Xan of Mercia

[ur-favorite-fishgirl]

sex is a distraction from your true purpose in life which is to go to the aquarium and look at the fish and go "wooooooaaah.... fishies". cmon guys we all need to lock in.

[plaguedstreetsofpity]

i now own kickass docs btw. if anyone wants to see

[plaguedstreetsofpity]

they make me a bit taller too which is great

[mumblingsage]

Definitely do let doms and tops of all genders be pathetic, though. We deserve rep and it's so much fun.

[mumblingsage]

"and maybe she likes getting dicked down and is a little pathetic too" my sister in Venus there are MULTIPLE publishing house imprints dedicated to this concept. Some of them even publish good books!

(I don't want to go overboard here because I think the last post had a point about flat dynamics, and it's about fandom trends rather than original romance novels, but I'm having trouble getting past the concept that "PIV sex and the man is competent and the woman has moments of vulnerability" is uh. New or notable or underrepresented.)

[courtmartialme]

i know everyone is tired of hearing it from me but i'll never be free from how people think you can only ship a het ship WOKELY if the man is a pathetic useless idiot and the girl babysits and pegs him and has the personality of a door. i promise you won't get your woke card revoked if you spend five minutes of your time to consider the girl has a personality and the guy might be a competent person. and maybe she likes getting dicked down and is a little pathetic too. have you considered also liking the girl and maybe wanting her to be a spoiled baby too? also I'll Kill You

[xanofmercia]

god give me the patience to ignore people on the internet being so adamantly wrong.

[mumblingsage]

Random editing tip of the day: like many of these tips, it's easier said than done, but try not to view editing as a punishment. Best of all if you can view it as fun, an opportunity, a game (fanfiction of your first draft!). But at minimum, realize that you are not being graded, nobody knows what your first draft looks like except you, you are not failing if you have mistakes (if you're not spotting mistakes in your first draft, something very weird is going on), and getting to improve your story with a second draft is not a waste of time you could have avoided if only you were talented enough. Writing is thinking, and thinking is re-thinking and weighing multiple options. Do it again, a little differently this time. That's all.

[xanofmercia]

do you have any tips for "I feel bad because I'm not spotting mistakes in my first draft"?

i think i'm cool with finding lots of things to fix and fixing them but >:/ about not finding anything to fix. like yeah i'm constantly self-editing so ig my "first draft" could qualify more as a 1.99th draft but also. sometimes i'm like wow this is gr9 and ready to go and then i feel like i'm bad at perceiving the flaws in my own writing wow i'm bad at editing!!! and now i don't trust my assessment.

[starofhisheart]

Happy pride to those 5 seconds where Charlie Swan thought Jacob was coming out to him in the most insane way possible

[prokopetz]

Fascinated by the implication that asking if someone played AD&D is offensive. It is presumably impossible to play AD&D if you are under a certain age. It's banned you simply can't do it.

(With reference to this post here.)

I think that remark is more the product of the weirdly common (on Tumblr, at least) notion that it's somehow offensive to imply that anyone is over the age of thirty. I didn't call it out at the time because it would have derailed a much more interesting line of questioning if I had, but that doesn't mean didn't notice it.

[xanofmercia]

feel like that’s not a tumblr thing as just a society thing. people have always done that with women with the “how dare you I am not old enough to remember that!!” “oh yeah sorry you don’t look a day over 25”. ig it’s an unusual tumblr thing in that it gets applied gender-neutrally

[saulwexler]

Hey did you draw that evil feminist caricature to warn men how their wives would act once they got the right to vote? Illustrator: sure did boss. real sexy, just like you asked.

[xanofmercia]

server opinion is that these are cute love taps but not anything serious enough to make so many stars so he must have been spanked properly earlier and the lil taps are just a reminder.

he’s still moping instead of doing the dishes tho so maybe another punishment session is due once she finishes her book?

[mephistopheles]

yall i swear to god if a bitch says her pronouns are she/her then her pronouns are she/her

[mephistopheles]

my close friend from uni was a cis girl who had the audacity to wear pants and cut her hair short and like nobody at this school, a place OBSESSED with ‘respecting everyone’s gender identities,’ would call her ‘she.’ after MONTHS of this she started wearing a fucking pronoun pin to work and i dont even think that fixed it. me, im sorta androgynous; i have shaggy self-cut hair and go by a neutral name, but i always say my pronouns are she/her, and people ive worked with for months and have introduced myself in front of fifty times will STILL reflexively say ‘they’ for me. i respect the progressive circles i run in, but this IS evidence of misogyny. people’s definition of “woman” or “girl” is so narrow and high-maintenance that even the tiniest deviation from the norm gets you forcibly defeminized. but it’s a compliment, right? like who would wanna be a girl anyway?

[mephistopheles]

replacing an inescapable gender binary with an equally-inescapable gender trinary is stupid 🩷

[xanofmercia]

meanwhile I do the short hair and pants thing and still get she/her’d even though my pronouns are they/them. I don’t do any of that effortful femme presentation that so many women are forced into. I think people might have this misconception that nbs can’t be attractive and if someone seems “sexless” to them then they can be discounted from the “female” category but by contrast if someone seems attractive in a feminine way then they can’t possibly be nonbinary because nbs are not attractive and femme, they’re androgynous or weird-looking. which is of course a whole other can of worms of badness. like they’ve got this idea that if you’re doing something to acceptable standards for femininity then you get the female label. and if you don’t then you don’t. and it’s a problem all around but Ime the definition of ‘girl’ is only narrow in specific contexts. it gets real wide real fast when you’re trying to escape it.

there’s probably also some corollary for if folks are masculine to a certain degree. like a lot of trans guys and nbs I know have no breasts and have facial hair and are still getting she/her’d or ma’amed. and of course the nbs who get invalidated or considered ‘basically men’ if they look a certain way. and meanwhile there are cis female drag kings who do a great job with their presentation and seem very masculine and get very aggressively “ladies”d by folks in a power move kinda thing. and it’s like. that’s not even inaccurate but it’s deeply weird that folks are doing that. so like. deviation from femininity can get folks forcibly trying to shove people back into feminine boxes, or it can just be overlooked with a shrug by less progressive folks even though it can be an intentional signifier. which is not to say that the progressive folks’ habit is okay or any less misogynistic. it’s just frustrating all around.

