Enemies to Lovers

[ermingarden]

Enemies to Lovers by Aster Glenn Gray
My Rating: ★★★★☆

Note: I received an advance copy of this book to give an honest review.

Why do we write what we write, and love the stories we do? What does it mean for a story to be "good"? Enemies to Lovers explores these questions at the same time as it plays with some of fandom's most enduring and beloved tropes.

Enemies to Lovers pairs steamy sexual tension with an insightful exploration of internet fan culture. Megan and Sarah are both passionate members of the same fandom, and they're about the same age, but their different backgrounds in fandom – Megan started out on LiveJournal, Sarah is a Tumblr native – lead to what might be thought of as a culture clash around community norms. For a short romance work, Enemies to Lovers is impressively nuanced on an emotional level. Megan's feelings about Sarah are complicated, and that doesn't get completely glossed over as soon as they make it into bed together.

I enjoyed every minute of this book, and I'll likely read it again before too long.


Some additional thoughts that didn't make it into the Amazon review:
I am about 96% sure that the fandom Megan and Sarah are involved in, for the fictitious TV show "Paranoid", is a thinly veiled reflection of a particular corner of real-life Marvel fandom: Steve/Bucky shippers. And that means the "woobie Mishka wars," as Megan describes the discourse, probably echoes debates among Stucky shippers about woobifying Bucky. (Personally, I think people should woobify characters as much as they want. Write the stories you enjoy!) I was intrigued by that glimpse into the particular issues and dramas of a fandom in which I'm not involved, and which is very different from the corners of Tolkien and Star Wars fandoms I frequent.

And finally, since debate on the topic is so central to the book, I'm curious: what are folks' thoughts on woobification in your own fandoms?

Comments

[chestnut_pod]

*through gritted teeth* Fanon!Fëanorians…

I completely agree with the above commenters who remarked upon the Woobie's helplessness in the face of circumstances -- those circumstances can neither be their fault nor escapable by them. I saw a ton of this back in my Torchwood days, very early on in the last years of LJ, but I think the purest versions of the form are less frequent now, or at least, I see them less frequently. If I had to wager a guess, the sorts of people who in the past would pick an ickle babey to woobify via all sorts of torments are nowadays in the purity camp, and would be horrified to write the sorts of stories that I most associate with the Woobie: torture, rape and recovery, kidnap, sometimes pregnancy fics, etc. However, the passivity and assumed moral purity have certainly not gone away. Perhaps the Woobie's torments have merely been watered down, and the core of the character really is the utter lack of agency!

In the meantime, I must get around to this book! I make a point to try to read all the pro-published novels about fandom -- so far I have found one (1) good one, and this sounds intriguingly like a potential number 2.

[ermingarden]

Eeeeeeeexactly.

I'm not sure all the (would-be) woobifiers are in the purity camp; the woobie!Obi-Wan fics I mentioned definitely feature those themes. (Thinking of, like, the entire oeuvre of I_Gave_You_Fair_Warning on AO3, for example.)

I think it captures the particular tensions between different models of Doing Fandom very well rather than treating fandom as a monolith; I think it does this because it's aimed at fans, while works like Rowell's are intended for a more general audience that might have no familiarity with, say, LiveJournal or even Tumblr.

[chestnut_pod]

True that! I think you're right -- I do think there's some kind of kinship between "character is woobie" and "character can never do anything wrong or morally questionable, therefore is totally passive and reactive" but you're right, it's not 1:1!

Though idk if I'd call Hydra Trash Party/Dead Dov kinds of fics woobie, necessarily? Something about the focus just seems sort of different, not that I could really explain why!

[ermingarden]

Agreed – you can definitely write about a character being tortured without woobifying, in the same way that a character can be a prodigy without being a Mary Sue (*cough* Vernestra Rwoh *cough*). "Woobie", as I understand it, implies that the character is perceived as out of character relative to the canon depiction.

This can be tricky, though, because a person can say "oh this is out of character because this character is a Total Badass and could never be helpless/would get over this right away" even though (a) the character was never in a similar situation in canon and (b) it kind of implies that when people are helpless it is Their Own Fault. So I imagine woobification – or characterization being perceived as woobifying – would tend to be a bigger issue in fandoms that don't have a high level of graphic violence in canon but whose fanwriters do write those sorts of fics, though I don't have any statistics to support that.