#astroloquacious

astroloquacious replied to your post“nottheliterati replied to your post “a deep thought maybe? on...”

Ah, ignore my prior comment then. I do think (queer) people know what demi-bi is, but if it doesn't feel like it fits, it doesn't fit. (Explaining your identity to non-LGBT+ community members or people who don't have at least one close LGBT+ friend.) is a whole 'nother story.)

See, I never heard that one, and it sounds an awful lot like “demi-boy” which is like, a whole separate other thing on a different axis entirely. But like... I mean, it’s not that I never hang out with queers at all, so it’s weird to me that I’ve never heard it ever in all this time and feel like I had to put all that together from scratch.

And sorry, I think I’ve lost some replies in the shuffle of a real busy offline life today, but someone (oh, it was you, LOL hi) pointed out that they don’t know anyone who’s both demi straight-- and i think that’s an important relevant point too, and I’d expand that to be monosexual in general either straight OR gay-- it seems to me like being demisexual tends to also have a super high co-incidence of being bi/pan, because if your model of attraction works that way you’re clearly generally operating on some different level or axis that’s not the “normal” (i.e., the way we have any language at all to describe) way attraction works. And there was definitely an earlier reply or reblog from @salamanderinspace that has by now scrolled off my activities pane where they mentioned having attractions based on totally unusual aspects of experiences, and maybe it’s that ace-spec stuff like this just isn’t examined much?

Oh yes, here’s the reblog. an excerpt:

For a long time I identified as asexual, but I’m not asexual, I’m very much a sexual person and I feel both arousal and attraction… it’s just extremely rare that I genuinely experience those things for PEOPLE.   Much more often I’ll feel attraction around fictional characters or types of art…when Jenny Slate says she’s had sex with the moon, I feel that.  I have sometimes felt aroused by pictures of body parts, but more because they’re pictures than because they’re body parts; I’m feeling more of a connection with the photographer and the story they’re telling than the subject.

[...]

But I think what we need really is actually a whole system of new words which describe - NOT whether you feel attraction, and NOT who you feel it for, but what is the specific attribute or mechanism that causes you to feel attraction/arousal. 

really, though, the whole reblog is so interesting-- and like, yes, yes, that the attraction is not necessarily sexual and shouldn’t be taken to be about sex, it’s more than that and it’s different than that!!

I think it’s a fuckin’ shame that Ace Discourse has taken over to substitute a fucking pointless discussion of Whether Aces Are Queers for a meaningful and fascinating discussion that I think could be super illuminating about the really, really different ways a lot of people experience the spectrum of attraction-- I really think there’s an entire universe of non-allosexual modes of attraction that have nothing to do with, like, gender, classical physical attractiveness, literally anything Hollywood has ever heard of, any of the things that stand for Sexiness in movies, etc.-- there’s just a whole universe of stuff that is super, super normal, but we totally lack any way of discussing it. And since sexual attraction is a thing so intrinsic to a person, it’s basically impossible to understand someone whose modes of it work radically differently than yours.

Like, I genuinely, literally cannot comprehend what it is that like “normal” allosexual straight people experience when they see some boring straight person in a bar and are like “That’s The One”-- It is as incomprehensible to me as, like, calculus. I know calculus exists and is like, a kind of math or something, I think there’s letters in it sometimes, they use it for like spaceships and things, but that’s as much as I could tell you. I know “love at first sight” exists and I totally know there are people who only like, say, brunette chicks with slim thighs, but I can’t really tell you anything more concrete than that and I can’t actually begin to comprehend what it would be like to experience life like that.

So the problem with ID’ing as bi or pan simply because I experience attraction independently of the subject’s physical sex or gender presentation is that it feels very distinct from people who are bi or pan and experience attraction dependent on the subject’s physical sex or gender presentation, if that makes any sense?? It feels like an entirely different thing, not that I couldn’t find common cause with such a person? but i often feel so weirdly alienated by bi memes that are meant to be in-jokey, LOL.

girderednerve replied to your post “a deep thought maybe? on demisexuality”

this is So relatable, i too would like to be able to describe more or less how i feel or approach attraction with some term that doesn't require a three-minute explainer & a vetting process. it feels kind of frustrating that most of the language available here seems designed to describe (/pathologize?) behavior instead of express attitudes & emotions, but what's new, right?

