loquenadiediceperosiente

[fictionplumis]

This short story is dedicated to Marina, of whom is my inspiration for this story, and it is written for the Witcher fandom, but especially for my fellow Rorveth shippers. Though I imagine every fandom can probably relate to this a little bit.

---

There's a dog in my neighborhood.

The dog doesn't live in the neighborhood, mind you. No one here owns it. It's just constantly in our neighborhood.

It's mostly harmless, but it's annoying. It poops in everyone's yard, it barks at all hours of the night, it growls at anyone no matter how nicely they try to approach it, and sometimes it will dig up flowerbeds to drag to its own neighborhood and rebury.

We don't feed the dog. Most of us try to ignore the dog completely in the hopes it'll go away, but that's hard when the dog starts getting particularly frustrating.

Over the years, we've tried various ways to deal with the dog.  At first, we would lead the dog back to its own neighborhood, thinking surely it would be happier over there. All the houses are made to its liking, and the streets should be familiar to it. But it's a stubborn dog and would keep coming back.

We thought to train it, thinking that maybe it just needed some instruction on how to act politely in our neighborhood, but it growls and barks at offered treats, suspicious of us and our motivations, and refused to cooperate.

We've even tried contacting the dog catchers, but I think everyone can agree they're pretty useless.

Our final resort was to try to get rid of the dog completely. We put up fences to block it from coming in, and those worked for a little while, but the dang thing always finds a way around them and it's right back to digging up gardens and pooping on front pouches.

The people here are all very proud of the neighborhood we've made for ourselves. It's a little odd, and not everyone would care to live here, but that's fine. We stick together as a small, close-knit community and we don't bother anyone. But we like for our neighborhood to look nice, and whenever we get people jogging through, we smile and wave and make sure they feel welcome. We want our neighborhood to feel inviting.

So even though this dog isn't ours, we've had to start taking responsibility for it.

See, sometimes the people that pass through our neighborhood will see the dog, or they'll see the poop, and they'll ask us about it. In those moments, it's about more than just the personal responsibility of cleaning up the poop or tracking down our lost flowers to replant so that our neighborhood looks nice. Now we have to explain about the dog.

Even worse, the dog will sometimes see someone jogging through the neighborhood to look at the houses or compliment the decor, and the dog will follow them home to poop in their yard and yap at them into all hours of the night. Then whatever poor fellow will come back, confused and miffed, to ask about the dog.

"I'm sorry. It's not our dog," we try to explain, and we hope they understand.

It's not our dog.

We're the ones that have to explain about the dog.

And yes, the dog did follow you home from our neighborhood.

But it's not our dog.

Please don't judge our neighborhood because of the dog.

The dog embarrasses us. The dog makes our whole neighborhood look bad. It shouldn't be our responsibility to deal with this dog, or clean up after this dog, or apologize for this dog, but we feel it's the polite thing to do. So please, be aware that there's a dog in this neighborhood, but that we are so much more than the trouble it causes. We hope you can look past the poop it leaves behind, and allow the rest of us folks who actually live in this neighborhood make you feel welcome whenever you decide to pass through.

If you need help cleaning the poop out of your yard, we've gotten very good at it.

[tearlessrain]

please help me- i used to be pretty smart but i’m having so much trouble grasping the concept of diegetic vs non-diegetic bdsm!

gfkjldghfd okay first of all I'm sorry for the confusion, if you're not finding anything on the phrase it's because I made it up and absolutely nobody but me ever uses it, but I haven't found a better way to express what I'm trying to say so I keep using it. but now you've given me an excuse to ramble on about some shit that is only relevant to me and my deeply inefficient way of talking and by god I'm going to take it.

SO. the way diegetic and non-diegetic are normally used is to talk about music and sound design in movies/tv shows. in case you aren't familiar with that concept, here's a rundown:

diegetic sound is sound that happens within the world of the movie/show and can be acknowledged by the characters, like a song playing on the stereo during a driving scene, or sung on stage in Phantom of the Opera. it's also most other sounds that happen in a movie, like the sounds of traffic in a city scene, or a thunderclap, or a marching band passing by. or one of the three stock horse sounds they use in every movie with a horse in it even though horses don't really vocalize much in real life, but that's beside the point, the horse is supposed to be actually making that noise within the movie's world and the characters can hear it whinnying.

non-diegetic sound is any sound that doesn't exist in the world of the movie/show and can't be perceived by the characters. this includes things like laugh tracks and most soundtrack music. when Duel of Fates plays in Star Wars during the lightsaber fight for dramatic effect, that's non-diegetic. it exists to the audience, but the characters don't know their fight is being backed by sick ass music and, sadly, can't hear it.

the lines can get blurry between the two, you've probably seen the film trope where the clearly non-diegetic music in the title sequence fades out to the same music, now diegetic and playing from the character's car stereo. and then there are things like Phantom of the Opera as mentioned above, where the soundtrack is also part of the plot, but Phantom of the Opera does also have segments of non-diegetic music: the Phantom probably does not have an entire orchestra and some guy with an electric guitar hiding down in his sewer just waiting for someone to break into song, but both of those show up in the songs they sing down there.

now, on to how I apply this to bdsm in fiction.

