Sunshine Challenge 2023 #3: Bluebells and Discarded Shells, And Pretty People All In A Row

[silveradept]

Prompt 3: Bluebell
In the language of flowers, the bluebell is a symbol of humility, constancy, gratitude and everlasting love. It is said that if you turn a bluebell flower inside-out without tearing it, you will win the one you love, and if you wear a wreath of bluebells, you will only be able to speak the truth.

Bonus prompt: Lavender Rose

Perhaps it is my jaded outlook on the world, but looking at those virtues alone makes me think "that's a recipe for abuse by itself." I mean, it's also supposed to be something like the societal romantic ideal, where you have one true love that you make up with when you fight, who you always are with in the end, who you appreciate for all the things they do (eventually), and who you ride off into the sunset with for your happily ever after. It's a very specific mindset, still mostly performed by cisgender heterosexual monogamous people, and reflected in a lot of published fiction with cisgender heterosexual monogamous characters.

That virtues that seem ripe for putting someone in an abusive situation if their humility, constancy, gratitude, and love aren't reciprocated are seen as great for love, regardless of whether they are reciprocated, probably says a lot about cultural conceptions of love and how they are still fairly firmly rooted in systems that are more concerned with property rights, social standing, and gendered role expectations in a society saturated with patriarchy and obsessed with power.

It's not just our personal relationships, either. Corporations have been demanding these virtues, and to see our workplaces not as somewhere we labor for our wage, but a place of family, or of a sacred calling. They want us to be loyal to them without providing a scrap of loyalty or love in return, because they have to be profitable, and the profitable decision is almost never the one that helps the worker. (They demand it of the customer, too, an entire economy of branded products that we are supposed to purchase and display and talk about as if this were The Truman Show and our friends and neighbors are little more than walking wallets we are supposed to evangelize to every moment because every moment has a camera or a microphone attached to it.)

And speaking of evangelism, it's probably no surprise that these virtues seem ripe for the abusing by those who proclaim themselves the intermediaries between the human and the divine, or the shepherds of humans to an eternal positive reward. Pastoral care is an afterthought to a huckster, and there are a lot of people who want to prey on the believers and provide them with convenient justifications for their biases or assure them they have the easy way into the happy afterlife, regardless of what the books and the prophets say about such pitfalls and those who promote them.

It makes me wonder if the person holding a large sign saying "Ask me why you should go to hell" in the middle of a Pride celebration believes they are enacting these and other virtues. Do they honestly believe they can gather more believers and followers by choosing that place, that time, and that message, especially when they are surrounded by other churches, temples, and spiritual houses offering a much more accepting and understanding message? In a place where there are many beshirted persons proclaiming they give free hugs for all who want them, or who say that they will be substitute parents for those whose biological parents have cast them out or refused to love their whole selves? If surrounded by Samaritans on all sides, how willfully ignorant must you be to ignore the lesson? How arrogant to insist that you are correct and they are wrong and furthermore that they should bow to you and your interpretation as the correct one?

(I'm sure those people feel like they were virtuous and persecuted for it, because such signs and messages during a Pride celebration are catnip for the argumentive and the mocking alike. Like the person in the Jesus-esque costuming holding a smaller sign saying "Not with these guys. You're cool with me.")

I'm also going to say that just about every time the trope of having to tell the truth comes up, it's almost always a horror story, even if the horrors are often played for laughs. Because there are so many situations where direct and truthful communication is going to be seen as a major problem. If we all were to say I would prefer not to to all of those things we would prefer not to, we'd have to build an entirely different society. It might be a better one, but the intervening time would be something to live through. Or answering honestly when someone wants you to answer politely, or getting mad when you ask whether they want an honest answer or a polite one, because then they won't believe the polite answer and they wanted an answer they could believe. Autists have many stories of trying to learn the complex and shifting rules about when honesty is okay and when it isn't, and the consequences that were visited on them every time they got it wrong and then got a bewildered stare when asking someone to make explicit what they had tacitly learned. And while there are also stories of telling incomplete truths or truths without their context so that someone will draw their own incorrect conclusions or be deceived, that's usually just additional burden on the person who's been cursed with truth-telling.