[godblessthesickos]

“SPLC used donor money to pay informants in extremist groups without donors knowing so it’s fraud” how do I write in to say that I’m an SPLC donor and I think that’s a based use of my money and I will give more if they do it more

[maelace]

Also that's just not how donations to nonprofits work? Like, unless you give a donation with restrictions (these are usually large program-specific donations or grants), a donation is assumed to be for general operation expenses. This means it can be used at the org's discretion. If it makes you mad that, for example, a percent of the money you give to an org that provides a service to the homeless, is used to pay their accounting costs, you can be mad! You can choose not donate again! But unless you said 'this is only for programs for the homeless' it's not fraud.

[xanofmercia]

man this is lit that ao3 nonsense where people were mad that ao3 bought stonks instead of just spending the bare minimum on servers and then idek giving away the rest? returning it? buddy that is not how nonprofits work. you gotta put some money aside for a rainy day. you gotta make sure that money doesn’t sit idle and makes some babies for you while it’s gay out. so yeah all nonprofits gotta pay for overhead and if a nonprofit ever says they actually give 95% of donations directly to the poor then that is actually very suspicious because where is their overhead coming from. where are the salaries coming from. are they actually making it work on 5% because they have tons of volunteers and are virtual and the head is independently wealthy and also they get a fuckton of donations…. Orrrrrrr is something wrong.

[mumblingsage]

Being an informal literary executor kinda sucks sometimes, by the way.

[mumblingsage]

"Uncompensated" is the word that keeps coming to mind, but "thankless" is probably the best way to put it.

[prokopetz]

I'm interested in convincing my friends to play Gone to Hell, but you've noted it has unspecified flaws that require a full rewrite to fix. Do you think it's reasonably fun in its current state with no extra rules attached, or should I cajole them into playing Eat God's playtest draft instead?

At this point it's less that it's fundamentally flawed and more that it's just not terribly interesting by current standards.

When I started working on Gone to Hell, right around the same time that Doom Eternal dropped, emulating the actual gameplay of old-school first person shooters (i.e., as opposed to merely adapting their settings) was largely unexplored territory in indie tabletop RPGs. There were a tiny handful of published games which gestured in the idea's general direction, like Gregor Hutton's 3:16 Carnage Amongst the Stars, but for the most part it was unexplored territory.

Over six years later, however, there's been a flowering of interest in the genre in the interim, and there are now any number of tabletop RPGs with explicitly classic-FPS-inspired gameplay, many of them written by people with a much deeper understanding of the source material than my own.* I'd love to take credit for being there at the start of the trend, but let's be real – the vast majority of those authors have never heard of Gone to Hell. If you want to try out a tabletop RPG that plays like a classic FPS, I'd suggest you go play one of their games instead!

(As for Eat God, I'll never say no to more playtesting for current projects, but it's not really a substitute for what you're asking after.)

* To be fully honest, the last "serious" FPS I stayed interested in long enough to 100% clear the single-player campaign was Dark Forces II.

[fru-fru-brigade]

Okay, you keep referencing there being other games that play like a classic FPS, but we've never seen or heard of them and you are always frustratingly vague about what they might be.

[prokopetz]

I have literally posted rec lists in the past, including in direct response to one of your own posts.

[prokopetz]

I feel like I haven't picked up any interesting games in a while. If you're reading this and you have a moment to spare, please recommend a fucked up tabletop RPG that has fewer than ten ratings on itch.io at the time of this posting.

[prokopetz]

Posting a collected list of qualifying recs from the notes, both here and via Bluesky. Note that I have accepted only full games, not supplements ("system neutral" or otherwise), and that I will not be taking questions about what constitutes my definition of "fucked up" at this time:

BUNNYJACKS by PennyBlake

Burn and Again by Aster F

Chimera Girls by Sapphic_Flesh

The Concealment Society by Doug Levandowski

The Devil City & its Seventy-Seven Vicious Princes by Dukerino

Doll.Ball by curatrix-ribston

Don't Kinkshame God by Softie

Faith & Sails by Juilian Kay

How I Turned Into a Comically Busty Clown?! by Unishifter

Huit Mille Milliards of TTRPG by The Bit Bet

IN PURSUIT by quinnntastic

LIVING, BREEDING by devours-the-world

Meat Channel by glitterbandemissary

My Tongue Behind Your Teeth by Porter Goldfinch

Oneiroi by Sapphic_Flesh

ROCKS FALL by ImaginationSimulations

Seeking the Wisdom of the Scavenger King by Reizor

Thunder in Our Hearts by Marn S.

Trial By Heresy by TheDreadGazebo

Wet Grandpa by Melsonian Arts Council

YEARNING by Reyes Makes Games

[prokopetz]

(If you've picked up any of the big itch.io charity bundles over the past five years or so, it might be worth checking whether you already own any of these. There are half a dozen entries on this list I didn't realise were already in my library!)

[symbiotebadger]

I've always wanted to try THIS MACHINE HAS MEAT IN IT. I spotted it looking through one of the trans charity bundles I got a few years ago and it's style and premise always grabbed me.

[prokopetz]

Funnily enough, that one was also just randomly in my library from a charity bundle I picked up like three years ago.

