i never considered the use of "un/necessary" in the "sex scene discourse" rhetoric as a way to elide saying that the art always by definition "needs" all of its constituent parts, but that's totally what it is -- a "defense of the unnecessary" is already ceding ground to the rhetorical framework of the coddled/fascist mindset by assuming that things can like, be unnecessary within an artistic work. I think Brandon Taylor's writing here absolutely nails that and more. here are two of my favorite paragraphs:
Another defense of the unnecessary that crops up in writing advice forums and in threads and tweets (now posts), is that “you need an unnecessary scene where the characters are just hanging out to give the story room to breathe.” And I would argue that that is…not an unnecessary scene? That is a very necessary scene? It literally has a function? How can it be unnecessary if it has a function? I mean, truly, use your human mind. Words mean things. And you might say, oh, these people who say that mean that the scene is not important for plot reasons, that’s what necessary/unnecessary is about. And I would argue that a scene where the characters are hanging out is in fact also still directly related to the plot. because in the scene where the characters are hanging out, they are also, hopefully, if it is well written, processing what they have experienced up to that point. It’s not just a breather for the audience. Hopefully, the characters are processing—dealing or not dealing with what they’ve done and said and heard and had done to them. Hopefully, in your “rest scenes” there is actually quite a lot of plot happening, and hopefully, in those scenes, something is happening to make the next thing happen.
In a story, all things are related. What a character feels about what is happening is as much a part of what they do next as anything else. We only believe character action when it seems to come out of real human response to situation and circumstance. That’s why some plots appear more plausible to us and some appear implausible. You can make a set of implausible events feel likely and believable to a reader if the characters respond and behave in ways we might imagine ourselves behaving or someone behaving. This is how the fantastical and speculative fiction work. This is how fairy tales and fables work. Bears don’t talk. But if they did talk, they might behave in certain ways that are familiar to us. Wolves don’t go around dressing as grandmothers, but we do know that wily people will do anything to get what they want, including dress as a grandmother to trick a little girl alone in the woods. Pigs don’t build houses, but if they did build houses, we might imagine that they’d pick an assortment of materials that made sense to them depending on their personalities and quirks. But that is about plausibility, not necessity.
emphasis mine
