Het!Reid vs. Slashy!Reid

[poeticpathetic.livejournal.com]

We had a great discussion going on here about Reid as written in slash fics.  Some people touched on Reid written in het fics as well and I was hoping to explore that a little more.   I know het isn't as popular amongst fandoms as slash is (and this is across the board), but I've seen two distinct variations of Reid in het fics, and I'm new to the genre.  There's the confident, self-assured Reid who's clearly aware of what he's doing, and then there's the Reid who is a total fumble and fail and lets whoever he's with sort of take over.  What do you think is more accurate and why do you think we see two ends of the spectrum?  What episodic evidence do we have when it comes to formulating Reid's sex-life, if any, and how do you interpret it?

Comments

[madlori.livejournal.com]

I don't think either portrayal is entirely accurate. I don't like the totally-inept Reid, because that isn't who he is, and definitely isn't now. I see him as somewhat shy, kind of awkward, but capable of holding his own. In canon, he wasn't really that shy with Lila Archer. He had no problem talking to her even if he felt a little hesitant about his attraction to her. Once they were in that pool, though...damn. She kissed him first but then he pretty much took over. And once Morgan got him going with Austin the bartender, he was completely in control. He was a little shy but he did just fine.

I'm currently writing (or posting, I should say, it's already written) a lengthy Reid het fic. Part of my goal of the story was to portray a Reid who was confident and grown up, but still retained some of his shyness. He's not an alpha male like Morgan, but he's not giving up his own power in his relationship. I don't think it has to be one or the other. I think Reid is both.

[renee7931.livejournal.com]

I agree with this. It seems that once he knows the female in question is interested, he's pretty confident.

[emmakitty.livejournal.com]

I completely agree with you. Reid's self confidence is seen a lot even in non-sexual encounters (like in that halloween episode and when he blows up the film canister in the bullpen) but his awkwardness is there too, sometimes. Like in that episode with the bartender, he says something like he doesn't know how to start the conversation, but then once Morgan gives him some tips on how to start it, he totally works it on his own. I think that's one of the things that makes him such an interested character (and that really speaks to MGG's skill as an actor) -- how so many seemingly contrary characteristics (shyness and self-confidence) legitimately exist in this one character

[vampireheart88.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty excited to read this story.
Reid het fics are very hard to come by these days.

[madlori.livejournal.com]

You can read it right now, it's being posted one chapter per day at bau_fic. It's called "How to Fight Loneliness." Here's the link to the first chapter on my fic journal, just keep clicking Next Entry.

http://madlorific.livejournal.com/730.html

[renee7931.livejournal.com]

Yay for my topic inspiring a new discussion! Not bad for a newbie!

[cloudzrshibby.livejournal.com]

Give Reid's archetype, its pretty easy to see why you either get confident!Reid and shy!Reid. You see that a lot with other "awkward" characters (I've personally seen it in fics with Greg from CSI, Hiro from Heroes, and Dan from Gossip Girl).

I agree with the first post, saying he's somewhere in between. Slightly shy, but still pretty grown-up. He's just still kinda awkward. That, and MGG has said before he's bad at talking to women; I'm sure he lets that rub off in his character.

[drasticbarbie.livejournal.com]

i actually wrote a whole 13-page paper on slash once. it was specifically about rape slash, but i had to touch on all slash and yaoi. from my research and so forth i came up with a few different reasons that might explain your question.

one is that slash has nothing to do with gay guys, unless its the sort of slash that's written by and for them. that's not most slash. instead, slash is a lot like Japan's yaoi in that it's made for and by women and it's about heterosexual relationships. the dom and sub, or as i prefer, seme (literally, attacker)and uke (literally, one who is attacked) represent masculinity and femininity respectively. a writer or reader can explore these concepts without having to feel like one is stronger because the uke is weaker or the seme is stronger. and in fact, often it's the opposite. regardless, both characters are male but represent two extreme versions of gender identity.

a second theory is that the two guys, seme and uke, represent two very opposite types of men. one is strong, stoic, aggressive, and so on. the other is emotional, compassionate, gentle, needy, and so on. the seme and uke each have personality and physical traits that women want in men, but neither have all of them. by making them so extremely one way or the other the women who read or write can sort of fulfill something in their fantasies that isn't possible in life or in het smut.

think about the sort of fumbling, victimized Reid in slash. would you be comfortable reading that character as a woman? i think that we are so used to identifying the word victim with the word woman or girl. it's easier and less frightening to explore relationship dynamics when you make these characters men.

of course, there are lots of other explanations. that was just my interpretation. i also don't think it's anything to do with this particular fandom or any fandom in particular. every fandom has its own characters that are almost always the seme or uke. for example, in X-Men Wolverine is generally always a dom or seme. Gambit is almost always an uke, and is very often a victim of rape or abuse. i guess you can call that fanon. in HP, Snape can be either seme or uke, depending on who he's partnered with. slash writers, i think, look for the seme or uke in their favorite characters.

as to het, it generally makes me really uncomfortable to read. there is only one fandom in which i will read het and it's probably because the established pairs are so good together that i wouldn't change it.