[xanofmercia]

Possibly not fucked up enough but I like drama llamas for its vibes it’s in multiple charity bundles but only the recent ones

[cryptotheism]

A lot of booktook smut is easy to make fun of but generally I think women jerking off is a good and righteous thing. Yet another example of things that are embarrassing also being cool. Lotta complex thoughts to think out there. Be safe. I love you.

[mumblingsage]

Prev tags: #ITS BAD BECAUSE ITS BADLY WRITTEN#not because it’s smut!!!!#also maybe 50 shades is related to the puritanical wave?#idk I feel like smut as a whole is important#individual smut may be a bellwether or indicator#but yeah probably an individual smut work can’t make big changes to society#although I do feel like 50sog sparked a lot of discussions#and.. it kinda shows how we’ve regressed?#like those books had sex scenes!!!!#And now people are calling ACoTaR ‘porn’#when it’s kink-baiting with one vague sex scene#That is like. 5% as much porn as one Fifty Shades trilogy book.#Idk I feel like audience reactions to individual smutty books can also say something about society#though the smutty books are not changing things just inviting reactions that we can look at#ACoTaR has sex-adjacent stuff that Maas refuses to follow through on because she is a COWARD#I could go on at length

So I think this may actually be an example of the phenomenon Lincoln Michel on Bluesky (and author of the Countercraft substack newsletter) called, and I paraphrase just a bit, "Nobody is reading enough in the genre they have opinions in to actually have informed opinions." That is, a lot of the people conflating ACoTaR and erotica 1) don't read much erotica and 2) probably haven't read much of ACoTaR.

(Ramble about sex writing below.)

In fact, many people I follow on Bluesky for smart politics takes and who are well-read in other genres have a really annoying tendency to conflate YA, romantasy, and dark romance and not to stop and think about why that is probably not how the genres work! One conversation with a high school librarian could clear this up!

Though I know there is some...I don't know if I'd call it overlap, maybe shared themes?--to the point that ACoTaR touches on all 3! I myself haven't read it -- Maas's book was on my To-Read list for a while and then I learned it was maledom - but my anthropological research tell me the first book is firmly YA, and more explicit sexuality (though still probably mild by actual erotic romance standards) comes in the later books. "YA series gets more intense and mature in later novels" is not a new phenomenon. In fact it was one of the things a lot of my generation enjoyed in reading the novels of She Who Lost Her Mind And Soul To Transphobia.

...Then, 50 Shades was fully adult erotic romance written as fanfiction of a Mormon-chaste (though also Mormon-kinky) YA romance. So go figure.

50 Shades was only the latest of a long string of novels to "start a conversation about women's sexuality" that never seems to actually go anywhere. Before E.L. James we had Jackie Collins, who I was going to call "forgotten" but no, many people do remember her - often with fondness - it's just few people read her anymore. I picked up one book and was astonished at her versatile attempts to depict in PIV over and over in the course of 700 pages. (I was going to say "heterosexual PIV" but there was also a gay sex scene that just switched some details, and also added some homophobia.) And before/around the time of Collins there was also Shirley Conran's Lace which, pro: the heroine tells her useless husband she can make herself come with <5 minutes when masturbating (she used an egg timer to collect the data) so he's got a Skill Issue, and con: the rich 'exotic Arabian lover' type (okay obvs the racism's a con in itself) regularly kills goldfish by inserting them into women's vaginas and their wriggling death throes are supposed to cause orgasms? Which was actually more distressing than the chapter of coercive porn production, which was also emotionally :( but at least had a sort of governing logic. ("I can excuse bog-standard dubcon kink, but I draw the line at animal cruelty that's also racist and just plain doesn't make sense.")

And we also had Jean Auel, and again proving Lincoln Michel's point, everyone says Clan of the Cave Bear is the sexy one when the only sex in it is rape of a preteen Ayla (not bodice-ripper style, either, but written as drama--nowadays we have the useful term "whump fic" for that kind of distress/sympathy/angst/catharsis) and Jondalar with his magnificent mammoth tusk (not a metaphor Auel used herself) doesn't show up until Book 2! And its' probably Book 3, Plains of Passage, everyone is really thinking of!!

Anyway. I'd say something about goldfish memories in erotic lit but I never want to see "goldfish" and "erotic" in the same sentence again. (If someone inevitably takes this as a challenge, use goldfish crackers, which are as much of a challenge but also won't genuinely distress me, just make me roll my eyes.)

To wrap this long ramble up: kink-baiting is a useful term! Though of course for the truly kinky, we might walk away as satisfied by a 500-page novel where everyone keeps their clothes on as by something more explicitly raunchy. Sometimes sex is the least sexy part of sex.

[consortofsassgard]

Oh I love and appreciate this thank you!!

For some clarity on ACoTaR — yes, unfortunately I have read the first 1.75 books; I was going to spork book 3 but did not have the energy. The FMC is 19 and imo the vibes are “New Adult”, in the sense of “genre that was supposed to exist but never really did”? So like. YA in the sense that it’s a Bildungsroman/self-discovery story with a protagonist who doesn’t really know who they are or what they want yet and behaves childishly, but the characters are over 18 so sex for reader titillation can theoretically be a big part of the story. Fourth Wing is also an example of this — Violet is 20 but she’s also going to a ~magic school~ with making new friends and self-discovery and unlocking her personal magic powers. I think that’s often what people are looking for when they say they want “Romantasy”, but that’s just speculation as to why YA, Romantasy, and NA-except-NA-isn’t-really-a-thing get conflated, with possibly a dose of “yknow, [blush] porn”.

