You know, I look in the mirror nowadays and see an adult that my younger self would've been afraid of-- tattoos, shaved brows, androgynous haircut, bold(er) and brash(er) clothing, and an overall gender neutral, inscrutable appearance the majority of the time.
But I also see someone who's a million times happier than my younger self, someone who smiles a lot more and finds those smiles are genuine more often than not. I see someone who's managed to survive the storms that nearly drowned my younger self and who would (I hope, I dearly hope) offer a hand in friendship to that younger self to show that it gets better. I'm quite fond of this person. I need to take better care of them.
Okay so I made a list of 30 (well, 29 actually) prompts I am releasing into the wild. The point of this is that at least one of the participants are not having a good time.
It has 30 prompts for November but feel free to write and post whenever, but please add the tag #No one nuts November or #NoonenutsNovember wherever you post. You do not have to @ or credit this blog if you use any of these prompts.
(Text version under the cut)
1. Safeword
2. Sub/dom drop
3. Loosing intrest halfway through
4. Trying something that doesn't work
5. Medical emergency (bonus points: it happens during bondage)
6. Bad/failed orgasm
7. Should have safeworded
8. "Wait, it's not supposed to hurt?"
9. "Let's never try that again."
10. Sex so bad they break up after
11. Realistic shower sex
12. Incompatible kinks
13. Threw up on that thang
14. Can't get hard/wet/aroused
15. Says wrong persons name during sex
16: ugly crying/overwhelmed
17: "I remembered you being better at this"/"I'm not impressed."/"I've had better."/"You're not hung chill"
18: Allergic reaction/cut off circulation
19. Dirty talk/degradation gets too real
20. Ignored/missed a safeword
21. Random horny confession that kills the mood for the other person/people
22. "No really, that's not going to fit."
23. Fire alarm goes off/interrupted by a third party
24. Pushing themselves into sex they aren't ready for
25. Sex toy gets stuck
26. Only one person having fun/agreeing to boring sex
27. Couple brings in a bad 3rd
28. Sex in a bad location
29. Sex so bad it kills you/one of the participants dies
You know what I miss the most about pre-1990s fantasy? Novels with titled chapters and tables of contents. I know you still get them now and again, but before the 90s it was common practice, and you wouldn't believe how much easier it is to discuss shit when you've got named episodes to go on.
Hey, fat people deserve to have fun and get their needs met even if theyâre the least healthy mf you know. Fat people deserve proper medical care, and carbs, and to wear shorts and so many more things! EVEN IF THEY ARE UNWELL AND ESPECIALLY IF THAT UNWELLNESS IS DUE TO THEIR WEIGHT!!! Fat people deserve the world and more. Not just the healthy fats or attractive fats or small fats or fats that are fat because of medication or disability.
King: So it turns out the southern lords have been neglecting their taxes and padding their own coffers, the eastern lords are stealing from the war effort, and the western lords are dealing in human trafficking.
Queen 1: I have a few suggestions.
Queen 2, the former street urchin turned spy turned false noble turned queen: *slowly holds up her dagger*
Queen 1: My dear, we can't just stab all our problems away.
I would LOVE to hear more gripes about accuracy of portrayal of historical monarchies!!!
I have been wanting to do this for a while, because there is a lot that irks me. And this ranges across board from big budget period dramas to how people write royalty AUs, which means this isn't one specific thing I'm pointing at. And if it is helpful on a writing tips level, I'll be happy with that.
Long post under the cut:
Disclaimers:
I research 19th century European history, which has a lot of questions about what a monarchy is and why they continue to exist. That's the perspective I am bringing to this.
I probably shouldn't have to say this, but: this is not about modern monarchism. This is about history. I don't want to debate whether you think certain countries should continue to have their monarchs be public figures who are only nominally head of state.
The short version:
Monarchies are institutions. They are part of how the government functions and that should have implications for how someone writes them. A monarch is a person with a built in job that they were born into.
Monarchies are not all absolute. They can exist in a multiple forms with very different structures, and often discontent within a monarchy wants to reform the system not replace it.
My biggest advice would be this: figure out how your fictional or historical monarchy is structured. You don't have to exposit about it, but you do need to know it.
The long version:
The King has a job and there is a right and wrong way to do it.
Fantasy monarchies that draw upon history seem to have Versailles in mind in terms of an aesthetic space and royalty with a lot of power over the people around them. This also includes a lot of lounging around and looking pretty and doing lavish things. However, the issue is that this is a mental image of the dysfunction in the French monarchy close to the revolutions. You can't "Après moi, le dÊluge" through several centuries of government.
A King (or Queen) has a job, a really important one. They are the head of state, the highest authority in the country, and the highest judge on legal matters. At least in the platonic ideal of absolute monarchy, those jobs being concentrated into one person means their responsibility and good judgement will give the state stability and consistently.
Enlightened absolutism was exactly that: monarchs staunchly holding onto the ideals of the Enlightenment and making reforms from the top down. People who read texts about ideal government and natural rights and put it into practice.
