#who would want to read a novel about a protagonist who doesn't like men /s

[friendlycursedspaceotter]

In vain I have struggled. It will not do. The past few weeks have been a torment. I cannot complete the essay on how Pride and Prejudice combats amatonormativity through the emphasis on familial and sisterly relationships, and also contains extensive evidence for my aroace Mary headcanon and how Jane Austen inadvertently created one of the first queer characters in British media by 11:59 tonight. I have fought against the threat of failure in the class, my worse judgements, and the great admiration of my beloved feminist literature teacher. I am now in need to ask her to put aside all that and end my agony.

I hate this. Most ardently. Please do me the honor of allowing me to make it into a Tumblr post.

[chthonic-cassandra]

Recent books, fiction (including lots of retellings that I am a sort of a jerk about) -

Linden Lewis, The First Sister - reasonably strong sci-fi, quite solid for a debut novel. I picked it up and was drawn in for concubine narrative reasons; the most compelling of the novel's three protagonists is a young woman raised from childhood to be a one of an order of priestess-concubine women serving on spaceships and prohibited from speaking so as not to reveal the secrets they hear. I found this plotline affecting (as I would), but the novel as a whole needed to a work a little harder for the emotional investment of its readers. What was most striking was how vividly of the moment it felt within the genre - all these elements (neural implants, identity confusion of a somewhat dissociative nature, a particular relationship with empire, a particular handling of gender) felt recognizable as specifically characteristic of sci-fi of the past decade or so. I wonder how these stories will age.

Holly Black, Book of Night - this is Black's first foray into adult fiction; it's entertaining but not particularly memorable urban fantasy. Peculiarly, it bears a striking resemblance to Leigh Bardugo's first novel for adults, published a couple years back - both center around rough-edged female thieves (for a generous definition of thief) trying to work around wealthy men who are seeking power through magic while also getting entangled with a somewhat mysterious male love interest with an anguished backstory. This was fine. Black has always been a bit hit or miss for me, but this doesn't have the wild, self-indulgent edge of her strongest work, and the magic system is incoherent to the point of being distracting.

Swapna Krishna & Jenn Northington, eds. Sword Stone Table: Old Legends, New Voices - short story collection, new interpretations of Arthurian legends. Fine but not great. A few of the stories will stick with me, like Roshani Chokshi's Fisher King story about fate and Maria Dahvana Headley's epistolary retelling set in turn-of-the century America (interestingly, I haven't much liked the novels of Chokshi or Dahvana Headley's that I've read before?), but none of them deeply moved me or really made me see the originals in a new way. The modern retelling (by Jessica Plummer) with reincarnated (maybe?) Elaine as a barista will stick in my mind both because I was left puzzling over the author's choice of coffee orders for the Arthurian characters and also because it made me think wistfully about one of my old LJ friend's reincarnated Arthurian figures fic which I loved a lot and don't remember how to find again.

Gwendolyn Kiste, Reluctant Immortals - Lucy Westenra and Bertha Rochester are living out their immortal lives together in California in the 1960's when they have to deal with the reemergence of Dracula and Rochester into their lives. This was a cute novel in a lot of ways, but suffered from an unwillingness to commit too far in any direction - to its horror, to its humor, to its aesthetics. The liveliest parts of the book are when Kiste is setting the grotesquerie of Lucy's vampirism against 1960's Americana, and I think what the book really wanted to be was a kind of playfully feminist explication of the contemporary-set Hammer Draculas (probably without the Jane Eyre element at all, to be honest), but it didn't actually go there and so a lot of it fell flat. I was moved by Lucy's many deaths and her meeting Mina in the liminal space in between resurrections, but none of it was enough. Like another feminist vampire novel I read earlier this year (The Lost Girls), I theoretically appreciated its engagement with Dracula tropes from a different lens, but in practice it just played everything too safe, falling within this neat narrative of female revenge that is probably quite joyful for some readers but doesn't land for me.

Elizabeth Nunez, Even in Paradise - King Lear reset on Barbados. This didn't work for me; I found it scattered, tonally weird, and none of the characters felt emotionally believable.

Adania Shibli, Minor Detail (trans. Elisabeth Jacquette) - a contemporary Palestinian woman reflects on the rape and murder of another Palestinian woman by Israeli soldiers in 1949. This was moving and effective in its brevity, though the distancing effect of the one tragedy being seen through the other character's gaze/imagining was, I found, not quite what I ended up wanting out of the narrative. Interesting for my ongoing tracking of violence representations.

