milfs in space

Chapters: 1/3 Fandom: The Arcana (Visual Novel) Rating: Explicit Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Nadia/Valerius, The Devil/Valerius Characters: Valerius, Nadia, The Hierophant, Lucio, Volta, Vulgora, Vlastomil, , Valdemar, Male Apprentice, The Devil Additional Tags: Hate Sex, Rough Sex, Pining, Obsession, Masturbation, Dubious Consent, Dubious Consent Due To Identity Issues, Basically Valerius Wants to Fuck Nadia So Bad It Nearly Ruins His Life, god what a mood, Nadia Route, Nadia Route Spoilers, Nadia Route - Upright Ending Series: Part 4 of "The Arcana" Ficlets Summary: Valerius has never stopped resenting Lucio for all the things he took and didn't earn - from the power and title that should have gone to Valerius, to the Prakran princess he married, who looks on the smitten Consul only as a friend.

But when Nadia falls into a never-ending sleep, Valerius' obsessive passion for the Countess leaves him vulnerable to a particularly crafty Arcana with plans of his own. And while he might be familiar enough with magic to know that the woman visiting him at night isn't the real Nadia Satrinava, Valerius has no idea that he's been fucking the Devil all along . . . and surrendering another piece of his soul every time.

okay so I discovered @thearcanagame last month and instantly became helplessly addicted (it is a QUEERTASTIC TAROT-BASED FANTASY ROMANCE CHOOSE-YOUR-OWN-ADVENTURE NOVEL WITH OVER FIVE THOUSAND FICS ON AO3 ALREADY and I am furious at myself for being so late to the party). If you know anything about me BUT AT ALL you will be wildly unsurprised to learn that I instantly fell head over heels for both Muriel (”Big Sad Broken Man Wracked With Guilt Over Dark Past Who Needs to Be Loved Back to Life”) and Nadia (”Bossy Ice Queen MILF With Light Domme Energy, Just a Dash of Mommy Kink, and Boobs That Look Incredible In a Gown") and have already become a fic trash monster, to the point that I am writing fic in first person to keep it in the voice of the game. The things we do for our ships, man . . . .

Anyway here, have some smut, there’s definitely more coming.

Ace of Cups

Fandom: The Arcana (Visual Novel) Rating: Explicit Relationships: Muriel (The Arcana)/Reader, Apprentice/Muriel (The Arcana) Characters: Muriel (The Arcana), Apprentice (The Arcana) Additional Tags: First Time, Virginity, Muriel Route (The Arcana), Muriel (The Arcana) Route Spoilers, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Sex In A Cave, Snowed In, Hand Jobs Series: Part 1 of "The Arcana" Ficlets

Summary: Muriel is on the verge of falling apart after losing Khamgalai and Morga, and failing to stop Lucio. Clearly there's only one way to snap him out of it - but the Apprentice doesn't realize it's something he's never done before.

Takes place in the Muriel Route, Book XIV (Temperance), Chapter 1, "Run," albeit with a few very minor plot changes. Artwork is from the Muriel gallery.

Eight of Swords

Fandom: The Arcana (Visual Novel) Rating: Explicit Relationships: Apprentice/Nadia (The Arcana), Nadia (The Arcana)/Reader Characters: Nadia (The Arcana), Apprentice (The Arcana) Additional Tags: Light Dom/sub, Dom/sub Undertones, Cunnilingus, Body Worship, Aged-Up Character(s), Female Apprentice (The Arcana) Series: Part 2 of "The Arcana" Ficlets Summary: After their visit with the High Priestess, Nadia and the Apprentice spend the night in the magical realms and discover a secret new desire to explore.

