OT4!

[jlh]

I'm an OTP kinda gal, and I'm not ashamed of that. I'm either in or I'm out; either it's a pairing I vaguely care about and maybe read some fic about one time or if a friend is writing it, in which case I can be a multishipper, or I love it and I write it and I read it and I'm involved, in which case I'm totally OTP for both sides of the pairing.

I know it's popular to snark that one is in fandom "for the porn" but I'm actually, honestly here for the romance. I write them, I read them, I think about their structure. And the real mystery the writer needs to crack when writing a romance is not the HOW, but the WHY. What makes these two people just fantastic for each other? Why do they fit together? How are they the same, and how are they counterparts? What are the rough places? It's akin to what Lord Peter says about murder--once you know HOW you know WHO. In romance, once you know WHY you know HOW.

Anyway that's all to say, I'm OTP about most of my pairings, and I'm not entirely fond of OT3s in general (musesfool wrote an excellent post that I of course can't find right now about how OT3s are usually about one person of the three, really about how B and C love A. In fact often the OT3 as solution-to-ship-war is written in just that way, with Harry/Ron/Hermione a notable exception.

I find myself more and more interested in OT4s all the time. I'm particularly into OT4s that are two men and two women. Now, while I do have a tendency to write characters as some flavor of bisexual, I'm okay with some relationships of the OT4 being nonsexual. For example, I'm increasingly OT4 with White Collar's Peter/Elizabeth/Neal/Diana, and sure, that OT4 starts out being mostly about Peter, but Elizabeth and Diana have both developed relationships with Neal, and while we have to wait out Tiffani Theisen's maternity leave to actually see it on screen it's easy to think that Elizabeth and Diana have some sort of relationship too.* Of course, that relationship between Diana and Neal is very specifically nonsexual, and I'd probably only write it so under special circs (mostly: D/s, with Diana on top and Peter and Elizabeth present).

Same with another head-OT4 of mine, Puck/Kurt/Mercedes/Quinn. Or the way that in the WWII fic I wrote Chris/Blake-Amanda/Carly becomes an OT4 in order to get around marriage, inheritance, and immigration law, but it's never sexual between the two couples. And while I've written about Harry/Hermione/Ginny/Draco mostly in a sexual context, that OT4 works, too. Seamus/Dean/Parvati/Pansy is a kind of OT4, though completely nonsexual between the couples, and I haven't worked out what all the corners of that one would be.

And then there's Kirk/McCoy/Uhura/Spock, whose internal relationships I see sort of in a square like this:

Jim -- Bones
Spock--Nyota

where the horizontals are strong romantic love, the verticals are growing connections of very close friendship, and the diagonals are initial suspicion leads to grudging respect leads to eventual understanding leads to appreciation and affection. K/Mc/S/U is my one three men and a lady OT4, though there are ways in which I see Kirk as sort of female at times. Eh, who wants gender binaries anyway!

I have to admit, I'm kind of nervous about my whole OT4 thing. Some of you, I know, are very firm in not wanting to see any of the few out gay and lesbian characters, or out gay and lesbian people who turn up in rpf, written in any kind of heterosexual context. That isn't what I want to do here; it isn't about changing anyone's sexuality (except for the usual slashing-the-ostensibly-straight). It's more about being interested in how two couples can become entwined, and how sex does--or doesn't--play a role in that.

(I mean, I already wrote Seamus and Dean having a foursome with Remus and Sirius, and I have a little idea in the back of my head of possibly writing Parvati and Pansy having a foursome with Tonks and Luna, so the Seamus/Dean/Parvati/Pansy OT4 really isn't about sex.)

Hopefully I can write these OT4s in a way that won't seem disrespectful! I certainly hope I've succeeded so far, but if there's a reason I'm hesitant to talk about my OT4 shipping, it's definitely the presence of gay and lesbian characters within these OT4s.

Thoughts?



*In fact, I'm considering writing, for my Diana fic, an AU in which Diana was working with Peter at a much earlier point, and Elizabeth is a lesbian, so that it's Diana who gets together with Elizabeth, and then as a couple they watch Peter struggle with the Neal situation. This honest-to-goodness wasn't about clearing Peter for Neal, but rather thinking of a way in which Diana/Elizabeth worked for me.

