In which I try my hand at fannish meta

[liv]

So azurelunatic posted adorable Pacific Rim fan jewellery to Tumblr. And I appear to have thinky thoughts about a work of fanart.

I loved the film of Pacific Rim but in a very superficial escapist way, I didn't at all feel like it stands up to analysis. Apparently there's going to be a sequel, and I'm not sure that from a narrative point of view it really needs a sequel, but I am thrilled for the prospect of more shiny giant robots. I really like Pacific Rim fandom, I feel like the fan community see subtleties and complexities in the film way beyond what was there when I just watched it in the cinema. Basically I love the version of Pacific Rim portrayed in this vid by chaila much more than I like the canon.

And beyond PR fandom itself, I really passionately love that the concept of drift compatible has been adopted into fannish critical vocabulary. A lot of the time I don't care about ships and slash, or I care, but I get annoyed that any possible affection, teamwork, or even hatred and rivalry between characters is collapsed down to sex. Not that slash is a bad thing, not at all, and I can very much appreciate fanworks that postulate and explore a sexual / romantic relationship between characters where I don't really see that dynamic in canon. So it's not that there's too much sex in fandom, it's that there's too little of every other kind of connection I'm interested in.

So, the option of considering whether characters are drift compatible is very dear to my heart. I love that drift compatible can cover a romantic relationship or a sibling relationship or friends or even frenemies like Newt and Hermann. (Though at least in sovay's hands I can really buy sexual tension between them too.) I love that there's a canon three where any pair of the three are DC, and ok, they're triplets but it's easy enough to extend that concept to a triad or OT3. I particularly like drift compatible crossovers, because speculating whether two characters from different universes would have sex can certainly be hot, but it's hard for it to be more than that when there's no textual evidence of them interacting. But whether they could pilot a Jaeger together, now that gives you some really interesting character exploration!

I like that the ur-example of a drift compatible pair is Raleigh and Mako, who are certainly friends and only ambiguously a romantic couple. (I thought the final scene with them kissing against the sunrise was forcing a romantic frame onto the relationship, but other people with a good eye for films like rysmiel interpreted this as them being kissing friends, not a couple, and I do think there's room for that reading.)

The thing is, I feel absolutely starving for language and frames to talk about strong, passionate connections that are not romantic and heteronormative. In real life I've found it sometimes hard to tell friends how much I love them without resorting to either romantic language or quasi-religious terms like soul-mate. And in media and analysis of media it really frustrates me that there's such a gap for talking about any kind of strong connection that isn't a couple relationship. But now there's drift compatible. There's the kind of connection where you can cope with direct access to eachother's brains without going mad, and you can work together on a complex and dangerous task requiring both halves of the team to give the best of themselves constantly or they and the world may be destroyed. I've sometimes used LM Montgomery's term kindred spirits to talk about the friends who mean everything to me, but drift compatible is stronger than that. I'm sure there are words for this kind of thing in Classical Greek, but I'd rather a term that is instantly recognizable to everybody on the internet, not only to erudite classical scholars.

So yes, I really like the idea of people being able to give their friends matching jewellery with little cute Jaegers and a tag saying "drift compatible"! (And aww at the little note that says you can add a third or fourth necklace.) I kind of wish the tags in this particular example weren't heart-shaped, because yes, a heart means "love", but it kind of drags the drift compatible thing back towards the massive gravity well that is romantic connection. And really, you have to have a gender expression within a certain range to wear a pendant with a sparkly crystal and a heart, which limits the usefulness of this jewellery. Still, I'm really grateful to del Toro for coming up with this concept and to fandom for elaborating it.

Comments

[simont]

I kind of wish the tags in this particular example weren't heart-shaped, because yes, a heart means "love"

That does seem odd. For drift-compatibility, surely, you almost by definition want a brain!

[liv]

I'd like a brain better, definitely. When I looked at the pendants I thought what was wanted was a plain, square or round tag. I don't really have an artistic enough imagination but on some level what I'm really after is jewellery that looks like something that the Shatterdome would actually give to pilots as a badge, maybe a little bit of circuit board or something? Something that fits the cyberpunk aesthetic of Pacific Rim a bit more, and something that looks a bit more like a medal or badge of honour than a love-token.

[ghoti.livejournal.com]

Yes. I have more or less trained most of my friends to the point where I can say "You beautiful wonderful darlings I love you both so very much." as a stand alone comment, as I did recently, and both parties know that that's true and irrelevant to the attraction I (actually do, but may not) feel for them, but it's taken a lot of being me around people for that to work and so I gather it doesn't work for everyone.

[liv]

It's true, anyone I was able to feel close enough to to want to express this sort of thing, would probably also be willing to listen to long detailed explanations of the fact that when I say "I love you" I don't necessarily or even likely mean "I want to have sex with you" or "I want to be in a couple with you". And... romantic is different from sexual too, there are friends I'm totally happy to have sex with if circumstances are right but don't want to entangle our lives or act mushy around them, and there are people I love extremely dearly and I want to gaze into their eyes and send eachother love poetry and there's no chemistry between us.

