Roadmap to the kinks
Jun. 16th, 2006 10:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwynWork, work, work... way too much and I have to work this weekend and all I want to do is think, watch, and talk about my new insane fannish glee, my soap opera madness, Steve and Kayla back on Days of Our Lives! But instead I have to work, and then more work, and then try not to let my stomach churn in dread of going to NY next week and all our tenth anniversary copy and then the massive redesign launch... gah. And a big fat wah.
In between the madness, though, I was pondering why nearly 20 year old soap characters from the cheesy '80s would make me so happy right now (besides the obvious bit of nostalgia for a time before my life went to hell in a handbasket) and I realized that their story, especially Steve's as an individual character, was an early roadmap to what would become my fannish interests and kinks, for lack of a better word (I've never really had a lot of kinks in the fannish sense, because my main interest has always been quality writing or vidding or meta discussion, rather than the type of story/vid/topic -- but I'm as much a sucker as the next person for something that hits all the right buttons).
I didn't even know about media fandom back then, and the intarwebs were a mere glimmer in the eyes of the Arpanet guys. My only experience with organized fandom was SF fandom, but that was a different ball o' wax in most respects, at least in the early '80s. Primarily literary based, for one thing. Slash was a symbol on a keyboard. I'd never given pause to even think about the types of stories I responded to, or the tropes that appealed most to me.
So, Steve and Kayla are back on Days now, and Steve has amnesia! Yay! I love amnesia, even though the kind they always have on TV is so rare as to be negligible -- real amnesia is a lot more like Memento, and utterly terrifying. But no mind, I adore soapy amnesia stories. And it's great because it means Steve is acting a lot like the bad-boy tough guy he was initially on the show, before they realized he was superb and wrote him in as a real character. When he first appeared, he was a kidnapping, terrorizing, leather-jacketed lowlife with an eye patch and a tin heart. He was not a good guy. But!
From afar, he fell for the pretty nurse he was hired to scare away from Salem. This meant that he wasn't just a sexy bad boy, he was capable of reverse corruption (if I can find that post where I explain this, I will link to it). I was in heaven! He told the Powerful Evil Bad Guy, Victor, that he didn't want to do the job anymore, and was promptly beaten by Victor's thugs to within an inch of his life. So, there it was: taking it on the chin for someone else without them knowing you're sacrificing for them. At the time, I never realized that all this made me deliriously happy because it was a model of the sort of thing I loved. And there were just tons of signs of what would become my little fetishes later. This is why I love the character, and the romance, so much.
Tragic past that leaves terrible scars, physically and emotionally. Seriously, it doesn't get much better than an eye patch. They're not blind, but they're horribly scarred, and they can't forget what led them there. In Steve's case, we find out early on, when he kidnaps Hope, that it was her One True Love, Bo Brady, who caused Steve to lose his eye. A fight over a woman, no less, when they were in the merchant marine. So, there's all kinds of great stuff I've come to love: dark secret past with another prominent person in the story, lingering scars and years of bitterness, reVENge, a disbelief that anyone can see past the scars and love that person. Whee! When people never really get over the emotional part of the physical scarring, it's even better. After Steve had been beaten and Kayla rescued him, she had to leave to go get medicine for him. He got out of bed and went to the grungy mirror and looked at himself, and said "She didn't even flinch," referring to her taking off his eye patch to tend his sexy wounds (which he had struggled with her about). He was so convinced he was so ugly and his wound was the physical manifestation of his inner ugliness, and yet she saw past it... swoon. Really, it just doesn't get better than that, and I search for this sort of thing now in all my entertainments.
Also, there was a nascent pair of slash glasses that I had on sometimes, even without knowing what slash was -- Steven and Bo not only had deep history and bad blood and ruined friendship between them, they had wild chemistry and so a lot of their running around together had a definite slash bent. So to speak.
Only one person can bring out the soft gooey center/heart of gold. The best part about Steve when he came on the show was that he was so damn different from bad guys you usually saw on soaps. He really was bad, but he was also clever and had his own personal code. He walked the walk and really did talk the talk. But once he fell for Kayla, the good part of him that he supressed so hard, and that we'd only seen the faintest glimmer of when he kidnapped Hope, came out and he didn't want to hurt her. And even after they got to know one another, he kept believing he was bad for her because he was... bad. Inner turmoil! Miscommunication! Noble sacrifice without the other person understanding what they're doing! All of this couldn't have made me happier at the time, and still continues to make me delirious with swoonage (unfortunately, I rarely get a chance to see this in fanfic anywhere, but it's my favorite kind of theme, and I'm bummed that I always write it, though never get to see others tackle it much). It's the kernel of OTPness and definitely set the stage for my fixation on people who can be only with certain other people.
