after a lot of chewing on it, I've come to understand that my ability to enjoy noncon/dubcon scenarios depends to a large extent on the narrative containment mechanism surrounding that scenario.
for example, if we're talking IRL play, there's generally clear protocols for this, right? ways to unambiguously go "scene over" or "scene suspended" and resurface into the reality where everything we were doing was just playing pretend. I've known for a while that this works for me; if the scene is otherwise to my taste, then the fact that it's fictionally non-consensual doesn't seem to harsh my vibe.
and â especially given the number of friends I've got who write smut â I'm familiar with, and understand, the principle of "the fiction is the scene" when discussing titillating fiction. in the same way that an IRL scene is just playing pretend, any fictional narrative we're writing is by definition playing pretend, and we can distinguish fiction from reality, right? on an intellectual and ethical level, that all makes perfect sense to me; putting aside actual authorial agendas, which are a separate topic, there's nothing ipso facto immoral about writing a fictional sexual assault scene to titillate, nor about being titillated by it.
but what we can enjoy is a more slippery topic than matters of logic and ethics â more tied up in our personal thought patterns and emotions â and this is someplace where my congenital worldbuilding proclivities bite me in the ass. I have a bias towards imagining imaginary worlds as real worlds, which carries with it a tendency to imagine the stuff outside what the fiction itself depicted. and that means, on an emotional level, that "the fiction is over" apparently doesn't suffice for me as a containment mechanism around the scene, because the simulation was already bigger than the fiction.
the reason I finally managed to figure this out is because I accidentally stumbled upon a containment mechanism that does work for me, in a place I didn't expect to find it.
to set the stage: I'm in a few online TTRPGs, and one of them had in its pitch that NSFW situations and content are allowed. (it's invitation-only, and we have a lot of kinks in common, and I've played with the other folks there enough to trust them not to spoil the vibes.) recently, my character ended up in a situation where noncon sexual peril was heavily implied (although the GM carefully ensured, as per pre-game discussion of yucks and yums, that nothing Actually Happened). but then I got reminded that there was a channel in the game's Discord server for "bonus scenes", including non-canonical bonus scenes, and I realized to my own surprise that I wouldn't actually have a problem with playing out the "bad end" that we had implied was possible if the scene was contained in that "non-canon" bucket.
which is a really funny workaround, right? apparently, as soon as we establish that "the situation is less real than the character/setting", somehow it doesn't taint the simulation anymore and I can get back to it being a zero-consequence lurid fantasy.
