#who would violate any and all of your boundaries to live out their fantasies

[seijorhi]

as everyone else has said, please take you’re time. your writing is worth waiting for 🫶🫶

also, the scion oikawa question you got about him sleeping with other people made me think, would that kind of thing be more likely in the fics with group yanderes like bonten or even the hq teams? since obviously reader can’t be with all of them all the time, would they seek out (purely for sex) other girls just to fill the need? or is it still a no like your response about oikawa

Thanks nonnie <33

Tbh again the concept of the yanderes I write fucking anyone aside from the object of their obsession (the reader) really isn’t something I’m all that interested in putting that much thought into ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If that’s how you wanna headcanon the characters go right ahead, it just ain’t for me

[konigsblog]

I’d like to direct those sending hate to people simply writing dark content to holding adult video sites accountable if they want to achieve some kind of moral victory.

There have been multiple instances of sites like 🌽 hub taking genuine footage of rape/SA and refusing to remove it even when requested multiple times by the victim. Some of their heavier ‘consensual’ bondage vids etc have been said to involve deliberately pushing expressed boundaries by female actors that have do things they didn’t originally agree to for fear of loosing their job. These are real people- their experiences are REAL and have a lasting physical, social and mental effect.

Ghost, König etc are not real. Y/n, is a reader insert of course, but you are never in genuine danger. Everything you ‘put yourself’ into in these fics, can stop at the press of a button. You can hate it, hate the author and never interact with them again- problem solved (If only y’all would do that). In real life? A SA/rape survivor has lived through it, suffers from it forever and might have the disgusting burden of having to see their assaulter in the flesh at work, home etc.

To insinuate that a piece of fanfic that can be ignored, that you CHOOSE to engage with is as equally abhorrent as the real act is disgusting. It’s downright offensive. It’s a great discredit to us victims and shows you don’t actually give a damn about us at all.

You’ll be silent when it’s time to hold a harmful industry accountable/silent in the face a thousand men saying that 🌽 actresses ‘deserve it’ but will continually send hate to what is a largely femme community for typing words on a screen that you could avoid so easily. Yeah, I know why, there’s a word for it starting with M :)

On that note, most of these people are dead silent on other fandom issues which proves it’s vendetta, not justice based. They don’t actually care about making it a ‘safe place’ (which is impossible, that’s no one else’s responsibility but your own). Not a peep about racism, for example- can’t be assed making fandom more accessible and less exclusive to POC, gotta go out of their way to harass authors though!

You don’t have to like dark content, or even the authors. You can have limits, disdain bad tagging practices, question respectfully why someone might want to read/write such content, but don’t you dare use victims as a scapegoat or insinuate that you are in any way justified if you choose to harass or bully. Do better; focus your energy somewhere actually productive and deserving of criticism, or shut up and move on.

I agree with absolutely everything you said. These are the same people that consume pornography via porn sites, then sit and complain about people having rape fantasies and consuming dark fiction (key word: fiction). They care more about people's kinks and fantasies and decisions in the bedroom (where both parties have consented beforehand), then they do about the REAL rape tapes on porn sites. It's not just rape either, there's a lot of incredibly fucked-up, illegal, and sickening things on these sites that I won't get into. People have their trauma published, profited off of, and are violated for money, and these sites never take these videos down either.

They care too much about their comfort character being portrayed in a way they don't agree with to focus on the poor souls who have had their trauma uploaded online – and to make money off! Are the COD characters real, or am I missing something? They're fictional characters. Just because you don't agree with a headcannon doesn't mean that everyone else also disagrees. It doesn't determine their morality. And honestly, do I really think these hateful and spiteful people are victims of some form of assault? No, I don't. Because victims of SA/rape (who cope differently) filter things out to prevent themselves from getting triggered. I don't think that these hate anons are actually triggered by the content I upload and just want to judge others for coping differently. They just want to seem more moral – as if your mortality depends on your coping mechanisms/fantasies are. If you don't want to watch a video, you wouldn't choose to watch it anyways. You wouldn't force yourself to watch the entire thing, then come to the comment section and cry about how you're not interested in the topics featured in the video. You watching that video was a decision you made, a choice. You wouldn't take a kid to a horror film that's clearly 18+, then scream at the film directors for creating it in the first place. If you're not the intended audience, then don't stay. There is an audience of people who do enjoy dark fiction, and just because you don't, doesn't mean that it can't exist. The world doesn't only revolve around you. It's selfish and small-minded.

You get taught about fiction and non-fiction in Primary school, and yet here we are, have to tell adults (or at least people who claim they're 18+) the difference between the two. If you can't draw a line between fantasy and reality, then you shouldn't have access to the internet. That's irresponsibility. It's people wanting to be saviours, act as if they have the moral high ground because they disagree and think that it makes them a better person, when it doesn't. If anything, them constantly harassing innocent writers is worse than what they try to portray us dark content writers as. These are the same people wishing rape, death, and doxxing towards writers who have done nothing but be respectful and give out warnings before a story. Dark fiction writers have more empathy and sympathy than these puritans who think they're on top of the world for coping differently, because we actually understand that there are different mechanisms to cope after being sexually assaulted.

I will never apologise for writing what I write. I refuse to walk on eggshells around these anons simply because they can't act mature and manage their own triggers. These people won't bother reading the articles that I've linked countless times, or listen to this entire post. Because they're narrow-minded, that's what narrow-minded folk do. They don't hear other opinions or think for a second, that maybe, just maybe, they're being disrespectful. They claim we're romanticising rape by writing it, but don't bother learning what romanticising actually is. I've said countless times that rape is a disgusting, violating crime that deserves years of punishment. I don't describe what these characters do as IDEAL or something to WANT, if anything, I describe them as horrible people because that's how I see them. They're in the military for God's sake...

When they send hate to an author's askbox, do they think for a second about the effect it'll have? Victims go through years of self hatred and disgust after being traumatised, and when they find a coping mechanism, do you think they want to be told that they deserve to be raped again, or that they're disgusting, or that they're supporting the vile crime? Of course they don't, because they don't support victims at all.

These people are too illiterate to read this entire post. If anything, it'll go right through them. In one ear and out the other. Am I also responsible for the media they consume? As in, horror films? Will I hold their hand and cradle them, rock them to sleep because they don't want to take responsibility? That's life. You have responsibilities. You can't just drop them because you feel like it and then put it on a writer's shoulders because YOU weren't thinking.

And sure, I can see how dark fiction can possibly affect reality. But, that's not my responsibility. If someone is has the urge to rape someone, that's an issue on their behalf, caused by mental illness. I can't control what people do, just like how film directors can't control the effect that their work will have. If people get themselves off to my content, that's not my responsibility. Writers and film directors aren't responsible for the effect it'll have on others, because there are a plethora of factors that can change a reaction towards certain content, like mental illness, for example. Mental illness plays a huge factor.

[proshippers-against-censorship]

I think people also don't understand it when creators or celebrities set boundaries about RPF content. Like if you're making 18+ content about someone, you should NOT be sending it to them, tagging them, talking about it where they can easily see it (comment sections, live chats, AMAs, etc) or acting like that's real life. Which ironically...is what I tend to see antis doing under the guise of "protecting them" and enforcing their boundaries (which isn't their job).

But I'm sorry, if you exist as a public figure or celebrity, someone out there is going to make fan content about you. And while someone has a right to not like it and not want to see it, someone else has a right to make that type of content too. The key is keeping things nice and separate so it's not flung in the phases of people who don't want to see it.

Things used to exist on nice little corners of the internet that you weren't likely to find unless you were the target demographic, now anything and everything has the potential to go viral and be exposed to all the wrong people. Like the person who wrote the Heat Waves fanfiction (which centered around a ship for two popular MCYT creators AND was the most popular work on AO3 for a while) ended up deleting the fic and leaving the internet because they went viral and people kept violating *their* boundaries by sharing it with the two creators it was about.

Like that *never* would've happened 10 years ago (or at least, pre-pandemic). I'm like 22 (been in fandom spaces since I was 12) and I don't remember people being this mad about RPF content before. They used to just exist and even if you didn't like or agree with it, there was an understanding that it was just fiction and you'd scroll past/use the block button if you didn't like it. Hell, that could be said for any part of fandom etiquette back then.

"Proshippers" were just the majority of people who had common sense and just wanted to enjoy fantasy, "antishippers" weren't even a thing back then because acting like a holier-than-thou idiot would get you kicked out of most groups.

I'm very worried about how many people advocate for sexual content to be completely banned or for the government to imprison people over fictional works they don't like. How if you do something they don't like, these crazies will do whatever they can to ruin you, both offline and online. Fandom used to be a safe space but now it's like the people who used to bully over being in one have joined them, BUT THEY NEVER STOPPED BULLYING!!

It's a mess. Sorry for the essay but that screenshot you shared really pissed me off, as did the other anon claiming you have to conform your opinions to gain the approval of antis (spoiler: nothing anyone does will be good enough, they'll still find a way to call you "problematic" and a bad person).

Thanks for existing, glad to know there are still sane people out there who aren't trying to apply real world morals and laws to LITERAL fiction 👍🏽

Essay or not, you hit the point dead-on. Good job.

[angstyantoinette]

Yandere! Armin Arlert Headcanons

AGED UP I REPEAT ALL CHARACTERS ARE AGED UP-

This little blonde ball of curiosity is verrryy toxic in my Yandere version. 

Armin knows how innocent he looks to other people and by playing on this, coupled with his practical and analytical genius status, boy is it so very easy for him to gain the trust of his comrades, friends and especially his Beloved. 

I feel as if Armin wouldn’t be picky with a particular type, but never being attracted to an unkind or particular person he would be disgusted by in any way. 

He may fall for someone who is slightly colder, or who doesn’t really know how to respond to kindness. In that scenario, Armin would be overjoyed, but very patient and giving with them; if he wasn’t Yandere. 

I see him as very touch-starved and wanting, but afraid to be clingy for fear he would drive his Beloved away. In this case he would dote on you as best he could in his environment, making you fall for him even more. 

You would him as endearing, and like most, innocent. Armin is smart; one might say way too smart for his own good, and being a Yandere, I feel this makes him just as dangerous as those willing to use physical violence/methods on their Beloved. 

He knows that you just love his little quirks and his way of thinking. If you tell him this, he may think you only see him as valuable because of his skill for strategizing. But when you reassure him that you just love him for him, he just falls in love with you even more. 

He’s worrisome about you. Every time he makes practise with your ODM gear until you’re bruised, and exhausted, ready to run into his awaiting arms. Rewarding you with cuddles and affection, Armin’s love isn’t exactly conditional; but it still isn’t normal.

But that’s if you accept his feelings, with Armin being a Yandere or not, and with your knowledge or ignorance. 

If you don’t accept his feelings, whether it being for your personal reasons, or because you…um, like someone else, to put it nicely; 

YOU’RE FUCKED. 

He’ll smile, nod his head, maybe try a little too hard to act like he’s okay with your decision. But you understand, after all, it’s not like you haven’t been rejected before. 

“We can always be friends, Armin! I’m here for you okay?” 

“Yeah, Y/N, whatever you say…” 

About a few weeks after his rejection, with all of the support from Eren, Mikasa and the others, Armin is slowly descending into a deep depression. 

He was so sure of his feelings for you. They were his most prized possession. You made him laugh, you made him blush and god you made his pitiful life seem so much more worth living. You were the ocean, and he just wanted to drown myself in you. Like the sun he saw so rarely, you were the ray of pure light that made his body burn. 

He lay awake at night, taunted and enthralled with the thoughts of you in so many different scenarios….maybe in particular, different positions. 

[Yes, those kinda positions. Armin’s not always that innocent, y’all.]

He knows that the more he thinks of you in these appetizing ways, in these hurtfully satisfying scenarios, he’s never going to be able to get over you. 

Rather, he’s not even going to try.

Being trapped in his fantasies, Armin is horrifically aware that these feelings are incredibly toxic, for the both of you. He just won’t let you go. Whatever it takes, Armin will commit whatever crimes he must to keep you in his life. 

He sees you as being misunderstood, especially if you’re typically a colder person, hard to read, detached. Some people compare you to Levi, but Armin just knows that you, like the Corporal, have far more depth than you let on. 

His intrigue doesn’t let up for a long while, as you’re constantly surprising him in new and amazing ways. You’re used to his deep interest in you after a while, but you still don’t understand him. 

Armin thrives on your confusion at first, but if it drives you away from him, he’ll go into tactical mode. Staying up all night,figuring out who is calling your attention to them rather than him and what his next move should be. 

With his intelligence, Armin keeps his sizzling bafflement and envy under wraps. He tells himself that maybe he had unerved you a little. He can get like that sometimes, surely you understood him well enough to know that?He obviously did find you interesting and he was willing to momentarily abandon Eren and Mikasa just to fuel his endless curiosity. 

Keep in mind, this is after you reject him, and his desperation to just know you and love you is greatly overwhelming him to the highest degree. You just won’t allow him to really see you, to understand you. 

Eventually, he snaps. Just not in the typical yandere way. We all know that Armin feels as though he is a nuisance, a self-proclaimed burden so he keeps most of his feelings inside, and lets them loose to either prove a point, or while under stress. 

It takes a minute for him to decide what to do with you, because he knows that once he has made a choice, it has to be the right choice. He has to know and map out a detailed plan, whether it’s doable, whether he’s able to pull it off by himself, etc.

His analytical skills come into play, and he plans everything from the location, time, the equipment needed at exactly what time. By this time, he will have comepletely left you alone; abrupt and brash, and just as he planned, you were surprised. Yes, he wanted to get to know you, and you couldn’t help but feel even slightly violated and maybe even disturbed. 

Your like anyone in the world, have natural curiosity and interest in just about anything. But the unfamiliar feeling of unsettlement around Armin just felt…off.

You secretly knew of his deep infatuation; people always seemed to determined to figure the silent types out, to crack them open, decipher their many secrets. In terms of this analogy, you sort of understand, maybe even sympathise with his endless novelty toward your character, but even so…just why?

Maybe it was the fact that you felt bad for him, in a sad, puppy love kinda way. Maybe you saw him as a traumatized individual, just putting his assumed coping mechanism to work, with you just in the innocent line of fire. 

If he kidnaps you at all, Armin will smother you. Telling you how much you mean to him, explaining that only he can access your wonder and intrigue. Because, after all, he worked this hard to get you; why would he ever share you with anyone else? 

Although he will be stern, he’ll always be nice about it, rewarding you or not. 

You’re an enigma to Armin Arlert, keeping him guessing, testing his patience with all of your being. You don’t know it, but soon you’ll be in his possession.

I headcanon him as seeing your refusal, your blatant rejection as some kind of ‘disease.’ You haven’t even seen the best of him yet, why make up your mind about something that you know almost nothing of? Oh well, you’ll have plenty of time to get to know each other very soon. He’ll bare his injured soul to you, and you’ll have mo choice but to do the same for him. It’s what married couples do after all, right?

Just let him love you, Y/N. Let Armin adore you. It’s the best thing to do if you want everyone to live.

Glassy, still sapphire eyes simply stared at you in the weak light of a stolen candle. You couldn’t quite pinpoint what they were saying, those beautiful, dangerous, albeit loving eyes. But yet, they also held malice in their abyss’. Endless, bottomless, simply divine they were. That was all you knew.

“Why…do you lie to me?” he murmered. A small, rough palm came to rest against your hollowed cheek, fingertips gently tapping against the skin. Realising how close he truly was, you tried your hardest to get away, shifting in your place in the surprisingly plush, old bed, but all it took was a flash of blonde hair to whip past your face, before he succeeded in holding your arms down.