Action! Some of the storylines on Days at that time were very action-oriented, which was not very common. At all. A lot of it had to do with the type of character Steve (and to some degree, Bo and Roman/John) was. There was running around Stockholm, guns, nefarious doings, and I still vividly remember one sequence where Steve was racking the slide on a gun and saying goodbye to Kayla, and he and Bo going off to do something heroic, to the tune of Peter Gabriel's Red Rain, which really amazed me at the time. Not the kind of music you usually heard on soaps back then, and definitely not the kind of events. I hate stories where people are just sitting around in a nameless room somewhere talking about relationships and then maybe having sex. No story could be more boring to me than the standard fanfic line where there's no sense of movement, of a world outside the two main characters. I like motion and plot and meat. And I totally blame Steve for this!
Snark. One of the things that also made Steve stand out was his incredible sarcasm. He was mean-spirited at times, always kind of bitter except with Kayla or Hope at first, and he was just so sarcastic. He mocked people all the time, and at first, started calling Kayla "sweetness" in derision, but it later became his term of endearment for her. And even with amnesia, they've brought that back to the reappeared Steve... he's every bit as snarktastic as his old self (at least, before they tried to turn him into a leather-jacketed SNAG) and it's always fun. Fanfic has often been written by people who think they're funny but they're not, and it can be painful to read stuff by people who really don't have a knack for true snark and droll, witty delivery. I think because Steve's actor was just so great at ad-libbing or twisting lines, throwing in great body language to change the meaning of the scripted lines, it left me with this lifelong need to see characters like that. I don't like snark for snark's sake (which is why I find a lot of the most popular fandoms so empty these days), I like it when it's character and scene development, when it changes the tone of a story or makes something feel different. I think Steve being back on the show is going to bring it out of its stiff doldrums, or I sure hope so. Bring on the sarcasm!
Sex. Really fraught sex. The standard fanfic plot, het or slash, usually involves the characters slowly realizing their love for each other, and then it culminates in them getting together and having the most mind-blowing sex ever. Bleh. I like it when people are tortured by their inability to get together with someone for dozens of pages, and if they consummate, then flame out or lose one another, even better. It's much funner when you get people going "OMG, I should not have done that" and then running for the hills, especially if they won't explain and the other person thinks they have cooties because Beloved Sex Object ran away from them. Soaps have long understood this phenomenon, and they did it wonderfully with Steve and Kayla. At the time, I wasn't clued in enough to my kinks to get what was at work there, but the two of them danced around everything for such a long time, would get close and then part, or she found out that he'd been the one terrorizing her, or whatever, and it was fantastic. I think it was like almost two years before they finally had sex. And then there was still more trouble. Fraught sex is just the best. HHJJ shopping for curtains? Feh! I spit on that! Nothing beats a good traumatic car accident after running away from the person you just made love with but don't think you should be with.
A couple people thought I was mocking the show because I've gone on and on about the cheese factor. But no, really -- it makes me happy to cringe in embarassment on this. Normally, my embarassment threshold is lower than a snake could crawl through, but in this case, I'm all over the cheese. I wear the cheese, dude. Even the hair-ful and terrifying '80s flashbacks they've been running, I'm so there. It goes down smooth like Velveeta.
Also, did I mention scars? Because dude, losing an eye... that's like the scar zenith. And it got even better when Kayla went deaf and mute and Steve learned sign language for her. So there were like, double scars! And he convinced her to have surgery, but they didn't know she had regained her voice until their wedding, when she spoke her vows!! Yay! Scars, emotionally and physically! Ahem. But anyway. Yeah, this is the blueprint of my fannish happiness, and I never even knew it till now. This has been a good week, just because Steve and Kayla are back, and they're totally doomed.
