🌬

Here's a digital copy of it, along with a plaintext version, prepared-to-bind version, and the cover.

See, every time you harvest something, you take the nutrients in that item away from the soil, and they go somewhere else. When I put a banana peel in my compost bin, I think (a little gleefully) about how I've just added an exotic, different profile of nutrients to my own property--but I also think about that distant banana plantation that lost tons of nutrients per year to US grocery stores, and I wonder what they replaced those nutrients with.

The farmer across my field grows corn, which gets harvested for feed. Corn is a nitrogen-hungry crop. Every year, that corn sucks up nutrients, which get harvested and shipped away. The farmer, being a conventional farmer, mostly replaces those with a conventional fertilizer. Nitrogen is often applied to fields in the form of ammonia fertilizer, which is made via a process that binds nitrogen in the air with hydrogen from natural gas. This feels like a vast resource, but of course we know it's not inexhaustible and not without cost.

Ideally, said farmer does soil tests and applies a carefully considered amount of ammonia. It is taken up by the growing plants and relatively little is lost. Possibly (often), though, some of the ammonia is leached out via rain and ends up in waterways, where it causes plant overgrowth and algal blooms, which harm the waterways in several ways, and turn those nutrients from a resource into a contaminant.

Meanwhile, the corn is also uptaking a variety of other nutrients from the soil which the commercial fertilizer is NOT replacing. Year by year, those nutrients get shipped off to distant feedlots and depleted in the soil. Eventually, those nutrients are gone from my neighbor's field and, quite possibly, languishing in a manure lagoon somewhere in, say, Indiana, where one can only hope it's properly treated and made into compost. But, you know. Not necessarily.

When I buy compost at the store, it's usually based in either cow manure or "forest products". Hopefully, depending on brand, those forest products MIGHT be collected municipal yard waste. Which is pretty good. Those suburbanites don't want their leaves, I do, win/win.

Except that because those suburbanites raked their yard waste, they now need at some point to fertilize their trees, shrubs, and turf grass. Meanwhile, they've eliminated habitat for the many insects that use leaf litter to either overwinter or reproduce. They may not be counting the costs, but the costs don't stop existing.

The ebb and flow of nutrients is something that, in the current system, goes utterly unregarded by most of the people taking part in the process. Even gardeners bring nutrients onto their soils mostly without thinking about the places those nutrients came from. I think in a sustainable world, that needs to change.

Okay I'm gonna do an experiment.

There you go, I just typed "romance novel for women" on google and these were the sponsored results:

"Prisoner of the devil" is the story of a woman kidnapped and abused by a man that she ends up finding sexy.

"Forbidden romance" is a love story between a woman and a nazi who turns out to be good guy somehow.

"Cry Baby" is about a woman held captive by a brutal gang that rapes and tortures women. I think she ends up impregnated by the gang leader by the end of it.

"Powerless" is about a young woman forced to endure trials and fight other women to the death to get the prince.

"Toxic" is another story of being held captive and abused by a "sexy" gang leader.

"Haunting Adeline" is about a woman falling for the creepy but also sexy man who stalks her. One reviewer wrote "He really had me contemplating if getting stalked is that bad."

"Beautiful Beast: an age gap forced proximity mafia romance" well the title says it all.

Okay I'm gonna do an experiment.

There you go, I just typed "romance novel for women" on google and these were the sponsored results:

"Prisoner of the devil" is the story of a woman kidnapped and abused by a man that she ends up finding sexy.

"Forbidden romance" is a love story between a woman and a nazi who turns out to be good guy somehow.

"Cry Baby" is about a woman held captive by a brutal gang that rapes and tortures women. I think she ends up impregnated by the gang leader by the end of it.

"Powerless" is about a young woman forced to endure trials and fight other women to the death to get the prince.

"Toxic" is another story of being held captive and abused by a "sexy" gang leader.

"Haunting Adeline" is about a woman falling for the creepy but also sexy man who stalks her. One reviewer wrote "He really had me contemplating if getting stalked is that bad."

"Beautiful Beast: an age gap forced proximity mafia romance" well the title says it all.

Okay I'm gonna do an experiment.

There you go, I just typed "romance novel for women" on google and these were the sponsored results:

"Prisoner of the devil" is the story of a woman kidnapped and abused by a man that she ends up finding sexy.

"Forbidden romance" is a love story between a woman and a nazi who turns out to be good guy somehow.

"Cry Baby" is about a woman held captive by a brutal gang that rapes and tortures women. I think she ends up impregnated by the gang leader by the end of it.

"Powerless" is about a young woman forced to endure trials and fight other women to the death to get the prince.

"Toxic" is another story of being held captive and abused by a "sexy" gang leader.

"Haunting Adeline" is about a woman falling for the creepy but also sexy man who stalks her. One reviewer wrote "He really had me contemplating if getting stalked is that bad."

"Beautiful Beast: an age gap forced proximity mafia romance" well the title says it all.