Anyway, iirc the first book was marketed as YA, and there was some speculation that a lot of people who read it were teens and/or used to just straight up YA, and that’s why they talked about how ~sexy~ it was… but then it got an adult audience who were very into it and the marketing for it changed — I know someone who worked for Bloomsbury at the time ^^; and apparently they changed the covers to reflect the new target audience, tagged it differently, and got bookstores to move the series to the general Fantasy section instead of YA. And it’s credited as the series that launched the whole “Romantasy” trend. But it seemed like the “oh it’s faerie porn” didn’t stop after more adults were reading it? So… maybe the specific adults who read that are ones who’ve read neither enough romance nor enough fantasy to critique it on those grounds and therefore also haven’t read all the sex scenes (good and bad!) that are in romance and fantasy novels. Still very strange to me.

ACoMaF and ACoSaF did have more sex scenes, and were less romance and more “main plot with romantic elements”. They were also pretty different from the first book in that they were less Bildungsroman and more an attempt at depicting healing from trauma, and also the first book was originally supposed to be standalone but sold so well that Maas cannibalized her hades and Persephone retelling to make sequels for ACoTaR. Not to give credit to the transphobe, but Maas didn’t even do that sort of organic “characters grow with the readers” intentional plotting; she seems to have just bashed these things together.

(For the record I’m a hater but there are bad books I enjoy, and I especially like trying to understand what about them appeals to people even though they’re bad)

The dark romance thing weirds me out!! That’s clearly a different subgenre!!! I think ACoTaR’s kinkbaiting may be related to this but it’s possible I’m giving it too much credit. Basically there’s a scene where the eventual final love interest makes other males get on their knees and grovel, which, hawwwt; and then a scene where the FMC is forced to wear skimpy attire, has her “intimate regions” painted, and gets drugged into dancing in a sexualized way, though that’s fade-to-black. Which, okay, that’s definitely way further than YA normally goes, to the point where I don’t actually think this series should be classified as YA? I mean I don’t care what the teens are reading, I just think that’s not an accurate label! Some people care more about YA as an indicator of heat level. Anyway, it seems like fun noncon yandere stuff, but the author completely glosses over the sexy parts (helplessness/frustration, the humiliation, any fear or pleading or whatnot) and has the FMC be all ~defiant~ and brave through the painting until she blacks out from the drugs and then we don’t get to see anything. And then!!! The worst part is that the book then tries to justify all the noncontent (noncon content… I think I’m clever or something) by revealing that actually it was all for the greater good, so it was in fact *okay* for the eventual love interest to have drugged the protagonist and made her do sexy dancing. He’s actually a good guy and a feminist! And he never actually touched her junk or her chest, so it’s fine really! It’s not actually sexual assault if he just put her between his legs and touched her waist but nowhere else! And suddenly the book got WAYYYYY squickier and more disturbing than if it had just been a good ol’ proper dark romance.

Anyway, I wonder if that’s related? Some people had an awakening from ACoTaR where they wanted more consent issues and yandere stuff, but they only knew that stuff was in “romantasy” and didn’t have other terms for it? So they didn’t know to look in “dark romance”. Maybe that’s too far-fetched, though. I know 50 shades had serious consent issues that some people were into (coughs, me, I wish they’d just gone full dark with it instead of pretending it was a regular kinky romance), but I feel like a lot of people are worried about being bad people if they’re into straight-up noncon, so they have to only read stuff that makes them feel better by giving them a taste of it and then going SIKE!!!

you’re absolutely right that Lincoln’s point is something that’s good to keep in mind. Embarrassingly, I hadn’t actually thought of that, but it would explain a great deal, and I REALLY shouldn’t have jumped to the conclusion that people were getting more prudish! I used to be more logical, I think; gotta get it together. I would imagine folks reading ACoTaR and Fourth Wing and gushing about how sexy it all is could be new to romance and unused to books that are full of sexual tension. That’s definitely a possibility. And then people who are pearl-clutching about how sexy it all is… they probably haven’t even read the books.

I REALLY appreciate hearing about all this history! 50 shades came out when I was in high school, so I was old enough for all the reactions to it, but not for Collins or any of those others. And aaaaaaaaa that goldfish bit is so much more horrifying than I expected 🤣 though I once read a good fic where someone fantasized about making slugs come out of another character’s vagina so that she would be in great distress… but the key thing is it’s a fantasy, and the slugs aren’t dying!! No actual slugs are harmed and even within the fantasy the slugs are fine. And it isn’t racist against actually existing groups!! I think the idea of a fish literally dying anywhere near me is just way too much of a turn-off. Squick!! No shame to anyone who’s into that but aaaa no!!!

I didn’t realize so many conversations faded away, though. It’s saddening. Wish they’d been more productive!

And yes to that last bit! Honestly the sexiest parts in ACoTaR were the ones where Maas didn’t even seem to realize how gay it all seemed, and therefore glossed over it all. Not queerbaiting because it clearly wasn’t intentional, but kinkbaiting! Because!! She demonstrates in the next book she knows it’s kinky but it’s, like, all part of an act and the villain character isn’t *actually* a villain *or* a sadist, so actually none of this will be happening in future and also you all know making people grovel in real life is bad, right? I am flipping a table about this. I do know where to find actual kinky stuff, including the fun noncon variety; I just have an additional sin to add to the list of “this book had so much potential but not good execution”

Hmmm. What about a merman with a gold tail? That feels sufficiently far away while still being reasonably sexy. Maybe he gets whumped but then comes back to his lady and gets comforted. No death-throes involved.