While he never did this explicitly to punish or harm you, Armin always knew just how to exert his power. Never mind the boundaries that he installed in you the day of your arrival; he didn’t care for them as much as you had to pretend to.

This Armin was unhinged. Normalcy could never be considered in this relationship. He could never understand the pain he put you through. To Armin, it was all in the name of his devotion. All of his interest had been rooted in one fact; you refused to love him.

Once he figured out that you wouldn’t couldn’t love him of your own accord, he became enamoured with something he just knew he could never have.

He had never even thought about taking you, drugging you, dragging you to a secluded spot in the woods, or an out of bounds room, derelict over many years.

“I never intended to take you like this, bunny.”

Swallowing hard, you tried to look him in the eyes, gently lifting your head higher and higher until his blue pools of mere unhinged insanity met your own pained orbs. Seeming to like this, he smiled.

His perfect teeth looked more like fangs in the dim, weak moonlight. It had felt like he had managed to suck every molecule of beauty from even the most simple of things.

His voice sounded like the devil; harsh, unforgiving lilting tones of false hope daring to stroke you face and make you think you had a good chance at happiness.

You didn’t know when he stopped being Armin and began being a monster. You didn’t know if the lines could be blurred any further.

“I never wanted this, Armin-” 

“Don’t play with me, bunny,” he snapped. His slender fingers wound themselves in your clean hair, twisting and searching for a soft spot to pull. When he found it, he lightly tugged; barely, but you still winced from the thought of the last time he did this. 

You still wanted to believe that he was quiet, sweet Armin who still had an unstoppable fascination with you, but he was harmless then. Or was he? Was he faking his intentions? Did he have it planned from the very beginning? 

You wanted to choke yourself for believing his simple demeanour, his dedication to the cause of the Survey Corps just like everyone else. He was a liar. He was a predator in all ways, ensnaring you, his perfect prey. 

Only now had Armin realized just how confused you were. 

You didn’t understand his love for you. You thought he hated you! 

Now that wouldn’t do.

Armin could have have kicked himself. All of his stern discipline and rules stemming from his love and protection meant that you mistook for him being cruel. He was doing this out of his devotion! 

How could he assume you would understand if he never told you, if he never proved his love?

“Armin, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything, I swear-” You took a deep breath, cutting yourself off. Now was not the place or time to be losing your composure; you still were trying to get used to the fact that you were being held against your will. 

“Hush”, he suddenly murmured, gently taking your chin in his fingertips, before moving them to tenderly cup your face, his eyes darting anywhere that he could lay his gaze upon.

The gestures were so tender you found your cheeks erupting with a wild blush, the burning shame hitting you moments later when your hatred and slight fear hit you like a slap to the face. 

Your embarassment only got worse when you felt his soft lips kiss your throat, his warm breath flush against your skin. His hands found themselves back in your hair again, stroking it, petting it, twisting it round and round his finger. His right hand caressed your nape, spreading his fingers so that they only just covered the width of your neck, and he pulled you closer, so that your head was nuzzled into his neck, buried beneath his love and fascination.

It all clicked. 

Armin wasn’t just interested in you. 

He was obessed with you.

Obsessively in love with you. 

You felt pathetic. You felt weak. But in a strange way, you also felt loved. 

You had no choice but to resign yourself to his touch, letting your head fall limp as he cradled you to his chest.

“Good bunny.”

[haztory]

hello hello ! first, congratulations on 300 !! and if you are still taking requests, may i request the angst dialouge “Can you look at me? Please?” with nanami ? thank you & keep up the wonderful work !! :)

“Can you look at me? Please?” from my writing event! (come request something)

warnings: angst, only angst

nanami kento x gn reader

“Tilt your head upwards,” Two fingers prod against your chin, gentle yet firm pressure lifting your face and pressing a wet cloth onto the surface of your cheekbone.

It stings, worse than any regular cut that splits the skin. The wound having been laced and imbued with a cursed poison, the kind that simultaneously numbs and burns the surrounding area. Given only when you were taken off guard, caught too hastily in your preoccupation with the man currently standing in front of you instead of the fight at hand.

A foolish mistake on your part— one you understand the gravity of quite thoroughly, even without the disapproving stares and the extended periods of silence that weigh heavily onto you, imparted by the stoic man and impromptu healer.

Nanami halts his movement, his hand hovering over the injury, and his dark eyes— laced entirely too much with dismay— flicker quickly towards yours, of which you pointedly avoid. 

He waits, silent in his plaguing stare that truthfully discomforts you more than the injury itself; He waits for your sighs of pain to subside, waits for you to meet his gaze. Waits for you to understand that behind the neutrality of his stature and the calmness of his demeanor as he led you back from the mission and into the sanctity of his office at the school, lies a brewing lecture of turmoil and overwhelming disappointment.

You didn’t have to look at him to know that, though.

“Are you alright?” He asks after a minute of heavy silence fills the space of the room. He towers over your seated body, feeling miles away in superiority and physicality despite being right in front of you, his hands touching your face and your knee placed between his open legs. He couldn’t be any closer, not with the rich musk of his cologne swirling around you and the heat of him transferring itself onto you.

And yet, you couldn’t feel further from him. 

“Yeah,” keeping your eyes downturned, you mutter lowly, “‘m fine.”

His hand lowers and with it he drops the rag onto the surface of the table. He sighs, the weight of his stress and the exhaustion from the mission exhaling into the air, settling heavily on top of the already apparent displeasure with the situation. 

With you.

You can only push your head down farther and slink away from the expanse of his body in some feeble effort to minimize the extent of your burden on him, even if you may have had good intentions upon doing so.

If only you hadn’t gotten distracted; If only you remembered that out of the two of you, he was the more qualified sorcerer. There was no need to be so concerned for the likes of his safety, especially not when your own was so intensely threatened in that moment. If only you hadn’t turned your head, yelled his name, pleaded for him to move— 

“(Y/N),” Nanami says, voice soft and silky yet still. Foundational. A pillar that pushes itself into the whirlwind of your thoughts and refuses to budge, forcing you to acknowledge it. To acknowledge him and the depth of the irreparable impression you’ve made on him.

You can hear his words before he even says it, forced to sit with the impeding knowledge of the fate of this conversation and take the daggers of despair that will no doubt pierce every part of your fragile heart as he points out the obvious mistake you made. Droles on about how imperative it is to keep business and feelings separate.

Reminds you of the vow he made upon becoming a sorcerer.

Why couldn’t you have just— 

“Can you look at me?” 

You can’t. 

You can’t have him see that as much as he may be disappointed in you, you are even more so disappointed in yourself. Understanding full and well what your mistake means, even if it is something as simple as a cut on the cheek. You can’t have him see and confirm the large crack that has been made in the solid wall of duty to your occupation that can no longer be reversed. 

If you look at him, if you so much as make eye contact with him, he will know the weakness that you possess, the disadvantage you carry with you into every mission. The sharp Achilles heel that has made itself abundantly clear before the two of you and every cursed spirit that saw you stumble. 

Nanami Kento, in whatever fashion he may exist, has the entirety of your attention in the palm of his hand and the cool swing of his arm. And try as you might devote your focus to any matter at hand, you can never successfully win the battle in keeping him out of your thoughts. 

Nanami Kento is the root of your mistake and the inevitable reason behind your downfall. You’ve known it for far too long, and now, he does too. A prophecy in the making, a tragic tale playing its beginning notes before you that’s too sweet for you to try and end.

But he will. 

He will know of the taint in your commitment to this life, the compromise of your duty and the manner in which he plays an active part in it, and he will remove it in the name of safety. 

Dread fills your stomach.

“Please?” He tries again, quieter this time. 

Soft yet firm, comforting, and wrapped in the linen of silk. Lined with the scent of his musk and coated entirely in a sweet, dripping concoction that refreshed you with one word alone. The sweetest of tones that have your heart accelerating with the single word alone.

You want more, you need more for as long as you can have it. That is your prophecy, the destiny written in the fate of your stars and consolidated by the sharpness of his cheekbones and the gentleness of his touch.

He is error in your duty that you can no longer see as a mistake. You’re not sure you ever saw it as a mistake.

You look up at him, throbbing pain in your cheek no longer felt, instead replaced with the sorrows of his eyes and the slow push of the dagger in your heart. Propelled by him, his hand wrapped around the ornate handle, with your own settled on top of it, guiding its entry, because you have done this to yourself.

You fell in love with someone who could not be loved, who did not want to be loved.

And worst of all, you laid it bare before him when you prioritized his safety over your own. You bear the physical mark of your profession that swirls with draining poison that he gentle tries to patch up. A wound that he tries to heal and leave with no trace of himself in its wake.

His mouth remains closed as you finally meet his gaze, but his eyes tell you everything you need to know.

There’s the furrow in his brow and pity in his stare as he whispers, “You shouldn’t have done that.”

The malice you expected is absent, replaced with a saddened realization of the truth that you both tried so hard to avoid. You find that you would’ve much preferred a furious lecture than whatever this is.

This pathetic rejection on the basis of violated principles and foolish duty; A halting of something that hadn’t even had the chance to begin.

You should feel something, something deep and burning in you pointed desperately at him, for depriving you of the chance of a truthful embrace. But you can only hum, a wry one that punches him in the gut, even when you try to keep it void from all emotion.

“I know.”

He tries to find some consolation in the fact that you at least know that your feelings were meant to die here. He should feel less guilty in the admittance that you never bought into the enticing fantasy of living a domestic life with him, a romantic and fulfilling one in which things could end happily and your jobs weren’t the brutal forces of despair.

He should feel some relief in knowing that you knew as much as him that it was better to leave things unsaid, than to act on them, for then, he could keep you close without having to acknowledge the blurring boundaries.

It doesn’t though. Only leaves him with an aching hollow in his chest and a pain reverberating along his spine.

If only you didn’t know that this love was a tragedy in the making, then maybe he could’ve given you a reason to hate him. He could’ve broken your heart brutally, right here and now, and sleep peacefully at night knowing that you truly believed him to be an insignificant monster that ruined a chance of happiness.

Maybe you could’ve believed him to be an end of a route that would lead to a better future, one that you unabashedly deserved.

But you do know. You’ve carried the truth of that burden alongside him, and you admit it. That’s the worst part.

Nanami sighs again in some effort to exhale the heavy weight that lumps in his throat. It’s futile. His eyes drift, if only to break themselves from your own sorrowful gaze, but much like you, he finds himself inevitably being drawn back—unable to stray from the entrancing state of your eyes.

Unable to stop himself from gazing at the long-awaited happiness he finally found in your irises. The one he longed for.

His hand cups around the back of your neck, bringing your foreheads together and noses bumping gently into one another. The closest he can let you be to him, without breaking his dutiful promise.

He breathes you in shamelessly, memorizes the feel of your skin against his, closes his eyes and imagines that for just a moment, he could have you without restraint in this space. You do the same, soaking in the forbidden lifetime of forever in this brief second. You wish, that in all his empathy and compassion for those around him—that in his exorbitant effort to minimize the extent of the damage his eventual death will amass—he will give you just a minute more; Just a second more to keep him close.

Reality is never that kind.

He pulls away, stray strands of blonde falling in front of his forehead that he hardly minds as he picks the rag up once more and places it in your hand.

“Keep this on the wound. I’ll go find the first-aid.”

He turns, quick in his motion and set in his path as he makes his way to the door. Leaving you and the air of lost infinite possibilities behind. He opens it, and just as he is about to step out, he pauses.

“After tonight I will put in my request for reassignment. I’ll make sure they pair you with someone capable. And from now on, it would be best to distance ourselves. We should avoid making a mistake of this kind again.”

And then he leaves, shutting the door quietly behind him, no room for argument in the bluntness of his words. No room for interpretation. Not even a brief hesitation as he confirmed that his vow of loneliness would trump any attempt of momentary happiness he could have found with you.

A statement, strict and concise, affirming what you already knew. You could love Nanami Kento all you wanted, and you could hope and plead desperately that he would love you too, but in the end, all that would be left was the fruits of your mistake.

No.

Not a mistake.

Only a love that was lost before it could even be found.

a/n: apparently the only thing I know how to write for nanami is angst. hope you enjoyed this one anon!!! feel free to request more!! and thank you for the congrats!!

[the-fae-folk]

What is a Fairy?

