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Having just taken an hour-long exam in Old English (blew the translating-into-old-english, got most of the translating-from-old-english) I’m feeling somewhat pseudo-intellectual, so I’ve decided to present my thesis/rant on that omnipresent fandom phenomenon, the designated slut, and his h/c cousin, the designated victim. Or, how come Harry is paired with everything that breathes and Duo always gets beaten up?
If you’ve been around a fandom for a while, you’ve probably noticed that one character tends to get abused and beaten—or, alternately, tends to engage in wild kinky monkey sex with the other characters—more often than the rest of the characters do. The fandom sex object phenomenon has been pointed out by Aesthticism.com columnist Jeanne, who labelled the character in question the “Designated Slut.” This is slightly different from the “Designated Uke,” so called because he is usually the prettiest, most fragile-looking character and, get this, is always, always the uke in any NC-17 fic or fanart. The Designated Uke sometimes doubles as the Designated Slut, but not always.
The Designated Slut is generally “reversible” (that is, he can be either uke or seme depending on who he’s shagging) and usually gets paired with a variety of characters. In other words, he sleeps with more people than anyone else. Not necessarily in the same story, but in general. And when he sleeps with people, he doesn’t just bounce in and out of bed and move along (if he did that, he’d be a Designated Player, like Gryffin-whore!Sirius or the sluttier versions of Ginny Weasley & Blaise Zabini). No, for the DS, sex almost always leads to some sort of relationship (or it doesn’t, but he wants it to, and there is angst). He angsts about sex, devotes his life to it, is motivated by it. Sex is what the DS does—well, often, and with every character conceivable.
Also, the DS is more likely than any to other character to have some sort of sordid sexual abuse in their past—they were a prostitute, they were abused as a child, they had a bad experience with a previous lover, ect. He’s also more likely than anyone else to be drawn in super-slutty bondage-type drag.
Each fandom tends to have at least one DS, sometimes more. In GundamWing, the DS seems to be Duo Maxwell, who is paired with Heero, Wufei, Zechs, Relena (once in a great while), Hilde, you name it. He’s occasionally paired with Trowa or Quatre too, but they’re usually together in any GW yaoi fic, because their relationship in the series is completely saturated in subtext. In just about every case, he’s got horrible sexual trauma in his past from his childhood on L2, and has more sexual experience than his partner.
In Harry Potter, the DS are probably Harry, Hermione, and Snape. Not on the “sordid past as a prostitute” count, but using the “paired with the most people” criteria. Hermione has been paired with (and impregnated by) practically every male character in the series in het fanfics, and Harry and Snape serve the same purpose in slash fics. Unless the HP slash story you’re reading is a Remus/Sirius or Weasleycest fic, chances are it’s got either Harry or Snape having sex in it. With Draco, with (in Snape’s case) Remus, with Voldemort, with each other, you name it. I blame Alan Rickman’s sexy bichitude.
In the Magnificent Seven slash fandom, the Designated Slut is Ezra Standish, who has been paired with every single one of the other six regulators, and generally has some sort of sordid past in which he slept with people as-part-of-a-con/for-money. Whether he’s the uke or the seme, he’s generally the more experienced partner (at least, more experienced when it comes to m/m relationships, because sometimes he’s paired with Buck, who, according to series canon, has had more women than Imelda Marcos had shoes—though, of course, he always becomes willing to settle down and commit once he’s had a taste of the magic that is Ezra!sex).
Sometimes, the DS is kindly provided by the series, as with Yami no Matsuei’s Tsuzuki (lust object of pretty much every character in Yami), Weiss Kruez’s Yohji (who sleeps with/hits on everybody from Omi to Manx) or PotC’s Jack Sparrow. He doesn’t actually sleep with anybody, since PotC is a Disney movie, but the way Johnny Depp played him, he practically dripped sex. Or maybe that’s just me and my Johnny fetish.
Anyway, that’s a Designated Slut, and people have noticed and written about this tendency before. Rather less commented upon is the accompanying phenomenon of the Designated Victim
If you’ve read enough fanfic to notice that one character tends to get more bootay than the rest, you’ve probably also noticed that there’s a particular character who attracts pain and suffering like a giant angst magnet. That would be the Designated Victim.
The Designated Victim is the guy (or, occasionally girl) who always gets kidnapped, beaten, shot, raped, tortured, cruccio-ed, left to wallow in their own depression until they attempt suicide, ect. He has more angst than anyone else, is frequently misunderstood and treated unjustly by the other characters, and often has a chronically low self-worth (the better to angst extensively).
The Designated Victim often doubles as the Designated Slut (the past full of horrible sexual trauma and prostitution lends itself nicely to the more sexual forms of torture and angst), but frequently shows up in gen and het fic as well as in slash.
In Gundam Wing, the Designated Victim is, again, Duo, who has been captured and tortured by Oz more often than any other Gundam Pilot.
