‘We cultivate love with embittered
minds, with lies and with deceit, and then expect from her joy of body and
heart: but instead she bears only pain, corruption, evil fruit and blight… And when this yields bitter sorrow, festers
in our hearts there and destroys us, we accuse Love of the crime and say she is
to blame who never was.’
-Gottfried von
Strasburg, Tristan and Isolde.
However fanciful Gottfried’s take on love may be, he got one thing right – if you don’t treat your partner right, they most likely ain’t gonna treat you right either. You can blame one another until you’re blue in the face, but it won’t change the fact that, as in the immortal words of Lou Reed[1], you’re always going to reap what you sow.
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I have paradoxical ideas about love. It’s probably the reason why I’m unable to form any long-lasting relationships. I want to be loved and I want to be ravished. I’m a romantic, and I’m a perverted deviant (in case you hadn’t noticed already). I want to dominate and be dominated.
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There was a psychological study that discovered that women are usually attracted to men of a higher ‘dominance level’ than they are. For instance, a woman of low dominance would naturally find a partner in a man who’s of moderate dominance. A woman of extremely high dominance were usually attracted to raging sexual psychopaths. It was the only way they could be satisfied in a relationship.
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So I had this idea, and it was basically that a couple love one another in this explosive way that we witness so often in, say, the movies. But they can’t express their feelings adequately, and so they end up hating each other; and they love and hate one another so much that their only outlet for their emotions is the physical merging of both their love and their hate.
And then I realized that such a couple existed, only they happened to be comic characters, and of course, how could I make a statement with comic characters, they hardly reflect people in the real world, do they? But since I was going through a comic book fetish at the time, I went and wrote it anyway, despite my better judgement.
The result was something called Rogue Psychology.
*
‘Gambit
was created to be, among many other things, an adversary for the X-Men, working
to subvert and destroy them from within. The connection with Sinister was part
of his genesis from the get-go-- *however* that connection related solely to
*my* conception of Sinister and the plans I had for him and the team, post "X-Men"
#3 (1991.)’
-Chris Claremont, X-Fan
Maybe I am a disturbed person. I’ve got so confused about what’s ‘normal’ and what’s not that I can’t really tell anymore. Maybe I’m not so bad as I think I am, because I still have such a conscience that I want to justify myself in writing this fic, if not for its darkness of purpose, then certainly for what some people may feel are its ‘out of character’ elements.
I personally, don’t think it’s out of character at all, which I shall explain briefly in my sad, fangirl-ish non-wisdom.
1. Remy is a dark character. He was made to be that way and always will be. In fact, this is the only fic in which I felt I did him a modicum of justice, in all his sinister (pun intended) glory. He later became mired down with all this self-hate and guilt crap; but that was the way he turned out, and in the end we have to live with it. Remy is man of pole opposites. On the one hand he wants to be loved, and on the other he feels that he doesn’t deserve it. The more he wants to be loved, the more disappointed he gets, the more bitter he gets and subsequently the more he is filled with resentment. Usually he’d direct all that hate towards himself, but one can only go so far with that when one feels wronged and misunderstood. And who can blame the man for feeling misunderstood?
2. Round about the same time that Remy’s character started to go haywire (circa ‘96-’97), Rogue’s character also simultaneously followed suit. It does lead one to suspect that their lives (unreal as they may be) follow some sort of weird tandem. For example:- as soon as Rems starts moaning about how he ought to be poked up the butt with a trident in the fiery pits of hell for his role in the Morlock massacre, Rogue started to wallow in self-pity because she couldn’t have both Rems and Joseph, and she couldn’t touch anyone, and oopsie, she just happened to leave Rems to die in Antarctica. And even worse, when he came back, she gave him the cold-shoulder, telling him it was all over and generally playing hard to get. Her rationale: ‘It ain’t easy for me, so it shouldn’t be easy for you.’[2] And Remy didn’t get mad?? He stood there and took it?? What happened, did he transform from a man into the proverbial mouse while he was Antarctica?? (I reckon the ‘Green Mist Lady’/Mary Purcell idea was an A.J.-type dream, a blip in the mess that is the Marvel Universe. Remy, it seems, was actually possessed by the Proverbial Mouse during that time. I half expected the two of them to wake up in bed one morning and say, ‘Ohmigod, the past year has been just a dream!’, then just forget about it and have great sex. Of course.)
So, I had more foundation for my sinister (pun not intended) plan: a) Remy was originally intended to be dark; b) Rogue is a selfish bitch.
Hey presto! I had now formed the nucleus of what was to be Rogue Psychology!
*
I
am now going to attempt to be serious.
There are two things I am really concerned about. One is the psychology of and interaction between people. The other is the expression of emotions. What I wanted to do in this fic was to explore that thin borderline between love and hate, and how, if ever, the two can be reconciled. Remy wants to expiate the wrongs done to him by committing wrong – such is revenge – but the thought frightens him, because what he wants to do is the very antithesis of that which could redeem him. And that is his dilemma. He is torn between base instinct and tenderness, between the urge to sate his passions and the need to be absolved.
