Age: old. Gender: wouldn't you like to know, weatherboy. Video games, memes, Souyo, farming games, ancient fandoms, do not cite the deep magics to me etc. etc. Trying to be a writer, mostly just struggling
an incomplete list of reasons why sex scenes are good, necessary, and a character study, & rarely gratuitous (from a seasoned smut writer and published author)
body image and dysphoria. does this character voluntarily throw their clothes off, do they have to be coaxed, do they enjoy looking in the mirror, are there any areas they refuse to acknowledge? scars? tattoos? what does this say about their past?
what role do they take in the bedroom, and what relationship does it have to the role they take in day to day life?
social/communication skills. how good are they at eye contact, asking their bedmate what they want, are they about verbal communication or body language? what is their body language, is it open or closed off? are they nervously chatty, are their words short and clipped, are they nervously quiet?
touch starvation. how do they react to touch? when's the last time they were touched intimately? how does this touch remind them of their previous encounters with touch, or is this their first time?
glimpses of their education, sexual and otherwise, and the ways this influences their view of the world. what is their understanding of consent? where did they get it from? what do they think of kink vs vanilla? what is their relationship to both?
self esteem. do they take on a role of service in the bedroom because they want to, or because they feel like they have to in order to be worthy, no matter what they really want? how good are they at expressing these thoughts? do they freeze up when their bedmate asks them what they want? do they even know what they want?
how much attention do they want on themselves vs how much are they comfortable with? would they rather the attention was just on their bedmate?
how much guilt, shame, or repression do they have about sex in general? does it feel like a performance, is it true for them? how do they do with being vulnerable with another person, clothes on or off?
how do they feel about submission/domination, about penetration? do they want marks to be left, or do they insist on no trace left behind?
how do they treat their bedmate? loving, rough, tender, gentle, harsh, sadistic, deferring, no matter the scene/dynamic?
what about aftercare? for themself, for their bedmate? do they do it, do they know what it is, how do they do it? do they value it or do they do it just because you're supposed to?
an incomplete list. might add more. sex scenes add SO much value, insight, and development to a character. they are an incredibly intimate and vulnerable setting, which is how the right writer can show readers so much about who this character is in a bedroom setting. it is not gratutious.
Persona 4 is where the Persona milking really started (P4 anime, P4 stageplay, P4 Arena games, P3xP4 crossover games), with P5 and P3 following in its wake. So I wonder how Atlus will milk P4R since P4 already got all the spin-offs
Now, this is by no means a short or small game. I just got THAT obsessed with it.
Slay the Princess is a horror visual novel. There are only two characters, but there are also a ton of characters. There are only two choices (slay the princess or don't do that) but there are also a zillion different branching paths to take. Also there is a lot of gore and there are some really fucked up scenarios. It is a very good game. I can't say much else other than that outside of a read more because if you can handle gore and you are even a little interested in this game I cannot possibly recommend it more. Pick it up and play it with no spoilers, it's a fantastic time.
I'm going to talk about the game now, okay?
This is SUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCH A GOOD GAME HOLY MOLY
At first it seems like a very simple game. Black and white hand-drawn graphics, kind of basic music, a smarmy British narrator urging you to slay a princess, a bunch of options that don't seem to matter much.
Eventually it's 2am on a Monday night and oh shit you have work in the morning but you did it, you brought the shifting mound five vessels and you discovered that there really are only two characters in this game somehow and the graphics are gorgeous and grotesque and the music is phenomenal and the writing! is! amazing!! And now you're eyeballing those 131 steam achievements and all the locks on the memory pages and going "I'll get there I can take my time"
And then it's six days later and you've gone through all the routes multiple times and gotten all memories and all the steam achievements and now you are free, much like the crow monster protagonist and (in some of the endings at least) the princess herself.
This game manages to do everything with nothing. Limited color palette (on purpose), only two characters (technically), only two voice actors, limited controls (all you are doing is selecting choices!), etc. It manages to be beautiful and horrifying, hilarious and profound and disgusting, and also very moving in parts. I like that just five vessels could tell a complete story but going through all of the storylines told a completer story. I like that the princess could be completely innocent or completely irredeemably bad depending on your choices.
