Sealed with a Kiss

Fanfiction
Title:	Sealed with a Kiss
Author(s):	Jade Drofsny
Date(s):	1992
Length:	one fan says it is 3 pages, another fan says 11 pages
Genre:	slash
Fandom:	Blake's 7
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Sealed with a Kiss is a Blake's 7 Blake/Avon story by Jade Drofsny.

It was published in It's Greek to Me.

Reactions and Reviews

Sealed with a Kiss: My god, this one's a turkey! It's not just the poor prose style and the habit of greedily racing through the author's kinks, but the characterisation really doesn't work for me.

This is a rape-love fic. It's not a taste I particularly go for (although I've written stories where the characters pretend they're being raped for kinky fun, and I love ambiguous-consent stories), but other exponents of the genre make it clearer that it's about loss-of-control and hidden-desire - Willa Shakespeare, for example, makes the characters basically psychologically healthy, and M. Fae Glasgow can write a fairly twisted Blake while showing how he got that way, which works.

I haven't read this little gem for years, and am still trying to forget it. Starting from the end of The Keeper, where Avon says, "Another few seconds and I would have left you, Blake," it shows Blake stewing about that comment for a few minutes, then slamming Avon up against the wall and raping him.

Three pages of lovingly-described agony later (and it seems that the point of it is pain rather than sex), Avon has an orgasm or a spiritual epiphany, I can't tell which, and realises he is in love with Blake. Meanwhile, Blake apparently realised he was in love with Avon, and burst into tears (without stopping raping him, naturally).

If there was any character development at all, this story would be a lot easier to take. Sudden reversal of feelings doesn't count, at least not without doing the basic groundwork. And neither of the characters appear as adult or intelligent human beings at all. There's a positively icky insistence on Avon's inner self being vulnerable and childlike, and needing this pain forced on him to accept his own feelings. Meanwhile, there's no real explication of Blake's feelings or reactions, and he comes across as capricious, cruel and abusive. Which, I am almost sure, is not what the author intended.

Avoid.

11pp, Blake/Avon. Set after the episode The Keeper. Blake can't stop thinking about Avon's comment in that episode that he (Avon) nearly left. Blake's not having that: the crew needs Avon, he needs Avon, Avon is his, and they both discover how violently possessive Blake is. Characters sound much more like themselves in this - except for what they're actually saying, if you see what I mean.