In between the madness, though, I was pondering why nearly 20 year old soap characters from the cheesy '80s would make me so happy right now (besides the obvious bit of nostalgia for a time before my life went to hell in a handbasket) and I realized that their story, especially Steve's as an individual character, was an early roadmap to what would become my fannish interests and kinks, for lack of a better word (I've never really had a lot of kinks in the fannish sense, because my main interest has always been quality writing or vidding or meta discussion, rather than the type of story/vid/topic -- but I'm as much a sucker as the next person for something that hits all the right buttons).
I didn't even know about media fandom back then, and the intarwebs were a mere glimmer in the eyes of the Arpanet guys. My only experience with organized fandom was SF fandom, but that was a different ball o' wax in most respects, at least in the early '80s. Primarily literary based, for one thing. Slash was a symbol on a keyboard. I'd never given pause to even think about the types of stories I responded to, or the tropes that appealed most to me.
So, Steve and Kayla are back on Days now, and Steve has amnesia! Yay! I love amnesia, even though the kind they always have on TV is so rare as to be negligible -- real amnesia is a lot more like Memento, and utterly terrifying. But no mind, I adore soapy amnesia stories. And it's great because it means Steve is acting a lot like the bad-boy tough guy he was initially on the show, before they realized he was superb and wrote him in as a real character. When he first appeared, he was a kidnapping, terrorizing, leather-jacketed lowlife with an eye patch and a tin heart. He was not a good guy. But!
From afar, he fell for the pretty nurse he was hired to scare away from Salem. This meant that he wasn't just a sexy bad boy, he was capable of reverse corruption (if I can find that post where I explain this, I will link to it). I was in heaven! He told the Powerful Evil Bad Guy, Victor, that he didn't want to do the job anymore, and was promptly beaten by Victor's thugs to within an inch of his life. So, there it was: taking it on the chin for someone else without them knowing you're sacrificing for them. At the time, I never realized that all this made me deliriously happy because it was a model of the sort of thing I loved. And there were just tons of signs of what would become my little fetishes later. This is why I love the character, and the romance, so much.
Tragic past that leaves terrible scars, physically and emotionally. Seriously, it doesn't get much better than an eye patch. They're not blind, but they're horribly scarred, and they can't forget what led them there. In Steve's case, we find out early on, when he kidnaps Hope, that it was her One True Love, Bo Brady, who caused Steve to lose his eye. A fight over a woman, no less, when they were in the merchant marine. So, there's all kinds of great stuff I've come to love: dark secret past with another prominent person in the story, lingering scars and years of bitterness, reVENge, a disbelief that anyone can see past the scars and love that person. Whee! When people never really get over the emotional part of the physical scarring, it's even better. After Steve had been beaten and Kayla rescued him, she had to leave to go get medicine for him. He got out of bed and went to the grungy mirror and looked at himself, and said "She didn't even flinch," referring to her taking off his eye patch to tend his sexy wounds (which he had struggled with her about). He was so convinced he was so ugly and his wound was the physical manifestation of his inner ugliness, and yet she saw past it... swoon. Really, it just doesn't get better than that, and I search for this sort of thing now in all my entertainments.
Also, there was a nascent pair of slash glasses that I had on sometimes, even without knowing what slash was -- Steven and Bo not only had deep history and bad blood and ruined friendship between them, they had wild chemistry and so a lot of their running around together had a definite slash bent. So to speak.
Only one person can bring out the soft gooey center/heart of gold. The best part about Steve when he came on the show was that he was so damn different from bad guys you usually saw on soaps. He really was bad, but he was also clever and had his own personal code. He walked the walk and really did talk the talk. But once he fell for Kayla, the good part of him that he supressed so hard, and that we'd only seen the faintest glimmer of when he kidnapped Hope, came out and he didn't want to hurt her. And even after they got to know one another, he kept believing he was bad for her because he was... bad. Inner turmoil! Miscommunication! Noble sacrifice without the other person understanding what they're doing! All of this couldn't have made me happier at the time, and still continues to make me delirious with swoonage (unfortunately, I rarely get a chance to see this in fanfic anywhere, but it's my favorite kind of theme, and I'm bummed that I always write it, though never get to see others tackle it much). It's the kernel of OTPness and definitely set the stage for my fixation on people who can be only with certain other people.
