Musings - Sex & Love in Sci-Fi/Fantasy

I watched Back to the Future again over Thanksgiving, and I realized there were similarities to El Goonish Shive.

(Bear with me on this one.)

I like sci-fi/fantasy elements that change love and sex. Think about how much sexuality changes if the body becomes an Eclipse Phase-style sleeve for the mind, and people can easily change their bodies. If the body is more like a phone case than core hardware, how does sex change? Do people start artificially heightening arousal with hormone injections?

Or the same deal in a magical setting – 2^nd edition D&D had the girdle of masculinity/femininity as a cursed item. You could make an entire campaign about finding one to help a queen transition.

Even though a bunch of stories have these elements, though, they don’t really explore them. Either they’re story-of-the-week innovations, to be forgotten by the next episode, or the writers don’t want to dive into the cultural implications of change. Sci-fi is historically used for allegories and exploring technology, but it usually doesn’t take a look at the small and personal.

Which is where El Goonish Shive comes in for me. Early on, the then-main protagonist was turned into a girl, and in trying to get changed back, the female persona was split into a separate character; that character has since been an integral part of the story, and the easy availability of shapeshifting and gender-changing for the protagonists has shaped their attitudes about sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation.

(Whoof, that was a long sentence.)

I love EGS because it does exactly what I want: It looks at how sci-fi and fantasy elements change love and sex. Looking at grand sociological or technological changes is interesting, but it doesn’t get more personal than seeing how sex changes.

Kinda the same for Back to the Future – even throwing out the incest angle, how much harder does it get to have a relationship with someone from thirty years ago, who you have to hide the future from? What’s the closest equivalent to sex with an AI that thinks at 33.86 * 10^15 operations per second? Whatever the equivalent of sex is, how mind-blowing would it have to be to completely occupy that AI’s mind, like a human’s during an orgasm?

And that brings me to superheroes.

Almost every superpower – telekinesis, precognition, super strength, duplication – could get used in sex. I guarantee it. (Rogue still has it rough, admittedly.) And given modern fetish culture, you’d probably have baseline humans looking for matches with their specific power fetish. There might even be a powers dating site.

I want to read about the people using that site. I want to know what makes Captain Supreme swipe left. I want to read about how Masked Marvel isn’t just her powers, and if you bring them up instead of her traveling or philanthropy when you message her, she’s not going to respond. I want to know how Valkyrie deals with the social stigma around online dating.

Hmm. Maybe I want to write about that.