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noladyme · 3 years

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La Cuervo - Chapter 4

She is used to the biker-life, having grown into a woman in the familiar embrace of SAMCRO. A bad decision and a gun-shot later, she gets whisked off to Santo Padre, and put under the protection of another club. What is supposed to be a short stint in the Mayan headquarters just north of the border to Mexico, turns into something more; when la quervo begins to develop feelings for el angel - and he seems to return them in kind...

TW: violence, blood, drug use, alcohol, smut, fluff, angst

In the spirit of "The Crown Princess of Charming", this is a story about O.C. Nina and Angel Reyes. It is obviously non-canon, as characters who have passed on on Mayans M.C. are present in it, and others have been excluded completely. Nina is written as a cis-female, but I have tried to keep her race and looks as ambigous as possible. Should you find any of this story offensive, please let me know.

Nina spent the next week doing her best to avoid Angel. He, in return, acted like they’d never had the encounter in the cage – or any encounter at all, for that matter. He spoke to her about as much as the next girl in the clubhouse; though, unlike with the other girls, he avoided all kinds of flirting or terms of endearment, other than the occasional mami, when he asked for another drink. Women crawled all over him, and he seemed perfectly content and used to the fact. Deciding she was better off for how everything had turned out, Nina threw herself in to helping Chucky in the office, and reading some of the books EZ had left in the trailer; when she wasn’t slinging beers behind the bar. The atmosphere was still awkward, though; and she was beginning to feel something like homesickness.

Not having heard anything from Charming since she’d arrived, Nina went over to Bishop with a pair of beers for him and Taza, who were deep in conversation one evening; after they’d just come back in from some meeting or other. They’d been sending her discrete looks throughout their discussion, and she thought now was as good a time as any, to check in with them. Setting down the beers on the table, she paused for a moment, before speaking. “Bishop? I don’t mean to intrude, but I was just wondering if you’d heard from Chibs? Or Tig, maybe?”. Bishop shook his head. “Sorry, sweetheart. No word from either of them”, he said earnestly. “We boring you here?”. “No, of course not… I didn’t mean… I really appreciate you taking me in. I guess I just don’t see the need for all the secrecy…”. Taza gave his president a hard look, and Bishop nodded. “Take a seat”, he said to Nina.

Sitting down, Nina felt her heart racing. She didn’t like the look on the faces of the men in front of her. “Do you know who El Palo is?”, Taza asked. Ninna nodded. “He’s president of Vatos Malditos…”, she said. “How do you know that? Have you heard about our relationship with them?”, Bishop asked. “Of course not”, Nina replied, knowing that would be the right answer. Bishop let a smile ghost his face. “So SAMCRO told you. Are they working with them?”. He was testing her. “I just serve the beers”, she said. “Good girl”, Bishop said. “If you know who he is, you probably also know that he’s a grade-A psycho”, Taza said. “I’ve heard things…”, Nina muttered. Palo’s reputation was terrifying; SAMCRO spoke of him almost like a ghost – one of the murderous kinds. “Palo used to have a cousin up in northern California. About a month back, he was shot and killed by who Palo thinks is a hooker, in a date turned mugging”, Taza said. “It turns out that the truth is a bit more complicated than that”, Bishop said. Nina was beginning to connect the dots, and felt her heartrate go up. “Palo’s cousin’s name was….”, Taza began. “Gael…”, Nina interrupted him in a whisper. “Yeah”, Bishop said. “You in serious shit, sweetheart”. Nina’s hands were shaking. “I didn’t know… I thought Chibs brought me here to keep me away from the police-investigation. I mean, it was self-defense, but…”, she croaked. “Why didn’t they tell me?”. “They probably didn’t want to scare you”, Taza replied.

