#fuck your marginal gains this is about The Good Of The People do you understand

[remcocoa]

behold the long hair

[anendoandfriendo]

Us being a protogenic-endogenic system, and also a generative system, it's always odd to us to see people talk about it as if the growth and just being a system is suffering, because to us NOT growing and NOT being a system is suffering. So we kind of have to stop ourselves from going like:

You don't want friend???? You don't want found friend???? You kick friend out like a sad lost puppy????

No hugs? Cuddles? No small acts of love? But waking up to the projection of your headmate when he shifts a little trying not to wake you up is adorable. That's...not something people want? :( Like sure the external world can do that too and singlets can do that too but it's not the same. It hits different when the person in question is in your own brain. Double the hug!!! Double the cuddle!!! It's an endless feedback loop until one of us stops!! :D

And also, pinging a more generalized "good morning" and getting hundreds of pings back in return is the most amazing feeling ever.

Also describing in-headspace events to singlets when we do manage to get a connection between frontspace and backspace + someone manages to write it down. Those mf'ers would probably ask us "who needs drugs when you have...whatever is going on in THERE?" which validates both our plurality and also the fact we can be a fucking freak without doing the drugs thing (the sex and drugs hellsite here needs to understand those are not the only two ways to be on the margins).

None of us can really *do* math the way people think it means, but 💜 seems to be able to grasp some of the more abstract concepts in our POD3 training. 💜 is also like, fifteen, so someone else keeps having to drag xem out of the front because "you literally just got here, please let the adults do this until we can figure out how you actually function," and such. Pretty much everyone would feel bad if a systeen got burnt out because of us. And other our-system-is-literally-the-size of-a-village-right-now moments.

Okay but fr does anyone else know the feeling of amazement when you see headmates projecting themselves from your brain and out of the window, so you can see them like playing and stuff? Like everyone knows it's physically impossible to interact with the actual environment in that state but it's nice to see/feel/know about that people can get along this well.

SMXWHCNNLQ WE DO NOT GENERALLY AGE UNLESS WE WANT TO. Either that, or it is very weird since there is at least a lower limit. But we saw Elise very specifically choose how to age up and when, and to what age, which does mean we probably do have some semblance of a choice in our system. It brings us a lot of joy to have seen someone plan things out to that degree and take such pride in it, actually.

So like, yes, people who don't want growth are perfectly valid and fine; we aren't their system, we're The Rusanya Collective of Systems (RCS)/The Rusanya Polyplex. But like sometimes we see people complain about splitting, growing, or just gaining a new member as like some inherently awful thing that must have had a reason for it. We wanted to propose the alternative, which is, no it's not inherently horrible. There's not always a reason for it either. The former statement can set your free if you want it to, and latter is not a bad thing.

[fanby-fckry]

Ignore what I said about queuing this. I wrote the rest of this post when I was in a better headspace; now I’m petty and pissed off, so I dug into my queue and grabbed it.

Do you ever get hate from a stranger on a post and wonder… How did you even find this post??

Still getting used to the idea that fandom antis will apparently purposefully browse the tags of the thing they hate because it seems so genuinely pointless to me, but ok. I’m starting to understand that some people just choose to be angry, I guess.

But what blows my fucking mind is that I got hate on a vent post???

I don’t tag my vent posts with anything but my tags and content warnings. And I tag them #[topic] cw so it’s not like people are finding them in the main tags for that thing.

Reblogs are turned off, so it didn’t get thrown onto their dash by someone they follow that follows me and reblogged it in good faith.

So this person had to:

Choose a thing to be intentionally hateful about.

Choose to search not just for that thing, but instead to search #thing cw.

Find a post made 12 hours ago with 5 notes on it.

Decide, Yup, time to be an asshole!

I try to assume ignorance before malice. I try to assume someone’s having a bad day before I assume they went out of their way to be an asshole.

But I genuinely do not understand how you could accidentally stumble upon an unrebloggable vent post only tagged with cw tags.

How?? Why??? Wtf?? Why do you even care? Do you gain anything from this? Does this make you happy?

Or are you scrolling, seething about how much you hate, hate, hate a certain group of people? Are you clenching your jaw? Is your blood pressure rising? Do you need to take a break and do some breathing exercises?

Fucking go touch grass.

I’m writing this post for the same reason I made my other vent post: because it helps me process. Sometimes, I just need to scream into the void without bugging my partners or taking up time in my therapy sessions. And sometimes, my mutuals comfort and/or commiserate, which is nice.

But I genuinely cannot think of a world in which hate-scrolling an obscure tag would in any way positively impact my life or anyone else’s.

The last time I hate-scrolled, it was through a repost account in an attempt to go find all the original artists that the blog had stollen art from. I found one, and a few other artists had already been tagged, but eventually, I got so angry I couldn’t focus anymore.

So I stopped. I blocked the account. I moved on.

And the only reason I didn’t do that from the start was because it was genuinely helping someone for me to hate-scroll. It helped the artist I contacted. If I had been the first to get to a few other works I recognized, it would’ve helped those artists too.

I also didn’t seek out this blog; one of their stollen posts showed up on my dash and I went, Wow, that’s stollen art! Time to go fuck shit up!

Who does it benefit when you seek out other people’s posts when you know the content is upsetting to you, just to hate on them? What does that accomplish besides marginally increasing the suffering in this already shitty world?

Queueing this rather than posting it so that it won’t be obvious which vent post I’m talking about, but holy fuck this makes me feel things.

[wazzuppy]

I saw your post about how people treat the phrase "white feminist" and yeah, I totally agree. There is this really weird trend to fully ignore misogyny even in leftist circles and belittle women who try to talk about how they're oppressed. Even if a woman is white she's still gonna be systemically oppressed because that's just how misogyny works. I find it pretty disgusting on this website where most discussions about misogyny are hijacked by people literally going "man hating is so bad and you shouldn't point this out". It's cool people defend trans people but 1. criticizing men as a social class isn't "bioessentialism" or whatever, it's genuinely just talking about the oppressor class and 2. why do you see trans women as men??????? like why is this argument always brought up anyway? i get TERFs would say it that way but when the target is so obviously not a TERF it's so odd. I've lost mutuals on here for just saying the words patriarchy and that MRAs are bad. It's baffling. I hate this progressive language coded misogyny in leftist spaces with all my heart. Women should be allowed to be afraid and angry when they're so obviously oppressed in every part of their lives. Sorry for the big rant

no need to apologize, i pretty much completely agree.

i think there is a very weird attitude around men's rights in general. like, it often feels as if they're trying the take the fact that they're men and have an inherent advantage to GAIN their rights out of the equation.

not to say i don't think men should have rights or that every single man is more privileged than the average cishet white woman. that's not true. but privilege exists even in marginalized groups because hierarchy still exists, and advantage and disadvantage often affect the same person. like, even a gay man has a leg up over a het woman because they are a man. and likewise, a het woman has an advantage over a gay man because theyre het. things arent as simple as "this group is always more oppressed than this one no matter what." its more fluid than that.

not to mention... a lot of the issues that do affect men (as in the hyper masculine, "feelings are gay" bullshit) are ones that were started and continue to be perpetuated by other men. like yeah, it fucking sucks and it should be fixed, but you get why the victims aren't the ones who should be doing the work, right? we can help and we can offer sympathy, but ultimately that's something THEY need to get over for any real progress to be made.

i also think there's something kind of gross about how a lot of feminist discussions are taken as "you just hate trans men!" automatically, without even knowing the genders of the people having the discussion. trans people should ABSOLUTELY be taken into account and defended, and its completely true that many, many feminists are transphobic. but the assumption that radical feminism (and i mean actual feminism, not "radfems" because thats just a different flavor of wanting patriarchy) = hating trans people feels very icky to me. you can be feminist without being transphobic, and you can be transphobic without being feminist.

leftist language, in general, needs some kind of adjustment or just for people to better understand what certain terms are actually supposed to mean. because lots of people just slap the word "terf" onto someone who is either not feminist or not transphobic.

for example: j.k rowling is undeniably transphobic. she regurgitates lots of terf rhetoric, but the problem with calling her a terf is that... she's not a feminist. like at all. she has an obvious hatred of women and has an extremely conservative mindset of what women should be. that's why all of the mothers in harry potters are good, and all of the unmarried/women without kids are bad. that's why hermione's personality is just a list of misogynist stereotypes.

this issue is especially gross when you remember how dogshit trans feminists are treated, masc or fem. trans people will talk about how men have personally hurt them and how that affected their views, and then a dozen cis queer people will come in like "noooo hating men is bad!!" and assume theyre cis.

i have more to say, but honestly, im tired and a lil sick so i'll leave it there for now. but theres a lot i think that needs to be discussed with how leftist language has evolved, and how feminism is sometimes treated like a scapegoat when it comes to who should be blamed for transphobia. i dont know of any of this made sense but yeah.

[goopgirlie813]

I wanna add another thing now that ive been thinking about it; y'all ever notice how right-wingers like to play the victim? "Reverse racism" "blm wants to oppress white people" "women actually have privilege now, men are the oppressed ones" "gays are trying to force us to all gay marry" etc etc etc.

Yeah, uh, they have a very obvious persecution complex. Its kinda their thing, a defining feature. It has been the backbone of fascist regimes (nazis said "the jews are ruining our society!! Theyre out to hurt your children and fuck up your life!!"). Bullying them only feeds this tendency. It gives them more material to work with.

But if you refuse to be mean while also refusing to budge from your position? They cant weaponize that as easily. They cant dismiss you as easily because you didnt give them the out of victimhood. You robbed them of an opportunity for martyrdom, their strongest propaganda tool.

Facists thrive on meanness, hatred, and anger. Not only does it shape their views of other people, but they thrive in environments where they are hated. It makes them stronger because they know how to flip the script.

But you know what facism isn't equipped to handle? Stubborn kindness. They cant weaponize it. They cant make themselves the victim to gain sympathy. They cant twist it their way and make themselves look powerful. Because bullying in the face of kindness makes a person look bad. It damages reputations.

Being kind without comprimising on your views puts fascists between a rock and a hard place. Because if they keep fighting you they erode their own cause. Because so much right-wing indoctrination relies on them being the victims fighting for a rightous cause. That falls apart if they attack people who are being kind. They need to make the person a villain first or else they expose their own lies. If they cant effectively convince people you're a villain, they lose a lot of their power.

This is not about holding their hand and making them feel happy. This is not about blaming marginalized groups for their own oppression. This is about ackgnowledging the enemy's weak points and using them to our advantage. We are not pointing fingers or casting blame, we are trying to strategically break the facades of facism.

Thats what people in these comments are failing to understand: kindness is not a reward only given to good people who do good things. Kindess is genuinely the most devastating weapon against fascist propaganda. Meanness on the other hand? That just waters their crops. Being mean to fascists helps them. It reinforces their beliefs, and opens opportunities for them to lure people in by exploiting their empathy for victims.

I am not asking you to be soft and quiet and compromising. I am not asking you to tell fascists "its ok I forgive you." No. I am asking you to observe the reality of the situation and react accordingly. Strategically. I am not saying that you are to blame for the spread of fascist rhetoric, I am telling you how fascists are exploiting your behavior for personal gain so that you can course correct and cut off their propaganda supply lines.

Let me reiterate:

I am not blaming you for your oppression. I am telling you that fascists are taking advantage of you and how to stop it.

Remember that story that went around about the Karen yelling at the cashier and OP putting money in the tip jar every time she yelled, while making eye contact to make it clear what they were doing? Yeah that kind of thing.

You dont have to be kind to the bigots, you just have to refuse to be mean to them. Every time they say something mean, say something kind about their target. Every time they harass someone, do something kind for their target. And do it immediately, publicly, in their face and everyone else's.

Another element is to behave in good faith. Aggressivley assume good intentions. Explain why harmful behaviors are harmful while emphasizing the assumption that they have good intentions. If they, like most people, do just want the best but have misguded views of how to achieve that then this approach can and will make them change their behavior and mindset. If they genuinely do want to cause harm then sticking to the bit even when its absurd becomes a kind of mockery. The only mockery that they cannot weaponize. Their meanness contrasts so starkly with the aggressive positivity that they turn themselves into satirical charicatures if they double down.

Kindness is fascism's most devastating enemy.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

[e-vasong]

I’ve already talked about a Leverage crossover where the Hargreeves are conmen but I'm. losing it thinking about. a Leverage AU where the Leverage team sees these kids on tv, and they just go.  oh shit, that’s just fucking wrong.  (I know the timelines don’t match up but let’s pretend the umbrella kids were born a little later, or that Leverage takes place a little earlier, or something like that.  I don’t know.)

But these fucking umbrella kids show up on TV, and at first none of them are paying much attention. Not right away.  They’re busy running cons, and none of them except Hardison watch TV for fun very often.

So they’ve all heard bits and pieces about this Umbrella thing, and aren’t quite sure what to make of it.  Superhumans, huh? Eliot mutters at one point. Whatever. Our lives are already so goddamn weird.

But eventually they catch a broadcast while they’re home in between cases.  it’s playing in the background while they’re enjoying a meal together at the brewery.

The Umbrella Academy saves the day yet again! the broadcaster declares cheerily. We go now to a statement at the Louvre from their leader, Sir Reginald Hargreeves.

It’s just novel enough to catch their attention--being who they are, they all perk up at the word Louvre--and it gets them half-watching as they chat over breakfast.

It’s Parker that sees it first.  She’s Parker, so what catches her attention is actually not the fact that one of them is covered in blood, nor is it the fact that their father is calling them by numbers instead of names.  It’s the way that they stand, tense and upright.  It’s the way that the one covered in blood is trembling minutely, so fine that it’s almost imperceptible. But she notices. And she notices the way that the one to the bloodied boy’s left--the fifth one in line--leans over ever-so-subtly when their father is looking away. Whispers something with the barest movement of his lips. And then, after a moment of hesitation, he links hands with his shaking brother, twining their fingers together.  Parker knows that whisper, knows what this is. She used to do that with her brother.  Used to hold Nick’s hand, just like that, when their fosters were scaring him, trying to provide comfort even despite the fear of being caught.

It’s not long before the others follow her gaze. She’s stopped engaging in the conversation entirely, is just staring at the television with a death glare, nose wrinkled.

“Parker, baby,” Hardison says.  “That’s your angry face.”

“I’m angry,” she says, and doesn’t elaborate.

“Got it,” Hardison takes it in stride, as he always does.

Eliot’s frowning at the TV.  Unlike Parker, his eye does jump to the most obvious thing first.  To the boy, no older than eleven or twelve probably, drenched head to toe with blood.  There’s no rips in his clothing; Eliot’s pretty sure the blood isn’t his. He’s standing up straight, but his shoulders are slightly hunched.  Like he’s injured.  Broken ribs, maybe?  And he’s been taught to hide them too. He’s also not the only one with that too-stiff posture. These kids aren’t standing up straight. They’re standing at attention.  Number One, their father calls one of them, and what are those? Fucking callsigns?  

Sophie and Nate are watching too.  Their faces are carefully blank.  They aren’t happy, Parker’s pretty sure, but they’re trying not to react.