Comments

[edithmorningstar]

Did you ever read the Merlin AU where it's set up as a sedoretu, which is lifted from Ursula K LeGuin's the story of o? I can probably dig up the link if you haven't and are interested. In the sedoretu construct, there are 4 people: 2 men and 2 women, where one woman and one man are "morning" and one of each gender are "evening." Everyone is expected to have a sexual relationship with both of the people who are of the opposite morning/evening orientation, and a platonic relationship with the one who shares their morning/evening orientation. Often the sedoretu might be two pairs of siblings, if the siblings are both morning or both evening. As far as I can tell - and I haven't yet read the original LeGuin explanation in her book - morning and evening are personality based, temperamentally based, but also known and codified socially at a young age, and not considered to be actively chosen. Also apparently with the sedoretu a lot of time people first find their platonic match, and then seek out an also already-matched pair of the opposite orientation.

In the fic, Merlin and Gwen are morning and Arthur and Morgana are evening. There's an assumption that because Morgana is evening and Arthur's foster sister, if he *didn't* have her in his sedoretu it would be tantamount to declaring her unmarriageable. It would have interesting implications in allowing a Harry/Ron/Hermione/Ginny resolution of the H/H H/G ship war, since Ron and Ginny both being one orientation (I'm sure they'd be morning) would make their being siblings a non-issue.

I'd love to see an Atlantis OT4 with John, Rodney, Teyla and Ronon in something like a sedoretu, but I'm not sure who'd be which orientation to make it work best. John and Ronon as evening and Rodney and Teyla as morning, most likely. If you lift the restriction about one of each gender for each orientation, you could do all sorts of interesting dynamics. I like the idea, I guess, of it as a model of a workable OT4 where not all the partners are expected to have romantic or sexual relationships.

Anyway, the whole sedoretu thing is another neat lens for OT4s and kind of matches some of the ways you seem to be thinking about them - your star trek example anyway made me think of it.

[edithmorningstar]

...and now I remember the original reason I'd opened this post in a new tab to comment on it - to say ditto on the romance bit. I hadn't thought of it in terms of the how and why but it *fits* and now I have a framework for articulating why I feel the way I do about romance and characters who fit together being the big reason I love slash. I'd gotten it down to knowing that the payoff for me is always at the emotional/romantic climax, even in a pwp where there's a competing sexual climax vying for attention. I like best those stories, whatever rating, that acknowledge the emotional payoff in that way in their narrative structure. Which is also why many a PG or PG-13 story can be a lot hotter than some explicit ones.

[jlh]

This is super interesting, thank you! Actually when I googled "sedoretu" a link to that fic was on the first page (!) so I read it at AO3 just now. It's an amazing concept and the writer does some very interesting things with it. It's definitely a workable model for those kinds of relationships, and I'm interested to read the LeGuin as well.

I think for the H/H H/G R/H battle it wouldn't completely solve because Harry and Hermione wouldn't be together, so it would be more like OBHWF with same sex elements. (Which, I must say, I read a story that pointed in that kind of direction. It starts out with Hermione having this magical dildo, an idea I totally stole later, and fucking Ginny I think with it, and then she's with Ginny and they invite Harry to join the two of them and fuck him, and then he goes back to his room and wants to be with Ron, and then he and Ron get all emo about their great love until they get an owl post from the girls saying that they're fucking off to be together anyway. Sadly the story is totally gone, unless it's been reposted someplace.)

What's the most interesting about it is the idea that attraction works more in a morning-evening way than in anything related to gender, making everyone vaguely bisexual but then also controlled in some other direction. I think the part I'm the most worried about in terms of running around writing this stuff is the "everyone is bi" which I admit my own writing tends to for tons of reasons, not the least of which is my own sexuality, but I have run into, as I said, the very strong opinions of people who don't really care for that sort of thing, because they want the gay characters, or even the merely slashed characters, to be gay, not some sort of flexible yadda. On the one hand I can't obsess too much about other people's agenda when I'm writing (particularly the slashed characters) but on the other hand I don't want to be insensitive, either. Or I guess really, bi-normative. (Insert here the "everyone is kinda bi" vs. "no one is really bi" yadda yadda.)

BUT, in going over to the polyBB that the fic was from I did find that someone is writing Kurt/Mercedes/Puck/Quinn for the new round, so now I'll totally have to watch that and read that fic! and see if they avoid problems with Kurt being in any kind of a relationship with a woman, and if it gets flack.

[jlh]

Yeah, I mean, I was brought up on classic romcoms, which of course don't have any sex (unless you count dancing) and I think my writing is a lot of recreation of that structure, so I completely agree with you. For me, I really don't get the whole "aliens made them do it/sex pollen/magic bonding" forced thing. I mean, you want to write the marriage of convenience and then they fall in love, fine, but the dub-con fuck leads to love thing feels too WNGWJLEO, a dynamic I never liked. (And which, people increasingly point out, is kinda homophobic.)

