Pros Fic Reading Challenge - The Third Week in April by Ellis Ward

[jat-sapphire.livejournal.com]

Circuit Archive again. TW: Rape.

I swear. About 1 in 5 Pros stories has either B or D raped. And way too many of them have healing OTP sex in them.

Still, it's a good story, and I'm sure I'll read it again.

Comments

[a-boleyn.livejournal.com]

H/C stories were big ... I got over whelmed after a while and stopped reading any.

[jat-sapphire.livejournal.com]

(Hope you don't get this twice, swear I typed it before) So many people love H/C. Wonder if I will someday write it on purpose.

[tinturtle]

How would you say Pros compares to Starsky & Hutch in this regard?

Man from U.N.C.L.E. fanfic includes fewer rape stories, I think. I don’t know if that is because MFU canon lends itself so well to other extreme hurt/comfort scenarios or for some other reason.

For what this is worth, on AO3, 1.2% of Pros stories, 1.1% of S&H stories, and 0.6% of MFU stories carry the noncon warning. (The percentages of stories in each fandom that don’t use warnings are 40%, 31%, and 15%, respectively.)

[tinturtle]

I notice, though, that only 29% of the MFU fic on AO3 is slash, while the S&H fic is 52% slash and the Pros fic 76%. Rape fics are much more likely to be slash than otherwise (so that there can be healing OTP sex, no doubt), which means that the figures in the previous post could be improved. Considering slash works only, the portion of AO3 fics with the noncon warning is 1.3% for Pros, 1.8% for S&H, and 1.4% for MFU. (Not using archive warnings are 38%, 35%, and 20% of slash fics in each respective fandom.)

So maybe Pros just seems to have more rape stories because it has more slash overall. Or maybe stats drawn from AO3, with its limited coverage, don’t show the whole picture.

[tinturtle]

Further fun fact: On AO3, 2.8% of non-crossover Sentinel slash carries the noncon warning. All the dystopian sentinels-and-guides-are-known AUs may contribute to that. (I filtered out crossovers because ideas from TS have been applied unrelated fic in so many other fandoms. The portion of non-crossover TS slash that didn’t use archive warnings is also high, at 55%.)

[jat-sapphire.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's hard to tell from warnings. TS as well as SH has, I think, quite a few writers who do not like warnings and won't use them. I'm a big tagger, but I don't like writing noncon, so it's not a tag I've used. I will sometimes read it even when tagged. The Circuit archive doesn't seem to use tags, or else I've been ignoring them. I know I've read Surprise!Bodie/Cowley or Doyle/Murphy, and it didn't kill me, but I prefer my B/D just B/D, thx.

[jat-sapphire.livejournal.com]

Rape stories? I don't remember reading any in SH. That can't be true, so I must have just been lucky and not found them.

[sc-fossil.livejournal.com]

Oh, they are there. I tend to avoid them in my fandoms. Not a fan of rape/non-con. I can read it. I probably should admit that Strange Days Indeed is a fav in spite of the rape. I like the h/c in this one because of how it's presented. So there are always exceptions!

[gilda-elise.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Pros stories can often be a bit dark, but Ward's writing more than makes up for it.

[bodiestar.livejournal.com]

The thing that gets me with Pros rape stories is that when it is Doyle raped we have a lot of his rape recovery but it seems that when it is Bodie we dont have so much of him trying to recover. He just seems to be ok a lot of the time and in some ut is actually Doyle who suffers more even though it is Bodie who was raped.

[jat-sapphire.livejournal.com]

Yes! The Ellis Ward one I read was full of Bodie being cross that people think he'd be traumatized. OK, haaard-man. I have seen Doyle's trauma at Bodie's rape written as one more way that Doyle's bleeding heart makes him the tender, caring one. Yeah, okay, watch some episodes because Bodie takes care of Doyle--if anything, more often. I love that story in which Doyle worries that since Bodie tends to rush off to get revenge, likely one of them will be dead before Bodie gets around to expressing his feelings...to Doyle directly.

[bodiestar.livejournal.com]

There is a definite trend towards Doyle being the one who always seems to feel guilty, traumatised or hurting. Bodie seems to have to be the one to try to get Doyle to stop hurting or feeling guilty. I like to read ones the other way round also but do struggle to find them.

[jat-sapphire.livejournal.com]

I bet you struggle to find them! Hmm, the omly thing that comes to mind is post-Fall Girl fic, and I'm not very fond of them. I must think this over.

[byslantedlight.livejournal.com]

I tend to think the large number of rape fics (and references to rape) was connected with the period when alot of our Pros stories were being written - I remember being very much more aware of rape as an issue back then than people seem to be now (which I'd like to think was a good thing, with it being less common, but I suspect isn't as true as it should be). (Although that could also just be cos I fall into the same age group!) But I think it was a coming-of-age time, a new awareness that rape didn't have to be hidden and that it wasn't something that women should be ashamed of (though I think we're still not at the place where men realise they're the ones who should be ashamed). Women were working out how to deal with this, and I think that's reflected in the Pros stories that were being written to some extent - they're not necessarily as true-life-written as we might write a rape story now, now that we know more about the processes and issues involved, they're more how-might-this-be-dealt-with...

[jat-sapphire.livejournal.com]

I think you're right. And I certainly hope that the writers weren't processing RL experience that way.

(One night a writer's group I was in had a horrible conversation. It contained a considerably older guy who had been a journalist and had 2 grown daughters, a younger man who lived in a suburb and had 2 teen daughters, a rather laboriously "woke" guy who had no children, a woman my age, a slightly older woman, and me. The slightly older woman had gone to a talk that included a statistic that 50% of women in the US experienced sexual assault. All three men argued vociferously that this could not be true. Suburban guy pressed Chris to downgrade the rape she said had happened to her. "Was there penetration?" he kept asking. I was in no mood to share the fact that I happened to know that 100% of the women in this conversation had been raped. Just. I think of that when people talk about disclosure. I sure was not interested in being grilled on how much penetration I experienced in order to be permitted by Suburb!Jerk to call what happened sexual assault. So I don't know if we will ever have good stats. But you're right. We need to help people call the assault what it is.)