“What the hell?” Hardison says slowly.  He’s the last one to catch on, though only by a very narrow margin.  He lacks Sophie and Nate’s cynicism, and the years of personal experience Parker and Eliot have, but he’s still too smart to not figure it out almost immediately.  And he is first one to abandon the stunned stillness that’s fallen over the rest of them, pulling his laptop out of his bag, already quickly tapping away at the keys.

“This ain’t right,” Eliot says, voice a growl in his chest.  “This is--this is--it’s televised child abuse.”

Sophie makes a quiet noise of agreement then. “It is,” she says, quietly disgusted. “Those poor children.”

Nate is still staring at the screen, lips pressed flat.

“This Reginald guy looks rich,” Parker says.  Then: “Can we kill him?”

Eliot chokes on his drink.

“How is this even legal?” Sophie asks.  She sounds curious, though not particularly surprised by the grievous violation of child protection laws before her. “It’s so...blatant.”

“Sir Reginald Hargreeves,” Hardison says, no longer typing.  “He is--oh shit.” And the typing resumes, faster and a little more panicked than before.

“Hardison?” Nate prods after a moment, giving Hardison a sidelong glance.

“Yeah, yeah, it’s all good,” Hardison says.  “The INTERPOL files on this guy are locked up tight though.  Almost tripped their security system there.  I didn’t, of course, but--”

“You couldn’t get in?” Eliot says, smirking.

“Yet,” Hardison says.  “Dammit, man, it’s been less than five minutes.  Give me a couple hours and that thing is mincemeat.  Metaphorically speaking, of course.  But I do see what’s going on here and,” he clicks his tongue, shaking his head in disappointment.  “Y’all, this is hinky.”

“Yes, I think we got that,” Nate says.  The corner of his lip twitches up.

“Yeah, yeah,” Hardison says.  “This guy has got friends everywhere.  No one knows how he got the kids, but it looks like he technically bought them--”

“He what?” Sophie sounds like she’s been suckerpunched.  Parker can’t think of the last time she heard Sophie sound so shocked.

“Oh yeah.  You think that’s bad?  The numbers aren’t code names  The numbers are their name names.  Like, legally.  I just found an article that said he ordered them by how useful he thinks they are, but judging by the adoption papers it was actually in the order he, uh,” Hardison coughs, “acquired them.”

Eliot is swaying where he stands.  “Common tactic.  He’s pitting them against one another so they’ll be easier to control.  It undermines the self worth of the ones lower on the scale and makes the ones that are higher up feel obligated to do what he wants.  Son of a bitch.”

“...And it looks like he leveraged their powers as excuse to gain exemptions from child protection laws,” Hardison continues like he hasn’t been interrupted.  “Claimed their abilities meant they don’t need the same safeguards.”

“That’s bullshit!” Eliot sounds thunderous.

“I know, buddy,” Hardison reaches over blindly, waving his hand around vaguely until he finds Eliot’s shoulder.  He gives it a comforting squeeze.  “I didn’t write it.”

Eliot heaves in a shuddering breath.  “That’s just--”

“Evil,” Sophie finishes.  

“I’m inclined to agree,” Nate says.  He’s not watching the TV anymore.  He’s staring off into the middle distance, arms crossed over his chest.

“Oh!” Parker perks up.  All the grief and distress that had been brewing on her face vanishes like storm clouds parting for the sun.  “Nate! Nate, are you scheming?  You look like you’re scheming.”

Nate makes a noncommittal grunt.  “It would be dangerous.”

“They’re in danger,” Sophie says softly, jerking her head in the television’s direction.

Eliot’s long-since gotten to his feet.  He’s pacing, and that’s how Parker knows he’s furious.  When Eliot is too angry to stand it, he has to move, has to find some way to handle the rage roiling under his skin.  Usually he cooks, chopping vegetables with furious aplomb.  And when he can’t cook, he paces.  

“They’re fucking child soldiers,” he says.  “I can’t--” he cuts himself off with a furious shake of the head.  I can’t believe, he was about to say, Parker thinks, but he had to stop because that’s not true.  Eliot knows better than anyone what the government--what the world does to people they find useful, whether its skill or power that makes them so.

“Y’all are behind,” Hardison says in sing-song.  “I’m already trying to burn this motherfucker down.”

“Hardison, do not tip our hand,” Nate says, snapping into his leader-voice automatically.  Parker grins.  He’s already got a plan, then.  She knew all that reluctance was just for show.  Sophie laughs, as clear and bright as the ringing of a bell, and even Eliot perks up.  

Hardison grumbles, closing his laptop and stuffing it back in his messenger bag.  

Nate is grinning a little too, though it’s that angry smile he gets sometimes when Parker knows he’s thinking about hurting bad people.  She understands.  She's wearing hers too right now.  Nate glances them all over, and for all the malice dripping off the knife’s edge of that smile, his eyes are soft.  Maybe even a little proud.

“Fine. Fine. You guys win,” Nate says, lifting his hands in defeat.  He’s putting on a show of being beleaguered, but Parker can hear the sparking anger in his voice, and oh, how could she have forgotten?  Sophie is so gently righteous, Hardison so achingly distressed, and Eliot so full of fire and fury that she almost didn’t notice Nate’s seething wrath, nearly forgot that Nate looks at every injured child in need of help and thinks of Sam.  “Everyone, get your things.  Hardison, get us some plane tickets.  Let’s go steal some children.”

“Okay, okay.  I ain’t complaining cause, like, fuck that guy,” Hardison says, slinging his bag over his shoulder.  “But stealing children?  Could you have made us sound anymore like kidnappers?”

“Hardison!”

“I’m just saying.”

[writing-in-april]

Poker Face

Spencer Reid x Female Reader

Summary: Reader thought she could get away with speaking her desires out loud as long as they were in a different language. Turns out, someone could understand her.

A/N: Hey guys! This is my fourth fic for my 1250 follower celebration!! I got this request from @imagining-in-the-margins and if you want to see the original request go checkout my follower celebration Masterlist! I do not speak Russian, nor do I know someone who does so I made everything in italics as if they were speaking in Russian! Hope y’all enjoy reading and requests are open!

Warnings: 18+, Public sex (who’s surprised lmao), Reader is very unprofessional and probably should be fired lmao, Dom Spencer with hints of Sub Spencer in the future (dont worry all my Sub Spencer lovers I’ve got more coming for that soon!), Nickname use: Princess, Unprotected sex, Fingering, Oral sex (M receiving),Creampie

Main Masterlist Word Count: 2.1k

Words in italics are in Russian

There was no harm in voicing my thoughts I thought to myself, in a different language, Russian specifically. Especially since the only one that could understand me wasn’t near me at the moment nor would she probably bat an eye at a slightly risqué remark. Emily was snuggled up at the other end of the jet, her headphones in both of her ears. They would plug up any sound around her preventing her from translating the lusty thought that sat on my lips.

If I said my thoughts in Russian, no one would be able to catch how much I wanted Spencer’s fingers inside me. They were long, obviously dexterous- I knew they’d be able to reach places inside me that I couldn’t reach myself. I couldn’t say these thoughts out loud, in English at least,

I didn’t want Spencer to ever know. But, I wanted to get the thoughts swirling in my head off my chest, the only way to do that without embarrassment was to say it in a way that no one here would be able to understand.

As Spencer shuffled with ease and delt the cards out with his dexterous fingers my lusty thoughts were too pressing for my lips to be able to contain. So I spoke quickly with my voice slightly lowered, maybe Spencer and the people around me would miss my transition into a different language, “I wished you would use those fingers on me instead, preferably inside of me.”

Spencer blinked back at me, obviously confused by my words.

“Sorry, just spaced out for a second, didn’t realize I had switched to Russian.” I giggled out, mostly because I was amazed that I had gotten away with it. I moved on quickly not wanting to linger on my ‘slip up’ any longer, plus I finally wanted to try and play against Spencer in a poker game, “Let’s see if your poker face is as good as everyone says it is, Spencer.”

—-

“Please, fuck me?” Over the course of my daring adventures I had become increasingly louder with my declarations. Last week I had commented about how much I wanted his cock in my mouth, of course in Russian and the week before that I had made my initial comment about how much I wanted his fingers inside me.

This one happened to be the loudest out of the three little sentences that seemed like innocent slips into another language to everyone else, but to me and only to me I was voicing my desires. Each time I did it a little rush of adrenaline sparked through me, no one besides Emily would be able to translate, who wasn’t with me in the file room. It was only Spencer and I in here right now, the rest of the team had gone home for the night.

“Maybe we shouldn’t do that at the office, but if you asked me again somewhere else I’d do it.” He answered me back and in perfect Russian as well.

My entire being withered in embarrassment as soon as I had translated Spencer’s words, he understood me. He had understood all of what I had said, every last word. I should’ve remembered that he spoke Russian, we had a case where he spent the whole time translating, I couldn’t believe how idiotic I had been. I wanted the earth to swallow me up in that moment, just so I could escape Spencer’s piercing gaze. I couldn’t tell from his words or the look on his face what exactly he was feeling about my words, some profiler I was. He didn’t seem angry at least, maybe a bit bemused?

I shrank back a little more over fear if he was making fun of me or not. If I hadn’t been feeling so mortified I would’ve realized that Spencer wasn’t one to make fun of anyone, hindsight is 20/20 after all.

“Your poker face is spot on.” Was the only measly response that I could find myself to come up with, in an attempt to cover my embarrassment if only a little bit. A bunch of apologies also felt like they were crawling up my throat. I was absolutely mortified that I had been caught red handed, it was beyond unprofessional- I don’t think there was even a word for it. I had crossed the line so far I might as well have leaped over it, forgetting that it had ever existed.

“Well- I am from Vegas and before you start apologizing, you don’t need to. I liked it.”

Silence fell between us again after his smart remark. It was like we were sizing each other up, deciding what to do.

“You know- there’s no one here tonight, everyone’s gone home…” My confidence seemingly had come back after being knocked down a few pegs. I tapped my fingers absentmindedly on the large desk in the file room, my mind wandering to think about what it would be like if he bent me over it.

“That’s true.” A smirk was on his face now, one that I didn’t see often from him. I felt like I was going to be ensnared by him as soon as I took the time to blink.

Sure enough in a flash he had brought me into a bruising kiss that I got swallowed up by so fast there was no chance for me to try and win back any dominance.

In no time he had me bent over the table, my face pressed into the cool silver metal with my back arching up trying to reach his touch in any way I could. He gripped the waistband of my skirt roughly, but did not pull it down right away. He pulled my skirt down ever so slowly that by the time it reached the floor I impatiently wiggled to step out of it.

“You’re impatient.” He stated simply. I couldn’t deny it because of how true it was, all he’d have to do was pull my black lace panties off to see how wet I had become.

Instead I decided to lean in on how needy and impatient I was by whining out, “Spencerrr, please?”

“What do you want? Is it the same thing you said to me on the plane?” He pressed a kiss to my hip as he pulled down my panties just as slowly as he had done with my skirt, making me squirm again. Once I was bare from the waist down before him he paused for a moment to look at me; I withered a little under his gaze. I whined again when he carefully took his long fingers to just slightly part my folds before speaking again, “Tell me.”

I hesitated a little for a moment trying to focus to remember exactly what I had said on the plane. When I had collected my thoughts I whispered out in Russian, much more shaky than I had said on the plane, “I wished you would use those fingers on me instead, preferably inside of me.”

He was seemingly satisfied by my breathless reply, immediately beginning to work me up to orgasm. As he started to work his fingers inside of me he pressed his other hand down on the small of my back, a silent warning to not move.

I contemplated disobeying him, but when two of his fingers curled inside me to perfectly hit my g-spot it felt too good to lose.

“You gonna cum so quick for me, princess?” I got even wetter when he said princess like that, in Russian made me get even wetter than I already was. I was practically dripping down my thighs- and Spencer’s fingers.

“Yes! I’m gonna cum soon!” I gasped out and tried in vain to wriggle my hips to gain more friction, his hand on my back however was unyielding.

“Ask nicely and I might let you.”

“Please?!” I even asked it in Russian to make the plea possibly better in Spencer’s eyes. He didn’t respond right away, only picking up his pace faster. I tried to hold off my orgasm as best as I could, but I wasn’t sure how much longer I was going to be able to hold it. “Please, sir?”

“Alright, since you asked so nicely. You can cum, princess.”

I gave up the fight of holding off my orgasm, it immediately washed over me. My legs shook with the force of how hard and fast my orgasm shot through me, causing me to cry out as well.

Once I had come down from my high I slid off the table and down to my knees to repeat what I had said while at the round table a week ago “I want your cock in my mouth.”

He looked at me with wild eyes and obliged me, letting his cock free from his slacks. My mouth watered at the sight of him, his tip was bright red and dripping with precum. He had obviously not been the only one to be turned on.

As I grasped him in my hands and jerked him slowly I relished in the way he felt in my hand. He felt hot and heavy, I couldn’t wait to take him into my mouth.

I wrapped my lips around his tip, sucking lightly. Spencer’s head tipped backwards, his hands curled into fists as if he was trying to prevent himself from grabbing my hair to fuck my face. Little did he know that was exactly what I wanted.

When I guided one of his hands to the back of my hair to reassure him that I didn’t mind if he took control that way he almost let out a groan, but successfully stifled it by biting into his other fist. He then fisted my hair harder, wrapping his hand around so tight that tears prickled a bit in my eyes. It wasn’t a bad feeling at all, I enjoyed it.

I enjoyed it even more when he started to use his hand to guide my head up and down. He set the pace to the one he desired. It wasn’t too fast or hard, it was actually quite slow. He dragged out each of my movements and when my nose nuzzled at the base of his cock he had me stay there for a moment each time. Each time I gagged a little on him he let out an almost whine, it made me wonder whether or not he’d look good underneath me as well. Though I was thoroughly content with being underneath him at this time.

Even though I had already had one orgasm the tingling between my thighs was not satiated, looking up at Spencer’s blissed out face only served to make me even more turned on.

“Stop.” I blinked up at him like he had done so at me on the jet, confused. I pulled off of his cock, a slight pop echoed in the air. He then lifted me up onto the table with my legs wrapped around his waist before I could ask him why he wanted for me to stop.

“Now what was that last thing you said to me? I want you to ask me again. ” His cock was running up and down my folds teasing me. My head fell back and I moaned when he bumped my clit.

“Please, fuck me?” My breathless voice sounded wrecked already.

“Well, since you asked so nicely.” As he slid into me my eyes rolled back into my head as he slid into me. His pace was faster this time than what he had done while fucking my face. I was squirming with overstimulation and my orgasm was going to come ridiculously fast. Spencer could sense it too and brought his hand down to my clit to bring me over my peak even faster.

“You can cum again, princess.” My second orgasm was much longer than my first. It sparked through me slowly, almost in waves that felt like they had multiple peaks.

He too, was not that far behind me. When he tried to pull out to probably cum all over the tops of my thighs I kept him locked in place with my legs around my waist and asked, “Cum inside me?”

