Towers in Starlight

[contemptible-scoundrel]

during the latter days of the panel-1 period, with key side characters under thrall, the sexpervert queen of macedonia turned to the spartangirl, warning her "If I defeat you, I shall touch you sexually." the spartangirl's laconic reply was one word: "If."

[princess-rosiebird-nsfw]

"i consent ♡" written on a whiteboard above princess's bed, obviously in 1 of th maids' handwriting

[towers-in-starlight]

People are discoursing about Godel's theorems, and thus talking a bunch about Con(PA) and ¬Con(PA) and such. Which has got me wondering: what does nonconsensual Peano arithmetic look like?

So far my best guess is that it's where you're trying to design a new formal system, but then once you've finished defining it you realize that, whoops, despite your intentions it's accidentally isomorphic to Peano arithmetic.

[taylor-titmouse]

been thinking about porn game mechanics lately. specifically how the physical sex of a protagonist greatly impacts what you're able to do and the sort of story you can tell. obviously you can do whatever you want forever, when i say "can" i mean "while keeping it to my tastes and/or attracting a wider audience" and the "you" in the sentence is really "me". ok? i'm putting this under a cut because it's long stream of conscious rambling. thinking out loud.

it's the basic sex game conundrum of punishment/reward. say we're playing a theoretical sex castlevania. you've got enemies on the map, and you've got bosses. where do you put the sex?

the natural answer is "when you lose/get too damaged" because everyone loves a sexy game over. and maybe when you beat a boss you get rewarded with a sexy cutscene. there ought to be sex as a reward, you don't want to Only reward playing the game poorly.

so what does that mean if your protagonist is a cis man with a cock? or a cis woman with a pussy? how does the story and monster design change if you're expecting a dude to get beaten and fucked vs a lady? do you make it a gay sex game, with the guy getting it up the ass? or do lady enemies all ride him when they catch him? i hear you reaching to type "both" but then what is your story saying about sex, domination, and humiliation? one of those sex acts is more "humiliating" than the other, more understood to be a punishment.

which is part of the challenge with the other side, what if your protagonist has a pussy? how do you differentiate between the sex as punishment and the sex as reward/triumph when penetration is your main option? what sort of story can you tell? what kind of message may you end up sending? "taylor you can just do other sex acts" does an image of fingering or cunnilingus feel like more of a Video Game Reward than an image of PIV? be honest. "give them a strap on/magic cock" we're back to Saying Things about penetration and dominance and humiliation and that needs to be given consideration. and also come on that's lame.

if a pussy protagonist is getting fucked five times by enemies on the way to the boss, once they've defeated him, what is the game Saying if your reward is to put his cock inside you? what does it mean for your protagonist and their story goals and motivations? how does one inform the other and the narrative choices you can make?

as with any narrative you've always got to be asking yourself why you're making certain choices. what point are you trying to make, why are you telling this story via sex game? in this subgenre of sex game? why is it a metroidvania, a roguelike, a dungeon crawler? how do the game mechanics and larger narrative support and justify each other?

it's much to think about. i imagine it's why so many sex games with pussy protagonists are about succubi, it's an easy justification for why sex as punishment and sex as reward look the same. but it's also the only way a lot of game devs can imagine a female protagonist wanting to go on a sex adventure where she has any agency--it's a biological imperative. they can't imagine sex being a reward for a woman in any other way. sad.

it's relevant to regular writing too, tbh. like cadogan. if he defeated romick in a fight, riding his cock isn't very different from if he lost. sure, romick could be tied up and not in control, and that's kinda humiliating, but he's still putting his cock and cum inside cadogan, the thing he'd have wanted to do anyway. at the end of the day it's not much of a punishment. (and i am talking purely in the pornographic, narrative sense, yes i know "you got to have sex, what are you upset about" is a real problem with SA). this is why cadogan is functionally ace as a character--this is how he would think of it. i beat this man, why would i reward him with my pussy? madog, you fuck him.

i wasn't really building to any particular point so much as just thinking out loud. how do you make sex a reward and a punishment in a video game or story, while keeping it interesting, sexy, and thematically cohesive. our greatest scientists are working on it

[wirelessmousegirl]

You're just saying that because your a sick pervert who gets off to themes and ideas

[towers-in-starlight]

Aelie, creator of some bondage-centric games I've enjoyed, has started a webnovel! It's not hugely centrally aimed at my kinks, but I've nonetheless enjoyed what exists of it so far and am looking forward to seeing where it goes next. It's nice to see her back to making stuff, after a bunch of years since her last release.

[kradeelav]

i know things are hella grim in the nsfw/kink art circles especially in the last year --

but I'm hearing there's a NSFW-friendly ko-fi alternative built on atproto that's actively in the works, and being vetted by lawyers right now. as torrent-princess (OP) says, you should be able to swap out payment processors while keeping your account intact. this matters since even if stripe removes support, you'll still have a shop and all of your links intact. (ATproto is an infrastructure that bsky is built on, but is far bigger than bsky with far more opportunities.)

additionally, the Free Speech Coalition is working on a credit union specifically for adult work (including kink art) - here's the link so you can add your interest & support. Since this will be built by sex workers, there'll be far less risk of being debanked for spurious and puritanical reasons.

on a domain TLD level, there's an initiative here for a .furry domain built from the ground up by seasoned furries; it's unclear whether they'll support NSFW, but it's yet another promising turn of events for a group that's been similarly affected by censorship.

there are friends and allies out there helping to build a working parallel infrastructure. keep being vocal, keep supporting these initiatives when it's possible, and keep supporting your nsfw/kink artists. ♥

[towers-in-starlight]

I have been told I'm unusual in the degree to which my instinctive response to people hurting me is to flinch towards the source of the pain rather than away, and to get very clingy towards whoever's doing the hurting. It's reportedly very cute. And also supposedly it resembles some sort of mean effect that might be inflicted on someone in a mind-control doujin.