[bbt-criminal.livejournal.com]

in my view, slash is the girlie version of traditional lesbian pr0n (here being defined as having nothing to do with actual lesbians, but a sexual depiction of two women engineered by men for men.). There's no competition there for the viewer/reader. It's the "I'm greedy" theory. Why would I want to mess up a perfectly good fantasy by throwing some other girl in there?

I have to admit for the most part I have a particular hatred for the stereotyping fic writers heap onto the characters. Most characters that I like are a little odd, which is why i like them. Then some perfectly gendered writer comes along and wipes those things away to place my beloveds into a sexualized little box. For example, I don't believe for ONE second that Spencer Reid would be a bottom. EVER. It's not in his personality to give up that much control. And yet every Morgan/Reid fic out there has him as some weak little thing. He's not weak. Never has been once on the show, hopefully never will be.

The het stuff is almost as bad. I'm seen so many people turn Catherine Willows into a Barbie that it isn't funny.

I thought we had all lived through the feminist revolution. Isn't it time to drop this whole woman=doormat BS? Which is right in line with stopping the forced feminization of certain body types- MGG may be skinny, but he's not girly.

This is the reason why everyone should read madlori's current fic. I think it's called a "Cure for Loneliness," and she has produced well rounded characters who are neither stereotypical nor victimized. She made people!

[renee7931.livejournal.com]

This is actually the nitpick I had it the topic that I started about Reid in slashfic. I agree with you.

[antoinettemason.livejournal.com]

[antoinettemason.livejournal.com]

actually, i want to comment further on this (though i do like it!). i think a lot of what you said here sums up why i personally find most (male) slash unappealing. because it's usually two men seen through a woman's eyes, it doesn't really ring as authentic to me, especially when you toss in the tendency to feminize one of the partners. the best male slash i've ever read was by a lesbian writer, and i think she did it so well because the men in her fic weren't objects of desire to her, but simply two people who were attracted to each other and happened to be male. she didn't feel the need to turn either of the partners into "the girl."

of course, i'm not a big fan of romance in general, het or slash, again because of the tendency of so many writers to assign "male" and "female" roles to the partners no matter what their gender. like you said, we've all lived through the feminist revolution, so why the hell do so many writers insist on clinging to outdated tropes?

one more point you raised that i want to comment on, which might get me in some hot water, is the "i'm greedy" theory. i should preface by saying that this doesn't apply to all slash writers, but that is precisely the reason i feel pretty contemptuous towards a good bit of slash that i've read. to be fair, this is mostly slash written by young or very naive writers. more mature writers accept that it's fantasy and write slash because they're interested in the dynamic of two men, not because they feel threatened by a fictional female, while, in my observation at least, the writers who are most insistent on feminizing one of the men are the ones who can't stomach the thought of another girl being with "their" men. also in my observation, those writers tend to be more than a little misogynistic. that somehow seems to come through in their writing, and it just grinds my gears like nothing else.

[bbt-criminal.livejournal.com]

I couldn't agree with you more. There is definitely an overly-possessive element there.

and then people wonder about various actors who don't want to go to cons or actually meet the fanbase. If I was in that position, I wouldn't want to go near people who have spent a fairly intense chunk of time dwelling on me getting raped by all my co-workers. It's scary, and in a lot of ways the stories seem to make it somehow acceptable. I find that Hurt/Comfort stuff makes me very uncomfortable because quite often it's a straight up "domestic violence" scenario where it's one partner more or less sadistically hurting the other, all so the reader can have the little frisson of the apology at the end. This stuff is also, as you mentioned, incredibly misogynistic. It always amazes me that a lot of this is written by girls. Does this mean that on some level, they are willing to trade personal safety and physical integrity for a false sense of love? (Of course, as a culture, women are definitely raised to think this way. Changing the gender so it's a man getting abused doesn't in any way improve the situation.)

The psychology of the writers is the thing that I keep coming back to.

[benitle.livejournal.com]

Then some perfectly gendered writer comes along and wipes those things away to place my beloveds into a sexualized little box. For example, I don't believe for ONE second that Spencer Reid would be a bottom. EVER. It's not in his personality to give up that much control. And yet every Morgan/Reid fic out there has him as some weak little thing. He's not weak.

I have a few thoughts on these statements.

First, I wholeheartedly agree on some writers wrongly applying gender roles to m/m fiction. It's one of my pet peeves. I'm a slasher at heart and I'm a woman. What I enjoy most about slash fiction (and the main reason why het doesn't attract me as much as slash does) is the fact that gender dynamics work differently in m/m fic than in m/f fic. This is not to say that in m/f the female will never be emancipated or the dominant partner in a relationship, it's simply a fact that - most of the time - two men are different together from a man and a woman. It does turn me off when an author turns one of the males in slash into "a girl" and forces m/f dynamics onto a m/m fic. I'd like to think that most of the time the reason for this is simply poor writing.

I also agree with you when you say that Reid is not a weak character and that he's perfectly able of taking care of himself and also - in my personal off-screen canon - of taking charge in bed, no matter whether he's with a male or female.

