This has turned into a whump blog for the most part, but there's still other writing stuff in the archive and I can't keep a theme so other stuff will show up anyway.
Welcome, welcome! It is that time again! We are coming back with a vengeance for 2026.
Four or More 2026 Pride Event
AO3 collection
This is a limited time Ficathon where the only requirement is to have your work be Pride-themed.
What’s Pride-themed? Anything from actually loudly attending Pride to quiet coming outs to family. Celebrating mixed orientation relationships or watching people’s sexual orientations and genders change and evolve within the polycule. Gender fuckery in the sheets or in the streets.
We will not be policing works for one definition of Pride
Our Four or More Bingo will be officially launched on June 1st, but you can combine this event with the Four or More Bingo (or any other event that allows it) for an extra challenge.
This event will run exclusively from June 1st to June 30th.
This is a low-stakes, personal challenge. There's no penalty for not finishing, you just won’t make it to the Pride collection.
GUIDELINES
Any medium! Any rating! As long as your work focuses on a relationship with 4 or more people, it's allowed!
All works must be your own and not previously posted. AI generated works will be deleted from the collections.
You may combine these with other events, as long as the other event allows it (examples are @polyamships polyamshippingday, lyricaltitles challenges, etc)
Small fandoms welcome!
Don't forget to comply with the community guidelines.
MEDIUM SPECIFIC GUIDELINES
Minimum wordcount for fics is 100 words. There is no maximum
Minimum for art is a sketch on unlined paper (figure sticks allowed!). There is no limit to the quality or effort you want to put in your fills.
Minimum for moodboards is a 3x3 grid (9 images individually or edited in one image). Maximum is given by the place where you decide to post. On tumblr, the maximum is 20 images, but on AO3, you're free!
Minimum for podfic is a 100-word fic. There is no restriction on maximum length or sound effects.
Minimum for fanvids is 30 seconds. There is no maximum.
Other mediums don't have a minimum. Do you want to make an in-universe magazine for your ship? A cross stich pattern? A sculpture? Go ahead and do it! I look forward to all the things you can create.
FAQ below the cut
Q: What kind of works am I allowed to submit?
A: All type of fanworks are welcome! Fics, art, podfic, meta, you name it. As long as the main relationship features 4 or more people, it's allowed.
Q: I don't have an AO3 account. Can I join?
A: Of course! All you need to be able to participate on tumblr is a tumblr account. If you don't have an AO3 account and would like to post there, please contact the mods off anon and we'll get you an invite.
Q: My work contains [INSERT WARNING HERE]. Can I still participate?
A: Yes. This is a CNTW (Choose Not To Warn) space. Feel free to post without worrying about warnings.
Q: I don't want to see [X] content, can you please remove it?
A: No. The only content that will be removed will be that that does not comply with the rules.
If you have any questions about the event, don’t hesitate to send a message.
Welcome, welcome! It is that time again! We are coming back with a vengeance for 2026.
Four or More 2026 Pride Event
AO3 collection
This is a limited time Ficathon where the only requirement is to have your work be Pride-themed.
What’s Pride-themed? Anything from actually loudly attending Pride to quiet coming outs to family. Celebrating mixed orientation relationships or watching people’s sexual orientations and genders change and evolve within the polycule. Gender fuckery in the sheets or in the streets.
We will not be policing works for one definition of Pride
Our Four or More Bingo will be officially launched on June 1st, but you can combine this event with the Four or More Bingo (or any other event that allows it) for an extra challenge.
This event will run exclusively from June 1st to June 30th.
This is a low-stakes, personal challenge. There's no penalty for not finishing, you just won’t make it to the Pride collection.
GUIDELINES
Any medium! Any rating! As long as your work focuses on a relationship with 4 or more people, it's allowed!
All works must be your own and not previously posted. AI generated works will be deleted from the collections.
You may combine these with other events, as long as the other event allows it (examples are @polyamships polyamshippingday, lyricaltitles challenges, etc)
Small fandoms welcome!
Don't forget to comply with the community guidelines.
MEDIUM SPECIFIC GUIDELINES
Minimum wordcount for fics is 100 words. There is no maximum
Minimum for art is a sketch on unlined paper (figure sticks allowed!). There is no limit to the quality or effort you want to put in your fills.
