Makotic Crack

That book I got - god, I'm reading it now and the guy who wrote it is a complete Blondie/Tuco tinhat.

There is no heterosexual romance in this film, no love story and no tenderness

(emphasis mine)

and

It is full of male egotism and masculine symbolism. There are plenty of unshaven faces complete with scars, blood and sweat. Phallic symbols abound, such as the pistol that Blondie carefully cleans, the cigar which he occasionally shares with his partner Tuco, numerous rifles, and cannons.

and that's just over two pages.

More as I read more of the book. Aren't you happy.

So this was my day today. First, I brought a ticket to see John Foxx from Ultrabox The Four Horsemen Ultravox doing a show in the concert hall attached to my school, because it was £3 and looked fun.

Then, I took out a book from the school library about the music of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly because I was flicking through it out of love for the film and all of a sudden I turned to page 54 and the following passage shot out and punched me in the eye:

In what is perhaps the only erotic moment in the film, Tuco is seen getting out of a bathtub and is completely naked except for the revolver he wears around his neck. He walks over to a closed hotel room door, expecting to surprise whoever is on the other side. Blondie, however, has surprised Tuco by entering the room through another door. He sees Tuco, and while talking to his naked friend, gently caresses the top of a bed post.

...I cannot believe this.

This man is being paid to write down the general slash-goggles stuff that us slash fans pretend only we can hallucinate. And it's not even the point of the book (discussing the film's music). But the author still found it important enough to his interpretation of the film to mention, and did so freely.

And that's the sting. No-one looks at the author of this book and says 'you're interpreting it wrong' or 'you're being disrespectful to the characters and their creators' or 'you just think that because you don't understand the way men act and think' or 'but they can't be gay, they're cowboys' or 'you're just like all the other stupid pervy academics, you make every relationship into sex'.

The author never asks himself 'am I making this up?' or 'was any of this intended at all?' or 'is this just me projecting because I want to hit Tuco/Eli Wallach and can't understand Blondie not wanting to like the stupid pervy academic I am?' He never tells himself that he is a dirtybadwrong, filthy person for even thinking about it. He just saw it and wrote it and his book got published and people read it and agreed.

Well, it's opened my eyes. I'm never going to feel guilty for seeing slash, ever again. If academics see slash, and hold it as a valid interpretation, I don't see why my interpretations are any less valid just because I would rather write fanfiction exploring those interpretations than a book stating those interpretations. Being interested in men does not make you biased or stupid and if you're seeing homoerotic symbolism, that's because you're seeing it. You don't need canon confirmation or creator interviews, because it's what you see. It's a load of sexist shit, since because if you were male and you just wrote down your opinions as an essay, no-one would do anything else besides nod and agree that Blondie's hands were on that bedpost.

At least if the essay was good.

I just had the WORST CONVERSATION IN THE WORLD with my father.

ME: I need to sort out something on the computer [before we go to the music festival tomorrow].
HIM: What?
ME: Uh, putting up the monthly challenge on the fic community.
HIM: What kind of fic community?
ME: Well, uh, the slash comm I write -
HIM: No. NO.
ME: What?

He then made fun of me for like ten minutes for writing slash, and I knew he wasn't being serious but it still hurt my feelings quite a bit. Thing is, I think he understands that I'm not hurting anyone and so on, but not only does he not understand it, but he doesn't understand why slash is desirable.

And I'm pretty sure most of the fans don't understand why it's desirable, either. There's just, for me, something about it that appeals to me, somewhere deep down. It's not even a sexual appeal. The feeling of reading a really good slashfic is like - for me, it's like being hugged, from the inside. Being surrounded by people who love these characters and the characters loving each other and me loving the characters myself is just a heady sensation.

And - I don't know why it hurt, because to me it feels so normal as to not to think about it. So him calling me weird, and me not being able to explain how natural it feels to me, how it's not about sexual desire but about freedom of expression as much as anything, just made me feel like I was back in high school again.

Sigh. My skin's kind of thin right now, I think.

So in Brawl, the Otacon (MGS2) sticker gives 'Slash resistance +9'.




...I don't know how to feel about this.

Um. As you all probably might have guessed by now, I am not perturbed by the subtle undercurrent of homoeroticism in Metal Gear.

I, however, wasn't really prepared for Metal Gear 2 convincing me that Snake has a king-sized crush on Dr Pettrovich Madnar.

