#It makes me feel viscerally repulsed (affectionate)

[toushindai]

I miss you ganauru fics. 🖐️😔 What are your favourite headcanons about them? Like, would they be a cute couple if they didn't hate each other so much?

I’ll be honest anon, I don’t really have any interest in them if they don’t hate each other? The draw for me has always been the conflict between them, the obsessive focus they inspire in each other as men similarly attracted to power with such different aims and beliefs about themselves. Would they be cute…? Would they be sweet, affectionate with each other? We’ve seen Rauru be that way with Sonia, but my take on Ganondorf is that he’s spent so long lonely, his emotional needs left unseen for too long at crucial ages—ie, far far younger than he is now—that he has crusted over emotionally and has little capacity for joy or kindness that isn’t caught up in cruel domination. So a cute Ganondorf isn’t something I’m interested in in a canon-compliant capacity. I mused once, in response to another ask, about an AU scenario in which Rauru descends to the desert rather than central Hyrule first and he and Ganondorf are drawn to each other there, but my musing started and ended with that ask, and even if I were to continue in that vein, it wouldn’t be with the aim of writing a cute romance; it would be examining what kind of changes they would work on each other by meeting at a different time.

I hope I’m not coming off as too harsh, anon.

Some headcanons! oh this post is getting long—

I forget if I’ve said this anywhere but a crucial part of the dynamic between them is that Rauru is physically attracted to Ganondorf, to a debilitating extent, but Ganondorf’s attraction to Rauru is more to the thought of dominating him and having power over him. Sex is a way to enact this desire this while the kill-him-and-take-over-his-stupid-kingdom plan is still a work in progress, and honestly the chance to call him very dirty names and feel him react to that is at least as satisfying if not more so than intercourse itself.

In contrast—and I only noticed this recently—Ganondorf’s fantasies of killing Rauru are much more physical and visceral than Rauru’s of killing him are. Rauru’s fantasies of having Ganondorf executed are very hands-off; he has no interest in wielding the axe. What makes him shiver inside is the thought of his word, his officially sanctioned power, overpowering Ganondorf’s more physical strength. Fascinating!!

I have the headcanon that Zonai can’t get drunk, and in early drafts of what-wasn’t-ACNOC-yet, Rauru tells Ganondorf this—to a flash of indignant anger as though this is something Rauru hid from him, letting him think he could manipulate Rauru this way. In the fic series as it stands… I don’t think this has ever come up. After the second time they fucked it became less beneficial to Rauru to smugly share this fact with Ganondorf, because that means he’s making this obviously unwise decision completely sober.

Rauru is pansexual and dynamic-wise thought he leaned entirely submissive (this is how he is with Sonia, and with other partners they’ve had) until Ganondorf dropping to one knee in his formal audience set several new mental pathways on fire all at once. Ganondorf on the other hand is purely dominant—there is no part of him that desires to be submissive—and—ok—look it feels presumptuous to declare anything about Ganondorf considering I still feel like an interloper to LOZ fandom, but—as I’ve been writing him he’s either gay or his sexuality is so centered on domination that the way he is expected to interact with potential Gerudo brides does nothing for him. There’s something there that repulses him, drives him even further from connection with his people. And so his connection with Rauru is novel to him, something that’s genuinely scratching an itch he’s never had scratched before, albeit in a quite unwholesome way.

I’m sorry anon, I really do have nothing cute for you. There were moments when they almost connected, when they were almost two people who could have been friends. But after a split-second spark of empathy this only made them loathe each other more, for being someone who would inspire that want without ever really being what they wanted.

[sluttish-armchair]

New slimy, predatory classical song came to me out of nowhere. I recorded the melody with Keylimba in B flat so I won’t forget it. Not gonna do anything more with it until much, much later because my body most certainly is NOT ready for it…

And I’ve got other more important irl things to work on, so…

[thekidyouforgot]

Insurance

She was a bad kisser. At 16. Now she’s a woman: crimson lipstick to match the strapless red dress she beams above in a candid shot she’s selected as her profile picture. The third beer of the night has my lap hot from the hum of the processor dishing out my random searches of old flings and other bodies I feel myself missing. I know from my year spent binging on bongs and David Foster Wallace that it’s better to *want* than to *have* but I find myself tapping out the first names of girls I couldn’t bring myself to call back because of bad breath, burly brothers in the armed forces, or dating resumés of a certain shall-we-say type-of-man I once felt a particular inadequacy towards. My former love life a monument to premature prejudice.

