Floral and Feral

Lead Me Not Into Temptation

E | 8.7 K | non-con

Feyre Archeron, the Lady of Spring has been married to the High Lord for a few years now, and is delightfully, perfectly, and incandescently happy, thank you very much.

That is, until her eyes begin to wander at the High Lords' meetings.

Thus begins an intricate dance of skirting around the edges of ballrooms, where the High Lord of Night pretends that he does not see the Lady Feyre looking at him, and in turn, the Lady of Spring pretends that she is not looking.

But Feyre should have known that if you gaze too long into the darkness, the darkness begins to gaze back.

And want.

—

Read on AO3

Please read the tags 🖤

fic art by the lovely @ vmiistudio

—

Lead Me Not Into Temptation

E | 8.7 K | non-con

Feyre Archeron, the Lady of Spring has been married to the High Lord for a few years now, and is delightfully, perfectly, and incandescently happy, thank you very much.

That is, until her eyes begin to wander at the High Lords' meetings.

Thus begins an intricate dance of skirting around the edges of ballrooms, where the High Lord of Night pretends that he does not see the Lady Feyre looking at him, and in turn, the Lady of Spring pretends that she is not looking.

But Feyre should have known that if you gaze too long into the darkness, the darkness begins to gaze back.

And want.

—

Read on AO3

Please read the tags 🖤

fic art by the lovely @ vmiistudio

—

'cinema is dying' okay but everyone is flocking to their local cinema to see a beautiful hit musical, and so many have shown up this weekend that licensers decided to extend its theatrical release for another week, a massive rarity in the current climate

And to top it all off, the version of Eurydice from the beginning of the musical, before love softened her hard edges and made her trust him, probably wouldn't have followed Orpheus out of Hadestown. Eurydice really does trust him to get her out, because she's looking for the Orpheus she used to know and she's seen the power of his song and worldview.

Everything we get in canon is extremely watered down and you can actively see her thought process play out in the text. There’s no cliffhangers or nuance because she spells everything out for us and it’s clear that that’s the way we’re supposed to take it. In the nicest way possible, it’s not revolutionary work at all.

Mor's weird ominous horse girl moment meant nothing

she talks about men getting on their knees as devotion because she is vanilla

she uses a lot of music imagery IN GENERAL because she is UNCREATIVE and LIKES MUSIC

she recycles motifs because she is too lazy to think of new ones

bread has steam when it's fresh out the oven like

this is not 4D chess it is windows xp pinball

This is harder and harder for audiences to grasp, and I sympathize, honestly, because we have become more keen over the last couple of decades, and we've noticed how many stories have been sold to us as an ideal we should reach for that would be harmful to us if we did so - stories intending to propogandize values centered around control or subjugation

but you have to learn to recognize when that's what is happening and when a work is simply clumsy, indulgent fantasizing shared with others, and how to settle your jerking, trigger-happy reflex when you notice something in a work of fiction that shouldn't be emulated in real life. That's not what fiction is. That is not, at base, its purpose or intent.

recognizing that a situation would be abusive if it were real does not mean that all stories where those situations happen are inherently ABOUT abuse. Unless we have reason to believe the writer is indeed trying to propagandize societal control on some level, then the story is about what the writer says it's about, because it's not real

there's no one with agency involved, there is only what the fictional fantasy writer wanted to happen in their fictional fantasy world. You being able to identify "if these two people existed this relationship would be abusive" doesn't change the intent of the text. It's GOOD that you can identify that! It's actually excellent! It's a necessary component to experiencing fiction and keeping yourself safe in the real world, but it doesn't change the intent of the text

You are absolutely, Capital R Right: if these people existed and treated each other this way, it would be abusive. But they don't exist. They are Anne Rice's Barbies, and she makes them kiss rough and mean and murderous and underage and incestuously, but through it all they remain Barbies, and she had zero responsibility to explicitly designate those Barbie relationships as abusive for the benefit of a reader who feels like they can't trust a fictional text unless it spells things out for them in real-world morality parables.