He obliged me with a groan pumping into me a few more times before spilling inside me. We were both slick with sweat, making me wish for a shower. As soon as I got cleaned up that would be the first thing I’d be doing when I bolted home. Maybe I could bring Spencer along for another round, I could hear him speak Russian to me all day.

“I’ll go get something to clean you up.” He spoke softly as if he was afraid I’d break, you’d think after the way he had fucked me that he’d realized I was not so breakable. I’d have to fix that later. As I sat there with his cum dribbling down my thighs waiting for him to return , mixing with my own I knew that I’d never underestimate Spencer’s poker face again.

—-

Tag list (message me if you want to be added):

All works:

@shotarosleftpinky @90spumkin @kyra-morningstar @s1utformgg

Spencer Reid/CM:

@calm-and-doctor @destiny-tsukino @safertokiss @slutforthegubes

Dom Spencer:

@rainsong01

[insomniamamma]

Safe: Ezra x f!reader w/Cee

A/n: What can I say? I'm hormonal and all my shit hurts and if I cannot get snuggles IRL then I will write something super soft and self-indulgent to make myself feel better. Part of the Prickle AU. Set sometime after Sacellum.

Warnings: Oh no! There's only one bed. Soft!Ezra. Language. Cee's best friend on The Pug is non-binary and also named after my little boy's favorite stuffy. Maybe the slightest bit of angst. But mostly super soft.

         "You did this on purpose."         "Right hand to Kevva, I did not. I asked for double occupancy and they must have misunderstood and--"         "You don't have a right hand,"         "Let's go back to the reception desk," says Ezra, "We may be able to negotiate more appropriate accommodations."         "Errgh," you groan. Reception had been a nightmare, three freighters worth of traffic trying to secure berths all at once. It was a lot of people. Too many for your liking. Cee was staying with Kit and their family. Kit and Cee had practically tackled each other right there on the dock, everyone else forgotten, walked away arm in arm.         "We shove off in three cycles," Ezra hollered at her retreating back, and she flapped a dismissive hand at him. You had to smile. For three cycles Cee gets to be a normal teenager hanging out with her best friend without worrying about points and pulls and overhead costs and fuel margins.         "I don't wanna go back down there," you say, "Too many people. I think twice the population of Falnost was waiting in that fucking line." You brush past him and into the suite. The ceilings are low and slightly curved and it feels strange to be under this much grav. The outer rings of Puggart Bench have something close to terra-normal gravity, but after so much time spent on little moons and worldlets, this much G feels weird and you have no desire to trudge back down to reception.         "You sure?" Asks Ezra.         "Yeah," you drop your day bag and press a hand to the mattress. "Look at the size of this thing. It's, like, five crash-couches wide. This seems above our pay grade."         "They're overbooked," says Ezra, "We're paying the same points for the berth we should have gotten. I made sure of it. I can sleep in that recliner if--"         "No."         "No?"         "Kevva, Ez, we're both adults," you say, "I think we can share a bed for a night without exploding."

        Your suite has a real, honest-to-Goddess shower with a generous 15 minute timer. You scrub as fast as you can and then just let the water hit you, let the pressure pound on your tense back muscles until the chime sounds and the water cuts off. You towel off and dress, soft clothes you sleep in, and pad out into the main room. Ezra is reading, face far off and serious, and you just look at him for a minute, illuminated in the warm lamp-light, absorbed in his book, little furrow between his brows and then he looks up, all knowing smirk and dancing eyes, he's caught you staring.         "Your turn, Ez," You say and turn your face away. Kevva. This man. You've been trying to keep things professional, but it's a losing battle. His flirtations make you flush, but he's never tried to push you, never tried to leverage the fact that it's his name on the ship's title, that you signed a contract, that you are junior-most crew. You feel safe with him. And, from your limited experience in the fringe, that is a miracle in itself.

        Ezra sets his book aside and heads for the bathroom. You peel the sheets from the other side of the bed and settle in. There's a media player bolted to the wall, but you just want quiet. You switch off the lamp on your nightstand (we both have lamps, we both have a nightstand, how weird is that?) The sheets feel deliciously cool against your skin. To be clean and sleeping in clean sheets...if Heaven isn't like this Kevva's got some answering to do.         Ezra sings in the shower. You're barely awake and you smile. Ezra can't carry a tune in a bucket, singing fringeling songs and reels, stories of mercs and pirates and ghosts and you drift off to the sound of him, the sound of the water running.

        He sees you soft and loose and asleep. No rail-gun, no body armor, no thrower under your pillow. Your face slack, snoring slightly. You've kicked out of the blankets and lay curled as if chilled.         "Hey Artichoke," he murmurs, pulls the blankets up and tucks them around you, "Let's get you warm, yeah?"

        Ezra wakes. Bleared red numbers of the clock saying that this is still the deepest ditch of local night. Ezra is warm and confused. He feels you pressed against him, your chest to his back, an arm hooked around his middle, your legs entwined with his. You've sought him out in your sleep and folded yourself around him, your breath slow and steady against his nape. Ezra's eyes prick with tears. He can't remember the last time he's been held like this. He's had lovers. He has payed for sex on the less reputable Benches of the Great Arm, but for someone to hold him? For someone to touch him without payment, without trying to press some advantage, gain some kind of leverage, without priming him for the inevitable backstab?  He is overwhelmed. He tries to wriggle away from you, but your arm just tightens around him.         "...fixed the transponder," you mutter against his neck, "told you we didn't need...told you..." He pats your arm and relaxes against you.         "Okay, Artichoke, okay, sweetheart. Go back to sleep."

        You wake enfolded, Ezra's good arm wrapped around you. You feel the steady beat of his heart beneath your ear, the slow sussurration of his breath, the snores that catch in his throat and turn to murmurs, the rise and fall of his chest beneath your cheek. You've tucked yourself against him in your sleep. Your hand rests on his sternum. Oh Kevva. What are you doing? You go rigid.         Your first impulse is to wrestle out of his hold, take one of the blankets and install yourself in the recliner that you wouldn't let Ezra take, but part of you wants to stay right here in the combined warmth of your bodies, feeling his breath, his heart, his calloused palm spread against your shoulder. You shift, making the smallest effort to pull yourself away and his arm tightens further, a low, sleepy chuckle reverberates through his chest.         "Hi Ez,"         "Hi." He strokes the pad of his thumb along the exposed curve of your shoulder.         "I'll get up," you say, even as he shifts and cups the back of your head in his palm, tucking you closer.         "You don't have to," he says, voice rough with sleep. This gesture pricks at your heart. Coming up on Falnost has made you hard, guarded, there has been precious little gentleness in your life, pulling rocks out of the parched ground since you were big enough to lift a shovel. Learned to fight and shoot to chase water-thieves from the homestead. He strokes the back of your head like one might pet a skittish cat and your heart squeezes.         "Ezra?" You hate how small your voice sounds, you hate the uncertainty you hear there, "Are we okay?"         "Of course we are," he says, "Why wouldn't we be?"         "I wrapped around you like a Bueller's world python and I did it in my sleep-"         "The wrapping was mutual-"         "You're not mad or uncomfortable or anything?" He laughs again, gentle huff of breath against the crown of your head.         "Mad about waking with you in my arms? The day I'm mad about that you can just shoot me in the head and send me to Kevva because I will surely have lost my ever-loving mind." You smile against his skin and relax some, your hand unfists and you curl your arm around his soft belly, feel his breath hitch.         "Tickles."         "Sorry." You feel yourself drift, skirting the edge of sleep. He is warm and solid and you let yourself relax against him.         “This feels...safe..." you say, so close to sleep that you're not sure if you've said it aloud or if you've just thought it. And you're not sure if you hear his response or dream it, one word. Always.

        "She's late," says Ezra.         "We still got a sixteenth to button up and board,"         "Still," says Ezra, "Yon freighter will leave with our pod wether we're strapped in it or not." You see Cee and Kit, trailed by Kit's parents, weaving through the crowd. Cee is beaming, her blonde hair has a brilliant streak of blue, and Kit has a matching streak in their hair.         "Hey guys!" Cee hugs Ezra and then hugs you.         "How was your shore leave, Little Bird? I like the fancy hair."         "Isn't that cool? We've got matching streaks," says Cee.         "It's semi-permanent," says Kit, "We'll pick a different color next time!" You have to smile. Cee looks revitalized. Three cycles spent with her friend, just doing normal kid things has been good for her.         "Check this out!" says Cee and pushes a laminated drawing towards the two of you. Ezra makes a show of looking carefully.         "I recognize you and Kit," he says, "I am not familiar with these other people, though."         "They're from The Streamer Girl, dumbass," says Cee, "Here's Clo and Reive and Lily and Auri. See? Kit put us right in the story." Ezra gives Kit his best smile.         “You drew this? You are very talented." Kit smiles big.         "Thanks!" says Kit, "I'll put you guys in the next one! Maybe you could be professors at Bowsun Academy or something."         "I look forward to it," says Ezra.         "Time to go, Cee," you say and Cee and Kit exchange one more enthusiastic hug.         "Later fringeling!" Calls Kit.         "Piss off, stationer!" Cee calls back. Ezra curls his fingers around yours and squeezes. Cee tells you all about her three cycles with Kit, the movies they watched, the Real Food they ate. How Kit's little brother wanted a blue streak in his hair too and Kit's parents said no and how mad he got. I wanna be cool like Kit and Cee.         "I told him he's got plenty of time to be cool," says Cee, "And he told me that I don't understand how the world works. He's like, four." Ezra laughs.         "Wise for his years." Says Ezra. And the three of you fall quiet. You find the pod much as you left it, towed to the Polly Jean and clipped in, transferred by the station's tugs. You settle in and do a full systems check. Calling out the checklists and making sure everything is good for transit.         "What are you guys so happy about?" asks Cee.         "Whatever do you mean?" asks Ezra.         "You been all smiles since I hit the dock," says Cee, "Both of you. Did we score a really good job? Did we win the Puggart Bench lottery or something? What aren't you telling me?"         "That," says Ezra, "Is for us to know and you to endlessly speculate about."         "Hmph," says Cee.

Tagging: @oonajaeadira, @grogusmum , @honestly-shite, @writeforfandoms, @ladyvengeancesposts, @the-blind-assassin-12

[orchidthesupportingcharacter]

Hi, subject of her vagueposting here. It does not mean I hate religious people, it means that I am morally opposed to the major religions (that I have been exposed to) because of their violent, patriarchal, or abusive systems of control, and enforcement of rejecting critical thinking at minimum and utterly rejecting science (often at the expense of their members).

You should note that this position doesn't mention hating religious people. In fact, the things I'm opposed to effect religious people more directly than they effect me. (Though rejection of critical thinking and science are pretty much the basis of transphobia, that wouldn't be as much of a problem if religious leaders didn't decide that trans people are perfect representations of the devil that they can use to gain more control via fear over the members of their religion). My position is that as long as organized religions exist in the form that they do now, they will oppose every single bit of progress we try to make. And as long as they can continue to effectively control an entire party in the US government, they're going to succeed in at least stopping progress.

That being said, I'm fine with people being religious. Religions are pretty good at providing community, which is pretty important for humans. For the most part, an individual's religious beliefs don't effect me (unless they happen to have all the power over my fucking house).

I'm also not perfect, shockingly. It really bothers me to learn that people I'm close to are christian, because they seem to be either unaware of or okay with the system that caused me so much pain.

I'll end this with this:

@sagevirda complained about rejection of religious people in LGBTQ spaces, which she is right to do. In order to be what it should, the LGBTQ community should never be exclusive.

I'm relatively certain her entire paragraph was vagueposting about me (I'm more certain that the beginning is for sure. Also not bothered by the vagueposting (if it is about me) it's an important topic that I would have weighed in on regardless). She also didn't grow up religious and as such likely doesn't understand the struggle and pain of deconstructing beliefs that were by design supposed to be more important than anything else and losing all of your community and support.

She also compares being an antitheist to other positions of discrimination against minorities (she would be mostly right using her understanding of antitheist. See my first paragraph for why that isn't accurate though). But even if her understanding applied, I live in a completely christian dominated area. They are not a minority or a marginalized group. There are 0 open atheists in my state government (that I could find). If you tell someone you aren't a christian here they assume you're a mormon (and ignore the fact that mormonism is a kind of christianity). And although discriminating against majorities is still bad of course, this absolutely would not be the same as being a proud racist or homophobe.

I'm just gonna come out and say the controversial thing that's been weighing on me for months now.

I am visibly Trans and I experience transphobia on a regular basis. I have never once been misgendered or made to feel uncomfortable by a member of my Jewish community.

I am visibly Jewish and I experience anti-Judaism on a regular basis. I am consistently devalued, shunned, and othered by Queer people in Queer spaces and Queer communities because of my Jewish identity.

LGBTQIA+ people need to do better to accommodate religious minorities. Anti-Jewish sentiment due to Queer-based religious trauma isn't any better, kinder, or more moral than anti-Jewish sentiment due to white supremacy.

[sondepoch]

Lighter (3/5)

Breaking the Collar

Nine months in the human trafficking circuit has destroyed every sense of normality you ever knew. For you, it's commonplace to be ordered on your knees for your owner, his clients, anyone else Childe deems necessary—and you've reached a point where you accept it this misery, just going along with the motions of life because there's nothing else to do.

Diluc and Kaeya change that.

They enter your life on a regular workday afternoon, stepping inside Childe's massive office under the pretense of sorting out a business deal, but a single hastily written message makes it clear that they're not here to hurt you: they're here to help you.

The only issue is that you have no idea how to escape Childe.

Fastened | Unlockable | Lighter | Breaking | Broken | Gone | ✔

MASTERLIST

There’s something demeaning about the outfit Childe has picked for you today. It’s nothing unlike what he had you wear when he last took you outside the apartment, when he brought you on a train to Xiangling’s restaurant, but the blouse and skirt he has you in today are looser than before, and skimpier, too. 

The thought confuses you until you realize that it’s because where you were previously dressed like a regular girl, in fairly modest clothes that were designed to shy away from attention, you’re now dressed like a slave once more: like a little sex toy that can only wear thin, loose clothes so her owner, alongside all her owner’s friends, can have easy access to the pretty tits and cunt beneath.

It should make you sick. 

Yet, as Childe slips his hand underneath your skirt to grip your thigh, the only thing that disgusts you is how easily you find yourself relaxing into his touch. 

“Angel,” Childe murmurs into your ear, voice hovering lowly under the quiet buzz of the van you both sit in. “Angel, I have a present for you.”

That catches your attention. You turn your head to your owner, eyebrows lifted in confusion, as Childe pulls a box from his pocket.

Immediately, you know what’s inside.

The first few gifts Childe gave you were all varied: the very first was, of course, the necklace he gave you in place of the ugly, metal collar all the other girls have to wear. The second was his jacket, too tattered for him to use anymore but literal paradise for someone like you, who had already grown used to spending every waking moment naked. Then, his presents began to come in the shape of services rather than material objects—the decision to allow you to sleep on a bed, the decision to let you eat better-quality meals, the decision to spare you from being sent to Scaramouche for a beating as punishment for a stupid blunder you once made—but after a certain period, Childe had granted you all the freedom he could give.