YES. I guess really that’s what I’m objecting to-- I have always, always hated how pathologized it all seems, and how it’s like. You have to have a 3.5x5″ laminated card with 1000 words on each side to explain your gender identity and the pride flag you specifically are entitled to wear (like a clan tartan) (you need a genealogy to show you’ve the right to that one) (like, am i bi through the distaff line if I’ve had oral sex with a woman, can you squeak me in on a technicality even if I’ve been celibate, I paid my dues by almost getting expelled from boarding school for getting discovered naked in bed with a girl, listen I always bought drinks at the drag karaoke night I’m in the system, how does this work) -- ugh.

Like-- all of this is complicated and I shouldn’t be able to boil down the entire essence of what makes me, me, and how I love and who I love and why I love and when, to a simple phrase, but god, it would be nice to have some more nuanced language around some of this, it would be nice to have something to explain this entire spectrum, which is maybe more like a color wheel, which is maybe actually more of a kind of sphere, which is actually maybe a bit more like the branches and roots of a tree, which is really kind of more than a single mind can understand because it’s a part of the whole of the existence of living things on this planet and beyond--

I feel no remorse for what I've done. :) You are WELCOME.

I'm really getting into the "terrible, inaccurate porn as a Wolf witcher meme/rite of passage" bit now. Mostly because I did actually work as a proof-reader/line editor for a romance imprint for a year or two, so, THE THINGS I HAVE SEEN.

Man I’m coming up sort of blank on the really dumb shit, it’s a hot minute since I bothered reading any romance that wasn’t actually good. I should go look up the Crucifix Nail Nipples post. I tried for a moment to write some bad purple prose but couldn’t get into it. 

s-leary replied to your post “more brainstorming about Geralt’s Formative Porn Experiences”

Oh yes, that’s an outtake that needs to happen.

You know, knowing me, there’s a good chance it’ll wind up actually in the main text of the story, so. 

2nico replied to your post “oh apparently i can reply to replies again”

love it. fund it. prostitutes like "why do so many witchers have That Specific Request and why are they always the wolf ones" that's one thing it's a pity the ubiquity of internet porn for the youth has extinguished. formative porn and the odder benign fetishes people developed

something like shamefacedly tame like blindfolds or something bc it featured

oh man yeah, I’m old enough that I grew up in the era of non-ubiquitous porn and I definitely remember a few of the earlier Erotic things I encountered, most of which I just didn’t get but a few of which got weird little hooks into me and Yeah I probably don’t want to admit the things I like weirdly find arousing/disturbing now that most people wouldn’t particularly notice.

I don’t know how different it is now, when basically anybody can get hot and cold running porn to their specifications-- I mean, how do you come up with the specifications when you don’t know what you like yet??? I bet you still wind up with bizarre fetishes based weirdly on what you encountered first, even with the deluge kids have got to deal with now.  Just, as with most things, in the old days of more limited media, probably there were more frequent examples of people seizing on one particular pop culture thing that slipped through and caught a lot of young minds at formative moments, whereas now it’s all a lot more fragmented. IDK if that’s true though. 

mikkeneko replied to your post “oh apparently i can reply to replies again”

my vote on the dryads one is that the older witchers pass it on to the younger ones once they have actually Met dryads and can't read it again. but now geralt is stuck with it, because ciri's already met dryads

Oh there’d probably be a side note of “gosh mister are dryads really like this” and the older witchers laughing up their sleeves and saying more or less “fuck around and find out” and probably once a generation or so the dryads have to deal with an unusually gullible young Witcher who is possibly more wide-eyed than the situation warrants.

mikkeneko replied to your post “more brainstorming about Geralt’s Formative Porn Experiences”

I second the vote for an entire afternoon being spent jaskier and/or yennefer going over geralt's bookshelf and Learning Things about their boyfriend (maybe something is going on at the keep that they have to stay out of the way of?)

I may just cram them in there for a bit. If I had a scene that long they’d definitely eventually wind up with Lambert coming in and breaking the news to them that the one where the hooker pisses on the guy was definitely not Geralt’s so stop freaking out, because he’s feeling charitable and they’ve been quietly horrified for a good ten minutes or so while he was eavesdropping. (Like, no shade, random readers, if watersports is your thing but like, I was just picking something, here, it’s nothing personal.)