Also!!! This is kinda back to the topic of conflating genres — I know the Discourse recently raised some valid points about content warnings, but I think the biggest issue was just that Ava Reid’s new book didn’t get tagged and marketed as horror/dark romance? It had a very horror-looking cover, but the Goodreads and Libby tags were “fantasy” and “romance” and not horror at all, and the second half of the summary was all “she has a mission… but this guy is sooo hooot and there’s sizzling passion! She can’t fall in love what will she dooo?” Which is very standard Romantasy summary style. And not at all Ava Reid’s usual vibe!!!! So it felt like the marketers were making an intentional effort to market it to Romantasy fans when it was clearly horror/dark romance/maybe gothic romance. So of course they were outraged! That’s not at all what they signed up for, regardless of content warnings! This is a bit of a tangent, but just. You’re right that genres are important to people, often for reasons of “more like this”/“avoid this” and I would be so frustrated by people mixing them up and causing confusion for everyone else, so 🫡 all the respect to you for not spending hours arguing on Bluesky or any other ywitter-like. The only reason I do not is because I do not have any Twitter-like account, though I am working on my self-control.

[mumblingsage]

I'll probably have to cut back on my rambling to keep on schedule today, but these are certainly topics I have feelings and opinions on! (Some dark romance and consent talk under the cut.)

the author completely glosses over the sexy parts (helplessness/frustration, the humiliation, any fear or pleading or whatnot) and has the FMC be all ~defiant~ and brave through the painting until she blacks out from the drugs and then we don’t get to see anything.

In Maas's defense (though it can be too easy for me to defend a concept that didn't work in a particular execution), this could be a case of the author writing a different kink than you wanted or expected, because I find defiance and bravery incredibly hot. Joan of Arc has had fanboys and fangirls for centuries because of this. ...actually, lots of Catholic martyrs have, good god, let's put that tangent on kink back into this box and move on...

Though it probably doesn't affect Maas with her publisher so much, I think a nonzero amount of "wimping out" we see from dark-ish romance writers comes from the fact that Amazon will unpublish your book and ban your author account if you write something too edgy. Some of the self-censorship is because of actual censors. Though some of it is also the fact that the writers + target audience are simply not that kinky. They want the frisson of the feather, not the perversion of the whole chicken. (This is a reference to a joke phrase and not something I came up with on my own.)

The worst part is that the book then tries to justify all the noncontent (noncon content… I think I’m clever or something) by revealing that actually it was all for the greater good, so it was in fact *okay* for the eventual love interest to have drugged the protagonist and made her do sexy dancing. He’s actually a good guy and a feminist! And suddenly the book got WAYYYYY squickier and more disturbing than if it had just been a good ol’ proper dark romance.

Eeek 0.o "Protagonist suffers for the greater good" can still be an artistic (even kinky) choice (see Catholicism tangent above), but the way this seems to be aimed mainly at soothing qualms about the male protagonist is. Huh. Not well constructed IMHO.

As someone who has read way more about ACoTaR than she's read ACoTaR, I'm also bemused (in the original sense) by how there's a significant character arc, apparently, of recovering from the trauma of an abusive relationship, but...the heroine's current relationship is also not a shining model of consent and respect?! Like, I think "trauma recovery" and "dark romance fantasy" are both valid modes of storytelling, but they're two tastes that might not blend well together because the premises they each rely on don't stack?? (I suspect there are authors out there who have done this combination well, somehow, but they are probably smarter and weirder and have less mass appeal.) And "character goes from one abusive relationship into another" makes unfortunate sense psychologically and could be written interestingly but is very different from "recovery and empowerment arc."

You're definitely on to something with the "NA-that-never-was" genre. Which actually IS an example of a longer influence from Fifty Shades, excitingly!

My rather pessimistic assumption is that, with the current crop of novels as well as the original 50 Shades, a lot of readers found out they're interested in sex, but they're fairly vanilla, and yet the most common form of sex is maledom/femsub, and while the dark romance readers are more conscious of it (gleefully so, good for them) there's also a substantial chunk of humankind who hasn't actually processed that "male/female" and "dominant/submissive" are two separate axes. And our culture still isn't sure how to write about consensual sex. Also the edgier/kinkier it is, the more marketing hooks and keywords you can use. So I'm not sure we're seeing an authentic upwelling of kink so much as a strange default. But I may be failing to grasp the full mindset here, because there's also an audience that discovered omegaverse and made it heterosexual. Something something superstimulus? I dunno, I'd rather spend my time exploring things that appeal to me. (I always remember Roger Ebert's review of Crash, "I found myself wishing a major director would lavish this kind of love and attention on a movie about my fetishes." The beauty of Crash being it's about something nobody very few people would actually kink on, laying bare the mechanics of fetish without distraction.)

But none of this is happening independent of growing cultural prudishness, either. If people read more about sex and were more willing to talk about it, many of these confusions could be cleared up. (Perhaps people would find it all less interesting without the titillation of secrecy, repression, and incomplete explication, though.)

Separately, though perhaps not unrelatedly: the conservatives pushing to ban actual YA novels from "pornographic content" have not read any of the books and often target books that genuinely don't have any sexual content.

In any event, I predict that in 2036 we're going to be talking about some new 900-page gathering of eroticised misogyny (I say this in a technical sense rather than a judgmental one) as if nothing like it had ever been published before. And I'll have to defend the eroticism while being bored to death by the misogyny.

Will I have finally published some novel-length femdom by then? God knows. My muse hasn't been cooperative on that front for various reasons, and I admit the feeling like nobody will know how to read it isn't helping, lol.