That said, even if there are a fair few spaces where these virtues can be disastrous if unereciprocated, they're not the only available space to contemplate love and these virtues in. Fanworks and the communities they create push back on a hegemonic narrative or a single correct interpretation, no matter what the now-deceased Anne Rice (or the similarly deceased Anne McCaffrey) have said on the matter. The most common lens to use on a story is a queering one, whether that's charting a path where the two men who are good friends become lovers, or the two men who are locked in the eternal struggle of enmity have regular hatesex. Where the love triangle doesn't resolve by choosing one and abandoning the other, but working out boundaries and relationships and being able to share. Where stories end without everyone coupling up into pairs, but some people stay platonic, others get who they want and how many they want, and still others are respected as not actually being interested, without anyone getting shamed or called broken for getting what they wanted. Where there are monsters, but there are also monsterfuckers. You can still get humility, constancy, gratitude, and love in all of those resolutions, and there's an argument there that it's healthier to spread that burden around over all the people in your life, rather than expecting a single person to provide all of those things for you when you want them.

The other common fannish lens is the "what if?" Make a small change, see what parts of the house of cards come tumbling down and what might be built in place of it. Change the setting entirely and see how the characters might interact in a completely different environment, usually one with far lower stakes. Change the fundamental rules of the universe so that all social relationships are viewed through strict hierarchies of dominance and associated social protocols for those relationships. Or create a caste system where those dominance relationships aren't based on choices and social roles, but baked into the biology of the characters and make them navigate a world that either favors them, discriminates against them, or tries to ignore them.

These kinds of settings lend themselves very easily to stories where the person who breaks the social norms is doing so because they're breaking with an oppressive set of rules. Or stories where the person who is breaking the rules is mistreating the people they have responsibility for, and the main tension is whether someone will follow them in breaking more rules for a greater good, or will find a method, possibly obscure and arcane, to create the desired result without having to disturb the social structure that led to this particular situation. Usually, the person who is at the center of the conflict is in a position where they cannot act in their own interests, and even if they are, they often have to be circumspect about it or perform the kinds of virtues represented by the bluebells mentioned here, so as not to prejudice the reader or the society against them and that they continue to be seen as people who are worth fighting over or who deserve to be freed from the oppressive systems they are ensnared in. And yet, even in our canons, including that venerable institution of the Disney Princess, we filnd more and more of those Princesses talking matters into their own hands. Jasmine declares she's not a prize to be won (even if she turned out not to be the most action-oriented girl), Rapunzel managed to eventually get untangled from Mother Gothel (and if you needed an obvious example of how those virtues can be used to trap someone in a circle of abuse, there you go), and Merida is intent on finding some solution to her situation that allows her to retain her freedom (even if the movie itself goes very hard against her and sides with Elinor in almost all ways.)

Fandom is pushing the envelope on what kind of stories can get told, both officially and unofficially. And, at least to me, it's big enough that it can accommodate everyone's niche. There's people who can write sprawling epics for works that have finished their canons years ago, or drabbles that manage to compress a great amount of meaning into careful word choices to deliver an impact in a hundred words. There's also space for people who are putting out their first piece, full of heart and hope that they can find a community (and also, likely some rough edges or unexamined assumptions.) There's space for the people who are working out issues by putting their blorbos through the same situations and writing out the endings they want for themselves, or who tell about things that are too painful to discuss directly by using characters for the necessary distance. There's people who put together stories that are meant to make others happy. There's creators who draw so many beautiful things, and vidders who splice things together and set a soundtrack to show the things they love, and the podficcers who give voice to stories. There's the meta folks, the manifestos, the analysts and the organizers. All of this output to try and expand the space for discussion and experience and eventually even manage to get those kinds of stories told both in the canon and in the fandom. The fans become creators, and eventually the creators of things that will generate their own fans, expanding the possible stories being told even further outward. And even though we get the occasional person who seems into it for their own ego, for the most part, it seems like fandom has humility, constancy, gratitude and love to their creators and their own fans. Even when the expression of those virtues comes out in a full-throated demand for creators and gatekeepers to do better than what they are doing now.