Paging through Network Effect for other reasons and came across the following passage; now I’m belatedly, unintentionally filling that loveless aromantic prompt by yewlojee. With Murderbot & Mensah meta.
We all know the infamously aromantic “Do you love my mother? Thiago thinks so” / “Not the way he thinks” exchange, right, but do we ALSO know how aro relationship anarchy the ensuing exchange is too:
I said, “Your second mother is…” Client wasn’t the right word, not anymore. “My teammate.” I could see I had to clarify. It was really hard finding the right words. “Before your second mother, I had never been an actual member of a team before. Just an…”
Amena finished, “An appliance for a team.”
That was it. “Yes.”
“I see. Thank you for letting me ask you questions.”
This!! this is MB putting to words just how important Mensah is to it, what their relationship IS to it without social shortcuts or euphemisms or any other bullshit. They are teammates, and that means more than anyone outside the relationship would know. She made it feel like its contributions and opinions mattered to the team. She offered their reliance on it like that meant it could rely on them, an interdependence, a being part of something as someone. She was the first person to ever make it feel like it mattered. I’m fucking tearing up just thinking about that.
And there’s no script or euphemism or simple social shortcut to say that, is there? To say, “That person who’s important to you, she’s important to me because she took the time to treat me with dignity and respect when everyone else had overlooked me. She saw me as my own person, and I answered that recognition. She saved my life, and I saved hers, not because I’m obligated to save her, or because she’s obligated to me, but because we care about each other.” What a whole narrative to explain a relationship- and yet to cut it down to “love” or even to “she’s my client” would be to flatten everything that is important about their relationship into something that it isn’t. The things that are important about their relationship- and in this case, the things that Amena deserves to know about how her mother and her mother’s SecUnit are important to each other- need to be explained in their own terms, without bullshit, without glossing, without hiding behind a pre-existing shape.
It’s about finding your place in a network of relationships, isn’t it? A network effect. Not a hierarchy, no insistence that relationships must take certain shapes, no pre-set expectations imposed upon relationships from outside, no expectation that this or that kind of relationship must be more important than other kinds. No hierarchy, no rules.
That’s the best of what relationship anarchy offers. Just people figuring out how they relate to each other in the ways that make sense for them, with the words that make sense to them, how to fit together in the great web of connections known as family and community.
I love that only like about 10% of the tumblr polls I’ve seen have been legitimate surveys of people’s opinion. It’s always like: team-building exercise that goes freakishly well, team-building exercise designed to fail hilariously, psychological experiment, vanilla extract, “Hey look at this cool bug [literal]”, “Hey look at this cool bug [computer]”, multi-stage tournament, vanilla extract again,
I feel like I veer wildly back and forth between “is this a thing I made up” (not conceptually, obviously, just the term for it) and “this is a thing everybody knows and recognizes” and the responses to this poll post have not helped clarify that for me.
but point is: proxyfucking is the name that I personally use to describe the situation of “two characters who are fucking but it’s primarily about their feelings toward a third character who isn’t there.” this can be a “we are both in unrequited love with this person” fucking about it, or a “this person is dead and i hate you but you’re the only other person who understands” fucking about it, or a “we hate each other but are bound together by a third person” fucking about it, or even just “one person is experiencing emotions about a person but coping by fucking somebody else”, or any number of other possible permutations that basically involve “dealing with your feelings about somebody by fucking somebody else.”
the feelings in question do not even have to be fuck-feelings. in fact it is sometimes better if the feelings are at least partially unrelated to sex.
man it’s been a minute since I wrote any proxyfucking, grief ritual or otherwise. I should do something about that
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