Hello :)
May I ask what you thought of the last episode of The Sun from another Star? I adore this story, they got me obssessed with them but some scenes in the last episode got me feeling, i don't know, a bit uncomfortable? Arthrit was quite pushy and I wonder if that's the kind of behaviour he used to have (which would explain why people are saying he is a bad person)
I am still enjoying this series tremendously and I cannot believe it's almost over but those scenes got me thinking. I will miss them so much, I might need to read the novel!
This post by @chibipandaao3 and @befuddledcinnamonroll gets at a good number of my thoughts about the series directly.
@doublel27 also pointed out in our dm's about the show "Daotok’s trauma with relationships is that his ex didnt actually want him and went after him for a dare/money, so part of what he needs to know is that Arthit is actually interested in HIM Daotok and isn’t just seeing him as a challenge. Or won’t get tired of Daotok being difficult."
On a broader level, I think the whole of the BL fandom could gain something by exploring the nuance of consent in BL and beyond. The whole sequence of Arthit's pursuit reminded me of one of my favorite contemporary sexuality theorists, Avgi Saketopoulou, and her distinction between 'affirmative consent' and 'limit consent' in her book Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk Race, Traumatophilia. Affirmative consent is the kind most tumblrinas of the mid-2010s will be overwhelmingly familiar with: no means no and the enthusiastic yes! As she explains "violations of consent are real and deserve our attention.” Affirmative consent developed from the informed consent model in the medical field, which was such an important step forward in disability rights and general patient care, especially for marginalized communities. This kind of verbal clear-sighted consent can absolutely be sexy!
However, "affirmative consent imagines a subject that can be fully transparent to herself." Being able to articulate what you want clearly and verbally can be a break-through, a joy, a sign of trust and self-awareness, but it depends on individuals, real or fictional, who can and want to do so. "Where affirmative consent imagines a subject that can be fully transparent to herself," Saketopoulou argues, "the self cannot be fully known...we are always somewhat opaque to ourselves." Do we really know everything we want or don't want? What pleasures might the unexpected hold for us? What displeasure might our desire return to us?
The alternative to the affirmative consent model should not swing the pendulum so oppositely that it dangles into the belief that an individual knows exactly what another person wants and ought to be able to act accordingly. Instead of an outside authority determining another person's wants, limit consent is thusly named how this kind of consent comes from an individual's choice to let another person transgress the limits of one's own boundaries and therefore one's own concept of exactly who they are (limit experience). "While the usual paradigm around consent is about maintaining control of a situation, limit consent is more about giving up control." Under limit consent, we agree to let someone explore with us without a pre-mapped plan or script for how things will go.
Limit consent can obviously be about sexual experiences, but it's also a kind of consent we admit throughout our lives as we accept people and experiences in that could likely change us. Saketopoulou has a particularly edifying example in her book.
"A colleague, whom I will call Imani, is playing with her four-year-old daughter, Lumi. "Be the monster!" Lumi instructs her. Instantly transforming herself into an imposing ogre, Imani leaps forward. She snatches Lumi. "I will eat you!" she growls mancingly. Lumi squirms from within Imani's firm grip, squealing with delight. She fights back, giggling in abandon. Then suddenly, she yells, "Stop!" Imani stops immediately. They look at each other; a moment passes. Clearly, they have done this before. 'Again!' Lumi commands. Imani instantly leaps forth. Again she grabs, again the scary monster, again ominous and frightening. Lumi is laughing. 'Stop!' she commands anew. Imani stops. They rehearse this scenario a few times. Several repetitions later, Lumi looks vaguely unsatisfied. Then, a solution! "We'll play a different game," she announces. "I tell you to be the monster; you grab and scare me; I say stop; but this time"--she punctuates each word--"You! Don't! Stop!" "I don't?" Imani now hesitates. "No," Lumi replies confidently, "you go on and on, more and more." "What if it gets too much?" Imani asks anxiously. The little girl, however, seems utterly disinterested in this adult question of safety and careful calibration. The question of safe limits does not appear to worry her: "You have to not stop, or else it won't work!" she says impatiently. "Don't worry, let's just go on and on, more and more."
