curing cancer with the power of love: clementine & jude
I never wrote an autopsy for baby, give me it. I write autopsies for every original work I’ve completed, because I’m pretty narcissistic, but I didn’t write one for Baby. Probably I didn’t get around to it because my life was just a few months short of imploding at the time of posting, so I was a bit busy, and as a result, forgive myself for this oversight. I didn’t even have this blog yet. Hell, I was still on PST, god’s worst time zone.
I also might not have written one for Baby because it’s not really worth writing one for, but still, content’s content. And it’s pretty fun! If you’re into lighthearted infidelity. Actually, at the time of writing, and if I recall correctly (editor’s note: I may not, as you will soon learn), I suspected I was also, in fact, being cheated on a little, so I wouldn’t be surprised if that played a part in it, too. For what it’s worth, I never got confirmation either way, so that will forever remain one of life’s fun little mysteries.
My own personal experiences aside, Clem & Jude, despite their light touch and somewhat insignificant percentage of my bibliography (love em to death, but still, at 13k, our time together was brief), were, overall, an incredibly significant milestone on my writing journey. They were the first ones! They were the first weird freak lesbians that were mine. I had my practice runs with f/f Wangxian for sure, and there are obvious pieces of my previous fandom proclivities on full display, but at the end of the day, Clementine and Jude were my first true original characters and IP. And that’s pretty cool.
Actually. Wait. What the fuck am I talking about. That’s a complete and utter lie, lol. I wrote Don’t Worry About It first. Scratch the victory speech. My sense of time is incoherent. I wrote Don’t Worry in 2022, and Judentine in late 2023. I had conceived this blog post so fully in my head as talking about Judentine as my first loves, damn. My memory… is bad.
Oh well! If nothing else, I am at least sure I haven’t written a blog post about Baby until this moment. Based on my ao3 chronology, it looks like I wrote Baby first, because I was still querying Don’t Worry at the time, which was also a likely cause for my momentary detachment from reality above. So, I suppose, as far as you, the reader, is concerned, I did actually write Baby first. Context is strange like that. Time is strange like that. It feels like I should have written Baby first, because it’s not that good, and Don’t Worry IS good. Then again, they’re very different beasts.
I don’t remember anything about the early stages of Baby. Other than the infidelity ping above, nothing rings a bell. I did revisit it the other day, though, and despite its rough edges, it’s kind of a hoot, in its own insane way. There are some excellent insults, and it always delights me when there are excellent insults in things. I like when people argue in a way that is both cruel and funny. There’s just something about how those two not-quite-opposites temper each other that makes it so compelling. Personally, I’m a big fan of Clementine being referred to as a Reese Witherspoon dupe, if Reese Witherspoon was mid. I also quite enjoy Clementine’s deeply inappropriate, “If I was interested in therapy, I would’ve majored in fine arts,” zinger. Along with Clementine suggesting her infidelity is OK because MLK cheated on his wife, too. Not only is she a bit of a rude and offensive mess in general, but she also acts this way toward her future wife. I mean, she does indirectly call Jude a cow at one point. Which, unfortunately, is also quite funny. To me, anyway. Sometimes, I wish I was the type of person who just yelled insults when I got mad. So long as you’re trading barbs with someone who can take it, it seems pretty therapeutic. In a deeply unstable way, Clementine is a bit aspirational to me. She gets angry, so she acts angry. What a straightforward and honest way to live your life.
Clementine, overall, was such a joy to write. The concept of “the worst person you know but she’s going to cure cancer” is so simple, so elegant, and so perfectly ripe for a dumb romp like this. I’ve talked a lot before, maybe on this blog, maybe just in my head, about how much I like playing with the balance of “good” and “bad” in my characters. “Good” and “bad” of course being almost entirely undefinable and ever-changing, because that’s a much more realistic portrayal of humans than any type hero or villain. There’s been “edgy” content in recent years that skews grey, but when I talk about this balance, I don’t really mean it in such a dramatic or egregious way. I mean in the much more mundane way that regular people are usually too busy living their own lives to worry so much about how “good” or “bad” they are. For example: telling the woman you’re on a first date with and don’t know very well that you’re sorry, but it won’t work out, all because the ex you’re obsessed with just fingered you in the washroom. Overall, you didn’t waste that much of her time. The emotional investment was quite low. But also, it’s pretty lame to let your ex finger you in the bathroom when you’re on a date with someone else. The good/bad balance is more exaggerated in Baby than it usually is in my works, because it’s just a dumb comedy romp, but still. There are echoes of it. But also, Clementine should stop cheating on her girlfriends.