But since I’ve gone dark. Deleted high school and college social media accounts. Tried Snapchat but couldn’t figure out how to turn the camera away from my bloodshot mug. I did Tinder. Bumble. I tried okCupid for a day before feeling such an emptiness and public vulnerability I couldn’t swipe any more. My bios were limericks; barely-coded innuendos; once a cliché so banal it was personally offensive when I still got matches; sometimes brutally honest paragraphs; but more-often-than-not meta-commentaries on the state of dating in our culture as if I was above it all and playing intellectual about it would help me attract that same sort of opposite. I’ve swiped models without profiles, artists who eschewed normalcy to hide behind absurdism, and every shade of white women who claim they love yoga, adventures, and avocados. I’ve swiped Kim K look-a-likes who blanketed their natural allure with puffy-lipped caked-on aesthetic that made me viscerally repulsed. And once I swung the other way to get a glimpse of what I was up against but that was something I’ll never do again for fear of my sanity and alignment of sexual orientation. I’ve dated these women, come very close to falling in love, and then pushed them away because anyone online cannot be REAL. It’s a projection of who we wish ourselves to be mixed with the assumptions of what we believe the opposite sex desires in a suitable partner. A dimly lit portrait we’ve constructed out of the materials available.

But I can’t link in my bio to my history of substance abuse, my penchant for women who play dumb, my professional victories, or the hours spent riding the spin bike in my roommate’s little sister’s childhood bedroom, who (the roommate’s little sister) I’ve had a crush on since the first day I saw her but have never mustered the courage or brashness to openly show affection out of fear of rejection and my paycheck (roommate is also boss). Those women I encounter in my daily life are so much more attractive than the ones I swipe online. They are whole: faulty, round, acne scarred, and seductively reclusive. Yet I cannot make a move. I can’t threaten their space or my own caged safety. So my only recourse is loneliness. Suffering.

I got burned so bad by love at a young age it nearly killed me. It left terrible scars I keep barely hidden beneath the face of a stoic. Anyone who’s ever had a loss of self-identity knows you’re never the same. I’ve spent the last—let’s see, August 2011 was what—6 years trying to rebuild myself while totally ignoring the women who opened themselves up to me. There were at least 6 of them. Six women I took to bed and woke up next to but I couldn’t open anything besides a condom. These are major generalizations, of course, but the trend is that boy (me), burnt by first love, feels it necessary to take loss out on opposite sex by being indelibly affectionate and ultimately noncommittal. It’s no mistake we use combustion imagery for lust/love: heat + fuel + air = fire. But so often I took all the oxygen out of the room because it was the one thing I could control.

So let’s get back to social media. We’re all disgusted with what we’re portrayed as beyond our control. And we’re equally disgusted for our attempts at over-compensating that image. And we’re all trying to light a fire to stay warm. So of course we exert the only control we have over our image. But it’s not sustainable. We can’t keep feeding the fire shit and expect not to smell. We have two choices: be yourself or be no one. I’ve chosen the latter for the last 6 years. I’ve lived under the cold guise of anonymity out of fear I can’t project who I want to be.

I halfway tried with a certain Midwestern bible camp counselor. We conversed and debated for two months before going on a date. Her nose ring and love of craft beer kept my hope alive that she wasn't some bible-thumping Republican who had a thing for bookworm boys with big—well, we never got that far. The conversation died and so did the romance. And once the fire burns out it takes too much effort to reignite with someone who's just a pixelated icon and a couple expensive dates. You decide it can’t be real. She wasn’t real. That she saw in you something that doesn’t actually exist and once the excitement of nubility resides there’s nothing left but the shell of the boy you’ve been trying for 6 years to escape. And I hate it. I hate myself so bad for who I was 6 years ago. Time to stick out my neck and risk losing my head all over again.