Symmetries in Mauling Snarks and Hook, Yarn, Sinker
Mauling Snarks and Hook, Yarn, Sinker are two fics that have a bunch of interesting similarities and symmetries. They are both Slice of Life stories about aesexual-spectrum people in long-term queer relationships. They both are lighter and fluffier AUs of their respective source material (Worm and Teen Wolf, respectively).
Their symmetries are even more striking. I'll start with gender stuff: CmptrWz, the author of Mauling Snarks, is a man writing about Taylor Hebert, a bullied girl who becomes the hero Maul, with the power to talk to snarks (the things that give people powers) and hit things at a distance. pprfaith ( @wordsformurder), the author of Hook, Yarn, Sinker, is a woman writing about Stiles Stilinski, an artsy man who owns a craft store and is really good with children.
Both of these descriptions are incredibly reductive, but this highlights one of the symmetrical differences: Mauling Snarks changed Taylor's power, and retroactively changed the world so that this power fit well. HYS changed Stiles' setting, aged him up, and removed all the supernatural powers because they were not necesary for the story, because these are people who could actually exist IRL. Mauling Snarks is driven primarily by Taylor's power and connections, while HYS is driven primarily by Stiles' character and friends.
As they meet their partners to be, the authors tell very different stories.
Taylor meets Amy Dallon when she's in costume as Panacea, the world's greatest healer, because she has TSS and other injuries from the trigger event that gave her powers. She's delirious, and says "You should buy a greenhouse." This is because a lot of Amy's depression is because of her snark's boredom with always healing humans. Playing around with plant biology will make her snark happier and improve her mental health. Taylor starts out by giving Amy useful advice to make her happier, which looks like incoherant rambling at first, but which contains a life-changing bit of well aimed advice if you look past the surface.
Stiles meets Peter Hale after Cora, Peter's toddler neice, runs headlong into his leg. He picks her up and starts looking for her adult, and finds Peter. He's immediately struck by Peter's "stressed dad doing his best to take care of three kids" look. Stiles demonstrates his kid-distracting skills by giving Cora a crochet ball with peas in it, and then starts to help Derek, Peter's 6 year old boy, get over thinking that crochet is for girls, pick out yarn and learn to crochet. He demonstrates that he is good with kids, and that is what catches Peter's attention. He tells Derek his advice straightforwardly and follows up with a real life example of a manly man whose knitting a baby blanket!
Taylor doesn't go out of her way to make her advice understandable. She just gives it and goes on with her life until she meets Amy again. This comes up over and over again in the story: Taylor doesn't want to be easily understandable. She likes to confuse people, to give them misleading answers, to see how long they will run in circles before wising up and asking her for more information. She doesn't often lie outright, but loves to mislead or just not give people the information they want. Also, telling someone that something is classified is not lying, but also doesn't give them any useful information. Add in the threat of making you fill out hundreds of pages of Non-Discloser Agreements, and not many people push her.
Stiles likes to give good advice, to make himself understood. When he talks about grief with Laura, Peter's 10 year old niece, he figures out the right metaphors to get her to understand. He goes into detail about how that loss is like a bomb went off. There's a crater in Laura's heart where her mom and dad died. That crater will not disapear, but as life goes on grass and flowers will grow there, until it doesn't look like there was a horrible explosion there at first glance anymore.
The authors' interests often shine through in their characters' interests. Taylor is a systematic thinker who enjoys reading bureacratic documentation, who knows what forms to file before pulling a prank, who gets really into computers and tech as the story goes on and she builds up more and more connections with powerful people. Stiles is a craft store owner who crochets and knits, who loves taking care of kids and hanging out with his tight-knit friend group.
Both of these characters are not typical of their genders. They have interests, personalities, and interaction styles that are more typical of the opposite gender. When I first started thinking of these stories as symmetrical opposites of each other across gender lines, I grappled with the idea that Taylor is more masculine than feminine and Stiles is more feminine than masculine, even though Taylor's a girl and Stiles is a man. At this point, I just accept that gendered traits are population level and there absolutely are masculine women and feminine men.
Taylor is possibly demisexual and possibly aesexual. She has an aversion to romantic and sexual relationships with non-parahumans, because her snark is social and wants a certain level of compatibility with her partner's snark. She doesn't care about physical form, but about trust. Her relationship with Amy is non-sexual as far as CmptrWz has written, but much more intimate. Because of some powers bullshit after they became friends, they share powers and snarks. Both of them can feel the other's body using Shaper, Amy's snark. They can talk easily at any distance with Broadcast Administrator, and are basically always aware of the other. They have both upgraded the other's body, in collaboration with Riley, a biotinker who's really good at human augmentation. The process involves taking the patient's skin off to integrate nanoweave armor into it, as well as improving basically all internal organs, including the brain. It doesn't get much more intimate than that. Can you see how the powers drive the story and relationship here? I get that I'm barely scratching the surface of their relationship, but Mauling Snarks is 1.5 million words long and I've got a few paragraphs.
Stiles is aesexual and doing romance backwards with Peter. He thinks that sex is gross, but loves taking care of Peter's kids. His first date with Peter was a crafts festival that was just as much a business trip for his store as it was an opportunity to hang out with Peter without the kids around. They already knew each other for months by that point.
I'm kinda running out of steam on this essay for tonight, so I'll just post it and maybe revisit it later. Also, @olderthannetfic, thanks for the kind words and curiosity about Spacebattles. I hope you enjoy this, and I'll have some more comparisons between these stories whenever I get around to it. Also, I should reread HYS again and get back to rereading MS. Have I mentioned that MS is 1.5 milion words long? I’m not doing justice to these characters in a short essay like this.