This, to call back to @2nico up there, would also be the part where Lambert, because he has never really spared himself from his own horrifying honesty, would point out to them that it was a running gag among brothels that when they saw the Wolf medallion they just got out the blindfolds or whatever because all the Wolf trainees totally read the same bodice-ripper, and Jaskier’s like making light of it and Lambert’s like I’m not fucking around though if you have a blindfold I’m yours for cheap, don’t even tease.

(Hm maybe not a blindfold but definitely something super vanilla but slightly odd. Definitely softcore as fuck. Like, fuzzy handcuffs or feather dusters kind of shit. It’s not Geralt’s praise kink, he came by that honestly all by himself.) 

and later they’re like oh ha ha Geralt, Lambert was trying to get us to believe that all Wolf Witchers have a kink for fuzzy handcuffs and his attention snaps up and his pupils dilate and he’s like uhh no that’s, that’d be, that’d be really silly, I would never-- uh-- why, do you, uh, do you have those?

If you legit wanna get into witchcraft I volunteer my knowledge/services, my mom taught me as a kid & then I got real into chaos magic & the theory behind magical systems so I went full dumbass academic about it.

I *do*, is the thing. I like, really do. I’ve bought and read several books, and noodled through a number of websites, and have been poking around this for literally years, but any kind of genuine starting place continually eludes me. It feels like I’m just... pretending, like I can’t actually get at any kind of genuine reflection or knowledge, it’s just pretending and I’m not really interested. But it has really, honestly, truly been years, maybe decades, of me being interested and bouncing off, and obviously it’s got to be some kind of legit interest if I keep coming back to it, so how do I approach it in a way that doesn’t just feel like I’m pretending?

Anyway I am always interested in other perspectives, I wish I could stop being so goddamned self-conscious about it and just do it, which is what everyone keeps telling me but like, I can’t just do anything, I have ADHD and there are usually six to ten invisible steps that come first that normal people don’t even fucking notice and so can’t advise me on how to surmount, and this is a pretty clear case of that.

beyoursledgehammer replied to your post “replying to replies about not looking for more fandoms to be in”

also anon's ask sounded like 'please watch this and write fic for it'

It did, rather, which in my book is sort of a rude thing to say but I am perfectly aware that to many fannish people this would be a compliment. It’s hard, when one is in a bad mental space (as, oh boy, I sure am-- I just found out on my way out the door after 10 hours on the clock at work today that I haven’t been getting paid for the few hours my job has taken me back, either-- I worked 12 hours 4 weeks ago, and 18 hours 2 weeks ago, and none of those generated any kind of paycheck, so now I have to do battle with my employer as well as the DOL people and sweet Christ I was so looking forward to actually earning some money for the first time since March and now I have another fight to fight and I’m going to have to use a phone and articulate my needs and advocate for myself and I just would like to curl up under a table and fucking cry instead of any of that, and I would just say I won’t come in until they sort it out but they don’t need me so whatever. I have no leverage in this, I never have; they’re still paying me minimum after eleven years so to assume that they value me would be to severely misstate the matter. So to say I’m in a bad mental space is probably seriously underselling it) not to take that as a sort of imposition, or even an attack-- a normal person would have no problem seeing that as a sweet, flattering invitation, why can’t I just watch a simple fucking TV show or whatever it is, God, but it’s a bit of a stretch to assume bad intentions there so I’m really really really trying to focus on being polite and respectful in my answer, because probably this person isn’t just treating me like a fic machine and poking me until good words fall out, but it’s real hard, at the moment, because I am a fucking wreck and that’s sure what it felt like to me. Which, anyway, that was not very composed or clever of me and I should stop there!

I am going to insist that surely anon did not mean it in a gross or demanding way and the part of my jerkbrain that is seeing it that way is just being a jerk.

<small>but also, like, plz don’t do that. don’t ask me to write things. if i have not been talking about a fandom plz don’t ask me to get into it. I get that people like that but I don’t. Like that. It’s not how my brain works. It just feels like another reminder that I am not a normal person and won’t ever be.</small>

lazaefair replied to your post “replying to replies about not looking for more fandoms to be in”

<3 <3 How are the mammoths coming along, by the way?