Lumi wants to relinquish control, perhaps in trust of Imani, perhaps just to explore general risk, with its potential for both the good and bad. Either way, she wants change to her experience. This is what Arthit and Dao have been circling in their relationship to one another, for me, albeit with less enthusiasm than Lumi, and for Dao, much less verbalization of that desire. But in his allowances and the subtle expressions Oat has been masterfully playing across his character's flat affect, its clear there's desire, which hits a limit on his swan-long neck.
In affirmative consent, transgressing past another's limit is the site of betrayal. ArthitDaotok would be done for. In a limit consent model, though, "the relative safety of the relationship is what puts in place the 'facilitative circumstances' that [psychiatrist Emmanuel] Ghent suggests can enable passibility and the risking of an encounter with opacity. The safety in question, however, is not that things will not go wrong but that if they do, which they could, both parties will stick around to process and hold the injury together." Isn't this exactly what we see Arthit do here, as he apologizes, discusses his urges, and remains to let Daotok know that this artsy beauty's boundaries won't dissuade the beast's heart? Through accepting the affection of his friends and Arthit, Daotok is confronting the opacity of the walls he's built up after his experience with his ex and childhood of exclusion. They're gradually bringing him into a place to recognize his own desires for connection and belief in his own desirability.
BL in particular is interested in characters who are quite unclear about themselves and their desires, characters who don't want what they want. Like The Sun from Another Star, the pursuers are rarely arguing "I know you want it." The pursuers just know what they themselves want and, taking a leap of faith past the mixed signal they're receiving, go about it...sometimes aggressively, to say the least. This is a capital-D Dramatic tool after all! I'd generally condemn this exact method in real life, but as a piece of queer fiction, it gets at a queer feeling to me, and maybe just a feeling experience by anyone who's asked to repress their sexuality by society.
Some queer folks can confirm their sexuality openly and independently, but many of us went through a period of simultaneous wanting and not-wanting for same-sex relationships, compartmentalizing our desires from our ideas about ourself. Within the conflicted emotions, there's a dream for someone to bust open the locked door and make it possible. For all the closeted years the feeling was experienced, its no surprise that the erotic fantasy can persist, too. In my reading, the dubious consent and so-called rape scenes can sometimes symbolically get at this feeling in a way one-to-one representation can't always manage to dramatize. (And that's why I'm really interested in Thai writer Chim who seems to be trying to explore the realism of PTSD from sexual trauma alognside BLs use of dubious consent to eroticize the above queer fantasy.)
Going into a general experience as a viewer of art, such as BL, we can draw on limit consent as a model for accepting complicated aesthetic experiences. We consent to view most art--we go to museums to see paintings and sculptures, we go to theaters or turn on our screens to watch tv and film--and we don't know what we're getting ourselves into. Now, in an affirmative consent model, the viewer might presume some idea based on the genre, the type of museum, the network, and more broadly on their expectations for societal standards and art, generally. They've signed up for a specific experience and have a right to feel betrayed or trespassed if the art does not subscribe to the expectations to which they consented.
Under a limit consent model, however, the viewer consents to the art's full extent of possibilities, including the possibility that the aesthetic experience of viewing it goes beyond their comfort, understanding, and stable sense of selfhood. They've consented to be transformed by a work, which can come with surprise, risk and quite ugly, disturbing thoughts and feelings. In fact, artworks could leave you with completely unresolved and even traumatizing emotions. I mean, it could leave you feeling ecstatic or enlightened, too, but there's the rub of releasing yourself to art. Maybe you'll want to avoid viewing it ever again or giving it another thought. The thing is, the art isn't forcing you to stay or abandoning you and leaving you to process it alone. People forget that. It will remain for you to revisit when you're ready to face the parts of yourself and your understanding that proved to be so challenging to face when you viewed it.
Some people have constrained ideas about what BL must be, what queer representation must be, and series offend their sensibilities when they don't ascribe to that notion. I feel that, too. But I've increasingly learned not to react so quickly (nor to write my hate down hastily for others to read on main). Instead, I'm trying to become more curious about what limits of myself I can't yet access to appreciate it. And the secret parts of yourself aren't all dark, either. The erotic torture romance of VegasPete could be as eye-opening as the fluffy chaste joy of 2moons. There might easily be wells of joy you didn't know were possible! You are vast. Limit consent is a way to explore those multitudes.
