#caracalliope

you know, I generally don't have top/bottom hot takes but I will say my overall hot take is that topping and bottoming is, as much as we dislike admitting it, as much about gender as it is about sexual pleasure - and this is at least a little because sexual pleasure is contingent on gender pleasures. Therefore, any take about a character topping or bottoming must factor in the sort of gender pleasures and neuroses they have around these very concepts in order to achieve maximum hotness in erotic fiction (and there is nothing hotter than an author who does it deliberately and with intention, having unpacked the cultural signifiers around bottoming = being penetrated and the gender neuroses clustered around that, versus an author who reproduces these signifiers but refuses to believe there is anything sociological to this and its just because they find it hot or whatever*).

ANYWAY to illustrate:

Maedhros, for example is the man who gave us "not least wise among us" and "a king is he who holds his own or else his title is in vain" and if I'm being honest, "now what ships and rowers will you spare to return" is definitely a classic bitchy queen. The latter can even be read as a very elevated passive-aggressive "now what wise guy" provocation, especially coupled with not only mentioning Fingon but giving him a laudatory epithet when Feanor abandoned Fingolfin specifically because of the threat to his authority, which probably explains Feanor's incredible overreaction with the burning of the ships. Bottoming is simply one more weapon in his arsenal of extended psychological warfare and rebellion against his father and his desire for "third Finwe" to settle down into respectable heterosexuality and continue the family line. However, there is never a single moment when he is not in completely control of the situation and his own enjoyment of his nebulous effeminate gender pleasures. Even while subbing and not just, as is his usual practice, domming from the bottom.

Maglor, on the other hand, has made a practice of being all things to all people while being completely selfish, therefore is always whatever configuration of sexgender is the most in demand at any given moment and therefore tops or bottoms depending on whatever valence and mystique his partner is assigning to topping or bottoming. Deep down beneath this, however, since he is looking to essentially replace nonconsensually, Eru-given masculine authority in his life with chosen masculine authorities, his ideal situation is docilely bottoming for a strong-willed DILF.

Therefore, now you may think this makes Maedhros and Maglor essentially incompatible but to that i would say this actually makes them arguably more interestingly compatible because Maedhros is always in charge even while getting dicked down, while Maglor is not always in charge, but on the other hand Maedhros' bottoming is freighted with gender meanings related to penetration, while Maglor does not, so Maglor in this situation is performing a creditable impression of a masc service top but emotionally is playing the gender of "brotherwife" to Maedhros, therefore allowing both of them to say fuck you to dad (in more ways than one) and thus they arrive at perfectly complementary sexgender performances that unqualifiedly bring out the worst in each other <3

*in general the whole "its just hot and its not that deep" is the most annoying line of argument anyone can make because what you find hot is culturally contingent and some of us like thinking about what those cultural contingencies are so we can make things deliberately and specifically sexier instead of just reproducing boring cut & paste porn scripts on account of a bullheaded refusal to take porn seriously

sometimes you tag something in a haze and it's fine.

alright so @normanskiptakamori has made me deeply unwell recently about both a wurst polycule and his OCs who have a fucked up historical throuple with norman takamori and i annoyed him into combining them into a gorgeous fic here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/69726646

and that wonderful line is dropped in it. mint stuff. a+. my unhinged comment on it says it all.

separately and related canonically barry syx fucking loves taking orders and would go to hell for anyone he loves and there are various fics that interpret that man as the best sub to ever be as a result. god almost every sundrysyx fic has sid domming him and i think that's beautiful.

and barrys are clones, so. i think that's mostly shared with nyne. like most things are.

I thought it was going to be about general environmental destruction, like pollution from a highway or the forest being cut down, so learning that it's not that specifically is a HUGE relief to me. I can handle what's basically a nuclear disaster to stoats.

ooooh you just had to get in there with one of the REAL big questions. you said you know what auntie mac hates? being concise. let's make 'er ramble

I think basically the thing I love most about buffy is that she is my exact same age and we grew up together. although I didn't actually discover her until I went off to college because my conservative evangelical parents thought she was witches, which to be fair she was. she was also sneaking out at night and losing your virginity and fighting demons and worrying about grades and money and friends and boys and vampires and protecting your little sister and your best friend comes out as a lesbian [VERY exciting for baby bi mac!] and your other best friend is having an identity crisis and dating a demon you once battled to a standstill and how much of a normal life is it even possible to lead when you are battling demons all the time. what is not to love and relate to?