For the STBB that's going up Sunday, I thought a lot about changing the structure around because so often it's UST-sex-freak out/unexpected obstacle-angst-resolution-sex. I really didn't want to write the whole freak out in the middle, so I had to find another way to structure the thing, which changed around the placement of the sex, and I had to futz with how to place it within the emotional resolution that didn't feel forced. It took some doing! But I got there and I felt like for that fic in particular, without it, it would have been weird. But I might have left it out for another kind of story. You don't always need it, that's for sure.

Thanks so much for commenting! I'm always leery of posting meta like this and everyone being, oh clio, why do you think so much?

[edithmorningstar]

Duh, yes, you're totally right re the ship war bit. I was a lot more focused on the platonic bit letting Ron and Ginny be in the same sedoretu than on Harry and Hermione being the other platonic pair. :/ Ah well.

I guess, re the "everyone is bi" issue, I kind of figure in a sedoretu-verse, yes, EVERYONE is bi, but only half the people are morning/evening. I wonder actually if then there'd be forbidden love between people of the same orientation. THAT could make an interesting H/H/R/G fic actually - they're a sedoretu, but Harry and Hermione don't want to be purely platonic, and it's a private and/or public scandal. I do find it interesting that in a sedoretu-verse, the only forbidden sex is a het sex, because what matters more in terms of "how things are done" is the morning/evening bit.

I am also on board for that Kurt/Mercedes/Puck/Quinn! (I do love Kurt/Puck. A lot.)

I get why people are worried about erasure, in terms of writing a canonically gay character as anything other than a Kinsey 6, but I also feel (and maybe this is my own bisexuality talking some) that not allowing for a more varied interpretation of the range of human sexual preference is also erasing. It matters a lot how it's done and why. It hasn't seemed to bother many people when, for example, Idol slashers write an Adam/Kris/Katy threesome, if it's more about finding a solution to Kris being married to someone he clearly loves and who a lot of fans really like than about wish fulfillment that might, say, pair Adam with a mary sue. And even then it matters how it's written.

We should, as a fandom community, be able to tolerate the subtlety of not everything always needing to be black & white all the time. Real people, in the real world, aren't always 100% the orientation they identify as. It doesn't seem as erasing to me to put a gay character in a three-or-more-some with at least one same-gender character, either - certainly not the same as simply pretending the character's canonical queerness never existed.

I wonder about this issue in other contexts too. There was a whole wank in bandom a while back, I hear, over someone writing a canonically Jewish RPF-subject as Christian without any kind of note or explanation inside or outside the fic. I definitely see the major problem with that. But I also don't think we should necessarily then simply never tolerate fic that asks "what if?" for a minority character. The thing is in doing it sensitively, with deliberate attention to avoiding erasure. I was positing a hypothetical what if fic for Adam Lambert around whether he would have grown up quite the same, felt like quite as much of an outsider in his teens, if he hadn't been a minority religion - and if that might have taken him on a different path where he might have been less driven to success, maybe not pushed himself in quite the same ways, or something. If the whole fic were threaded around that theme, that what if question, I don't think it would in itself automatically not be OK. What would automatically be not OK is what the bandom fic in question did, where it simply introduced the character as Christian and never addressed that there had been a change from canon or that there should have been some impact on this AU version of the character. I worry sometimes that we as a community are going to prevent ourselves from exploring some of these touchy areas and miss some opportunities for gaining more understanding through them. If it's a choice of erring on the side of caution, then I do want to err on the side of avoiding erasure, for sure. But I do think we should still get to explore, as long as it's done sensitively. That's all a long-winded way of saying that, yes, I wouldn't trust everyone to write a good fic where Kurt's involved in a mixed-gender foursome, but I definitely believe it can be done well and without stomping on Kurt's queer identity.

[edithmorningstar]

And NOW, I'm thinking, hmm, I wonder about what ifs taken the other way, and seeing how characters who aren't part of minorities would be if they had been. We see that some in genderswaps where a guy is shocked at being treated differently as a woman, but I'm thinking about what if Rodney McKay were black? And always had been. Would subtle institutional racism have held him back from something in his career? Would he have been forced to tone down his crankiness because people would tell him it was threatening to have a black man get so angry all the time? Would he possibly be just a touch less entitled, not having been able to access straight white male privilege his whole life? Or would it maybe not have any significant character impact on him at all, and just be another changed feature in an AU. And then there'd be such a tight line to tread and not be appropriative. Which means I will never be gutsy enough to do a what if like that, and honestly it probably wouldn't be a good idea for me to try as a middle class white woman, but it's interesting as a thought experiment in thinking about how fandom would react, and what real issues it would raise for the writer and reader.