Minimum for moodboards is a 3x3 grid (9 images individually or edited in one image). Maximum is given by the place where you decide to post. On tumblr, the maximum is 20 images, but on AO3, you're free!
Minimum for podfic is a 100-word fic. There is no restriction on maximum length or sound effects.
Minimum for fanvids is 30 seconds. There is no maximum.
Other mediums don't have a minimum. Do you want to make an in-universe magazine for your ship? A cross stich pattern? A sculpture? Go ahead and do it! I look forward to all the things you can create.
FAQ below the cut
Q: What kind of works am I allowed to submit?
A: All type of fanworks are welcome! Fics, art, podfic, meta, you name it. As long as the main relationship features 4 or more people, it's allowed.
Q: I don't have an AO3 account. Can I join?
A: Of course! All you need to be able to participate on tumblr is a tumblr account. If you don't have an AO3 account and would like to post there, please contact the mods off anon and we'll get you an invite.
Q: My work contains [INSERT WARNING HERE]. Can I still participate?
A: Yes. This is a CNTW (Choose Not To Warn) space. Feel free to post without worrying about warnings.
Q: I don't want to see [X] content, can you please remove it?
A: No. The only content that will be removed will be that that does not comply with the rules.
If you have any questions about the event, don’t hesitate to send a message.
Have you fallen for a ship with 0 fics? Perhaps you even thought about writing it but weren't sure there'd be a point. Why not join Launch the Ship—a multifandom challenge to write the first fic for a ship! It provides a friendly little community during what can often be a lonely voyage.
All you need to do is choose a ship with 0 fics, and complete a fic for it before the deadline, July 20th. Everything else is optional, though there are opportunities to share ideas and check out each other's work.
Sign-ups are now open at this link and will be until the deadline (July 20th, 23:55 UTC). Fics will be revealed publicly on July 21st, 00:01 UTC.
So my beta reader for the Big Fics is an astrophysicist, right. Who is currently also writing a hard sci-fi novel about the exploration of Phobos (more power to them, I cannot with the physics required for that, best I can do is soft sci-fi/fantasy and that reminds me I should finish that story).
Anyway I was bitching about how hard it is to come up with feasible planets in Star Wars because sometimes you need a new planet from scratch and sometimes you need to know more about a planet than the 'has jungles, is probably a moon technically' than Wookieepedia will give you, and they're like 'oh yeah I can do something about that'.
So they've written (in Matlab but they swear it will run as a .exe as well and I may be conscripted to embed it as a web tool at some point) a star system generator.
You input what you know about the planet (ecosystem, population, sun colour, does it have liquid water, does it have a moon or moons, is it a moon or moons, temperature averages, atmosphere, you get me) and it will give you the... everything else about the star system, in obedience to real-universe physics. And if you input nothing you get a randomly generated star system.
And I’m like oh I know people who will be into this with a vengeance, and they're not on Tumblr, so this is me seeing who exactly would be keen on, and I cannot stress this enough, a real-physics comprehensive star system generator.
It's still in the debugging phase (last error fixed: every planet wants to have a population of exactly 5000 regardless of other factors, turned out to be a missing equals sign somewhere), but I'm psyched for this and trying to gauge interest for how high a priority 'make this an accessible web tool' needs to be.
Thinking about monster whumpees licking their muzzles when they’re nervous. Having their boundaries disrespected cause they’re not communicating them verbally, but they don’t want to hurt anyone so they just deal. Someone touching a pain point causing the whumpee to instinctively nip. The whumpee being roughly muzzled for it.
This post is basically a transcript of a speech I give to newbies to the D/s scene all the time IRL. I figured it might be useful not only to people curious about kink IRL but also to smut writers here on the smut writing website.
For the purposes of this post, I am sending specific physical acts out of the room. Right now they don't matter, because you can meet an emotional need through any number of physical acts. So when I say that there are many ways to dom and many ways to sub, I am not referring to many kinds of physical acts. I mean that there are many emotional needs that doms and subs bring to scenes, and those can change the scene more than the choice of physical acts that will occur in that scene.
