#secretagentofcaos

Well, that explains the mini earthquake we just experienced ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I agree on wanting to see Fen's POV. She’s more insightful than Pat, has to deal with more society nonsense without any allies. Even the subplot about Pat's brother would have been more fun from Fen's POV.

(I was disappointed to hear Charles' next will be m/f romance. Meh)

I do feel like something important was lost without Fen’s pov, and I do wonder if it would’ve affected the overall plot and relationship structure as well: perhaps with Fen having a say Charles wouldn’t have felt the need to quell all conflict the minute it showed up? I don’t know: she certainly didn’t have that problem in ToE (or at least not to the same extent: being myself I confess I always want Archie and Daniel to hate each other for about thirty pages longer than they actually do).

I confess I’m not overly enthused by the premise of Charles’s next, either. Despite that I’m a consummate and very hardcore m/f shipper in fandom, I’ve not yet got on the m/f romance bandwagon (is it a bandwagon when it’s 99% of the overall output?), and “shady guy ends up being helped by uptight woman who has a secret thing for him” is one of my most roundly despised plotlines pretty much ever. So I might be getting this one from the library, rather than insta-downloading it from Barnes & Noble.

vermiculated replied to your post: inclineto replied to your post...

I want to bang my hands on the table and yell: romance point-of-view switches are not below any of us!! they add intrigue and nuance in a way that obviates the need for fake-outs and late-period plot complications!! this I believe!!

Truly. Truly! And in a genre that depends on people having very specific and believable emotions about one another, not being able to see one of those people having those emotions really throws the whole thing off its axis. Not that it can’t work, but you do have to put effort into counterbalancing in a way that I think often gets neglected.

'romance novel exegesis' it's simply the best <3

I do love how much we all wanted to like this book and ended up feeling disappointed. that's how i like my literature: fundamentally unsatisfactory.

<3

We had such hopes! KJC’s reputation around these parts plus historical f/f plus characters we were already at least slight intrigued by: the ingredients were all good, but alas, the final product bland and unfortunate.

poor Daniel da Silva: that's probably not even the worst work trip he's taken that year.

WTF anon

secretagentofcaos replied to your post:

"the calm of the storm of them" —> just kill me dead already

<3<3<3

secretagentofcaos replied to your post: 

"Dominic figuring out ways for them to have non-kinky sex that still works for him (this is not as difficult as he thought it would be, which leads to a bit of a guilt spiral about Richard" -> this hurts more than it should, but their incompatibility wasn’t just about the kink. Dominic needs a counterpoint, Richard needs a partner. They are better suited to be friends than lovers and that’s just one of life's great injustices because of all the years of pain and regret. 

"Silas figuring out kinky things he enjoys because of their kinkiness. (I tend to get the impression that he is fairly neutral about a lot of the kink (…)" -> yes! Silas isn’t into kink for its own sake. He enjoys it because it’s sex with Dominic and it really, really works for Dom, but at first he could do without the kink. But he grows to enjoy the sense of power & control, of learning to read Dom's reactions, of being able to give to Dom what no one else can whilst keeping him safe. 1/2

And now I have the mental image of Silas leaving the knife on the nightstand when he wants to play rather than wait for Dom to give a sign and yes, it’d be glorious. And it’d make Dom melt in the spot. He’d be free to ignore the knife, put it away if he’s not in the mood, but if he  stays quiet, then he's in Silas' hands for whatever he wants to do with him for the night. 2/2

Yes, exactly. As I said to @inclineto (has that reply posted yet? idk idk), Dominic’s able to talk himself out of the guilt spiral without overly much angst, but the thought definitely occurs; one can only hope that, post-Silas and post-David, they’re able to unbury themselves from all the regret and recrimination, self- and otherwise, and fully restore their friendship as it could be, unhindered by all the various hang-ups.

A resounding yes--I love the idea of Silas also sort of quietly figuring out his own thing while they figure out Dominic’s thing(s). And Dominic wanting to please him on his own terms, and not only Dominic’s, and Silas dismissing the either/or of that but also thinking more about what he specifically wants. (That scene in the book is unsurprisingly one of my very favorites, and I want so much more on that theme.) I get the general feeling that Silas is very much a ‘take your pleasures where you can’ sort of person, and while he’s had plenty of decent sex in his life has never really thought in specifics about what it is he wants.

secretagentofcaos ha risposto al tuo post “janie why do people on this website have such bad takes. "white male...”

In all fairness 'white male atheism' seems to refer to how many prominent atheists are, in fact, white men, which is not necessarily representative of atheism as a whole.

eeeh possibly but thing is... if outside the western hemisphere a lot of atheists can’t say they are because it’s illegal to be, the fact that the outspoken ones (if we’re discussing dawkins & co which anyway aren’t representative of the entire group and aren’t worse than your usual religious person doing proselytism I mean if everyone else can do it then they also should be able to) are white men anglosaxon most of the time is another reason why there’s... a problem that should be addressed in that sense ie that a lot of atheists from non-western countries who are also not white don’t have a platform or risk dying/going to prison to get one, not that ‘ah well it’s all white men’. like, they’re prominent because they live somewhere they can flaunt it, others can’t. :(