@caracalliope  EXCELLENT blend of styles. An ikona of some psiioniic characters could also be very fun visually!

yeah, i just had to nope out, i was like, i dislike everyone on this ship except - weirdly - Pete

it's very... i don't know. i don't even like competence kink all that much, but i hate this sense of like - team infantilization? and bad boundaries, yes. and vespa's entire thing. and just, an intimacy that felt unearned, and in fact felt less earned than when we barely saw these characters (specifically, buddy&jet together)

it feels claustrophobic i think? i'd love to hear more of yr thoughts

reconditarmonia replied to  your post

yes please let's yell about season 3

i think my main takeaway is that everything they tried to do assumed a level of buy-in that i just *did not have* - the episodes about everyone else's problems and tragic backstory when we've barely met them, the godawful "family" thing (that's not what a crime family is!!!)

I felt so sorry for Sasha in the finale lol, which was probably not the intent

y’all are basically saying what I’m thinking! (though for me Juno remains the one I don’t dislike, even if I dearly miss the unhealthy-habits mystery-solving version of him)

The weirdest thing about S3 is that after the first two episodes covering Peter’s PoV, I was still entirely on-board - Buddy’s family comments seemed more ironic than sincere, we got to see Juno and Peter from interesting new angles, lots of interesting future dynamics to develop-

Except no development actually happened. You’re both right, that the season and finale relied upon a loyalty that was never actually built out, merely stated, and then the repetition of those statements made me claustrophobic and yes, feel oddly bad for Wire. 

...okay this is going to become that long post on team dynamics...

Competency

How is this team this bad at their job. Forget as a team, even individually we have Rita failing to distribute her bot’s abilities because she likes a stream too much, Buddy thinking an EMP killing her is an acceptable loss when she is the one directing a mission, Peter reading a map upside-down and almost getting everyone killed because of it???

The last two tripped me the fuck up - this show made me dislike a dramatic attempt at self-sacrifice! I love dramatic attempts at self-sacrifice! But not when it would get all of your crew killed. Buddy saying Peter had merely been reading the map upside-down threw me so hard that I spent minutes wondering if she was covering for him actually being a traitor for her own reasons, but no, apparently that was the real reason.

(Juno waits till they’re literally at the Curemother Prime to have any questions about the motivations of the Prime’s keepers?)

Look, I’m not expecting superhuman rising to the occasion here, but I am expecting everyone to use the skills that I expect them to have. If Juno fucked up an attempt at leadership or Peter failed to deal with an injury correctly, that’s interesting! These mistakes weren’t.

Genuine Friendships

Putting aside that I am a sap who would rather watch teams that are friends than teams that aren’t, if you are going to say family this many times, I expect to see friendships develop. People actually growing to like each other as people and stuff.

We get the tiniest bit of that with Jet and Rita hanging out, but we already knew he thought highly of her at the end of S2. And we got some Buddy-Pete stuff at the beginning, but that was highly contextual to his role on the crew. I personally needed more overlapping groups/friendships and whatnot, and I think the season would’ve better for working on that.

Don’t wait till the finale episodes for Juno and Vespa to have the tiniest of shifts in their relationship due to Ransom’s scavenger hunt, when they started the season antagonistic and the shift could have begun earlier. Don’t wait till the finale episodes to tell me Juno and Buddy have been shooting together every week and expect me to have the same feelings as if you’d set it up as a throughline earlier.

Even the pre-existing relationships seem less earned this season than previously, for some reason (Juno/Peter, Buddy/Vespa, Buddy & Jet, etc)

So...boundaries

I don’t know how a crew made up of people who all actively chose to join it and its mission could feel this suffocating, but it did. And sure, “family” started to grate, but I can’t put my finger on why the overall dynamic itself made me feel that way. 

I was listening to the getaway conversation in the final episode, right, and I kept wondering why I was getting annoyed and I think the thing is - I really didn’t like people’s loyalties getting dictated like that. I didn’t like that it left no room for discussions of tradeoffs, even though I obviously agreed it’s better than the rest of the crew bail than hang around for Ransom to pop up, because there are obviously tradeoffs even there. I dunno, man, just felt off, along with Buddy’s micromanaging in general.

And then very occasionally the season would be weird about boundaries in a different way, like Rita apologizing for looking into Pete’s real name and past. Why should she apologize! He’s a random guy on her crew who Mistah Steel is sweet on, of course she looked into him, are we genuinely supposed to think that was somehow rude of her?

-----