I wrote that whole bunch of it last year (oh lord, it was only last year. Most of it’s under f-lock but the intro and some of the beginning is publicly readable here, for anyone who hasn’t seen it) and then petered out because not super many people were reading it and also I realized I suck at plots, and then I was revising it with some input from a friend but then neither of us really had time, so I set it aside and now when I look at it, all I can see is how it didn’t really work as a plot and so all I’ve really got is some worldbuilding, and a bunch of scenes I don’t like. Very frustrating and sad. I don’t know where to start, to get back to it.

mikkeneko asked “God that's a mood. I don't understand how people can watch a new...”

God that's a mood. I don't understand how people can watch a new series every week. I need room to get emotionally invested!

Yeah I’ve had a few messages to that effect. I’m glad I’m not the only freak--  I’m not interested in just watching something to pass the time, I only really want to read or watch something I’m going to get fully invested in, but that’s such a huge commitment that I can only manage it once in a--

!!!!! oh my god I’m demisexual for media that’s what it is

it’s just like how I can’t get into people unless it’s going to be a whole thing and most of the time there’s just not that connection so there’s no way I’m gonna. Well, anyway, it turns out that for me that’s not a sexual thing that’s my whole me, I’m not interested in something unless I’m going to basically marry it, and the thought of dating something else while still married to the previous thing goes beyond unappealing into just plain alien. Like, just, how??? like I’m already eating a steak, why would I put an ice cream sundae also into my mouth at the same time, it’s not a perfect metaphor but it has the same total lack of moral judgement I intend here-- it’s not that I don’t love steaks in an abiding fashion, and honestly I actually love ice cream sundaes even more than steaks, but if I’m in the middle of eating a steak I’m not going to order? dessert? and also start eating it? like right in the middle of dinner? I’m already eating, I only have one mouth? Why would I do this? How would I do this???????????

Obviously it does not work this way for most people but that’s super super how it works for me.

astroloquacious replied to your post “replying to replies about not looking for more fandoms to be in”

I would personally love to get to know some of your original fic stuff.

I wish I had the wherewithal to scratch some out now, honestly, because I also want to be writing it but I am currently in the midst of this Witcher steak but a few people have been kind enough to be interested, and I want to post some but I currently hate everything original I’ve ever written, alas. I made the mistake of trying to reread the novella I was working on in, oh god, January, which I’d gone so far as to have some people beta-read before I decided it was... not... good. (It’s not freestanding, is the problem, it’s the prequel to a thing, and I thought, well, I’ll write the prequel, but it doesn’t make sense without the thing, in defiance of my fond hopes, so, I’m sort of stuck again.)

Oh gosh I was working on it in January. Of this year?? It seems like a thousand years ago. Well, here’s a scene from that novella, in which the prequel’s narrator gives us a little rundown of exactly who Our Protagonist really is.

(Ha, I found a description of him in another entry about this. I was calling the protagonist Paladin Guy, because when I first wrote the main novel thing I didn’t know what a paladin was but he definitely was one. Here’s how I described him:

And while Paladin Guy is, like all paladins, a little bit of a dumbass– pure of heart, pert of buttocks, bright of eye, holy of spirit, dumb of ass (I wouldn’t call him exactly home of sexual, it’s complicated)– he’s not a complete moron, he’s got to be smart about some things.

I should close these parentheses.)

Oh my gosh, in one of the entries in the tag about that novella I’m talking about how I’ve just seen the first couple episodes of the Witcher. It was that recently that I was working on it. Fuck. Wow. Ugh.

because the book in your head isn't REAL or CONCRETE and is therefore incapable of having flaws. And being so upset at the flaws that you don't write means you aren't improving. To paraphrase Ira Glass, the only way to get your work up to the quality of your taste is to first produce a lot of shit. Also I was 100% right and please tell me more about dumbass paladins and the incredibly exasperated handlers who love them. Lawful Stupids & Lawful Assholes are the best.

I just gotta address one thing in this very sweet message (which I did enjoy but I feel deserves a response!), which is that the only way to get your work up to the quality of your taste is to first produce a lot of shit--

I have written literally a million words of drafts of this novel, so far; I started work on it in 2003.

Please believe me, the problem with this novel, and all of them, is not that I have not produced a lot of shit already.