Ava Reid is too prolific for me to keep up with, so I have no idea what is happening with her latest book. Though she has won my shield on a permanent basis for people being weird to her about writing characters who are sexual abuse survivors - in a beautiful dark fantasy/horror novel (with a rather wholesome "overcoming trauma" romance subplot, come to think of it. Wholesome in a very bloody way. It was great and we should have more books like it IMHO.) "Oh nooo he's sooo hot she's overwhelmed by passion" seems very Reid-standard to me (as someone who has made occasional questionable decisions because That Person's Hot, I rather like it), though it can be taken in happier or more ominous directions, and maybe this latest one was unusually ominous? I think if anyone looked at her work and didn't expect some Gothic romance, dark fantasy, or horror vibes, they are insufficiently literate to have an opinion. If they picked up a book from her having never read her before, that's not their fault, but a) they had a content warning to heed? and b) look, I speak as someone with 20 years of femsub allergies under my belt: If there is a thing that will ruin your day to encounter, it is on you to take 5 to 15 minutes of reading Goodreads reviews to check if that thing is in the book or likely to be in the book based on the author's track record and target audience. No one else can do this for you. Well, you could literally ask a friend to do the vetting for you, but I mean you can't expect your guardian angel to come down from Heaven on a sunbeam with a gentle warning.

Sometimes you get surprised by content that's heavier than you were expected (you either didn't expect it at all, or what you got hit way harder than you expected, or whatever) and it sucks! You're not a bad reader for being upset and you have my sympathy! But if you try to turn it around and blame the author, you're just being aggressive to cover your discomfort with your own vulnerability! Sorry! Bring this to your therapist!

Oh wait, my last irony was that when I said "someone has probably combined trauma recovery with dark romance in a weird but effective way,"* I was thinking Reid might be the one to do it. I don't know that she has (Juniper and Thorn's romance arc is intense but hardly dark romance IMHO) but I think she's probably capable. But the preeminent example in my mind of "She's fleeing an abusive relationship and winds up in a less obviously abusive but still possessive and controlling one, and the author expects you to find the second relationship thrilling" is Nancy Price's Sleeping With the Enemy, which is not consciously dark romance but simply insufficiently evolved in its feminism (also a gripping suspense read. Like I was quite frustrated with that side of it but my frustration stems from how much I overall was liking the book).

*I've seen several instances of "fleeing an abusive relationship and entering a kinky one" but the kinky relationship is usually negotiated risk-aware BDSM, not dark romance. I personally enjoy this version as a BDSM and consent nerd, and I think it's probably way easier to make work, thematically, than "fleeing an abusive relationship and entering one the reader kinks on, while knowing it's not RACK, and this is presented as recovery." Don't do watersports on my leg and insist that it's raining, yeah? But I still don't want to rule out how some writer could make that work, probably in a "It's not objectively healthy but it's the most we should ask of this particular character" or in the delightful "Look, for the good of everyone else, these two (three, etc) should be quarantined in mutual passion" ways.

[consortofsassgard]

Hmmm. I think (more under cut)

because I find defiance and bravery incredibly hot.

I absolutely can too! So I think this is more like... the consent thing? Where you like explicit consent talk but don't like the way a lot of recent tradpub generic sexers do it.

There's a great d/s au fic where the sub finally clicks with a dom and has to obey their instructions, but he absolutely REFUSES to let anyone find out about this, he would literally RATHER DIE than let anyone know about the leash around his neck, so he's putting on a brave face and continuing to snark and lie and act like everything is normal even while his biology is slowly killing him for trying to disobey a direct order. Staying upright and fighting and insisting to everyone that he's really just too lazy to bother killing this latest dom to prove he isn't dependent on them, honestly, even while his organs slowly shut down. I ate that up like a thick milkshake!!!

Or my favorite whumpee ever, Jaime, who jokes about his trauma and has internal monologue about how the best thing about him is rotting in the dirt but he has to find some courage and live.

I absolutely wouldn't mind seeing a female character who does this in the same sexy way, or even female characters who snark under very inadvisable circumstances! Female characters who are loud and obnoxious and messy and can't shut up to save their lives and sass their aggressors even though they'll probably be tortured to death for it!

But... I think the problem with Feyre is that it doesn't seem like there's an actual in-text or in-character reason why she's acting all ~brave~ and ~defiant~. It's very performative, like Maas is trying to check off all the "Strong Female Character" boxes. Honestly, Feyre's characterization in the first two books is a hot mess - she seems like a response to the early 2010s criticism about Disney princesses not being "strong women" because Cinderella had to get rescued by a man (ignoring how abusive situations work) or because Belle got kidnapped and didn't pick up a sword to defend herself (because only machosexuality is respectable or "strong"). She's constantly trying to arm herself with knives, in a way that's reminiscent of 11-year-old me strutting around the house with a pocketknife because I thought it made me badass and un-fuckwith-able. Even though she's a human in a land full of faeries who've demonstrated they're way faster than her, and she gets disarmed immediately in pretty much every scene. It's less "knife as security blanket" (me after certain traumatic events happened and I started carrying a knife everywhere again) and more "knife because this signals to my readers that she is a Strong Female Character."

Of course, all the 'males' in the book also have to tell her how strong and manly she is - Lucien says "I admire your balls, Feyre" (there was no surrounding context that made this any less awkward).

I think a nonzero amount of "wimping out" we see from dark-ish romance writers comes from the fact that Amazon will unpublish your book and ban your author account if you write something too edgy.

Interesting! I figured it was actually because major publishing companies were absolute cowards who wanted every product to appeal to a "mainstream audience" instead of having subsections of audiences who each wanted different things and were catered to. So they try to write books that appeal to an imaginary Average Reader. I figured it also had to do with not wanting to compete with themselves, which meant "erotic romance" and "romantasy" had to be separate genres with mostly mutually exclusive customer bases. But all this could be wrong!

Eeek 0.o "Protagonist suffers for the greater good" can still be an artistic (even kinky) choice (see Catholicism tangent above), but the way this seems to be aimed mainly at soothing qualms about the male protagonist is. Huh. Not well constructed IMHO.

Yup!!! I can enjoy actual suffering for the greater good, OR "protagonist thinks they're suffering for a 'greater good' but they might very well be wrong", but in this case the justification is so flimsy and embarrassing, and it really is for the sole purpose of letting readers feel less guilty about being attracted to the love interest.