I say this to newbies to the scene because they tend to have a narrow view of the motivations and needs that bring people to D/s, biased by both the newbie's own preferences and the depictions of D/s they've seen in media. The same is true of people who write kink fic. Kink fic is very biased to a narrow subset of the wide range of emotional needs that people might bring to this kind of play.
It's really important to understand this in D/s IRL because a mismatch or miscommunication about these needs can lead to a bad scene. For example, let's take the approaches of sub-as-beloved-pet and sub-as-object. If a dom treats a sub as a beloved pet when what they really want is to be treated like an object, then a sub who went into a scene needing to be ignored, or at the very least the illusion of being ignored and disregarded, is suddenly in the spotlight of a lot of intense attention and affection. Again, I will note that both of these scenes could potentially involve the same physical acts, just approached differently. Let's say it's a service submission scene where the sub is naked and cleaning the room for the dom. Sub-as-beloved-pet would get frequent praise and lots of patiently repeated instructions, while sub-as-object would get one detailed instruction at the beginning and no reinforcement except a punishment if they get part of the instruction wrong.
I'm going to go through a bunch of different styles of dom and sub, with the emotional needs that underlie them. This list is not exhaustive. I'm sure there's more I haven't thought of or encountered, so feel free to reblog with additions. It may also be a bit dom-biased because I'm a dom, but I think that might be for the best, because the emotional needs of doms are generally less understood than those of subs.
Various consensual kinks discussed below. Kinkshamers in the notes will be blocked with extreme prejudice.
Dom-as-control: This may seem obvious or even trivial, but it shouldn't be dismissed: many doms are motivated by an emotional need to have some part of their life where they have total control over what is going to happen. Something that I love about this style of domination is that I always know exactly what will happen next (except if there's some emergency, safeword, or other issue to address.) There are no wild cards in a controlled D/s scene except for those I explicitly allow (like if I ask a sub to choose which whip I'll beat them with.) This is also a reason why I personally have a very hard time switching; I have difficulty with the uncertainty of not knowing what will happen next. It should be noted that this style of domination is fairly incompatible with the bratty style of submission, as the brat is constantly throwing wild cards into the scene.
Sub-as-blankspace: The other side of this coin is the sub who needs to not have to think anymore. They've spent all day deciding what to wear and what to eat and which toothpaste to buy and they just want to stop. This is a very common motivator. This sub needs specific and clear commands from a dom, without too many steps, or else needs to have a well-established protocol of kneeling and service that they can do by pure muscle memory. This sub does not want the dom to offer them a choice of whips they can be beaten with, because that forces them out of the blissful blankspace of not needing to choose.
Dom- or sub-as-service: The same emotional need can sometimes motivate domination or submission! Many people dom or sub out of a desire to please their partner. It's about taking on a defined role that you know will meet your partner's needs. It feels good to be needed, after all. This motivation for D/s is generally the best understood by the public, especially as a motivation for doms. It's generally more socially acceptable to want to control and torment people if you're doing it selflessly in order to please them. A big part of my motivation for making this speech to people, and for writing this post, is to point out that this is far from the only style of domination, and pleasing their subs is far from the only emotional need that doms might have.
Dom-as-whumper: I'm using this terminology because of the website I'm on. I'm not into whumpfic, but I recognize in people who have a visceral need to see their blorbos whimpering and bleeding the same need I have to tear apart a cute kitten with my bare hands, or to crush a sub beneath my booted foot. It's the cuteness aggression approach to domination: sometimes your sub is so cute your hands itch with the urge to destroy them. This is where domination and sadism bleed into each other; this style of domination does not work well for the sub who wants to submit without being hurt or humiliated.
Sub-as-object: Subs who like to be treated as furniture, robots, or objects are often motivated by a need to enjoy a sexual or kink situation while being free of attention and scrutiny. Obviously, some baseline level of attention is needed for BDSM safety; the dom needs to be able to notice if the sub is injured or upset. But beyond that baseline, it can feel very freeing for a sub to be turned on, blissed out in subspace, crying, drooling, whatever, without anyone closely watching or listening to them, so long as they fulfill whatever their purpose as an object is.
Sub- or dom-as-flex: Both doms and subs can be motivated by a need to feel competent. I definitely feel awesomely powerful and competent when I do a style of domination that requires specialized skill, such as hypnosis. Submission can also provide a feeling of competence: look how long I was able to stay kneeling on the hard floor! Look how perfectly I cleaned the room, exactly as Mistress told me to do it!