It has taught me a lot of things! it sure has! I learned close 3rd POV when I threw away the entire third draft of the book and started from scratch completely rewriting it in 1st person so that I could then re-translate it to 3rd person. It was 200,000 words long at the time and I did a complete retype with no copy-pasting, both times. (That was approximately 2004-5, I think, though the file dates aren’t definitive since I’ve switched computers a couple of times since then.)

I just. Haven’t made a full coherent draft any of those times, and took all these breaks to write fanfic instead so I could get some feedback (and in the midst of that, took breaks from fanfic to not write at all, which did rather bad things to my psyche, but not really worse things than spending my life getting laughed at for wanting to write a novel, really; you gotta balance this shit).

But it’s not that I lack faith or confidence or haven’t practiced. It’s just that I’ve spent a lot of time burning myself to acquire some skill and it’s hard to bravely plunge back in again, and by now I’m extremely skeptical of that novel ever being anything worth anything on its own as opposed to an object lesson in The Way Not To Do It.

Which was why I was also working on other unrelated novels... But anyway, I just felt that should get a response. Because yes! as always, the correct answer to any worries about writing is generally, write more, but in this specific case, it can safely be said that I did try that one. It might be time for me to attempt something else, like maybe supportive beta readers or like, somebody with some concept of how an edit ought to work, but those aren’t things I know much about and I’ve been so alone for so long.

This is the novel, in fact, that taught me the valuable life lesson that Nobody Cares About Your Novel, now that I contemplate it, so. I mean, there’s some scar tissue here. I’m working through it.

But yes, I’m fully aware, you gotta write a lot of shit before you write anything you’ll like, and in fact, I’ve done so.

msilverstar replied to your post “astroloquacious replied to your post “replies and asks and such” ...”

Maybe it's your unpublished first novel and you should move on to the next?

I have moved on, many times, and have circled back around to it because it is a story I want to tell and care about deeply. I think there’s a story in it I ought to tell, but I am also aware that I’m fairly mired in it-- however, the only reason it’s being discussed at all is that I picked it up briefly because I spent a year slogging through a Brand New Idea that also bogged down into bullshit after I wrote about 3/4 of a draft and it failed to develop a plot.

So methinks it’s not that particular novel that’s the problem, somehow.

mikkeneko replied to your post “astroloquacious replied to your post “replies and asks and such” ...”

I'm sure you've heard this one before, but: perhaps printing out your draft, the whole ass draft, and then typing it up again would let you sift out the good stuff

Mm I tried that. The waste of paper horrified me, so I used side-by-side computer windows and transcribed it entirely  in the 600,000-word process I described earlier. What happens with that is that I often think “oh I could go this other completely different direction here instead” and then I have two completely incompatible storylines going, and you can repeat that infinitely and it’s super easy to get a million words of which there is not one coherent chunk for you to work on. So that’s super not an approach that’s useful for me, but I know it works for other people and I’m not knocking its validity-- I just know, I’ve tried it, a bunch, that’s great for a really thorough final polish but utterly disastrous for a good way to winnow through a lot of ideas and pick just one.

astroloquacious replied to your post “astroloquacious replied to your post “replies and asks and such” ...”

WOW, that's a lot! I rescind that particular bit of advice, then, ha ha. Would you say that the issue is more a lack of feedback, then? You mention feeling like it needs editing-- do you mean structural editing? Is it an issue of not feeling like the plot & characters are solid?

It’s that I have too many ideas, chase down more and more of them, and wind up with a huge fractured mass of story, mostly worldbuilding, with endless iterations of new reworkings of the old ideas, and they are measurably better with each iteration! but I can’t actually support a plot on them, they’re too fragmented.

My problem is largely that for most of my life I haven’t had anyone willing to read my writing, and it’s only made worse by my horrid rejection-sensitive dysphoria that means that if someone says a thing I wrote isn’t exactly perfect as-is then I have to lie on the floor in despair. I’m hoping I’m a bit more robust now as like a whole-ass adult but that’s debatable. In my real life, people think it’s funny that I think I can write a novel, and are super not interested in reading it, and that’s all I’ve had.

pantsy-fancy replied to your post  “astroloquacious replied to your post  “replies and asks and such”   ...”