(The justification is that he's only sexually harassing Feyre to piss off her current love interest, because he thinks if the love interest is pissed enough about all this then he'll kill the female antagonist. I mean, the female antagonist has already imprisoned Feyre and put her into a bunch of life-threatening situations, and also taken away the current love interest's magic and forced him to wear a mask, but apparently he needs more reason to be mad at her???)

how there's a significant character arc, apparently, of recovering from the trauma of an abusive relationship, but...the heroine's current relationship is also not a shining model of consent and respect?!

The most logical explanation is that in most Hades/Persephone retellings, Demeter is cast as an overprotective bad mother so she can be the villain in their love story. (I personally dislike this because I love the rationale for why that story is such a tragedy for Demeter but ANYWAY) Since there's no Demeter here, Tamlin, the High Lord of the Spring court, has to play that role. Rhysand (the Hades analogue who rules an underground court and is unfairly villified by everyone) even shouts anguishedly that he "kidnapped the Bride of Spring".

You're definitely on to something with the "NA-that-never-was" genre. Which actually IS an example of a longer influence from Fifty Shades, excitingly!

!!!!

My rather pessimistic assumption is that, with the current crop of novels as well as the original 50 Shades, a lot of readers found out they're interested in sex, but they're fairly vanilla, and yet the most common form of sex is maledom/femsub, and while the dark romance readers are more conscious of it (gleefully so, good for them) there's also a substantial chunk of humankind who hasn't actually processed that "male/female" and "dominant/submissive" are two separate axes.

Noooo T_T

That is depressing, but it would make so much sense... although, a random tangent on this -- apparently a lot of the imitator kinky romances got complaints from 50sog fans saying they didn't like the male love interest because he wasn't "alpha" enough, like Christian Grey. Who is canonically a switch and does not behave in a traditionally "alpha" way at all, instead relying on underhanded manipulations and deceptions to get his way. He doesn't have a super forceful personality! He even puts on a Good Guy act where he's always saying "That is, if you want to." So... personally I'm a bit confused about what those folks actually want.

And our culture still isn't sure how to write about consensual sex. Also the edgier/kinkier it is, the more marketing hooks and keywords you can use. So I'm not sure we're seeing an authentic upwelling of kink so much as a strange default. But I may be failing to grasp the full mindset here, because there's also an audience that discovered omegaverse and made it heterosexual. Something something superstimulus?

Hmmm. Much to think about.

(Perhaps people would find it all less interesting without the titillation of secrecy, repression, and incomplete explication, though.)

Roman Roy irl

Re: Reid - I definitely feel bad for her and will continue to maintain she did nothing wrong; iirc she got hate on one of her books because of how dark it was, and then she added content warnings to a later book and got hated on for having content warnings. Then she didn't include them for the latest book and got hated on for that.

I agree with you that right now it's not industry standard to include content warnings, and given that's the case, people have responsibility for their own reading experiences and can't blame the author for dark content.

But one criticism that I feel may have actually been valid was not directed towards her at all, it was directed towards both the publisher's marketing team and Goodreads. Apparently they did look up the latest book on Goodreads, and everyone at the time (first week of release) was calling it a "romantasy", and the reviews didn't really mention the fact that there were horror elements at all - just that there were spicy sex scenes in it. As for the description - I'm not saying that kind of thing doesn't happen in Ava Reid novels, but... there's a certain tone/convention that tradpub uses for summaries of fantasy romance novels versus horror novels versus gothic horror, and the tone of that summary was VERY standard fantasy romance. Which was a very weird and misleading thing to do. Some people suspect that the publisher did this to intentionally stir up controversy when romantasy readers inevitably were lured by the summary and marketing tags, read the book, and exploded in outrage.

For context, here's the summary:

Once there was an island where the dead walked the earth, and seven noble houses ruled by the arcane secrets of necromancy. A conqueror’s blade brought them low, burning their libraries, killing their lords, and extinguishing their eldritch magic. But defiant against the new order stands the House of Teeth and its last living members: beautiful Marozia, the heiress to the House, and her cousin, the uncanny Lady Agnes. Though she has not spoken a word in seven years, Agnes is the true carrier of the House’s legacy. And she has her orders. She must recapture the secrets of death magic and avenge her family’s fallen honor. She must arrange the betrothal of her beloved cousin Marozia to Liuprand, heir to the conqueror’s throne, for access to the forbidden library in his grotesquely grand castle. Revenge burns in Agnes’s heart but so do stranger passions—and it is Liuprand, the golden prince, who speaks to her soul. This passion is as treasonous as it is powerful, poisoning the kingdom’s roots and threatening to tear the already shattered realm in two. For Agnes’s final order is the gravest: She must not fall in love. Book One of The House of Teeth Duology

I think the title, cover, and series name all screamed "horror" to me, and since I know of Ava Reid I figured this wouldn't be up my alley, but the tone of the summary is... I can't articulate it, but it's worded in a "grand, sweeping fantasy romance" way, where it's like. Magic and pretty things and noble titles and castles and noble quests and forbidden romance.

Granted, the introductory quotes they used were all very clear about this being a gothic romance or kind of dark, but I know some people skip those and just read the summary. Which, sure, is on them, but also... why this summary???

By contrast, tradpubbed novels with horror elements tend to have official summaries that sound suspenseful and emphasize the potentially scary parts. Because that's what readers are there for!

Last couple sentences of a horror anthology summary:

But when they stumble upon something unexpected in the former room of a gruesome serial killer, they quickly realize that they’re in over their heads. Sometimes, it’s the dead who need our help—and the living we should fear.

Anyway, my point is that Ava Reid might've done nothing wrong, but this is a super weird choice on the part of whoever's writing the blurb (which is almost definitely not Reid because usually the author doesn't do that), because all that wording is very... romantasy camouflage. Those aren't horror's coloration patterns!!! It's wrong!!! And what was up with Goodreads that week?!

