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.)
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regna
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Date: 2014-06-12 12:17 am (UTC)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.)