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theleaveswant) wrote2011-10-01 08:15 am
theleaveswant) wrote2011-10-01 08:15 am
Kink Bingo fill: Blood Ties meta for prompt: sensory deprivation (wildcard)
Title: I'll Follow You into the Dark
Fandom: Blood Ties
Characters: Vicki Nelson (Vicki/Coreen, Vicki/Henry, Vicki/Mike, Vicki/Henry/Mike)
Kink: sensory deprivation (wildcard)
Summary: Rambly meta speculating on how Vicki's retinitis might affect her play relationships with three of the most significant others in her life (might edit later for improved coherency)
Content notes: No standard warnings apply. Spoilers for the series generally and the pilot specifically.
Rating/wordcount: G/2000ish
So, Blood Ties. I only watched the series for the first time this August (I'd been curious about it before that, but didn't make the effort until I caught an episode by chance while house-sitting for a friend with cable), but my feelings towards it are coloured by a nostalgic fondness because it brings together two women whose creative works have had a significant impact on my life: Christina Cox and Tanya Huff, I am eternally grateful to you both for making mea bit of a lezzerthe person I am today.
Christina Cox is one of my longest-standing celebrity crushes, stretching back to her appearances on due South and my sporadic following of F/X: The Series in elementary school. Then Better than Chocolate happened and, well. I don't know if that actually changed my perception of her and my attraction towards her, or merely helped me to articulate it, but I've certainly not been able to look at any of her characters as entirely het or femme since. Nor entirely vanilla or submissive either, I realized after becoming active in kink and seeing her defend D/s to the eponymous Dr. on House and speak lovingly about her human horse on Bones . . . I am more than a little bit afraid that when I encounter her in a cafe or a yoga studio changing room (I've “met” Janet Bailey, Julian Richings, and Sergio di Zio that way within a year, so it's bound to happen eventually) my eyes will bug out and I will chant “one of us” until someone escorts me from the premises.
I haven't read any of the Vicki Nelson “Blood” novels, so cannot speak to closeness or quality of adaptation, but I did read Huff's Quarter series several years ago. In fact my mother read the first book, Sing the Four Quarters, to me in segments as a bedtime story when I was about ten, and although in hindsight I suspect that she must have skipped over the more graphically violent or sexytimes bits that I dimly remember from reading the first three books for myself not much later, she did not omit or amend any other part of the story, and I remember absorbing from her de facto presentation of the characters' many same-sex/gender and non-monogamous relationships a solid understanding that this is okay (so thank you Mom, as well).
Blood Ties-the-show is cheesy and unfortunately prone to regular and rather egregious racefail, but it stands up pretty well in other areas such as sex- (and at least subtly kink-)positivity, realistic presentations of goth and Pagan communities, and offering a large number of multidimensional and agency-exercising female characters (at least compared to another, currently airing supernatural adventure/paranormal romance series filmed in Toronto and starring a tough but caring female PI saddled with gift-curse magic Specialness, a spunky goth sidekick, and a love “triangle” involving a police detective who in turn has a spunky Black sidekick, that shall remain nameless, cough cough).
All this preamble is actually relevant insofar as it predisposed me to believe, even before I started watching Blood Ties, that the protagonist, Vicki Nelson, was queer, butch, kinky, top-leaning, and possessed a capacity for polyamory, and I have to say I'm impressed with how close the series came to explicitly proving me right. Vicki is a private investigator, an ex-cop who left the homicide department after she was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a disorder identified by progressive visual loss beginning with defective dark adaptation (nightblindness) followed by reduction in visual field (tunnel vision), potentially leading to total blindness. Her life takes a turn for the weird when she's hired by a university student to prove that her fiance was murdered by a vampire—he wasn't, but the investigation leads Vicki to meet a real vampire, graphic novelist Henry Fitzroy (bastard son of Henry VIII) and to be marked by a real demon with arcane symbols instantly tattooed on the insides of her wrists. From this point on, Vicki's professional portfolio swings sharply towards the supernatural as she's drawn into stopping or helping monster after ghost after necromancer with the help of Henry, her client-turned-office aide Coreen Fennel, and her former partner (in more sense than one) Detective Mike Celluci.
I'm not really sure where to start talking about Vicki and sensor deprivation, except to say “it would work!”, and I'm running out of time to finish this line, so I'm just going to ramble and hope something smart happens (no promises, I'm tiiiiired). I should also say that I'm not trying to draw any generalizations or say that temporary sensory deprivation in kink play is the same as on inherently related to disabilities involving permanent or progressive sensory loss, only speculating on how a particular cluster of characters, one of whom happens to have a visual disability, might experience this kink in that context.