Jude’s “artist” dialogue is so bad. Like, it’s bad on purpose, but it’s still bad. Which is fun. Even more fun when Clementine eats it up. There is something so heinous about a grown woman calling another grown woman “angel baby”. Some may argue it’s too much. I would say, correct. And then not change anything at all.
Zoey’s great. Much too good for the narrative she appears in. She’ll reel one in eventually, have no fear. Objectively, she is nothing more than the straight woman archetype. Subjectively, she’s not even in it that much, but she’s great. As a woman who often struggles to speak with conviction, I enjoy living vicariously through deadpan snarkers like Zoey. She’s not mean, she’s just direct. So should we all, Zoey! It’s a cruel joke of the universe that characters like her are relegated to lesbian best friend status, but tragically, she and her sisters are just not messy enough.
The tenses are a little crazy. That was me dipping my toe into any amount of past tense after years of not writing it and shaking off some serious rust. Both my novels are in present tense. My other, shorter original works are all past tense. This is subjective, but for me, I needed to move away from present tense because it was too reminiscent of fan fiction. But here, it’s messy. Especially in a story that doesn’t even break 15k. Doesn’t help that the first part of it is framed as a kind of weird, kind of fun, very visual-medium-esque story within a story as Clementine relays the drama of the night previous to Zoey. It’s like the written version of that trope in TV/movies where a character is telling a story, but then it just flashes back to the events as opposed to having the character narrate the whole sequence of events. Which actually is a lot easier to convey when there’s a visual component to your story. When it’s strictly text-based, things get a little hairy. But I tried. It was a fun idea.
The entire NOW/THEN framing device of Baby is lazy. No two ways about it. I don’t care for NOW/THEN narratives. It was just a storytelling shortcut I took because I wanted readers to be invested quickly, and it’s not a long story. This is also a bad fan fiction habit. I don’t like this tope in visual media, either. Make it worth my while to stick around as opposed to trying to reel me in with a filmmaker’s bait and switch. In my defense, the NOWs and THENs of Baby are much less exciting, and with less connective tissue. Wait. Maybe that’s a bad thing. Again, it’s just a way of filling in the blanks that encourages brain-candy reading, not real connection or depth or meaning. Which, for a 13k sex romp, is like, whatever. Guilty as charged. [editor’s note after I’ve already published this blog post: literally did not remember I already wrote an entire paragraph about my dislike of NOW/THEN storytelling in the Come this here July debrief, but hey, at least I’m consistent]
My real first with Judentine was the threesome. Threesomes are a big thing in fandom world, at least the corners I skulked around in, but I never cared for them. If I ever conceived of writing a threesome, my plans were usually surrounding how bad and icky it would go for the main pairing. It’s kind of a litmus test for my fictional couples. Who’s damaged enough to try a threesome with the love of their life plus some rando even though the idea turns them inside out with grief/jealousy/rage? I suppose when it’s out of only bad feelings, you could probably make an argument for most. Judentine are the exception to that. Sure, the way they do threesomes is still freaky and possessive and weird, but I do think they actually have fun. I mean, not really in the one that made it onto the page. But after they get married. Like. It’s almost their way of proving how obsessed they are with each other. It’s like, yeah I want my pussy eaten, but I also want to be kissing my wife at the same time, and Clementine is a scientist, and not too bad at math, either, so she probably figured out the trigonometry of that desire pretty early on. Meanwhile, Jude would say some pretentious purple prose about the female form—never purpler than what she’d say about Clem, of course— and off the three of them go. Clementine & Jude and her.
If I may, I made quite an iconic Wangxian tweet many years ago. It was something like, POV: you’re wangxian’s third. and the image was a closed door. This is Judentine, except the door is open and you’re between Clementine’s legs. But also the door is still closed. But it’s also open. But also closed. If that makes sense. Am I making sense? Do I ever? I suppose the point is moot, in that case.