                       If if would help your original novel progress to have an AO3 comment squad for cheerleading & encouragement as you write chapters, then sign me up!!! You are one of my favourite writers and I would love to read anything you're working on. (Apologies if this is out of place--I realize I'm jumping into the middle of a conversation here)          

Oh, you’re not out of place at all. Someone else (@s_leary? maybe?) suggested I put this original work up locked on AO3, and I was under the impression that original works were prohibited on AO3, but now that one mentions it I guess they changed that. It’s not impossible! I just... don’t use AO3 as a place for concrit, so I’m not used to attempting that, but I guess I’ve had some good comment discussions there. But that’s why I was trying to post the mammoths thing on Dreamwidth back in 2019 (you know, before the earth’s crust had cooled, back in that epoch, so long ago), but so few people use DW it was rather difficult to really get any discussion going.

fabledshadow replied to your post“ok either tumblr’s glitching or y’all are just reblogging all the same...”

When I like these posts I am sending good vibes and positive thoughts your way ❤️❤️❤️

Thank you, dear. <3

astroloquaciousreplied to your post“mutton chops”

Nooo if you're going to change Geralt's hair, he should at least get to wear the Designated Queer Undercut! (Made famous in my household during my partner's play-through because they started a later quest where you have to talk to several of Dandelion's girlfriends, and stopped in the middle SPECIFICALLY TO GO GET THE UNDERCUT because, and I quote, "I need them [the NPCs] to know I can't take this much heterosexual nonsense seriously.")

HA I absolutely think this is right and true.

UNFORCH, Dr. Friend is A STRAIGHT MAN. This is inescapable. He’s the kind of straight man who finds it enjoyable to flirt with other men, and is so great at parties he often gets invites to events where he winds up being the only straight guy (there’s a running joke that one of the anaesthesia nurses, a gay man, is his Emotional Support Nurse, and they’re super tight, so I’m not just saying that DF is Cool With The Gays in a general Some Of My Best Friends Etc kind of way, I literally mean that he is actually specifically Cool With A Bunch Of Specific Gays and has consistently been so over the decades I’ve known him), but despite all that, he is a straight man, and sometimes, boy can you tell. 

 bittylildragon replied to your post“mutton chops”

Oh my GOD that hair and beard combo, I wasn't even aware he COULD look that bad. Geralt baby, what have they done to you

RIGHT

I mean, DF is just trolling, but. Still. 

 mikkeneko replied to your post“mutton chops”

i had NO IDEA you could change geralt's hairstyle i thought he just LOOKED LIKE THAT

No! it turns out there’s One Good Look, and then the default look is Okayish and you see that one sometimes, and then for some reason they offer other options and they’re All Super Bad and why do they offer them?? I don’t know!!! So that terrible trolls like DF can troll us all!!

akilah12902 replied to your post “mutton chops”

you CAN get stuff repaired, at any armorer or blacksmith, or via repair kits. just. it's an option!

Oh yes, we’re aware-- he actually had opted to repair it right before accidentally dying one time, and on the reload was like no, fuck this gambeson, I am not wasting a repair kit on this piece of shit, I’m just going to equip something else as soon as I can because it sucks.

grrlcookery replied to your post“ok either tumblr’s glitching or y’all are just reblogging all the same...”

Oh man I hate when my emotional bruises and my friends' emotional bruises step on each other

I would like to be a more patient person than I am but I am only one person and I only do so well. It’s okay and I’m over it, I’m just maybe taking a lil Tumblr break and opting to believe it was just a glitch, and talking myself down from unfollowing half my mutuals because I can’t deal. This is not a productive impulse and probably won’t help at all.

 bittylildragon replied to your post“Princess the Goat”

There IS actually hidden treasure in the Riordan Manor, she is not scamming you, but it's SUPER well-hidden. Also, I see you chose to have Geralt say he killed Letho in the previous games. That's a pity, Letho in this game is Grade A Witcher Beef and is a great character.

We found the Riordan Manor treasure eventually! Yes thank you.

We did not make any choices about the game, we just declined to load a saved state, and so they decide whatever for us. Alas, no Letho, but as we didn’t know who the fuck he was to start with, we had no idea how to choose whether to manifest him or not. It is weird, what they automatically decide for you though if you don’t tell them otherwise. Like... why.

nogling replied to your post“mutton chops”

Terribly Unfashionable Dad Flings Himself from Highest Point of City in Order to End His Hair Suffering.

astroloquacious replied to your post “Re-Equip The Swords First”

I actually had the gall to tell Kiera I was in love with someone else during that convo tree and she literally laughed in my face and was like "bitch I want your dick not your emotional baggage" but like. Even if Geralt wouldn't have turned her down for some fun, we ALL know he's a disillusioned romantic & a rusted-over idealist and part of him would have thought it before his pragmatic side was like "shut up and take the free human contact."