She eyed Bishops smokes on the table, and he handed her a cigarette. The two men frowned at her, as she grabbed her inhaler from her pocket, and took a hit, before lighting the cigarette. “Don’t… I get enough shit from Tig about this”, she said. Another smile ghosted Bishop’s face. “Palo contacted El Padrino… Alvarez; as Gael died so close to our Oakland charter territory”. “San Joaquin county”, Nina said, and took a huff from her smoke. “He called in Mayan help to find you… Offered good money for any info”. “Why didn’t he hand me over, then?”, Nina asked. “Marcus’ loyalty to SAMCRO, and the promise he made to Jackson Teller, to stay on good terms with them, weighs more than money”. Nina closed her eyes and sighed. “I guess I owe you more than I know”, she said. “Well, reaper paid us a bit more on top of the loyalty we owe them”, Taza chuckled. “But, you’re safe with us. Palo won’t think to search in his own back-yard”. “What do you mean?”. “The Vatos’ territory borders our own. In more ways than one”, the VP said. “They’ve claimed the area just south of the wall”, Bishop said.

“Fuck… Fuck!”, Nina rasped, and ran a hand over her face. “So why are you telling me this? If Chibs didn’t think I should know”. “Keeping it a secret from you won’t keep you safe”, Bishop replied. “If we’re going to protect you, and keep our promise to SAMCRO, you need to know how serious this is”. Nina narrowed her eyes. “But you’re not letting the rest of the club know…”, she said. “The lady’s got a point, Bish”, Taza said. Bishop held up a hand, and hardened his expression. “We talked about this, Taz’. You know the shit we’ll get in to at the table, if they find out we’re double-crossing a business-partner like this”. “We haven’t dealt with VM in months. There’s no money between us anymore”, Taza said. “And there sure as shit won’t be in the future, if Palo finds out about this”, Bishop said, and gestured towards Nina. When he saw her expression, he sighed. “Look, I made a promise to our brothers in SOA, but I’m not going to risk future Mayan-business over it. For now, this stays between us, you got that?”. “Yeah… whatever you say”, Nina muttered. Bishop raised a brow at her, and she made a frustrated sigh. “I know how club business works; it’s not my place to mess with it”.

The door to the clubhouse opened, and Coco, Gilly and Angel – accompanied by the blonde he’d ignored the night Nina had arrived in Santo Padre – walked in. Nina was about to get on her feet, and walk back to the bar, when Bishop grabbed her hand. “This is also why I don’t want you starting things up with Angel. All due respect, I don’t need him losing his head over some croweater from Charming, if this blows up in our faces”, he said. “You have nothing to worry about. Nina said, an edge to her voice. Bishop tightened his hold on her hand. “I’m serious. I need my men focused on business; and if Angel starts thinking with his dick, instead of his head, there’s a good chance he won’t be able to make the right decisions, when push comes to shove”. “As in, you’re worried he won’t be able to hand me over to Palo, if necessary”, Nina almost hissed. “That’s not what I’m saying, Nina…”, Bishop said. “Then, what are you saying?”, she replied. The president let go of her hand, his expression turning almost guilty. They both looked over at Angel, who’d put his arm around the blonde. The girl tugged at his beard, and he leaned down, letting her kiss the corner of his lips. “Like I said, you have nothing to worry about”, Nina muttered, and walked away as quickly as she could.

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Once behind the bar, she put on a mask of calm indifference. “Can I get you anything?”, she asked. “Sol. Thanks, niña”, Coco said, holding up two fingers to imply one for him and one for EZ. Nina served the beers without correcting Coco. He’d stuck to the nickname since the moment she’d climbed onto his bike, and she decided to take it as a compliment. EZ and he went over to rack up a game of pool. “You?”, she asked Angel. “Dos Equis”, he said, with an indifferent smile. Nina – knowing his regular order – had almost already grabbed a bottle with XX on the label, and put it on the counter; before he finished speaking. The blonde girl pressed against Angel, and ran her hand inside his cut. “It’s about to be tres equis, baby…”, she giggled. Angel cleared his throat, and stretched his neck. “Take it easy; yeah, mami?”, he said, keeping his eyes straight ahead. He gave her shoulder a standoffish clap, and walked over to the pool-table to join his friends.

