexual Love, Jay Lake's MAINSPRING ends in a Realization of Heterosexual Love and KW Jeter's INFERNAL DEVICES ends in, essentially, sex-to-save-the-world. I'm going to call them Acts of Aggressive Heterosexuality, but there must be a TVTrope about this already.

(Also Lake's GREEN ends in an Act of Aggressive Heterosexuality even though it's technically a homosexual act, because it's a lesbian-for-the-sake-of-the-Male-Gaze act therefore it is essentially an Act of Aggressive Sexuality.)

I mean really now.

I've also read NEWS FROM NOWHERE and LOOKING BACKWARD, both 19th century utopia novels. NEWS FROM NOWHERE has that silly "it was a dream!" trope and is awfully libertarian ("abolish government!") and was supposed to be a response to LOOKING BACKWARD which is, well, The Government Is A Corporation which is about centralized socialism growing out of capitalism but man, is that hella optimistic (and it also has an exceedingly silly romance subplot). Marge Piercey's WOMAN OUT OF TIME's utopia also has that odd libertarian feel and the idea that each village has its own culture which is adapted from specific regional culture is kind of... iffy to me. (Although I did laugh at the future sense of history in which Harriet Tubman delivers "Ain't I A Woman" before, uh, laying seige to the Potomac?) I also liked "per(son)" as a gender-neutral pronoun, but there still didn't seem to be a lot of queerness going on. Although it's better than Joanna Russ' THE FEMALE MAN which is hella binarist, I mean, father-mother two-parent family units in a future where there's pretty much just one gender?

I also got around to reading FLATLAND. It was cute, but kind of flat.

20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA was not, as I had hoped, about fighting kraken 20,000 leagues in the sea's depth, but more a 20,000 league tour of the world's oceans and a very long catalog of the fauna, geography, shipwrecks and one Canadian's kvetching about being trapped in a submarine. There are exactly three obvious anti-colonial sentiments expressed by Nemo in the whole of the book; the rest is pretty much him being a misanthrope and quitting civilization just because he can.

I'm going to read as much of SO LONG BEEN DREAMING now.

Comments

[spacehawk.livejournal.com]

Is there a name for the trope where the main character has to have sex in order to save the world?

Oh wow this. If it doesn't have a name already, it needs to be named. This ties directly into the "asexual representation in fiction" projects that myself and others are working on.

I am recalling a contrapositive version of this trope in ALL THE KING'S MEN, where because long ago, when the protagonist was young, and he saw the girl he likes sleeping peacefully in bed in her parents' house, and didn't have sex with her (thus getting into a fight with her parents and thrown out of the house and several other things), both he and the girl are doomed to miserable unhappy lives with no chance of repair. (And it's assumed that if he had tried to have sex with her when she was sleeping right then, she would have wanted that. Uh.) Anyway, this is the necessary step to save the world (personally and politically) that he didn't take, thus messing everything up forever.

Joanna Russ' THE FEMALE MAN which is hella binarist, I mean, father-mother two-parent family units in a future where there's pretty much just one gender?

That book has problems.

I also got around to reading FLATLAND. It was cute, but kind of flat.

Did you catch all the hidden Shakespeare references? :-) (Abbott was a Shakespearean scholar.)

[fantasyecho.livejournal.com]

I had an inkling there were Shakespearean references but didn't follow up on it! I have through all these very quickly.

[spacehawk.livejournal.com]

That was one of the best parts of the book for me, catching all the hidden references and meanings in the book. I had also done quite a lot of personal research into Abbott at the time, though that's a different story. :-)

[spacehawk.livejournal.com]

Oh, and on that trope, I just read this (http://swankivy.tumblr.com/post/88181182755/anagnori-yeah-okay-but-if-you-werent) on an asexual activist's Tumblr.

Yes, she's aro ace and was literally asked (and badgered about) what gender she would have sex with if she "had to" to save the world. /sigh/

It's a lose/lose because of you can't say "no one, I'd let the world get destroyed" or they'll badger you about that, and you can't say a gender/person/whatever or else they deny you're really ace. Like some "haha gotcha" moment they think they're having.

("Gee, that's a good question. Which of your immediate family members would you murder with an axe in order to save the world?")