#hanahaki lamb is such a fun idea

[legendspeaker]

Soo... LeshyLamb am I right?

[titleleaf]

much ado with red and white, please!

Yesssss YESSSSSS it's body horror consent issues hours on titleleaf dot tumblr dot com

much ado with red and white (Shakespeare's Histories, Henry IV/Prince Hal hanahaki disease noncon, CW for discussion of incest and consent issues

Where the fuck do I start with this one -- I love bullshit medieval medicine and I extra love bullshit medieval medicine explanations for fantastical or imaginary conditions. There's an incredible fic for Webster's Duchess Of Malfi that takes the fandom omegaverse trope and refracts it through the lens of Early Modern medicine and constructions of sex/sexuality, for instance. Translating the unrequited-love focus of hanahaki disease into an Early Modern-does-Medieval context is a lot of fun, and I drew on then-contemporary writing about melancholy and unrequited desire to get the wheels turning here.

The idea that an unrequited craving can be dangerous or have some permanent effect has fascinated me since I was a kid (Rapunzel's mother just wanted some damn lamb's-lettuce!) and I think I brought to the table here too the story of Amnon and Tamar from 2 Samuel, this intensely selfish desire that flips like a switch to disgust and contempt as soon as it's satisfied. On the one hand it's possible to read Amnon's contempt in that exchange as being driven by shame as soon as sexual frustration is no longer there as an obstruction, kind of a very dark form of post-nut clarity, but on the other it's just the basic-ass grim case of a man who really only wants one thing from the object of his desire and has no respect or regard for them otherwise. Henry isn't in quite that position -- his love for his son isn't exclusively or even primarily sexual -- but him pursuing temporary relief is going to wreck him in the long term.

Incest isn't a metaphor for anything and need not be a metaphor for anything but Shakespeare handed me a blank check for all of my favorite things -- complicated relationships between adult family members, childhood baggage with implications for foreign policy, guilt, anxiety, paranoia, poorly-understood desires, the royal family as a criminal enterprise. Hal's relationship to his father has been not just shaped by but actively distorted by monarchy -- in some ways hereditary divinely-appointed rule is this grand, magnified version of the "natural" state of things under patriarchy, but the reality of exile and usurpation and inheritance and allegiance all within one big already-dysfunctional family just kind of shatters any potential for relationships without a shitload of baggage. Henry's feelings regarding his son are cross-contaminated by the whole range of things he feels regarding Richard II (and about his own bygone youth, health, and posterity) and Hal has to navigate that minefield. Dying from Unrequited Pining Disease because you oops accidentally killed the guy you're pining for and it turns out your son is not, in fact, an adequate substitution... oops.

I looooove body horror and botanical grossness -- hanahaki disease first and foremost looks gorgeous, it's super aesthetic and tailored to fanart and moodboards and whatnot, but fusing it to the idea of the king's body having a parallel relationship to the land he rules (fruitful or sterile, health-giving or sick) is really fun.

I forgot how fucking mean it is to have Hal straight-up go "I'll do this only if you step down and let me become king, I don't want to do this, it's disgusting to me" and Henry being like oh yeah totally totally I'll do whatever you want, I'll give you whatever you want, just let me fuck you, and then not even doing it. There's a third part of this fic series that I need to finish up and post already where he gets some comeuppance for that, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Hal is trying to make the best of a really really really bad situation.

It was really hard to figure out a plausible textual background for Henry's own understanding of incest, sodomy, and specifically parent-child incest between two persons of the same sex -- he doesn't understand it as destructive or damaging for many of the reasons I or any other modern person might do but in terms of sexual sin and lechery. Robert Manning of Brunne's early 14th century poem Handlyng Synne outlines incest as one part of the seven-part sin of lechery, and it's very explicit about the degree of closeness being part of the problem, here, have a very shitty translation:

Þe þryddë synnë ys þe werst | The third sin is the worst,

Þe clerk[es] calleþ hyt 'yncest,' | the clerks call it 'incest',

 whan men take kyn yn felawrede | when men take kin in fellow-rede

And wyþ hem doþ doun flesshëly dede; | and with them doth do fleshly deed

Þe ner[ë] syb she ys hys kynde, | the closer-related a family member she is to him,

Þe morë plyȝt shal he þere fynde | the more plight shall he there find

There's a whole constellation of fucked-up sexual-sin concepts floating around for both Henry and Hal, but they actively obstruct either of them being able to articulate what's going on between them (Henry having displaced his desire for a more distant kinsman into a nearer one, even) or why it's damaging. Henry's trying to make a deal with what he's doing like it's different from other sins only in severity and it's not going to work out amazingly for him.

I forgot I use the idea that semen is the same kind of life-essence found in bone marrow in this fic and having spent the week elbow-deep in rendered bone marrow, it's especially narsty. Henry ejaculates a horrifying amount across all three of these fics since it seems so intuitively linked to the idea of somehow consummating an unrequited desire but it's all absolutely ghastly.

The title of this fic comes from one of my favorite pieces of Shakespeare writing, Katherine Duncan-Jones' paper on contemporary receptions of Shakespeare's Venus And Adonis -- taken from the letters of William Reynolds, a deeply unwell Elizabethan citizen and prolific correspondent with lots to say about religion, sex, politics, his monarch, sex with his monarch, and the content of Shakespeare's verses:

(It's just a funny off-handed summary of the content of Shakespeare's elaborate wordplay, to me. Like saying Hamlet has lots of stuff about flowers and recorders and shit.) I write about a lot of characters who've fully bought into the whole white-skin, rosy-cheeks, red-lips paradigm of beauty and incidentally a lot of characters with easily-flushed faces, both Richard and Hal among them. Pale sick skin and flowers, jizz and blood, it's all happening in this fic.