What are your H/D squicks?

[lomonaaeren]

I'm talking about squicks specific to Harry/Draco fic here (like a certain type of characterization), rather than to squicks that could apply across the board (like bad grammar or spelling).



1) Reading a fic in which the author portrays "bottom" as meaning "weak." Just ugh. So the minute Harry and Draco get into bed, even if the one bottoming has been strong, argumentative, complex, and equal to the other up until that point, now he must start crying and being scared of penetration and doing whatever the one topping tells him to do even if he's uncomfortable with it? I know there's a power dynamics to sexual relationships, but stripping it down to power and only power bores and disgustes me. In extreme cases where the one on the bottom is also very feminized, I think there's more than a hint of misogyny. Women can never be powerful unless they're the ones penetrating men? The penis is almighty? Please.

I don't mind stories where, say, Draco finds more pleasure in bottoming, or where Harry or Draco has a psychological quirk that inclines them to one or the other. Even there, though, I want it to fit in with previously established characterization. If Harry and Draco are perfect equals out of the bedroom and then suddenly have a D/s relationship inside it with no prior hint of that, simply because the author assumes the bottom is less powerful and under the control of the top, I'm clicking the back button.

2) This one is more nebulous. I can't really call it "one flawed character, one perfect character" because I've seen stories where both Harry and Draco were flawed that still hit this squick for me. Maybe I'll call it "one character hopelessly mistaken, the other always right." In any case, what happens is that the author sets one character on a pedestal and makes the other one into a hopeless mess as he chases the idolized one, dragging him relentlessly through past mistakes, making him apologize for the most minor things, cursing him with awkwardness at tasks he can do perfectly well, and treating mistakes as deadly and unforgivable until he's groveled and pleaded. It seems to happen more often that Draco is the perfect one, and Harry is the one who has to do something to "deserve" him, but I suspect that's not true and it's simply that I've run into more stories that do it; I've seen it the other way around, too, and it squicks me just as hard. Now, in canon they've both made mistakes, but saying that Harry must apologize and grovel and never be good enough for the author's perfect, beautiful, snarky, witty Draco because he used Sectumsempra on him, while it's just fine that Draco almost killed Harry's best friend (if you want to limit it to events in the same book), strikes me as deeply silly. The excuse I've seen offered is "Well, Draco didn't mean to kill Ron, he was trying to kill Dumbledore!" And Harry didn't know what that spell did; it's not like he lingered down the corridor rubbing his hands together, cackling gleefully, and imagining Draco all over blood. If you're going to focus heavily on the canon mistakes that will keep Harry and Draco from an easy relationship with each other, why in the world is it limited to one side?

I suspect that, in the end, this squick is largely the same as the other for me: I want to see Harry and Draco have an equal relationship, and the author weakening one or idolizing one prevents that from happening.



What are your H/D squicks?

Comments

[lomonaaeren.livejournal.com]

Sexually "hot" is so subjective. It's one reason I worry about the fest prompts that are heavy on kink and light on plot. Of course the recipient is probably still going to say she liked it, it's the polite thing to do, but I'm a lot more worried about my ability to actually arouse someone, especially with kinks I don't share, than I am worried about my ability to engage them with a plot.

Unfortunately, at this point I don't think I'll be going back to that story. I'm working on other original stuff that has my full attention, and that story was abandoned...about a year and a half ago now, I think. I find I violently hate everything I wrote from about six months back and can't reread it.

[kestrelsparhawk.livejournal.com]

Yes. In fact just before I started reading f-list, I posted on a fic which I didn't like at all but which was reccd by several people recently. The dislike was because it started with a rape, and it particularly upset me because those who liked it and wrote it didn't see it as rape.

So after thinking about it a lot, I finally decided that sex fics are actually a different genre that I don't want to read, but which are held to a different set of criteria than the fics I want to read.

Would love your opinion someday...

[lomonaaeren.livejournal.com]

I hadn't thought about sex fics as a distinct genre, but the idea makes so much sense that I wonder why I didn't. (Probably overexposure to the idea that "fanfiction is porn" and "slash is porn," which I don't agree with but which is so prevalent in fandom that arguments against it simply waste time).

For my reading, I tend to prefer genslash, where the sex scenes are cornerstones of a larger plot and the characters don't spend all their time in bed, and I do think the standards for that type of fic are very different. I wonder why kinky fic gets a pass? Because there's not much of it outside fandom, maybe, so the readers want to encourage the writers to keep writing it?

[kestrelsparhawk.livejournal.com]

Confession -- but buried far enough down probably you'll be the only reader of it. I have written "hot sex scenes" (or as hot as I could manage) in both my h/d stories BECAUSE they were fest fics and required sex. The first one, especially, I always felt was contrived (but then, I'd never written to others' requests before, so I was scrambling a lot to make it fun for her, and also not look like a terrible writer my first time out.) I'm working on a sequel for that, and there's no sex in it, just because it didn't fit, not because it's wrong.

The second one had a sex scene in the middle I considered part of the story, but not terribly vividly sexual -- not down to the "tab a and slot b" as the primary descriptor in the scene. The second was a present for someone, and I tried to make it "hot" for me as well. I like innuendos and emotional reactions... in other people's fics, I do love well-done first times, because they resolve UST in me. But if there's a lot of sex scenes in a story, I tend to skim or just skip them, because... well, it's pretty hard to read about other people's sex lives in an established relationship and find it either erotic or character developing!

Well, read my essay -- I'd never thought of sex fics as a distinct genre, being proud enough to have come up with the original genre division of literary/commercial/fan . But it makes total sense to me now, which to me is a mark that I could well be right! So your comment encourages me very much. (Someday I plan to publish all these as an academic publication, so comments may affect this -- it's on the way to being a good paper, I think.)

[lomonaaeren.livejournal.com]

I know exactly what you mean. I've felt compelled to put sex in two of my fest fics, and while it sort of worked out in one of them (though I still wish I'd had more time to write and smooth out the story), I think the other would have been better without it.

I've bookmarked the essay; I should have time to read it tomorrow.