Katherine Duckett, Miranda in Milan - Miranda after the events of The Tempest tries to unravel the secrets her father has kept from her. This was enjoyable, at points quite so; the queer narrative was an especial pleasure after my Shakespeare group had just had a conversation about the pointed foreclosure of Miranda's opportunities for lesbian desire in the play ("no woman's face remember/save from my glass mine own"). But the plotting is pretty weak, and it's not as sharp a reading of the play as I would have hoped for. Still glad I read it.

Laura Sebastian, Half-Sick of Shadows - Elaine of Astolat retelling that I thought was just straight-up bad. Flat characters, incoherent world-building and relation to the legend (there are some pieces which are just imported assumptions from Mists of Avalon in a totally different setting), just really irritating.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia, The Daughter of Doctor Moreau - premise should be clear from the title. This was solid, enjoyable, didn't change my life. This is always my experience of Moreno-Garcia - I liked her early novels and was excited to see her grow as a writer, but to my gaze at least she seems to have just...stayed consistent. I enjoy her books, but I always want something more - I wanted them to be weirder, darker, more emotionally intense. This was no exception. I'll probably keep reading her work.

[marlowe1-blog]

"A Young Girl" by Kathy Acker (High Risk)

So that's what all the fuss is about!

I never liked Kathy Acker. I suspect it might have been timing. I either read her too early, before I wanted to read experimental novels or too late when the "cool" books of my college years were a little embarrassing. I saw her interview William S. Burroughs and she seemed cool but she wasn't writing anything that I liked.

Until I read this story and holy fuck this is amazing. This is raw and crazy and moves along at a speedy clip. It has all the misogyny of a Burroughs book but with Acker, you know she's depicting the nasty and angry mediocre men that she's been dealing with. So it's like Andrea Dworkin writing about her experiences with abuse and her assumption about hateful men but without the essayist need to tell you what it means.

This is also a very 80s story in all the worst/best ways. Think Brett Easton Ellis without the smug cocaine stuff. Think the anger of AIDS victims knowing that the government is fucking them over. They aren't going to be singing on tables. They are living in the poorest neighborhoods but they aren't upset when the homeless people tell them to fuck off.

The young girl is being traded off between Mayor ______ and her dad. And who are we kidding, the mayor is obviously Koch who let the city go to Hell and bitched about graffiti. He wasn't the outright gentrification force of Giuliani kicking everyone out of their homes, but he was pushing for the gentrification process that Giuliani would complete. Also Koch was the gay mayor who hid his homosexuality and let the AIDS crisis get just as bad as the Reagan administration.

So it's the mayor and the artist fighting over this girl as she's watching and hearing them all be fucking horrible. The artist is the MALE artist who gets away with hurting women in the name of art. I'm thinking about Roman Polanski but there are so many of them in the world. And of course, he's one of those guys that fucks any woman he wants but if his wife steps out, he's violently divorcing her.

So the ending? The ending has the mayor helping the artist realize his vision of painting a dead or dying girl that looks like her daughter. The mayor claims that he found a corpse in the morgue but he just gets the daughter and ties her up in a car and sets it on fire. And her dad just draws and sketches and doesn't give a shit if it's her. She keeps saying that he doesn't see her, but more likely he sees her and doesn't care.

But the homeless rebel and she gets out and fuck those two.

I guess it's cool that Kathy Acker isn't immune to the happy ending. We've been dragging through the shit.

The one this this reminds me of is the Red Riding Quartet which is all about murder, murdering women, rape and violence with shitty protagonists doing stream of conscious vicious talk. Only the fact that a woman is writing it and the woman doesn't get sacrificed to the plot makes all the difference. I am reading Nineteen Seventy Seven and I love the way it's written but i hate myself for liking it. No such self-loathing with Kathy Acker.

[jimlingss]

It's B from @bang-tan-bitches and I would like to request a yandere fic. It can be BTS OT7 x reader or BTS member of your choice x reader. Similar to your amazing isekai story i would like something similar(a long one shot or a multi-chapter, your choice). Whether YN transmigrates to a game or a novel (not as a villain but maybe as a cannon fodder side character that has little importance to the story and just wants to lay low) but YN captures the attention of the love interest(s) and shit starts getting weird, intense, uncomfortable. Maybe it causes the supposed female lead to turn into the villain, maybe it causes the love interest(s) to turn into the villain(s). Maybe YN realizes that something is wrong with the story/game but can't figure it out. Idk. Time period doesn't matter. Modern. Ancient. Fairytale. Fantasy. Whatever.

