Gaywatch

can I be so real with you. can I be honest. totally aside from the moral panic about women on booktok being """porn addicts""" because they're reading erotica, I think it's so fucking goofy when people act as if there needs to be some kind of societal reckoning with how tiktok books "aren't very good." like, okay? they're commercial products mass produced for entertainment. tiktok didn't invent that; you're going to have to take it up with pulp magazines and dime novels and comic books. you guys would throw up if you found out about Fanny Hill.

I guess my point being if you've allowed yourself to develop a superiority complex because you think you're reading "better" books than Those Other People maybe uuuuh calm the fuck down and kill the book cop in your brain, it literally doesn't matter.

That's it exactly! Low quality writing and cheap entertainment are what they are, but everything has to be sold as a trope, more emphasis is getting placed on erotica (also ace! And I don't care about reading it but its frequently boring and I don't want to write it!) and I've seen a decline in quality of debut sf/f adult fiction.....it all reads like tell-don't-show YA...and I can't tell of it's the manuscripts that are getting sold to cater to the literary equivalent of a fast fashion consumer base, or if its editors chopping up better structured works to fit the ideal.

And on the one hand, that isn't new either -- Anais Nin's erotica was miserably churned out at $1 a page, though rather than for an algorithm she wrote it for one specific rich guy who was always demanding more sex, less plot. But it's still kind of sucky for everyone who prefers to write and read different things. (Speaking as someone who enjoys reading and writing sex scenes, though I'm picky about the kind of sex.) We need to watch the terms of our complaints, given we're in an environment of growing censorship, but it's as natural for these complaints to exist as for mass market writing to be a bit underbaked.

Obsessed with characters who portray themselves as worse than they are. Who are lying to everyone including themselves about it. People generally assume if someone's lying about themselves they're trying to look better but sometimes they're trying to look worse. They attribute agency to where they had none, add intend to accidents, try to convince everyone that this is something they did instead of something that happened to them.

audiences have no idea how to be uncomfortable anymore

watch movies that make you uncomfortable read books that make you uncomfortable go to plays that make you uncomfortable watch tv that makes you uncomfortable look at paintings and sculpture and artwork that makes you uncomfortable. it is spiritually and morally and ethically and artistically really really good for you. think about why you are uncomfortable. what biases do you bring to art? what biases does the art bring to you? how do you reconcile this? how does your worldview grow and expand and change? all this and more will be answered and available to you if you just engage with art that does not coddle you and treats you like an intelligent human being that can sit through discomfort

Look, sometimes you just need forty thousand words of comprehensively researched geopolitical worldbuilding in order to adequately contextualise a scene of two rival princesses angrily jerking each other off. That's totally normal.

Fuck it. I wanna see the two princesses jerking eachother off AND the 50 million words of geopolitical world building that props it up.

having completely opposing headcanons at the same time is important for the diversity of the fandom ecosystem. yes I believe this would happen. but I also don’t. hope this helps

Now on its 6th year.. thank you Xiao Zhan and Wang Yibo for bringing us The Untamed. Happy 6.27

6.27.2026 7th year.. thank you Xiao Zhan and Wang Yibo for bringing us The Untamed. Happy 6.27!!!

No I genuinely don't think there's any better wording of the last part