[ghoti.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's true.

[kaberett]

:-)

[liv]

Glad you like!

[pretty_panther]

I think on a first watch PR is very action based but re-watches bring out the details that can fill out the plot. I adore the idea of drift compatibility. I think it can be fascinating to think of the Hansens and well...how does Chuck deal with his dad being in his head? Neither need nor want to know of the other's sex lives ect. But yus, I love the friendship bracelets. The shop is on a break though apparently and NO I WANT THEM.

[liv]

You could be right, maybe the film really is more subtle than I'm giving it credit for, and it's not all just made up by creative fans. It must be a pretty unusual parent-child team who are drift compatible, it's not just the sex thing, it's the whole individuation issue, being the kinds of people who can cope with a parent / offspring in their head must take something really special, I think.

And wow, the friendship bracelets are even more lovely than the pendants, I hadn't seen them. Those I am very tempted by for when the shop comes back.

[rysmiel]

I'd read it that the younger Hansen drifting with his father and the ways in which he's something of a jerk are probably not entirely unconnected.

The thing I like that really showed up for me on last watching, as more subtle stuff goes, is just how much of a kick in the teeth it is to obnoxious manpain narratives; a central character who loses his brother early on and whose primary emotional reaction from that is compassion, understanding, and trying to help his new drift partner with her issues rather than angst is sufficiently solidly in that it doesn't need showy foregrounding. (Nor understanding what the chain of command is for and why trying to be a big damn hero on your own is a bad idea.)

[cjwatson]

Personally I had great difficulty with the plot because I found it hard to get past my "why aren't they just using overwhelming air power rather than building giant robots?" reaction which wasn't really addressed at all; I know, mecha genre conventions and all. But there's some really interesting character psychology and a lot of stuff to like in it, so maybe I should try it again.

[liv]

I think you have to turn off your brain a bit, because nothing about the set-up for the giant robots makes any sense at all. It's a glorious visual spectacle, and yes, there is some interesting character stuff alongside the big screen action scenes. Also, I think this analysis is onto something, it's more than just fannish wishful thinking.

[liv]

I really like your reading of this film, but I just didn't see anything nearly as good as what you did. But I agree with you that the complete rejection of the manpain trope, and the awful one where the hero shows what a free spirit he is by breaking military hierarchy, are very well and subtly done. I think you might be right about the Hansens; I do like the way that you don't have to be pure in heart to pilot a Jaeger, you can be kind of jerkish as long as you have that connection with your co-pilot.

[rmc28]

Amusingly, the first two people who I thought of wouldn't wear such a thing, though I totally would. (We're drift-compatible, not accessory-compatible.)

[liv]

Awwwww this is the most endearing comment! And yes, there are definitely people I just wouldn't wear matching jewellery with, no matter how awesome the jewellery and how much I love them.

[seekingferret]

From my post when the film came out:

What did interest me in the movie was the drift. I saw people on FFA talking about it in terms of soulbonding, and I'm sure much of the fandom will write it that way, but I'm interested in it from a transhumanist perspective. Raleigh -- Gypsy -- Mako is a threesome, not a duo, and it's mediated by the tactile sensation of shared (giant) phantom limbs and a shared nervous system.

[liv]

That is really really interesting, I hadn't thought of the transhumanist thing, but of course. Is the whole post linkable?

[seekingferret]

http://seekingferret.dreamwidth.org/109001.html

[liv]

Thank you, that is indeed fascinating, lots of implications there I hadn't thought about.

[wild_irises]

I haven't seen PR (and now I want to), but there's something very special here, and I share your sense of huge lacunae in being able to talk about intense non-sexual personal relationships (she says, with a friend of 40+ years duration sitting across the room, having come 2,000 miles for no other reason than to spend time with me).

If you haven't read the Modesty Blaise books, check them out on this axis.

[liv]

Thank you for this comment and the recommendation of more books with friendships. It is also wonderful to hear about your friend, every time I find an example of something like that I feel like I fit better into the world, somehow. I think the film has really a lot of flaws, but also that chaila's vid brings out something that is actually there, even if a bit overshadowed by lots of fairly gratuitous blowing things up.

[azurelunatic]

I had occasion last night to say "I'm sending this to my drift partner" in IRC, and got instant recognition without any of the side-shippiness that can be rather unfortunate in some situations. It doesn't matter whether or not we're banging in this context, it matters that this thing is amazing and I need to make sure that my drift partner has it too.

[liv]

Awwwww! Lovely anecdote, yay. Thank you for the original Tumblr link too, but it really is so nice to have this language for someone who is that important in your life when it doesn't matter whether or not we're banging.