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@sapphicwritingdisaster
Hi! This is my first post and I'm going to use it to give an overview of the kinds of things I intend to post here, since launching straight into the insanity doesn't feel right lol.
I do a lot of writing, frequently around a variety of fandoms, but original works aren't uncommon when I get a good idea.
Favorites include:
Fallout
Warhammer 40k
Devil May Cry
RWBY
Percy Jackson
Cyberpunk
Diana/Huntress Interview 1
[F] This is Doctor Frerk, a Psychologist for the Foundation at [static] conducting a psych-eval interview to determine pilot readiness to return to active duty. Please state your name and age for the recording.
[H] Huntress, 24
[F] Not Diana?
[H] ...
[F] For the record, subject has opted to glare at me. Please give your responses orally and clearly. Next question: In your estimation, how attractive are you, Huntress?
[H] Is that what the Foundation thinks is important right now? How hot I feel?
[F] Please answer the question, pilot.
[H] *unintelligible grumbling* I'm sure I'm somebody's type, but.... I don't know. Maybe a 5 or 6, if I had to put a number on it?
[F] And how long have you been in the program?
[H] Total? About six years. As an actual Pilot, four.
[F] For the record, what were you doing before you became a pilot
[H] The Foundation decided Diana was a good fit for the Alpha program. Extensive body modification and the physical therapy required to keep the augments in good working order and adapt to the changes.
[F] How polite are you?
[H] *long pause* Not very, I guess? *unintelligible* I regularly fight monsters from an alternate dimension. Fuck decorum.
[F] What modifications were done to your body, as part of the Alpha program?
[H] They gave me a cocktail of stimulants, growth hormones, and some kind of steroid. They also removed my natural teeth and replaced them with titanium. My canines can extend and retract out of the sockets in my jaw.
[F] How well do you pass?
[H] What?
[F] As a cis woman.
[H] are you fucking kidding me right now? I AM a cis woman! You pumped me with experimental steroids *you* didn't even know the side effects of!
*scraping, loud thud*
[F] Sit down, Huntress!
[H] I'm halfway to being a man! I'm 5'9, 250 pounds of pure muscle, and there's more gravel in my voice than the average driveway! And you-aahhhh!!
*sounds of arcing electricity*
[F] For the record, the guard just subdued the subject.
[H] Tucker..... one of these days, I'm going to fucking kill you
[F] What is your Frame?
[H] She's a Priestess-class CONSUME unit. Designation Karibdys.
[F] Pilot, by your estimation, how skilled are you?
[H] I'm not sure how to answer that. Shell was the real talent in our cadre. I'm just lucky, I guess.
[F] You're referring to callsign Bombshell, correct?
[H]......
[F] For the record, the pilot nodded in the affirmative. Once again, I ask that you give your responses orally and clearly for the record.
[H]....yeah
[F] If your cadre's ace and its wingwoman were killed, how did you survive?
[H] *long sigh* As an act of desperation, I dove deep... way too deep. She was eating me. Void was seeping in. And then.... she... *WE* started to eat everything else. We chewed our way out. I remember seeing pieces of Squirt and Shell's Frames floating around us. But she just kept eating. I.... I think.... I think... *unintelligible, quite sobbing*
[F] You and your fellow pilots are required to use it/its pronouns. How do you feel about this?
[H] *manic laughter* I.... I used to think it was funny! Now..... it's.... the only thing that fits... what I see in the mirror.
[F] You say you took on Void. Your medical records indicate that you had to have some excised. How did it make you feel?
[H] It.... feels like dreaming, doc. It's like taking an upper, downer, and psych all at once. Like your brain is going faster, but you're calm and unworried. You can hear tastes, smell sounds. It's enough to drive a Girl mad. My body is already unrecognizable. I can't lose my mind too. *faint sobbing*
[F] I think I have what I need. Guard, escort it back to its quarters.
*sounds of clothing rippling and something heavy being more or less dragged from the room. Door slides open with a hiss of pressure locks*
[H] Doc....
[F] One moment, guard. What is it, Huntress?
[H] tell..... tell Shell.... that I'm sorry there wasn't more of her left....
*end recording*
fanfic writers who type their works directly onto ao3 instead of copy-and-pasting from elsewhere have no fear. fear fears them.