When you come across something unfair, or disturbing, or traumatic, it's natural for you to psychologically prioritise processing it.

Internalising that 'it's sexy when men are dominant over women' is one way. We're encouraged to believe this. Because, in my opinion, that type of domination is inherently violent, and violence expresses domination, that becomes 'it's sexy when men hurt women'. And then women write or fantasise about this stuff. Whether or not they're authentically invested in the premise - it's a way of digesting how we culturally perceive men, women, and their relationships.

I think it's a consequence of living in the conditions women live in. Basically -

1. Gender is sexy. Gender is deeply eroticised, and involves a lot of the sexual scripts people learn and rely on. Man aggressive, woman submits is just exaggerated gender.

2. Catharsis. There doesn't need to be any personal, individual trauma for living in a patriarchal culture to affect women. The pressure to conform to gender norms and scripts, the awareness of women's vulnerability, and constantly having to navigate gendered expectations whether you want to or not can create a powerful sense of relief if you just give in.

3. A lot of women are probably very bored. Cosy romances are popular, but also not very interesting. Genuinely passionate, erotic, and interesting character dynamics are hard to write and can't just be churned out for profit.

3.a. The cultural ascendancy of the concept of male sexual abuse as the expression of women's sexuality means that this kind of thing becomes normal; the default; the easy fantasy to reach for. And hey, it makes you hot, it makes you interesting (but only in a cool, socially validated kind of way), maybe it makes you seem less bland and boring to yourself.

3.b. Violence is cool. This goes well beyond erotic fiction. Violence is gendered. Women 'like' cool men, and their 'natural' place in stories with violence is as the victim.

3.c. Erotic fantasies aren't where most people want to start tackling their preconceptions of gender and narrative gender roles.

4. If she isn't satisfied with her sex life, it's probably because she isn't satisfied with her sex life. She might just think kink is an easy fix to restore excitement, rather than trying to find her husband more sexually exciting, address anything affecting her sexual attraction or enjoyment of sex, or try new things without a power dynamic.

5. These books sound like 'romantic' whump. I feel like 'why women like whump' is a slightly different topic.

It's also worth noting that Malenia remaining conventionally attractive and nude is actually the exception in Fromsoft's games- all other female bosses (incuding ER now that I think of it) are either just as monsterous, older, or fully clothed, such as Vicar Amelia and Ebrietas from Bloodborne, or Lady Butterfly from Sekiro. I believe that Malenia's nudity in her Goddess of Rot phase was supposed to reference that famous painting of Venus rising from the conch in the sea, since she emerges from her bloom in a similar fashion

transforming into the kind of shit you'd find in the meat section at the supermarket

"sexy".

First time I saw his second phase I wanted to vomit. I also wouldn't call a shirtless guy "mostly nude" nor treat male nakedness like female nakedness. Women's bodies are objectified and sexualized in a way males' aren't. Godfrey ripping his shirt to intimidate the player is not the same as Malenia running around butt naked. I mean look at her...

She looks ridiculous.

Godfrey was never meant to look hot he was meant to look brutal. From what I've seen, only men fawn over him.

Radagon is okay though he looks like a magestic corpse. Why is he not walking around naked? He gets to keep his dignity.

Malenia is very generic in the end: young, pretty, naked. You say it's rare but Marika is similar. We never even meet her, she's a skinny white woman tied up for us to stare at. She looks young and pretty, with a nice view of her clivage on display. Renala looks young and pretty. Ranni looks young and pretty. Melina looks young and pretty. Some of them look spectacular but there's a clear lack of imagination when it comes to female characters. And that's disappointing because the devs have shown that they are capable of doing better. They ridiculed themselves imo with the naked second phase.

To push the analysis further, it's the standard "this female is powerful, so we must take her down a peg." Same as female celebrities on red carpets wearing little to nothing. The more powerful and successful a female appears, the more men need to be reassured that she's still a second class citizen and a sex toy.

Naked:

Mytha

Queelaag

Najka

Just a conventionally attractive woman when literally none of the male bosses are Like That:

Lady Maria

Priscilla

Sister Friede

Yharnam Queen

Maiden Astrea

Fools Idol

I've only played Elden Ring from them, but when I was researching other female bosses following the trope I found two you mentioned, that are so fucking ridiculous it hurts:

I found some more naked bosses (they all fly, too):

Women just don't walk, sweat, groan, use big weapons, or, you know, wear clothes, it's very unladylike and men get so scared they throw away their controller.

Dead By Daylight is consistently misogynistic, but I was still shocked when they partnered with the Alien franchise because check this out:

The alien looks great in the game, no problem there. Of course, we don't know if aliens have genders, all we know is that, like ants, they have a "queen" that produces eggs, right? Which means that, in their tiny little male brains, the devs thought "queen is female righthth??, female alien! therefore sexualized alien??,?,," and thus, this monstrosity was created:

Wow! A robe conveniently opened in the middle showing her breasts and genitals! So original!

And the main character is wearing high heels and stockings, very important for combat!