I *do* want to try putting in more ethnic diversity in my interpretations of book-verse characters. If an author describes someone as "handsome" and having brown hair, they could be any color at all, and if there aren't other cultural markers, it could be a way to add some chromatics and cultural diversity into canons that are otherwise written - or assumed to be written - as overwhelmingly white.

[edithmorningstar]

There is one subgenre of AMTDI that I like - it's the one where there's been tons of unresolved longing, but neither party has dared to make a move because it'll ruin the relationship they do have, and then when they're thrown into an unavoidably sexual situation, they can't hide behind that anymore. But it works best when that really is something both characters have been wanting and not allowing themselves to go for, and the AMTDI or whatever is just there as a catalyst, the same way hurt/comfort or other tropes around admitting pre-existing feelings can work.

And, ah, no problem on the meta. Apparently spamming you with rambling meta comments is my new insomnia hobby :) (sorry?). Being able to participate in meta like this is one of the reasons I needed to have a fannish journal again so badly, and it's like falling in love with fandom all over again to be able to geek out like this.

[jlh]

omg Kurt/Puck. I wish there was more good fic. I read a bunch of it this summer, and I really should go back and bookmark the stuff that was actually good. I love how the comm had a whole wank over needing to warn for bottom!Puck. Crazytimes.

The funny thing about that Adam/Kris/Katy fic is that Amy (ruby_fruit) wouldn't let you post that on glambertfic because she very strongly feels that putting Adam anywhere near a lady is WRONG, NO SERIOUSLY WRONG, WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH YOU though I can't find the post that she made about it, though it might have been Journey that actually made the post. ANYWHO that's what's in the back of my mind when I think about that stuff—her thoughts and also the conversation about Rachel Maddow/Keith Olberman fic.

But yeah, I would hope that given that we spend so much time writing about how love happens where it happens, that we could write about what it means when you have a queer identity and you're in a het relationship, or in a mixed-gender poly relationship. Heck, there are queer women who end up marrying men, we know them, and they aren't any less queer for that. I guess it's like usual, TREAD CAREFULLY, and if people want to be absolutist about shit than as The Dude said, well, that's just your opinion, man.

[jlh]

Well, that's what dark_agenda was doing with the Chromatic challenge, yeah? I have this half-done plot-free HIMYM fic where none of them are white, and I just need to fix the thing after a friend beta'd and made some really great points about it.

I would bet a lot of money that McKay's crankiness would be evident but MUCH LESS ENTITLED. Which is weird because isn't he like, kind of pretty entitled? So having McKay not be a white male, in any direction you want to go with that, would be really interesting. But yeah, I think of Obama and how everyone is like, "he never gets angry" and I want to be like, "You would never have let him be president if he gets angry, because he's black. He got where he is because he doesn't get angry."

And, you know, there are plenty of books that have chromatic characters that just aren't the main character. You know, reading those two entries that were on metafandom a while back, the "oh my I haven't written about women and CoC like I wanted to" and "here is my 15 step program for doing so" the thing that struck me is how people are like, "main chars only plz" so often. It's like, look down a level, dude.

[jlh]

No apologies please! Seriously.

Pre-existing feelings yes! As in, some UST set up before other things happen.

[edithmorningstar]

I missed a lot of the Dark Agenda stuff recently - now I'm going to have to go read that challenge.

It would be interesting to have the Atlantis team go to a planet where darker skin is privileged, and they have a major stereotype about the Angry Pale Man, and they like John OK cos he plays by their rules and doesn't speak up too much, but Rodney's contributions and intelligence are downplayed and dismissed. Problem with that being that they've done versions of that story where it's more like "look, ignorant natives who don't know that Rodney knows better than them!" enough on the show. They'd have to be seriously powerful as a planet, and very advanced, and all, and then they'd run the risk of being magic negroes, but it could be workable.

And huge agreement re the main/less-main characters thing. It's part of the same "I'll only write or read the one big hot ship everyone has decided is The ship in this fandom, and it involves main characters." But there's also a problem when people are choosing which minor characters to bring in to flesh out their fic's world too. And some of *that* goes back to which minor characters get more airtime in canon.