[Drabble] Reassurance ("The Great Escape," Danny/Willie)

[valmora]

Title: Reassurance
Rating: PG
Fandom: The Great Escape, the movie
Pairing: Danny/Willie. Someday I need to be more original and write, I dunno, Hindley/Colin or Roger/Mac or Hilts/Ives, because EVERYBODY writes Danny/Willie.
Disclaimer: Not mine, except for the innuendo.
Notes: Remember that scene where there's a cave-in on Willie and Danny gets him out and they then declare that they need to shore up the tunnel? This is a little drabble from that.


Reassurance

Danny comes crawling up the step ladder to stand beside Willie’s bunk in the darkness.

“You are safe,” he says, reaching out to touch Willie and arresting the gesture in midair.

“Yes,” Willie says, eyes shadowed but voice warm. “I’m all right, Danny.”

“I worried, when you had been buried, that we would not get to you in time.” Willie can hear, now, the fading panic left from that afternoon’s cave-in.

“But you did,” Willie says, capturing Danny’s hand and resting it against his chest so Danny can feel his heartbeat.

“I know,” Danny says, and does not pull away.

Comments

[dastari.livejournal.com]

I probably haven't seen it since I was 8 or so. My dad likes it, but it certainly wasn't a movie that I have strong memories of. At best I consider it a "dad movie" and thus gets filed with the Westerns and other WW2 movies that dad likes.

Well giving an example of something doesn't mean that any other example isn't true. I mean heck, how about Seshoumaru/Inuyasha/Miroku. Miroku is the most heterosexual man around and beyond being brothers, there is just no indication at all for Seshoumaru/Inuyasha. They hate each other. Indeed you even talk about Alucard/Anderson, two men who hate each other. You can't get more shippy then that. You just turned enemies into lovers. Then you go on to try and talk about Alucard/Anderson after just saying that people don't write ultra-masculine guys as slash. Juxtapose that with Quatre from Gundam Wing. If anyone wrote slash fanfiction with Quatre then I'd buy it because there's a lot there to support it. Writing slash with Wu Fei is the exact opposite. There's no way in hell that he's gay. Yet, it's there and it's prevalent.

However, I do agree with you. The fun with slash seems to be in taking an ultra-masculine guy and so feminizing him to the point that he might have a uterus and that's what I find wonky. I think that in some respect it stems from a desire to emasculate men, but don't tell me something isn't there when I hear people talking about slash constantly and I know about lots of the fics and the pairings.

[valmora.livejournal.com]

I can't counter an Inuyasha example because I don't know the series.

I could only see Alucard/Anderson if it weren't acted upon or if it were in the past, because there's no allowance for an established relationship in canon. You see where I'm going with this? We can't get in the characters' heads, so we don't actually know if Alucard lusts after Anderson or not, and if it were in the past - well, we don't know why they hate each other now, besides Anderson's hatred of vampires, do we?

I think that you can't really argue with one person's view of whether one character is straight or not. If you choose to see Wufei as only straight, that's your right. I personally prefer to see him that way, but I can also see why people would see his interactions with other characters as having a possible homoerotic undertone. I mean, I wouldn't see some of the characters from Harry Potter as being slashy ('slashy' being different from 'gay' - 'gay' means actually in canon homosexual, whereas 'slashy' means the character has the potential for being slashed), but I do read other 'ships.

You've also misinterpreted what I said. I never claimed that these authors made the deliberate decision to effeminize characters, because frankly, I did use the word 'inexperienced,' which implies a degree of, shall we say, disdain.
Most readers/writers with standards have very little respect for writers who cannot write the character without effeminizing him.

However, I can't agree with the 'ultra-masculine' thing either. The reason the writers are writing slash for a pairing is because they see those two characters as having chemistry. You can speculate yourself to kingdom come about the Freudian motives behind who they see as having chemistry, but that is the honest reason most slashers - most reasonable slashers who honestly support the pairings they write and aren't just doing it to get a squick reaction out of people - will give you.

See, I don't think you have a very unbiased view of the slash world. Not that my view is unbiased either, but your assumptions are going to be colored by the slashers you interact with, rather than what you read, because you don't read slash. And I think you've been exposed to the more extreme, in-it-for-the-shock-value-rather-than-love-of-the-'ship, sort of slasher, which isn't the majority of the subculture at all.
So please don't judge all by the expressed opinions of a few.