Ship & let ship, terfs fuck off, block me if you donāt like me. Otherwise my askbox & dms are always open! I love talking to people.
Also, I'm asexualāwhat a fandom for me to be in, I knowā and I'm not particularly interested in smut, though I'll still read it occasionally.
Emperors Geta and Caracalla are currently living in my head rent free and I intend to use this blog to post drabbles/headcannons that don't fit on Ao3!
I also have a carageta playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6ymwXw9NiMhHSQzAFNZa5C?si=5f5f4356211c40fc song recs are very welcome!
essentially all Iām saying is that you need to be less afraid of being a pervert. You have to train and practice the pervert muscles in your heart so they can grow strong. Literally everyone is a pervert about certain things and many people still think theyāre perverts for chill regular things like being gay because their upbringing has left them with atrophied senses of sex. We solve both of these problems at once by encouraging burgeoning pervertedness at every step of the way and ensuring people do not feel like they have to hide it under lip service to norms
Why is always Geta who plays the "passive" role in the sex scenes with Caracalla in your Fanfictions?
I'd hope not too passive, that boy is going through a lot very actively in those stories. But in all seriousness, for several reasons, and in this essay I will...
Sex between men in ancient Rome had very strict dynamics and carried serious social implications particularly for the receiving party. Men could fuck just about whoever they pleased in Roman society, but only as long as they were the one who did the penetrating. A man in the receiving position, however, was instantly and permanently tainted by that act, never to be regarded as equal with other men afterwards, or as anyone to be taken seriously as a citizen. Misogyny was viciously present in every context for Romans, and a man who performed "the woman's part" in sex acts became in the eyes of his society only a half-man, someone who was not to be trusted or valued or respected to the degree a "real" man would be.
Further, the penetrated party in Roman sex between male people was most often an underage boy/a pubescent "youth" or a slave, and commonly both at once. These two classes were expected to be recipient in sex acts performed by free men as much as a woman is, and while stigmatised, it was more widely accepted or expected for a boy or a slave to be in that position than any free Roman adult man. This further presses the point that a man can only fuck, but letting himself be fucked lowers him to the same standing as a slave or a child, and is thus an act of immense degradation and an offense against social order.
The accusation that a man enjoyed being, or had otherwise been under some circumstance, penetrated by another man was a common political weapon wielded against powerful figures (and frequently the emperor) in Rome right alongside... well, claims of incest. Romans really fucking loved accusing everybody and their cousin of incest and bottoming, because the way to attack someone's position of power first and foremost came through attacking their manhood. Anything that implied they were failing sexually, or else were being controlled by other men (or worse, by women) was the go-to for undermining another's standing in society.
So what does that have to do with Geta? Next to nothing, aside from illustrating how awkward and dangerous that position would be for him. But it has everything to do with Caracalla.
Caracalla's central conflict in Gladiator II is his observed lack of power, how he is constantly overshadowed by Geta, how he's viewed by the people around him, and how he struggles to cling to his position with his ailing health and a complete lack of competency in that very role he has inherited against merit. Geta is always undercutting his rule - Geta is always in charge of every little thing over him, Geta has the veto power to his decisions and uses it at every turn, Geta can quite literally grab his diminutive self off the goddamn floor and take him away like a petulant child. He has no real power, and no sense of being respected as the emperor, or even as a man to begin with. He's small, he's visibly and deliberately feminine, he prefers male partners; there's a graffiti on the Colosseum wall with a mocking drawing of him and his monkey next to a rape threat, so the people know and they do not like it. This is a large part of why the people sneer at him, why he's disrespected and regarded as lesser - it's a cultural given that, even under the best of circumstances, he would be seen as weak and unreliable, effeminate in every demeaning sense and implication of the word, and not a man or worthy of a man's title. And we know Caracalla's circumstances are anything but the best.
Because of all of this, it doesn't take much of a leap to presume that for Caracalla, assuming a non-dominant role in sex would be a further humiliation or a confirmation of the things that the people are saying about him. He might like it, want it otherwise; there's no real reason why he couldn't or wouldn't, if not for this background. What we do know, though, is that as he is, he's never in control where he wants to be, he's never respected as a man, he has no outlet where he could feel in charge and powerful and not lesser than other men, except in bed. There is not one goddamn person in Rome who is going to tell this boy to bottom. And in his position, I can't imagine him wanting to put himself there, either.