I made this mistake once.
Didn't know Ao3 wiped your drafts after 30 days.
Never again
Ok this is a bit different than my usual writing, but this song gave me this idea for an animation. I have zero drawing skills, so I will probably never follow it up, but I want to get the idea out there.
The lyrics dont fit the entire narrative for reasons that will be obvious to basically everyone who hears it BUT its what I was listening to when I thought of it, and Xana is an ally as far as I can tell, so I dont mind giving her a shoutout.
The entire animation revolves around two characters that are functionally identical at the beginning. They start out as young children, playing and laughing, but as theyre getting older, they start to look different. They get into arguments and fights more often as they become more visually distinct as opposite binary genders. Maybe the boy has a distinct face shape and wears a blue hoodie and the girl has distinct hair and a pink hoodie. Thats what I'm going to run with, but they just need a different distinct feature each.
After a big fight, she ends up bricked up behind a wall, and he tries to ignore her. Time is shown to pass, and she occasionally tries to talk to him. He always tells her to go away, but she literally cant.
It ends with a big breakdown moment, where the boy, tears in his eyes, breaks the wall down and they hug. The final shot is a single person sitting and smiling, with both the distinct face shape and hair, in a pink and blue hoodie.
Here's a worldbuilding tidbit I came up with on a seperate project from what I post here.
The idea of Selkiesš in human form using a tongue click as shorthand for emotional understanding. A sort of "I see you" in a similar vein to the Na'vi, who use the phrase "I see you" to mean much more than the literal perception of an individual, more akin to "I see into you, I understand you, I accept you." No, Norm's explanation has not left my head in like a decade.
So if one went through a terrible hardship that they struggle to speak about, the other might make a clicking sound to signal that they see and understand what the other has gone through.
The thought process behind it:
From my understanding, harbor seals dont have great eye sight, so they supplement it with echolocation. For a Selkie, which has human level intellect, I'd imagine that echolocation allows them to perceive things more clearly. So symbolically extending that to emotional situations when in human form makes a lot of sense.
TRIGGER WARNING: Allusions to suicide.
The words are not said directly, but you have been warned
She paced the Northside Watson apartment. It had been months since Val had disappeared. Months since she had launched a one-woman assault on the most powerful megacorp on the planet. She had spent days combing the news, the net, even offering what she could to fixers for info. Nothing.
She couldn't keep this up. She knew she couldn't. It had been months. She had obviously died in the attempt. But then, why wasn't that in the news reports? Not expecting anything, she called her girlfriend again. Something she had done numerous times since she had vanished.
Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Then, the familiar voice. Her heart sank as she once again heard the outgoing message.
She had told herself this would be the last time. So she left a message.
She was crying again when she ended the call. She picked up her luggage, a large, armored case that once held the high-end body armor she had given to Val. She made another call, this time to the woman she had been introduced to by her missing girlfriend. She arranged the meeting. An escape from her life in this choking city. She couldn't do it anymore. It would kill her if she stayed.
Then, her holo rang. A photo of a woman on a motorcycle appeared in the corner of her view, alongside the name. She answered it the second she registered who was calling.
"Valerie!" She screamed. "Oh my god, Val, where have you been!?"
The voice that answered was clearly Val's. But it was.... wrong. She had spent months voice training, and now she was... pitching it down?
"Hey Judy...I um... I keep seeing your calls and... I.... well, I....." she froze. No. Please, no.
After a long sigh, the voice continued
"She didnt make it." Johnny finally finished.
Your cat has always brought you gifts- dead birds, mice... You and Mittens moved South. The gifts kept on coming, but were increasingly... disturbing. The coyote, okay, sure. The lizard left zoologists stumped. Today,you found her standing atop a corpse best described as Mothman beside your bed
I rolled over in my bed. There was an annoyed meow somewhere vaguely in front of me.
"Sorry Mitzy," I mumbled, my eyes blinking away the drowsiness. As my vision came into focus, i noticed Mittens was at roughly eye level, but further away than the edge of the bed.
"Whaa?" I spoke through the yawn, trying to figure out what was wrong. Then it clicked. She was standing on something. A brown and black thing with what looked like mottled wings and reddish eyes. It had to be at least four feet wide, probably only slightly taller, and at least 250 pounds. And it clearly wasnt breathing. Mittens sat atop its corpse, licking her paw and rubbing it over her head, cleaning her ears.