Dom-as-troll (or mad scientist): The sibling to this kind of dom is the writer who thinks "wouldn't it be fucked up if....?" and then writes a freaky nasty little horror story about it. A great thing about D/s is that you can have a thought like "wouldn't it be fucked up if I tied up my sub and then ate their favorite snack right in front of them?" and then you can just do it (provided you know your sub likes to be tied up and tormented.) Then you can find out how your sub would react to your terrible ideas and laugh evilly at the results. The emotional need being served here is the goblin part of your brain that wants to break things just to see how they shatter. All you need to do is find someone who wants to be broken.
Sub-as-brat: Brats are often discussed as a single type of sub, but in my experience, there are two rather different emotional needs that drive brats. Some people are brats because they need the assurance that they can act out all they want, and it won't derail the action; the dom is strong or skilled enough to subdue them no matter what nasty tricks their goblin brain gets up to. Other people are brats out of a need to live in a predictable and fair moral universe. Those brats want a very clear system of rules and punishments for those rules. Then they test the rules, and they get meted out exactly the punishment they were promised. Within the world of this scene, the world is fair, and the same misbehavior will always face the same consequences, something that rarely happens in the real world. These types of brats are rather different, because the first kind of brat doesn't care as much if the consequences of their misbehavior are inconsistent, while the second kind cares a lot.
Sub-as-beloved-pet: Or beloved child, if they're an ageplayer. I find that subs that like to be a beloved puppy are driven by an emotional need to be loved, treasured, and supported unconditionally, even if they make mistakes, even if they behave messily or clumsily, even if they look silly, because that's how a good pet owner should treat a pet. There might be discipline involved, but the discipline is very supportive and patient.
Dom-as-nurturer: Some doms are motivated by a need to be in a nurturing role that their non-D/s life may not allow them to fulfill. For example, a man who wants to express affection and tenderness to his partner but has a hard time doing so because of the way he was raised may be able to unlock that ability if his partner plays a sweet puppy and he's playing the puppy's doting owner. Basically, the D/s scene creates a little world and a set of roles in which it's expected and normal for the dom to be nurturing, even if that's not true for the dom outside of that scene.
Dom-as-enfant-terrible: The other side of the coin is a dom who needs to be in a role where they can be unreasonable, demanding, and selfish, a role that their non-D/s life may not allow them to fulfill. For example, a mother who spends all day thinking about her family's needs may relish the opportunity to center her own desires without worrying if she's being "too much." She can be impatient and fussy and demand the sub do things over and over until she's satisfied, all of which she can't do when she's working as a teacher or other caring role.
Dom-as-artist: I think this is a hugely under-appreciated motivator for doms. Many have a need to be creative and imaginative that they fulfill through domination. I've been to workshops and demos at kink conventions where I've been awed by another dom's fiendish creativity. I once watched a hypno dom with a sub who got off on being afraid, and he hypnotized her and crafted an extremely elaborate horror scene in the room, filling it with menacing shadows and phantasms. This is where I'm contractually obligated to link A Dom DM because this is where domination overlaps a lot with game running and game design.
Sub-as-aesthetic-object: The flip side of this coin is that many subs enjoy being an aesthetic object or canvas for a dom's art. Very often these are subs chasing a need to feel beautiful, or at least enjoyable to look at. Subs who want to be aesthetic objects may enjoy wearing special outfits during scenes, or being posed in sexy or appealing positions. Subs in this kind of scene may enjoy letting go of worrying about whether they look good to the dom, because the dom is shaping them to their own preferred aesthetic, whether that's via poses, makeup, shibari, or something else.
Sub-as-sexual-creature: A lot of subs enjoy being called sluts, offered up for free use, or otherwise being hypersexualized. Why is that? Well, our society has a lot of shame and repression around sex, and it can feel much easier to relax and enjoy sex if it's couched in the fantasy that you have no choice because you've been reduced to a purely sexual creature. The sub has an emotional need to give up responsibility for choosing to have sex and be sexual, because that responsibility is a heavy weight to carry.