Of course, I say this as someone who reads a tooooon of tradpubbed summaries (but not the books themselves XD). Honestly, if I hadn't known the book was by Ava Reid and had just seen the summary by itself, I would've glossed over it because to me that just sounds like yet another bog-standard generic "Romantasy" novel.

[adds Nancy Price's Sleeping with the Enemy to my list]

I do actually like the idea of corruption arc romances, where the abused protagonist gets in a new relationship that might also be abusive, but makes the protagonist worse in ways that they enjoy, yayyyy. There's a fun Joker/Harley premise where Harley gets out of bad relationships with gross white boys and into a terrible relationship with an awful white boy! But it leads to her discovering some fangs and claws for herself and getting good at murder and crime, and she loves that. The toxic relationship she's stuck in might be rough, but she lives and breathes for that toxicity and enjoys the hell out of many things about it. Which isn't, like, an excuse, but it's a VERY juicy story and makes them SO fun to read about.

Weirdly, this is yet another thing ACoMaF hinted at but didn't actually do? Feyre and Rhysand end up roleplaying as an evil couple in multiple scenes, including one where Feyre pretends that Rhysand corrupted her and made her evil, but the reader is assured that this is all just pretend and they have very logical solid reasons for doing this pretend. And... I guess the whole "Tamlin was boring and didn't let me do anything fun but Rhysand lets me LARP as his evil queen so he's better" could work... except according to more prolific readers, there's a scene in the third book where he also keeps her trapped due to overprotectiveness???? And then she ends up doing the same thing to her sister, because she realizes they were right to trap her like that???? Very strange.

I could also be into the Pet Tiger Fantasy type romances, where a protagonist might escape one shitty relationship and get with an overprotective, possessive villain who does lots of bad things outside the relationship, and does things that would be abusive in real life, except the fantasy is that this Pet Tiger knows the protagonist better than the protagonist does, and only does things that benefit them. Sure, it might not be how real life works, but I get why it's a hot fantasy. Especially if the Pet Tiger then goes after the protagonist's exes in creative ways and makes them fearfully apologetic. Definitely want to see more gender-diverse versions of this, though. I've seen male tiger/female protagonist and male tiger/male protagonist, but pretty minimal others!

[xanofmercia]

okay absolutely no one asked but yes this

girl goes around thinking “I’ll escape I’ll escape” for like 40 pages even though the plot established over and over again that trying to escape would be stupid and she should actually wait and find out more information. she doesn’t figure this out until I don’t even know ten chapters later or some shite. this isn’t done like “well she has trauma and loves her family so of course she’s being irrational about it”. she hates her family and the books never deal with anything re: she might have trauma from living in pahhhhverty (also the author is a rich person trying to write poor people and it shows). she grabs a butter knife from her dinner table to use as a weapon even though she has mirrors and windows in her room. then she tries to sharpen the knife against her floorboards so she can use it in her escape attempt. she also has ropes and stuff and is allowed to go outside but nope butter knife is best weapon. she could literally use a fork instead if she really just wanted a sharp metal thing. author has clearly never actually been in a fight probably hasn’t even so much as thought for long about the relative utility of ordinary household objects for stabbing. but she wants her fmc to seem tough so. knife everywhere. even though it’s a cutlery knife.

also apparently all their silverware is made of gold. even better. great weapon. because gold is famous for holding its shape under pressure.

she’s supposed to be this big bad hunter who kills a lot to keep her family safe and is very expert and tough like Katniss Everdeen but she is convinced that gold cutlery is good weapon.

(also the entire hunting scene is all wrong, author did no research just wanted her to seem action girl hero. she forgets to restring her bow before shooting, doesn’t go for the larger animal to eat, apparently skins a full wolf in ‘minutes’ (wrong it would take at least half an hour), and then calculates and arrives at ‘my family will eat ten pounds a meat every week per person’)

Celaena (protagonist of her previous hit fantasy series, throne of glass) is even stupider about this because she doesn’t have any weapons so she decides to carve a knife hilt out of… a bar of soap. then she pushes sewing needles into it to use as a “makeshift knife”.

she is supposed to be a very famous assassin.

also during a competition when someone is mysteriously killing all the competitors and she just had a round where she couldn’t identify a poison, she finds a bag of candy on her bed and immediately stuffs her face with it without once thinking about “hey maybe I shouldn’t eat this until I know who it’s from”.

Maas wants to write action girl protag so bad but they are accidentally so so comical cuz the things she comes up with are so dumb

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

not my tweet or my fic (and there’s a good chance of this comment being a bot) but yeah, don’t do this. sure, some writers wouldn’t mind having fanfics (or direct continuation) of their fanfics written by someone else. some may even be thrilled and happy. but the fandom etiquette is that if you want to write a fanfic or a continuation of someone’s fanfic, YOU POLITELY ASK THE WRITER FOR THEIR PERMISSION. not their readers.

also 5 months isn’t long at all. 5 months is 5 minutes when it comes to fanfics. I’ve waited years for my favorite fics to get updated (one of my favorite fanfics was updated by the author after 13 years) and I’ve never said anything to them about “it’s been ___ years, I don’t think it will get updated anymore”. because another fandom / fanfic etiquette is that fanfic writers write for free in their free time, they don’t owe you anything. maybe they will update one day. maybe they won’t. if you want your favorite fic to get updated, you comment something like “this is good!! I’m excited for what happens next” and maybe your positive comment will motivate the author to update. but you don’t say “it’s been ___ months or years”. fanfics writers write for themselves and their own enjoyment. they’re just kind enough to let you read their works for free. stop being rude and entitled to fanfic writers.