buggery | RotK, Batman, and Little Boys: Meta Meta Meta (Reply)

So, I do have a bunch of observations about Return of the King that are actually more about the film, itself, than about Other Things Entirely. I have a steadily growing file of noodlings on those observations which will eventually ripen into an actual post about RotK.

But I had a number of moments, watching Tuesday night, in which I experienced an odd sensation -- the sensation of knowing that something I was seeing on the screen was going to wind up fetishised by other people seeing the same film, and being mildly disturbed not (so much) by what was actually happening onscreen, as much as the expectation of (subsequently) seeing something I myself had no kink for being eroticised to the point that I would see it that way. This has a lot to do, I think, with recent discussions about what makes one person's kink another's squick, initiated by Cathexys on

virgule, and about the different kinds of stories that involve sexualisation of minors, raised by Te on her own journal.

I fear I'm not being very clear. And... much as I find it odd to consider anything a "spoiler" that comes from source material older than (most of?) the people reading this post: [spoiler cut begins here]

Here's my disclaimer and statement that I am not making any sort of value judgments about either the types of stories posited below, or the people who would write them. This is about my reactions to certain images in RotK, and certain stories that as far as I know haven't even been written yet; reactions, not moral or ethical objections.

So. What, exactly, am I talking about? Three things.

One: Frodo's navel.

When Sam finds Frodo at the top of Cirith Ungol, he has, as in the book, been stripped by the orcs. (I'm willing to bet that more of the Frodo-torture depicted in the book will actually appear in the extended edition / director's cut, too.) There are a number of shots of him lying on his side on the floor, wrists bound before him, his naked torso filling the width of the screen. It's an image made for hurt/comfort fic.

It's also an easier, or at least more obvious, image for connecting hobbit-slash with paedophilia. Because in this case it's not just the childlike innocence of the hobbits at issue; there's Elijah wood's body, right there. And as much as I know Elijah is an adult, and Frodo is an adult, he doesn't look like one, especially with his shirt off.

Two: Pippin and Denethor.

Um. Okay, maybe in this instance I'm exactly as much creeped out by what was right there onscreen as anything I suspect might be written about happening between-scenes. Hell, I was just disturbed by Denethor, period. His interactions with Pippin just made him seem that much more horrible by contrast.

Three: Pippin and Gandalf.

Here, again, what's touched off my reaction is the interaction between a Hobbit and a Man (and I have sooooo many issues with Tolkien's [ab]use of that term, but for the purposes of this post I'm just going to use it the way he did), or at least a Hobbit and a Wizard, which is a similar enough thing in general. There is something about hobbits, not so much their childlike stature as a seeming innate innocence, that seems to me to make them inescapably unequal partners in any liason with Tolkien's taller races. Not that there's much to suggest a basis for Gandalf/Pippin slash, but there's just enough, mainly in certain overlong gazes, and their posture, sometimes, when they stand together. And... maybe I could describe this better after seeing RotK again. I'm talking about a few minutes of a film that ran over three hours.

Talking to Te (at great length *g*) about adult/child slash involving Batman has made me realise that I'm not nearly as universally squicked by chan pairings (or whatever you want to call them, and I'm using the term "chan" as loosely as it goes in this sentence) as I used to think I was. But the squick is definitely still there. With Gotham stories, what I like best in a story involving attraction between an adult and a teenager is when I find myself both disturbed and aroused by it.

What seems to be bothering me about the three scenarios from Return of the King has to do, I think, with getting from point disturbed to point disturbed-and-aroused. And to do with recognising that I'm not just disturbed, but squicked, in Cathexys's sense of "squick" as including the awareness that this is someone else's kink, even if at this point the "someone else" is only hypothetical, so far as I know.

::sigh:: I don't think I'm going to get any more coherent, at this point.

What do you all think?