In HP, it’s Snape, from among the adults (you’d think it would be Sirius, but no, it’s Snape—he’s got that whole ex-Death Eater-seeking-redemption thing going) and Draco from among the students. If I had a euro for every fic in which Draco was horribly abused by Lucius, I’d be able to go the next month without visiting the Bank of Ireland currency exchange. Likewise for fics in which Voldemort discovers that Snape is a spy and tortures him (or is unaware that he is a spy and tortures him purely for kicks)
In Mag7, Designated Victim status is split pretty much evenly between Ezra and Vin Tanner. Both of them attract bullets like the LoTR movies attract squeeing Legolas fangirls, and Vin is always being captured by brutal bounty hunters or tracking down bad guys despite the fact that he’s slowly bleeding to death from some horrible injury. Ezra gets beaten up by angry poker players, shot while trying to defend some other character, or bitten by snakes. Both of them will conceal these injuries from the others, Vin out of pure “I-can’t-quite-‘cause-the-others-need-me” stubbornness, Ezra out of a desire to prove himself. Sometimes, for variety, bad guys will leave one of them out in the desert to die.
The DV, like the DS, is also occasionally provided in the original canon (ex: Mulder in X-Files, though Krychek partially shares his DV status in the fandom), but is one isn’t provided, fans will create them. Generally, the Designated Victim is a character perceived as needing redemption of some kind (unpleasant, ex-Death Eater Snape in HP, Krychek the RatBoy in X-Files, the slippery con-man Ezra in Mag7) or a character with a painful past who for some reason views himself as lesser than the others (like street rat Duo in Gundam Wing), or both, like former mass-murderer Methos in Highlander (a favourite of h/c writers, because he’s got 5000 years of past to fill with angst and misery).
If you’ve been around a fandom for a while, you’ve probably noticed that one character tends to get abused and beaten—or, alternately, tends to engage in wild kinky monkey sex with the other characters—more often than the rest of the characters do. The fandom sex object phenomenon has been pointed out by Aesthticism.com columnist Jeanne, who labelled the character in question the “Designated Slut.” This is slightly different from the “Designated Uke,” so called because he is usually the prettiest, most fragile-looking character and, get this, is always, always the uke in any NC-17 fic or fanart. The Designated Uke sometimes doubles as the Designated Slut, but not always.
The Designated Slut is generally “reversible” (that is, he can be either uke or seme depending on who he’s shagging) and usually gets paired with a variety of characters. In other words, he sleeps with more people than anyone else. Not necessarily in the same story, but in general. And when he sleeps with people, he doesn’t just bounce in and out of bed and move along (if he did that, he’d be a Designated Player, like Gryffin-whore!Sirius or the sluttier versions of Ginny Weasley & Blaise Zabini). No, for the DS, sex almost always leads to some sort of relationship (or it doesn’t, but he wants it to, and there is angst). He angsts about sex, devotes his life to it, is motivated by it. Sex is what the DS does—well, often, and with every character conceivable.
Also, the DS is more likely than any to other character to have some sort of sordid sexual abuse in their past—they were a prostitute, they were abused as a child, they had a bad experience with a previous lover, ect. He’s also more likely than anyone else to be drawn in super-slutty bondage-type drag.
Each fandom tends to have at least one DS, sometimes more. In GundamWing, the DS seems to be Duo Maxwell, who is paired with Heero, Wufei, Zechs, Relena (once in a great while), Hilde, you name it. He’s occasionally paired with Trowa or Quatre too, but they’re usually together in any GW yaoi fic, because their relationship in the series is completely saturated in subtext. In just about every case, he’s got horrible sexual trauma in his past from his childhood on L2, and has more sexual experience than his partner.
In Harry Potter, the DS are probably Harry, Hermione, and Snape. Not on the “sordid past as a prostitute” count, but using the “paired with the most people” criteria. Hermione has been paired with (and impregnated by) practically every male character in the series in het fanfics, and Harry and Snape serve the same purpose in slash fics. Unless the HP slash story you’re reading is a Remus/Sirius or Weasleycest fic, chances are it’s got either Harry or Snape having sex in it. With Draco, with (in Snape’s case) Remus, with Voldemort, with each other, you name it. I blame Alan Rickman’s sexy bichitude.
In the Magnificent Seven slash fandom, the Designated Slut is Ezra Standish, who has been paired with every single one of the other six regulators, and generally has some sort of sordid past in which he slept with people as-part-of-a-con/for-money. Whether he’s the uke or the seme, he’s generally the more experienced partner (at least, more experienced when it comes to m/m relationships, because sometimes he’s paired with Buck, who, according to series canon, has had more women than Imelda Marcos had shoes—though, of course, he always becomes willing to settle down and commit once he’s had a taste of the magic that is Ezra!sex).