Then, his presents had to change.

He began gifting you jewels, all of them in different colors but always unfairly expensive, to make your collar sparkle.

You make no haste in opening the black, velvet box Childe gives you, eyes bright. You don’t think twice about how embarrassing it is that he’s conditioned you to associate these little gemstones (probably worth mere pennies to a man as wealthy as Childe) with happiness, but even you can’t keep the smile off your face as you snap open the box and see a blue twinkle staring back at you. 

“It’s a sapphire,” Childe explains, pulling the gemstone out by the short, silver chain it dangles from. “Since you told me that you like colorful stones.”

You remember saying that. It was true: being Childe’s favored toy meant that you were always by his side; it gave you no room for pastimes, and so you found that the most entertaining thing to do was toy with the shiny stones that dangled off your collar and angle them into the light to trace patterns into the ceiling. It’s an activity that works best with larger, colorful stones: the dainty diamonds Childe always used to gift you didn’t work half as well.

“Do you like it?” the man asks, staring down at you. “I thought you deserved a reward so behaving so well last time we went out. If you’re good this time as well, I’ll give you another one.”

I won’t be here for you to give me another one, you think. 

“I like it,” you say, ignoring how your heart instinctively speeds up with—is it fear? concern? hesitation?— when that thought runs through your mind. “Thank you, Sir.”

Childe grimaces.

“I mean, Ajax.”

Calling him by his name is still a hard habit to get into, but you find that the syllables roll off your tongue much smoother now. Alas, you shouldn’t need to worry about it too much longer. Not if today’s meeting with Diluc and Kaeya goes as planned.

“Here, lean forward so I can put it on you.”

The way you arch your neck forward is familiar. You and Childe have been in this position countless times before, him always being the one to fasten his gifts to your collar, and it shows in how quick Childe’s fingers are in attaching the short chain of the sapphire to your necklace. Within seconds, you feel the task’s completion as you lean your head back and smile at your owner, the weight around your neck marginally heavier than when you both stepped inside this van.

“It looks good,” Childe says, squeezing your thigh gently. “You look good.”

“Thank you,” you say like a good little slave. Then, you decide to go the extra mile. “Ajax.”

The man doesn’t respond to that, opting to glance out the window as his driver speeds down the highway that’ll doubtlessly bring you both to the office Diluc and Kaeya share, but you can see the edges of his lips curling upward. It’s rare, after all, for you to address him by name. No matter how much he loves it, your tongue still says “sir” on instinct, a little crack in the homey picture Childe is building with you in his mind.

It’s not like it matters, you think, stopping yourself from thinking too much about your owner before you can begin to feel bad. If all goes well, I won’t ever have to see him again.

The thought instinctively brings a smile to your face, but it falls just as fast.

If.

Looking back, the message Diluc and Kaeya gave you was cryptic. ‘WE CAN HELP YOU’ provides no accurate timeline to place your hopes in. The second message, ‘COME WITH TARTAGLIA NEXT WEEK AND WE CAN FREE YOU’ was of the same nature. Up til now, you’ve been vaguely interpreting their words to mean that they would free you immediately if you managed to go with Childe to this meeting. But the human trafficking world is so complicated, and you can’t help but think that things may be delayed even longer.

All you can do is hope for the best and pray that reality won’t disappoint.

“How much longer?” you ask your owner after the view outside the window has changed from a highway to a cityscape.

“Impatient, aren’t we?” Childe chuckles. “We should be there any time soon. Keep an eye out. Their office is in one of the big buildings.”

That doesn’t tell you much, given that nearly every building this van drives past is over fifteen stories high. 

You’re in the middle of scoffing at Childe’s poor description of the office when the car finally stops: and only then do you understand that when he said “one of the big buildings,” he meant the biggest fucking building in the entire city.

You’re gawking like a fool as Childe helps you out of the car, mentally overwhelmed at the sheer size of what has to be the tallest office in Snezhnaya. 

“It’s…” 

Big doesn’t begin to describe the grandeur of this place. It’s nothing you’d expect from two men who are working undercover to free people from human trafficking: it's got to be the most eye-catching thing you've ever seen, one hundred stories high or taller, with every inch of the exterior covered in wall-to-wall windows. It looks like an upscale version of Childe’s own office, and if you thought his building was lavish, then this is full-on opulent.

Your owner has to forcibly pull you forward to get you to move. 

You almost forget to tuck your precious jacket—the one you so foolishly forgot when you last went out in public, the one Childe insisted you bring this time in case you have another episode—underneath your arm because you’re so busy marveling at the exterior of the building, though you thankfully remember to do so right before the van door closes. 

“It’s nothing impressive,” Childe grumbles as he pulls you past the professional double doors. “Diluc and Kaeya are only renting the top ten floors here. They’re not even rich enough to purchase them.”

“Ten whole floors?” you ask, eyes round as you stare at the inside of the ground floor. Childe tugs you towards the elevator, and you’re just barely able to slow him down so you can stare at the marble floors, the expensive-looking paintings on the wall, the embodiment of wealth unlike anything you’ve ever seen. “Why do they need ten—”

“They’re sex traffickers, angel,” Childe tells you when the elevator doors shut. (You have to force yourself to refrain from marveling at how even this elevator seems posh and refined.) “They use the top floor for their own operations. The other nine are where they run their prostitution rings.”

Your face darkens at that. It must be the exact same as Childe’s office, where he has you and his other favored prostitutes up at the top with him, and all the girls he doesn’t want to show favoritism to are forced into the life they were meant to follow when they were brought into the human trafficking world: either as unpaid sex workers that are sold by the hour from Childe to other equally-awful clients or as human trafickees to be shipped to someone else if they prove to be too much trouble.

But then, you remember Diluc and Kaeya’s message.

‘WE CAN HELP YOU,’ they said.

There’s no way that they’re running a sex trafficking front up here. Childe must be wrong. It’s probably just a lie they told him to gain his trust so that they could best help you escape this life.

“They’re so arrogant,” Childe grumbles, crossing his arms. “I bet they chose this office just to piss me off. It’s bad business, too. They’re losing out on money by choosing such a fancy place. Not even the Snezhnayan sex work model will boost their profits.”

“What’s the Snezhnayan sex work model?”

“The system we use in the Fatui. It’s supposed to be the best, money-wise. You hand-train the elite girls as prostitutes so that the best ones become magnets for high-caliber clients. You sell off girls who don’t show promise early on. And then there’s a handful of average-quality, compliant girls you keep for the low-caliber clients that want a good fuck but can’t pay as much.” Childe folds his arms as he leans back against the elevator wall. “It's the most profitable method, even if it means that the girls you sell will always be low-quality.”

“Wouldn’t I be an elite girl?” you ask, staring at your owner. “You trained me, but I never had to work as a prostitute. And I only sometimes have to meet your clients, and—”

“You’re different,” Childe says, avoiding your eyes.

Immediately, you want to ask what he means by that. Unfortunately for you, the elevator doors open at that precise moment, and Childe leads you forward by the hand into an office that, now that you think about it, definitely was designed to upstage Childe’s own place of work.

“Come on, you can do it, baby.” A low coo from the left side of the room draws your attention, and your eyes widen in a mix of confusion, concern, and finally, horror. 

“Ignore Kaeya. Focus on my fingers. Relax your throat, doll, yes, just like that…”

Even Childe stiffens when he sees the three men splayed out on a couch: Diluc and Kaeya sandwiching a youthful-looking boy between them as Diluc shoves his hand down the boy’s throat and Kaeya strokes the boy’s small cock. 

For a moment, you don’t understand why the boy looks so wrecked, his braided hair dampened with sweat and his face covered in tears, but when your eyes watch as a trickle of sweat trails from the boy’s neck to his stomach, joining a copious amount of white fluid you can only imagine to be the result of countless orgasms, it’s clear that Kaeya’s overstimulating him. Add that to the way Diluc’s entire hand is slotted down the poor boy’s throat, and how the redhead is still stubbornly trying to get more inside, and it becomes clear that whatever this boy is feeling is far from pleasant.

The picture makes it irrevocably clear that this boy is to Diluc and Kaeya what you are to Childe. 

Instinctively, you imagine how you would feel if you were in such a position. Your worst memory under Childe, after all, is from the time when you were handed over to four men who fucked into your G-spot so vigorously that you cried at any sensation for hours. Your second worst memory is from the time when a client forced a massive dildo so big you couldn’t breathe down your throat and left you like that until Childe intervened. 

The idea of those two memories being combined into one makes you want to vomit. 

“Fucking hell,” Childe grunts once he’s past processing the image before him. “Get your toy out of here. Do you have to be so disgusting?”

“Oh, please,” Kaeya responds, not an ounce of hesitation in his voice. He doesn’t stop stroking the boy’s cock. “You had your little angel out during our last meeting. Let us have a little fun now, alright?”

“Hell no. Even I don’t dabble in…” Childe sneers when he sees how young the boy seems to be. “Children.”

Diluc laughs, a deep, rich sound that reverberates through the room. “He’s older than he looks. We’re not scummy enough to deal in children, either, Tartaglia.”

“You’re scummy enough to have to share,” Childe says, scoffing. “What, did you guys spend so much money paying for this building’s rent that you couldn’t afford more than one kid to suit both your needs? The two of you look pathetic, you know.”

“I wouldn’t call it pathetic,” Kaeya offers. “It’s more like we know exactly what we want. And if we both want the same thing, we’re not going to waste our time with…” The man’s single eye skirts over your figure with purpose. “Cheap replacements.”

“Really, now?” You can sense Childe getting offended for you. “You think your little toy is better trained than my angel?”

“I don’t think it, Tartaglia. I know it.” Kaeya grins. He gives the boy’s cock another few strokes, going at the same pace, the small, red-flushed thing twitching furiously in response. “Just watch.”

Kaeya abruptly pulls back from the boy, lifting his hand in the air for dramatic effect, and one, two, three seconds pass where nothing happens. The little organ he’d been stroking still quivers, either from overstimulation or from desire, but the boy suppresses his orgasm, and you can see the desperate, shallow breaths he tries to take from around Diluc’s hand.

Then, it happens.

“Cum, Venti.”

On command, the boy keens, eyes rolling to the back of his head as his hips spasm and jerk up into nothing. Venti’s cock looks abused, a thought demonstrated by how little cum actually shoots into the air and onto his stomach, the substance looking more watery than it looks healthy.

You grimace when you understand how far Venti must have been pushed to reach this point. 

The boy practically melts into Kaeya’s hold after the orgasm has left his body, boneless after something so intense, and the final shreds of resistance he’d been offering Diluc’s hand disappear as the redhead’s wrist edges deeper into his throat.

“Such a good boy, isn’t he?” Kaeya says, grinning as he strokes Venti’s hair, brushing the sweat-stained bangs from his forehead. “He’s ‘Luc’s favorite. We haven’t had any discipline issues from him in years. Same goes for the rest of our merchandise.”

Kaeya’s words are a shameless flex on Childe: a reminder that your owner’s girls are so often poorly-trained and that even you, the star of his trafficking business, are secretly planning on running away.

You don’t need to look up at your owner’s expression to see the raw annoyance plastered onto his face. 

“No discipline issues?” Childe grunts. “So if I bought him from you and ordered him to kill himself right now, he’d do it?”

There’s a beat of silence.

Whatever response Kaeya was expecting, that wasn’t it.

Finally, Diluc speaks up.

“Venti, much like your toy over there, isn’t for sale.” Diluc withdraws most of his hand from the boy’s mouth, leaving only the tips of his fingers in such that Venti cranes his neck forward to suckle at them. “But if you want him gone that much, it’s fine. He has to go to work now, anyway.”

You can feel your eyebrows shoot up at that. Kaeya watches your expression, and he laughs.

“Sorry, girlie. I know your master over there likes to exercise preferential treatment with his pets, but we don’t do that in Mondstadt.” Kaeya gently pushes Venti to his feet, holding his hand until the shake of the boy’s feet subsides. “All our toys have to work. Favoritism should only go so far in a world like this.”

With that, Kaeya pats Venti’s butt and sends the boy off, and you watch in a mix of awe and horror as he stumbles towards the elevator to “work.”

If it were real, you’d be mortified. 

Venti was overstimulated to tears, his legs wobbling the whole time as he stumbled past you, the apples of his fair cheeks flushed a feverish red. There was saliva dripping down his chin, cum still smeared on his stomach, and the reek of sweat and sex wafting off the entirety of his stumbling, nude form.

But you comfort yourself with the knowledge that it was all just an act. 

You close your eyes and hold your jacket closer to your body as the elevator releases a low ding, forcing yourself to remember the message Diluc and Kaeya left for you that filled your heart with so much hope. What happened with Venti just now looked bad, but you’re certain that it was all part of their master strategy to deceive Childe until you’re free from him.

(If there’s a sudden thump of a body hitting the ground and a low groan from behind the elevator doors as soon as they shut, you force yourself not to pay attention to it.)

“Fucking finally,” Childe mutters as soon as Venti is gone. He shuffles forward and flops down onto a couch, pulling you with him. “Listen, I don’t want to be here any more than you guys want me here. Let’s get this over with quickly, shall we?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Kaeya mumbles, using a sanitized cloth to clean his hands before slipping his usual gloves back on. Next to him, Diluc does the same. “All we need to do is fix a transportation route for the merch, right?”

“Yeah,” Childe grunts. “I already have some ideas. I own a parent company that sells furniture. If we can legally frame our transactions under the branch of…”

You zone out as soon as they begin using human trafficking jargon you barely understand.

This meeting is much more civilized than the previous, if the whole incident with Venti can be forgotten. The jabs Diluc and Kaeya make towards Childe are much more subtle, popping up rarer, too, and Childe doesn’t openly taunt them with your body the way he did in the first meeting. 

It takes nearly an hour before your owner even remembers you, and even then, his touches remain somewhat innocent. He only ever ghosts his fingers against your thigh, oft going down to drum his fingers against your knee while he continues to work out the logistics of his business deal. The touches honestly end up keeping you on edge with how delicate they are, and it’s right when his fingers have finally flitted up to the innards of your thigh, right when you’re holding your breath, right when Diluc and Kaeya’s eyes are fixated on where his palm has crept beneath your skirt, that his phone rings.

Immediately, Childe’s hands are off you. 

“I have to take this,” he says, wrapping a protective arm over your shoulder as he beckons you to stand next to him. “In private.”

“Take the elevator down to the second floor if you want privacy,” Diluc offers. “It’s not being rented out, and there aren’t any cameras there.”

“Thanks,” your owner says, leading you towards the elevator. 

“Wait,” Kaeya calls, right as you’re about to step in behind Childe. You glance behind your shoulder to stare at him, and the devious expression on his face concerns you. 

Kaeya winks at you a second before Childe, too, turns to face him.

“Leave your girl here with us, will you? Give us a treat to nibble on to kill the time.”