"How did you even get that in here!?" I asked, bewildered. Always the most important question from this girl at 7 AM. It was a fair question, considering my doors were only about 30 inches wide.
So I read a book awhile back involving werewolves and highly unscientific pack dynamics, and it gave me an idea for a book.
Similar concept, werewolves with similar pack dynamics. The alpha is a complete asshole to the MC for like half the book, bullying them out of doing normal things with the other men of the pack. MC assumes its homophobia because MC is gay.
Fast forward through some angst and soul searching and MC accepts that they're actually a trans woman, not a cis man.
And the alpha chills out almost immediately. Because his issue with MC was never "you like men," it was always "you're operating outside of your place in pack dynamics." But he literally can't just up and say that because of an instinct-enforced version of the Trans Prime Directive.
Basically, he, by instinct, has to act with the packs best interests at all times. Telling her, rather than letting her accept it on her own, would be detrimental to her well being, so he cant do that. But by still trying to operate as a man, MC is also upsetting another instinct regarding heirarchical structures and that is its own problem. So he basically ends up in this shitty feedback loop of "I can't tell them, but they're going to keep doing shit they're not made to do." And tries to sort of nudge them in the right direction keeping them out of the masculine roles they keep trying to fill.
Does it play with problematic tropes? Yes.
But could it be a good angsty YA romance? If handled well, I think it could.
Am I the girl to do it? No. I dont think I could tackle that very well at my current skill level.
Minor spoilers for Cyberpunk 2077, Phantom Liberty
The glass couldn't hold. It was bullet-resistant, yes, but it wouldn't hold up for long against an armed military helicopter.
The other woman slid in next to me, dropping as low as she could to slip under the closing security gates. The platform was swarming with NUSA black ops. She had already wiped out a squad, mercilessly executing them with well-placed shots from her Malorian 3516 and an automatic shotgun, as well as a combat knife and her own bloody knuckles. Her skin has been broken a dozen times, revealing gleaming subdermal armor wherever bullets had torn theough her delicate flesh. I had seen her specs. She was packed with so much chrome she was two steps shy of going full 'borg.
I knew what I needed to do. But it was too much. I could barely stand. I.....
She's carrying me towards the doors now. The soldiers are screaming, the helicopter spiraling out of control. I mustve done it, somehow.
Theres more soldiers on the bridge to the tower. She raises a hand, but her Malorian is still in its holster. Red sparks fly from their implants, and they scream as if their souls are being torn from their bodies. She connected to me with her personal link. Sharing the strain between the two of us. Something about that thought feels wrong. She made a fault sound i coukdnt quite place, like a grunt as we started to move again.
My legs start to work, she's not so much dragging me along now as im staggering alongside her. We reach some kind of slope, where she raises her hand again as more NUSA soldiers approach. In a moment, they scream, writhing and clutching at their cyberware as rogue AI streamed in through the Blackwall. There was the sound again. Louder this time
V was laughing.
More soldiers came around the corner, stepping out from behind pillars and raising their guns. *No, run, you stupid bastards * is the only thing that goes through my mind as she releases the Blackwall protocol again. And V laughs, chuckling darkly, but much more openly now.
She's lost it. Gone cyberpsycho.
As she drags me towards the monorail, more of them open the doors at the far end of the platform. We're almost on board, they're hardly a threat. She laughs like a madwoman as she releases another blackwall pulse. They collapse, screaming as their own implants ripped their minds apart.
God, what have I done?
___________________________________________
This came from what I assume was a bit of emergent storytelling based on my character choices. I built heavily into more cyberwsre, including the Edgerunner perk. I was about 15 points over my technical limit by the time I did the final PL mission, and when I got the Blackwall pulse ability by linking to Songbird, V actually dipped into cyberpsychosis. It was the second time it had ever triggered (the first being during the fight in the prior construction zone), and it felt incredibly fitting and quite cinematic for her to lose herself as she was frying people literally by closing her hand. And I was thinking how must songbird feel right now? Hearing V giggling as she slaughtered these soldiers, knowing she's added so much more stress to her system, all in the name of a lie. While I dont feel like I captured the nuance, I at least got the concept down, and I'm happy about that.