If you can do this great! If you can't or don't want to, that's okay too. You're an amazing writer with so much talent and I'm really appreciative of all your work. Thank you for taking requests from your fans, I'm sure you've received a lot.

Take care! 😘💜💜💜

at the start of the pandemic, I was getting back into manga and manhwa and then after a few months, I dawdled off but recently, I’ve been getting back into it again haha so this request came at a pretty good time. Hopefully you won’t mind that I’ve taken some creative liberties with this request lol I think it’s more fun if I keep readers on their toes, including the requester.

On another note, I really shouldn’t be writing all my isekai’s with Taehyung as the main lead but he’s just so fitting asdfghjkl

↳ The Fox Bride

2.6k || 99% Light Fluff, 1% Angst || Kim Taehyung || Isekai!AU, Slight Yandere!AU, Nine-Tailed Fox!Taehyung

You are a tutorial character.

But you weren’t always. You still remember being a career woman in the twenty-first century, struggling with overtime and paying bills while trying to keep yourself fed. The success of that ranged from month to month. But more importantly, you still remember that night too.

It was rainy. Your car blew a flat tire. You pulled to the side of the highway and got out.

The last thing that registered was the deafening honk of the semi-truck. 

Then you felt yourself flying upwards.

But when you landed, instead of colliding with the concrete and dying upon impact, you fell back onto your ass in the middle of a market on a dirt road. Transported back a thousand years ago.

Your purpose was fulfilled in the next two minutes. 

“Are you alright?”

The male protagonist had stretched out his hand and helped you up. The hero. The main character. It was obvious with his bright red hair, shining eyes and bronze armour. He was so starkly different from the rest who were gray and drab, including you who was suddenly in a brown shapeless dress. He was practically a neon billboard in the middle of a graveyard.

“Are you Y/N?”

You looked at him, befuddled that he knew your name. But before you could even respond or provide a line of dialogue, he said, “This is a delivery from Baker Jeon. He gives you his thanks.”

The protagonists handed you a loaf of bread. Undoubtedly his first ever quest. 

You looked down, not sure what to do with it.

“Do you know where the blacksmith is?”

You had absolutely no clue. But there was the deafening noise of hammering steel literally ten steps away. You would have to be blind not to see the gruff man shaping a sword at an anvil right on the road and deaf not to hear it. As if that wasn’t enough, the literal sign of the shop read: ‘the blacksmith’.

So you pointed.

“Thanks.” And he trudged off.

You were utterly confused until a background character who said they knew you waved you over. You shared your bread with her, brushed aside when she asked you what was wrong, and you followed her as she walked up to your supposed cottage.

All the while, you saw yourself in the background of the hero’s main quest as he ran through the town.

And that was that.

It wasn’t so hard to figure out where you were or what the hell this was when you put your mind to it. Without much of a job or a family, and no technology but the candle that you had to conserve when night fell, there was ample time.

So you spent it thinking and you eventually solved the mystery.

You were in Beast Boys Harem: A Forbidden Embrace. AKA. a dumb yaoi otome game app that you downloaded on your phone when you were sixteen and bored. You remember because you were too cheap to buy the routes, so you played the tutorial, prologue and read the summaries of the routes online. Now you regret that you didn’t just fork over the goddamn five dollars. 

Even more than that, you regret that you even downloaded the game in the first place.

But at least you’re just a tutorial character. You’re free from the storyline and the plot—

That’s what you thought.

Turns out living a thousand years in the past in a fantasy realm as a woman didn’t bode well. It was probably no different from how it would’ve been like in the medieval ages. You had no trade skills. No one was willing to accept you as an apprentice when you were a woman. You found that you were essentially illiterate with a reading level of a preschooler, no one was willing to teach you, and you had no power or wealth when you were without a father or a husband.

And you’re certain what the landlord and tax-collectors are doing is illegal.

But in this world, in this unjust realm, there is no such thing as the law.

“We know you’re in there!”

You jolt from the heavy pounding on the frail wooden door.

“It’s time to pay up!”

Your hands tremble as you set the candle down that’s still billowing of smoke, the flame smothered out mere seconds ago. As much as you want to hide and pull the blanket over your head, you know that door won’t last. They’ll find you if you’re trapped in here.