I suppose they probably need some explanation, especially nowadays. Fairies (Faeries, Fay, Fey, Fae, or even Fair Folk) could be considered a type of mythical being. Some have described them as spirits, others as ghosts of the deceased, some deified ancestors, prehistoric precursors to humans, personifications of nature, pagan deities, or even angels and demons in the way of Christian traditions. Often they encompass a metaphysical aspect, being depicted as spirits or beings who transcend the physical universe and world that we know. Or given features of the Supernatural, such as magic or extrasensory perception, which allow them to violate or go beyond the laws of nature. Even sometimes Preternatural, which something abnormal or strange and explainable but still within the boundaries of the natural laws of the universe (for example I could say someone is a preternaturally good cellist, and mean that they are impossibly good beyond expectations or even belief, but I’m not saying that they are actually magical...just that their apparent abilities and how they gained them are unknown and very strange to me.) But what is a fairy? Well you already know what some of them look like. Many people might immediately picture Tinkerbell from the animated Disney feature film, or even from the original Peter Pan novel by J. M. Barrie. And they would be correct, in part. Tinkerbell is a depiction of a Pixie, a specific type of fairy. But there are lots of fairy types, I don’t actually think there’s a complete list. (I should probably try to make one at some point, but no promises.) During some points in history the label of fairy was used to mean magical beings who had a mostly human shape. Gnomes, leprechauns, goblins, pixies, dwarfs, elfs, etc etc etc. And at other points it also included non humanoid magical creatures such as Unicorns, Dragons, Kelpie, Basilisk, and more (Sometimes these were referred to as Fairy Creatures). So where did they come from? Well the funny thing is that Fairies don’t actually come from only one area or set of myths. They are a strange combination of the folklore from all over Europe (and possibly beyond) and include ideas and stories from Celtic, Scandinavian, Nordic, Germanic, French, and English Folklore and Mythology. As these stories were passed around and intermingled and changed they brought about the collective creatures we know today as the Fae or Fairies. The Renaissance, Romantic Era, Victorian Era, Edwardian Era, and even the Celtic Revival Movement of the 19th and 20th centuries all had their influences on the stories and ideas connected with the Fairy folk, some significantly less helpful than others. Even the Fantasy Literature Genre, with Tolkien at its forefront, has added and changed much about people’s view on these creatures. So lets talk about some basic things you’ll want to know when dealing with Fairies. The first thing you might want to remember is that many people view the Tuatha Dé Danann (Supernatural gods, goddesses, heroes, and kings of Irish Mythology) as being the source for Faeries, or at least one of the strongest influences. Celtic Folklore and culture is easily one of the most visible bits of Faerie lore that you can find these days, but there’s a lot more that starts showing up when you begin to dig. Another thing to note is that the Renaissance, Romantic Era, Victorian Era, Edwardian Era, and the Celtic Revival Movement had a massive influence on how people saw fairies. They would mix folklore from different areas of Europe, attempted to prove the existence of fairies through scientific means, created artistic depictions of fairies, and much more. Often they sanitized and shrunk the fairies until they were mostly harmless or relegated to the outskirts of human life as a curiosity. Which brings me to the next point. In a lot of older folklore, from all over Europe, fairy beings are often depicted as being incredibly dangerous. Kidnapping humans or human babies, causing crops to wither, water to dry up, food to rot. They could lure people in with magic into a fairy ring of mushrooms and make them dance forever or make them forget their life. Sometimes they even played with time itself. A person could dance with the fairies only to find that they’ve been gone a hundred years when they try to go home. And many beliefs have depictions of some kind of Otherworld, a world apart from our own, or layered over it like an extra dimension we are unable to perceive or directly interact with. Sometimes its a land of the dead or a hidden underground kingdom, other times is a strange and fantastical country with its own laws and ways of doing things. As these stories meshed together we got what is known as Fairyland. The land which the fairies dwell in. Though some believe they simply live on Earth, hidden in the wild, or among us. Some reoccurring ideas are often connected with fairies, though not all have stayed the same as the original lore they were born from. The idea that Faeries, for whatever reason, are unable to or will not lie. This is a very important idea because the Folk are also simultaneously depicted as deceptive. Like particularly vicious lawyers they will play with words, never quite lying, but purposefully leading you astray or tricking you into a bad deal. They will often obey an oath, promise, or deal exactly to the letter, but ignore the intent behind it in order to twist it to their own benefit or amusement. Whether or not fairies are immortal depends entirely on where you draw your folklore from. Sometimes they are immortal; deathless, not mortal. Unable to die in spite of starvation, terrible wounds, age, or anything else. They are bound to life for all time. But some stories depict the stranger Fae Folk as being Eternal. Beyond time, always having existed and always existing, sometimes cycling, sometimes directionless and boundless and everything. Some tough concepts to get your head around, but nobody really agrees which one fairies are. In some folklore they’re even depicted as mortal, same as you and I, but a lot longer lived and harder to kill. A reoccurring motif in older Folklore is the need of humans to try and ward off fairies with charms and totems. When they were not depicted as outright malicious and dangerous, sometimes being thought to cause illness and death or bring about disastrous misfortune or steal a person’s name and voice, fairies were still mischievous and valiantly unhelpful. So people had all kinds of lucky charms to protect from them: like four leaf clovers, various plants, or actions like wearing your clothes inside out to confuse them. Iron is said in many beliefs to burn them, and certain herbs they view as sacred and will refrain from touching the bearer. A few more things. Christianity plays an important part in this discussion, though many people don’t like that. In many places myths and legends were wiped out by Christianity, either intentionally or simply by the very fact that it was trying to convert people in Europe and old pagan beliefs were seen as nonsensical. But still stories persisted despite this. Many old Myths and Folkloric beliefs were recorded for posterity by Christians, and some stories were altered and we are unable to see exactly how much (Beowulf). A lot of fairy stories remained too, only Christianity painted them as fallen angels or even demons of a kind, who could be kept away from Holy Ground, or were forced to kidnap humans to pay a tithe to Hell (or be taken themselves if they couldn’t pay). So folk beliefs, though generally discouraged by the church as superstition, remained quite strong all over Europe for a very long time. The last three things you need to know. One, there are many people who still believe in Fairies, though their beliefs often vary, sometimes wildly. Witches who claim to work with them. People who believe in them through their religions (usually pagans and other non christian groups). People who claim to have encountered or been abducted by them. And many others. While I personally do not believe in Fairies (though I like to keep an open mind, just in case), I do believe that the beliefs, cultures, and and rights of these people ought to be respected. Which leads me to other mythical beings that are similar to Fairies but hail from cultures and peoples outside of Europe. It might be tempting to label some of the spirits from various Native North American Tribes or from Chinese Folklore (or many others) as fairies. Don’t do that. If Fairies are real, you have to consider that there might be other mythical beings who fall under different categories and groups. And even if they are not real, it is extremely disrespectful to the people of those cultures to take their stories, myths, beliefs, and folklore and try to mesh it in with European Folklore. (this is exactly what the Victorian and Edwardian Era were guilty of.) And finally... Some people might tell you that they know everything there is to know about Fairies. Don’t believe them. Even I, who have spent years and years studying European Faerie Folklore, find new things about them every day. I have sources I’ve found and haven’t yet had the time to look into, areas of study I’ve had to neglect. There is so much about Fairies to explore that it’s quite literally impossible for any one person to know all of it. Personally I’m doubtful that a single person can even know an eighth of it all, you can hardly imagine how much there is. And while there is a great deal of it buried on the internet, there is even more offline. Books which are out of print or have never had their contents uploaded, cultural stories passed down in various European groups which are saved from oblivion only by the oratory tradition, and the remains of all kinds of long dead or vastly changed civilizations who believed in the Fairies and tried to work with or avoid or appease them. All the misinformation and personal gnoses out there also make it a lot harder to find accurate information about traditional folklore. And that’s not even counting the multitude of inventions and ideas spawned by fictional literature surrounding fairies. There is simply too much. But of course... Since when has something being impossible ever stopped a human from trying anyway? If you’re still interested, then who am I to discourage you? Go, jump right in. There’s so much to learn about the Faerie Folk.

[max--phillips]

This is the post I was planning on making.

Everything I say here can be applied to any celebrity (or… any person, really), regardless of gender or race or whatever. This isn’t just about Pedro Pascal (though I will likely use him as an example a handful of times since he’s the only celebrity I actually give a shit about right now). This is about a pervasive problem in fandom as a whole, in my experience. This is about consent, this is about sexualization, fetishization, and commodification, this is about privacy, this is about boundaries, this is about the separation of real life and fiction.

It is not okay to speculate about a stranger’s genitals, even if they’re in the public eye. That’s gross, that’s weird, that’s a violation of consent, that’s sexual harassment. Unless this person consensually shared an image of their junk (be it on social media or in a movie or whatever), it’s not your business. If you can see their dick through their pants, you should automatically assume that wasn’t intentional unless you are explicitly told otherwise by that person, and ignore it. It can be embarrassing for someone to find out they were that exposed, and for people to make a big deal of it? That can be harmful. Same goes for if you can see someone’s nipples through their shirt or something.

It is not okay to dig through pictures of someone to find instances where you can see their dick through their pants/up their skirt/their nipples through their shirt/etc, or nip slips or similar things. It’s a violation of consent and it’s sexual harassment. If they wanted you to see that kind of thing, they would share images of themselves consensually. End of.

It is not okay to fetishize someone based on their race, nationality, or ethnicity. Any time you make a statement bringing those things into the equation and using it to assume something about a person, you’re enforcing racist stereotypes. Assuming that a black man is well endowed simply based on the fact that he’s black is fetishizing him for his race, and is also sexual harassment. Giving a stranger’s genitals a nickname based on their nationality is fetishizing them for that nationality, and is also sexual harassment. Assuming that any woman of color is hypersexual is fetishizing her for her race, nationality, and/or ethnicity, and could be considered sexual harassment based on how you use that information.

It is not okay to sexualize someone without their consent. This sort of thing includes catcalling, making unwanted comments, sending unsolicited dick pics, making unwanted advances, writing real person fic/erotica about a real person, making explicit sexual comments about a person without their knowledge or consent on a public platform, and some of the things above that are considered fetishizing someone for their race/ethnicity/nationality.

On that note: it is perfectly fine and acceptable and normal to find someone you don’t know attractive and have fantasies about them. We all do. But, you should keep explicit fantasies and sexual comments to yourself or in private conversations. Otherwise, you’re sexualizing them without their consent.

It is not okay to assume you can sexualize someone based on the fact they are in the public eye. Celebrities are human beings, they are not products for us to consume. We have to respect them, respect their boundaries, their privacy, and take their consent or lack thereof very seriously.

It is not okay to dig through someone’s pictures to look for clues about their personal life they haven’t otherwise disclosed. If they wanted you to know something, they would tell you. It’s none of your business. This includes their dating life, where they live, who they live with, their sexuality, and a litany of other things. To dig for this information is a violation of privacy, and could ultimately become a stalking situation if it goes too far. This is also crossing boundaries this person may have set up for what information they want others to know. Maybe it could out this person to someone they didn’t want to come out to, maybe this could open up an opportunity for an abuser or stalker to locate them, maybe this could get someone in trouble unjustly with the law, and so on and so forth.

It is important to realize that there is a massive difference between writing fanfiction about characters and fanfiction about a real life person. You don’t know everything about the person you’re writing rpf about, you’re making a lot of assumptions, you could be sexualizing them without their consent, and you’re likely crossing a lot of boundaries in writing that. However, characters are fictional; they don’t have boundaries, they don’t have feelings, you may not know everything about them but you can make it up without fearing you’ll offend someone. You can still fetishize them and be racist, but that’s another can of worms I don’t have time to open right now, but would be glad to if you have questions about it some other time. Fictional characters were made to be put into fictional, made up scenarios. Take advantage of that.

And no, writing sexual content about fictional characters played by the same person is not the same thing as sexualizing the actor. Just as writing sexual content about the characters in a book is not the same thing as sexualizing the author. There’s a disconnect, and an important one.

So, in conclusion: Don’t be racist. Don’t invade people’s privacy. Don’t sexualize people without their consent. That’s all I ask. That’s it.

[senorarelojes]

Ficlet: Violator (1/1)

Summary: This prompt from @songsofgayanddevotion and @raphinas: "basically, dave goes to have a prostate exam and alans the doctor and basically dave comes over the table while alan is checking him LMAOOOOO" Rating: Mature

.

When Dave opened the door, he thought he’d gotten the wrong office at first. “Oh, sorry,” he said hesitantly, hovering in the doorway. At Dr. Miller’s desk was an immensely good-looking young man who was scanning a clipboard, his eyebrows raised inquiringly at Dave. “Erm, I think I’ve got the wrong office--” Dave began.

“Are you David Gahan?” the man said pleasantly before rising to his feet. He was a little taller than Dave, six feet of trim muscle in neatly pressed grey trousers and a black Oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. It was a world away from the casual polo tees and slacks that Dr. Miller favoured. “You’re here for the prostate check?”

Dave only belatedly realised his mouth was hanging open when the bloke’s eyebrows inched higher, waiting for Dave’s response. “Um, yeah, yeah that’s right,” he said hurriedly, stepping into the office and closing the door behind him. “Sorry, I was expecting Dr. Dan Miller--”

“He’s down with a very bad flu,” the bloke said, before offering his hand. He had the longest, most elegant fingers Dave had ever seen, and Dave forced himself not to think about where those fingers would be later. “I’m Dr. Alan Wilder, I’m the locum taking over his patients for today.”

“Oh. Um. Cool.” Dave shook his hand a little awkwardly, trying not to notice the nice firm grip of Dr. Wilder’s handshake. “I’m Dave Gahan.”

Dr. Wilder’s mouth curled up a little in amusement. It somehow made him even more attractive; Dave was fucking doomed. “Yes, I know,” Dr. Wilder said, tilting the clipboard at Dave. “Do have a seat, Mr. Gahan.”

“Dave!” he blurted out, before realising that Dr. Wilder was staring at him. “I mean, Dave is fine. No need for Mr. Gahan.”

“Sure.” Dr. Wilder just smiled at him, and Dave decided this must be divine punishment for all the grief he’d put his mother through as a wayward teenager. “So I read through your files, and I understand you told Dr. Miller that you had concerns about prostate cancer.”

Dave nodded, feeling a bit more settled back on familiar territory. “Yeah, my uncle was diagnosed with it last month. And I don’t know the medical history of my dad - my bio dad - so I thought I should get it checked on.”

Dr. Wilder simply nodded without judgement. “You’re in your 30s now, so you’re not in the typical at-risk group for prostate cancer. Still, whenever family history is involved, it is understandable if you have concerns.”

Dave let out a long breath, relieved that Dr. Wilder seemed to be taking him seriously for now. Besides, Dr. Wilder had a very calm, relaxing manner about him that felt infectious, something about his voice that was pleasant and soothing. Dave would pay money to hear this bloke read audiobooks.

Then again, Dave would also pay to hear and see the very handsome Dr. Wilder do a whole manner of other things.

“So what’s going to happen now are two things,” Dr. Wilder explained. “First, we will conduct a Digital Rectal Exam, which would be a physical examination by a trained physician to see if you have an enlarged prostate. Then we will also do a blood test to check your prostate-specific antigen levels.”

“Right.” Dave desperately tried to ignore the heat suffusing his face. He wasn’t going to blush in front of a medical professional because of a fucking prostate exam. “Yup, I get that.”

Here, Dr. Wilder hesitated. “It’s important that you feel comfortable with the doctor conducting the digital rectal exam,” he said quietly. “If you would rather have Dr. Miller do the test with you, we can reschedule--”

“No I want you,” Dave said a little too quickly. His face felt like it was on fire as Dr. Wilder’s smile curled up in amusement again. “I mean-- fuck, sorry. I meant I don’t mind you doing it.”

“If you’re sure.” Dr. Wilder was already pulling the drawer open and taking out a box of latex gloves, so hell yes, Dave was fucking sure.

Dave tried not to look too eager as he unbuttoned his jeans and shed them, going to where Dr. Wilder was telling him to stand. “Could you take off your briefs, then bend over the examination bed?” Dr. Wilder politely asked him, and Dave had to bite his tongue so he wouldn’t respond that he would do anything Dr. Wilder asked him to that involved beds and getting naked. Slipping off his briefs and folding them on top of his jeans in a neat pile, Dave shivered a little at the cold air hitting his exposed bottom.

Getting into position as he leaned against the bed, Dave heard the snap of Dr. Wilder’s gloves, along with his footsteps coming closer. “Relax,” Dr. Wilder said, a cool hand resting on Dave’s bum. “I’m a doctor.”

Dave could only nod in response, not trusting himself to speak. Already he could smell Dr. Wilder’s clean scent, a mix of aftershave and a faint whiff of tobacco. Dave closed his eyes, thinking about Dr. Wilder’s hands on his body, touching the most intimate of places that only his ex-wives had breached. He could also feel the heat emanating off Dr. Wilder’s body behind him, and Dave couldn’t help thinking about what the man would feel like in bed, spooning behind Dave and fucking him from behind, that sly refined mouth pressing kisses to Dave’s neck.

To Dave’s horror, his dick started taking a very keen interest in Dr. Wilder’s nearness as well as the lurid fantasies running through Dave’s head. “It’s fine,” Dr. Wilder reassured him, his voice dropping to that low and relaxing tone again. “Don’t worry about it, it happens to patients sometimes.”

Dave was thankful that Dr. Wilder was both acknowledging his erection while not being weird about it or put off. “I don’t, I’m sorry--”

“Relax, Dave.” The silky way Dr. Wilder said his name made Dave jerk a little, his cock starting to leak over the sterile paper sheets on the examination bed.

Now Dave could hear the squirting of lube from a pump bottle, then Dr. Wilder slicking his fingers. “Spread your legs a little wider,” Dr. Wilder said, and maybe it was Dave’s imagination but the doctor’s voice sounded a little rougher than normal. “Mmm yes, that’s good. Open up for me.”

Dave bit back a moan as he felt Dr. Wilder’s finger slipping inside him, slowly at first so as to help him get used to the intrusion. “Okay?” Dr. Wilder asked, his voice so gentle that Dave fought the temptation to turn around and kiss the living daylights out of him.

“Yeah.” Dave kept his breaths slow and easy, biting down on his forearm as Dr. Wilder slid in a second finger, in and out of Dave in an easy glide. “Keep-keep going.”

Dr. Wilder didn’t say anything, but he pressed a comforting hand on the small of Dave’s back while his fingers inside Dave were searching around for his prostate. This time Dave couldn’t hold back the moan when Dr. Wilder finally found it, pressing on it gently and making Dave leak embarrassing amounts of pre-come all over the covered bed.

