#textic cheer

I call myself aroace for convenience but find that kind of... reductive? Misleading? Because--what is kink attraction. It's definitely a real thing, that I definitely have, and in this realm I am extremely bi,* in a way that the aroace label doesn't leave much room for. And I want a way to communicate that because it's important to how I experience Being Queer in General. But I don't know if what I experience is a subset of sexual attraction? Aesthetic attraction? Something else entirely?

Like--what is "I want to have kink thoughts about this specific (real or fictional) person." What is "looking at/thinking about this specific (tbh usually fictional) person has reminded me that my kinks exist and I'm low-key horny now." Does the fact these feelings have the potential to stimulate sexual arousal make it sexual attraction? Or does an attraction count as sexual only if it makes the prospect of specifically sex with them seem appealing to me? Is some hypothetical person's "ooh he's cute; imagine if we had sex" sentiment fundamentally different than my "ooh he's cute; imagine if he had the flu" sentiment? Even if "IDK; maybe whack off to the thought of it later" is their and my identical response to these respective sentiments? Like: which thing makes an attraction sexual. The part where your genitals have a positive opinion about it, or the activity that the attraction makes you wish for? 'Cause like... I don't usually want to interact in meatspace at all with the people I'm kink-attracted to. But masturbation is a sex-adjacent pleasure, yeah? So if "maybe whack off about it later" is the action that an attraction draws me toward, then. Is that not sexual........?

And I don't even necessarily mean I wish there was a consensus on this. My wishes are less ambitious!--I just want to read perspectives on how one potentially might classify these feelings. The queer community is chock-full of microlabels and navelgazing, so? Why have I found no attempt anywhere ever by anyone to give words to experiences like this?

I.e. that they actually genuinely don't consider their condition unusual/scary/particularly worth remarking, and bring it up only in answer to questions or to explain their behavior

You know--the "to me, this is Tuesday" implication

Like. Hubris and lack of self-respect are not the only two reasons why a sick person might choose to do something that seems unwise/too ambitious to onlookers? And "too sick to do x" is not a discrete, objective quality. In most situations,* one becomes too sick to do a thing when the sensation of illness overwhelms their wish to do that thing

Give me nervous, overbearing caretakers who don't know the sick person's limits as well as the sick person does

Caretakers who want to help, and whose moral support cheers the sick person up, but who get unnecessarily jumpy at the sick person's least show of symptoms/admission of discomfort

Sick characters who lie there, glassy-eyed and sweaty, but serene and fondly smiling--maybe even biting their lips to keep from laughing--as the caretaker splutters, You did WHAT?!, because the sick character knows what they did sounds bad, and knows also that they'll be fine.

Please. I'm begging y'all for more sickfics that privilege the inside view. IDC whose perspective you write it from, just--stories w/ self-possessed sick characters, and caretakers who can't tell what they need just by looking at them.

As they wait they mentally rehearse their next steps. When it boils they’ll stand, turn off the stove, flip the kettle’s lid open so it’ll quit screaming before the sound wakes up their housemate, pour it, punch 3, 0, 0 and then the start button into their microwave’s kitchen timer--but then, they predict, they will need to sit again for the three minutes while it steeps.

1. Magic hunger is hot; we can cite precedent for this. Moreover, hypovolemia produces nearly the same symptoms as hypoglycemia??--i.e., even in regular humans, extreme hunger feels much like bleeding out. And that’s so satisfying, so neat. Give unfed vampires dizzy spells 2021. What in the whole world could be better than “immortal but sickly”

2. In the same vein (wur hur, I guess): postprandial hypotension. Humans can get it after large meals--it’s like, your nervous system diverts so much blood to the task of digestion that the rest of you becomes functionally (can you guess?) hypovolemic, and so, as after losing blood, whenever you stand up you risk blacking out. Might vampires have this problem after eating, too, while waiting to assimilate their victim’s blood? For humans, one way to cheat functional hypovolemia is by drinking a ton of water, so that your overall fluid volume looks normal and your body doesn’t freak out over not having enough blood. Do vampires use the same mechanism? Is that why drinking other people’s blood makes them feel less like--you know--death? Because their nervous systems mistake it for their own blood? If so then, yeah, those first few hours after feeding they’re gonna be glued to the velvet fainting couch.

3. Honestly, the whole conceit of vampires is they have bad circulation. Do you not realize how cute that is?? Sluggish purple hands and feet. Shedding all their layers after they feed as their internal temperature rockets back up to 98.6, then burrowing back into them when they wake up at sunset, hoping to trap what heat remains so they can at least stay at daytime room-temperature till their next meal

4. Vampires with carefully-hidden blood spots on their sleeves like an old-timey consumptive

Like don’t get me wrong there’s a stag ger ing amount of fic out there w/ the premise “Jon shows up to work sick,” and I am so glad it exists. But most of it is, like--Jon shows up to work so ill he can’t stay awake at his desk; one of the assistants drives him home or drags him to the cot in the spare room. Or, Jon shows up to work in so much pain that after two or three hours he physically cannot move; one of the assistants &c. Or with a fever so high he’s too delirious even to drink water, and one of the assistants has to take him to A&E for a bag of fucking saline, jesus christ Jon why are you like this. And don’t get me wrong, I can subsist fine on these! They’re my potatoes and molasses

But this is not my favorite kind of “Jon shows up to work sick”-fic. I think it is for many--I have observed that lots of people in this fandom see. Jon’s tendency to push through crap, hide scary things that happen to him even from people whose own safety it might help to know about them, and wave away/refuse other people’s concerned gestures. And respond to that with “I want to see something break him”--usually so Martin (or Tim or Daisy or Georgie or Basira) has to put his pieces back together. I like this! Again, really don’t want to come off as blowing raspberries at it