Immediately, you think that Kaeya has said the wrong thing. Childe is a fiercely protective man, over you more than anything else. There’s no way he’d leave you in the hands of two men he barely even likes, and it’ll probably only cast suspicion in his mind to hear Kaeya ask for you so candidly.

You shut your eyes, instinctively preparing to hear Childe’s rejection.

Instead, his tone is light when he speaks, almost amused. “Finally seeing how high-quality she is, eh?” Your owner is smiling at Kaeya, not an ounce of irritation, anger, or protectiveness on his face. “Fine. This call will take a while anyway. Just make sure you don’t wreck her too much.”

With that, the redhead steps into the elevator and leaves you with nothing more than a featherlight kiss to the temple, and you’re standing there, dumbfounded, for a full ten seconds before you process what has happened.

Alone, you realize with a start. I'm finally alone with them. 

Immediately, you sprint forward, grabbing Kaeya’s hand in an attempt to tug him off the couch, not caring about how you dropped your jacket on the floor in your rush.

“Come on,” you say, eyes wide. “If—if you want to set me free, we have to go now while he’s busy!”

But Kaeya doesn’t move an inch off the couch, instead pulling you onto his lap with a strength you didn’t realize he had. 

“What are you—”

“Shh, baby. We have to put on a show in case Tartaglia comes back, yeah?” You feel Diluc shuffle behind you, and the redhead is quick to wrap his hands around your hips from behind. 

The slowness, the casualness, the feigned normalcy of their actions dumbfounds you.

“Why aren’t we leaving?” you whisper, hands going up to grip at the fabric of Kaeya’s suit. “You said you’d free me if I managed to come to this meeting, so—”

“Relax,” Diluc mumbles into your ear, gloved hands sliding beneath your blouse to grope at your breasts. “Freeing you isn’t something we can do at the drop of a hat. It’s not just about you being here.”

“Right,” Kaeya says, his fingers slowly undoing the zipper on your skirt. “We asked you to come to this meeting to first check if it would even be possible to free you. A test, if you will. We weren’t sure you’d pass it. But if Tartaglia is willing to give you enough freedom to wander around with him, we figure you should also have enough freedom to do what needs to be done for us to free you.”

“What?” you whisper, trying to force back the tears that are pooling in your eyes. This is everything you’d feared: that Diluc and Kaeya’s idea of freeing you would be more complicated than you’d realized and that the whole process would require more time. “What do you need me to do to be free?”

“Aw, don’t cry.” Kaeya tosses your skirt to the floor right before he goes up to wipe away the tears from your face. “It’s not hard. We just need you to get ahold of Tartaglia’s fake documents on you.”

“His...what?”

Confusion is ultimately what brings a halt to your tears, and you cock your head naively at Kaeya right as Diluc speaks up.

“Fake documents,” Diluc explains, beginning to rub the front of his pants against your naked arse. “Every human trafficker has a series of documents for their merchandise that they can use for transportation and claim purposes. We need to get yours from Tartaglia.”

“Why can’t you take me away without them?” you plead, still clinging to the hope that you might be able to go free today. “Why do I have to—”

“Because, depending on how smart Tartaglia is, he can use those documents to rightfully get you back, even if we set you free.”

“What?” you ask. “How?”

“Think. If he has you listed on those documents as a minor, then the State can only do so much to protect you. Especially if he has himself listed down as your guardian. Even if you try to speak out against him, the Snezhnayan police won’t care. They’ll send you straight back to him, and you can bet that whatever freedoms you have now will be forever lost to you the second time around.”

“B-but, if I can prove that I’m not the person in his fake documents—”

“You can’t prove that,” Kaeya interrupts. “If you’re lucky, Tartaglia’s fake documents would be low-quality. But if he was smart, which we both know he is, then his documents will be of a high-enough quality that people will believe them when they see them. And unless you happen to have your official documents on you, there’s nothing you can do to protect yourself except steal the papers from Childe before he can use them.”

The annoyed, almost bored inflection of Kaeya’s voice shakes you to the core. They rattle this information off so quickly, so intuitively, so earnestly that you have no choice but to believe them.

“Okay,” you whisper, voice shaky. “Okay, I’ll do it. I’ll get the documents you want.”

“Do you know where he keeps them?” Diluc asks.

“I think so. He has a locked briefcase that he always keeps in his office. I don’t know the combination to open it, but I should be—”

“Good,” Kaeya interrupts. “You seem like a smart girl. I’m sure you can figure it out.”

“Y-yeah,” you say, hesitant. The man’s words seemed like a compliment, but his tone felt much more derisive. “Um, is that all, or is there anything else I—”

“That’s all,” Diluc says. “Two weeks from now is when we’ll be ready to get you out of here. We’ll be staying in the hotel across from Tartaglia’s apartment. The two of us will be in rooms 213 and 214. Come find us at any time, and as long as you have the documents on you, we’ll be able to set you free.”

Your heart beats a little faster at that. 

“Really?” you whisper, almost not believing it. The goal you’ve been given is finally real: it’s tangible, so clear that you can already see yourself using something sharp to tear into Childe’s briefcase and retrieve your documents before you’ll finally be able to live a life you can be proud of.

Kaeya smiles when he sees the look on your face.

“Really,” he whispers, reaching a rough, gloved hand up to cup your cheek with infinite care. The kiss he coaxes you into is gentle, soft, and sweet. It’s everything he is, everything Childe isn’t. 

“Thank you,” you whisper, leaning forward to wrap the man in a hug. You don’t care about the fact that Diluc has unbuttoned and pulled off your blouse now, leaving you effectively nude as you embrace Kaeya, but he doesn’t seem to mind either. “Thank you so much.”

“You’re welcome,” the man whispers in response, and you can hear the smile in his voice.

The next minutes are marked by more peace than you’ve felt in months. Sandwiched between Diluc and Kaeya, you feel oddly safe. The roughness of their gloves stops bothering you, the silky brushes of their hair stop tickling you, and the closeness of their bodies, the warmth and the heat that radiates off them as naturally as light off the sun, only relaxes you in their arms.

When Kaeya begins playing with the jewels on your necklace, you don’t stop him.

“Tartaglia gave you this?” he asks, tugging gently at a diamond. 

“Yeah. They're all presents for being good.”

You can’t help the smile that blooms on your face as you say that: it’s like a reminder that you’re special, that you’re important, that even though you’re down in a world where your life isn’t even your own, you still have worth.

Behind you, Diluc’s fingers reach over your shoulder and begin lifting up individual stones to the light. “These are expensive,” he mutters, twisting a ruby among his leathered fingers. “More expensive than what someone would normally give to a slave.”

“I know,” you say. “It's because this is supposed to incentivize my good behavior, and—”

“No,” Diluc interrupts, voice soft. “It’s supposed to manipulate you.”

Your voice catches at that, and you glance at Kaeya for confirmation because you doubt it can be true. Not when Childe always seems so sweet when he gifts you these presents. Not when you've come to look forward to them as the one light in your life in this dark, dark world. But when the blue-haired man’s face twists into sympathy, your heart falls.

“B-but...I like…”

“You’re supposed to like it,” Diluc’s voice, rich and deep, rumbles out into your ear. ”But you need to understand that it’s not a necklace, doll. It’s a collar.”

“I know that,” you say, now wrapping your fingers around the chain protectively. “But I don’t—I don’t want—”

Kaeya kisses you, bringing two hands to your cheeks to cradle your face in his fingers.

“We’re not going to take it away from you, baby.”

He kisses you again.

“Relax.”

Those words soothe you in a way you can’t quite explain; the idea of losing your necklace, even being told that your necklace was a ploy to manipulate you (though you already knew that, to some extent), was unsettling. You much prefer the notion that it’s an innocuous gift: mainly because you’ve grown far too attached to it for it to represent human trafficking and all the pain you’ve had to endure thus far.

But, right when you’ve calmed yourself and forcibly stopped yourself from panicking, you feel a sharp tug on your neck.

“What did you—”

“Nothing,” Diluc says, holding two gemstones—two diamonds, one blue and one pink—in his palm. They still have their chain attached to them, but that's it: there's nothing connecting the diamonds to your necklace, the chains having been ripped off.  You feel your expression change as you see what he's done. “Just—”

“What did you do?!” you blurt, panic beginning to overtake your heart. “Childe—Ajax—he’s going to notice! I—I’ll get in trouble, and—”

“Shh,” Kaeya whispers, trying to calm you down with a kiss, but you pull back before his lips can touch you. “It’s not—”

“Put it back. Put it back!”

You've turned around and are about to hit Diluc when the man grips both your wrists, holding you with such a force that it freezes you. The look in his eyes is fierce, fiery, red eyes shining brighter than the rubies dangling off your neck—and for a single second, you can’t help but think that the man looks furious. 

Then, the expression is masked, and you’re both left calmer for it.

“Tartaglia won’t notice. Unless he makes a habit of regularly counting what’s on your neck, only you’ll be able to feel the difference.” Right. That makes sense. Childe likes to look at your necklace, but you doubt that he’ll actually know how many presents he’s gifted you. Not when he barely touches the thing, dexterous fingers always reaching out to feel your body instead. 

“And besides,” Diluc says, easing you back into your earlier position with your back resting against his chest. “It’s a promise. The two diamonds.”

“A promise?”

In front of you, Kaeya smiles in understanding.

“Right. It’s a promise, baby. We’ll give you these two diamonds back once we’ve freed you, and until then, they’re our weight to bear so that every time we look at them, we remember that we’re waiting for you so we can set you free.”

“It...is?” you ask, hesitant. You haven’t been in the outside world in a while; is this how people do promises now?

“Yes,” Diluc mumbles, kissing your ear as he strokes your hair. Every brush of his fingers against your head instinctively relaxes you, until you’re almost as calm as you were before he took two stones off your necklace. “Do you trust us to return them to you?”

It’s a disguised question.

What Diluc is really asking is this: Do you trust us?

“Yes,” you breathe. It’s the only right answer.

Then, the two men go silent. They focus on relaxing you once more, running their gloved fingers up and down the sides of your body, almost massaging your skin as you sit between them. 

Unfortunately for you, all you can think about is your necklace.

It’s the first time you’ve had it be lighter than before: Childe only ever adds to it; he never takes. Now, right when you’d grown used to the weight of the sapphire he attached this morning, you’ve got the odd situation of it being even lighter than it had been when you woke up.

You know that you should feel freer now: less chained down to Childe and to the Fatui.

But deep down inside, you miss the weight.

Minutes later, when you’re a little less emotionally overwhelmed and a little more relaxed as the two men gently run their arms around your body, another thought surfaces.

“A-also,” you say, hesitant. “Um, everything you said at the beginning of this meeting…”

“All lies,” Diluc says, pulling you closer against his broad chest after you slink too deep into Kaeya’s embrace. “Tartaglia had a negative impression of us coming in, so we had to play to that. Everything we said was just for show.”

Your shoulders sag in relief at that, but another thought continues to poke at your brain.

“And Venti?” you finally manage to ask, remembering how ruined the boy had looked as he stumbled away from the two men holding you.

“He’s a masochist,” Kaeya blurts. “We asked him beforehand if he’d be okay with participating. Not sure he realized how all-out we were going to go, but I’m certain that he enjoyed himself.”

That...makes sense! You’ve heard before about masochists, and looking back, everything Diluc and Kaeya did to the boy really did seem to be for the sake of his pleasure. You’ve heard countless times about overstimulation being something sexy, something desired, something liked by the select few who could bear it. Similarly, the way Diluc had his hand down Venti’s mouth...that’s the equivalent of Childe having you suck on his fingers during sex, right? 

You laugh a little when you realize that everything you’d been scared about had an explanation. You should have known better than to doubt Diluc and Kaeya, two people who are saving you from hell itself. If anything, you should be on your knees thanking them instead of raising questions over what they had to say to be able to help you out.

“I’m sorry for all the questions,” you confess, sheepish as Kaeya’s fingers begin toying with your breasts. “I’m just...really nervous. And a little scared.”

“Who wouldn’t be?” Kaeya asks, a tinkling laugh spilling from his lips. “We were the same way when we first came out here to save people from human trafficking.”

“Really?” you ask, eyes round. “Do you guys do this for a living? How many people do you save?”

“Uh...whoever we can, really. We use our covers as human traffickers to identify targets that would be easiest for us to free. You seemed like one. Before you, we helped that boytoy from Zhongli. Before him was some Khaenri'ahi girl, and…”

Zhongli? You ask yourself, trying to figure out where you know that name from. It’s familiar, so familiar, and…

“Wait!” You blurt, sitting up straight and nearly knocking Diluc backward in the process. “You guys were responsible for freeing Xiao? The one who’s always by Zhongli’s side?”

You remember the short little man, beautiful in his own right, from when Childe had a business meeting with Zhongli. That was the first time you learned of Xiao, the last time being just last week when you heard Scaramouche say that the green-haired boy had somehow disappeared. 

Hope blooms in your heart as soon as you realize what that disappearance was: the successful removal of one more slave from the human trafficking network, something you're next in line for.

Diluc lets out a light laugh when he sees how your entire face has brightened up now that you have genuine proof that these two men are for real, that they’ve helped people escape in the past and that they’ll help you escape in the near future. 

“Wait, if you guys freed Xiao, then were you also the ones responsible for setting, uhm…”

Your brain blanks out as you try to remember the second person Scaramouche mentioned when speaking to Childe. What was her name? Amine? you think, but that sounds off. Umino? Lumina? You continue to guess names in your head, brain fixating on Childe’s interaction with the other Fatui executive until finally, you remember her name.

“Lumine!” you declare with pride. “Were you the ones who set her free, too?”

Kaeya stares at you with a shocked expression. His lips part and his face freezes, eyebrows lifted comically high on his forehead, and you turn around to glance at Diluc, but the redhead is in a similar state.

“You’re telling me,” Kaeya begins, “That Lumine...”

He can’t bring himself to finish, and so Diluc steps in to complete the question: “Lumine belonged to Tartaglia?”

You glance back and forth between the two men, unsure of why they seem to be regarding this news with such shock.

“I think so?” you say, now beginning to doubt yourself. “I’m not sure. But Scaramouche said something like that to him, so I—”

You’re cut off by a sharp cackle of laughter from Kaeya. You stare at him in shock, and then behind you, Diluc has begun chuckling, and then Kaeya’s laughing even louder, and within seconds, both men are laughing their heads off at something you barely understand. 

“Oh my gods!” Kaeya blurts between fits of almost-hysterical giggles. “You’re telling me that Tartaglia? Fucking Tartaglia? Was the one to lose Lumine?” He laughs some more, loud and merry and cheerful. "So I was right when I called you a—a—" Kaeya stutters in his laughter. "A cheap replacement?"

You stare at the blue-haired man in confusion, not understanding a word of what he's saying nor why he seems to find it so hilarious that Childe and Lumine are connected. You want to open your mouth to ask why, but you have to stop yourself because it's at this precise moment that your owner returns; and this is the picture that Childe sees when the elevator dings with the announcement of his arrival: you, completely nude and squashed between the two Mondstadt business partners, Kaeya in front of you, laughing his ass off as if you’ve told the joke of the century, and Diluc behind you, the most stoic man in the room losing his composure in an equally graceless manner.