The degree to which Vicki's disability affects her daily life appears to vary from episode to episode according to its usefulness to the plot, as is typical for genre TV, but it is remembered regularly enough that it's clearly a major issue in Vicki's life and her relationships with people who care about her. Vicki is proud and independent and she resents the fact that her eyes don't work like they used to and how this makes her more reliant on other people. She chose to continue her intermittently action-packed and observation-dependent life as a detective by hanging up her shingle as a PI, rather than stay behind a desk on the police force. It's for these reasons that I don't think Vicki would choose or enjoy experiencing sensory deprivation (a blindfold to take away her remaining vision, or perhaps even more potently a hood or earplugs or something to render her completely vulnerable and off-balance by shutting out her hearing and her spacial awareness, or heck, even being denied use of her glasses for a period of time), though I do think that it could be an intense and rewarding scene for her if it happened in a place of trust (or a mightily traumatic trip, if you want to come at it from that angle of consent play). As a top, however, I can easily imagine sensory deprivation play and blindfolding specifically being a favourite practice or fantasy of Vicki's, either as a staple, maybe ritualized, part of her play, or for super special occasions.
The energy of a blindfolding scene would be different for Vicki and each of the series' other regular cast members, the three most actively important people in Vicki's life. The simplest 'ship, in a way, is Vicki/Coreen because Coreen is pretty much straight-up submissive where Vicki's concerned—a bit of a bratty streak, to be sure, but nowhere near as emotionally tangled as Vicki's relationships with Mike or Henry. Coreen is Vicki's employee, her subordinate, as well as her junior by several years. Coreen looks up to Vicki and relates to her in a way that mixes shades of friend, fan, little sister/niece or even daughter together with their professional dynamic. If Vicki puts a blindfold on Coreen, it's not about Coreen specifically, but about her role as Vicki's bottom and Vicki's appreciation of her vulnerability in this state, with only a secondary connection to Vicki's issues around her own waning vision.
With Henry the vampire and Mike the cop, things are a little more complicated: on one hand, Vicki bristles at reminders of their respective greater than average sensitivity to clues in the environment, combat skills, etc., and seeks to demonstrate her independent competence, rejecting their frequent efforts to take care of her out of both feminist principles of empowerment and defensiveness about her vision (the result is the same: Vicki can kick open her own doors), so there's an element of levelling the playing field or even of turnabout being fair play when Vicki “handicaps” Mike and Henry (taking away their unfair advantages and giving herself the boost of that proverbial one-eyed man in the land of the totally blind).
Henry and Mike both have alpha characteristics, and in their own milieux they're accustomed to holding power and being in control, however they both find themselves off-kilter around Vicki (Henry because she's too “strong-willed” to be susceptible to his glamouring—Mike isn't—and Mike because of their shared history and accumulated years of bonding and baggage [guess what I almost typed there? :D ]).Where Henry and Mike are concerned, Vicki is a topper of tops. When Vicki tops Henry, she does it with the understanding that nothing she does to him—blindfolds, restraints, wickedly brutal painplay—puts much of a dent in his awesome vampire mojo (his other senses are too keen, he's too strong and too experienced at getting out of captivity, and as long as he's well-fed he can regenerate from nearly any wound), unless he lets it. The exercise of control here isn't physical but emotional; Henry could dodge everything Vicki throws at him, but he won't, because he's fascinated, enthralled, captivated—in short, he's completely under her power. When Vicki tops Mike, it's part of a legacy of trust not always accepted, returned, or vouchsafed, but repeatedly offered nonetheless. When she blindfolds him, he's putting his safety in her hands again, and taking the bet that she'll bring him through, again.