“If you can’t, spread those legs of yours!” a low voice spits and there’s chortling from the men.

Someone adds, “Sell your body already!” 

“Open up! Damn whore!”

Without a single possession but the white nightgown clad on your body, you open the latch of the back window. You cringe at the squeak, trying to keep your movements quiet before the door gives way.

You hoist yourself up onto the window ledge. The door bends with the strength of multiple clenched fists against it. Your feet touch the soft grass outside your cottage. The men shout.

And the door finally slams against the wall, hinges broken. 

But by then, you’ve slipped into the shadows.

“Where is she?!”

The blanket is ripped off the bed, curtains are whipped back, every drawer dumped onto the ground and cupboards yanked open. The floor shakes with the weight of their boots and you press your palm to your mouth to silence your panting breaths, slowly stepping away.

“That damn whore slipped through us—!”

But as your shitty luck would have it, a sudden crack has the whole world coming to a standstill.

Shit. You look down at your feet, realizing that the snapping noise came from you stepping on a twig. And it’s exposed your hiding place.

“There she is!” — “Out the back window!”

You grab fistfuls of your dress and bolt. 

“Get her!”

With your cottage on the edge of town, there’s nowhere to run but through the dense woods. It’s shrouded in the darkness, no doubt filled with wild beasts creeping through the thicket. The rustling canopy of the trees doesn’t allow the dim, waning moonlight to illuminate your path.

So you’re left blind. Struggling up the high incline of the forest, feet slipping on dirt and mud. But you keep sprinting with all your might, even when the pointed, coiling branches scrape at your calves until blood sheds and the hem of your dress tears in the underbrush.

“Run, little rabbit!” one of them mocks, “Run!”

The four men continue to give chase, gripping onto their roaring torches, shrieking and howling after you. One of them is manically laughing as if your efforts to flee only adds to the thrill. Their greased hands reach out to snatch you, but the tips of their fingers graze the ends of your hair.

Your teeth are sunk into the bottom of your lip, sobs breaking through your aching chest. Your lungs burn, dying for a break or moment of relief. But you don’t relent and luckily, you manage to build distance between you and the men. Only, that luck comes crashing down by a fucking hole.

A hole in the forest floor that you don’t see. That has your footing all wrong. That makes you scream and fall.

You twist your ankle in a direction it’s definitely not supposed to be in and cry from pain. 

A second later, you force yourself to get up and keep running with tears flooding your eyes and dripping down your cheeks. But it’s more like limping than running, akin to hobbling on one leg and every movement has pain shooting from your swelling ankle.

The effort becomes futile. They surround you within minutes.

“All finished?” The tax-collector’s head cocks with a spreading grin. “You’re not going to keep running?”

Why couldn’t you just fucking die the first time?! Even if it was an awful death where you didn’t have time to prepare yourself or say goodbye to anyone, at least it would’ve been the end. At least you wouldn’t have to suffer.

But there’s no time to grieve. Or hate the new life you’ve been given. This is it. You have to keep going. You have to survive. By any means. You’re about to pick up a branch and uselessly wave it around at them, shout at them to stand back. Anything that you could do to save yourself—

“Who dares come onto my mountain?!”

There’s a deep timbre behind you. A husky voice that quivers the very core of the forest.

As if the wind has swept through, the trees and thicket rustle and it goes silent.

The men fall back onto their asses, some torches clattering to the ground. Their eyes have grown double in size, nearly falling from their sockets and their jaws have dropped to the dirt.

“I-It’s the nine-tailed fox!”

The man scrambles back.

“Demon!” 

Another barely manages to get onto his feet. He turns around and lurches away while shrieking.

They all run. Scattering away as frantically as cockroaches when the light is flickered on.

From your spot on the ground, you turn around with wide eyes. 

Amber irises meet your gawking and they practically glow in the darkness of the forest. He is dressed in a loose, white robe that’s draped over his frame, open to the middle of his chest. And over his honey hair, on the top of his head, his pointed golden ears twitch. By the torch fire still yet to die out, he is illuminated and his shadow is casted on the ground. The blazing flame warms his cold, sharp features. 

He is the most beautiful person you’ve ever seen. In both worlds you’ve lived in.

And you know who he is.

Taehyung. One of the love interests of the hero. A seductive, sly creature that eventually coaxes the hero into selling him his soul to grant one of his wishes. But Taehyung grows to become an obsessed character that wants to do nothing but monopolize and possess the hero for himself.

