bad!logic: an explanation for cheating bastards fic?

[cimorene]

So browsing through back posts of badfic, I've encountered, just recently, a rationale for Cheating Bastards Fic and its rather sweet but horrifically deformed cousin The Wives Know And Don't Mind At All Fic. This is a rationale that never would have occurred to me, personally, but it was voiced by more than one badthor and several badreaders in the discussion post: basically, in essence, they think that an implausible-to-the-point-of-impossibly-convoluted explanation that nonetheless agrees, on the surface, with observable reality, makes for more plausible (and thus inherently "better") fiction than a plausible alternate universe.

This is why it's more likely that passionately political characters with decisively un-homophobic politics would be closeted, or embroiled in years of deception and lies and partner betrayal, than that they would have failed to get together with said partner while otherwise remaining more or less in character. Apparently. (The tone in which this argument was delivered was actually rather condescending.)

I mean. I just. WHAT? These two deformed clichés are some of my biggest RPS rage-buttons (in any RPS fandom, and I include especially bandom because it's my primary right now, but the post in question came from a Daily Show community) - the former much more than the latter in the case of characters who don't strike me as cheating bastards, but the latter can be even more maddening when you get too used to the flippancy with which it's handled.

So by this logic, for example, a genderswap story (these usually conflict only with the laws of physics, and not with the available information about the celebrities we're slashing!) is far more plausible than, oh, a universe where a character was gay from the beginning or even a universe where their career simply didn't take off.

In other words... it's the exact opposite of Occam's Razor! Conclusive proof of the squirrelly twistedness of the badthor mind?

Comments

[emmuzka.livejournal.com]

Soo.. if the character is married in the real life, our aim should be to write it in because it's canon, and then explain it with some obscure cheating-open-relationship logic? Sure. No prob...

And btw, as I'm fallen for MCR fic, could you point me to some rec pages with, like, good fics. There have to be some. Seriously.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Most of bandom keeps itself connected via delicious pages. You could browse mine or click around through the main tag feeds of the pairings you're interested in, or if you find another reccer whose style you like you could check them out. I don't see a lot of rec lists in more traditional formats (without word limits...), now that delicious is so common.

[emmuzka.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the tip. For some reason I have been very traditional with this, like, googling and stuff. Maybe I'm degerating back to my boyband slash days ;)

[fairestcat]

That's... remarkably convoluted thinking there.

Cheating Bastard fic is one of my massive pet peeves in any fandom, not just RPS. Why would I want to read about people being assholes? It makes no sense to me.

The Wives Know And Don't Mind At All on the other hand, is something I really like if it's done well. Part of that comes, I think, from the fact that reading too many The Wives/Girlfriends Don't Exist stories in a row sometimes makes me feel like I've suddenly been transplanted to the weird Planet Without Women. (Which is not to say I don't like a lot of The Wives/Girlfriends Don't Exist stories, just that I have to be careful not to overdose on them or it starts to really creep me out). Mostly, though, I think it's just a consequence of being poly. I'm in a long-term relationship with a married woman, so The Wives Know And Don't Mind scenarios feel more comforting and familiar than wildly implausible.

That said, when they're done badly (as is the often, but not always the case when written by bad authors) they make me want to tear my hair out and that's because they treat the women really kind of crappily, diminishing and dismissing their relationships so as to elevate the slash relationships as OMG Special And One True Love.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Yes, a believable poly relationship would be one thing, but "Not in the same way I love you, Stephen, of course!" or "That's okay, I know you'll always care for me! Now you boys get an apartment together" is quite another. It's quite difficult for a convincing open relationship to find a place in badfic, and I don't feel that it ever belongs in a story where the woman in question isn't a significant character as well. If she's simply window dressing, making her apparently complicit is just as offensive, in my view, as villifying or victimizing.

[someblazingstar.livejournal.com]

I haaaaaate CheatingBastards!Fic, because, like fairestcat said, why the hell would I want to read about people or characters I like being jerks, just for the sake of cheezy drama? Reminds me of a horrible Duran Duran Mary Sue I read ages ago (which I read because the summary promised slash, which actually only occured in the sense that Simon and Nick like, maybe kissed once during the sex scene with them and two best-friend Sues, UGH) where the whole point was that Simon Le Bon is a heartless scumbag who uses his fans for sex, but then two of the fans get revenge. Like, why would anyone who likes that band at all ever want to read that?

But I'm torn on "The Wives Know and Don't Care" fic. Because, as it's usually written, as an easy out for the author so they don't have to actually deal with the emotional complications of such a thing, it sucks. But... Two guys that I've dated have had this very intense love/hate relationship with each other since high school. I'm one of, like, 6 girls that they've both been involved with, they talk about each other incessantly, and one even spent about an hour elaborating on a very detailed sexual fantasy about the other once while we were in bed and he was very drunk. (Which was, um, really amazingly hot. I'm a perv, what can I say.) I'm not dating either of them now, but if they ever actually just went ahead and fucking did it like they've been wanting to for, like, 20 years? I would (and would have been) SO ON BOARD for that train. SO ON. I would much rather see them just get over their weirdness with each other than keep lying to themselves and the girls they date, seriously. Dating and now being friends with them is like living in a fanfic.

But um, I know that my situation and mentality are not normal - so while it's an understandable thing to want to write, the problem lies in writers assuming that the people's actual wives would think and react just like slashers would, which is possible, but not necessarily likely. But not impossible. Oh, I don't know.

[someblazingstar.livejournal.com]

And yeah, I agree that it's better to just leave the SOs out of the story entirely than try to come up with some convoluted justification. I just have less of a problem with The Wives Know than The Husbands Don't Care If They Break Their Hearts or, even better, It's Okay Because The Wives Are Bitchy Shrews Who Don't Deserve Them Anyway. Uck.

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

What I really hate is when people get all high and mighty about how if you don't write the SOs, it means you're either mysoginistic or completely OC or both. Maybe it's because I don't care to write open relationships or cheating all the time! A little bit of either I don't mind, but I'd prefer a universe without SOs when I'm writing RPS (or hell, RPF, too; I've written stories with Carrie-Anne Moss and Rachel Weisz and I'm pretty sure both have husbands or boyfriends).

[cimness.livejournal.com]

I'm exactly of a mind with you. If it were handled well, my irritation would be minimal, and if it were done well ENOUGH I'd like it either way, but either because most people have so little notion of how open relationships could work or because they don't care (since the wives/gfs are still just an obstruction to them, however they decided to get rid of them), those almost never turn out well! I can't see at all how a story where they just happen to carry on an affair with someone other than their life-partners is preferable to an au. Even if that's an open relationship, it just seems bizarre and pointless if the third person doesn't have some significant characterisation as well. You can't devote pages to the one dude's mouth and eyes and poetically sexy posture and the heart-warming and affirming nature of having sex with him, and then 3-15 lines of dialogue to the supposed life partner. I've never seen any merit to the argument that alternate universes without SOs are inherently misogynistic. They're homosocial, yes, but that doesn't imply misogyny. Now, if there are no female characters in existence at all, and the story has much scope, you might have a point...

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm sure there are no-SO AUs where there are no women. There are plenty of stories like that in FPS, too, where the female characters just mysteriously disappear.

And yes, you've really hit the nail on the head there with the so-called open relationships. It would be one thing if the SO was a fully-realised character and it was shown that yes, this guy really does love his wife/girlfriend just as much as the dude he's waxing rhapsodical over, but you can't have the sort of OTP that fandom loves and have them be married to someone else. It reads like cheating, even if it's supposed to be an open relationship.