happenstance pairing
Jul. 23rd, 2018 06:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraSo Saturday night I went to see Janelle Monáe in concert and also read Heyer's The Masqueraders on the subway there and back, which ended up feeling amusingly thematic.
The concert was fabulous, the very best kind of concert where the songs I already liked were even more awesome live, and the songs I hadn't appreciated as much I got the appeal of. Also I found it pretty moving to be there... a really nice giant happy crowd to be a part of, and Monáe is a phenomenal performer and intensely affirming. :heart hands:, everybody. (Also I would like to shout out to several iterations of my past selves, who thought to listen/relisten to her albums, look up the set list so I wouldn't spend the whole thing hoping for "Many Moons" and being disappointed, and remember my glasses. Nice work, team. And hi to whichever future self has hopefully just found this entry and remembered we want to nominate the Dirty Computer film for the Dramatic Short Hugo.)
I've heard Masqueraders is Heyer's queerest romance, and, okay, it's still pretty het - both crossdressing siblings end up in the end with a societally-appropriate partner for their birth genders - but it's totally canonical that the dude love interest who figures out the girl only figures it out because he's paying such very close attention to her, eyebrow eyebrow, and while girls dressing as boys is an entire genre, dudes dressing as ladies is vanishingly rare, so hey. And also one of the men (the figurer-outer, not the crossdresser) was canonically fat, which is also vanishingly rare in romance - I don't know whether it was a portrayal that would work for everyone, fat-phobia-wise, but for me, I'm not bothered by the "very big and very wise" trope/stereotype... there's so much bullshit in our culture the opposite way that this older "space-encompassing-body, all-encompassing mind" thing feels vastly preferable. And I didn't hear the nicknames for him ("the mountain" and "the mammoth") as disrespectful, just affectionate? Maybe because it's so clear that she's immediately attracted to him. Anyways, I really liked this one, plus there were a couple of stories on AO3 that were just the "nope it was in fact less straight than that" followup I wanted.
The concert was fabulous, the very best kind of concert where the songs I already liked were even more awesome live, and the songs I hadn't appreciated as much I got the appeal of. Also I found it pretty moving to be there... a really nice giant happy crowd to be a part of, and Monáe is a phenomenal performer and intensely affirming. :heart hands:, everybody. (Also I would like to shout out to several iterations of my past selves, who thought to listen/relisten to her albums, look up the set list so I wouldn't spend the whole thing hoping for "Many Moons" and being disappointed, and remember my glasses. Nice work, team. And hi to whichever future self has hopefully just found this entry and remembered we want to nominate the Dirty Computer film for the Dramatic Short Hugo.)
I've heard Masqueraders is Heyer's queerest romance, and, okay, it's still pretty het - both crossdressing siblings end up in the end with a societally-appropriate partner for their birth genders - but it's totally canonical that the dude love interest who figures out the girl only figures it out because he's paying such very close attention to her, eyebrow eyebrow, and while girls dressing as boys is an entire genre, dudes dressing as ladies is vanishingly rare, so hey. And also one of the men (the figurer-outer, not the crossdresser) was canonically fat, which is also vanishingly rare in romance - I don't know whether it was a portrayal that would work for everyone, fat-phobia-wise, but for me, I'm not bothered by the "very big and very wise" trope/stereotype... there's so much bullshit in our culture the opposite way that this older "space-encompassing-body, all-encompassing mind" thing feels vastly preferable. And I didn't hear the nicknames for him ("the mountain" and "the mammoth") as disrespectful, just affectionate? Maybe because it's so clear that she's immediately attracted to him. Anyways, I really liked this one, plus there were a couple of stories on AO3 that were just the "nope it was in fact less straight than that" followup I wanted.