Three of the four Rejects of my Darktide firearm have long term injuries they have to deal with. They all came about as a response to cosmetic choices I made, sometimes unknowingly, and to be honest, I'm actually quite happy with that.
Maia is missing an eye. It was replaced with an augmetic eye, the first one that was available in-game. This came about because I bought it for the aesthetics, and she just started to look weird without it, so I wrote it into her story.
Liara is blind in one eye, and part of her jaw and eye socket is deformed. She is also the only one of the first three to have an injury included during her character creation stage, though for story reasons it happens when she's on Tertium with the Warband
Sarine has a broken, improperly set, and poorly healed leg. I bought her the Psyker leathers, and thought it just had armor plates on it until I looked a bit closer and realized it was a full leg brace. So I included her leg being broken on a mission, and she hasnt been without the brace ever since.
Trans Week of Visibility has ended, but tbh, I forgot it even existed. So here's a sort of late but timely letter I wrote to my mother this morning to just get the feelings out. And before anyone in my audience of five asks, I wont be sending it to her. There would be no point.
-------------------------------------------------------
One thing I dont think I was ever warned about before I started transition is just how much general regression will occur as you take off the mask. Because you never realize how much of your life is built around playing this role that never quite fit.
I thought I was over a lot of the anger from my childhood, but I just got better at ignoring it. And hell, maybe I could do the same now, ignore what was swept under the rug, even though the rug refuses to lay flat anymore. But that line, "there were no signs," refuses to be ignored.
What do you mean there were no signs? Dont you remember how adamant i always was about having long hair? How upset I was when it was cut? Dont you remember scolding me for hanging out with that girl too much, even though she was my best friend? Getting angry with me for playing with dolls and horses on the church floor with a girl with a trees name? As I got older, you mocked how I sat, ran, held my books, what I chose to read, how I dressed, what I did with my hair, always calling it "girly" until I was too scared to do anything besides what I saw my brother do, because I couldn't trust myself to make the choice that boys would.
I told you once that I'd had a dream of waking up as a girl, and just living my life as normal. And you, a woman in her 50s, called me weird and mocked me for it.
What I didnt tell you? What I didn't tell you is that I played a girl in our class play. The one I insisted we not go to. Do you remember that?
I didnt tell you that the dreams didn't stop. Even as they got more distressing as I got into middle school.
I didnt tell you how excited I was when my hair would get long again, because it meant I could do little mannerisms I had picked up from the other girls, and nobody could attack me for it because it was just part of the reality of having "long" hair. Or how brushing it behind my ear the first time every few months felt like starting a timer to the inevitable cut that would quickly follow.
I didn't tell you thay the reason you caught me staring at the mirror was because I was waiting for the reflection to move, because surely thats not my body, right?
I never told you how many stupid or illegal activities I got up to with the local boys trying to feel like one of them.
Or how hard it was to play along after I realized nothing would "fix" me.
I wish we had lived in a more accepting town. Maybe then, Seth would still be here, and I would not have tried so hard to bury myself for fear of doing the same. Maybe I would've accepted myself sooner.
But even then, I would still wish I'd always been your daughter. Maybe then, you could have loved me the way I needed you to.
Do different chapters have different Psyker powers, or is that just the Wolves?
Different chapters have different takes on powers. Psykers (of similar grade) can ultimately all do the same stuff, more or less. The way powers manifest and the kinds of abilities people trend towards are influenced by culture, psyche, training and belief. Because Warp Things.
Let's take the Salamander and Space Wolf librarians, as an example. They both decide to create a lightning storm using their powers. The Salamanders' storm might look more volcanic in nature. Roiling ash clouds, the smell of sulphur, white lightning emitting an orange glow while the temperature climbs. The Wolves' storm rolls in on a a blue-grey thunderhead of arctic clouds. The temperature drops, rime starts to form on localised surfaces and lightning howls down from an aurora borealis as chill winds rake the treeline.