“What the fuck…” your owner mutters at the sight, but seeing Childe only makes the two men around you laugh harder.

It takes a full minute for them to calm down, and in that minute, you rise from their couch and move back towards Childe like an obedient slave, only wearing your clothes when Childe nods at you that it’s okay for you to do so.

“So,” Childe deadpans once Diluc and Kaeya have finally stopped laughing, though Kaeya still releases a giggle every now and then. “Did my girl tell a funny joke or something? You guys sounded like a bunch of dying hyenas.”

“Something like that,” Kaeya says, smiling at Childe, but you sense something deadly in his eyes. 

“Alright, well…” Childe awkwardly tries to steer the conversation back to what they’d been discussing before. “I guess the final details will have to be ironed out once I actually use this company as a cover to ship the girls to you, but is there anything else we need to talk about? Transportation-wise, we seem solid.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Kaeya drawls, a strange smile on his face. “But, real quick, I want to talk about prices one more time.”

“For fuck’s sake,” Childe grunts, annoyed. “We already agreed on five-hundred thousand mora per shipment. Don’t try to haggle with me again on this.”

“Ordinarily, you’d be right,” Diluc says, crossing his arms. “But we just learned some interesting information.”

Childe’s eye twitches in annoyance. “Right,” he blurts, leaning back. “What is it? Did you find out that I’m giving a better deal to someone else? Because that sucks, but that’s how this business works with new partners. I’m not going to—”

“It’s not that,” Diluc interrupts, lifting a hand. “It’s moreso that before, we thought we were purchasing merchandise from a valued, respected dealer.”

Diluc’s lips quirk into a cruel grin. 

“Not from the infamous idiot trafficker who lost Lumine.”

You can hear the ice settle over the room before you feel it, the abrupt, chilling silence suddenly making every second feel like an hour. You’re almost scared to move, scared to pull your eyes to your owner who, for the first time since you met him, looks like the child his codename was assigned for.

Childe doesn’t try to speak, but his every thought is displayed in his eyes alone, the cerulean blues giving insight to a hurricane of emotions wilder than the sea. In his eyes is fear, horror, despair, and pain, so much pain. 

Something about the look on his face makes your heart break.

Diluc and Kaeya don’t care.

“I think charging five hundred thousand mora is a tad much for a douche who almost brought the entire industry down. Hell, you should be paying us for even being willing to deal with you, but…” Kaeya glances at Diluc, a single blue eye flitting down to where Diluc extends three fingers against his knee. “We’ll settle for a drop in the price instead. Three-hundred thousand mora per shipment. That good with you, Tartaglia?”

You’re expecting your owner to bargain, to argue, to scoff, to do something other than stare into the distance with those bright blue eyes that now look more blank than anything else. 

When you hear Childe mutter a meek “Okay,” you nearly recoil in shock.

Even Kaeya is surprised. “R-really? Damn. Actually, I think we should go even lower, y’know? Every trafficker in the world was scared for their life because of you, so maybe drop the price some more as reparations for that? Whaddya say, two hundred thousand? Per shipment?”

You stare at your owner, silently begging him to do something. Even you can tell that he’s being taken advantage of now, and that awful look in his eyes is something that even you’re unfamiliar with.

“Okay.”

“Fu...okay then? But also, you were kind of a dick to us last time, so how about you make it one hundred thousand? Seems more fair to me.”

“O—”

You grab your owner’s hand before he can agree, and the touch seems to snap Childe out of the awful fog that had been wrapped around his head. The look in his eyes is only less marginally troubled when he abruptly stands up, gripping your hand in a silent plea for you to move with him.

“I’m going,” Childe announces. 

He begins walking away so fast that you just barely have time to grab your jacket before you’re at his heels.

The man completely ignores Diluc and Kaeya as he waits for the elevator to open with a rigid posture, seeming to feel uncomfortable or fearful or panicked or a mix of all three. Kaeya begins laughing behind you both, and you almost want to tell him to stop: tell him that yes, Childe is an awful human trafficker and yes, you hate him as well—but the poor man looks like he’s on the verge of having a panic attack, and you know first-hand how awful a feeling that is. 

You’re grateful when the elevator finally opens, more grateful when the doors close and you and Childe are finally in isolation together. 

Only then, in the silence of the box as it moves you both down to the ground floor, do you hear Childe’s shaky breathing. It’s jagged, uneven. Then, you take note of the way his hands are clenched into fists, palms enclosed so tight that his arms are shaking—and despite everything he’s done to you, you feel some semblance of pity for him.

“Ajax,” you mumble, hoping that the name will calm him. “Relax.”

A moment of silence.

“I am relaxed,” he responds, and when you glance over at him, he’s completely back to normal: breathing even and palms loose.

His eyes, though, are just as pained as when the two of you were sitting upstairs on that couch. 

“I’m sorry,” you say. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that you’re the one who let it slip that Lumine and Childe were connected. Even if you don’t understand the scope of what you said, it's clear that it had an impact. “I didn’t—”

“It’s not your fault,” Childe says, not looking at you. “Don’t apologize.”

More silence. It feels heavy, unlike the usual, comfortable stretches of quiet that you and Childe like to bask in.

“What...were they talking about?” you ask quietly, still staring at your owner. “Diluc and Kaeya said that—”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

A moment of silence.

It feels so heavy that it seems to crush you under its weight.

“Who is she? Lumine?”

More silence. 

This time, Childe is the one to break it. 

“The only girl I ever loved before you.”

That’s a lie, and you know it. If Childe loved you, he wouldn’t be bringing you around to meetings, dressing you like a cheap slave, and handing you off to other men to flex how ‘high-quality’ you are. If Childe loved you, you would be long gone from the human trafficking circuit because he would have set you free. If Childe loved you, he wouldn’t force you to stay by his side because he’s your abuser, your trafficker, the monster that haunts your life. 

Most importantly, if Childe loved you, he would have given you a proper answer to your question. Not some flimsy skirt-around that only furthers his attempts to manipulate you into loving him back.

Your eyebrows furrow the slightest as you feel the elevator hit the ground floor, brain still focused on everything Diluc and Kaeya said. Everything Childe didn’t want to talk about. Lumine.

Curiosity begs you to stick around and learn the truth.

Logic, reasoning, and the desire to lead a life of your own tell you that you’ll be long gone from Snezhnaya before that’ll ever happen. 

MASTERLIST

Fastened | Unlockable | Lighter | Breaking | Broken | Gone | ✔

Word count: 7.9k

Notes: eyyyy i'm alive! i promise i never forgot about this fic, it's just that after i missed the original due date, my mind was just like 'eh, it's already late, what's a few more days?' and that's the story of how this is two months late. thank you to all the kind commenters from the last chapter - to the people who checked in on me, ily; to the people who sent me those wholesome asks on tumblr, ily ily; and to the people who made guesses on what would happen in future chapters - guess what :D you acc helped me shape this :3 i originally meant for lumine to be a passing thing mentioned once and never again, but she'll end up being important for chapter 4 ^^ so thank you to everyone who'll still be here after i disappeared for so long. hope you liked this chapter (lmk your thoughts!) and i can't wait to see you all in the finale <3

Comment & Like

Next Update: 6/11

I do not own the rights to Genshin Impact or any of the characters within it.

[avo-kat]

just realized i have a follower thats a terf

i dont really pay too much attention to tumblr names, but having “rad” in their shouldve tipped me off

so i guess i have to, and i cant fucking believe i do considering the stuff i reblog, say once and for all:

TERFS FUCK OFF

go educate urself and stop buying into the patriarchy lmao. are u kidding me. honestly. its so embarrassing being a terf. :/

or radfem or whatever yall call urselves

it costs nothing to be kind and to educate urself and have some compassion for ppl

like what is even the point of being a terf. does it make yall feel good? do u feel superior? do u gain brownie points with conservative men that hate cis women too? cuz they do. transphobic men hate women, trans or not. or are yall transphobic lesbians? how does that work?

trans people, as gay people, have existed for as long as humans have, in all kinds of human cultures. trans people have been shamans or priests, there are gods and divine beings that change genders or have multiple genders, so why are yall so ignorant? whats the point?

its ok to be scared. its ok to be uncomfortable.

i wasnt born with perfect knowledge of social justice. i learned. there were things that scared me or made me uncomfortable.

but its not ok to take those fears and use them as weapons of hate.

if something makes you uncomfortable, ask yourself why? what is the problem?

the reason will be mostly: not knowing enough, or having learned the wrong things. we all grow up in society, we are molded by the opinions of our peers, guardians, authority figures and the common folk opinion.

but not everything we are taught is right or just.

my family and i are immigrants, and yet ive heard racist opinions from my family all my life. that always seemed very wrong to me.

how can you be part of one marginalized group and hate another? whats the point? there is no limited amount of cake that the people in charge are distributing. they only got one cupcake, that they are fighting over themselves. if you want some fucking cake, you have to make it yourself. but you cant, because you only have one ingredient. and if you poison your neighbours sugar, you cant ask them to borrow some.

educate yourself.

question authorities, question your peers, question your family, question EVERYBODY that tries you tell something - especially, especially if that something is feasting on your fear and growing your hatred.

ive been hurt before and i sought explanations and reasons online. why would somebody that claims to love me treat me this way?

and guess what i found?

radfems.

oh, it was so easy.

so fucking easy.

they dont call themselves radfem everywhere. in some places, they dont call themselves anything. sometimes they make snarky comments about liberal women, or liberal women. if you are not american that may not mean to you.

they start of with simple things, things that everybody can easily agree with. the patriarchy is at fault. its the reason for creating toxic men, men that are unable to communicate, to heal, to seek help. because of the patriarchy men are raised to be unemotional, aggressive creatures only looking for dominance and possession. see? its not your fault. its theirs. they are bad. bad bad bad.

if you are deeply hurt, but on the verge of going back, of forgiving, of clinging to your feelings, its very easy to grasp at something that gives you rage instead of grief.

its easier to hate than to hurt.

they pull you in.

they make you feel understood, validated. they see and understand you, confirming your feelings. and they keep on pulling.

other topics come up. prostitution. porn. their argument sound good? they dont mean ANY harm. they want to protect. and the outside group does not, the others cant be trusted. so how do we protect those that are exploited? criminalization of perpetrators, punishment, restriction.

it sounds good when they say it. but those things do not make for a healthy society.

and they keep on pulling.

its easy, then, after establishing men as the enemy, to go after trans people. because if you started to accept that gender is a reason for pain and suffering, then trans people simply dont fit in the schema.

trans people are not your enemy. trans people dont want to date ignorant, bigoted assholes anyway, so relax. yall literally have nothing to fear.

just because an opinion is easy to accept, does not make it right.

question your opinions and those that inform them.

TL;DR: terfs fuck off. if u follow me and ur a terf pls fuck off even more!?!?!? the fucks wrong with u. you are not welcome.

[lmsr-lilitu-sephiroth]

Dude, no one is born fucking evil. Thinking that way leads to eugenics. It's about choices and the decision to make the ‘easy’ choice that will absolutely hurt a lot of people, or the right one that means you actually reduce the harm you do.

And sometimes writing is a tool to understand motivation. To explore emotion. Jeez, it's almost like people have complex reasons to do anything. I just get so sick of these reductive, one-dimensional arguments. They never go anywhere good, because black-and-white thinking leads to nothing but witch hunts. How many times do we have to go through this?

And wasting energy on obsessing over the things in fiction, when fiction just doesn't follow all the same real-world rules, is just that. A fucking waste of your precious energy and time. Going after writers in such a witch hunt is merely taking the easy choice that will only hurt real people. A fictional character is just that. Fictional. Not a real person with agency. You know who is? The writers.

People like to write horrifying things for various reasons. Do I want to interact with anything that involves detailed abuse? Hell no, because I don't want to experience the flashbacks to kick up. But I can't magically wipe all the problematic media from existence. And there is media that I find Because that kind of witch doesn't exist, so I of course can't. Instead, I can only curate what I see and interact with to my own preferences.

If you really want to protest problematic media, go after people who write for big-name media producers. Writers on places like AO3 (which is nonprofit, by the way), or any other online space dominated by fanfiction, literally have no power over the world of media. If you're so terminally online that you think only fanfiction online has any sway over public consciousness, then you're a fool. And if you think you can get ahead or gain respect for punching down, you clearly don't understand how the system works. Respectability politics are a farce. The authorities you're trying to appeal to probably hate you as much as you hate these ‘problematic creators’. You're suffering a delusion that small-time creators actually affect places like Hollywood. They do not.

I swear so many people don't understand how the mind works. Fiction provides a safe outlet because most people can tell the difference between fiction and reality. Reading or writing fiction lets people explore uncomfortable topics without actually hurting real people. If they do then go out and hurt a real, living, breathing person, it probably wasn't because of writing or reading that little tiny piece of fiction.

Horror, as an example, exists as a genre for a fucking reason. It's a safe outlet to explore the deepest, darkest recesses of our minds. I once found a Cardcaptor Sakura fan comic I wish I hadn't. I found it gross as hell. I vamoosed as quickly as I could once I realized what it was (this was so long ago I barely remember, though). But I can't stop people from uploading that stuff online because no one has that kind of control over the internet. You don't have to like some of the content people create. You are absolutely free to find it gross.

And the thing is, you do have to actively seek this stuff out.

On that note, quit with the puritanism. It helps no one and gets marginalized people hurt the most, including and especially the innocent ones.

I feel I'm repeating myself, but seriously. All people are individual and should not be beholden to arbitrary standards in fiction alone. Unless you can physically prove they harmed other living people, you can't do anything because of fiction. If you want to think someone is a creep, ok. Stay away from them as best as you can. But thought crimes don't exist. Stop being a Puritan.

Stop trying to mind control other people's creativity because they don't write only according to your puritanical standards. Fictional characters are like puppets for you to play with. People struggling with emotions need an outlet so they don't actually hurt others.

Stop thinking of other people like they're beholden to your main character syndrome. This isn't a game where you can modify everything around you with impunity.

Stop infantilizing everyone. Stop acting as if others are unable to realize the line between fiction and reality. Stop acting like the people who write the stuff you find repulsive speak for an entire fandom.

Witch hunting groups inevitably tear themselves apart eventually once they've run out of outsiders to target.

I usually don't like to jump into discourse online, and I refuse to actively take part in shipcourse. But writing fiction is something I'm actually passionate about. And I just want to point some things out about trying to control what others write, even if you ‘mean well’. After all, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

If you really want to make sure the fiction isn't hurting real people, you'll get better results if you get off your high horse and engage content creators where they're at.

90% of arguments about media could just be solved by saying “different people like different things in their stories” and leaving it at that

[luidilovins]

You should turn your post on the Uncanny Valley into a book or something. I am not even kidding, it's brilliant and sorely needed information. Thank you for it.

Tbh its just speculative that the uncanny valley is an inherent biological trait and not cultural or a learned behavior at the moment. A good example would be the cultural phenomenon of colorophobia where in the US we have a longer history of using clowns in our horror pop culture genres than countries like Japan.