My favorite vessels were definitely the Witch, the Thorn and the Razor. Witch and Thorn had the best designs, and Razor was just very funny. I disliked Fury and Beast the most, Fury because her route was absolutely the grossest and Beast because she can eat you and that is my #1 most irrational phobia. I really liked the concept of the Wild, you and the Princess literally becoming a path in the woods... I just don't like how you get there. The Spectre was also a favorite, her design is very cute and I like that she can possess the main character and interact with the voices in his head.
I think the thing I like the most about this game is that all the different routes make perfect sense. If you just coldly murder the princess with no hesitation of course she comes back a as a ghost, and if you're mean to her of course she comes back a the Wraith. But if you let her possess you and then try to take both of you out you end up possessing her instead. Of course if you ask the narrator if she's really unarmed or really dead she isn't dead and she had a secret knife on her, which then turns her bones into swords that she can stab you with, which then turns her entire everything into blades. Of course if you betray her she becomes the Witch. And so on and so forth. Peak storytelling.
10/10 game, very very cool. I love interactive fiction! I love video games!!
A large part of the reason families were bigger in the past was because marital rape was not considered rape and birth control/abortion methods were ineffective, dangerous and/or illegal. We can dance around this and act like our great great great grandmothers just loveddddd being mamas so much that they decided out of their own free will to have 11 children. We can pretend that they DECIDED to have big families because it was a financially advantageous decision so they could have more labor around the farm. But a lot of children in the past were fundamentally unwanted and not conceived out of love, children were not a choice women got to make. We need to admit that and stop pretending historical women were inherently more maternal because they were impregnated at the age of 15 and kept having babies until they were 40. That did not make them loving mothers, it did not make them āthe divine feminineā and it sure did not make them happy.
I've had a very interesting week and I feel like I need to document it, if for no other reason than I will be going back through my tumblr in December for the retrospective anyway and I might as well.
Last Saturday I didn't have the car and I took the bike to do a ghost tour. Ghost tour went fine, I hopped on the bike to go home, and I accidentally hit a curb... and the back tire exploded. Just the inner tube, but still. I had to push the bike back home for about a mile. Fortunately it was after sunset so I wasn't dying of heat but I was definitely aware of all the cars passing and a little overly paranoid that someone was going to run up and try to steal the bike from me as I was pushing it. Fortunately the electric motor still worked, so I was able to push the throttle just a little bit and more or less steer the bike as it went the same speed as I was walking. That definitely helped. I kept hitting my shins against the pedals though, and that sucked.
Sunday I attempted to take the bike to a local bike repair slash coffee shop and they wouldn't be able to do the repair until Tuesday, but they did go ahead and special order a new inner tube because of course my bike is ~*special*~ and requires a funky sized inner tube.
Sunday was also the day I was maybe supposed to drive 10 hours round trip to go handle some Family Drama(tm) but by the time Sunday actually rolled around all of my family, who I love dearly, had decided to be actual adults and not make me drive 10 hours round trip. Which I would have done, but I was glad I didn't have to because I was still pretty exhausted from just Saturday alone. I have threatened to come mediate, and I think the threat of me, the youngest (by a wide margin) having to make them all sit down and talk to each other like adults has made them rethink all of the drama. Maybe. Hopefully.
Monday was normal, I think. Tuesday I had to wake up early to drop the bike off before work, then had to scurry back over during lunch to pick up the bike, but the tire is no longer flat!
Wednesday, Roomie took the car to go to two different gigs, leaving me to get to and from work and also to and from a ghost tour without it. I decided to take the bike to my 9-5 job. I got there in one piece and it was fine, but I cannot stress enough how there are zero bike lanes for at least 60% of the trip and there aren't even shoulders for about 20% of it. I was definitely living in Fear of a driver not paying attention and having nowhere to go to get out of the way, but I made it to work. And my coworkers all either had the reaction of "whoa sick bike" or "you biked?! To here??? Just call me if you need a ride next time!!"
And to be fair, I really should just ask for rides. I know they're not offering just to make themselves feel superior or what have you. About 20% of my motivation is not wanting to impose on people, but the other 80% of it is I like riding my bike! I just wish it was, oh I don't know, safe
On Thursday I at least got dropped off instead of having to bike or walk, but I did end up walking back. In 100 degree heat. It was only 20 minutes, I was fine. Had another ghost tour, took the bike, it was fine.
Friday (yesterday) I had the car. My team had a non-mandatory after work team building event, in which we got free food and went to a place nearby to play some interactive games. Of course I went, there was free food and I genuinely like all of my coworkers. From the description on the website it looked like we were going to be playing a bunch of fun little co-op games. You know, problem solving, pattern recognition, etc. That is what we did, technically, but what they leave off of the website (or I guess what they can't really convey through pictures or even videos) is how insane the games actually are.