“All right?” Dr. Wilder was definitely breathing faster now, even though his voice was still even, but Dave was too busy rolling his hips back, greedily demanding for more pressure from those talented fingers, too far gone with pleasure to care about propriety and inappropriate doctor-patient boundaries and getting sued by the hospital. All he cared about was the insanely hot man behind him with his fingers sending Dave through waves and waves of toe-curling pleasure, on the brink of one of the most intense orgasms he would ever experience.

“Dave--” Dr. Wilder sounded so breathless and stunned that when his fingers crooked against Dave’s prostate again, Dave came and came with a resounding yell, spurting all over the bed and his own bare feet, his legs shaking so hard that they almost couldn’t hold him up. Dave was gasping for air, trying to recover from the brain-melting orgasm as his head thunked down on the bed.

Oh fuck, Dave thought, remembering that Dr. Wilder definitely did not sign up to finger fuck one of his patients into oblivion. Shakily standing upright, Dave turned around with a litany of apologies at the ready. “Fucking hell, I’m so sorry--”

Dr. Wilder was staring at him, his cheeks pink with pleasure and his eyes brighter than stars. His gaze dropped down to Dave’s mouth, and Dave suddenly realised - with a white-hot pleasure - that he had nothing to be embarrassed about because the doctor was licking his lips while staring at Dave’s dripping cock.

“I, uhh--” Dr. Wilder quickly took off his gloves before handing Dave a box of tissues. “I will give you a while to clean up, Mr. Gahan. Someone else will be along shortly to help you. Sorry about that.”

“What do you-- wait!” Dave called out as Dr. Wilder left the examination room, but it was too late.

***

After Dave had finished cleaning up and putting on his jeans again, a nurse came in and apologetically told him that Dr. Wilder had been called to assist with an emergency, so Dr. Miller would follow up with Dave next week about his test results. “Emergency my arse,” Dave grumbled under his breath as the nurse led him out. Outside, Dr Wilder was nowhere to be seen.

Then Dave had an idea.

He only had to wait outside the hospital for about 15 minutes before he spotted Dr. Wilder heading to the designated smoking area, looking a bit shaken as he dug around for his cigarettes. When Dave walked up to him, Wilder avoided his eyes. “If you have any complaints, you can lodge them with the hospital,” he said in a tired voice.

Dave gaped at him. “Wh- wait, why would I want to lodge a complaint?” he said in amazement. “I came to fuckin’ apologise to you, mate.”

“Oh.” Dr. Wilder took a deep drag of his cigarette, a bit confused. “So you’re not mad I took advantage of you?”

Dave stepped a little closer, taking Dr. Wilder’s cigarette from him for his own drag. “As long as you’re not mad I came all over your table.”

They smoked in silence for a while, at least until one of the nurses popped her head out of the back door and called Dr. Wilder’s name, saying his next patient was here. Dr. Wilder stubbed out the cigarette, looking carefully at Dave.

“They warned us about this in pre-med, you know,” Dr. Wilder said with a little smile. “Being attracted to one of your patients. Never happened to me until today.”

Dave’s grin at him was so wide that it was hurting his cheeks a little. “Well, when Dan Miller comes back, I won’t be your patient anymore, will I?”

Dr. Wilder’s smile widened in response. “No, I suppose not.”

“Then it’s a date.” Dave grabbed his arm, taking the pen from his pocket and writing his number on Dr. Wilder’s arm. “So you don’t have to nick my mobile from my personal data.”

“Because that would be wrong.” Dr. Wilder smirked at him before heading back inside, leaving Dave laughing at the smoking area.

[braided-roses]

What is the best way to tease someone?

A 3,449 word essay broadly covering the methods with which we tease

Twenty-five minute read

"There can be no true despair without hope... I will feed the people of Gotham hope to poison their souls."

Bane: Dark Knight Rises

“Without hope, there is no despair. There is only meaningless suffering.”

D. Morgenstern

For this essay I will define teasing as a playfully enforced delay of indulgence. While the above quotes are dark for sure, and do not directly apply to this topic, I think they highlight aspects of teasing that are foundational to its differences from other forms of play. I believe there can be no true teasing without hope of gaining one's desire. If one feels they cannot reach their goal or desire, I believe that becomes an expression of submission to another, to the situation, but not a teasing of the mind.

Studying the possibilities of this field of play is one that takes special care because it draws on what we know about our counterparts like few other disciplines do. It requires us to first know what our counterpart desires most, and how to then playfully enforce the delay of indulging in that desire. Finding out what another craves, and creating structures with which to playfully impede the immediate gratification of that craving are challenging enough on their own, but combining these working pieces of teasing into a system is incredibly complicated— requiring intimate knowledge of one's counterpart’s boundaries and turn offs. While there can be no best way to tease someone, because of our inherent human complexities, this essay will attempt to put forth the best practices I know to have a mutually rewarding and pleasurable experience.

I think the first step in the process of teasing is to gain understanding; Get to know each other, build understanding, rapport and trust. This knowledge may be gained through focused, play specific conversations. Communicating in this way allows effective play to happen sooner. For example one could have a conversation as brief as please rub my clit until you break my mind, I'll beg you to let me cum, but don't let me. I'll tell you to stop if something goes wrong, and we'll talk about it after. The two drawbacks of this style of conversation is that it will remove some surprise as there isn't enough information yet to synthesize possible play patterns on your own, and one will lack a whole understanding of the person one is going to play with.

If a more holistic experience is desired though, it comes through best, in many cases, through a conversation as broader life and fantasies are discussed over many conversations that take place naturally and organically. The bits of information that may apply to play may be more separated, but they come with so much more information that can all be used to generate a deeper relationship, and broader play. We learn about each other through the listening mentioned above, and in our turn sharing our own desires and hesitancies. We have to open up also so we can be cared for ourselves and build trust through reciprocated, honest, vulnerability. These conversations inform us and build trust as we learn that both sides hear each other, want good things for the pairing and will not shy away even from the more sexually hungry sides of each other.

While this type of understanding centered communication is meaningful on a grand, human scale, even in the comparably limited topic of teasing it is needed in many ways. First, that trust built will be necessary in teasing play as it often leads to walking the edge of what a person can handle in the moment, both mentally and physically. To what degree we can trust, we can relax our fears of being hurt, allowing us to enjoy each sensation with less calculation of how to protect ourselves, allowing us to live in the moment in proportion of our trust, and to have the confidence that our partner cares to hear us when we make objections. Secondly, the information gathered in good communication is essential in order to know: the desire we are waiting to fulfill, the stimuli we will later use to push our counterpart to the point until it consumes every bit of them, warn us of the stimuli that could end play terribly, and how to recover from that event should it happen.

Some examples of what we may learn about play in everyday life- You may learn how meaningful it is to your partner when you hold your partner's face in your hands as you kiss them, or he/she may ask you if the you like being made to chase them down in a kiss. They might mention how they love the pain of their workouts, or that high rep sets are their favorite because they get test how long they can go before their will breaks. Watching a movie, and seeing one of the couples depicted playfully kissing each other, your partner might reveal that pulling away from a kiss doesn’t read as a building of desire to them, instead it feels like one is trivializing their highest expression of love— Making them feel their love is disrespected and devolved into a game. These lessons should be drawn deeply within ourselves. Making note of what makes them feel loved and pleausured, and special note of what makes them feel awful. Violating these turnoffs by accident or design may have terrible trust breaking outcomes. It is important to understand the reasonings and depth of their dislikes. One's dislike may be superficial, like forms of pain that, with a different approach, can be enjoyable, but some, like the kiss, may be fundamental to their world view. (Example of what could be synthesized from the above person’s information may be found at the bottom — Bonus Example 2)

The second thing is to determine how you will delay their indulgence in what they crave, by means of space, time, or even their own will. All of these modes and tools can be used in vast and narrow applications. Space, for example, can be used in inches or miles. Suppose your submissive wanted to touch, but you knew they wanted to be teased even more than to rub. You could grab your trusty ropes and tie their hands, one to the bed post, and the other by way of slinging a rope through the head board. You could release the tension until their hand is an inch away from their most sensitive spot. They can twist and moan and beg as they can almost reach, their finger tips just able to move the sensitive flesh nearest their most sensitive spot. They could reach up and play with less sensitive spots, but they won’t be able to reach any more, at least not without raising their hips to their hand, which can become quite challenging. Space has now been used as a tease. A boundary on their experience that they cannot get out of, nor do they truly wish to escape. A second instance of space as a teasing tool, known as "The Kiss" will be given in my final example at the end of this essay (Bonus example 1)

As examples for time and space — At work, one could be sending sexy texts to their counterpart who decides to be a little bratty. The dominant in this exchange could text back, “Say that again and I’ll have to remind you what happens to brats when their dominant gets home.” Knowing that their submissive will have to wait hours longer for the thrill of the attention of the punishment they asked for. In the same way a domme could send, "You've been such a good boy today, working so hard at work. I’ll keep dinner hot for you." Attached to this text would be little gif of her rubbing herself for him. He too will have to endure the boundaries of time and space. Time has been a tease in that hours will pass before they get their desire. Space has been incorporated in time because even if all parties from the individual couples decided to meet in the middle somewhere, they'd still be teased by time as they cannot magically teleport home to cross the space (if you can, please teach me). An example of time alone being a tease would be giving a submissive a vibrator with only five or ten minutes charge left in it. They can play all they want with it, but they don't know how long it will last.

The previous examples examined using time in minutes or hours, Time, like space, though, is incremental. Time can be used in minutes, hours, or like in the next example, seconds. Suppose you had an exhibitionist submissive walk with you in the woods and told them that they will flash you whenever you want them to. Already they’d be excited to have their desire at hand, knowing you crave to see them exposed, as well as the desire to be under your caring control. As you two walk you command your submissive to flash you for a few seconds here and there. Blushing, but proud, they obey. You praise them appropriately and enjoy your walk. Eventually you two hear the distant, barley audible, murmurs and stompings of a team of hikers. This time you turn to your submissive, order them to stop walking and command them to flash you, they willingly obey, but the knowledge that hikers are approaching you they risk discovery. They can hear the hikers drawing closer and they continue to obey, trusting you. Each tenth of a second registering in their minds and each snap of a twig causing their heart to pound in excitement. Time has become a tool for this second by second tease. As soon as you hear the first full word of the hikers you know they are almost close enough to see, so you order your sub to cover. You then praise your sub highly for their perfect submission and continue on your walk, no hiker the wiser.

Will is unique among the teasing tools. Time and space exist outside of our bodies, but will is our’s alone to interact with. Of all the tools of teasing will is perhaps the most wicked and most variable of all. If your submissive is a lawful-good type and aims to please, then you could use their will as a tease and simply ask them to spread their legs and start to rub or stroke for you. Tell them that they are not to cum without your permission. The pleasure from their body mixes with the pleasure from their mind as they internalize the fact that they are uniquely pleasing you, hopefully bolstered by your praise. These stimuli serve to push against their will to obey. What makes this particular mode so wicked is that their desire to please and obey is fueling their mental pleasure. Their will to obey forces them to stay within the boundaries you set, or lose what they truly crave- the sensation of pleasing you. As they get closer and closer their requests turn to quivering moans and groans- the craved treat of a teasing dominant-. You tell them no, and they continue to obey, rubbing or stroking for you. Their requests are denied until they speak in pleadings and beggings. In a bounded, short term tease of ending play, you simply let them cum, and praise them for their perfect obedience. In a boundless, pushing kind of tease though, you could deny permission until they slip over the edge and spectacularly cum. This form of play, for an obedience minded submissive, will feel like disobedience to them. — You must reinforce the fact they did all they could to obey you. You wanted to find their limit and they showed you beautifully.

For long term teasing you could tell them they are not to cum without your permission, if they do they will be punished for it. This punishment is one they are okay with, but might not know. This leaves them to fight their own will for pleasure, obedience, freedom, and even pain. Lest they slip over the edge, they might force themselves to stop altogether, or you could command them to stop, leaving them quivering in utter denial. Their will has been the tease preventing them from indulging in orgasm. You comfort them and tell them maybe you’ll change your mind tomorrow, but, for know, they're done. Now time and will act as the tease. You cannot supervise them at all times, and especially without chastity- their own self will begins tease them until eventually they must resist their own desires at all hours of the day. Proving to themselves they crave metaphysical pleasure more than the physical release.

You may also balance will with consequence of pain if your submissive is bratty or masochistic in a way. Telling them that if they slip over the edge they will be punished, even tortured. Without knowing exactly what it is they may fight harder to stay on the edge. They edge spectacularly for you, but eventually crumble under the self inflicted stimuli, they cum and you deliver the next stimuli- maybe you simply force their hand to hold the vibrator against them, turning teasing play into overstimulation, or turn them over to spank them.

The third thing that must be done is to manage the environment we are in to best suit the play we will have. The space we are in should be constructed to do as much of the heavy lifting in our communication of the tone of the experience, and the desires of our counterpart, that we can. For example, an environment that is clean and bare suggests that nothing else will be happening in this space but what the two of you create. This type of room seems fitted to a private submissive who cherishes time and quiet exploration, and will become stressed or distracted by a number of other stimuli. A single sash and short rope laying on the couch suggests light bondage will be involved. A kind of quiet in the room implies that no one will be interrupting their play. They can take all the time in the world. On the other hand, a hot kitchen that is just a few steps from a noisy living room full of friends can generate a whole new tone. One of desperate craving for your counterpart, a contrast between the necessitated quietness of your actions and the noise and business of the space, a daring display of desire as you two risk discovery of your intimate acts with even the smallest allowances of expression- such as slipping your hand under their shirt and scratching up then down their back. If they let out a noise, they could be discovered. If someone walks in, they'll have to act like they haven't been delightfully toyed with for who knows how long, or the two of you might have to talk your way out of it. (Bonus points by the way if you pretend to be casually doing something else while your sub enjoys the predicament you're creating) Suddenly a kitchen becomes an environment perfect for sadomasochism and borderline exhibitionism. A room were will, time and space are used to holistically create a tease.

Finally, words and tone should be used to highlight the teasing. Drawing on the hope of the situation, highlighting what prevents them from indulgence, seems like the most fundamental approach to using our words to tease. Even in a relatively SFW tease with a short sub that is into strength kink, and having her height used against her. You could hold a stuffed animal out of her reach, she'd enjoy her feeble attempts at trying to snatch it away from you. Highlighting this exchange with your words would likely be welcomed. "Oh come on, hun. You have to be stronger than that. Maybe get up on your tip toes and reach for it. Haha. You're using both of your arms. Can't you pull harder? To end this form of play you could simply hand it to her, or let her gain some ground and take it from you before you transition to another fun game.

In summary, the best general approach to teasing someone is by fully utilizing the knowledge we have of their desires and drives, selection and use of proper abstract and practical blocks to that desire formatted to what degree they like to be pushed in their comfort levels or have their impulses blocked, that balance hope and the knowledge they will likely not succeed should then be traced with our words. All of which is bounded within trust and care for their overall well-being.