Clown entertainment has been around since the Egytian times and maybe some people have always been freaked out by them it honestly just takes one director or author to have an disproportionately irrational fear and good cinematography skills to convince people that they SHOULD hate clowns just as much, (I could say the same about the movie Jaws but thats a bit of a tangent,) or a memorable event that damages the public's trust in something that SHOULD be innocent or harmless. (A good examples being the John Wayne Gacy trials.)

Clowns are also thought to be in the uncanney valley so ita a fairly good argument on cultural phenomenon versus genetic traits. Up until aroud the 60s-70s clowns were actually fairly well liked by the US general public and a lot of older generation still find a fondness in it that would scare the living shit out of their grandchildren.

As far as evidence that I may be right about the "uncanney valley might be because of rabies" theory, there has been a small case study suggesting that the movements of a non-human robot that trigger the effect in us, is also present in people with parkinsons but the sample size is too small for me to be thoroughly convinced.

And don't be mistaken I also dislike this concept because saying that ableism is an inherent human trait is just as bad as saying racism is an inherent human trait. There is little to gain from distrust in the disabled and little historical evidence to suggest it was common or beneficial to discard disabled people. Disabled people's remains have been found time and time again to live to incredibly long livea and be cared for, and participate in their communities. I'm highly critical of this particular case study and I take it with a grain of salt because its on cosmo, but evidence of human disabilities and compassion can be sourced by actual bones and it's been placed on VERY credible sources. NPR, NBC, Discovery, Nat Geo, NY Times, literally the clostest you can get to creme of the crop news articles on DOZENS of accounts and if you have a goddam problem then pay for a tour to the Smithsonian, find an archeologist and coherse them into showing you the bones and then explain phorensics to you because you probably wouldn't understand unless you too were a phorensic archeologist yourself.

What I DO BELIEVE tho is that if the uncanny valley is a legitimate inherent trait, that like most evolutionary traits, it made it this far for this long because it somehow served us benificially. And the biggest benifit I can think of is identifying neuro-infectious diseases because they can spread agressivley, many of them lead to death or lasting effects and are fucking MISERABLE to catch. We're talking brain swelling, fevers, uncontrollable vomiting, tremors, hallucinations, motor and vocal tics, difficulty swallowing, seizures. This could all happen because they eat infected deer meat or because of one bad fox bite. It's miserable if you survive and horrifying if you dont. Rabies can survive in your muscle tissue for years before infecting your brain and once it does usually you only live for about 5-10 days in and out of concious knowledge that you're going to die painfully, and disease aggrivated psychosis. It would be hard to pinpoint the causation because the amout of time before full blown infection would vary too much to assosiate for a long time. So your only option is to hone in on telltale signs.

The disabled people who would suffer from herdeditary or developmental neurological disorders run the risk of prejudice from mistaken identity, but if a human is part of a community, and doesn't die within a week from having a wobbly head, it would sooner or later become apparent that they're not dangerous. I think nowadays culturally people don't press to learn more about disabled people due to social and political prejudice and never fucking grow up past that. Mistaken identity or not. You learn about people from the patterns of their behaviors so even ones that seem abnormal to you become a normal recognizable pattern for them. Fancy that.

We don't get grossed out by chimps or gorillas, who are even more distant cousins, and the proof that we don't have a search and destroy button for anything immediatly related to us is a bunch of bullshit can be found in almost every human's blood on earth. And not just neanderthals, but denisovans as well. And that's not even accounting for genetic backtracking the crossbreeding of other sapiens species before we were whittled down to just the three. What makes the tweet even stupider is that when neandertals still roamed the earth humans were shorter, hardier, and overall more rough looking so we looked even indistinguished then. We Also Chewed On Bones and neandertals handled cold climates better than us based on a study on chest cavity density and, skull nasal intake and heat circulation, providing genetic diversity and the upper hand in survival in the tundras or mountainous regions spanning over Eurasia. If it wasn't for humans fucking neandertals we might not have been able to spread over the contient or diversify the way we did.

So my full hypothesis is that if the uncanny valley is a genetic inherent human trait it was used to benifit people from catching agressive diseases in a time where the benifit of fearing a group member with rabies outweighed the cost of fearing a group member with a disability like parkinsons.

WHAT PISSED ME OFF was the idea that we are DESIGNED to be unwary of our evolutionary cousins could easily be used for white supremacist spaces to justify racism BECAUSE IT ALREADY HAS

So that one tweet that might seem like a quirky thinkpiece in my eyes is just fuel for eugenics trend round whatever number we're on. It's like we don't fucking learn. It would be REALLY easy to retool the concept that it's natural for people to be fearful of whatever the bullshit definition of sub-humans are. Claiming that black people were sub-human thus deserving of mistrust and submission to white ownership worked like a fucking charm.

Maybe if I go to college and major in psyche/socio/civics it'll be my college thesis. Right now I'm more of a hobbyist than anything, but what I DO know is that anyone can make an untested hypothesis to combat another untested hypothesis and it should hold just as much goddamn value. I combatted the idea that the idea that human othering was funneled into an unconfirmed effect that causes disgust and terror based on non-human sapiens is in fact racist and gave what is in my opinion a more evoluntionary practical approach to the uncanney valley.

The generalized links that I used APARENTLY weren't good enough for some people but aparently a single tweet that says "hur dur heedle dee uncanney valley exists because of human cousins" was taken at face value even tho it was probably tapped out in five seconds without regards to the reproccussions. I find a huge discomfort that less than studious links about the evolution of monkey social behaviors that I used as a guideline to explaining my concerns became the focal point for people to nitpick without even having the gall to "well actually" on the subject. That absolute ravaging NEED to rip apart at it and devolve into name calling because I MENTIONED racism is fucking suspicious and I don't trust it. I had to stop looking at the responses because some people were only reblogging and arguing with barely half of my argument and i was getting nowhere fast.

There were a few people that made actual points with cited sources that made their own rebuttle arguments. That I respect. It's just as valid an argument as mine and I'm ALWAYS willing to take on more credible sources to strengthen my stance or gain perspective.

But it's the utter dismissal of a concerning concept that just seeped into the subtext that gnawed at my gut. Some people on top of hating the linked sources I provided, admitted they didn't read it, refused to read between the lines to purposfully misinterpret or derail my main points, and detract that my claim that the tweet was a result of systemic white supremacy saturated into modern science was a bunch of bullshit because I claimed that 1500s anglos invented racism.

The thing is we did invent the racism that we fucking currently subscribe to.

We practice the science that we formulated based on our own social prejudice. Real people die from this.

We remain uncritical of our own theorums that we postulate then pat ourselves on the back like we're philosophical geniuses even though racism is a family heirloom with a new paint job.

We preach the eugenics ideals that we pulled out of our asses to benifit from fearmongering, promises of national security and unpaied labor.

White supremacists create subtext with the intention of it being consumed by accident or in ways that seem palatable.

Fuck.

That.

I don't hate the person who wrote the tweet. Chances are that they gave the tweet as much thought as they took the time to write it and went on their day as a fun little thinkpiece. Everyone on the internet does it. But its that kind of thinking error that needs to be adressed as a progression of historic and scientific prejudice that gets rehashed, recycled and untouched and continually damages and is weaponized against marginalized people. I am not wrong for taking it seriously especially when a bunch of people were sitting around nodding their heads just as effortlessly.

I don't owe the internet any more sources than the tweet. I don't owe anyone on the internet a full scientific ananysis. And the people's reaction to what I had to say was actually what further convinced me I might have hit the nail on the head.

[serinemolecule]

Not to harp on the obvious, but the discussion feels hollow without it: the only reason some people - not all, maybe not most, but definitely some - push for "equality" and "inclusiveness" and etc. in tech is because it's seen as a desirable and powerful position. No one's been belly-aching about it back when it was fashionable to tell nerds to stop being fat and ugly and what a bunch of losers they are. It's only up for discussion now that there's something to be gained from it. It's hypocrisy.

(context: a lot of women-in-tech discourse)

I mean, I was belly-aching about it.

I like to say I was a feminist until I met other feminists. I definitely saw plenty of things nerds could be doing better for equality. But then the first time I met other feminists, they were harassing nerds and writing long essays about how nerds were even worse than average men (which still seems to me like an absolutely insane position).

That was... a really big crisis of faith there. I spent years reading feminist literature, trying to understand their point. And the crazy thing was, a lot of the principles and concepts do appeal to me. But then the way they’d apply it, talking about how privileged nerds were, or just using it as an excuse to be assholes to people, that’s always seemed wrong to me.

My approach at the time was just to try to understand it better in private, and never talk about it in public. This lasted until I read the SSC essays on social justice which I entirely agreed on, then I joined Tumblr to hit on Scott, and since then I started getting more comfortable with writing out my thoughts, but also the really bad SJ of the early 2010s just mostly faded away from the spaces I’m in. I still hear insane stories from other places (like the New York Times! wtf!) but it no longer feels like a crisis afflicting my own community, so I never wrote anything out.

Part of it’s that my community is the rats, now. SJWs may still exist here, but they don’t have a social power to turn us against each other. Whatever effect Topher’s tweet had on the rest of the world, it means he’s no longer welcome among rats anymore. We dismiss them with equanimity using the ancient proverb, “Haters gonna hate”.

Anyway, I suppose now’s as good a time as any for me to talk about what I think about feminist theory.

I get the impression that Scott is embarrassed by his old posts on gender politics, but I still endorse every word. Even the words people like to criticize the most, I endorse as an angry expression of “Why don’t you care about how many people your ideology is hurting?” That said:

Privilege theory – I remember encountering privilege theory and thinking “yes, this totally fits the model that normies are privileged and nerds are marginalized”, until I got to the part where they started talking about how privileged nerds were. I think the theory is still pretty good, and of course the practice about writing privilege checklists and using it to silence people is incredibly fucked up.

Patriarchy theory – Fortunately, no one talks about patriarchy theory anymore. It came from the radfems and it always seemed horrible to me. It's uncontroversially true that ruling class is mostly male, but patriarchy theory seems to just equivocate between that and insane conspiracy theories.

For example, “culture is built for the benefit of men at the expense of women” requires you to just dismiss everything that hurts men and helps women, to excuse that fashion policing is nearly solely perpetuated by other women, and even if it’s true, the fact that it is perpetuated by everyone means pointing the finger at a specific group will not help fix the problem. Did Kamala Harris exercise “girl power” when she kept black prisoners in jail past their release date? 

Cultural appropriation – The usual steelman I hear for this is “it sucks when white people take your culture for themselves, and yet still call it cringe when you practice your own culture” – but the only objectionable part is the latter! Stop objecting to the former part! There’s nothing wrong with culture mixing and it is in fact one of the most beautiful things in the world!

Part of it’s that I’m a first-gen immigrant, and cultural appropriation attitudes often come from insecurities second-gen immigrants have. Cultural appropriation just means I’m now an expert on your new culture and you’re not allowed to stop me from infodumping on it.

The other steelman is “misusing religious artifacts is bad” and I think to the extent that it’s bad, it’s bad whether you’re doing it to your own culture or to other cultures.

In general I think Halloween was, among other things, a great celebration of diversity that did not need to be cancelled, and I don’t think any costume was offensive to the majority of any culture.

Intersectionality – This word confused me for so long. People kept explaining it as “black women often have problems specific to their group that neither women’s groups nor black groups themselves are equipped to fight” which just seemed obviously true and didn’t seem like we needed a word for it.

Over the years, I’ve seen it be used as a reminder of “don’t forget how your activism affects other marginalized groups”, so it’s probably a useful concept to keep around.

Microaggressions – I think being oblivious to microaggressions is an autism thing, but I still think it’s insane to make them a political issue. Sure, you can vent about them, but acting like they’re on par with actual aggressions just seems like a losing cause.

On second thought, I don’t think I have a problem with making them a political issue in general. I think the whole tactic of SJWs being a hateful harassment mob makes the microaggressions thing just come off as especially petty.

I also think there’s a lot of competing access needs here. I actually really like infodumping about what kind of Asian I am to anyone willing to listen, and I think acting like the question is the root of all evil is really unfair, especially since literally everyone who’s ever asked has been happy to learn about the finer points about Chinese ethnic groups.

Isms as prejudice + power – People have mostly stopped discoursing about this, which is good. Language policing always seemed bad to me.

Objectification – SSC says everything I feel on the topic: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/17/my-objections-to-objectification/

The last time this came up in Discord, people said that objectification is more than the straw-man being criticized in this article, that it’s about people being entitled to your body or whatever. But I think the article does address that: “This is obviously a legitimate complaint. It’s just not a complaint about objectification.”

I got exposed to objectification as a criticism of hot girls in video games. And I just can’t see hot girls in video games as a bad thing.

Rape culture – [cw rape] This is an incredibly sensitive subject so I’m going to give you some time to stop reading here.

Our culture has a serious problem with rape. I think it’s important to understand that it’s usually committed by friends and family, that it’s depressingly common and has nearly definitely happened to people you know, that it’s usually committed by people who don’t think of what they’re doing as rape, and that all the discourse on it is really fucked up.

I also think that calling this “rape culture” entirely misses the point. I’m sympathetic that SSC doesn’t understand it: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/19/i-do-not-understand-rape-culture/

Our problem isn’t that we glorify rape. Our problem is that we consider it a special kind of evil so bad that of course no normal person would ever do it, and this makes it easy to rationalize that whatever this normal person did couldn’t have been rape, which causes huge harms.

I don’t have answers, but I think it’s incredibly clear that calling it “rape culture” doesn’t help.

In general, I don’t think feminist activism on the topic of rape goes in the right direction. The smug “consent is like tea” video has the exact same problem. People don’t need to hear more “normal people would never rape” messaging.

[leutik]

Literature between Political Correctness and Cancel Culture

(Analyzed through Walter Siti, Natalie Wynn and Rick DuFer.)

(buckle up, because if you're gonna read this, it's gonna be long)

«Today is much easier to mistake an author’s personal stances with the content of their works, and then make the author pay for the work’s sins.

Today I look around and I have the sensation that literature is no longer taken seriously: that the way to interpret literature the way I knew it, depth-focused, focused on the power of words to reveal truths otherwise concealed to their own author, is disappearing — substituted by a conception of literature that has to serve a list of good causes.

When some writers of the “neo-effort” (Siti’s neologism) insist on the fact that words are decisive, and that it’d be urgent to change the words in order to change reality, I’m suddenly reminded of those old Marxist authors: they explained that the structure, which is what lays under society, determines what lays upon it, that is words and ideology. Thus, changing the name of something doesn’t change the thing the word stands for at all.

Literature has been considered throughout time the most indicated form to make resurface the part of ourselves — often, the least pleasant — that we’ve exiled in the shadows of our subconscious: a process that often happens without the author’s acknowledgement of it.