A lot of fiction takes that and goes: Oh, so they have unlimited power and can do whatever they want. Being king means you can do what you want without oversight? That's why someone would want to be king?
And yeah, sure, in theory. But the problem with having a job is that you can do it poorly and people will object to you doing it poorly. If someone is not fulfilling obligations, it is noticeable because the state functions poorly. The premise of Robin Hood is that the king is doing his job poorly. He's overtaxing, the officials are corrupt, there's disorder. The solution? Bring back the true king who is good and fair, and thus functional.
Ludwig II of Bavaria gets ousted from his throne for being more interested in opera and extravagant building projects than ruling. Again, it is a problem and people notice.
Historically, if you want to protect from someone being bad at the job you can support the idea that there should be more oversight and safeguards: Other bodies that control parts of the government alongside the king's ability to approve or disapprove. This tactic takes away the ability to be arbitrary since laws and such are not just coming from the crowned head of state. That would be a constitutional monarchy.
Not everyone needs to be Franz Joseph, waking up at the crack of dawn and working on governmental papers and meetings until bedtime. However, if a monarch is shown in fiction lounging around or talking to courtiers all day but never doing any actual governing, I'm going to assume they are very bad at their job.
2. You're probably understanding Courts and Ministers wrong.
I run into the issue quite a bit that courts are flattened to random servants, ladies-in-waiting, and people trying to be the king's sole advisor (for malicious power grabbing reasons).
The first problem: Being at court isn't an easily accessible thing. You're probably nobility or a scion of an important family. Your presence is built on family prestige and your own skill. Yes, even people in service to the monarch. There are no random people here, because proximity heightens the likelihood of greater promotion.
For example, I'm currently doing my research on a prince from an important dynasty in the 19th century. His secretary is a Baron.
It's not impossible for someone not of noble birth to get to be at court. They could have risen up the ranks of the army or be an exceptionally skilled civil servant promoted to the rank of minister. Though depending on the time period, expect these "new men" to get pushback from nobility by blood.
Ministers also matter.
Unless your fictional monarch is one of the few people who decides (to mixed results) to do all of the thinking about government on their own, there is a cabinet and ministers.
These are skilled people whose job is to think about aspects of government and be knowledgeable about them. A monarch might have many of them that argue and balance each other.
Or, you can write a particularly skilled statesman in a leading role that makes them just as prominent as the monarch if not more so. There are many historical examples of ministers who define their period:
If your monarch character isn't a strong person politically, but is intelligent, having them find a minister to take over most of the governing is a good idea. This person is promoted based on merit, even if the monarchy is hereditary.
I have rarely if ever seen fiction do a good job with a prominent minister as a character (except A Royal Affair, which everyone should watch).
Think of monarchies as whole institutions of government. They have people within them who do all the jobs of governing. But the structure of the government and the personality of the monarch can determine whether it is one person (Joseph II, Peter the Great, etc.), a prominent minister (like a Metternich or Bismarck) or a counsel or congress.
The structure can support a person not doing a lot as monarch, but you as a writer need to think what structures are around them allowing that.
3. Revolutions are scary.
There is a common trend in fiction to make your good guys pro-republic. They're revolutionaries who want to get rid of the king, so they must be good.
But here's the thing: Revolutions are a step into the unknown and have historically happened rather rarely and with very mixed results. That's because the system has to be really broken for something totally new to sound better than what you already have.
A monarchy can create a sense of stability: A fixed head of state who will be there until they die. Historically, people aren't seeking to change that. More often, the call is for a change within the existing structure. The Magna Carta or a written Constitution. Firing of Bad Ministers or the abdication of a bad king in favor of their heir. Creating elected bodies under the sovereign. These are all shifting the monarchical paradigm but keeping the monarchy intact.
And historically even the most liberal of people wanted to place restrictions of some sort on voting, especially property and gender restrictions.
There is a myriad of ways to change the system, the person at the top, or both while maintaining a monarchy. You can have a monarchy be elected as the best person among the nobility (though it didn't go that well for the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth).
Completely throwing the whole thing out means risking all stability vanishing. That could be anarchy. That could mean a charismatic strongman who is also bad at governing in power. You could end up with a guillotine and rivers of blood in the streets. You could end up with a restoration eventually because Cromwell or Robespierre doesn't actually produce something people want to live under and they want the old certainty back.
People have a sense of inertia about changing government. What you have is better than what you don't know, especially if there can be internal reform. Making your character a Republican (in the Jacobin sense, not the US politics sense) means that they are a radical in most times and places and will likely be in the minority.
If there is one thing I would say is the point here is that monarchies are government systems, and thinking through how someone exists in that system in fiction is important. Being king isn't actually much of a fun job unless you're very good at delegating or very irresponsible. Unless you want to be celebrity, president, congress, and moral center of the state all in one, being king isn't a great deal.