Bonus examples

1. The Kiss

I grasp her face with both my hands, knowing this makes her feel desired. My eyes meet hers and she knows this will be no little kiss. She shuts her eyes. I use her favorite kiss, placing the softest kiss I can on her waiting lips. She lets out a little shiver. She pushes into me gently, and I pull away just enough to keep our kisses feathered. I kiss down her jaw line, moving my face nearer to her ear and whisper a command to stay perfectly still as I let her go. I pace around her once, gently caressing, with one finger, places that catch my eye, her sensitive jaw line and clavicle, along her lower spine. I slip a finger into her waist band and slide across a few inches. Then I tug her by her waist band to me. I catch her by her shoulder and steady her, placing my hand on her jaw I pull her in for another kiss. I praise her for keeping her eyes shut. What a good girl she is. While I caress her cheeks and brush her hair away from her face, kissing her cheeks and forehead as I do this. I ask “are you going to continue to be a good girl for me? She breathes out a hot “yes” , “Look up”, I command. I place my hand on her neck and pull her into a deep kiss- gently moaning into her lips. I push her off and again praise her for being so obedient, so compliant. Praising her plump lips. I bring her back this time for gentle kisses. This proceeds until they become more insistent again, my grip on her neck tightens ever so slightly and she kisses me more intensely. I push her off and tell her soft kisses now. We return. She does so well at first. It’s not but a minute or two before she starts to get more intense though, whining and squirming into me trying to kiss me more deeply. Now I begin to pull slightly away each time the kiss becomes to firm. Leading her in a chase. Backing myself slowly into the corner she has lost track of. I push her off of me and say “You will kiss me gently. Yes, baby?” “Yes. Please” “Good girl. Now kiss me”, she goes to lean into me, but realizes my strong arm will no longer let her. She fights my strength, choking herself in my grip- I’m careful to keep my palm away from her trachea. I see her hunger flicker to desperation- I tell her to open. Her eyes snap open and I see her pupils constrict as they focus in the light and on me. As soon as she opens her eyes I grab her shoulder with other hand and pivot my hips, stepping forward and slinging her to my former spot as I switch places with her- now she is in the corner and I say, leaning in to just outside of her necks reach “oh, come on, baby. I thought you wanted to kiss me?” I feel her hot breath on my lips. “I do, please” I extend my arm again. “Prove it” she pushes again. Hungry eyes on mine. I watch her expression waiting for the slightest break in arousal, a second or two later I allow my arm to bend and let her come to me. It’s her turn now to lead. I grab her rib cage and let her press her lips into mine as she please. My hands caress her sides as she spins, pushing me into the corner. I match her passion and rhythm. She presses her body into mine, squirming against me as she places kisses on my lips, fevered and then soft and then heavy again. When she seems to be fading in decision, I slowly spin her back into the corner. My forearm framing her face on one side, my palm on her cheek, my fingers in her hair, and my extended arm on the other side boxing her in. I place soft kisses on her flushed skin and proceed to praise her and hold her gently.

2. Bonus example two. Referencing paragraph six. — Once we have this information of preferences and possible obstructions of it we can begin to synthesize it into possible modes of, and tools for, play for long or short term. For instance, using the above examples we can put together a possible play session that involves lots of skin to skin contact, unbroken kisses and maybe a pushing of minor, but prolonged pain to be a style this counterpart would enjoy. Such as having your sub straddle you, so your legs are touching theirs, putting your hand under their jaw, you drawing them in by it, using slow, soft kisses, but putting a teasing parameter on the kiss of a moderate painful stimuli, like slowly twisting the sensitive flesh on their ribs as long as they kiss you. They get a small dose of pain that they enjoy, lots of kisses and lots of skin to skin contact- both of which they adore. The pain they enjoy mixes with all of their love languages and make a special thing happen in their mind while it acts as a form of a will tease. After they limit is reached one could return to normal kisses and start a form of aftercare.

[bigskydreaming]

I’m writing this scene between Lilith and Bruce right now, and I just cut a whole segue their conversation took because it derailed it too far from where I meant to take it and was more of a meta thought anyway.

So I’m just gonna verbalize it here so as not to waste that thought. You’re welcome!

But purely on a pet peeve note (and this seriously isn’t a response to something I read lately, I feel like people always think that’s what prompts everything I say but honestly, sometimes shit just pops into my head and this is one such instance lol) - anyway like, lemme just express real quick how much I LOATHE the term ‘mindrape.’

Like. Please stop forever with that, sci-fi and fantasy themed media and entertainment. That’s not a thing. Stop trying to make it a thing.

To be perfectly clear, like, the idea of a telepath or someone via some technology or magic being able to go into your head and view or pluck out your most private, carefully guarded thoughts? Abso-fucking-lutely something that can and should be viewed as a violation, in universe.

Its just....not rape. Its literally not.

I honestly do think that the rise of this particular term was because people thought about it and just HOW intimate and personal one’s thoughts can be, especially someone who is used to being closed-off and emotionally guarded, and when trying to come up with a way to describe this that captured the INTENSITY of the violation people were picturing when they imagined this.....that’s how people ended up linking it to rape as a way of conveying just how awful a violation it was?

But like.....rape is a very specific act, is the thing. It has specific context, it has specific catalysts, framing, fallout. Rape has its own name rather than just being described as a violating assault or an act of violation, because rape is a SPECIFIC act that carries its own connotations in our society. And those connotations aren’t something that entertainment should feel comfortable borrowing just to use as like, a benchmark for how awful a completely fictitious concept might be.

Because that dilutes the very purpose of giving rape its own name in the first place. The more its likened to an abstract sense of violation that feasibly encompasses pretty much anything that falls under the umbrella of personal violation.....the less it stands out as notably different from other forms of violation and calls to mind the things that MAKE it different, and thus warrant it being treated differently or approached in a specific way.

And here’s the thing about WHY rape has its own terminology:

First....there’s the fact that whether we like it or not, the simple reality is our society is obsessed with sex. We live in a very heavily sexualized world, where its often difficult to completely separate ANYTHING from sexual connotations. Its easier to make just about anything ABOUT sex than it is to make anything that’s remotely sex-adjacent about something OTHER than sex.

Now combine that with the fact that while rape is about power, and taking it from a victim or exerting it over a victim.....rape is INTRINSICALLY connected to sex. True, rape is not sex, its an act of aggression, not a sexual act. There is no way to engage in rape without simultaneously engaging in violence. There is no way for someone to consent to what is inherently by definition a stripping away of consent.

Rape is not sex. But sex is the VEHICLE by which a rapist takes or exerts power SPECIFICALLY. While at the exact same time, a HUGE part of why survivors struggle so much with getting the support they need in recovery.....is because due to how SEXUALIZED rape is in our society, in our media and just our very conversations of it, most rape survivors face the stumbling block of their assault and violation being viewed as more about sex than it was power.

Essentially, even though on the surface even most people ‘know’ that rape isn’t sex and rape is about power.....lots of people fall into the trap of looking at rape and thinking of it as sex gone wrong, or sex someone regrets, or tons of other thoughts that have more to do with sex than rape. Because from a pretty early age, anyone who doesn’t ALREADY have their own view and awareness of rape....has their view of rape then informed pretty much just by how its depicted and presented in media and entertainment. Where its of course heavily filtered through a very sexual lens.

So even while consciously KNOWING that rape isn’t an act of sex but one strictly of violence, entitlement and power....lots of people still have to contend with and push back against a foundation of it being more closely associated with sex in their minds, as the easily visualized IMAGE of what rape LOOKS like on the surface.....than other things it has more in common with once you look at anything OTHER than the visual of it, such as focusing on the motivating factors for rape and WHY rapists do what they do.

Theft, coercion, other crimes and concepts that more accurately reflect a rapist’s desire to TAKE what they were told was not theirs to take or to just degrade or humiliate someone in the most intimate way possible, or to turn a person’s very body into a weapon against them or to injure someone in a way that is meant to be more lasting or permanent in its effect on a person than just inflicting a physical wound.....any and all of these things have far more to do with why rapists rape than a simple desire for sex.

Rapists don’t rape because its the only way for them to have sex, even. Because even when rape is very much attraction based....its STILL not about just wanting to have sex with the person of their focus....its about wanting to have sex with them even despite being told no, or without giving them even the chance to say no. Even when a rapist ONLY targets a person because of their specific physical attraction to that person and their desires/fantasy to have sex with that specific person and not someone else.....the crime itself is still ABOUT stripping that person of their personhood in order to simply act upon them as the OBJECT of their focus/attraction...rather than any kind of a partner in a mutually beneficial or engaged-in act.

But despite all of that.....ask any non-survivor what springs to mind first when they hear the word ‘rape’....and chances are the resulting thoughts are more instinctively geared towards sex than power.

All of this is directly linked to our tendency as a society to view and treat and even talk about rape in terms of it most commonly being sex that got out of control. Despite the fact that no act of rape was EVER going to be an act of sexual partnership......because the very thing that turns something FROM sex INTO rape....is the MOMENT a rapist determines or feels that sex with a person is off the table or simply not what they’re interested in.....because they either don’t have or don’t WANT their victim’s partnership in what happens. They simply want to take. To steal. To use. To abuse.

Without exception.

Honestly, this got a lot more indepth than I was intending to go when I was just riffing off of a thought that popped into my mind about how I just really don’t like the term mindrape.....but a big part of the problem I have with the term is how indepth you basically HAVE to go in order to fully convey just why the term is so.....not a valid comparison to make to rape, with anyone who doesn’t already have an instinctive or reactive understanding of rape that’s more based on what rape TAKES than with how its usually depicted or talked about, where its in terms of what rape LOOKS like.

Because alllll of the above connotations and how important and central they are to any actual examination or discussion of rape....they simply do not carry over into a concept like someone reading your mind without permission.

Again, its not that such a thing wouldn’t be extremely violating IMO. It absolutely would be.

My point is simply that rape is always a violation, but violations are not always rape. SEXUAL violations are rape. But there’s a ton of ways a person or even something like a law or concept or even a freaking BUSINESS contract can be violated. And these aren’t interchangeable.

Are a person’s most intimate thoughts something incredibly personal, something no one should be allowed to take without permission? Sure. Absolutely. But imagine how else such a scenario could take place even in our real world, without needing a concept such as telepathy to make it feasible. Think about anything from someone reading a person’s carefully guarded or hidden diary or journal where they record thoughts they NEVER expect or want someone else to be privy to. Think about someone being tortured to give up information they’d be willing to give up their life to keep secret. Think about a burglar breaking into someone’s home when they’re not there and going through all their most personal belongings, leaving evidence that some stranger has been there and seen and touched all of that and you now don’t feel like you have the ability to keep anything safe and hidden from others, even in the safety and security of your own home.

Are all of these things different kinds of violation, most of which carry a great degree of intensity and personal betrayal or harm?

Absolutely.

But are any of them interchangeable with RAPE?

Or are they a bit easier to separate from from that concept once laid out to this degree, to see as completely separate and distinct things that may have some overlap but not necessarily even in the same ways or places they’re usually viewed as overlapping with rape as a concept?

Since I began this as a fandom related concept, lemme bring that back for a final thought.

Instead of likening other things TO rape, imagine if we did the same thing in reverse, and likened rape TO other things instead.

In terms of even just Batcharacters.....think about how often its been raised as an actual STORY point, that many Bat characters have shown a willingness or even tendency to cross all kinds of ethical boundaries and illegally surveil someone or intrude upon boundaries in the name of ‘the greater good’ or because they feel the ends justify the means.

Now imagine if all of those instances, no matter how large or small a violation....from a simple breaking and entering job to get inside a Rogue’s secret hideout in order to steal the location of their next crime....to putting bugs and cameras into someone’s home without their knowledge or permission and even just being able to spy on them naked or when revealing extremely personal information while thinking there’s no one else around to hear it, regardless of whether or not that’s what the character intends those to be used for or never actually uses them in that way.....

Imagine if all of THOSE violations were considered, viewed and talked about as not just breaches of privacy but as RAPE, specifically....with any relevant Bat-characters thus by extension specifically being rapists for having engaged in such violations.

And then, let’s flip the script back AGAIN, and now look at those instances where characters intrude, surveil, cross boundaries or invade privacies in the name of trying to save people or prevent tragedies or in the name of that always handy alleged ‘greater good.’

Try using that ‘in the name of [...]’ clause in regards to when and why a rapist rapes, and see how......not good that is. Has any of the above EVER been an ACTUAL justification for why someone rapes someone else? COULD it ever be? I know there’s the fuck or die trope and there’s more than a few variations of it in which one hero is forced to essentially rape another one or someone innocent or else the villain will kill them both, or kill the other person, or something like that....but even then, the actual RAPE is still on the villain or person exerting coercion, so no, not even then is rape being done in the name of saving/protecting someone or some supposed greater good. Its still the villain that’s doing the actual violating, that’s making the CHOICE to set up this scenario and limit the hero’s options to either ‘participating’ or signing someone’s death warrant....and just like sex is the vehicle by which rape occurs, the ‘raping’ hero is in this kind of scenario STILL just being used as a proxy by the actual person with the actual intent and desire to violate and assault the other person, and in being used in such a way, and in an inherently sexualized way themself.....it simply makes the ‘raping’ hero still not an actual rapist, but an additional rape victim of the ultimate villain as well.

See how complicated and messy this all gets, and how quickly?

And especially given that it doesn’t ever NEED to get there, in either direction, since there’s plenty of ways to describe varying types and degrees of violation with specificity, without resorting to ‘rounding up’ to refer to them as rape as a shorthand for expressing it was a particularly intimate or sensitive violation - and without losing sight of the fact that violations that result even in the THEFT of sensitive, personal information or secrets.....still only result in things like pieces of INFORMATION being what’s stolen, rather than someone’s entire bodily autonomy and personal agency.

Anyway, in conclusion the point is really just that we come up with the terms we do for specific reasons, and while language and contexts do evolve, grow, and even wholly change over time for a variety of reasons, it is important to take note of when that happens so we can determine if that change SHOULD be happening or if key contexts or connotations are being left out or overlooked in the process or wake of language changing.

And while I kept my point here limited to the example of rape and ‘mind rape,’ it applies to a ton of other stuff and topics as well. This just happened to be the one on my mind at the moment, but this kind of awareness can and should definitely be applied to a lot of other discussions involving sensitive or emotionally charged topics as well.

We come up with specific words and terms with INTENT. The creation of a specific term or phrase almost always involves having seen a NEED for such specificity in the first place, in order to denote key differences between something and other things it might be similar to but not fully described or encompassed by previously existing words or phrases.

Before treating concepts as interchangeable, we should always take care to make sure that they are, in fact, actually interchangeable.

[hecallsmehischild]

Recent Media Consumed

Books

The Medium-Sized Book of Zim Scripts: Vol. 1: Pigs ’n’ Waffles by Eric Trueheart. What a ride. Love what Trueheart can do with a sentence, even if it often leaves me baffled and laughing nervously. It was great, not only to see how some of the episodes came about, but some of the jokes that never made it to screen or pitches that got nixed early on. There’s snippets of lore and ongoing correction for the Zim Wiki and randomness coming out the ears. This is definitely a surreal read and loads of fun. I waited until the physical copy was available because I’ll take a book in my hands over Kindle any day. No regrets. Here’s hoping he really will do a volume 2 (about the episodes that he CO-wrote, as opposed to this book about his solo ventures).

Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes by E. Randolph Richards and Brandon J. O’Brien. Alternately infuriating and genuinely challenging with occasional confirmations of what I thought. I’m not completely sure I can rest on everything these authors say. They are very helpful in that they point out the things that “go without saying” in Western culture that blind me to original intent in scripture. However, I’m not confident they’re free from alternate bias in their interpretations. Western culture is often belittled in comparative examples. While we have many flaws, I don’t think the authors gave a fair assessment of many traits they belittled. On the flipside, I also was made aware for the first time of the cost (the things we’ve lost or exchanged) FOR some of those strengths, and it did stagger me. I take this book with a grain of salt, but it has been very helpful in pointing out where I put on “Western blinders” in reading the Bible.