The authors of the neo-effort believe they have the duty to spread their ideas to the largest possible number of people and that, in order to do so, they have to simplify as much as they can what they write, sacrificing on the altar of efficiency the style, considered useless. The aim is to do good, namely gain an effect, what does it matter if it’s good or bad literature? Literature used to “take root”, to influence; put at the service of pre-established ideas, and not to venture into the discovery of something we don’t know yet. This way, it gains an ancillary role. And it’s a humiliation of literature — which can truly be useful, instead, only then it hurts.

Sartre’s “Nausea” doesn’t align with his political stances. For Sartre, the effort was the individual reflection of a society in perennial revolution, substantially a school of liberty, whilst for neo-effort the role of literature is to reassure.

Their attitude, their rejection of style, their low consideration of literature, tends to isolate the good writers out there, marginalizing them in a niche that looks like a convention of obsessed aesthetes in the public’s eyes.

I see it in the writing courses I teach: more and more young people whose main interest isn’t to write to learn something about themselves or society, but it’s to write to gain the title of writer and place themselves on the market, detecting the most profitable sector at the moment, which might be fantasy, crime, or effort-centred writing: it doesn’t matter, what matters is for it to be trending and to be reassuring to the reader, in a more and more therapeutic conception of writing.

Literature isn’t immediately therapeutic, this is the difference. When “The Sorrows of Young Werther” was published, copies of this book were burnt, because of the suicides it inspired. Today we read it at school. How much time has passed? I don’t refuse knowledge’s benefit, I refuse that knowledge can benefit instantly, painlessly. When I went to a psychoanalyst to face my neurosis, the psychoanalyst made me suffer for months, and only after I took benefit from it. What would have happened if they had welcomed me with a pat on the back and said “Don’t worry, stop thinking and go help African children”. Probably I would have had an immediate benefit, but all my neurosis would have stayed there, intact.

The Literature I talked to you about is depth-centred, and literature hasn’t always existed: thus it can disappear, sink for many years. Who said that it’ll survive, despite everything?

In Pasolini’s trial he was acquitted because Ungaretti was called to testify. He wrote a letter where he wrote that the formal value of Pasolini’s work turned into literature even those scenes that the prosecution deemed obscene. Law couldn’t do anything but recognize the critical judgement and welcome it. Web’s tribunal, today, would have burned Pasolini at the stake, and Ungaretti with him.» (via Walter Siti’s interview with the Huffingtonpost)

In other words, we can summarize Siti’s view with the sentence «novels aren’t the cure to the world’s evils.» They aren’t, because they don’t have the power to be, and more so they aren’t even supposed to be: writing is a form of art, and art has primarily an end in itself. Literature isn’t a political marketplace, even if it can be used to be — it’s not a crime to turn it into one, but by doing so, one loses Literature’s nature. By doing so, the harm could be mistake literature’s primary aim (that is being a form of art, that is style, that is the pursuit of the truth) with what they turned literature into: a marketplace to defend the author’s ideology.

Siti’s powerful image of the Web’s tribunal, the Web’s court finds an echo in Natalie Wynn video Canceling: in a sense, what Siti calls “neo-effort writers” fall under the same line of thoughts of Cancel Culture perpetrators.

«Like the guillotine, [cancelling] can become a sadistic entertainment spectacle.

Now there's a version of this conversation that's already been had to death, and it goes like this: On the one side are a bunch of male comedians who constantly bitch about how Cancel Culture is out of control, you can't joke about anything anymore without these Millennial jackals trying to get you in trouble.

And the other side is mostly progressive think-piece authors who argue that there's no such thing as cancel culture, it's just that powerful people are finally being held accountable for their actions and they can't fucking handle it, so they go around bitching about cancel culture.

Now unfortunately, neither of those viewpoints is quite as correct as some people might hope.

What Cancel Culture does, [is to] take one story and transform it into a significantly different story.

Presumption of Guilt

There's a traditional understanding of justice according to which, before you condemn or punish a person, you hear the accuser's side of the story and the accused's side of the story. You allow both sides to present evidence and only after everyone involved has had a chance to make their case do you pass judgment and punish the convict.

But cancelling does not abide by the law. Cancelling is a form of vigilante mob justice. And a lot of times, an accusation is proof enough.

Abstraction

Abstraction replaces the specific, concrete details of a claim with a more generic statement.

Essentialism

Essentialism is when we go from criticizing a person's actions to criticizing the person themselves. We're not just saying they did bad things. We’re saying they’re a bad person.

Pseudo-Moralism or Pseudo-Intellectualism

Moralism or intellectualism provide a phony pretext for the call-out. You can pretend you just want an apology; you can pretend you're just a “concerned citizen” who wants the person to improve. You can pretend you're simply offering up criticism, when what you're really doing is attacking a person's career and reputation out of spite, envy, revenge.

No Forgiveness

Cancelers will often dismiss an apology as insincere, no matter how convincingly written or delivered. And of course, an insincere apology is further proof of what a Machiavellian psychopath you really are.

Now sometimes, a good apology will calm things down for a while. But the next time there's a scandal, the original accusation will be raised again as if you never apologized.

The Transitive Property of Cancellation

Cancellation is infectious. If you associate with a cancelled person, the cancellation rubs off. It's like gonorrhoea, except doxycycline won't save you this time sweetie.» (via Natalie Wynn's Canceling video transcript)

Natalie Wynn describes and formalizes the phenomenon of Cancel Culture in those steps:

I only listen to the presumed victim,

I abstract the context to a vague idea,

I equate the action to the actor’s very essence (as if such thing even existed),

I say I’m acting in favour of morals or truth,

I accuse every person the presumed abuser ever came in contact with to be an abuser as well,

and I either reject every form of apology at the moment, or bring up the issue as if no apology was ever made at their first misstep.

Now, in this post I’m not trying to perpetrate any concept of charity, not only because it’s an attitude that takes a lot of work to inherit, but also because the negative aspects that might bring one to be a neo-effort writer or a Cancel Culture perpetrator are part of the very human nature (or, very stupidly, they wouldn’t be humans.)

The self-evidence rises here: those negative parts of human nature can be channelled everywhere, and literature or any other form of art is the healthiest way to do so: you’re not going to get rid of your anger, or your sadness — the best thing you can do is learn to control it and suppress it, but how is it going to work in the long run? It’s going to act past your good judgement, or even cloud your good judgement, clouding it into thinking you’re defending some pseudo-moralism or pseudo-intellectualism, when what you’ll be doing is just venting on someone else.

This is one way to see it: when one forgets what proper thinking is and falls into those quick and gut-feeling “thoughts”. Or one could even take advantage of this Cancel Culture, of this ground of poor thinking to instrumentalize this lack of critical judgement to attack someone else.

On instrumentalization and its dangers, Rick DuFer says:

«Political correctness works when its aim is to protect the weak from abusers, but when it favours every little susceptible sensitivity it turns dangerous.» (via Rick DuFer’s podcast DailyCogito)

Rick DuFer talks about a shared responsibility that happens during offence: shared between the offender and the offended. The problem with offence, as opposed to harm, is that it isn’t quantifiable, so the offender is guilty in regard to their intentions, and the offended is guilty in regard to the instrumentalization they can enact with the situation.

And again we find “instrumentalization”: if one destroys my property, I can quantify the damage, but if one insults me, how can I quantify how offended I truly am? This is when I can twist one person’s words and turn them into an offender, this is when sensitivity becomes a mask and no longer a virtue (or, for the toxic masculinity’s thought, a vice.)

Now, to wrap things up:

These people take the (s)word of this school of thought (which some other dichotomists may, generalizing it, call it “Strong Thought” or “Unique Thought”), perhaps without even knowing there’s an alternative, while there are multiple, actually: as many as the human beings right now populating Earth.

They may do it out of a dualistic and very childish view of society — divided into good and bad people. And if that’s your view of life, you’re not gonna want to be associated with who others deem as bad, following a gut feeling and nothing more. (And I say “gut feeling” to avoid saying “very poor thinking”, because that’s what absolutization, essentialism, and the rest is.)

Your thoughts aren’t really yours, and you become a vessel for something that belongs to someone else, someone who crafted those thoughts in a very different context, or with instrumentalization in mind. You don’t want to risk criticizing those thoughts because you don’t want to be isolated, or because you’re a sane person who deems it important to act rightfully (even if you’re letting others tell you what “right” is.)

And for how problematic moral relativism is, it surely is better than any form of absolutization: better than rejecting your status as “sapiens” and stopping thinking altogether, passively accepting what others taught you to be right and wrong, maybe even out of fear, or a stupid rush for glory and sympathy.

So I wouldn’t call this moral relativism, strictly, but rather moral subjectivism, or context-centred morality. A morality in which people still have a brain to separate a piece of work from an author’s ideology (against essentialism) and to still take into account the context in which an action was performed (against abstraction). A morality in which “good” and “wrong” aren’t seen in black and whites, but rather into lighter and darker greys; a morality which systematic use can slowly dress into the habit of charity towards one another, into kind teaching rather than cruel instrumentalization.

And is it really utopistic, is it really unfeasible, if we’re not falsely annihilating the suffering and the negative parts of the Human Experience?

This whole discourse could be turned into a political marketplace of rights and lefts, of conservatives and progressivists — but my aim here is much smaller (or bigger, if one is a humanist): to make the reader question their critical thinking, and just that.

(We love some self-doubt.)

I believe moral acts aren’t supposed to be a badge to share on one’s vest — to renew your status as “approachable person” (as if saying “don’t worry, you can talk to me, you’re not going to be deemed as bad for it”) or to be praised for. Moral acts are the only acts that raise humans from other species, the acts where the “sapiens” shows its evolution, the acts where our negative aspects aren’t hidden but channelled into arts, without the fear that someone might call us bad for it. (Immoral, even, whilst acting in the most moral way possible, exorcising those negative parts of us in the least harmful way possible.)

So, at the end of this unnecessary rant, my question is: is it better to be a minion in a culture where you have to watch your mouth, as if it wasn’t yours, or to be a person who’s engaged in researching how right and wrong truly manifest?

[titleknown]

...Reblogging because I think you open up some interesting points in a far clearer way than others I've seen, and I'd like to discuss from the reverse end in good faith.

Because like... fundamentally I find the idea that critique isn't meant to have some material effect fundamentally alien, to the point where my base assumption has always been that the understanding of the function of critique in the circles you speak of was...

...Well, this is antecdotal, but it seems like a viewpoint divorced from popular experience?

Like, to give an (intentionally extreme) example, the largest material impact critical theory probably had on the arts was Frederic Wertham using it in a way that set back comics as an artform in the US by decades.

Ditto for a large chunk of the moral panics or censorship decision we witnessed in the 80s/90s, there was always a child psychologist with Data and Theories on why this artform needed to be destroyed or censored.

Even if it's different disciplines evaluating social impact, I think it's easy to see where the wires got crossed.

Plus, criticism is a great instrument to legitimize or delegitimize an artform or work in the public sphere, and a lot of us are painfully aware that if your artform is culturally delegitimized, you don't get to exist in public space.

Like, for an object lesson in that, see how furries and fanfic writers were treated in public forums in the aughts wrt the massive cultural hate-complex around them vs now where folks in both subcultures have been building up that cultural legitimacy.

Or, for a closer to home example, how Steven Universe fanart fucking disappeared from my dash after the critique of its politics (and its fans) really went into overdrive post-Bismuth. No matter what way you evaluate the show, I feel like that's a pretty visible example of cultural de-legitmization banishing something from a public space.

Hell, on a personal level, a lot of people in fandom have painful experiences with their interests being marginalized due to that lack of cultural legitimacy. Anyone with a special interest can tell you that.

Point being, a lot of people have a lot of personal experience with critique being used as an active weapon and a passive means of denying/gaining cultural legitimacy, that the idea of critique as just this... low-stakes "think about it" sort of dealie you speak of is; again; alien.

And there's also the element of complicity, I think, that provokes that reaction. Like, in terms of a lot of the critique I see I feel like complicity and disgust with how people uplift these works and socially interact with them despite them being "tainted".

Like, to give an example, this is part of why I find Liz Ryerson's very antisocial view of games and art so loathsome. You can also see a lot of that in the left-leaning sneerposting towards "fandom" as a social practice, including someone who ran me off a server with it.

So, with that context in mind, the idea that it's not meant to condemn or shame those into those games comes off as more than a little two-faced, whether intentional or not?

Like, at least from my experience, it's very difficult to see someone say "I'm not saying you're a bad person for liking these games" when everything else around that discourse says "by allowing these cultural complexes to exist you legitimize the violence of your peers" and not think the former is less "sincere sentiment" and more "plausible deniability ass-covering".

Plus, I'd say the issue of colonialism is probably especially a hot button there; given that it's something a lot of us in the Global North who hear about it have few levers to do much about* and there's also that constant drumbeat that if it's solved in the just way our lives will have to get worse just like they are under capitalism but more "fair"**.

So, with an issue a lot of us are stuck being complicit in and are often told even by its advocates that to not be complicit would be to be impoverished and stagnant***, bringing it into a critical framework associated with condemnation over complicity is probably an easy way to take a raw nerve and bite down.

Couple that with people with scrupulosity issues who get exposed to this (myself included), who are probably more numerous than most people realize, and it's also easy to understand why people read that specific discourse as "Ok, you're trying to give me a secular form of Catholic guilt."

Like... does that help you grok better where folks are coming from when they get flustered over this? Do you have any thoughts on how to bridge perspectives like mine with perspectives like yours when they very clearly come from very dissonant experiences?

Like, I feel like there's a massive gap between the experiences of those in critical circles who think of this as a zero-stakes consciousness-raising exercise and those who've been; to put it bluntly; fucked by the Overton Window, and I feel like there needs to be some attempt to bridge it.

*At least wrt my US perspective, given both major parties unity on being unfathomably evil there and the fact that most non-electoral action on that issue here is a joke

**Note I don't necessarily agree with that sentiment, but a lot of people in favor of anti-colonialism do, but I don't think any of us know enough about political economy to know for sure, which is what makes it frustrating to discuss.

***Again, not a sentiment I agree with, I cannot stress that enough, though the forcefulness with which its proponents speak does end up setting off my Issues

Wish I had been able to articulate this sooner but the current wave of discourse about Cozy Wholesome Farming Games really shows once again that a lot of people's metric for the line that divides "smart person doing good, thoughtful analysis" from "terminally online freak looking too deep into into shit to start pointless discourse" is when they look deep enough to find something to criticize in a Popular Thing.

Like. The takes "Stardew Valley is an anticapitalist tale about the importance of community because in it the members of this small rural community band together to kick out the Costco analogue" and "The fantasy of landwonership on which games like Stardew Valley are predicated on is kinda bourgeois and the fact that it's considered politically neutral enough to be a common subject matter for games explicitly labelling themselves as Cozy or Wholesome speaks to how entrenched it is in our our culture and art" attribute roughly equivalent weight and importance to the politics of a cutesy farming game, but one of them is very popular and widely liked and the other gets you anons like "Uhm it's literally just a hecking cute farming simularino!? Touch grass lol you should be at the club lol do you even enjoy stuff lol not everything is politics are you really trying to make my heckin' farmerino simulator problematic? Stop looking for politics in everything you're just looking for stuff to get mad at you are a tar pit" etc etc etc