scar tissue that I wish you saw

[lunabee34]

If everything I learned about life I learned from fanfic, this week I learned that what we all really want most in life is for the person who rips off our button down to not merely suppress nausea at the sight of our hideously disfigured bodies but to love the freaking shit out of those burns and knife wounds.

I have seen this trope in every fandom I have ever spent more than two seconds in--whether it's Xander Harris's daddy-broken back that Spike lovingly licks into coagulation or a more milder take on the theme such as a Rodney McKay who despairs of Laura Cadman seeing his unfit naked body as she wears it.

And just this week, I saw it again in warholhp's Incurable, a Harry/Draco non-magical AU HP fic in which Harry spent four years at St. Brutus's Secure Center for Incurably Criminal Boys before transferring to Hogwarts. [Chapters are listed out of order; scroll down and find chapters 1-2 somewhere in the middle; all chapters are linked internally. However, there is one chapter towards the end where you get a "this journal has just been deleted" Frank message. I was all, "Nuh-no-nuh-no. I did not just read almost all of this fic and the writer DELETED HIR JOURNAL WHILE I WAS READING?! *wail* Never fear, my friends. The internal link is FUBAR; go back to mems, and you can click on the chapter just fine.]

In this story, Harry has multiple burns and knife wounds courtesy of Uncle Vernon (including the word freak carved into his chest) and a plethora of whip wounds on his back and buttocks from the corporal punishment meted out at St. Brutus's. Part of his romantic journey with Draco is allowing Draco to see and touch those parts of his physical body that Harry sees as irreparably damaged.

And here's why I love you, fandom, because rather than reading this trope as very obvious and anvilicious (I don't like my body, and I am using Harry and Draco to work through those issues), I see a lot of very interesting things going on here. Yes, there is a not insignificant part of this trope that is about the very real desire of all humans beings to be accepted and loved despite their physical flaws. But I also see that physical disfiguration as symbolic of internal darkness. The characters in these stories don't just hide their scars because they think they're ugly; they hide them because of what they represent--what they see as the consequences of a shameful event or their own propensity for violence perhaps, that dark passenger that rides shotgun with us all. And so when the beloved accepts--nay, even adores--that broken flesh, what s/heis really doing is accepting the inner demons, that darkness within. And that is ever so much more powerful than simply seeing beyond an imperfect body.

I think there's also a fair amount of fetishization of the damaged body in these fics--a nearly Rabelaisian revelry in the grotesque--and I find that fascinating.

So. *chinhands* What do y'all think of this trope? Is it as ubiquitous as it appears to me? Love? Hate?

Talk to me. :)

Sooper seekrit message to crazydiamondsue: YOU WILL LOOOOOOVE THIS.

Comments

well, I'm not seventeen, but I've got cuts on my knees

[lunabee34.livejournal.com]

and, maybe, I think, tied into the fact that chances are the characters we are writing about are depicted in canon as more than commonly attractive, so even if we only think our own bodies are 'okay' or 'average' the characters are probably hotter than we are -- so the only way to give them body image issues is to focus on wounds-as-imperfections.

Yes! I think that's definitely part of it. I mean, it takes a lot of doing to make John Sheppard hideous. And so we have to resort as writers to a pretty extreme injury or disfiguration in order to convince the reader that this body could be viewed as ugly.