Killing Me Softly (Yes, Virginia, There Is A Pun Intended)

Part of a series on BSG fanfic.

Today, I am going to talk about how Laura Roslin makes her exit from the universe.

Not all fictional characters die. Really, they don't. The idea that they do is part of a fallacy I brought up once before, but did not pursue, due mostly to inebriation. But this is a significant point. Not all characters die. In fact, the vast majority of them do not.

Which means that when a character does snuff it, it is usually fairly important.



In a certain sense, Laura Roslin's story is all about how she dies. This is dramatic, but I think it's a problem. It has a lingering aroma of the many, many stories out there in the world in which a female character's death resolves some tension in the narrative about power, knowledge or sex.

There are a lot of stories in which powerful women die. Queens, for example, tend to meet nasty ends. Dido ends up on that pyre after Aeneas sails away. Cleopatra goes hunting for snakes. And it's not just the queens, either. Women who know things also tend to die. Cassandra went splat outside the walls of Troy. Hypatia, poor clever soul, got flayed by a Christian mob in the streets of Alexandria.

And then women who commit sexual indiscretions also die. In Bleak House, poor Lady Dedlock expires because her husband forgave her for an affair and a child that she had before they ever even met, and Dickens feared his readers' minds would blown by this if he didn't kill her off.

Oh, and remember poor Anna Karenina and that train?

The nunnery is another version of this. In Verdi's Don Carlos, Princess Eboli, who truly has game, ends up taking the veil. In Dickens's David Copperfield, Little Emily is forced by the narrative to accept a life of eternal chastity because of a single youthful indescrection. And, more than that, she forgets how to speak all those foreign languages she learned! Or, in Laclos's Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Cecile is consigned to nunhood at the end. (And the Marquise de Merteuil is uglified by smallpox. This is a theme I've seen in many French novels, of the adventuresses getting the smallpox at the end. Zola does it to Nana, and Balzac hits Madame Marnette with a similarly nasty disease at the end of Cousin Bette). And, a universe away from French novels, don't get me started on what happens to Susan in The Chronicles of Narnia. A little bit of lipstick, one episode of flirtation with one of C. S. Lewis's scary cartoon Muslims (Prince Rabadash), and you're banished forever from the happy land of the talking lion . . .

Then, there is the theme of sickness, or deathly illness, allowing female characters to achieve insight, but cutting them off from personal relations. Helen Burns in Jane Eyre is one example I can think of at the moment. Or Lise, in The Brothers Karamazov, whose illness leads her into some weird things. Knowing things, in many pre-modern and some modern minds, is related to sex. Women who have sex may know too much, or women who know too much miss out on the sex. This is related to all that hand-wringing, mine included, about Roslin's wig.

(Methodology note: I am committed to pulling all non-fanfic material for these posts entirely out of my head. I looked up the spelling on Liaisons Dangereuses because I can't spell French, but that's all. So if I get something wrong, let me know.)

So, there are stories in which powerful women die, there are stories in which sick women achieve great insight at the expense of personal relationships, and there are stories in which women's deaths are closely tied to ideas about sex.

Laura Roslin's story, as fanficdom writes it, negotiates with all these themes. Sometimes, it is on a very crude level. One thing I hate about a lot of Roslin stories, is that the tension is set up as, "is her body sick and she can't fuck, or is she better, and she can?" Annoying as hell, this. Oh, and can we please not fetishize the sick female body any more? I've been to that party, and the music was terrible.

Often, though, it's more complex. With Roslin, the connection between sex and death is not the punishment theme, or (usually) the "can we fuck her or not" theme. It's a little bit different.

One place to start is here, with a story called "Five Deaths."

This is an exploration of five ways in which Roslin's life might have ended. She could have been Adama's wife, and died in the cylon attack. She could have been assassinated. She could have died on New Caprica. She could have died, and been cloned, and used as a weapon. She could have died of cancer in a very close-to-canon way.

How Roslin dies in these various sub-narratives determines her character arc retroactively. What is the point of telling this woman's story? "Five deaths" offers five different answers to this question. It's a good story.

But I want to go back to the sex and death theme. This is important.

