Reader, I ate his heart in the marketplace

old enough to qualify for a blockbuster veteran's discount | ashembie on AO3 | icon by aka-lorterian |

[helenvaughans]

[zitasaurusrex]

[annabelle--cane]

yknow I'm feeling a bit brave so I will venture to say what this blighted essay's pitch actually is: reading project hail mary (novel and film) as a ravishment fantasy. in both main threads of the narrative grace is brought wildly out of his element and pulled into the orbit of a mysterious foreign stranger who is significantly stronger / richer / more powerful than him, forced to accept unsolicited lavish gifts and personal praise despite protests and discomfort, and made to live in isolated locations in extremely close proximity to these people with no say in the matter, all of which are common motifs in ravishment fantasies. on her own, stratt also brings in other common motifs of restraints, drugging, being above the law, multiple kidnappings (I'm doing crazy things with the classical definition of "rape" as in "abduction" and its shared etymology with "rapture" as in "being taken to the heavens"), and the very specific yet still common motif of "otherwise trustworthy partner goes too far and doesn't take 'no' for an answer." rocky on his own brings in the overprotective flavor common to a lot of dark romance novel heroes, i.e. "I make sure you sleep and I like to watch you while you do it, I make sure you eat enough even if you've got baggage about it, I make inhuman displays of strength when you're injured, and as long as I'm around I'll make sure nothing bad ever happens to you ever again."

the issue I was running into with researching this a few weeks ago is that almost all of the scholarly writing on the content of people's forced-sex fantasies focuses solely on women's fantasies and starts with the research question of "why would women enjoy imagining such a horrible misogynistic thing?" despite surveys often showing that men have force-fantasies (where they are the one being forced) at very comparable rates to women. my hypothesis for a bit was "either men's fantasies are exactly the same as women's or they're completely different in [x] way," which was disproven interestingly when I did finally find something about men's force-fantasies: in content they are almost exactly the same as women's fantasies but the emotional motivations are often different in [y] way, which I hadn't expected. and [y] also super applies to my buddy ryland, perhaps even more than my original [x] hypothesis.

my hopes for writing this are twofold: a) to address the question I sometimes see phm audience members come away with of "if grace likes his life by the end and doesn't seem that mad about all of that, is the message supposed to be 'violation of bodily autonomy is good, actually?'", and b) to lightly resist one of the prevailing notions in the study of forced-sex fantasies, that ravishment fantasies are solely abstracted and fantastical and pleasurable and are completely 100% separate from fearful paranoid imaginings of / flashbacks to realistic sexual violence.

[annabelle--cane]

oh also: the most common interpretation of why people have ravishment fantasies is that it allows the fantasist to disavow a desire they feel ashamed of because, in the fiction of the forcing, they don't *want* it at all, they're being made to do whatever it is and can't be considered at fault. as I allude to in my final paragraph of the original post, I think it's a tad more nuanced, but there's definitely a lot of truth to that. grace can tell stratt that he's not smart or important or capable or brave or selfless enough to do what she wants, but she'll ignore it, make him do it anyway, and kit him out with skilled staff members and expensive lab equipment and coffee just the way he likes it. it's a fantasy of being respected and heroic and good whether he likes it or not.

with rocky, the fantasy is of being forced to be loved and protected. rocky decides to initiate contact, he decides that he's moving into the hail mary, he decides that he's always going to watch grace sleep even if grace says he doesn't need it, he decides to gift grace the fuel to get home even when grace pretends he doesn't want it, and he decides he's not going to let grace die to save him even when grace says he's made his choice. the two scenarios allow grace to experience the rewards of being selfless without needing to be so gauche as to ever say he thinks he's that good of a person AND to experience the rewards of being selfish without saying he thinks he deserves to be cared for.

[onedirectionforever]

“you support gay rights so you must be gay”

i support animal rights do i look like a fucking alpaca to you

[onedirectionforever]

turns out i am gay

[monsieurenjlolras]

holy shit how’d this alpaca learn how to type

[mywitchcultblr]

Diversity win! The alpaca is gay!

[adreamthatsworthkeeping]

[thebirdkiwi]

he was a llama

[fritextramole]

a llama?! he’s supposed to be dead!

[fexalted]

one of the best parts of making up increasingly wild and specific aus with a friend is sending them posts like "this is sooo blorbo in torture chamber au number 15" and they reply back like "YESSS btw have i told you about my latest idea for how to torture them even more" and you get to enjoy a little snack and kick your feet with glee

[hjartasalt]

See him sweeties

[hjartasalt]

He's so sweeties!

[hjartasalt]

Now see him fabulous

[hjartasalt]

Now see him. In the dark.

[hjartasalt]

My pet comma/kidney bean/some sort of slug

[jager-bruder]

[queen-scribbles]

[fluff-e-boy]

One of the most important images of all time

[animentality]

[opossum-mypossum]

[digitaldiscipline]

This is the 85 year old creator of Roger Rabbit:

[prokopetz]

It's kind of a trip seeing people debate which kings and emperors were the "good" ones when every single one of the rulers in question has a documented history of having people tortured to death for the crime of slightly annoying them.

[prokopetz]

The really funny part is how consistent this is regardless of any other attributes of said monarch. Their biography will be all "he was a vigorous social reformer, reined in the abuses of the nobility, championed religious tolerance, and also one time he had a guy beaten to death with a rock for insulting his horse".

[no-sharks-on-the-sun]

[shetheyslain]

Dahling you simply must read this book! It’s all about this devious little caterpillar who simply gorges himself on all manner of divine things

[batsandboba]

[fellshish]

@ fic authors what do you personally consider a successful fic? What’s the bar?

[sherl-grey]

actually writing the fic down

[chungledown-bimothy]

I fucking love when people give in-universe reasons for omegaverse shenanigans being a relatively new phenomenon and not just a fact of life. And this is probably my favorite out of all of them. Insane choice, and I want to kiss the author sloppy style about it.

As we all know, the Spanish Flu caused the omegaverse. Iconic.

[nosimpincurly]

You’re not depressed. You just need $250,000 in your bank account.

[catherinebunnington]

Reblog to materialize $250,000 in prev's bank account

[mercurys-in-retrograde]

let the contemporary record show mr beast was pretty ignorable for his whole career if you were just like, busy.

[kira-kui-n]

"get him pregnant" well thats not my thing but to each their own

"get her pregnant" *takes up my sword and shield* i wont let you do that to her. ......................