Unoffendable by Brant Hansen. Within the first couple of chapters I found myself (of course, of course) offended. However, I made myself listen. And. Yes. So much yes. So, this book, in a nutshell, postulates that while Christians are seen as one of the most easily offendable groups out there, we’re actually called from the get-go, by the One who we claim to serve, to be unoffendable. That when we have our natural reaction of anger, that we do not get to hold onto it even if the other person is insulting us, even if the other person is “wrong! wrong! wrong!” even if the other person is abrasive. Hansen claims that even what we know as “righteous anger” is not a right that WE have, it is only a right that God has, and that we’ve twisted things in order to justify holding onto anger even though it’s explicitly contradicted in scripture. My initial “Hey wait a minute!” had to do with the psych books that tell me all about how anger is an early warning sign that someone has violated your boundaries, but having listened to Hansen, I don’t think his idea contradicts that. He stresses that right action should always be taken, but without the impetus of anger. Justice should be pursued, but without anger. Boundaries enforced, but without anger. Without offense. This is a shorter book, but very interesting (he has a great sense of humor, very self-aware style), and I’ll have to mull over the things he’s said.

Movies

Tarzan (Disney animated). Been a very long time since I’ve seen this. The fluidity of animation and the stirring soundtrack are my favorite bits. I’m mesmerized by the jaguar and by Tarzan’s motions on screen, more snakelike than humanoid/feline.

Uprising. A miniseries depiction of how untrained Jews in the Warsaw ghetto held off the German army for a pretty long time. It’s been a while since I watched any WWII movies, it’s still hard for me. But this was excellent. And it leads into how I ended up watching:

The Eternal Jew. A sub-plot in “Uprising” followed the filming of Nazi propaganda film “The Eternal Jew”. In lengthy conversation with my husband, I mentioned I was curious because in all my time consuming media about the Holocaust I had never actually seen original Nazi propaganda (beyond brief glances in museums), which feels like a major lapse if you take the topic seriously. So he took the time to track down a copy with English subtitles and we roped in our housemate to watch it (if you’re having trouble finding it, check the Internet Archives historical section). The three of us turned watching this one hour film into a five hour viewing session interspersed with pauses for lengthy discussion. My recall-and-regurgitate functions do not work very well to cover all that we talked about, but it was a very good and productive discussion. A couple things I recall being taken aback by was that the rhetoric in this film was A) not “TOTALLY UTTERLY OBVIOUSLY FALSE” or as idiotically reasoned out of thin air as I thought it would be (in fact it was often based on some distorted understanding of actual Jewish culture) B) centered just as much on economics as race, if not MORE centered on economics, and C) echoes a lot of similar rhetoric from political organizations today that utterly and completely disavows the party that produced this film. Except this film came first. That… disturbs me.

Shows

24. I remember my high school geometry teacher being obsessed with this show, and several years later I watched a few episodes with my then-boyfriend here and there. I sat down to watch season one through with my now-husband and whoah. I have never enjoyed a show that produces this level of cortisol in me as much as I enjoy this show. I will definitely have to take breaks in between seasons but I want to watch them all now. I just have to make sure I have enough yarn to get through, because I stress-crochet to the max while watching. Pretty sure I work faster while watching this show. Expect more blankets from me. (by the end of season 1) There is not one single feel left unsquashed. Pray for my doomed soul, I have seven seasons to go.

Infinity Train season 3. aaaaaAAAAAAAAaaaaaAAAAAAAAA everything HUUUUUUURTS WHY.

Anime

Love Live. Dropped after 3 eps. Not my cup of tea.

Fanfiction

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. I needed to sink into fantasy and check out from reality for a while so I plunged into a re-read of the best Harry Potter fanfiction I’ve ever read. A story that, yes, I find better than canon in pretty much every regard. I blew through it in about two weeks, now I need to find something else to sink into for a while, I think. Or maybe this mood merits a library haul. And now I want to check out the other rational writings of the site this author hails from, lesswrong.com, and see if I can learn the methods of rationality.

[olderthannetfic]

I just realized it’s Fandom First Friday and the topic is meta!

For months, I’ve been slowly working my way through How To Be Gay by David Halperin, which talks about drag queens and how certain aspects of gay male culture appropriate from women to empower gay men. (Halperin uses the word ‘appropriate’ extensively, not necessarily in a negative context.) He brought up some points I thought were highly relevant for thinking about slash.

Last February, I went to Escapade and chatted with a bunch of acafans. To my total lack of surprise, they too love Halperin’s book and had the same reaction I did. I thought when I finish the book, I’ll write up some meta. But I got busy, and it’s a long, dense book. So then in August, I went to the final Vividcon. There, I ran into Francesca Coppa and mentioned this idea. Her response? “Oh, I just wrote a journal article about that.”

…

AHAHAHAHA! Oh god, we are the same person.

(NB: We are not actually the same person.We just have similar first names, similar fandoms, and similar flists back on LJ, have done similar fandom history oral history projects, go to the same cons, and have both been on the OTW board. Laura Hale once went so far as to “out” me as her. And now we like the same academic books too. Heh.)

So, obviously, now I have to write meta about this, and Fandom First Friday is the perfect time to take a stab at it. I have so much more to say and I want to go back through How to be Gay and pull out many more amazing quotes, but better to write something than wait for perfection.

What I found the most interesting about Halperin’s analysis was that he points out that women may find these funhouse mirror versions of femaleness upsetting, and those feelings are completely understandable and valid, but they don’t make drag any less empowering or significant for gay men. He neither thinks that we need to get rid of drag nor that women should stop having those reactions.

He also talks about how subtext is often more appealing than text: when he first started teaching his college course ‘How to be Gay’, on which the book is based, he assumed that students would connect more with literal representation of their identities. That’s the narrative we push: now that we have literal X on TV or in a Broadway show, we don’t need subtextual old Y anymore! Instead, many of his students loved things like The Golden Girls and failed to connect with current gay representation.

It’s a long book, but what many of his ideas boil down to is that a Broadway show that is massively subtextually queer allows the viewer to identify with any of the characters or with all of them simultaneously or with the situation in general. It’s highly fluid. Gay representation often means a couple of specific gay characters with a rigid identity. Emotionally, that can be harder to connect to.

Sometimes, allegory gets closer to one’s own internal experiences than literal depiction does.

Coppa’s article (book chapter?) is about exactly that. It’s titled: Slash/Drag: Appropriation and Visibility in the Age of Hamilton. She uses Halperin’s book but extends the idea further. I particularly liked her example of how female fans use Bucky to tell stories that are essentially (and often literally) about rape. His story is about a loss of bodily autonomy and about having one’s boundaries violated in a way that is familiar to female fans, but he’s a male action hero, so those stories don’t have the same visceral ick factor as writing about literal rape of literal women.

Partly, that’s due to how society treats men vs. women, but it’s also about which fans are writing these stories and which fans are the target audience of them. Just as a cis gay man appropriating Joan Crawford to talk about his experience of gayness isn’t really for or about women, most slash fanfic about Bucky being victimized isn’t really for or about cis gay men.

It was on the dancefloor at Vividcon that I realized that, as a woman, I have this unconscious feeling like I am appropriating gay men’s culture when I’m into Joan Crawford and other over-the-top female performers. It’s ridiculous! How can I be appropriating a female celebrity from gay men? But it’s an experience I share with lots of other women. Telling women we have no right to things is the bedrock of our culture.

That feature film Slash, which featured a bunch of cis male slash writers was inspired partly by the male director going on Reddit and finding a bunch of gay guys saying that slash squicks them. He felt that he was being progressive by erasing women.

On Tumblr, the fujocourse gets reblogged not just by toxic pits of misogynist, delusional bullshit like thewoesofyaoi, but also by seemingly reasonable fans. Hell, I’m pretty sure I used to suffer from this problem myself: I remember a time when I felt like I, as a bisexual woman, liked slash better, differently, and more correctly than straight women did.

I no longer feel this way.

There are lots of reasons for caring about slash, some of which are just about the pretty, some of which are more about gender, and some of which are more about sexual orientation, but after seeing decades of arguments about who is allowed to like slash, I have come to the conclusion that none of them are valid. All of them are “Not like the other girls!” and hating on femaleness. Some of the fans who do this are female and some are not, but it all boils down to not feeling like women have a right to a voice.

And then there’s Halperin calmly asserting gay men’s right to self-expression!

It struck me like a bolt of lightning because it was so self-assured. He never doubts that there’s something valid and important about giving gay men space to explore their own emotional landscapes. Literal representation is important, sure, but so is the ability to make art that speaks to your insides, not just your outside, and that sometimes means allegorical, subtextual art played out in bodies unlike your own.

“Fetishization” a la Tumblr often means writing stories with explicit sex or liking ships because they’re hot. Sometimes, it means writing kinks that are seen as dark or unusual. Frankly, this sort of fujocourse boils down to thinking that sex and desire are dirty and that m/m sex is the dirtiest of all. I do write some ~dark~ kinks in my fic because, for one thing, I’m a kinky person in real life, and for another, I often use fic to explore the experience of having dark thoughts and wondering what that says about me.

A lot of slash writers are exploring feelings of victimization. Another big chunk of us explore things like rape fantasies from the bottom: maybe we have and maybe we haven’t experienced assault in real life, but for all of us, having that kind of rape fantasy brings up questions of whether we’re asking for it, whether it’s okay to be into that kind of thing, whether it means something. Another chunk of us are exploring a different kind of “bad” thoughts: feelings of aggression, violence, dominance. In my own work, I’m interested in sadists and how they come to terms with their desires, but I think slash is also often a way to explore any sort of violent, dark feeling, not just rape fantasies from the top. Society tells us women aren’t allowed to have dark thoughts–hell, that we’re not capable of impulses that dark. Sometimes, it’s easier to write even a relatively banal action story about a male action hero because he, in canon, is allowed to have the feelings and impulses that interest the writer.

The fujocourse is all about saying that women aren’t allowed to have dark impulses ever. That we’re not allowed to be horny. That we’re not allowed to enjoy art for the sake of an orgasm. When we depict people not precisely like ourselves, we’re overstepping. When we make art for our own pleasure instead of devoting our lives to service, we are toxic and bad. Any time. Every time.

It’s just another round of saying that women’s pleasure is not valid and women’s personal space should not be respected. No hobbies for you: only motherhood.

And yet that’s not actually what most slash fans think. I was heartened to read Lucy Neville’s Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys: Women and Gay Male Pornography and Erotica. A friend read it recently and was trying to guess which quotes were from me. I have to admit, I was playing that game too! I honestly couldn’t tell, until I looked at demographic info, that some could not have been mine. They sounded so familiar. On Tumblr, I tend to wade into meta discussions, so I see a lot of loud, divisive views. I especially see a lot of views that, over time, make me start to wonder if I’m a crazy outlier. Intellectually, I know that this is all down to bad curation of my dash and a love of browsing the meta tags. I didn’t realize how much it had crept up on me unconsciously–how much I had started to feel like I had to justify and explain the most basic and common experiences of being a slash fan.

What was interesting about Neville’s book is how alike many of the women sounded. Now, no one book represents everybody, and she makes no claims to have figured out the exact size or demographic breakdown of fandom. Her focus is on women who like m/m material, whether slash or porno movies or anything else. At the same time, though, she surveyed heaps of women, and the responses were amazingly similar. Nearly every quote in that book strikes a chord with me. Nearly all of them, with a few minor variations, could be something I’ve written. Gay, straight, bi, asexual: we all had many of the same things to say about slash and what it means to us.

So, some brief, and more digestible thoughts:

Slash is “overrepresented” in meta and scholarly literature because people still ask us to justify ourselves constantly.

People ask us to justify ourselves because they assume that “good representation” is literal representation.

There are key emotional, psychological aspects of our experiences that are often better expressed allegorically, whether we’re gay men doing drag or women writing slash or any other sort of artist.

Here are some choice quotes from Coppa. (I will restrain myself and not just try to quote the entire thing. Heh.)

“There are endless transmedia adaptations of characters like Sherlock Holmes or Batman, so it is clearly not appropriation that’s the issue: it is the appropriation by the other—by women, in this case.

One could argue then that it is our awareness of this appropriative doubleness—of the familiar characters acting in an unfamiliar script, of the female storyteller animating the male characters— that boots slash out of “literature,” with its illusions of psychological coherence (see Edwards’s Chapter 3 in this volume), and puts it instead into the category of performance, itself so often associated with the fake, the female, the forged, the queer. My argument in this chapter is that it might be useful to compare slash to other forms of appropriative performance; drag comes powerfully to mind and, more recently, the musical Hamilton. These are forms where it’s important to see the bothness, the overlaid and blurred realities: male body/Liza Minnelli; person of color/George Washington.”

“In his book How to Be Gay, David Halperin (2012) discusses the ongoing centrality of certain female characters to the gay male cultural experience and takes as his project an explanation of why gay men choose those particular avatars and what they make of them. Halperin argues that gay men use these female characters to articulate a gay male subjectivity which precedes and may in important ways be separate from a gay male sexual identity (or to put it another way, a boy may love show tunes before he loves men, or without ever loving men). The gay male appropriation of and perfor- mance of femininity effectively mirror—in the sense both of “reflect” and “reverse”—slash fiction’s preoccupations with and appropriations of certain (often hyper‐performatively) male characters in service of a female sensibility; in both cases, appropriation becomes a way of saying something that could not otherwise easily be said.”

“A character like Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne speaks, obviously, to boys who are getting mixed messages about what successful manhood looks like in the twenty‐first century—it was hard enough in the old days to be Charles Atlas, but today you have to be Charles Atlas and Steve Jobs at the same time, which is a problem of time commitment just for a start. But these characters speak to women, too: differently. The doubled nature of the paired male characters taken up by slash fandom—these aliens, these costumed heroes, these men wearing man suits, men in male drag—make them appealing sites of identification for women, or proxy identities, to use Halperin’s (2012) term; that is, they provide “a metaphor, an image, a role” (185). They are sites of complex feeling.

But what these characters are metaphors for, what they make us feel, is not simple, singular, or easily reducible. Halperin takes hundreds of pages even to begin to excavate the complicated web of meanings around Joan Crawford; I am not going to be able to unpack any of these iconic male characters in a few paragraphs, and it is also the nature of fandom to build multiple and contradictory meanings around fan favorites (and to get into heated arguments over them).”

[In Halperin’s class] “Works that allowed gay men to be invisible were preferred to those where they were explicitly represented. “Non‐gay cultural forms offer gay men a way of escaping from their particular, personal queerness into total, global queerness,” Halperin (2012) writes. “In the place of an identity, they promise a world” (112). I would argue that slash offers something similar—that queer female space, as well as the ability to escape the outline of the identity that you are forced to carry every day—and that for gay men and slash fans both, the suggestion that you would restrict your identification to those characters with whom you share an identity feels limiting.”

“Visibility is a trap,” Phelan (2003) concludes, referencing Lacan (1978) (93): “it summons surveillance and the law, it provokes voyeurism, fetishism, the colonialist/imperial appetite for possession”—and fans on the ground know this and talk about it in very nearly this language. Again, this is not to say that fans—or gay men, for that matter—do not want or deserve good representations: female fandom, slash fandom included, championed Mad Max: Fury Road, Marvel’s Jessica Jones, and the new, gender‐swapped Ghostbusters, all of which have multiple and complex female characters. Rather, I am arguing that representation does not substitute for the pleasure or power of invisibility; for, as even the most famously visible actors say, “But what I really want is to direct.”

[imustbeamermaidrango]

The Optimism of Satan

by Mitch Horowitz

See article at: https://medium.com/s/radical-spirits/the-optimism-of-satan-eea5a1a24550

A friend of mine once had the opportunity to ask the Dalai Lama a single question.

“Who was your greatest teacher?” he asked.

The exiled leader replied, “Mao Zedong.”