For example, on the website they describe a game where up to five people have to find and stand on colored squares of different colors. The co-op version of the game has you all standing on one color and there is a very short time limit, so you have to work together to point people to the closest square to them, lest you end up having to let's say dead sprint fully across a room and leap onto the last remaining green square. Which I did. Multiple times. Which was actually very fun but I wasn't expecting to have to suddenly sprint around a room wildly while avoiding my coworkers, all of which are taller than me! And that's just the co-op version of one game. What they don't tell you is that many of the games are competitive. And my coworkers are all very competitive. So needless to say we didn't play a lot of co-op games.
The squares aside, there was a game that was essentially DDR with extra steps which I of course won very handily. There was also a game where you have to jump over or crawl under lasers. By the end of that game we were all doing very unnecessary and dramatic rolls across the floor just because it was fun. We are all adults. The youngest person there was 25, the oldest of us were 40. By the end I was absolutely exhausted and sweaty, and I still had a ghost tour to do right afterwards.
So as you can imagine by the end of the ghost tour, which is around a mile round trip, an hour and a half of walking and telling stories, I was very tired. So tired that I slipped on basically nothing and scraped the heck out of one of my knees.
Today I finally did something that I had been dreading and dreading and putting off for almost a year, which I thought was going to be very expensive, and it turned out that if I had just done it a year ago it would have cost... $62. I thought for sure it was going to be like $600. I have late fees and so the cost is more like $200. Lesson learned. Don't put stuff off!
And now I'm writing this post instead of doing what I should be doing, which is laundry and dishes and cleaning and sorting and organizing and oh also I have a farmer's market tomorrow and a different one next Saturday and I should really be making stuffed cats or bats or designing new stickers
But instead I'm probably going to play Stardew Valley or Slay the Princess (post about that incoming once I finish the game. Well, I mean finish it properly. Get most of the Steam achievements. Get all the endings, at least? It's a good game.)
hate it when you see something in media that has great kink potential so you skedoodle post-haste to ao3 only to discover there's none fic left beef and then you have to sit there going oh I see I'M the pervert weirdo I'M the problem with society and everyone else in the world is going to heaven with a hundred innocence dollars preloaded onto their ole fashioned wholesome funtimes themepark fast pass card like fuckin oath man
Ok adding to this though that even though it is extremely relatable, this is a KNOWN thing with professional writing. 10k is often referred to as "having a pot boiling" or "having a stew" - it's the point where you often see an idea coming together and it's exciting! But THEN... 30k-50k is the point where that fun has to start coming together. In theatre, it's usually week 3 of a 5 week rehearsal period where you have to stop talking about the play and really get it all up on its feet and cohesive. In art, it's committing to what are going to be the final visible layers of colour and texture, in sculpture the moment where you're truly at the point of no return with carving out the shape.
It usually feels really bad. Because this is the point it becomes real craft. It's so, so difficult to really be able to identify if it's truly not going to be anything or you're just in the hardest part of the process, and really the only way to know is to... write through it. Write it badly. Or, if you really can't, put it in a drawer and come back to it after a few months of breathing space. Remember, you can fix so much in the edit, but you can't fix nothing!
(I say, fully looking at my latest draft of my book and considering throwing it in the bin. But my editor said exactly this to me, so I'm passing it along.)
this is 100% true. I've written 6 complete novels at this point and every single time around the 40k mark I feel lost in the woods. Nothing seems to be working. I feel awful; I can't sleep. I keep going even though I'm convinced I'm going to fail. And then... It's like leaving a tunnel and getting back out in the sunshine. Stuff starts coalescing. Things that weren't working have obvious fixes. I "can write" again, except I was writing the whole time. It just felt hopeless in the moment. It's not. You just gotta get out of the woods.
this is my neocities site for archiving everything souyo! in here you will find:
links to p4 resources
places to find merch
a history of souyo fan art, fic, and more!
it's still a work in progress but all the pages have been basically set up (fair warning: it's gone beyond mobile unfriendly into mobile hostile territory. keeping it authentic to 2011)
discoholicmusic
germansingergirl
gummygunk
areudirty
theartofmadeline
vaporwave
dailybridgerton
romaincrisis
izzy806