But obviously that's not what's going on. Those pain-response-instincts are just straightforwardly sensible; why would anyone need to mind-control me into a behavior-pattern which makes sense on its own merits?

[rabbiteclair]

waking up two hours early for my job as a gacha character to put on my three discrete hair ornaments, four layers of clothes, eight-square-inch armor plates affixed to my clothes at random, various ribbons and straps that do nothing but encircle my thighs/upper arms, choker, and multi-layered gloves. however I forget to affix dangling tassles everywhere and am sacked immediately for my carelessness

[sistersorrow]

Woke up ten minutes early for a far hornier gacha game and just put on booty shorts and a tank top

[towers-in-starlight]

I recently made the interesting observation, regarding my bad-end kink, that it seems dependent on the bad end being dynamic as opposed to static. The dynamicism can be injected from either within or outside of the badness—"indefinite torment but with the content of the torment varying from day to day" can be a fun bad-end-shape, as can "indefinite torment of approximately-consistent content, but with the surrounding context changing, different surrounding people interacting with the situation differently over time", as can "indefinite torment but the victim relates to it differently over time"—but "indefinite torment of the same shape day after day without meaningful variation" is generally not a fun bad-end-shape for me.

Now I'm kind of curious how common this is, as a feelings-shape around bad-end kink. It definitely doesn't seem to be universal; the thing which prompted my noticing this was reading some eromanga by an author whose tastes seem to run in the opposite direction, repeatedly going out of their way to include situations where things would end up the same ~forever. And also curious what other aspects of kink-shape this might correlate with and/or be tied to which I haven't noticed yet.

[towers-in-starlight]

This constraint is, to clarify, specifically about focus on the internal content of bad ends. There's also lots of hotness to be found in being threatened with bad ends, and/or in struggling to avoid them, which often works for me even if the prospective ends are of a shape whose internals I find non-hot.

[towers-in-starlight]

There is something very aesthetically-pleasing about the prospect of, in the face of an overwhelming enemy, giving myself up in exchange for the rest of my party getting to go free.

The range of tactical situations where this is likely to come up is narrow. It requires that they be targeting me specifically and not the party as a whole, or else that my party expect retreat to have an unacceptably-high risk of failure such that sacrifice-to-increase-its-odds appears worthwhile but our enemy expect it to have an unacceptably-high risk of success such that agreement-to-such-a-sacrifice appears worthwhile. But it is so aesthetic.

[pink-of-hair]

🌂 No? It could be that alternate sacrifice to retreat strategies are also expectedly to be decently reliable by your team (rushing in and holding them back best you can) but not as reliable as a willing sacrifice retreat.

🌂 And then the enemy can even have the same perception as your team on that ("if this broad grabs at us and has that give them a headstart they have a 60% chance of getting away") and your negotiated surrender is still preferable to that to them, for various miscellaneous reasons.

[towers-in-starlight]

Oh, yeah, agreed on this, to be clear. None of the involved participants need to be wrong about their perceptions. Just, the set of situations where everyone is right in this sort of way and it still produces the relevantly-hot outcome strikes me as likely to be relatively narrow, compared with those where one side or the other has a less compromise-laden path open to them.

[towers-in-starlight]

I recently made the interesting observation, regarding my bad-end kink, that it seems dependent on the bad end being dynamic as opposed to static. The dynamicism can be injected from either within or outside of the badness—"indefinite torment but with the content of the torment varying from day to day" can be a fun bad-end-shape, as can "indefinite torment of approximately-consistent content, but with the surrounding context changing, different surrounding people interacting with the situation differently over time", as can "indefinite torment but the victim relates to it differently over time"—but "indefinite torment of the same shape day after day without meaningful variation" is generally not a fun bad-end-shape for me.

Now I'm kind of curious how common this is, as a feelings-shape around bad-end kink. It definitely doesn't seem to be universal; the thing which prompted my noticing this was reading some eromanga by an author whose tastes seem to run in the opposite direction, repeatedly going out of their way to include situations where things would end up the same ~forever. And also curious what other aspects of kink-shape this might correlate with and/or be tied to which I haven't noticed yet.

[towers-in-starlight]

There is something very aesthetically-pleasing about the prospect of, in the face of an overwhelming enemy, giving myself up in exchange for the rest of my party getting to go free.

The range of tactical situations where this is likely to come up is narrow. It requires that they be targeting me specifically and not the party as a whole, or else that my party expect retreat to have an unacceptably-high risk of failure such that sacrifice-to-increase-its-odds appears worthwhile but our enemy expect it to have an unacceptably-high risk of success such that agreement-to-such-a-sacrifice appears worthwhile. But it is so aesthetic.

[ace-trainer-alice]

In daily life sometimes you'll run into a form of deception, statements purporting to be one thing but in truth holding a secondary meaning. There can be a kind of poetry to it, but they retain functionality. However as soon as you get to deceptions with three or more layers, you're in hopeless pervert territory. There's no practical application for that many layers of deceit except for deception perverts to indulge in. Of course, as a mask pervert, I can only look upon such mighty works and enjoy the feast.

[towers-in-starlight]

Note to self: when reading Kudarizaka Guardrail eromanga for language-practice purposes, remember that not all the recurring characters have equally challenging vocabularies relative to my skill-level. I spend a lot more time per page on dictionary-lookups when reading a chapter focused on Quarta Alminess* than one focused on Quarta Tangel, for example. Budget time for the reading accordingly.

[luguuuu]

i’m having an edging party but none of you can come

[nekomimidusteon]

the undefeated chonomancy heroine has concerningly in depth knowledge of exactly how each of the bosses were planning to violate her if she lost