Both sex and death are methods of story resolution. They are both endings. The metaphorical linking of orgasm with death goes back a long, long way. I've seen it in Shakespeare, and no, I cannot instance a particular play at this point. I've seen it in otherwise coy and chaste Romantic poets. (Yes, dying on someone's lap means what you think it means.)

Someone over at Survival Instinct actually went there a while back. Again, I curse my own sloth - I did not write down the title or author of this story. The quote was in a raunch context, and it was like "you're killing me, Bill" or something like that, there was an implication that Roslin's death was somehow imminent, and the characters were keenly -- shall we say, sweetly -- aware of the play on words.

Survival Instinct does not ask authors to tag their stories for more than the basics (so, in addition to PWP, Smut, Angst, Drama, Ficlets, and so on, we do NOT have, say, Heteronormativity, Bad Puns, Dancing Tongues, Fire Imagery for Orgasms, Nibbling and Biting, Really Clever, Well Written, I Don't Think So, WTF, or any other potentially useful markers.) So I couldn't find that story again.

They do, however, have a 'Character Death' tag, which is nifty. Although sometimes you do not get, ah, quite what you might expect.

But anyway, death and sex. Or, death and orgasm. Here, the connection between sex and death is explicit as all fuck. Then, there is sex and the end of the world.

This sort of thing goes back to the Greeks, I think. In the Iliad, there is a lot of death in battle, and a theme that comes up over and over that young men who die in battle never marry. Death is a sort of dark substitute for marriage and sex.

And, as in some ancient mythology, there is sometimes an afterlife for Roslin.

Here, Tory kills Roslin (sex and death again) and then when she herself dies, she meets Roslin again, who turns out to be the Queen of the Cylons. No, I am not making this up. Yes, it is awesome.

Here, Billy returns from the beyond to comfort Laura as she dies.

And more of ditto here.

I will not instance that Evil Dead Galactica story here, which I found by searching for 'Character Death' at The Lady's In Charge, because although it has life after death in it, Laura lives. Spectacularly. Let us move on.

These stories do with death what a lot of fic does with sex. It is there as a story-ender, as a type of narrative completion, but it is implied that the story goes on. Most romance stories imply a happily-ever-after after the sex or the marriage. Similarly, this type of story implies, if not a happily-ever-after, at least an ever-after. We get to kill Laura without really killing her.

But there are stories in which Roslin really and truly dies. More recent ones have this happening with the explosion of the base-star she was on in The Hub, as here and again here. In these stories, death is really the end, in the story and for the character. Significantly, this is death as a result of politics. Not cancer. In a certain sense, it is more satisfying than the cancery deaths, because it is not about the mysterious and vulnerable female body. Roslin dies the way any male space-hero might die, by going down with the ship.

Along similar lines there is this, in which Roslin decides that a suicide mission is better than a lingering death. Moreover, she instructs Adama that should he see her again, he will have to kill her, as she will be not herself, but a cylon copy. This story explicitly rejects the cancer death for an active death which the character chooses herself.

Which gets me to my last story, in which Roslin dies at her own hand, and takes only herself with her. This is the only example I have found of this, but there may be others. Roslin takes her own life. This is interesting, because in a certain sense it is a swipe at the entire arc of the show, which has made a point of toying with killing her, and then not, and taking the decisions about her own life out of her hands. This is Roslin's revenge on the writers, I think.

So, where does this leave us?

One, death stories and fuck stories are closely related. Sex and death are both endings, and can be very interesting ones. This idea has a long, long cultural pedigree. Which indicates the extent to which fanfic is a literary genre that is fooling around (sometimes without its writers realizing it) with a lot of other literary genres. It plays with some very big conceptual toys.

Two, BSG-fanfic both is and is not post-gender. We do have the stories in which Roslin's death is a death any hero might have. On the other hand, we have that suicide-mission story in which it is made very clear that the blaze-of-glory demise is explicitly engaging with the death-by-cancer demise. Roslin the leader never quite gets away from being Roslin the woman.

And, we have the idea pushed by the canon itself, that Roslin herself is an abberation in terms of power-holding. She comes into power by accident, and she is going to die, likely to be replaced by that square-jawed boy wonder, Lee Adama. Things will return to normal, in other words.

If Laura was Lawrence, I think, Roslin would probably die rather differently.