This weekend I was at Full Throttle's wedding. It was an odd thing, because he got married ten years ago, but only now decided to actually do the whole ceremony and party bit. I struggled some with it because it was in a church and I had lots of internal issues with the religious and gender based stuff in a wedding I went to during the summer, and I did not want to run the God gauntlet again.
It is a tricky beast. I don't want to tell other people how to live, or what sorts of ceremonies they should have to mark their important moments. I also don't want to sit in a religious service silently seething at the ways it cements and supports entrenched sexist norms.
I ended up just skipping the ceremony and going to the reception. I could have easily made up any number of lies to get out of going to the ceremony but I felt like I had to pick one thing or the other: Either Full Throttle is someone I am close to, or he is not. If he is someone I am close to, I should tell the truth about having problems with the venue and composition of the ceremony. What possible good is being close to a person if you have to lie to them about things that are important to you?
On the other hand if he isn't important to me and thus lying becomes more palatable, then why go to the wedding at all? It makes no sense, to me at least, to go to a wedding if you don't care about the people getting married.
The wedding was Game of Thrones themed. There were lots of swords for decoration and the music constantly had me imagining tiny cogs and wheels. Part of that theme was the 'get the couple to kiss' rules, which were that you had to fight and win a duel with a plastic sword, and each victor of a duel had to take the couple's cause in the next duel.
A chance to make an ass of myself in public *and* fight with a sword at the same time? Sign me up!
Iolo and I decided that we, as the groom's gamer nerd buddies, needed to break the system. Iolo fought the first duel against the head table, so he ended up becoming the next champion. I challenged him, and he simply held his blades aside so I could whack him gently and defeat him, forcing the couple to kiss. This made me the new champion, and while Iolo could simply have challenged me and had me concede we decided that we had already broken the system this way once - no need to do it again.
The next way to break the system was for me to go up and challenge again, while I was still the champion. I would have to fight myself, and I could just whack myself with the sword, and both win and lose at the same time! I would both have to retire as champion and be the next champion, so I can only assume this would have spawned a singularity and swallowed up the earth had I done it, but before I put this plan into action I was challenged by somebody else.
Unfortunately this challenge did not go well for me and I lost, getting stabbed savagely in the stomach. It turns out that plastic swords can do little damage with a slash, but a stab in a vulnerable region is quite another thing entirely. I was in a lot of pain immediately, and even three days later my stomach is still hurting. I don't think I have any permanent damage, but it is not comfortable.
This strikes me as quite appropriate. Much of my relationship with Full Throttle was about playing football in university, and we played full tackle without any protective gear. I spent many a day limping about, barely able to move after savage hits in our games. That I would be injured at a Game of Thrones wedding, with Full Throttle as the groom, feels entirely appropriate.
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