Action! Some of the storylines on Days at that time were very action-oriented, which was not very common. At all. A lot of it had to do with the type of character Steve (and to some degree, Bo and Roman/John) was. There was running around Stockholm, guns, nefarious doings, and I still vividly remember one sequence where Steve was racking the slide on a gun and saying goodbye to Kayla, and he and Bo going off to do something heroic, to the tune of Peter Gabriel's Red Rain, which really amazed me at the time. Not the kind of music you usually heard on soaps back then, and definitely not the kind of events. I hate stories where people are just sitting around in a nameless room somewhere talking about relationships and then maybe having sex. No story could be more boring to me than the standard fanfic line where there's no sense of movement, of a world outside the two main characters. I like motion and plot and meat. And I totally blame Steve for this!
Snark. One of the things that also made Steve stand out was his incredible sarcasm. He was mean-spirited at times, always kind of bitter except with Kayla or Hope at first, and he was just so sarcastic. He mocked people all the time, and at first, started calling Kayla "sweetness" in derision, but it later became his term of endearment for her. And even with amnesia, they've brought that back to the reappeared Steve... he's every bit as snarktastic as his old self (at least, before they tried to turn him into a leather-jacketed SNAG) and it's always fun. Fanfic has often been written by people who think they're funny but they're not, and it can be painful to read stuff by people who really don't have a knack for true snark and droll, witty delivery. I think because Steve's actor was just so great at ad-libbing or twisting lines, throwing in great body language to change the meaning of the scripted lines, it left me with this lifelong need to see characters like that. I don't like snark for snark's sake (which is why I find a lot of the most popular fandoms so empty these days), I like it when it's character and scene development, when it changes the tone of a story or makes something feel different. I think Steve being back on the show is going to bring it out of its stiff doldrums, or I sure hope so. Bring on the sarcasm!
Sex. Really fraught sex. The standard fanfic plot, het or slash, usually involves the characters slowly realizing their love for each other, and then it culminates in them getting together and having the most mind-blowing sex ever. Bleh. I like it when people are tortured by their inability to get together with someone for dozens of pages, and if they consummate, then flame out or lose one another, even better. It's much funner when you get people going "OMG, I should not have done that" and then running for the hills, especially if they won't explain and the other person thinks they have cooties because Beloved Sex Object ran away from them. Soaps have long understood this phenomenon, and they did it wonderfully with Steve and Kayla. At the time, I wasn't clued in enough to my kinks to get what was at work there, but the two of them danced around everything for such a long time, would get close and then part, or she found out that he'd been the one terrorizing her, or whatever, and it was fantastic. I think it was like almost two years before they finally had sex. And then there was still more trouble. Fraught sex is just the best. HHJJ shopping for curtains? Feh! I spit on that! Nothing beats a good traumatic car accident after running away from the person you just made love with but don't think you should be with.
A couple people thought I was mocking the show because I've gone on and on about the cheese factor. But no, really -- it makes me happy to cringe in embarassment on this. Normally, my embarassment threshold is lower than a snake could crawl through, but in this case, I'm all over the cheese. I wear the cheese, dude. Even the hair-ful and terrifying '80s flashbacks they've been running, I'm so there. It goes down smooth like Velveeta.
Also, did I mention scars? Because dude, losing an eye... that's like the scar zenith. And it got even better when Kayla went deaf and mute and Steve learned sign language for her. So there were like, double scars! And he convinced her to have surgery, but they didn't know she had regained her voice until their wedding, when she spoke her vows!! Yay! Scars, emotionally and physically! Ahem. But anyway. Yeah, this is the blueprint of my fannish happiness, and I never even knew it till now. This has been a good week, just because Steve and Kayla are back, and they're totally doomed.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-06-16 07:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-16 07:32 pm (UTC)Anyway, just wanted you to know I'm having fun learning about Steve's eye patch and tortured love and grand homoerotic edventures and his amnesia and everything.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-16 07:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-16 07:58 pm (UTC)Steve totally set the standard for all my future crush-objects. Blond? Check. Smart? Check. Bad boy with a heart of gold? Check. Looks great in a pair of jeans and a leather jacket? Check. Long(ish) hair? Check.
I think if my mother had known just exactly how much DOOL was going to shape my future lovelife, she might not have let me watch it. *g*
no subject
Date: 2006-06-17 08:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-17 08:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-17 08:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-17 08:24 pm (UTC)It was funny for me because my "type" had always been darker. And then after that I had to pretty much realize that my only type was more about the characteristics (like those you cite) than the physicality because he totally blew my typing out of the water. I just wanted a guy like him, though sadly, I've never been able to find one.