As well as the dynamics Vicki-and-Henry and Vicki-and-Mike, there's Vicki-and-Henry-and-Mike. Henry and Mike have a strong competitive friction. Theirs is a boringly classic rivalry, with Vicki's affection set up as the ultimate prize, although Vicki is not impressed by their one-up-manship and has little patience for their childish squabbling. In the world of fandom, where Vicki is able to choose “both” and get away with it, even more interesting play possibilities open up. Where Henry would be a smart-mouthed but generally docile and obedient sub on his own, add Mike to the picture and he becomes a right show-off. Mike would likewise rise to the bait of competition, using his greater familiarity with Vicki's history and tastes to his advantage as he tries to please her best. But what would happen if both Mike and Henry were hooded or otherwise limited in their sensory range so that they could not tease each other nor monitor the relative quality of the other's performance? Would they find a capacity to cooperate, or would it make their competition even stronger, not to know what they were being judged against, allowing them instead to simmer in self-applied torment as they imagined what was going on outside their perception? Vicki could set them both up in sens-dep gear and leave them alone to tease and tantalize and punish and humiliate themselves with their own imaginations while she enjoyed a bubble bath and a good book or played with Coreen or even (gasp) got some work done (note: it is not safe to leave real-life play partners unsupervised while they are in sensory deprivation and/or bondage, of course).
It's past sun-up in my time zome and the mods' and the challenge could close at any time, and I think I've managed to touch on most of the things I wanted to, so I'm'a call this puppy donesky, just like my brain. In conclusion: Vicki Nelson is boss, and I am go sleep now :P
ETA: oh oh oh I remembered one of the other things I wanted to talk about! The specific symptoms of Vicki's disability at this point are developing tunnel vision and nightblindness. This means that she's basically blindfolded just by being in the dark, with no technological mediation required. Just standing in a space that's too dark for her eyes is enough to put her in that vulnerable headspace, that could spin either into fear (and potentially submission, depending on the circumstances; I also realize now that I haven't explained this clearly so it may seem like I'm uncritically assuming or projecting because my personal experience with being blindfolded is that it makes me feel helpless and when I feel like I'm in a safe space this is like an express ticket to subspace, but it's also plausible from Vicki's sensitivity around her vision on the series that for her, "blind[folded] = vulnerable") or defiance and fight (or it could just feel too stressfully much like work for her to get into it as play). This also affects her play as a top, because it reduces her control over her environment and her partner if she can't see what's going on around her (unless she was comfortable enough with her partner for them to get into a complicated perception/command exchange dynamic, sort of like a seeing-eye dog?). As a result, I think she'd be very picky about where she plays. It would make public play more difficult, both by reducing outdoor and clandestine opportunities made easier under cover of darkness, and by narrowing options for parties and clubs to those with well-lit play areas (or requiring her to bring her own additional light, as I've seen some people e.g. piercers do but it's not a common practice). She might prefer to play at home or in her office during daylight with Mike or Coreen, but that's not an option for Henry (he gets sleepy).
Fandom: Blood Ties
Characters: Vicki Nelson (Vicki/Coreen, Vicki/Henry, Vicki/Mike, Vicki/Henry/Mike)
Kink: sensory deprivation (wildcard)
Summary: Rambly meta speculating on how Vicki's retinitis might affect her play relationships with three of the most significant others in her life (might edit later for improved coherency)
Content notes: No standard warnings apply. Spoilers for the series generally and the pilot specifically.
Rating/wordcount: G/2000ish
So, Blood Ties. I only watched the series for the first time this August (I'd been curious about it before that, but didn't make the effort until I caught an episode by chance while house-sitting for a friend with cable), but my feelings towards it are coloured by a nostalgic fondness because it brings together two women whose creative works have had a significant impact on my life: Christina Cox and Tanya Huff, I am eternally grateful to you both for making me
Christina Cox is one of my longest-standing celebrity crushes, stretching back to her appearances on due South and my sporadic following of F/X: The Series in elementary school. Then Better than Chocolate happened and, well. I don't know if that actually changed my perception of her and my attraction towards her, or merely helped me to articulate it, but I've certainly not been able to look at any of her characters as entirely het or femme since. Nor entirely vanilla or submissive either, I realized after becoming active in kink and seeing her defend D/s to the eponymous Dr. on House and speak lovingly about her human horse on Bones . . . I am more than a little bit afraid that when I encounter her in a cafe or a yoga studio changing room (I've “met” Janet Bailey, Julian Richings, and Sergio di Zio that way within a year, so it's bound to happen eventually) my eyes will bug out and I will chant “one of us” until someone escorts me from the premises.
I haven't read any of the Vicki Nelson “Blood” novels, so cannot speak to closeness or quality of adaptation, but I did read Huff's Quarter series several years ago. In fact my mother read the first book, Sing the Four Quarters, to me in segments as a bedtime story when I was about ten, and although in hindsight I suspect that she must have skipped over the more graphically violent or sexytimes bits that I dimly remember from reading the first three books for myself not much later, she did not omit or amend any other part of the story, and I remember absorbing from her de facto presentation of the characters' many same-sex/gender and non-monogamous relationships a solid understanding that this is okay (so thank you Mom, as well).