What I don't agree with is your statement about him never bottoming. Bottoming doesn't always equal giving up control. If you think about the position of the bottom riding the top, it's still pretty much the bottom who dictates the speed, rhythm, angle and how deeply he allows the top to penetrate him. Even though the bottom is the one being penetrated, he is still in control. I think the idea of bottom = weak = girl comes from old gender stereotypes with women being penetrated during sex and being more passive.

That said, I'd love to read a fic where Reid refuses to bottom because he simply doesn't enjoy it. Not because he thinks it makes him weak/girly.


Oooops, sorry for the tl;dr comment.

[bbt-criminal.livejournal.com]

In BDSM, that is referred to as "topping from the bottom," which is more or less when you've got a manipulative sub who controls the scene by putting too many restrictions on what the "master" is allowed to do. It doesn't make for a good scene, or for good fic.

[benitle.livejournal.com]

But I wasn't even talking about BDSM. I was merely talking about two men with equal power/dominance in bed where the bottom enjoys taking charge. It doesn't have anything to do with one partner being a manipulative sub or not making a great scene/story. The point I was trying to make was that bottoming doesn't automatically mean losing control during sex.

[bbt-criminal.livejournal.com]

I'm going to disagree with you on that one. In our culture, penis=power. Therefore, any time there's penetration going on, there's a power imbalance. I know it's not polite to say it, and a lot of people are going to jump down my throat for it, but there it is. (Also, equal power makes for no sizzle. That would be why there aren't more Hotch/Morgan shippers. They're equals and it would be dull.)

On the other hand, we're going off-topic.

[bbt-criminal.livejournal.com]

My bad: Lori's fic is "How to Fight Loneliness." She is made of win, and I am not.

[madlori.livejournal.com]

*ahem* I have no comment.

[renee7931.livejournal.com]

I do! Your fic is awesome!

[samuelocean.livejournal.com]

As I am a) not a woman and b) prefer slash over het, I'm fairly stringent and picky when it comes to reading fics. I like decent, realistic fics. I don't like it when any of the characters are portrayed as 'weak' or 'the woman,' even if het fics. Granted, there's almost always going to be a more dominant personality and a more submissive personality, but that has nothing to do with weakness.

Some of my favourite CM pairings are Gideon/Hotch, Rossi/Hotch, Hotch/Morgan, Rossi/Morgan, etc. I prefer it when the partners have an 'equal' standpoint (even in BDSM fics), because it seems like there's more realism and structure to the relationship, than in many Morgan/Reid or even Hotch/Reid fics where one or the other is protrayed as being the 'victim' or the 'female.'

One thing that always turns me off from a fic that involves Reid is when they make him a poor, weak twit that can't take care of himself. Perhaps I'm biased, since I do have a lot in common with the character, but it annoys me. Yes, he's shy and awkward and tends to avoid trouble, but he's also very confident when he's comfortable and knows what he's doing. And reading fics where he's just... crying in an emo-corner totally dependent upon everyone else just makes me want to stab someone in the face. (I also have this same issue with House/Chase, House/Wilson, and Gibbs/DiNozzo fics)

I can understand it when a character is having a breakdown or whatever (IE, Tilting at Windmills, Hotch/Ried fic whose author I cannot remember) that is out of character for them, as long as it can be portrayed in-character if skillfully written (as the aforementioned fic was).

For het, it's just... mreh. I'm very picky with it, moreso than slash (mainly because women squick me, lol). And seeing women(or men) turned into slutty sex objects is just... not my thing. Women in het fics are portrayed almost, if not worse, than most 'bottom' males in slash fics. I've yet to find a het fic where the women and men are more 'equal' in their relationship. Which disappoints me, because I know that there's decent het fic -somewhere- out there. The women are either Mary-Sues(even if they are canon) or just weak twits.

I don't know. Perhaps I just have issues with characters being turned into simpering fools, in general.

Late but

[nights-fang.livejournal.com]

I don't think either portrayal is accurate.

Reid, despite his shyness is a very strongly independent person. He may not have an Alpha-Male personality but he has very much raised himself and been the caretaker for his own mother since he was a kid. Thanks to that, he pretty much is the type of person to keep control over a lot of aspects of his own life, especially his emotional control. He's used to finding solutions to his problems on his own, and probably just likes to avoid asking for help, simply because he's used to not asking for help. We've seen how he clearly feels odd telling Morgan about his nightmares, and asking for help. He is definitely going to carry that into any serious relationship he enters, be it a homosexual or a heterosexual one. He'll give up control, but only to a certain limit, and for certain aspects he'd probably refuse to relinquish any sort of control whatsoever.

As for his awkwardness and shyness, he is shown to get over that once he knows where he stands. Whenever he's introduced to the law enforcement the team is working with in the case he's does the whole awkward hand-wave thing, but once the team has settled in he pretty much asserts himself.

It may be because of Reid's past. Reid fits the stereotypical Woobie, and any woobie character always gets a little more bastardised than the rest.