Dom- or sub-as-taboo-breaker: This is a huge motivator for both doms and subs. We all live in a society, and sometimes we feel a need to break the rules of that society. Both domination and submission provide opportunities to do so. It's taboo to piss yourself as an adult, but a watersports scene creates a space where it is acceptable or even desirable for a sub to break that taboo. As a dom, I personally get a huge taboo-breaking thrill from slapping a sub across the face. There's something about the sheer disrespect of it, and the memory of being scolded for doing it as a child, that fills me with impish glee.
Dom-as-hunter/sub-as-prey: For the hunter to catch the prey, there must first be a chase, or at the very least an ambush. This need not be a literal chase (we sent physical acts out of the room, remember?) but it is a dynamic to hunter/prey-flavored BDSM: the hunter has to earn it. This fulfills an emotional need for both dom and sub: a dom who struggles with feelings of unworthiness can feel like they've earned their partner's submission, and a sub can feel that the dom cares enough to put in the effort to catch them. Hunter/prey also allows dom and sub to explore some pretty dark emotions within the safety of consensual kink, such as fear, obsession, and consumption.
Dom-as-shadow: I mean shadow here in the sense of shadow work. Many doms take inspiration from people who bullied them in school (and many subs enjoy re-enacting scenes of childhood bullying in a safe and consensual context.) There is a real emotional need served by claiming the power of those bullies for yourself. Those childhood cruelties can be utterly transformed by the change of context. For example, the catty whispers and sneers of straight girls who bullied me for being queer comes out very different when I perform those same catty sneers as a genderfucky adult.
Sub-as-lesser-being: While some subs like to be beloved pets, and others like to be disregarded objects, some like to be pond scum. There can be a real freedom that comes from occupying a role of being disgusting and horrible. Nothing good or useful can be expected of you, and nothing you do will ever earn praise, and so you're free from worrying about or pursuing any of those things. Sub-as-lesser-being is also a space to explore difficult emotions like shame and humiliation in a safe context.
Hey y’all I have an announcement! My web app that I’ve been working on, Afro Index, is now live! It’s a visual reference library of Black hairstyles, for artist, animators, writers, and anyone who wants to learn more about them!
Check it out at afroindex.org! 💛✨
A reference library for Black hairstyles with accurate naming,
structured filtering, and curated reference images.
You can help us improve AU-gust! This form is completely anonymous. None of the questions are mandatory, but the more answers we get, the mo
Very late, but it's here! I just posted the interest check form for AU-gust 2026. I'd be grateful if you took the time to fill it out and helped me run AU-gust one more time. :)
imagine your polyship playing dnd together. what class does everyone make their characters? who makes their character blatant self-inserts versus getting suuuuuper into the roleplaying aspect and making a character who is basically the complete opposite of them? who's taking the game seriously and who is just there to fuck around and mess with everyone else?
imagine your polyship all getting home from work at the same time, physically tired and emotionally drained, collapsing into a pile on the couch or in someone's bed, and just resting for a bit before ordering takeout
imagine your polyship trying to order takeout, but nobody can agree on what to order. how do they solve this issue? do they order from multiple places to please everyone, do they rock paper scissors and whoever wins gets to pick, do they try to compromise and find a place everyone likes? something else?
imagine person a and b both have horrible families they're estranged from. c is mutual friend who has a wonderful family. somehow, c ends up inviting a and b over to meet their family. cue a and b getting to see what a good family is supposed to look like, and perhaps being a bit envious of c. from then on, c ends up inviting a and b over more often, so that they can experience the familial love they never got. (and maybe in the process c realizes exactly why they care about a and b so much. bonus points if c thinks a and b are dating.)
imagine person a of your ot3 and person b don't get along. like, at all. they can barely stand to be in the same room as each other most of the time. however, they both really care deeply for person c... so they're trying their best to at least tolerate each other for the person they mutually care about
bonus points if they admit that, at least in matters of their mutual partner, they trust each other completely/wouldn't trust anybody else
imagine a and b of your ot3 being a couple that broke up (for whatever reason), and b is now with c. however, a and b still have some underlying feelings for each other (and. tension with each other) which c notices. and, well. c finds a cute, too, so rather than get mad or anything, c just tries their best to help a and b get back together, too (and get with a, themself, in the process)
