![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yvannairie) wrote2023-02-13 01:18 pm
Xenoposting 13.2.
It's always an unenviable position to be in a fandom and not care about the shipping that much but when it comes to Xenoblade 3... IDK man. The mental dissonance I get from the worldbuilding is just insurmountable. I just can't find a way to really engage with the text as-is because the implications are so horrifying, but I also can't find a way to introduce the concept of sex as a known quantity without knowing I am taking razor-thin slices of the text to do so.
I can deal with the implicit assumption that under the Flame Clock system, everyone is essentially magically neutered -- reduced to having the body relation of prepubescent teenagers -- but the idea that once they're free, they get accelerated to whatever post-pubescent stage we're supposed to perceive them as immediately afterwards is straight-up a horror premise. It interfaces with my virginity squick in ways I do not care to explain.
And while I can justify the idea that everyone in the kingdoms has a mostly normal psychological development and the only thing that is really suppressed is their ability to consciously form bonds, I know that that's stretching the text and is a decision I need to justify every time it comes up in writing.
Ideally, I just don't want to think about the "sex" aspect of it -- to take the worldbuilding about the inability to feel affection and kinship at face value -- but in practice the text contradicts itself too much for that reading to be cogent. One of the first signs of things outside the Flame Clock system being different is the presence of heterosexual eroticism. There's just not much you can do with the text that doesn't implicitly validate the specialness of heteronormative sexual mores.
And that kind of blows, my inability to really do anything interesting with the text blows, because I don't like to ignore the aspects of a thing I don't like like that. I don't want to pretend that getting off the Flame Clock changed nothing, even if the text of what it changed makes me deeply uncomfortable and doesn't really lend itself to a reading that wouldn't set off my squick about this very sort of thing. I can't just pretend that stories that are blatantly coming-of-age narratives aren't because the common feature of "sexual debute only happens when you come of age" makes me uncomfortable.
no subject
no subject
Yeah, like, the wiki listing everyone's terms as "[whatever age] mentally and physically" really had me being like did you protect the virtue of the fictional character because none of that matters if they truly are suspended in a prepubescent body relationship or emotionally neutered or however it works that they don't know that love exists until they're off the Flame Clock. Either way, the implications are fucked up and their sexual maturity would be on the level of a fucking child, if that is genuinely something that bothers people rather than just being something to signal their goodness and inclusion in a group with.
And it kind of sucks because the implications of "these characters can bond emotionally and experience attraction and affection, they just don't have the language for it" are fascinating to me. My favourite ship is powered entirely by how tragic the idea of being in love with someone who is warm, genuine, appreciative and affectionate and doesn't know what love is, it's one-sided pining up to the max and it only really reads like that if I let the "they don't know what love is" worldbuilding stand on its own. The writers just didn't think through what a mess conflating sexual attraction with emotional bonding would be, because they never are, because heteronormativity is a mind prison.
no subject