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ladybirdsleeps
2010-10-21 06:47 pm UTC (link)

Aha, now I remember that story.

I reacted to it as a subversion of the woman-as-obstacle trope, not as just another repetition of it. As you said, Akira's wife was more than an object; the author attempted to draw and understandable, human character. In the end, I thought that she was more sympathetic than Akira.

In slash it's almost a foregone conclusion that the male-female pairing will break up somehow. I suppose that for me that how it happened was more important than that it happened at all, in deciding whether or not I thought the story was sexist. When I think of woman-as-obstacle stories, I think of stories where the women are just obstacles and nothing else--they exist only to hold the male character back. I didn't even put Inertia into the same category because I don't think you can say that's true of the female OC.

Well, now I at least understand what some people are thinking.

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herongale
2010-10-21 07:23 pm UTC (link)

Yeah, in the end, that was kind of my conclusion too. Initially I felt pretty uncomfortable with the character as she was written, but I got over it. It's not the kind of story that goes into lots of detail about every little event, so it would have been hard to find a way to fit in all sorts of little characterization details to show who she was outside of the PPD... I don't really see how to do that, without either 1) making the story significantly longer, thus completely changing the nature of how its told, or 2) changing the entire thrust and point of the story, which... I can't see why she'd want to do that.

The POV of that fic isn't neutral anyway... we're only getting Touya's side to begin with, and so in the end I realized that if we are getting a limited and not entirely fair assessment of Natsuke as a person, that is kind of the point. Touya is definitely not the most reliable narrator, and he probably was never primed to give his wife a real shot from the very beginning, since he was in love with someone else before he even met her, and was in denial.

(also, when I say that I'm not especially objective about these kinds of things, mostly I meant that I've had personal experience being the fallback girl, the replacement woman for a man who refuses to admit he's gay... so it bothers me to see a woman placed in that role, but the reality is that it happens, and it sucks, and so the marginalization of the female character also fits that particular issue... and I'm glad the author decided to tackle it, even though it makes me uncomfortable to read about it sometimes.)

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