To tell the truth, while I was writing this story, I had no expectations of it at all. It started from the middle and kind of sprawled outward. There was this one scene playing round in my head, and it was Remy in a church. Dark, Gothic, brooding, oppressive. And he wants forgiveness for this really twisted, heinous sin. I was sick of the Morlock Massacre thing, and I wondered what could possibly be more heinous to him than that. And the answer was hurting Rogue; (arguably) his one true love, (arguably) his redemption, who he (arguably) loves more than she loves him. Why hurting her? Because she hurt him all the damn, bloody time. And why would he hurt her at all? Because Remy is ‘dark’ in nature. But he still loves her. So how can he express his love and his anger in one act? And then the answer hit me. The sin just had to be one unexpressed thought. And it had to be rape. That was certainly heinous enough, both to Remy and to the reader.
So the all-important crux of the story was there, and that one scene just before and in the church came out perfectly, just the way I had envisaged it. As to the conclusion, at the time I had nothing particular in mind, other than that Remy was never supposed to (nearly) enact his desire to rape Rogue. But now, in retrospect, it couldn’t have happened any other way. The way I saw it, he needed his revenge in order to purge himself of his grievances; she needed to be punished to feel she was ‘worthy’ of their relationship once more. The sex scene was the fruition of this strange act of both revenge and redemption (am I sounding twisted yet? I mean, is it strange to believe that some couples use sex as a weapon?).
I’ll be the first to admit that the scene was exaggerated. But I needed to write that way in order to describe the darkest recesses of a relationship based on so much unrequited passion. Both parties have been starved of every conceivable element of the love they supposedly share – why should it not be expressed in one lustful, violent, physical act? Both feel the need to love and to hurt, to manifest the savagery of their emotions physically. Sometimes I think this fic is less to do with R&R, and more to do with the predicament of a couple starved of expression (either that, or it’s just a reflection my own peculiar perversions). What I love about these two characters is that they are always compelling and repelling one another, forever on the verge of embracing and stabbing (q.v. Limitation Scars), so that both urges intensify to the point of explosive release.
Is it natural that he should want to hurt her? Is it natural that she should want to be hurt? Are these the sadistic/masochistic tendencies we all harbour yet never display to the outside world? Or are they just peculiar to their relationship?
These are the questions I wanted to ask.
Later – very much later, in fact – came the prelude to the church scene. I guess I just chickened out, and added all the stuff about Rems feeling wicked because of Sinister – just to make it more palatable (plausible?). Personally, I believe that Remy would have felt the same way without the Sinister element – in the original story, I even made him approach the rape with a far more calculated attitude – he seduces Rogue before trying to rape her, although not after she admits her own desire to be ravished as in the final version. In the end it didn’t sit well with me at all, so I changed it. However vile his instincts might be, I don’t believe Remy would ever deliberately set about doing such an act, especially not to the woman he loves. On a far more basic level, without the seduction the story made more sense.
On the ice he kisses her, and the way I conceptualized it, he did that because he thought that somehow all the old feelings of tenderness that he held for her would come back. Instead he scares himself, because the feelings don't return – if anything the lust intensifies – and he backs off. After the argument, he runs away and ‘if he was stronger’ he probably would have kept on running. Nevertheless he goes back to her because he feels helplessly drawn to her. The point is that he doesn’t even touch her until she admits her own passions to him. And even then, he is aware of the depravity of his actions and only continues because paradoxically, she wants him to. Ironically he does not find the realization of his revenge in her acceptance of her ‘punishment’. Instead it is her acceptance that destroys the purpose of his revenge, because he realizes that she has equal cause to seek revenge against him; because if he believes this is what she deserves, then he too deserves chastisement. And then the rape (if it is a rape at all, since she allows it) is no longer a rape, but consensual. Their lovemaking is no longer a weapon, but an exchange, a giving, a sharing.
I suppose the fic could be called disturbing not only because of the violence, but because it is both violent and titillating, because both characters are destroyed and gratified by their own actions.
Looking back, maybe I shouldn’t have used such well-known characters to write about such a subject. For one thing I thought it was appropriate, because the characters have baggage that everyone knows about; on the other hand, I felt I couldn’t write about them without the story being in the context of some wider plot. If this had been an original fic, I would probably have focused solely on the couple, their situation and their actions – the first couple of chapters and maybe the last would have been cut, in order to leave more to the imagination. But in the context of fanfic, it was important to have a backstory, however convoluted; it was also important to see Remy’s symbolic cleansing of Rogue, and thus his reparation for his deeds.
Maybe they shouldn’t have said anything to each other. Maybe I should have left them there, with actions speaking louder than words.
*
10-12-2003
[You can discuss any of the points raised here on the Message Board.]
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[1] In a song called ‘Perfect Day’, which was semi-horrendously redone for the BBC’s 1997 Children In Need campaign.
[2] The horrendous X-Men #81, which only managed to slightly redeem itself in the last few frames.