As insubstantial as everything about Baby is, the core “trope” of science vs art is something I’m really interested in, and often debate with myself. Which I suppose makes sense, because what is writing, especially writing an argument between two characters, if not having an extensive argument with yourself? At some point in the future, I expect to return to this conflict in a more serious way. No idea in what capacity, yet, but it’s not like there’s no meat left on the bone. There’s a lot to explore. Of note; in my heart, I’m a Clementine. A hard-line skeptic. In Baby, Jude and her dumb artistic license win the argument. Not that it’s an argument you can “win”. You know what I mean.
Clementine was an early addition to my club of friendless lesbians. She had Zoey there for a bit, but what can you do when you ooze dyke hormones and captivate every lesbian woman you meet, fuck her, and then cheat on her because you’re obsessed with the one lesbian who (supposedly) doesn’t want you back? Clementine was also early to the party as a serious pheromone-haver. Wren has other attractive qualities, for sure, but she’s also definitely a pheromone-haver. Same with protagonist of novel 2; yes, she has other stuff going for her, but she apparently just can’t help herself when it comes to emitting “you will fall in love with me” vibes. I don’t know. Maybe it’s a weird self-fulfillment fantasy where I want to be the one who stinks up the place with “women want me” pheromones. Or maybe it’s just a straight up fantasy where I want to meet the woman with the crazy lesbian pheromones in real life. Not sure. If I ever determine which one it actually is, I’ll report back. Although I probably won’t, actually, because I’ll be too busy getting married to her to do so. Sorry.
I like that they’re both kind of shit. That goes way back in the saltyfeathers lore, the balancing of the scales of shittiness within a pairing. They don’t have to be exactly even, but characters need to give as good as they get. I don’t like steamrollers. Lack of backbone is an interesting trait, lots to dig into, but just not really my bag. I don’t want steamrollers and I don’t want devils dating angels. Again, it’s just a little too silly for me. A little too costume from Spirit Halloween for me. It’s just kind of fun that for the majority of the narrative, Jude, despite her pretentious, blasé attitude, seems like Clementine’s ultimate victim until it’s revealed that she only refused to marry Clem in the first place because it didn’t fit into her vision of herself as a tortured artist. A tortured artist who got her big break because she 2012 hipster’d all over American Gothic a decade ago on DeviantArt. Aw. I can’t stand either of them, I say, with the utmost fondness.
The climax is ridiculous. And weirdly abstract, but I suppose that’s the point since it takes place at an art exhibit. In the real world, imagine if, without warning, you came face to face with an artistic rendering of your own pussy getting eaten out. No matter how good, that’s like, 911-worthy. In fake-world, it’s the perfect stupid ending to a perfectly stupid lesbian sex romp with infidelity. Actually, I think the greatest act of love Clementine performs for Jude in this story is not finally admitting her feelings, but the fact that she hung in there during Jude’s Grounding phase. Her scientist brain would have been screaming, but maybe her lesbian brain was like, well, at least she has nice feet. Or maybe it would be funnier if Jude didn’t have nice feet, just regular feet, or even weird feet, and still, Clem stuck around! I wouldn’t have. Do you know what grounding is? I’ve gotten ads for “grounding bedsheets” on youtube within the last few weeks, too. And now the fact that I’ve written it out multiple times in this post probably means I won’t be able to get away from it for another few months at the very least.
Honestly, the most notable thing about Baby is that in terms of posting things on ao3, that was indeed the final nail in the coffin of my participation in fandom. Which is both strange and meaningful and heavy and at the same time ended up being something of a lateral move, because all I do now is fandomize my own work and characters, in my head, by myself. Talk about being a friendless lesbian.
Clementine and Jude were not my first, despite what some deeply misinformed parties will tell you. They were a very quiet sophomore exercise in fandom-ish, silly, romp-esque writing that, despite my terrible memory, I assume I really needed to escape to at that particular time in my life. I don’t revisit them the same way I do some of my other works, but then again, the one time I did, just the other day, I felt enough lingering endearment that I was inspired to write an entire blog post about them and re-write my memory of their conception, so, y’know. That’s something. As they say, you never forget your first. Or your second.