Now reverse that: Geta, as ever the mirror image of his brother, has nowhere in the world where he can stop being in control. He's managing Caracalla every hour of the day, and Rome demands him to do this and do that and choose this and do better and command and control, and there is no one else he can turn to, no one he can trust, no one he can ask for advice. His life is about control: controlling himself, his emotions, never showing how he really feels, never showing hurt while bearing it for two, never speaking a word wrong, never making a poor choice because any one he makes could result in their downfall. In every case people look to him for what happens next. And he looks to Caracalla, not so much for support, but to ensure that he can at a moment's notice turn his brother's words around or into compromise, because Caracalla is guaranteed to always go for an extreme, and Geta knows that the wrong extreme can and will have them both killed. He has always been his brother's protector, but now Caracalla is even less capable of protecting himself - or them - than he was before. And the dangers are much, much greater than they were when it was just them against their father's violence.
While Caracalla feels entitled to his position and feels slighted and overlooked because he is not given the due respect for where he stands, Geta knows that neither of them truly deserves it and that neither can stand the test of pressure, and that every breath they take is precarious and uncertain. As a person, he's stifled and immobile, in perpetual freeze state when flight and fight have both been outruled as options; stuck in his circumstances, unable to let go even for one moment to rest and relax. Because if he does, who will protect them? Who will watch their backs?
Where Caracalla is viewed as mad and vain and beyond reason, Geta is viewed as the real emperor; the one who speaks, the one who gives final judgement on matters of life and death, the one who can be reasoned with and spoken to, as a man among men, while his brother is not and never will be.
By the time he's sharing his bed with anybody, he must be utterly exhausted. With his slaves or any other partner he might have to himself, he's expected to carry on that act: to always be in charge, to make the decisions, to be active and to act, with everyone else beneath him, submissive to him like to the will of the gods. He has no escape from it.
There's literally only one person who could, can, let him take off his mantle and be the boy that he never got to be. To be something else than a man for a change, to be anything but in charge, to listen and obey and submit and not think and just... be.
It's the only place where he is known for the person that he is, where the dynamic shifts and the weight no longer sits on his shoulders, and the only place where it can be taken off completely without consequence. Yes, the cost is horrendous; what it means for him in their society, what implications it has for his worth, but Geta already regards himself as next to worthless and further, nobody expects this from him. Caracalla has all the eyes on him on this: he's the one who surrounds himself with adult men for pleasure, he's the one who is small and effeminate, he's the one who acts unlike a man and who is mad and erratic and unreasonable. Geta sits with one woman to his side and gives off the impression that he is proper, and with him, things are in the right order.
So... why does Geta bottom in nine out of ten of our stories? Simply because he has the motivation and the cover to want it and need it desperately, and it coincides nicely with Caracalla's just as desperate need to experience the opposite in their relationship. Think of it as a fucked up vacation, gods know it's the only one he's getting.
logging into this blog for 0.2 seconds to say i just learned that syphilis wasn't introduced to europe until like 1200 years after caracalla lived? it literally cannot be what he has??
so I did end up writing carageta + cannibalism as a form of love (the metaphor part maybe got lost in space) it'd be cool of you if you don't let it flop š„ŗ
You can find the work here: AN ODE TO EATERS
shout out @shattered-world for their always kind words in my fics, all the comments n kudos made my day but they're always encouraging me to write more and they read everything I've written, and that means a lot to me
"They're both like wicked, but also I think very emotionally vulnerable and needy at the same time, and they both like live for each other and to destroy one another. So I was really interested in building that with Joe, like I felt like we wanted to be independent, but we also are completely a duo. These brothers are weird mirrors. They're completely different, but they're always surveilling what the other one is doing. So there's a constant sense of competition, but also love and need for being taken care of."
- Fred Hechinger on Emperor Caracalla & Emperor Geta
Frankly some of you should be hornier over weirder shit. The fear of being too genuine is the enemy of art. Be a bit of a pervert. It's good for the health. Doesn't have to be a sexual thing just own up to being a bit obsessed in some cringe shit it's fine.