Have these two groups done different things? Yes, but also no, not really. Both have ultimately drawn on the warp to manifest a "lightning storm" as it exists within their consciousnesses, by utilising cultural and training-specific catalysts and mental practices. Could a Salamander summon a giant, spectral wolf's head to savage someone? Yes. Could a Space Wolf spew molten fire from a shimmering drake's maw? Absolutely. However, the way each chapter, each culture, views and relates to core concepts will make similar things look very different, and will also mean similar things are taught in different ways, or perceived differently. You must also remember that key part of librarian psykery is focus, and so having strong concepts to focus on and assist in shaping what you're doing is very important, and typically easier if it's something inherent to your theology/culture/beliefs.
Keep this in mind whenever I get around to revealing Sarine or the Helhounds.
The king, after hearing the prophecy about a child fated to depose them, decided to just let the events play out without interfering.
The armored warrior strode into the keep, massive greatsword at the ready.
"Lord Helma-"
"FINALLY!" I cut him off, not caring what he had to say. "Do you have any idea how LONG I have been waiting for this?"
"Waited? But you.... you're the king. I'm supposed to depose your tyrannical reign." He seemed genuinely confused now, the point of his sword resting on the ground.
"Kid, the aristocracy made me nothing more than a figurehead about 25 years ago. Took them 15 years, but they managed. I 'took too much power away from them', so they pulled some legal bullshit to strip most legislative power from me." I stood up, grabbing the heavy case at my feet as I did so.
"But.... the quarry accident... my sister?" His tone was more questioning than anything.
"Yeah, kid, it was a real tragedy, and I'm sorry it happened. Do you know why it did? Cause they kept me from passing workplace safety laws back in 742. Said it would 'impact their profit margins.' Then they pulled their little legal coup, and here we are. Duke Carwen led the entire thing. Same Duke Carwen who exports stone to those artisans in the north." He shook his head, then dropped the ceremonial crown on to the steps. "There ya go kid, I'm deposed. You're free to do whatever you want. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm retiring."
Then he hefted the case onto his shoulder and walked past the confused stonemason who had started this whole rebellion, closing the door behind him with a loud bang.
The ringing in Maia's ears was intense. She'd been blown off her feet by the poxburster. Slime coated her red prisoner jumpsuit, but she'd been lucky enough to have thrown a hand over her face before the disgusting thing exploded.
"What do we do with her?"
"Nothing, the poxers will be here to feed soon enough." The man who'd been in the cell across from Maia had donned a helmet in the shape of a twisted skull. He and his compatriots took off without another word, leaving Maia stunned, slumped against the wall of her cell.
She may have sat there for minutes or days. She had no idea. All she knew was that she had to move. Poxwalkers would be arriving soon. That's what the traitorous bastard had said. She knew the horrors of the walking pox. Had faced the plague zombies before. She had to move. Slowly, she managed to drag herself to her feet, her head spinning. The deck beneath her feet bucked wildly, forcing her to lean on the wall to stay upright. The cell block around her was in uproar, but the sounds of the other prisoners was drowned out temporarily by the roaring in her ears.
Once her head had cleared a bit, she began eyeing the bars closest to where the explosion had been. If it had been enough to break open the other cell, maybe it had weakened her own.
She began to try the bars. Pushing and pulling, left and right. When it didn't work, she'd take a few steps to the side and try again, looking for some weak point she could leverage.
At some point, she became aware of the sound of wet, wheezing breathing approaching from the hall the Explicator had come through. The sound was getting louder and louder, and the screaming terror in her head grew louder in proportion. She slammed herself against the bars. Once, twice. She couldn't get much leverage against the vertical beams.
She glanced back at the hallway. Twisted grins met her eyes as dozens of poxwalkers stumbled towards the cell block, with a handful looking at her directly as the staggered along. She slammed her shoulder into the bars again and again, panic rising. Both her attempts and her prayers getting more frantic by the second.
*I will not die here! Not like this!* she screamed internally as she hammered the bars again and again. She felt something give way. The plascrete cracked and tumbled into the opening in the floor, splashing into the Tancred Bastion's sewer system.
She stepped back, keeping away from the entry gate as rotting arms reached through, poxxy arms trying to grab her. She glanced over to see that some were already being crushed through the bars by the weight of numbers and their insatiable need to reach new victims for their accursed plague. She did her best to block out the screams of prisoners less fortunate than herself, but her mind conjured images of their gruesome fates as the screams rang loud enough to turn her blood to ice.
She gave the crossbar directly above the broken plascrete a solid kick. The cracks widened significantly. She kicked them again. And a third time.