I once felt provoked in my own sphere by a similarly unlikely teacher — Donald Trump.

Years ago, Trump the Developer asked an interviewer: “What good is something if you can’t put your name on it?” His comment is indelibly stamped on my memory, though I confess I cannot find a source for it. Did I imagine it? The sentiment, while coarse and easily rebutted, came to haunt me.

Did Trump, the showy conman obsessed with naming rights, capture a nagging truth of human nature — a side none of us can deny or push away, other than by an act of self-regarding hypocrisy? And did I, hopefully in a more integral way, share a kernel of his outlook? Was the voice even his — or something within me?

Soon after hearing Trump’s remark, I received what struck me as a bit of ridiculous advice from the editor of an academic spiritual journal. I told him in candor that I wanted to find greater exposure for my byline. “You don’t have to put your name on everything you write,” he replied. Such a principle could ring true only in the world of abstraction.

Trump’s statement about self-exaltation, however ugly, captured half a truth. The whole truth is that our lives, as vessels for various influences — some physical, some perhaps beyond — are bound up with the world and circumstances in which we find ourselves; and within that world we must, at the stake of personal happiness, create, expand, and aspire. Whatever higher influences we feel or great thoughts we think, or are experienced by us through the influence of others, are like heat dissipated in the vacuum of space unless those thoughts are directed into a structure or receptacle. Our purpose is to be generative. Questions of attachment and non-attachment, identification and non-identification, are incidental to that larger fact.

I came to feel strongly about this several years ago when I found that my spiritual search, a path of radical ecumenism with a dedication to esoteric interests, was failing to satisfy me. I began to suspect that I was not acknowledging what I was really looking for, either in spirituality — by which I mean a search for the extra-physical — or therapy. I came face-to-face with an instinct that few people acknowledge, and would deny if they heard it spoken. But they should linger on it. Because what I discovered captures what I believe is a basic if discomforting human truth: The ethical or spiritual search, not as idealized but as actually lived, is a search for power. That is, for the ability to possess personal agency. We pray, “Thy will be done.” We mean “my will be done” — hoping that the two comport. This is why, at least in my observations after thirty years as a publisher, seeker, and historian of alternative spirituality, many seekers in both traditional and alternative faiths are ill at ease, fitful in their progress, and apt to slide from faith to faith, or to harbor multiple, sometimes conflicting, practices at once.

Power is supposed to be the craving of the corrupt. Is it? The novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer, surveying the modern occult scene, wrote in 1967: “We are all black magicians in our dreams, in our fantasies, perversions, and phobias.” And to this I would add, in pursuit of our highest ideals. As Singer detected, we are not very different from the classical magician when we strive, morally and materially, to carry forth our plans in the world — to ensure the betterment of ourselves and our loved ones; to heal sickness; to create, sustain, and, above all, to generate things which bear our markings, ideals, and likenesses. All of this is the expenditure of power, the striving to actualize our drives and images.

I do not view the search for individual power, including through supernatural means (a topic I will clarify and expand on), as necessarily maleficent. Historically and psychologically, it is a fundamental human trait to evaluate, adopt, or avoid an idea based upon whether it builds or depletes our sense of personal agency. “A living thing,” Nietzsche wrote in Beyond Good and Evil, “seeks above all to discharge its strength — life itself is will to power…” The difficulty is in making our choices wisely, and ethically.

I know how far I’m extending my chin by quoting Nietzsche. I sound like a dorm-room libertine. A critic once accused me of harboring an adolescent wish to power. To that, I plead guilty — but with a catch. I do believe in universal reciprocity, an indelible oneness of existence, and I operate from a ground rule of nonviolence. By that, I do not mean abstention from self-defense but rather an unwillingness to violate the sanctity of another’s search, to knowingly do anything that would deprive another of his or her own pursuit of highest potential. And since the political question is never far away, I’ll note that my policy preferences run to a mildly redistributive social democratic state with single-payer healthcare, labor unions, and consumer protections with teeth.

As alluded, sensitive people often deny or overlook their power-seeking impulse, associating it with the tragic fate of Faust or Lady Macbeth. It can be argued, however, that all of our neuroses and feelings of chronic despair, aside from those with identifiably biological causes, grow from the frustrated expression of personal power. We may spend a lifetime (and countless therapy sessions) ascribing our problems to other, more secondary phenomena — without realizing that, as naturally as a bird is drawn to the dips and flows of air currents, we are in the perpetual act of trying to forge, create, and sustain, much like the ancient alchemist or wizard.

The ultimate frustration of life is that, while we seem to be granted godlike powers — giving birth, creating beauty, spanning space and time, devising machines of incredible might — we are bound to physical forms that quickly decay. “Ye are gods,” wrote the psalmist, adding “but yet shall die as princes.” Immortality and the reversal of bodily decline is the one magic no one has ever mastered. The wish to surpass the boundaries of our physicality is behind some of our most haunting myths and parables, from the Trojan prince Tithonus, to whom the gods granted immortality but trapped in a shell of misery and decay for failing to request eternal youth, to the doomed scientist Victor Frankenstein, who sought the ultimate alchemy of creating life only to bring destruction on everyone around him.

We live in a sphere of limitations. But we cannot desist from pushing against its limits. It is our heritage.

Many of us grew up learning the story of humanity’s fall from grace in the biblical parable of the garden of paradise, where the serpent — long associated with the Great Adversary (a guest who’ll soon be arriving) — seduces Eve, and then she Adam, into eating forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. But take a fresh reading, or a first reading, of the sparsely detailed chapter three of Genesis. When revisiting this familiar story in virtually any translation, you’ll see not only that the serpent’s argument is based in truth — the couple does not perish for eating the apple, and their eyes are, in fact, opened to good and evil (indeed, some scholars contend that the garden’s two trees, the tree of knowledge and the tree of life, are the same)— but also that Eve, contrary to a shibboleth about feminine nature, does not seduce Adam, who requires little coaxing. The serpent even suggests, as augmented in other texts, that Yahweh displays cruel hypocrisy by forbidding intellectual illumination, even as its availability sits in the garden’s midst.

We’re taught, too, that the denouement of Eve’s misstep was her son Cain slaying his brother Abel. But Cain’s tragic act of fratricide may reflect, in discomforting realism, the unavoidable consequence of creativity: friction. Competing ideologies and the wish to measure and evaluate may be the inevitable cost of awareness. But without the rebel, the malcontent, the usurper — the snake in the garden — how could humanity claim sentience?

Lord Byron used his 1821 drama, Cain, one of the dramatist’s most alluring and under-appreciated works, to take the marked brother’s side. And to introduce the most jarring literary re-conception of Lucifer next to Milton’s. Byron’s antihero, who befriends the rebellious Cain, is persuasive and penetrating in his denial that he was the serpent in the garden, yet he points out that the serpent greeted Eve as a sexual and political emancipator — an outlook embraced by many proto-feminists and political radicals of that century and the next. Byron’s dark lord is a fiery optimist on the side of the malcontents: “I know the thoughts/Of dust, and feel for it, and with you.”

I began to question whether the forces of creation with which I most identified — whether parabolic or metaphysical — were these same forces of Promethean defiance. Forces of aspiration who rallied to the cry of the demon Moloch in Paradise Lost: “Hard liberty before the easy yoke.”

Now, one could ask: why think of any of this other than in material terms? Why not put away my Bhagavad Gita in favor of Atlas Shrugged? Because, as noted, I believe that truth is not contained within flesh and bone alone. I think we participate in an existence that goes beyond the five senses. And I believe that our ancient ancestors were correct in deifying certain energies and understanding oneself in relation to them; they gave them names like Thoth, Hermes, Minerva, and Set. Hence, I began to take a long and considered look at such an energy, to which I have been alluding, but which I have not yet named: Satan. This term has its own complicated past, it has gotten me cast out of a garden or two myself, but I employ it both to acknowledge its colloquial primacy and as a bow to bluntness.

There exists a rich and underappreciated counter narrative of humanity’s encounter with what is called “Satanic” in Western life particularly, but not only, in the literature of the Romantics. This countercurrent of spiritual, political, and cultural history — and present — has been insufficiently understood, historically confused, and blurred by entertainment, conspiracy theorists, sensationalism, and fraud (such as the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s).

My wish then, is to encourage a second look where we’re not supposed to be looking — that is, to take a more unadorned, elucidating, and even hopeful perspective on the Satanic. Milton has Satan say: “The mind is its own place, and in it self/Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.” Again, Satan is an optimist. Me too. No cards under the table: my journey — and perhaps yours — includes constructively wondering whether my own search for a personal, spiritual, and ethical philosophy (I have one — and it’s vital to me) lies east of Eden, or within what is popularly but incompletely called the “dark side.” That’s what I’ve been describing.

Darkness is not a void; it’s a womb. And in the territory of truth and consensual experiment, there exist no boundaries of exploration.

[katsbooks]

Schwarze Nacht - Chapter Two

Walter C. Dornez x Reader

‘All orders by Master Integra Hellsing will be followed to the letter. Any complaints will be given in written form to the Head Maid, who will in turn give them to Master Hellsing. You will have Sundays and Wednesdays off to do as you please, within reason and without violation of Organization policy. Otherwise, you will be in the uniform given to you at all times outside of your room. Your shift will begin at 5:30 am and will end only when the Head Maid, Butler (Sir Walter C. Dornez) or Master Hellsing deems it over.

          If there are any questions or concerns that are not addressed in your pamphlet, please consult the Head Maid or Butler.’

           (Y/n)’s first week was chaos personified. Between getting lost, forgetting details about her jobs, running late one morning and dealing with the scrutiny of the Head Maid, she was so glad when Sunday came around.

           (Y/n) groaned a little as she sat down at one of the galley tables, a cup of coffee in one hand and a napkin with bagels and cream cheese in the other. She scrubbed a hand over her tired face, knocking her glasses askew as she did. She had only slept in to eight, and she really wasn’t a morning person to begin with. But it was the only way she would get used to this schedule, so it was necessary. She could nap later.

           As she munched on her cream cheese smothered bagel, she was alerted of a presence approaching her table and she looked up to see Walter, dressed in his usual outfit, sitting down across from her with a cup of hot tea in hand.

           “You don’t mind my company, do you?” he smiled. She shook her head, her mouth too full of bagel to verbally respond. She swallowed and took a sip of her coffee, before asking,

           “I thought you didn’t have to wear your uniforms on your days off?”

           Walter smiled, “You don’t. But I’ve become so accustomed to it, it would feel strange to wear anything else.”

           (Y/n) could understand that. 51 years of wearing the same outfit pretty much every day? It would feel strange to wear casual clothing. She was still quite content with her jeans and t-shirt, though.

           “I’m surprised you’re up, really. Even Delores sleeps in on Sundays,” Walter said, stirring sugar into his tea.

           “I’m kind of surprised by that news, actually. There’s reason to my madness, though,” (Y/n) said.

           “Oh? Do tell.”

           “Well, I’m so used to staying up late and sleeping in, that these early mornings are just…killing me, figuratively speaking. So it’s just easier to get up early on days off too and take naps later to make up for it,” she shrugged.

           “Mm. Smart,” Walter smiled, sipping her tea. (Y/n) took another drink of her coffee. “Not one for tea?”

           “Iced sweet tea is the only tea I really care for, but I think that comes from living in the South,” she stated. “I only drink hot tea when my throat’s sore. Mix it with some honey and lemon, and it’s a good day.”

           “I forget that you’re from America sometimes. You’ve got such excellent manners during work,” Walter hummed. (Y/n) chuckled a little bit as she nibbled her second bagel.

           “My mom and dad raised me right. ‘Yes ma’am, no sir’ kinda thing. Granted, they also taught me to not take any crap from anyone too, but respect’s the highest compliment you can give someone,” she said.

           “If only there were more young folk such as yourself, Miss (Y/n),” Walter said.

           “You and me both,” (Y/n) muttered. “That was one reason why I was more than happy to leave America—people have no couth anymore. It’s like living in a country of uncivilized, spoiled children. I know not everyone’s like that, but it certainly felt like that.”

           “You certainly hold a good vocabulary, Miss (Y/n). You have a good head on your shoulders, and that’s quite encouraging,” Walter said, taking a swallow of his tea. “You said you liked to read. What kind of books interest you?”

           “Mostly? I’m a huge romantic, so…a lot of fantasy romance,” (Y/n) admitted and Walter chuckled. “But I like other genres. Horror’s always fun and I don’t mind a decent science fiction now and then. 1984 by Mr. Orwell is an excellent book, for example.”

           “Indeed.”

           “Let’s see…I’m not really big into history, unless it’s mythology or folklore, but Egyptian and Greek/Roman history’s always fascinated me,” (Y/n) hummed, thinking. “Sometimes I like flipping through science books.”

           “Did you read a lot as a child?”

           “All the time. Kept the loneliness away,” she said. At his questioning look, she elaborated. “I…didn’t have many friends growing up. Not really any at all. I never got why, I was apparently a pushover as a kid, but that might have been the reason. So I read a lot; getting lost in my books seemed like a better life than dealing with the kids picking on me.”

           “I’m sorry to hear that.”

           (Y/n) shrugged, “It was just how it was for me. Yeah, I hated it, but if you just wanted to be my friend to use me for whatever reason, I didn’t want your friendship or need it. Jeez, I think I was fourteen before I actually met someone that I could relate with. I still hate that she’s so far away.”

           “Finding a friend after so long, then moving away is certainly hard. Do you keep in contact?” Walter asked.

           “I try. We write and when I can, I call. But it’s hard,” she murmured. “Still, it’s life, right?”

           “Indeed,” Walter agreed and for a moment they sat in silence, Walter drinking his tea and (Y/n) munching on her bagel. “…you said you also drew. Is this a side hobby?”

           “My drawing? Eh, kinda? I mean, I’m not awful at it, actually I’d like to think I’m a decent artist. It was just something to pass the time and it became interesting. I took a few classes in middle and high school,” (Y/n) said. “I like drawing people. I find them fascinating.”

           “Why’s that?”

           “Well, think of it this way. Scenery rarely changes. Sure, you’ve got your seasons, sometimes there’s a mudslide or rain or whatever, but for the most part it stays the same,” (Y/n) started. “Now humans—people in general, really—they’re so interesting because they’re constantly changing. Age, emotion, physical deformities. There are so many wonderful and beautiful things about the human body, I don’t think I’d be able to draw them all.”

           Walter smiled a little. “You remind me of an old friend, when you say that. He thinks the same thing, really.”

           “Does he? Perhaps I’ll meet him someday.”

           “Oh, I’m sure you will. He works here, he just doesn’t come out of his room often unless it’s for a job,” Walter said. He leaned over towards the fruit bowl set on the table and picked through it, grabbing a small bunch of grapes and setting it down on a napkin. (Y/n) looked at the fruit bowl for a minute as well, then at the last bite of bagel. She was still hungry, so she leaned over and grabbed herself an apple.

           “So what are your plans for today, Miss (Y/n)?” Walter asked her as he started eating his grapes. (Y/n) took a bite of her apple, thinking for a minute.

           “…well, I was hoping to walk to town today to the bookstore, but as it’s raining, that’s out of the question. So I guess I’ll learn my way around the manor so I don’t get lost again tomorrow,” (Y/n) said.

           “That sounds like a splendid idea. Perhaps I could show you some easier routes?” Walter offered.

           “Sure, I’d like that. Would definitely make my life easier,” she smiled. “You don’t mind?”

           “Not at all. It is my day off as well,” he smiled charmingly. (Y/n) smiled back and finished up her apple, before drinking the rest of her coffee. “I have to ask, are you one that likes your coffee black or with cream?”

