we are living in #pervertworld

Hello! Thank you, that is wonderful to hear. I have to say I'm really blown away by the fandom response to my PHM vid + fic . . . it's been a while since I've been in a currently-popular-and-enthusiastic fandom, I guess! It's so lovely and it's definitely encouraging me to write/vid more.

I wanted to answer this because HEY YES THE DOUBLE TAP QUESTION PARTICLE it is so dear to my heart. I have yet to see any BTS stuff on how they composed Rocky's language for the film (please link if you have this), but it's clear that the language was integrated with the puppeteering to some extent, because Rocky uses at least some of his gestures grammatically. What I mean is that his question-gesture, the double-tap he does with one foot, has a grammatical function, unlike a gesture that has a semantic meaning (like thumbs up = okay/yay, that's semantic instead of grammatical). What that means is that some of Rocky's gestures are about giving contextual information for his words, like indicating grammatical mood (in the film we see him do question and emphasis). This is super fun to play with in scenes where they're touching/having sex, because not only can those gestures then be against or between their bodies, which is hot and interesting, and changes meaning depending on where on the body they show up, but also those gestures can add contextual information to the words they're saying and tell you how to interpret them. So, in my fic, I have Rocky do a question-particle (tap tap) to quietly indicate to Grace that he's asking a question, even if it sounds like he's making a demand. This is great for bdsm!

(I'm not an expert in signed languages, but really Rocky's question-particle is more of a sign than a gesture. And since his species is so spatially oriented, I wonder if they use signing space like Earth signed languages do. Signing space is where you use your physical orientation towards your signs to add another layer of meaning. So if I sign "Grace" in one area—with my left hand and low on my body—anything else I sign there, or sign towards that spot, can become associated with Grace. I can sign "see" from my eyes to the place where I signed Grace to mean like, I see Grace. So if Rocky gestures "question" with one foot, and then that same foot subsequently gestures something else, like "statement," we might associate the statement with the previous question. Whereas using a different foot might mean a different topic. Lots to consider.)

And so I just want to like. Invite people to come think about all this stuff with me! The tap-tap for a question creates all kinds of fun opportunities for kink negotiation/check-ins, but what other gestures might have grammatical significance to Rocky? Rocky already uses gestures for grammatical mood (telling the listener that he is asking a question rather than making a statement, that's an example of grammatical mood). Does Rocky have gestures for other grammatical moods, like imperative (a command) or conditional (and if-then construction)? In some languages, there's an optative mood—a grammatical way of expressing that you're wishing for something to happen—does Rocky have a gesture for that? Does Eridian have the subjunctive—a mood for urgency, demands, obligations, and suggestions—and is there a gesture for it? And, most crucially, how could that be deployed for porn?

Beyond that specific question, I just think it's really fun for these two to be still deep in the process of figuring out each other's languages and cultures while they're having sex. There's something so endearing about the way these two yes-and each other to ridiculous extremes and invent stuff on the fly and are like "I guess we'll just fly over a planet and dangle a chain into the atmosphere? Sounds fine!" They're constantly editing live code together and just going for it and I love thinking about that and doing that with their languages, too. Just muddling through and trying to figure out in real time what dirty talk might work for each other or how to communicate physically as well as verbally or how to describe that the motion you're looking for is in and out or round and round or whatever with a very limited vocabulary and a LOT of enthusiasm. It's extremely my jam. The linguistic stuff just makes it hotter, to me.

HEAR YE HEAR YE CHRISTMAS YCH COMMS (OPEN)