I just like best fic where he Does Things while sick other than Be Taken Care Of. Where the scenes where he’s trying to work (or socialize or track down a monster or whatever else) serve some function in the story other than proof Jon should not try to do this right now, I guess. You know--where his illness plays a role in the plot like illness does in a Dostoevsky novel! I’ve seen plenty of T/M/A equivalents of the scene in BK where Alyosha interrupts Ivan’s dream about the devil and listens to him rave and watches over him until he falls asleep, but. Give me a T/M/A equivalent of the part where Ivan staggers out into the snow after visiting Smerdyakov, and proves to himself that he’s thinking straight by looking after the peasant he knocked down earlier. Or oh my god, how about an equivalent of the part in C&P where Raskolnikov goes back to the pawnbroker’s apartment to hear the sound of her bell again! Or the part where he forces himself to endure his mother and sister’s visit even though he feels evil before them (and even though he ended up on the floor last time he tried), and Dostoevsky describes his stoical expression as that of a man who’s undergone a painful operation. Or--god, brave new world, dare I even to say?--of the scene in The Idiot where Lizaveta Prokofyevna comes to see Myshkin, expecting to find him at death’s door, and then, once she discovers him fully dressed and upright, thinks he must not be ill at all and keeps her whole family at his house till after midnight.

Just--does it scare you guys, how in T/M/A canon when Jon goes right back to work after an injury he gets away with it? How he never learns his lesson, nothing bad enough ever happens to him to make him stop doing that? Does it feel wrong to you?--give you an itch to fix it, maybe? Is that maybe part of where the urge to break him comes from? Because... yeah, right there with you, but. I am constantly hungry for art that lives with that fear, that stares at it, rather than trying to paper over it with stories about bodily suffering as an aberration that suspends the normal rules. In fanfic I have rather less lofty aspirations, lmao, since, I mean, even I’m not horny for my fear of the uncaring universe (unlike certain Fairchilds). But in real life, pushing yourself till you shatter into pieces and your boyfriend (or friend, or coworker) puts them back together isn’t how you learn to take better care of yourself.

Like? I’m not saying real life is “all h, no c”; it isn’t. Nor am I saying no one’s ever gonna drive you to the hospital if you come into work with a 104-degree fever; of course they will. I’m saying that a lot of the time, in real life you push and push and push and never shatter. You come in with a 101-degree fever, and it’s really fucking boring because you can’t concentrate, but no one notices you’re ill until you tell them, at which point they ask once, maybe twice if you shouldn’t be at home, and then change the subject for fear you’ll think they’re judging you. Whatever milestone you tell yourself you have to hit before you can stop? Either you’ll endure countless unanticipated miseries on the way but never find it, or you’ll pass it and think, “Huh, that’s weird--I don’t even feel that bad. Guess I’ll go another mile.”

And I guess I crave the intellectual company of stories that know that? So, like, fic-wise, give me mundane, unrelieved misery, or give me a Jon who decides not to push this time. Rather than having his body decide that for him.

Everyone thinks A must just fear displaying vulnerability, or that they respect themselves too little to accept help. But eventually B finds out it’s because A resents that their friends dote over each other’s colds but rarely even ask A how they’re doing in a more long-term sense. At first B misinterprets this, reading it as an “Oh I’ve dealt with worse, I feel silly accepting sympathy over a little thing like this” sentiment. So B tries to reassure them, saying something about how ll comfort is worth giving and all discomfort is worth voicing, and A explodes with irritation:

No, that’s not it!! That’s not the problem. The problem is that people think it’s cute and sweet and pitiful when A tries to downplay their cold, like A’s friends are being considerate by noticing and trying to coax A to admit how unwell they feel, as if downplaying is even what they’re doing rather than just not being that fussed. But that at the same time they implicitly expect A to hide the symptoms that actually bother them, actually threaten their happiness and hinder their productivity, because whenever A brings these up people either get quiet and bashful or make suggestions so ignorant it’s all A can do not to snarl and roll their eyes. That they give comfort only when the discomfort they’re facing doesn’t scare them, and that from A’s perspective that fear can’t help but look pathetic. That so many people can seem like they’re more grown-up and well-adjusted than A on the subjects of how to ask for help and how to show empathy for the sick, when really what they are is ignorant. That of course this seems simple to them—everything does from the outside.

So far so repellent, B thinks; they were just trying to be nice, after all. Besides, if A does habitually hide all their real suffering, how is B supposed to know when they want sympathy and when it would just make them feel singled-out, or remind them of things they’d rather not think about? But then A starts crying, and this question stops mattering much. B strokes their back and tells them sshhh; A accepts their touch but curls further over themselves and, between sobs, manages to wail out, “No—don’t tell me to shush! That’s all anyone ever tells me!”

And in the larger context, B still thinks that’s unfair, but right now they figure if they push back on it A will take that as more shushing. So for now they say, “I’m sorry; I didn’t mean it like that. Here—your nose is kinda”—and hand A a wad of tissues.

“Oh. Right, yeah. Thanks. God,” scoffs A once they’ve wiped themselves passably clean, “fitting, right?”

“How do you mean?”

“That even now this fucking—nose virus is somehow the most important thing wrong with me.”

B laughs, and pats the back of A’s hand, and says, “Actually I think the inconsolable sobbing takes that cake.”