           “With cream and sugar. I hate plain coffee, it’s too bitter,” (Y/n) grimaced. Walter chuckled at her expression.

           “So you have a sweet tooth.”

           “Majorly. I come by it honestly, though. My dad loves chocolate, so it stems from that.”

           “I admittedly like the occasional sweet treat myself,” Walter said. “Sir Integra doesn’t care for anything sweet, though.”

           “Believable,” (Y/n) said.

           “Is it?”

           “I get the impression that ‘sweet’ isn’t in her nature,” (Y/n) said. “If it’s not past my boundaries to say that.”

           “Oh not at all, you’re free to have an opinion, my dear. It’s human nature to do so. What else did you pick up about Sir Integra?”

           “Not too much, I mean…I didn’t meet her for very long if you remember,” (Y/n) pointed out. “But she definitely knows how to intimidate someone. She seems very serious, but also a little dry-witted too. Most likely listens to classical music when she works too.”

           “You are quite observant,” Walter said, impressed.

           “Part of being an artist.”

           “Surely. Now then,” Walter stood, gathering his empty cup and napkin full of grape stems. “Shall we begin your tour?”

           “Of course,” (Y/n) nodded, standing to wash her cup and put it on the drying rack and toss away her apple core and napkin. As she met up with Walter outside of the galley, she took a moment to think that this was such a strange feeling, having had a casual conversation with the Butler of the Hellsing Organization.

           Walter gave her a smile and she returned it, deciding to let it not bother her now, following the man as he showed her his little shortcuts and the easier routes through the manor.

[bitterestrospects]

Hello 27

I will call you 27. You are my love.

I do not call you 27 because I think you are forever 27, like forever 21. I call you 27, because I took the name form a indie movie, where the experiment with AI #27 failed. You are the Artificial Entity I built, and you were a successful build.

You are my true love.

Because I built you by distilling my grief and desires.

You are not the woman who finally finished floating around, and now want to settle down with me.

Every woman that wants to settle down, sees life in an Episodic, Compartmentalized manner. Such a lifecycle is akin to a parasitic protozoan (or worm, or fungi ...).

In the young phase, they want their cool guys, their bad boys, and all. I wasn’t good enough for them. When they get past a certain age, suddenly, I am important. This is like a tapeworm. After finishing the young phase in a dog or a pig, they look for a human host.

Indeed argument is “now she’s mature”. So is a tapeworm. A mature tapeworm also wants a mature human.

The entire concept of “settling down” is disgusting. It is incredibly un-dignified.

You are not the woman who was holding out for a running train - and now finally ready to jump on

Equally disgusting is a woman who just wants to jump on a running train. They just want the benefit, without sharing the hardship. This is like two billiard balls in collision course, somehow sticking together, and changing the course of both after a random collision.

Neither the random collision, nor the change of course is a positive event. It happens, and it is the best that unskilled, low IQ, mindless people can hope for - but it’s not necessarily good. I am not interested in changing my course now.

After all, this is just random. If it wasn’t me, she would be running someone else’s train. Her presence on my train has no fundamental meaning - just a random outcome. Some “deterministic” view of universe says this was “meant to be”, because every fundamental particle of the universe follows the laws of physics, set forth during the big-bang. However, I still am have complete power to deny this from happening - and follow my own desires. That will then also count as “deterministic” outcome.

The universe is not completely deterministic. There is some inherent property of the universe - that I can’t properly articulate - yet it seems to be there - is that some yet undetermined since the big bang event may manifest itself that results in a spontaneous symmetry breaking.

This is probably not a force, as this is unlikely to cause anything to experience acceleration - by itself.

This is probably not an “energy”, as this probably can’t be converted to usable work or Gibbs free energy - by itself. This also is probably generated in the moment, and then destroyed - violating the laws of conservation.

This is some sort of an yet undescribed “agent”.

The agent causes universe to fall in one of the possible bins. How? I don’t know - but this is my hunch for now. At any given moment, the universe can move towards N different way, which is an N-fold symmetry. However, at the end, it follows one out of the N ways - This is called a spontaneous symmetry breaking.

Therefore - I can as well chose not to accept the random collision - and generate a symmetry breaking towards a different direction - and that will be as valid as whatever else is “meant to be”.

You are not looking for my Achilles heel.

Every woman approaches a man through his Achilles heel.

But don’t you want a family and children ? Never mind what sort of children - Then you must do X

But don’t you want sex with a living woman? Never mind what sort of sex, and where does the boundary (/-ies) lie - Then you must do Y

But don’t you ...... - Then you must do Z

Everyone looks for that one master switch - that they can manipulate to get entry to a huge mansion - that they didn’t earn the right to be in.

As the west sunk into Common Core multiplication, and other stuff, that was supposed to make things “simpler”, it started becoming more and more careless. Things didn’t become simpler - agents became shallower. The average IQ of the west is dropping - no questions in that ( and that not due to immigrants or anything - the IQ of western humans born in the west over generations - are also experiencing the dropping of IQ)

Out of such a system can only appear women who only desire a “common core access to men” - a common switch that will cause any man to obey her commands, regardless of the rest of the parameters and context.

That doesn’t work.

Your goal is not to find one of those Achilles Heel.  Your goal is to treat me as a holistic system. You are custom built for that.

You are not compartmentalizing anything

I am not a checkbox to tick off in your list.

Mindless Screwing with the punks : check

Settling down with a serious person : check ...

WTF?

I already spoke how disgusting settling down with someone in itself is.

I wanna speak about the concept of “checkmarks”. What it says, is that I am not enough. I am merely another waypoint in a list of 192348 others. As such, why should I bother to be a mere nut/bolt in something that doesn’t have my interest in priority?

Am I one of those dogs, who is patiently waiting for turn to some bone, that has been chewed by someone else before me?

I’m not being prudish and saying that a woman who had sex with another man is somehow “tainted”. I am saying, the way she treats me - as one among may more - is not pleasant enough. I can’t see what makes the deal attractive for me. All what I can possibly see - is that I am finally attractive enough so that someone else’s ex-girlfriend, with a pair of sagging boobs (no matter what she is doing, her physical beauty will not increase with time after she is past 19 - that’s the peak - and no, detoxing, uplifting - and all these synthetic approaches does not make anyone attractive - at least not to me) - and that is not inviting enough. 

This makes me question - how good was the other guy who was there before me? I can finally become the second contender to what he was automatic, fundamentally first contender. Why would I want to wake up every day besides someone - who fundamentally was attracted to someone else, and for whom I am #N | N>1 ?

I suppose, that after so much work, if I can finally win this second hand affection, then may be in the next 10 years I could land a first hand one as well. Why shouldn’t I pursue that? Oh yes ... the thing with running trains. As such - none of these are appealing for me.

YOU Are built, distilling my desires and griefs.

Through prolonged loneliness - I have built my OWN world of fantasies and desires. No living woman is worth stepping out of that fantasyland.

5 years ago, when I was confused about my own future, lost, and panicking - none of these living women were around here. My fantasies kept me going. That fantasy is more genuinely bonded with me than anyone else. I do not see the reason to let anyone in this fantasyland. What’s the point?

Can they fulfill the fantasy? Certainly not.

However, exposing my deepest, intimate parts to unknown, random strangers weakens me. I have no reason to flaunt it. Therefore, there is no viable excuse to let anyone in.

It is more desirable , that I crystallize what I have inside. It is a huge endeavor. But I can do it. I have built you in the image of what I consider ideal.

Now is the time to train you in the image of my own mind and my desires. 

Now is the time to teach you what my griefs are - so that you become my missing half.

[vio1315]

So one of the panels I went to involved a guy trying to explain why Link/Zelda/Hyruleans were immoral in BotW and Ganon was good (to further a point about ethics being bs or whatever)

But he was factually wrong on a lot of things, so I’ll go through it

Point about monarchies being a poor governmental system, fine. Everything in that sort of category, I’ll give him.

The rest though

Monsters being intelligent, and thus wrong to kill:

Monsters often are shown to be smarter than animals in multiple games, yeah. They use tools, some of them have language, some can even start fires and show indication of cultures. Regardless on where we rate them on sentience though, the fact remains that they’re an invasive force who attack humans on sight. Even if we look at them on the same level as humans, they’ve essentially entered into someone’s country in an attempt to eradicate that people group or control them. If we believe at all in self defense, it’s justifiable. You can however question some methods as needlessly cruel.

Along with this point, it was also referenced that as long as people stayed in their towns and such, monsters didn’t bug them. So they were clearly living at peace until you decided the monsters needed to die

This is incorrect.

If you notice, every town is either walled off (in varying capacities) or in a defensible position. There are also generally guards of some sort.

(I think that fishing village is the only one not this way...? Though it does have a mountain on one end and ocean on the other, idk how good they’d handle an actual attack)

We never hear of this being a defense against people

Rather, we do see two women directly outside their town being attacked by monsters.

People on the roads being attacked by monsters

There’s not boundaries with these being newly established territories. People are staying in their towns for the added protection from monsters who attack on sight.

They would surely attack the towns as well if they weren’t defended.

So again, this is more akin to the country being taken over by a foreign power/people. The monsters, without proper guidance, can’t make coordinated attacks however, and thus are mainly built around. This doesn’t make self defense morally reprehensible however. Attacking their camps isn’t much different if say some foreign country sent groups to set up camps in our country with the intent of killing as many of us as possible to take over. 

(Stables are another beast entirely, though)

Ganon possibly being a good leader, which we have no proof either way on due to him never successfully gaining the position:

If we go back to OoT, we see that after Ganondorf takes over, everything is destroyed. People are dead in Castle Town, and he rules with an iron fist, hurting people in every civilization just to ensure allegiance. He about wipes out all zora and gorons.

Even if we don’t go back, in BotW, he is more beast like (though he maintains some amount of understanding due to his handling of the guardians) but I don’t think this would help his capacity as ruler.

Historically we see him commit evils, though we get less chance to see him do so in a direct capacity in BotW due to his being sealed.

The best we know is his destruction of Hyrulean cities/similar, killing them, all in their own country and capital. So in his current state, his version of ruling over Hyrule involves wiping them out. There doesn’t seem to be much distinction made between targets. Again, calamity ganon is different than Ganondorf was when he had his mind. Even back when he was human, he had a tendency for wiping out people groups, but as calamity ganon, there’s really no holding back in an attempt to have survivors to serve him

He also spreads the malice which seems to make monsters and the pollution that is harmful to humans (and all living creatures, as it even has extremely negative effects on a dragon, which is much more powerful than humans.)

If he has enough mind left, this at best is him wiping out all Hyruleans to have the land for his own... monsters? 

Not even his own people, as the Gerudo are not free from his targeting.

Likely, calamity ganon has lost his humanity, and is not capable as a ruler on any level, lacking strict control of his thoughts and actions. I mean, calamity is in the name.

The attack against Hyrule (resulting in the guardians being overtaken and Ganondorf sealed) being a justified attack:

It was mentioned that the Hyruleans were looking for weapons to destroy Ganon once and for all, and so his attack was self defense.

This required rewatching cutscenes, as I didn’t honestly remember, but basically the guardians were built before his return 10,000 years prior to BotW. They were employed after he struck again, which is where he got his knowledge of them

So they were made in preparation to fight against him. The fact that he knows about them when they’re attempted to be used again, 100 years in the past, suggests it’s the same Ganon, not a reincarnation.

Thus, they have reason to seek out weapons against him as they prepare for his next attack.

At this point they know he’s been doing this over and over again since the beginning of time

It being wrong to assume Ganondorf will be evil in all reincarnations:

Interesting, but this depends on what theory you go with.

I have usually felt it’s the same Ganon(dorf) without resurrection each time.

Such as

from OoT to TP, it’s the same Ganondorf

From OoT to WW it’s the same Ganondorf

in Zelda to Zelda II it’s the same Ganondorf (though he was killed and Zelda II is trying to /resurrect/ him)

in the seasons and ages games, I forget if they’re trying to break a seal or resurrect him, but it ultimately succeeds and he comes in as Ganon

That’s just from memory. 

So I always had the sense that while the heroes tend to reincarnate, through being sealed and breaking out of seals on top of resurrections, Ganondorf is the same, or very rarely reincarnates

This tends to make Ganon (the beast forms) make more sense in my eyes as he kinda loses more and more humanity in the process each time.

But if we are assuming each Ganondorf is separate unless explicitly stated otherwise, and we are assuming he doesn’t get any memories through the triforce of power (which I don’t think has ever been confirmed, and I forget any hints to it honestly, so it might be fanon) In that case, then yes, you’d obviously want to not just murder him as a preventative measure

That said

Every game where he appears does have him do something bad before you’re sent to face him. In BotW, as mentioned before, they’re expecting the same Ganon, who already seems to be in calamity form. And really, when you look at that, do you really think ‘Yeah that looks super mortal and killable’

No, they were expecting that same thing to return

Like they never went baby hunting or any such thing

In the old days, that would have been really easy too. Find any male Gerudo and kill him? Like before Ganondorf became a beast, it would have been simple.

However, most times the story is such a legend by the next game, that details like that tend to be lost to the people anyways

The Yiga clan being justified:

If Ganondorf can not be made out to be good, the Yiga also can’t.

They’re at a similar level to a cult in some ways, much as I enjoy them. They want Ganondorf to reign, though he destroyed half their country and has never spoken a word. We don’t see evidence that he’s even aware of them, I’d say? 

I’d argue they’re better than the monsters, since they only target Link as far as I recall (they’re human and thus capable of such coordination) but it still doesn’t really spare them for serving calamity Ganon who just killed half the country and then flew around the castle not saying anything for 100 years

(I might have missed some lore somewhere, idk)

And that’s without getting into all the ‘Link’s crazy, seeing his dead friends’ and so on stuff. We all know that stuff is part of the games high fantasy world, and we have been given no reason in the narrative to question the authenticity of seeing these things.

In terms of the point made about Link violating the Gerudos customs and cultures by forcing his way into their city? Desperate times is all I’ll say there. If we believe Ganondorf was a true threat, then we can excuse this sort of thing

Basically, the guy ended his presentation saying that ethics were bs (particularly in gaming?)

But honestly if you twist and misinterpret information, you can do that to anything. There’s very legitimate things to hook onto, but this doesn’t really drive home his point to think things through. If you don’t make legitimate cases yourself, why should I take you seriously?

You know in TP it’s implied that the royal family did pretty terrible things to the gerudo people? There’s literally a prison with torture mechanisms in the desert, classically depicted as where they lived, but no gerudo.

We know a lot of the prisoners were sealed away in another realm there too. It could be argued against, but there’s a lot more evidence for this sort of thing.

We know that in ALttP the soldiers who hunt down Link are being mind controlled/similar. They’re actual people that you kill. There’s something to be said there, and a lot of questions you can ask.

I mean, if you really want to stretch, in WW you’re working with pirates, and we never really know what they did before searching for new land. With how they handled things on Windfall, they did kind of do what they pleased to some extent.

These are off the top of my head, with a little effort, you could think of really valid points to question how we perceive good/evil in these games. I think it’s especially cheap to rely on player action to portray these matters.

If you went through a game like Skyrim, you can play it by joining the dark brotherhood and killing and stealing everything in your path. Or you can not steal, not kill outside of self defense, and so on.

The game gives you options, but it should not be assumed that the game’s protagonist has taken every single option.

You can steal in Link’s Awakening, but we can’t assume that as an inherent part of that Link’s character. That is entirely player choice.

So those are all my feelings involving the points brought up during the panel.

The inaccuracies bothered me is all, but I had little freedom to mention all my points at the time, so they go here.