Then she heard a wet splat as a body landed next to her. She stomped on its head as the poxwalkers hand reached for her foot, cracking its skull and spilling its brain matter over the floor. She braced herself for one more kick, putting everything behind it.
The bars swung open with a screech as they twisted on their one good bolt. The other hung loose as the plascrete broke away entirely, crumbling off and splashing into the filthy water below.
Without hesitation, she dropped through the gap, splashing down atop some biological material she had no desire to identify. Then she took off, leaving the screams of the dying behind as she sprinted upstream, looking for an exit.
Superman and Lois started out as a fun schlocky superhero show for me to watch in the background while I worked on other projects. I'd have preferred it stay that way, but they decided to make some *really* weird writing decisions in the final season that kicked on the Writer's Brainâ˘ď¸, so instead we're reimagining the entire series.
Now I'm not going to be rewriting EVERYTHING, at least not st this time, but one thing really drove me nuts.
Jon shouldn't immediately control his powers!
Jon is the golden boy. He's the archetypal popular jock, complete with dickhead friends and a position as the starting Quarterback.
They spent multiple seasons without him having powers and showing Jordan struggling to control his. Then Jonathan gets ALL OF THEM in under ten seconds and is in full control of them after a commercial break. That's just boring and removed all of the interest from the character. He had a whole storyline that was immediately dropped about learning his place in a world where he would never be as amazing as his superhero father and brother. There's a lot I could say here, but I'm getting lost in the weeds.
I think the writers needed to do one of two things.
Fully commit to Jon's lack of powers and the road that puts him on. Or
Give both brothers their powers at he same time.
Now I personally think the second option has the most interesting plot at the start.
Change nothing about how the series starts, but when the popes come down, nobody can react fast enough. But the brothers are completely unharmed. Fast forward, Clark tells them who he is, and they begin to train. Jordan is learning a lot faster than Jonathon is. Like, he's almost in full control within a handful of episodes. He loses it every now and then, but he is never forced to stay home from school or anything. He's the one having to make excuses for Jon, who goes from the most popular person at his Metropolis High School to a frequently absent nobody at Smallville High. Whenever he gets overwhelmed, Jordan has a way of talking him down again. I'd make this happen probably three times before the confrontation between them.
Eventually, the two get into an argument, with Jonathon being almost hysterical and taking it out on Jordan because he never seems to struggle while Jon has lost everything to his powers showing up.
To which Jordan replies:
"You think it's easy? What, you think I haven't had to work for it? The panic attacks, getting overwhelmed by lights and loud noises, that's all new to you, but I've ALWAYS had those!"
While watching, it occurred to me that all of their super abilities are things that could easily present as symptoms of anxiety. Jordan is literally already positioned as having mental health issues, with anxiety being specifically mentioned. And the writers do next to nothing with it. But if you make Jordan the prodigy, with Jon's golden boy life falling apart, their positions are flipped for maybe the first time in their lives, with Jon finally understanding how hard it had been for Jordan before now, and Jordan not seeing his prevoous anxiety issues in the same light as he watches his brother spiral.
____________________________________________
At this point, I've been very slowly working on this for a few hours, and I've kinda lost it. I may update and add more to this later, but I'm gonna post it now.
Do you guys remember how kidnap fantasies were popular on wattpad because young girls and queer teens were both made to feel shame at the thought of their own sexualities, so the fantasy of being kidnapped totally against their will was a way for them to engage with a romantic or sexual fantasy without feeling morally in the wrong for doing so? Added bonus that the fantasy involved being whisked away from repressive environments like home or school, right?
Finding out that Bram Stoker was in a sexless marriage and that scholars believe that he very likely was closeted gay puts the entire book into perspective as to WHY it reads EXACTLY like a self insert wattpad Dracula kidnap fic:
âI TOTALLY love my wife and would never do anything that an upstanding Good Straight Working Man wouldnât do but oh nooo, big strong man with broad back and strong enough arms to carry me back to bed like a princess trapped me and claimed me as his, completely against my will đđ But he protects me against the bad evil sexual women (who I assure you, I am TOTALLY sexually attracted to, as any straight man with a choice would be) but trust me, I do NOT want ANY of this. Whatâs that? The Count is not capable of feeling love? Would be a shame if I had the special ability to change tha-â
This is also the fantasy behind all those old bodice-ripper romances that people today like to mock or call problematic, by the way.
