sex=yaay please
Nov. 27th, 2006 04:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI've read a bunch of people saying that sex=death only because this is horror/SF/fantasy in dark mode and therefore everything =death.
I would disagree. Or at least call that very limited.
What happens with horror is that Big Scary Things happen, and then are somehow resolved/defeated.
The kind of horror I don't deliberately watch resolves it with a final massacre and the bad things winning. Which, you know, could be seen as leaving no one with a problem, except for that thing where usually they're ghosts trapped in hell by then, which obviously sucks.
But resolution does not always =death.
I can't believe I'm holding this up as a good example but the film I watched the other night, 13 ghosts, which I liked at the time principally for the lawyer getting sliced in half... It avoided the =death ending. And for once didn't have a 'noble sacrifice', otherwise known as suicide=yaay. I hate 'noble sacrifice'. Even when it was Buffy or Spike, it was bloody stupid. The only saving grace for both of them was that it was not in fact the end, and they had to come back and have another go because grand gestures aren't actually the point or the end or anything tidy like that. Makes the point be that 'noble sacrifice' is not enough, got to go to work.
ANYways
13 ghosts had a character say that the only way to save the kids was to sacrifice yourself, put love in the machine by dying for them. But that turned out to be the twist, becoming the 13th ghost would have been a Very Bad Thing and opened the eye of hell, and suicide=bad. What actually worked was *living*, was a bit of a leap of faith and a lot of hugging. That broke the death machine and freed the ghost of the dead lover.
So here you have resolution = love and life and stuff.
The thing is, with sex=death then sex is being presented as the problem. And death as the solution. The sex is the upset of the status quo and the death is how things are returned to equilibrium at the end. And that's just dead creepy.
You can equally well write very dark stories where death is *the bad thing* and sex is *the good thing*. You get a whole redemptive power of love thing going on at the end. You can still have all kinds of scary, creepy, dangerous, you can have zombie attacks or creepy ghosts or aliens that hatch out of your chest or anything else horror-sf-fantasy.
You just have, fighting it all, love and loyalty and all that good stuff. Including sex. There's some real powerful sex magic that should = life.
But no. We get =death all over the place. Death is the way the story gets solved over and over, kill the bad thing.
One reason I like ghost stories is you *can't* kill the bad thing so you *have to* do something else. Much more productive.
I want some stories where the horror is outside and good guys fight it. And they think about moral issues, maybe talk them through a lot or have people acting on both sides, lots of room for shades of grey. But on account of being a team, being connected, they do not become the monsters, because being people helps you stay a person.
I don't know if that isn't 'dark' or 'gritty' or 'adult' enough to please whatever audience they're aiming at. But I would like to watch more stories where love and sex = yaay and life.
I would disagree. Or at least call that very limited.
What happens with horror is that Big Scary Things happen, and then are somehow resolved/defeated.
The kind of horror I don't deliberately watch resolves it with a final massacre and the bad things winning. Which, you know, could be seen as leaving no one with a problem, except for that thing where usually they're ghosts trapped in hell by then, which obviously sucks.
But resolution does not always =death.
I can't believe I'm holding this up as a good example but the film I watched the other night, 13 ghosts, which I liked at the time principally for the lawyer getting sliced in half... It avoided the =death ending. And for once didn't have a 'noble sacrifice', otherwise known as suicide=yaay. I hate 'noble sacrifice'. Even when it was Buffy or Spike, it was bloody stupid. The only saving grace for both of them was that it was not in fact the end, and they had to come back and have another go because grand gestures aren't actually the point or the end or anything tidy like that. Makes the point be that 'noble sacrifice' is not enough, got to go to work.
ANYways
13 ghosts had a character say that the only way to save the kids was to sacrifice yourself, put love in the machine by dying for them. But that turned out to be the twist, becoming the 13th ghost would have been a Very Bad Thing and opened the eye of hell, and suicide=bad. What actually worked was *living*, was a bit of a leap of faith and a lot of hugging. That broke the death machine and freed the ghost of the dead lover.
So here you have resolution = love and life and stuff.
The thing is, with sex=death then sex is being presented as the problem. And death as the solution. The sex is the upset of the status quo and the death is how things are returned to equilibrium at the end. And that's just dead creepy.
You can equally well write very dark stories where death is *the bad thing* and sex is *the good thing*. You get a whole redemptive power of love thing going on at the end. You can still have all kinds of scary, creepy, dangerous, you can have zombie attacks or creepy ghosts or aliens that hatch out of your chest or anything else horror-sf-fantasy.
You just have, fighting it all, love and loyalty and all that good stuff. Including sex. There's some real powerful sex magic that should = life.
But no. We get =death all over the place. Death is the way the story gets solved over and over, kill the bad thing.
One reason I like ghost stories is you *can't* kill the bad thing so you *have to* do something else. Much more productive.
I want some stories where the horror is outside and good guys fight it. And they think about moral issues, maybe talk them through a lot or have people acting on both sides, lots of room for shades of grey. But on account of being a team, being connected, they do not become the monsters, because being people helps you stay a person.
I don't know if that isn't 'dark' or 'gritty' or 'adult' enough to please whatever audience they're aiming at. But I would like to watch more stories where love and sex = yaay and life.