if I'm referring to diegetic bdsm what I mean is that the bdsm is acknowledged for what it is in-world. the characters themselves are roleplaying whatever scenarios their scenes involve and are operating with knowledge of real life rules/safety practices. if there's cnc depicted, it will be apparent at some point, usually right away, that both characters actually are fully consenting and it's all just a planned scene, and you'll often see on-screen negotiation and aftercare, and elements of the story may involve the kink community wherever the characters are. Love and Leashes is a great example of this, 50 Shades and Bonding are terrible examples of this, but they all feature characters that know they're doing bdsm and are intentional about it.

if I'm talking about non-diegetic bdsm, I'm referring to a story that portrays certain kinks without the direct acknowledgement that the characters are doing bdsm. this would be something like Captive Prince, or Phantom of the Opera again, or the vast majority of bodice ripper type stories where an innocent woman is kidnapped by a pirate king or something and totally doesn't want to be ravished but then it turns out he's so cool and sexy and good at ravishing that she decides she's into it and becomes his pirate consort or whatever it is that happens at the end of those books. the characters don't know they're playing out a cnc or D/s fantasy, and in-universe it's often straight up noncon or dubcon rather than cnc at all. the thing about entirely non-diegetic bdsm is that it's almost always Problematic™ in some way if you're not willing to meet the story where it's at, but as long as you're not judging it by the standards of diegetic bdsm, it's just providing the reader the same thing that a partner in a scene would: the illusion of whatever risk or taboo floats your boat, sometimes to extremes that can't be replicated in real life due to safety, practicality, physics, the law, vampires not being real, etc. it's consensual by default because it's already pretend; the characters are vehicles for the story and not actually people who can be hurt, and the reader chose to pick up the book and is aware that nothing in it is real, so it's all good.

this difference is where people tend to get hung up in the discourse, from what I've observed. which is why I started using this phrasing, because I think it's very crucial to be able to differentiate which one you're talking about if you try to have a conversation with someone about the portrayal of bdsm in media. it would also, frankly, be useful for tagging, because sometimes when you're in the mood for non-diegetic bodice ripper shit you'd call the police over in real life, it can get really annoying to read paragraphs of negotiation and check-ins that break the illusion of the scene and so on, and the opposite can be jarring too.

it's very possible to blur these together the same way Phantom of the Opera blurs its diegetic and non-diegetic music as well. this leaves you even more open to being misunderstood by people reading in bad faith, but it can also be really fun to play with. @not-poignant writes fantastic fanfic, novels, and original serials on ao3 that pull this off really well, if you're okay with some dark shit in your fiction I would highly recommend their work. some of it does get really fucking dark in places though, just like. be advised. read the tags and all that.

but yeah, spontaneous writer plug aside, that's what I mean.

[evillillad]

guys ur still in public mayhaps stop gooning maybe?

[hallwords]

to you, it's a shitty sentence. to some random bitch 500 miles away, it's a fire line that'll haunt them for the next 17 years.

you don't know how impactful your writing is because it's been in your brain for far too long now. you've stared at it for hours and repeated "this sucks" over and over again to the point that you killed your capacity to feel anything about your work.

but trust me, once you get your shit out there, someone's gonna go over that paragraph you hate and go "jesus fucking christ" and put the book down to have an existential crisis.

[nothatsmi]

The raven king, chapter ten

"How interesting," they say.

(and they say it a lot)

(i'm not kidding. the entirety of the first two books is just both of them saying how interesting the other is. it's suffocating.)

Another medicated Andrew! And black haired Neil!

The two first books hold such bangers, and clearly not enough people ramble about them. I'm a sucker for the relationship they have afterwards obviously, but even before that they're hilarious. Many underrated scenes that could be worth drawing.

Also I underestimated how Neil dress and presents himself - like: he wears oversized, worn out and faded, preferably light-colored clothes; messy curlyish hair with bangs; sports hoodies; JORTS-

... He's got a banger style actually.

[mumblesplash]

i say if you’re gonna have the mysterious entities speak in rhyme you might as well commit (EDIT: part 2!)

(posting an unprecedented Part 1 of At Least 3 bc i actually have the entire script and most of the storyboarding for this done already)

[tiger-grace]

Steph: I think we should eat the rich

Bruce, a billionaire, sitting in his grand dining hall with his expensively hobbied family living in a multi million dollar manor, being attended to by a family butler: …that’s great, honey

[skltart]

pov you're some noble attending a royal gathering or whatever in camelot and you're all excited to meet the prince and then you get there and he's just hanging out with his twink of a manservant the whole night

[dooanuh]

OMG BUTCHNATURAL???????????????

[swiftmitsu]

i dunno about you guys,

but I don’t think they like Ink sneaking into their kitchen in the middle of the night

[ruporas]

need to exist in your warmth (id in alt)

[death-himself]

tommy’s such a fascinating case of allyship and the fact that there might be more cishets like him in the future with queer people being more accepted is hilarious to me

like how the hell does a cishet man get legally married to a gay man, refuse to get a divorce, write fanfic about them being together, then get attacked by terfs who thought he was trans

whether you like tommy or not you have to admit that’s a hilarious way to be an ally, his mom really raised him right

[its-tortle]

— taylor swift albums as months of the year —

[polarisbear]

you got mail!

[send-me-a-puffalope]

I've wanted to draw a purple version of scooped!Vanessa for a while now since my version is just an even whiter woman so I took this opportunity as an excuse to draw @chloesimaginationthings's design cause its just so cool.

[aroaceleovaldez]

Nico referring to his mom as "Mama" implies he most likely at least used to refer to Hades as "Papa" and i 100% headcanon he still does but mostly in the manner of him having the entire Underworld wrapped around his finger for being the baby of the family