âOh, my next forty years are going to consist of nothing but washing dishes and keeping house and bearing children for the disdainful man I married right out of high school because my parents said college was for men and I had no other obvious life path open to me? What if a pirate captain thought I was worth stealing away from it all? [what if I ran away but no-one could blame me for leaving]?â
#I read an article a long time ago about a woman who was raised in an incredibly repressive conservative christian community#where all that mattered was purity and virginity etc #She talked about how for a long time rape fantasies were the only way she could derive any pleasure from sex #because she couldnât feel safe exploring the idea of wanting sex #it wasnât really ABOUT rape or eroticizing assault or whatever #it was about creating a scenario where she was free from the shame associated with wanting #i think this is true of a lot of icky-seeming stuff in romance and erotica #itâs an imaginary scenario where nothing you donât really want actually happens #but you canât be blamed or feel guilty for it #you didnât do anything wrong#anyway that article changed my perspective a lot #i think thereâs also something to be said for people who have felt ugly and undesirable their whole lives #enjoying fictional scenarios where a hot alpha werewolf or whatever is so attracted to them he âcant help himselfâ or whatever #because it can also be really shameful to want to be desired #when you feel like youre ugly and gross ( @headspace-hotel )
#i had recently similar realization when stumbling into pit of y/n x character stories about âyour dadâs handsome best friendâ#it immediately introduces age gap where the man (usually) is middle aged and generally experienced#and y/n is a young adult at best but always exploring their sexuality for the first time#of course part of why this trope is popular is that teens tend to have crushes on adults#but I kept wondering why it has to be dadâs best friend until it hit me: itâs about safety#person who is your parents friend is a person who isnât scum bc otherwise your parents would be friends with them#theyâre safe and not a predator preying on young and impressionable like a groomer might#theyâre your parents friend so they care about you too#which makes the fantasy at the same time spicy (age difference) and safe (dadâs bestie canât hurt you)#idk itâs just interested how sometimes our brains try to justify things to us
@thirstyforred i hope you donât mind me pulling up your tags because youâve made a GREAT point which I think is also echoed in the following tropes:
A teenage girl falls for her older brotherâs cool skater friend who treats her like his princess (older cool guy who you know isnât an asshole and wonât take advantage of you because your older brother wouldnât be friends with him then.)
A lovely young maiden is totally nonconsensually kidnapped by a handsome alluring vampire whoâs 150 years old but still looks 30 (again, hot older lad whoâll show you the ropes and treat you well and also touch on that âwhat if Iâm worth stealing awayâ point from higher up in the post.)
Those romantic Hades/Persephone retellings where she goes willingly. The original myth is a story of a mother losing her daughter and shaking the skies and earth to get her back, but that doesnât really resonate with teenagers who feel trapped with their parents and would LOVE it if a tall, dark and handsome stranger whisked them away from their house and to his spooky goth castle with a three headed dog to pet. The ideas that Demeter was a mean controlling helicopter mom and Perse a cool badass queen who hated going back topside have likely stemmed from this as well.
While irl age gap relationships very much have the potential to be predatory, it is worth recognising why some people consider them attractive in fiction and what these fantasies help them explore.
Iâm sorry to bring up HP, but letâs take Snape, for example, since I remember him being a massive hot commodity back on 2012 Deviantart. I heavily doubt that most tweens girls who had a crush on Snape would actually want to get on with their teacher - it was just a fictional crush which allowed them to explore their likes and dislikes in a safe environment (and also let this man move on from his high school crush, which is also fair because letâs be honest he NEEDS to let go of it.)
So yeah, this post does put a lot of tropes and kinks into perspective, which I think is important because oneâs squick is anotherâs fantasy, and neither of these people are inherently more/less virtuous/problematic for liking or disliking it. Fiction is fiction. Real life is real life. What is cool in a book isnât necessarily what youâd like to experience irl and vice versa, and itâs good to bear in mind that peopleâs experiences are different than yours and their takeaway from a piece of media might be different from yours.
I try to only post my original scenes or whatever here, but this was just too important not to share, especially as a survivor who uses these themes a lot in my writing.