That same Taehyung approaches you with his lip curled as you teeter to your feet.

“Run away, girl.” He leans close. “Before I eat you.”

“Stop!” 

On sheer instinct and adrenaline, you push him back. Your palm shoves against his firm chest.

Taehyung stumbles back with his eyes becoming rounded. He looks down to where you had made contact against his body. “Did...you just touch me?”

“What?”

Taehyung’s head darts upwards and he captures your wrist in his hand, squeezing tightly. He tugs you in and on your swollen ankle, you stumble into him. Bodies flush against one another. Your face pressed to his warm chest. His arm coming around your waist to break your fall.

He is aghast. 

“You’re not from this world.” Taehyung’s yellow eyes swirl as they gaze into you. “Where did you come from?”

…

It’s been three days.

“Wed me,” he begs for the seventy sixth time. 

You don’t know why you’re keeping a count.

“No.”

You’re hugging your knees for warmth. The rice paper-paneled doors are slid open and letting in the chilly air. He doesn’t seem to be affected by the cold, but you don’t look at him for long. 

You turn into the corner of his home while sitting on the tatami floors as if you’re putting yourself into time out. But you’d like to say it’s your privacy corner. It’s as private as this abode, which was basically one room, could get. 

Taehyung sighs in frustration, placing his hand on his forehead. His teeth grit. “You’re only making this harder for yourself.” Your silence angers him more. “You can never leave.”

You turn over your shoulder to glare. “Even if I married you, you’d never let me leave anyway.”

Taehyung narrows his eyes on you and then smirks. “You’re right. Wed or unwed, I won’t let you out of my sight. You should feel grateful, girl. You’re the best human I’ve ever treated.”

You quietly scoff.

Maybe you should feel scared. Maybe you should tread more lightly. After all, he’s not a character to be trifled with.

But you know he needs you. That alone gives you power. 

As a beast, Taehyung’s been trapped on this mountain by priests for centuries. The only way he can be free is by feeding off of sexual energy and breaking the barrier. But of course, they also cursed him to be unable to touch any woman in this universe. 

You aren’t from this universe.

You jolt when you realize that while you were lost in thought, Taehyung’s crawled closer. He has a foxy smile, amber eyes searching your expression. “Maybe….maybe I’ll grant you a bit of freedom if you would just give into the temptation and let me have a taste of you.”

As cold as he looks, he is beautiful. He is mischievous when he smirks and sly when he speaks. You are utterly spellbound as you look into his irises. And the temptation he speaks of flickers in the warmth of your belly.

But you turn away.

“I already said we only do that kind of thing after marriage. And I will only marry someone I love.”

Taehyung draws back with an unamused scoff. “What a prudish world you’re from.”

He wanted you the moment you were brought to this house. With the intensity of his stare and your captivated state, you had let him pin you to his floor and you liked it. But then clarity came and you blurted that such an act only happens after marriage. A lie just to buy time.

You didn’t expect for the hero to arrive at Taehyung’s house the next day. With his red hair and bronze armour, he had gotten lost in the forest and knocked on the door. Before you could limp over and answer it, Taehyung jumped off the roof and confronted him.

The guy was thrown off the mountain within five minutes.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. They were supposed to have a steamy rendezvous. Taehyung was supposed to get the sexual energy from him! 

The story was going off the rails. And you’re not sure what you’re even buying time for anymore.

The both of you know it’s only a matter of time before you break and succumb to his mesmerizing seduction.

Taehyung is cruel, ruthless, obsessive.

But what’s the most bewitching thing about him is the jarring contrast of when he’s clumsy and nurturing. It’s what he regards as his own weakness. What he hides from others. But you felt your heart waver two nights ago when you were shaken awake in the middle of twilight. When you peeked open your eye to see him gingerly wrapping your swollen ankle with bandages.

He looked beautiful in the pale moonlight, ears, tails, sharp features softened—

“Ow!” You wince as he squeezes your ankle, right on your injury.

“You think too much in your head,” he says and looks at you. “What’s wrong?”

“It hurts.”

A sadistic smile tugs on Taehyung’s lips. He lets go, but only to lift your chin with his fingers. His plush lips are inches away, his breath warm on your skin and he gazes deep into you. “I won’t let you return to your world. I won’t let you run away. I won’t let anyone harm you.”

“You’re mine now.” Taehyung swears, “You’ll fall in love with me eventually.”

You gulp and he smirks.

The two of you know it’s only a matter of time.