I WOULD NEVER LET YOU DOWN I PROMISE

It really is incredibly refreshing to watch a show where the tone balances drama and fun this deftly. Like a lot of folks, I came to this show after The 100’s boner for shock deaths and sheer disdain for its audience finally broke me after they killed off Kane and Abby, and then Jason and Kim went on the post-season press circuit to breezily laugh and swap jokes about how fun it is to kill off characters and make audiences suffer as much as possible, and how the point of those deaths was that there was no point because, you know, that’s realism. The only showrunner who handled post-finale interviews worse than that was Veronica Mars’ Rob Thomas, whose utter disdain for fans, and for women in general, was genuinely astonishing. And this comes hard on the heels of the Game of Thrones finale just completely shitting on season after season of plot development, illustrating that Benioff and Weiss still don’t actually understand what anyone ever liked about their show. So I arrived at this show seething with so much frustration toward male writers who are more interested in violence than relationships that I don’t know that I would have been willing to dive into a high-stakes bank heist drama, written by a man and featuring multiple female protagonists, if I hadn’t had assurances from people I really trusted that I wasn’t going to get fucked over again.

And I didn’t!

Isn’t it amazing to watch a television show made by someone who genuinely wants you to be having a great time?

Isn’t it incredible to feel like the creators want you here?

Isn’t it wild to realize that all those writers trying to tell us that a story cannot have both high-stakes action and a heart were maybe just … uh, not very good writers???

I’m actually really glad you brought up the misogyny factor because that’s one of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot with this show. Because I think it’s actually doing something kind of extraordinary in the way it handles the reality of being a woman in a masculine, violent world – from everyday workplace sexism to abuse and assault. And it’s doing so by carefully avoiding the traps many other male writers fall into when they use “realism” as justification for telling stories where women are tortured and brutalized for entertainment.

As though women need to be reminded by men that constant threats of violence are our reality.

As though there are no other kinds of interesting stories to be told about our lives. As though no one could possibly want to watch us live, thrive, love, grow, find happiness, save the day, win, because that’s “not realistic.”

Sometimes this happens because the writer is a man who just blatantly doesn’t give a fuck about women and isn’t pretending otherwise, which at the very least makes them easier to spot (and more self-aware). But a lot of male showrunners, filmmakers, authors, etc., genuinely think of they’re helping when they torture their heroines for entertainment, and the reasons for that disconnect tend in my experience to be one of the following three things:

A kind of wish-fulfillment scenario about being the only male writer in the whole wide world who is sensitive and clever enough to take some shitty, sexist trope (sexual assault, exploitative nudity, stray-bulleting a lesbian) and actually pull it off, because no matter how many times women say “please God no, we are so sick of that,” he knows he can change our minds because he’s just that good;

The fetishization of women’s pain, in which the relationship between male writer and female protagonist becomes a creepy way to play out real-world power dynamics and let some guy work out all his issues with women by turning his heroine into a punching bag;

The misguided belief - of which women writers can also be guilty, by the way - that the heroic endurance of horrible suffering is the only way to show the audience that a female character is strong.

All of these, obviously, are infuriating, and infuriatingly common, and you are absolutely thinking of at least one example for each of them right now, I can feel it. So the older I get, the more I become unapologetically misandrist in my skepticism toward male showrunners writing female characters - especially in dramas, and especially especially in dramas where some degree of violence is built into the nature of the world.

All of this is to say that I had the same initial wariness about this show that you did, and I too was reliant on the recommendation of savvy feminist fangirl friends who I knew in my heart would never lead me astray. But there was always a part of my brain that couldn’t quite trust it. I mean, it’s a high-stakes heist! Everyone has guns! There are male criminals and female hostages! I know how the rules of television work! What are they going to do, not gratuitously murder any women?

… isn’t it depressing to realize how numb we are to the prevalence of this? That we’ve come to just expect it? That all those male writers and their Big Shock Deaths are ho-hum and predictable because actually it’s more shocking when women don’t die onscreen?