IT'S NOT EVEN SUBTLE. THERE'S CONVERSATIONS WHICH GO LIKE

NATASHA: Strange.
SNAKE: Yeah. Pettrovich looks so damn good even though he's old.
NATASHA: ...No, I meant that there's a moody superclone with a shady past and an awful haircut, an ex-ice skater turned secret agent to find her lost love, and a mad scientist, all running through the sewers of the world's shittiest country after having been chased by giant autonomous bulldozers in order to speak Czech to a genius scientist who doesn't understand any English except the word 'help' despite being a computer programmer and expert biogeneticist.
SNAKE: ...Yeah, that might be what you mean.

^ ONLY LOOSELY PARAPHRASED

SNAKE SPENDS PRETTY MUCH ALL HIS DIALOGUE WITH PETTRO FLIRTING WITH HIM, IT'S INSANE. AND PETTRO JUST KIND OF ROLLS HIS EYES AND SIGHS.

I love Pettrovich as a character, though. I mean, he's basically just Evil!Sokolov, but I find that makes him more interesting. He's clearly tortured by what he has to do, but he's too principled to whine about it (like Otacon does) - and at the same time, too principled to view things objectively. I also like that despite being an old scientist he does more physical stuff than any of the scientists in the later canon - an escort mission, a BOSS FIGHT, and he comes VERY CLOSE TO KILLING SNAKE WITH HIS BARE HANDS - no genetically-engineered viruses or remote-control robots for him; he doesn't even use stealth camo. I think he might be my favourite early canon character.

VAGUE HEADCANON EXTRAPOLATIONRY FROM SNAKE'S CRUSH ON PETTRO:

- Snake was immediately reminded of Pettro by Otacon, hence his immediate affection (HEY Y0U'RE LIKE PETTRO LET'S BE FRIENDS)/reticence (PLEASE DON'T MAKE ME SHOOT YOU WITH MISSILES)/frustration (PETTROVICH WAS AWESOME, YOU MADE A DEATH MACHINE BY ACCIDENT AND SUCK BY COMPARISON) upon first meeting them for MGS1.
- Old Snake grew his moustache in memory of Pettro. :{D

ALSO SNAKE WATCHES WOMEN'S FIGURE SKATING. IT'S CANON AND I LOVE THAT IT IS CANON.

DISCLAIMER: These aren't my slash goggles, okay? I ship Snake with Natasha like a fire on a cake. I don't fancy Pettro, but I wouldn't mind it if he was my granddad. Snake, however, is hot, as long as I pretend he didn't have such a bad character design in this game. Also Natasha looks like a blonde Amy Winehouse. Not awesome.

( Long and pointless and timeline-less and not entirely cracky Snake/Fox flirty roleplay segment; I'm Snake, he's Fox. )

I wrote the following deliberate badfic in a fanficrants entry.

Since I know not all of you are members and I want to sully as many minds as possible, I post it here, with a little context:

In my rant, I jokingly suggested an Metal Gear Solid/Happy Potter High-School AU with Otacon/Sephiroth. Someone wanted a link. Since it was entirely hypothetical, I wrote them one!

Title: My High School Fic
Fandoms: MGS, Harry Potter, FF7...
Pairings: Otacon/Sephiroth, Snake/Otacon, Snake/Sue, Dumbledore/Bashing
Warnings: DELIBERATE BADFIC.
Rating: R for deliberately badly-written sex

( ''That jerk Professor Flitwick gave me detention again,'' Otacon moaned, lugging his bag of books around on his shoulder. )

"Jess?"

"Yeah?"

"Please tell me I'm not the only one getting slashy vibes from Mr. Bingley and Mr. Darcy. Please."

"Oh thank god."

"They even have the whole seme-uke thing going on, it's insane!"

"Darcy tops."

"But only because Bingley taught him to love again."

"But then Darcy runs off with Elizabeth."

"Damn the social norms of the period!"

Well, I just beat Ac!d² yesterday -

- but don't run off yet, I'll spare you the spoilers and squeeing for a little while just to make this observation.

Anyone heard of a game called The Movies? It's very good. You are a movie mogul, and you have to make movies and get your studio into league tables and such. I am stupendously bad at it. It has absolutely lovely music. The movies I make without direction from the Writers tend to be long rambling martial arts epics with lots of expositionary scenes which don't make sense because I've forgotten to plug in my microphone and whenever two characters are romantically involved I dress them as robots for some reason, but probably not a symbolic one.

