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edenfallingRemix reveal day! I wrote three stories this year: A History of Handcrafts (Because a Sweater Equals Love) and In Foreign Tongues (Been All Over You) for ![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
melayneseahawk, and Postcards from Naxos (You Don't Have To Go Home, But You Can't Stay Here) for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sour_idealist.
I am going to talk about each in a separate post.
---------------
In Foreign Tongues (Been All Over You): 1,600 words, April 2011. Nyota offered herself as Gaila's sister when they first met -- she greeted Gaila with her name in all openness, the traditional overture to the creation of an in-net -- and Gaila has never regretted accepting that gift. Gaila/Uhura, dubious consent, mildly explicit sex.
Remixed from Talented Tongue, a ficlet by MelayneSeahawk.
The key word here is bonobos. My version of the Orion species is very much based on the hypersexuality, female dominance, and female inter-group mobility of bonobo troops, as reported by Frans B. M. de Waal. And yes, I can make that play perfectly nicely with widespread slavery.
Here's the thought experiment: when female Orions reach sexual maturity, they leave their birth groups and join a new group, where they form bonds and gradually move up in the loose hierarchy. Male Orions remain in their birth groups. As long as the population lives as hunter-gatherers, this is highly functional and egalitarian, but when they start to settle down as farmers, the daughters of high-status women can take some valuable trade items with them and use those to start on a higher level in their new groups than daughters of low-status women who come empty-handed. Over time, those differences will stratify and solidify until you have two (or more) classes in each village, and daughters will automatically join the equivalent class in their new villages. It's not too far a stretch to codify that stratification and have the "high" class essentially own the "low" class, and even to send members of the "low" class along as servants to daughters of the "high" class.
By Gaila's day, Orion Prime is divided not among nation-states but among Houses, each of which is topped by the high-House folk who own all the other members. Most people are slaves. The thing is, because each House is essentially a combination of multinational corporation and nation-state, there's nowhere for free people to go. If you don't belong to a House, you have nowhere to work, nowhere to live, and no one to live with. And being alone is unthinkable.
...
The thing is, though, that while that's a fascinating thought experiment, it has approximately nothing to do with MelayneSeahawk's story... except as a background explanation for what in hell Gaila thinks she's doing by randomly having oral sex with Uhura every now and then, for why she doesn't treat it as anything special, and even for why she doesn't talk about it -- she assumes, due to a cultural gap early in their friendship, that Uhura already knows what's going on.
I did finally manage to get the backstory and world-building shoved to the side so I could write the actual remix, but I still want to use all the material somehow, either directly by writing about Gaila, or indirectly as a backdrop for original fiction.
Maybe someday I will.
...
Also, for a story with a moderately explicit sex scene, it is amazingly unsexy, though hopefully not in a squicky way. That is partly because Gaila is thinking of the sex as roughly equivalent to, say, a non-foreplay backrub, or giving a glass of lemonade to a friend on a hot day. No. Those are not accurate enough analogies. Maybe it's more like playing a silly game with a friend to make her smile? ...No, not quite that either. :-(
Regardless of my analogy failure, the sex in this story is not fraught with anything, which, surprise surprise, has a way of deflating the tension that makes erotica hot. And also, while I can construct a properly erotic sex scene, given enough time and a reason to work past my embarrassment and general disinterest in writing explicit sex, the key words are "given enough time." I ran out of time. This annoys me, because MelayneSeahawk's ficlet is scorching hot and I wish I could have mirrored that more accurately.
(This is the remix I am least satisfied with, both as a story on its own and as a remix -- it feels a little flat to me, and I don't think I was able to make Gaila's worldview and narrative voice come to life enough to really give a different perspective on the events of MelayneSeahawk's ficlet. *sigh*)
sour_idealist.I am going to talk about each in a separate post.
---------------
In Foreign Tongues (Been All Over You): 1,600 words, April 2011. Nyota offered herself as Gaila's sister when they first met -- she greeted Gaila with her name in all openness, the traditional overture to the creation of an in-net -- and Gaila has never regretted accepting that gift. Gaila/Uhura, dubious consent, mildly explicit sex.
Remixed from Talented Tongue, a ficlet by MelayneSeahawk.
The key word here is bonobos. My version of the Orion species is very much based on the hypersexuality, female dominance, and female inter-group mobility of bonobo troops, as reported by Frans B. M. de Waal. And yes, I can make that play perfectly nicely with widespread slavery.
Here's the thought experiment: when female Orions reach sexual maturity, they leave their birth groups and join a new group, where they form bonds and gradually move up in the loose hierarchy. Male Orions remain in their birth groups. As long as the population lives as hunter-gatherers, this is highly functional and egalitarian, but when they start to settle down as farmers, the daughters of high-status women can take some valuable trade items with them and use those to start on a higher level in their new groups than daughters of low-status women who come empty-handed. Over time, those differences will stratify and solidify until you have two (or more) classes in each village, and daughters will automatically join the equivalent class in their new villages. It's not too far a stretch to codify that stratification and have the "high" class essentially own the "low" class, and even to send members of the "low" class along as servants to daughters of the "high" class.
By Gaila's day, Orion Prime is divided not among nation-states but among Houses, each of which is topped by the high-House folk who own all the other members. Most people are slaves. The thing is, because each House is essentially a combination of multinational corporation and nation-state, there's nowhere for free people to go. If you don't belong to a House, you have nowhere to work, nowhere to live, and no one to live with. And being alone is unthinkable.
...
The thing is, though, that while that's a fascinating thought experiment, it has approximately nothing to do with MelayneSeahawk's story... except as a background explanation for what in hell Gaila thinks she's doing by randomly having oral sex with Uhura every now and then, for why she doesn't treat it as anything special, and even for why she doesn't talk about it -- she assumes, due to a cultural gap early in their friendship, that Uhura already knows what's going on.
I did finally manage to get the backstory and world-building shoved to the side so I could write the actual remix, but I still want to use all the material somehow, either directly by writing about Gaila, or indirectly as a backdrop for original fiction.
Maybe someday I will.
...
Also, for a story with a moderately explicit sex scene, it is amazingly unsexy, though hopefully not in a squicky way. That is partly because Gaila is thinking of the sex as roughly equivalent to, say, a non-foreplay backrub, or giving a glass of lemonade to a friend on a hot day. No. Those are not accurate enough analogies. Maybe it's more like playing a silly game with a friend to make her smile? ...No, not quite that either. :-(
Regardless of my analogy failure, the sex in this story is not fraught with anything, which, surprise surprise, has a way of deflating the tension that makes erotica hot. And also, while I can construct a properly erotic sex scene, given enough time and a reason to work past my embarrassment and general disinterest in writing explicit sex, the key words are "given enough time." I ran out of time. This annoys me, because MelayneSeahawk's ficlet is scorching hot and I wish I could have mirrored that more accurately.
(This is the remix I am least satisfied with, both as a story on its own and as a remix -- it feels a little flat to me, and I don't think I was able to make Gaila's worldview and narrative voice come to life enough to really give a different perspective on the events of MelayneSeahawk's ficlet. *sigh*)