We’ve been subjected to a near-Pavlovian level of social conditioning by violence-obsessed white men in Hollywood, who have had almost sole control of the way stories about girls and women are told onscreen. A lot of writers who are trying to be intentional about avoiding harmful tropes do so by creating a world where horrors like police brutality, rape, homophobia, etc., simply don’t exist. And I’m not knocking that approach, by the way; many of my favorite shows, from Star Trek to Schitt’s Creek, posit a world where marginalized folks get to be free from the shit that burdens us daily in real life, so the show can focus on exploring all the other different kinds of stories that can be told about women, or people of color, or queer people, which aren’t typical “struggle” narratives. I happen to think there’s nothing wrong with this kind of fantasy escapism, and that we need more of it, and that it serves a genuine purpose by giving us space to imagine what a world free of that shit could look and feel like.

But La Casa takes a completely different task, one which is quite frankly a lot more risky from a male showrunner: this show has built a world which is, in fact, full of terrible men who do terrible things to women, yet the story is never sensationalist, exploitative, or burdened by misogynist tropes. Which is actually kind of extraordinary.

The secret?

Centering the woman’s emotional experience and keeping the narrative entirely in her point of view.

Here’s an example of what I mean.

[mild ST spoilers! skip this if you’re the only person in the world who took longer to catch up on s3 than I did]

This season on Stranger Things, two of the young female characters had storylines that drew on really ugly sexist tropes, but they were presented in very different ways; one was very clearly intentional, and one was almost entirely unexamined. Nancy goes to work for the newspaper, and every single man she works with is gleefully, enthusiastically horrible to her. It is instantly clear from the minute these characters are introduced that they are Bad People, and we want bad things to happen to them. The pack of gross old dudes sitting around a table laughing at the young girl with career aspirations, telling her to just shut up and get them coffee because that’s all she’s good for? That sexist trope was conscious. The storyline is entirely framed around Nancy’s point of view. 

But then elsewhere, we have Eleven and Mike in a relationship which has become physical, and for most of the season between the first and last episodes (which were the only ones I thought got the tone of this relationship right), Hopper turns into every stereotypical shotgun-toting dad who threatens the boy who wants to date his daughter and develops an extremely uncomfortable degree of violent possessiveness over Eleven’s emerging teen sexuality. That sexist trope was not conscious. The storyline is framed around Hopper (and to a lesser extent, Mike).

The way we know the difference between conscious and unconscious is that misogynist behavior is intended to be a dealbreaker with the newsroom guys; it’s designed to make us hate them. But we’re still supposed to love Hopper, and to believe in his love for Eleven (and I do, don’t get me wrong, I just think they deserved way better writing). But you don’t get any brownie points from me for showing us you know what grotesquely obvious workplace misogyny looks like if you turn right around and undercut that by not noticing that you’ve also inserted misogyny into a father/daughter relationship that didn’t have any before. The Duffer Brothers did not take us inside Eleven’s emotional experience of having her behavior policed by older men the way they did with Nancy … probably because, like many men, they get that asshole dudes telling women to get back in the kitchen and only speak when spoken to is sexist, but a dad threatening his daughter for developing sexually is just a classic funny joke.

This is the thing that La Casa does in an extraordinarily careful way: when sexist behavior is depicted onscreen it is always, always, always conscious, and it centers the woman’s experience.

I’ve put some examples below the cut, for folks who have seen the show or don’t mind some mild-to-medium spoilers.

Anyway, I’m so glad that you took the leap! For everyone else who is seeing this post and is still on the fence, I will tell you that three seasons in, the show has done right by every one of its women. That doesn’t mean bad things don’t happen - it IS a high-stakes heist drama - but they don’t happen in a misogynist or exploitative way. There’s not one female character on the show whose arc I haven’t loved.

Anyway, read on for spoilers, and my thoughts on some of the Terrible Men of La Casa and why the way they are written is so brilliant and insightful and, yes, feminist af. TW for mentions of domestic violence and sexual assault.

isn’t it the greatest??? that’s exactly how I felt about it too. it is legitimately healing to a degree which is surprising for a show all about crime. I love this found family with my whole entire heart and I’m dedicating my whole life to making everyone watch.