nostalgia

in an ao3 full of sex scenes written like everyone’s taken a night school course on fucking shibari and then written up the experience for a linkedin post the bad bdsm etiquette tag appears to me like a verdant oasis in the unforgiving desert

i think my big thing with this is like. people want their characters to be unproblematic so desperately and are mistakenly assuming that having them conduct these elaborate scenes with safewords and various systems and long discussions before and afterwards about how they all felt about it is a neutral thing. when actually that has absolutely huge implications for their characterisation and is usually incorrect (yes! incorrect ♥️) and incongruent with their actual characters. this person has a poor sense of responsibility and cannot communicate at all so why is he suddenly the responsible communication Tzar because he’s having sex. it doesn’t make sense and it’s jarring to read. if you are the sort of person who has that sort of sex that cannot be separated from your general character and personality (and i do not mean this in a kinkshaming way i mean it in regards to everything AROUND the sex). it doesn’t make sense to just pretend that everyone who has bdsm sex does it in the same Safe Unproblematic way regardless of character. it’s like when people write them having kids and getting married in a big traditional wedding with a big traditional proposal because That’s What People Do. no the fuck it’s not it’s what a very specific kind of person does and most of the time it’s NOT what the kind of person you’re writing about would do. these aren’t neutral things you are making big statements about their characters which do not align with literally anything else about them! to make them the kind of people who have safe responsible communicative bdsm sex you have to fundamentally change their characters! and of course apart from all that it is very very boring and cringy to read. so there’s that

thinking about how heated rivalry exists within (and occasionally strains against/is suffocated by) the conventions of its genre. it’s a fluffy smut novel no doubt even the author will tell you this. she calls herself a smut author. but in the middle of her most popular book you have shane, who hates himself so much that it eats him alive. shane who forces himself to have sex with women even though he feels guilty and emasculated and horrible but he thinks he deserves to feel that discomfort because he deserves it because he was born wrong. this kind of person doesn’t often exist within fluff books of this nature but you can’t divorce his experience as hyper visible gay man of color from his narrative. just the same as you can’t divorce the fact he exists solely to be something of an idealized love interest in a beach read. and so sometimes he’s beating against the walls of the source material. he’s in so much pain but this is still a romance novel and so there isn’t really room in the text for that pain. there’s nowhere for him to fully unload it because the story doesn’t invite it. and then you have ilya who thinks he is unworthy of love because his mother abandoned him and his father abused him and his brother detested (+ abused) him. and so sometimes also he is straining against the confines of his own point of origin. a man in a book about falling in love thinks he’ll never have love and once he gets it he struggles under the weight of it. i think the books examine him a little more thoroughly so he suffers from this less but still. it’s obviously like haha fluffy romance book they’re kissing and they’re both boys!! which is totally fine. i know what i signed up for. but then shane wakes up every single morning and thinks he is no better than dirt under someone’s shoes because he likes to let big strong men fuck him and he’s never going to be able to change that. the fact he has that, as a character, is delicious. but he doesn’t exist within a narrative that intends to thoroughly unpack that. he just has it. carries it with him. and every so often we glimpse through the curtain and we see the horrors and it’s like whoa. of course if being gay was a cakewalk this wouldn’t be a problem but since it’s not that’s just kind of inherent to his fabric. you can’t divorce him from the lived gay experience, especially not since there is a certain amount of realism lent to the industry he works in + the way other characters interact with him. we skim the surface of this aspect of shane because that’s just what this kind of book exists to do. yet something about it compels me. perhaps it is the lack that is interesting. this is not RR crit btw i think it’s neat i’m not whacking her it’s not her fault being gay sucks sometimes. her book isn’t about that, really. she’s trying to have fun. i don’t expect rachel reid’s A Little Life or whatever y’all were saying before do you know what i mean

Lowkey I hate fanon woke!Ilya. Let him be a little disgusting rat boy. Neither he or Shane have politics that would be acceptable to tumblrinas let's be so real

Hands shaking to get my phone out of my pocket after my 12hr shift. My Shane. Show me my Shane

acting like ilya wasn’t tongue deep in shane’s hole before the first time they did anal

the problem is that I think Jacob Tierney thinks Shane is endlessly fascinating but I think that Rachel Reid quite genuinely thinks he is boring

is this a safe place to say i don’t care that chappell roan is rude and i think it’s fine if she continues to be

the fact that since i made this post less than two weeks ago there have been at least three more categorically insane and incredibly vicious public attacks made upon her character… at this point i hope she starts killing people