Please save and share this info where possible. This report has since been removed by Amnesty International due to legal threats of libel from JK Rowling. This information is no longer easily accessible.
im sitting on a patio at my favorite cafe rn and im hand stitching them hem of a dress im working on. and i can see why someone would say im being performative by working on something like this in a public space. but frankly theres no element of that. i just want to work somewhere that isnt my apartment. i want to be in public, i wanna chat with strangers, i wanna see the world. itâs nice to hang out somewhere that isnt my home!
what i mean is when you say people are being performative you discourage them from doing shit they love in public. and thats no way to foster the world we want to see.
hey kitten. daddy needs to talk to you. your kink blog is great, but you are not highlighting the words correctly. kitten. stop highlighting. this is shit. did you seriously highlight that period. kitten.
This is what I meant by how a lot of white supremacy is projection.
"I feel like my penis/my Manhood as a symbol is smaller than Black man's" becomes "Black men have oversized penises and are sexually insatiable beasts."
"I am sexually attracted to, fetishizing, and feel entitled to Black women's bodies" becomes "well she's asking for it, look at how she looks, Black women are always more openly sexual."
"I am afraid of approaching Black men" becomes "Black men are a threat."
"I am afraid of approaching Black women" becomes "Black women are always angry."
"I am not smart enough/not qualifed enough/can't beat my white counterparts professionally" becomes "DEI and affirmative action are letting those Blacks steal my position in school/jobs!"
Your own fears and insecurities about yourself somehow become a reflection of my humanity, when it had nothing to do with anything. And somehow enough people think that and now it's systemic instead of the made up nonsense it always was. Ijeoma Oluo called it mediocrity, James Baldwin called racism the white man's problem, and they remain correct.
Okay, I need to add some clarification and correction to this.
This photo is known as The Pale Blue Dot. It was taken by Voyager 1, a space probe meant to explore the outer reaches of the solar system. Far from dying, she's still out there doing her job and is the furthest human made object from Earth.
In the mid 80's, they knew Voyager 1 would soon pass beyond where her cameras would matter and she needed to save power, so the question became: what's the last thing she should take a picture of?
Carl Sagan and Carolyn Porco both independently had the same thought: take a picture of Earth. Us. Yes, it would be essentially just one pixel. It wouldn't be scientifically useful. It might even damage the camera because of how intense the sun is, even forty times as far from Earth as Earth is from the Sun. But they got it sorted because it's NASA.
3.7 million (not billion) miles away, that's Earth. Caught in bands of light, artifacts of the Sun's incredible power even 4 million miles away. We are an island in a sea of radiation and vacuum and it's all we have.
I can't say it better than Sagan did, so I'll let you alone with his words:
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there â on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
what people donât realize about tumblr sexymen is a character being called one is a [bad] thing. the label was originally applied to characters that were lusted over by straight women who refused to engage with any other character who wasnât a white twink. thatâs why oncest exists. thatâs why those bill cipher and wheatley gijinkas exist.
sans was a special case because people preferred his original design (short and not conventionally attractive) however the ârefusal to engage with any other characterâ was very much still there like look at all of the AUs that were made specifically because of him.
the amount of mischaracterisation a character has to go through in order to truly count as a sexyman (and thereâs about 20 sexymen proper) would cause most people to have a brain aneurysm like it sucks so bad.
times have drastically changed since the onceler, and the range of characters people hype up is far more diverse than it once was. the time period in which a character was most popular (between 2012 - 2018) is the most fundamental part in making them a sexyman.
this is why any sexyman poll made after the one that killed queen lizzy is completely null to me. 90% of the characters in them are just regular fan favourites like get this common real life dude out of there. if you could talk about liking a character with a coworker and not get viciously made fun of by them then that character is not a sexyman like thatâs the full truth of the matter.
(this is also why anime boys like reigen and komaeda often count. hate for anything anime-based outside of the internet was especially egregious before 2020)
also. there is a huge distinction between âsexy manâ and sexyman. this is why senshi does not count. Because he is genuinely sexy. My final message. Goodbye
the idea that restrooms, locker rooms, etc need to be single-sex spaces in order for women to be safe is patriarchy's way of signalling to men & boys that society doesn't expect them to behave themselves around women. it is directly antifeminist. it would be antifeminist even if trans people did not exist. a feminist society would demand that women should be safe in all spaces even when there are men there.
btw this is maybe the single most key distinguishing feature of the terfy strains of radical feminism, the seed all the rest of it springs out of: they have absolutely no faith in the ability of feminism to actually destroy patriarchy. they do not think feminism can truly build a better world. they cannot really even imagine that possibility. they think patriarchy is an inevitable natural consequence of unchangeable biological facts, and therefore the goal of feminism can only be to mitigate the worst effects of patriarchy, not to get rid of it.
they can imagine a society where women get some designated safe spaces without men around. they cannot imagine a society where the presence of men is not inherently a danger to women.
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