Blood Ties-the-show is cheesy and unfortunately prone to regular and rather egregious racefail, but it stands up pretty well in other areas such as sex- (and at least subtly kink-)positivity, realistic presentations of goth and Pagan communities, and offering a large number of multidimensional and agency-exercising female characters (at least compared to another, currently airing supernatural adventure/paranormal romance series filmed in Toronto and starring a tough but caring female PI saddled with gift-curse magic Specialness, a spunky goth sidekick, and a love “triangle” involving a police detective who in turn has a spunky Black sidekick, that shall remain nameless, cough cough).
All this preamble is actually relevant insofar as it predisposed me to believe, even before I started watching Blood Ties, that the protagonist, Vicki Nelson, was queer, butch, kinky, top-leaning, and possessed a capacity for polyamory, and I have to say I'm impressed with how close the series came to explicitly proving me right. Vicki is a private investigator, an ex-cop who left the homicide department after she was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a disorder identified by progressive visual loss beginning with defective dark adaptation (nightblindness) followed by reduction in visual field (tunnel vision), potentially leading to total blindness. Her life takes a turn for the weird when she's hired by a university student to prove that her fiance was murdered by a vampire—he wasn't, but the investigation leads Vicki to meet a real vampire, graphic novelist Henry Fitzroy (bastard son of Henry VIII) and to be marked by a real demon with arcane symbols instantly tattooed on the insides of her wrists. From this point on, Vicki's professional portfolio swings sharply towards the supernatural as she's drawn into stopping or helping monster after ghost after necromancer with the help of Henry, her client-turned-office aide Coreen Fennel, and her former partner (in more sense than one) Detective Mike Celluci.
I'm not really sure where to start talking about Vicki and sensor deprivation, except to say “it would work!”, and I'm running out of time to finish this line, so I'm just going to ramble and hope something smart happens (no promises, I'm tiiiiired). I should also say that I'm not trying to draw any generalizations or say that temporary sensory deprivation in kink play is the same as on inherently related to disabilities involving permanent or progressive sensory loss, only speculating on how a particular cluster of characters, one of whom happens to have a visual disability, might experience this kink in that context.
The degree to which Vicki's disability affects her daily life appears to vary from episode to episode according to its usefulness to the plot, as is typical for genre TV, but it is remembered regularly enough that it's clearly a major issue in Vicki's life and her relationships with people who care about her. Vicki is proud and independent and she resents the fact that her eyes don't work like they used to and how this makes her more reliant on other people. She chose to continue her intermittently action-packed and observation-dependent life as a detective by hanging up her shingle as a PI, rather than stay behind a desk on the police force. It's for these reasons that I don't think Vicki would choose or enjoy experiencing sensory deprivation (a blindfold to take away her remaining vision, or perhaps even more potently a hood or earplugs or something to render her completely vulnerable and off-balance by shutting out her hearing and her spacial awareness, or heck, even being denied use of her glasses for a period of time), though I do think that it could be an intense and rewarding scene for her if it happened in a place of trust (or a mightily traumatic trip, if you want to come at it from that angle of consent play). As a top, however, I can easily imagine sensory deprivation play and blindfolding specifically being a favourite practice or fantasy of Vicki's, either as a staple, maybe ritualized, part of her play, or for super special occasions.
The energy of a blindfolding scene would be different for Vicki and each of the series' other regular cast members, the three most actively important people in Vicki's life. The simplest 'ship, in a way, is Vicki/Coreen because Coreen is pretty much straight-up submissive where Vicki's concerned—a bit of a bratty streak, to be sure, but nowhere near as emotionally tangled as Vicki's relationships with Mike or Henry. Coreen is Vicki's employee, her subordinate, as well as her junior by several years. Coreen looks up to Vicki and relates to her in a way that mixes shades of friend, fan, little sister/niece or even daughter together with their professional dynamic. If Vicki puts a blindfold on Coreen, it's not about Coreen specifically, but about her role as Vicki's bottom and Vicki's appreciation of her vulnerability in this state, with only a secondary connection to Vicki's issues around her own waning vision.