Sometimes, the DS is kindly provided by the series, as with Yami no Matsuei’s Tsuzuki (lust object of pretty much every character in Yami), Weiss Kruez’s Yohji (who sleeps with/hits on everybody from Omi to Manx) or PotC’s Jack Sparrow. He doesn’t actually sleep with anybody, since PotC is a Disney movie, but the way Johnny Depp played him, he practically dripped sex. Or maybe that’s just me and my Johnny fetish.
Anyway, that’s a Designated Slut, and people have noticed and written about this tendency before. Rather less commented upon is the accompanying phenomenon of the Designated Victim
If you’ve read enough fanfic to notice that one character tends to get more bootay than the rest, you’ve probably also noticed that there’s a particular character who attracts pain and suffering like a giant angst magnet. That would be the Designated Victim.
The Designated Victim is the guy (or, occasionally girl) who always gets kidnapped, beaten, shot, raped, tortured, cruccio-ed, left to wallow in their own depression until they attempt suicide, ect. He has more angst than anyone else, is frequently misunderstood and treated unjustly by the other characters, and often has a chronically low self-worth (the better to angst extensively).
The Designated Victim often doubles as the Designated Slut (the past full of horrible sexual trauma and prostitution lends itself nicely to the more sexual forms of torture and angst), but frequently shows up in gen and het fic as well as in slash.
In Gundam Wing, the Designated Victim is, again, Duo, who has been captured and tortured by Oz more often than any other Gundam Pilot.
In HP, it’s Snape, from among the adults (you’d think it would be Sirius, but no, it’s Snape—he’s got that whole ex-Death Eater-seeking-redemption thing going) and Draco from among the students. If I had a euro for every fic in which Draco was horribly abused by Lucius, I’d be able to go the next month without visiting the Bank of Ireland currency exchange. Likewise for fics in which Voldemort discovers that Snape is a spy and tortures him (or is unaware that he is a spy and tortures him purely for kicks)
In Mag7, Designated Victim status is split pretty much evenly between Ezra and Vin Tanner. Both of them attract bullets like the LoTR movies attract squeeing Legolas fangirls, and Vin is always being captured by brutal bounty hunters or tracking down bad guys despite the fact that he’s slowly bleeding to death from some horrible injury. Ezra gets beaten up by angry poker players, shot while trying to defend some other character, or bitten by snakes. Both of them will conceal these injuries from the others, Vin out of pure “I-can’t-quite-‘cause-the-others-need-me” stubbornness, Ezra out of a desire to prove himself. Sometimes, for variety, bad guys will leave one of them out in the desert to die.
The DV, like the DS, is also occasionally provided in the original canon (ex: Mulder in X-Files, though Krychek partially shares his DV status in the fandom), but is one isn’t provided, fans will create them. Generally, the Designated Victim is a character perceived as needing redemption of some kind (unpleasant, ex-Death Eater Snape in HP, Krychek the RatBoy in X-Files, the slippery con-man Ezra in Mag7) or a character with a painful past who for some reason views himself as lesser than the others (like street rat Duo in Gundam Wing), or both, like former mass-murderer Methos in Highlander (a favourite of h/c writers, because he’s got 5000 years of past to fill with angst and misery).
From:
no subject
So 'Mexico' is fun to watch, because there isn't a single character that's normal in it. They've all got trauma or/and were apparently born with great big ol' heaps of neurosis. But seeing the stereotypes cropping up makes me feel guilty, 'cause I have to wonder if I'm contributing at all to it.
Oh, yeah. Saw Weiss Kreuz. Waited through 20-something badly animated episodes for Yohji's belly-baring shirts. Saw none. Was it just a manga thing, or what?
From:
no subject
And Will Turner seems primed to become the DV for PotC. I'm wondering what aspects of a character lead fans to classify him or her as the designated victim or slut? Are there characteristics that these characters share across fandoms?
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no subject
God, I hope Sands doesn't end up the DV in 'Mexico.' I think I could tolerate him being the DS, but if he starts degenerating into weepy DV-hood, I might have to jump fandoms.
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Also, yet another factor that just occurred to me was outsider status. Will and Elizabeth, who tend to be DVs, were non-pirates stuck in a pirate's world. Draco does have his little coterie, but the main focus of HP is on Harry and his friends, obviously, so from that standpoint, Draco gets set apart, by association and by social status.
From:
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He's got a rather high body count for a victim. Not that there won't be people who try to write him as poor, hurt, helpless Sands (I think those authors may have been fooled by his prettiness into overlooking the fact that he acts like a border-line sociopath for most of the movie).
As for outsider status contributing to DV-hood, I think you're right. A lot of the DV-type stories I've read have included the "nobody really understands poor [insert name here]" theme. The other characters always misjudge the poor DV or simply aren't paying enough attention to him/her to notice what's happening. Therefore, the DV is isolated as well as horribly abused by bad guys (teh agnst! Teh angst!).
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no subject
I think the whole shirt thing may be partly fanon--you know, character wears a midriff-showing shirt twice and suddenly all fics portray him as a skanky man-ho who dresses like a male version of Brittany Spears.