"Geralt Roger Eric du Haute-Bellegarde" more like "my prized possession as a bby witcher was a collection of badly copied courtly romance poems about knights and a stack of suspiciously sticky bodice-rippers."

oh no

oh no Geralt was horribly tragically Romantic as an awkward teen oh no

I can’t write that, I secondhand embarrass too easy to contemplate it, but. He was. he really was. 

mikkeneko replied to your post “Re-Equip The Swords First”

I do dearly like DF's idea of what is 'in character' for Geralt

He’s got some specific ideas, and they’re mostly pretty great. They don’t all line up with mine, but like. I have like 100k of fanfic or more now (i hesitate to check) to explore mine so that’s fine.

nogling replied to your post “Re-Equip The Swords First”

Game!Geralt alternates between "kinda smooth" and "horrifyingly awkward". Keira was actually on the "kinda smooth" end of the spectrum, sadly.

oh no because that was not smooth. i mean, he was doing okay because clearly that was what she was after, but it was not smooth.

themardbard replied to your post “Re-Equip The Swords First”

Kiera and Geralt's relationship, for me, is this very close, niche "sarcasm bros" thing. Like what they have is very special to me and I love them. But I'm so relieved my actions didn't bring them to sex bc they aren't like that at all for me. ALSO YEAH GERALT IS A DAD AND WATCHING SEX SCENES WITH HIM IS A REALLY WEIRD EXPERIENCE EUGH

I didn’t get a good “bro” reading off them really, but I do feel like they had potential for bro chemistry. That just wasn’t what Kiera wanted, and Geralt, well-- I mean, I think he was too wary of her to want to be friends, particularly, even though he’s clearly lonely as fuck. 

And re: Dad stuff-- I mean! Somebody’s gotta fuck dads! I understand that! Clearly people find that appealing because so many dads are multi-time dads!!  a lot of people are out here fucking dads!! but I just. I like Geralt, I like him a great deal, but he is so dorky, and I think since I knew she was going to try to hurt him I was just like, I cannot enjoy this.

Also I was sprawled on the carpet of my best friends’ house surrounded by children’s toys watching this unfold and it was sort of an awkward setting for erotica? But also it was Not Sexy, in a lot of ways, so. 

beyoursledgehammer replied to your post “Re-Equip The Swords First”

Kiera and Lambert is the cutest thing T_T

I haven’t encountered them in any canon source, not even spoilers or playthroughs, so I can’t really imagine, but. 

I did plotbunny myself pretty hard with how that would go down in my ‘verse. Lambert’s like, wait, you fucked Geralt? and Kiera’s like ah fuck, men, gods, will you fuck off, and he’s like no no no hang on, and gets out his fucking bullet journal, and she’s like

what

and he’s like okay so I need details

and she’s like fucking what

and he’s like listen Yen won’t talk to me at all and Eskel gives some details but he won’t tell me how big Geralt’s dick is, you have to help me out, my data’s incomplete

and she has to do some mental calculus. Like, this is weird as shit, but, it is not the horrible territorial stupid man thing she had expected, and she also doesn’t have a ton of options right now, and honestly this is ripe for trolling, and honestly this could kind of be hot if you go about it right, soooooooooooo

I’m just saying that could be a really entertaining story, but I’m not writing it, because I’m nowhere near this timeline and also I wasn’t planning to actually kill off Aiden or even acknowledge that timeline in any way at all.

(You could even have a shockingly sweet denouement to the whole thing where after some really entertaining rounds of well he made me come four times so try harder she’s like actually, listen Lambert, I’m like way more into you than I was into him so I don’t want to be a buzzkill for you here but actually I’m kind of over it, can we just be you and me for a bit? and Lambert’s entire brain short-circuits probably.)

bittylildragon replied to your post “quen up and face the water hag”

I really enjoy the Pesta quest, but you are so right that the game just DOES NOT give you adequate clues about how to make the right decision.