With Henry the vampire and Mike the cop, things are a little more complicated: on one hand, Vicki bristles at reminders of their respective greater than average sensitivity to clues in the environment, combat skills, etc., and seeks to demonstrate her independent competence, rejecting their frequent efforts to take care of her out of both feminist principles of empowerment and defensiveness about her vision (the result is the same: Vicki can kick open her own doors), so there's an element of levelling the playing field or even of turnabout being fair play when Vicki “handicaps” Mike and Henry (taking away their unfair advantages and giving herself the boost of that proverbial one-eyed man in the land of the totally blind).
Henry and Mike both have alpha characteristics, and in their own milieux they're accustomed to holding power and being in control, however they both find themselves off-kilter around Vicki (Henry because she's too “strong-willed” to be susceptible to his glamouring—Mike isn't—and Mike because of their shared history and accumulated years of bonding and baggage [guess what I almost typed there? :D ]).Where Henry and Mike are concerned, Vicki is a topper of tops. When Vicki tops Henry, she does it with the understanding that nothing she does to him—blindfolds, restraints, wickedly brutal painplay—puts much of a dent in his awesome vampire mojo (his other senses are too keen, he's too strong and too experienced at getting out of captivity, and as long as he's well-fed he can regenerate from nearly any wound), unless he lets it. The exercise of control here isn't physical but emotional; Henry could dodge everything Vicki throws at him, but he won't, because he's fascinated, enthralled, captivated—in short, he's completely under her power. When Vicki tops Mike, it's part of a legacy of trust not always accepted, returned, or vouchsafed, but repeatedly offered nonetheless. When she blindfolds him, he's putting his safety in her hands again, and taking the bet that she'll bring him through, again.
As well as the dynamics Vicki-and-Henry and Vicki-and-Mike, there's Vicki-and-Henry-and-Mike. Henry and Mike have a strong competitive friction. Theirs is a boringly classic rivalry, with Vicki's affection set up as the ultimate prize, although Vicki is not impressed by their one-up-manship and has little patience for their childish squabbling. In the world of fandom, where Vicki is able to choose “both” and get away with it, even more interesting play possibilities open up. Where Henry would be a smart-mouthed but generally docile and obedient sub on his own, add Mike to the picture and he becomes a right show-off. Mike would likewise rise to the bait of competition, using his greater familiarity with Vicki's history and tastes to his advantage as he tries to please her best. But what would happen if both Mike and Henry were hooded or otherwise limited in their sensory range so that they could not tease each other nor monitor the relative quality of the other's performance? Would they find a capacity to cooperate, or would it make their competition even stronger, not to know what they were being judged against, allowing them instead to simmer in self-applied torment as they imagined what was going on outside their perception? Vicki could set them both up in sens-dep gear and leave them alone to tease and tantalize and punish and humiliate themselves with their own imaginations while she enjoyed a bubble bath and a good book or played with Coreen or even (gasp) got some work done (note: it is not safe to leave real-life play partners unsupervised while they are in sensory deprivation and/or bondage, of course).
It's past sun-up in my time zome and the mods' and the challenge could close at any time, and I think I've managed to touch on most of the things I wanted to, so I'm'a call this puppy donesky, just like my brain. In conclusion: Vicki Nelson is boss, and I am go sleep now :P
ETA: oh oh oh I remembered one of the other things I wanted to talk about! The specific symptoms of Vicki's disability at this point are developing tunnel vision and nightblindness. This means that she's basically blindfolded just by being in the dark, with no technological mediation required. Just standing in a space that's too dark for her eyes is enough to put her in that vulnerable headspace, that could spin either into fear (and potentially submission, depending on the circumstances; I also realize now that I haven't explained this clearly so it may seem like I'm uncritically assuming or projecting because my personal experience with being blindfolded is that it makes me feel helpless and when I feel like I'm in a safe space this is like an express ticket to subspace, but it's also plausible from Vicki's sensitivity around her vision on the series that for her, "blind[folded] = vulnerable") or defiance and fight (or it could just feel too stressfully much like work for her to get into it as play). This also affects her play as a top, because it reduces her control over her environment and her partner if she can't see what's going on around her (unless she was comfortable enough with her partner for them to get into a complicated perception/command exchange dynamic, sort of like a seeing-eye dog?). As a result, I think she'd be very picky about where she plays. It would make public play more difficult, both by reducing outdoor and clandestine opportunities made easier under cover of darkness, and by narrowing options for parties and clubs to those with well-lit play areas (or requiring her to bring her own additional light, as I've seen some people e.g. piercers do but it's not a common practice). She might prefer to play at home or in her office during daylight with Mike or Coreen, but that's not an option for Henry (he gets sleepy).