Anyway, today I was thinking about the first time I ever played on it, when I was still getting used to the buttons.

My previous movie - a comedy - had been a moderate success, so I used the proceeds to buy the Saloon set, allowing me to film Westerns. I told the writers to write me a new movie, and when asked to pick the genre, decided on a romance. The film needed two leads. Unthinkingly, I signed up the two actors I had who weren't tired-out from the previous installment and cast them in the lead roles.

After filming and lots of actors and extras running around in period dress, I watched the finished movie. Since this was in the '30s when narrative wasn't much of a problem, the film went like this:

Actor One sits at the bar table in his stetson, staring into his drink.

Actor Two enters through the door in his stetson, doing a sexy walk.

Actor One gapes, and falls in love at first sight. Actor Two does likewise.

Actors Two and One kiss passionately.

One of the greatest boons - and flaws - of The Movies is that it has gender-equal casting and, if the writers are writing a movie, you don't know what role they want for what.

It was when the first award for it came in that I realised what I had done.

I had just invented Brokeback Mountain, seventy-four years too early.

i am in bed, i am cosy and snug, i am on the psp, i am slowly dozing off thanks to this knockout herbal tincture i quaffed to ease a bout of insomnia, i am in that happy dreamy state, and i am reading slashfic.

heaven.

That Random MGS Slash Generator is way, way too much fun to play with.



There wasn't really anything to read into - it was, hell, it was a disguise, and it wasn't even a very good one; he'd not done anything with his hair at all, he was still unshaven, and colour contact lenses made his eyeballs itch and no-one really cares about the colour of your eyes anyway. Hair colour...well, that was different, he'd let it grow out, but no-one remembered Solid Snake being the blond one - that was Liquid, and as much as having hair the same as that bastard hurt it was a hell of a lot better than getting shot to death in the street for being the Evil Terrorist Solid Snake.

There wasn't really anything to read into. It was a disguise, it was enough to get about without getting shot, it wasn't even a very good disguise - no prosthetics and no contacts, no dyes and no plastic surgery. He hadn't pulled a Decoy Octopus and shaved his cheekbones and sliced off his ears so he could fit a rubber mask over the top without any unseemly bulges. He wasn't wearing a mask. He had a ski mask. He was just choosing not to wear it right now. It explained a lot about the damn guards, though - it cut off your vision quite a bit more than healthy. Like wearing a pair of blinkers. Plus, it was already hot enough in here, and anything originally designed for use in Arctic combat made you feel on fire in moderately warm conditions. Sweat stings if you get it in your eyes.

There wasn't really anything to look into, he thought, staring at his reflection in the glass of the window, ignoring Otacon's Codec-chatter in his ear, like the little shoulder-angel from Tom and Jerry cartoons - tips, advice, and witty reparte, but today it was just SEAL Team 10'll be here soon, stay on your guard over and over. More like a parrot on his shoulder. And he just didn't have the heart to tell him to shut up.

Apart from the glass, there was nothing to look into here. Just his reflection. But it wasn't his reflection, it was the reflection of his not-very-good disguise. The face was his, and the hair was Liquid's, but the costume, the poise, the name was all someone else. A Navy SEAL, seperated from his comrades. Furrows in his brow that Snake had bound away for so long behind the bandanna that he'd forgotten he'd ever had them. It wasn't him staring back, even though the disguise wasn't very good. It had already permeated him, somehow. This other him. Snake, dark hair, bandanna, and this other him, so different.

There wasn't really anything to delve into at all. Except the other him's pants. And the huge long list of videos and Codecbabble that Otacon had recorded of situations like this. Nothing to delve into at all.

This is way, way too much fun.

I'll generate a bunch now. Hold still.

Pairing: Cloud (masturbation)
Rating: PG
Theme: Mechanical

I could do that one. Reminds me of that smutty little hoplophilia joke I made in Marks.

Cloud x Vincent
NC-17
Swords

OUCH. NC-17 and swords do NOT go together. It'd hurt. Although props to Cloud for being the seme.

Sephiroth x Prez. Shinra
PG
Slick

I do not write teh Shinrapron.

Reeve x Cait Sith
R
Dark

OUCH

I might write that first one, though. That could be hilarious.

FOR. THE. WIN.