I'm so glad you wrote this up! Very valuable info to save.
I was never able to finish reading GOMM back in the day. I was lucky enough not to have promised anyone a response, so when I got too squicked I could just bail.
I think you're more than fair, contrasting the progressive story she's apparently trying to tell (brain damage doesn't equal uselessness, etc.) with the adult/child story she actually shows (zoicks). I don't think I would have been quite so evenhanded--given what seemed to be a complete abandonment of realism, I never got a good sense of story #1 at all. It was as if that was just gestured at vaguely as she proceeded into the depths of story #2. Because if she really did want to write about how a brain damaged person is still a member of society with an adult's needs and rights, why is the 'brain damage' so patently, iddishly fantasy-fictional?
I mean, as you say here: Jane's constant dwelling on his assumed age and the attributes that went with it... the real-life concept of "a mental age of #X", as I understand it, is actually shorthand, reflecting a more complex reality of changes in certain brain functions, reactions, attitude, etc. It doesn't mean that somehow someone becomes #X again in its original (or stereotypical) entirety. But Ray does, he "becomes" a unified, perfectly-regressed 9 (or whatever), and progresses in a unified, perfectly re-enacted process. Each of his assumed age ranges is easy to pin down, happens all of a piece, and brings with it a parcel of sexually-fetishized attributes. This sort of thing seems to shuck any faithfulness toward story 1 in favor of nothing but story 2. And story 2 didn't seem to have any of the positive potential elements of story 1.
Now, granted, I don't demand--and never have required--some kind of specious verisimilitude in my slash. But I do think that actually telling story 1 would require at least some, and the story doesn't bother, which led me to infer that it really wasn't about story 1 at all.
(And really, where my verisimilitude-jones does come out all the time is when presented with the sudden shrinking/fluffifying/ unacknowledged de-aging of a character. Doyle is NOT TINY. He is NOT FRAGILE. He is OLDER THAN BODIE. Etc. So when he almost-inevitably is shown turning his giant tear-filled eyes and trembling lower lip up up up to Big Butch Bodie... well. You know how I get. So this story, which, on top of the other things that squicked me, basically makes a huge meal of this process as the entire main premise... er. No thanks, I couldn't possibly, I'm full.)
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I was never able to finish reading GOMM back in the day. I was lucky enough not to have promised anyone a response, so when I got too squicked I could just bail.
I think you're more than fair, contrasting the progressive story she's apparently trying to tell (brain damage doesn't equal uselessness, etc.) with the adult/child story she actually shows (zoicks). I don't think I would have been quite so evenhanded--given what seemed to be a complete abandonment of realism, I never got a good sense of story #1 at all. It was as if that was just gestured at vaguely as she proceeded into the depths of story #2. Because if she really did want to write about how a brain damaged person is still a member of society with an adult's needs and rights, why is the 'brain damage' so patently, iddishly fantasy-fictional?
I mean, as you say here: Jane's constant dwelling on his assumed age and the attributes that went with it... the real-life concept of "a mental age of #X", as I understand it, is actually shorthand, reflecting a more complex reality of changes in certain brain functions, reactions, attitude, etc. It doesn't mean that somehow someone becomes #X again in its original (or stereotypical) entirety. But Ray does, he "becomes" a unified, perfectly-regressed 9 (or whatever), and progresses in a unified, perfectly re-enacted process. Each of his assumed age ranges is easy to pin down, happens all of a piece, and brings with it a parcel of sexually-fetishized attributes. This sort of thing seems to shuck any faithfulness toward story 1 in favor of nothing but story 2. And story 2 didn't seem to have any of the positive potential elements of story 1.
Now, granted, I don't demand--and never have required--some kind of specious verisimilitude in my slash. But I do think that actually telling story 1 would require at least some, and the story doesn't bother, which led me to infer that it really wasn't about story 1 at all.
(And really, where my verisimilitude-jones does come out all the time is when presented with the sudden shrinking/fluffifying/ unacknowledged de-aging of a character. Doyle is NOT TINY. He is NOT FRAGILE. He is OLDER THAN BODIE. Etc. So when he almost-inevitably is shown turning his giant tear-filled eyes and trembling lower lip up up up to Big Butch Bodie... well. You know how I get. So this story, which, on top of the other things that squicked me, basically makes a huge meal of this process as the entire main premise... er. No thanks, I couldn't possibly, I'm full.)