The blonde gave Nina a saccharin smile, and tilted her head slightly. “Sorry about you and Angel…”, she said in a phony tone. “I’m sure you are”, Nina smiled as friendlily as she could. The girl looked at her for a moment, narrowing her eyes. “Do you know how to make a screwdriver?”, she asked. Nina was taken aback. “Do I know how to make a screwdriver…?”, she repeated back at the girl. The blonde scoffed, and laughed a little. “Yes, a screwdriver… I know you’re new here, but if you don’t know how to work a bar…”. “Yes, I know how to make a screwdriver”, Nina cut her off, and turned around to get some orange juice from the fridge. She began mixing vodka and juice in a glass, ignoring the daggers the blonde was staring at her. “You should really be less rude to me… Consider who you’re talking to”, the girl said. “I’ll keep that in mind”, Nina said, and set the drink down in front of her. “We’re out of ice”. “Just go get some from the freezer out back”, the blonde scoffed. “I don’t want to”, Nina replied, and walked out from behind the bar.

There was a gush of wind behind her, when suddenly Nina felt her hair being yanked, and she stumbled backwards. In the flash of an eye, her face and top were drenched in vodka and orange juice. “I told you, I want ice; bitch!”, the blonde snarled. Nina reacted promptly, lifting her arm over the girls, and then hooking it underneath. She lifted her bent arm upwards, making the girl squeal in pain, as she had her arm in a lock; and she let go of Nina’s hair. Bishop and Taza quickly got on their feet; and Angel, EZ and Coco ran towards them. Nina’s hand gripped the blonde’s throat, and looked coldly at her. “I’d call you a nasty skank, but I’m a lady; so, I’m just gonna ask you nicely to never do that again”, Nina hissed. The blonde was gasping for air. “Let go of the nasty skank, Nina”, Bishop said, his hands up in a calming gesture. Nina let go of the girl, and she stumbled backwards into the arms of EZ. She was about to step towards Nina, when Coco got between them. “Nah… Don’t be like that”, he said. EZ and he pulled the girl away to the other end of the room, and the prospect held her there, while Coco stood in front of her; his eyes on Nina, as if she’d explode at any moment, and attack. Nina locked eyes with Angel, who looked at her in disbelief. His eyes were deeper than ever, and his stance was tense. Nina’s shirt was cold and sticky, her breath was raspy, and her blood was pumping; making it tricky for her to keep her voice even. “I’m gonna… go. Now”, she said, and left the clubhouse, walking as calmly as she could towards the trailer.

---

Through the sound of her own blood pumping like waves of the ocean in her ears, she heard loud talking from outside the trailer door. “You saw what she did!”, the blonde woman was complaining. “You’re just gonna let her do that to me?”. “Go home, Daniella”, Angel replied. “Aren’t you going to give me a ride?”. “No”. “Puto…!”, the girl snarled. “Puta! Get the fuck out of here!”. There was a volley of curses flung through the air, mostly from the blonde; before Nina heard EZ come outside, and offer the girl a ride home. Soon after, a bike started up, and drove out of the lot.

Nina was standing stiff as a board, clenching her fists, and trying to calm her breathing. There was knock on the trailer door, and she shook herself out of it, to go open. Angel was standing outside, looking sheepishly at her; one hand leaning against the doorway. “You ok?”, he asked. “She ruined my last clean top”, Nina muttered, and stepped aside for him to enter. He went over to a cubby in the small bathroom-area, and pulled out a white t-shirt. “EZ’s”, he muttered, and handed it to her. “Thanks…”. Leaning against the counter, Angel looked her over. “I don’t know whether to be impressed or scared of you right now”, he said with a slight smile. “Maybe even a little flattered”. “Why?”, Nina asked, still standing in the middle of the trailer, unmoving. “You weren’t defending my honor back there?”, he asked. “I was trying to get a crazy woman to let go of my hair”, Nina replied coldly. “And, what honor?”. Angel scoffed, and shook his head. “Shit, woman. Talking to you is like a bullet to the head”.

She didn’t know it had happened, before she’d done it. Her palm was stinging, and Angel held his hand to his cheek; where she’d slapped him. “What the fuck was that for?”, he growled. “You… Don’t say that…”, Nina croaked. “Not that”. Angel clenched his jaw, and the furrow between his eyes grew deep. “I’m trying here, Nina”, he said. “I tell you I wanna spend time with you, you get pissed. I give you space, you beat up a chick…”. “It was self-defense!”, Nina exclaimed, unsure which situation she was referring to. She was still stuck on his words. Bullet to the head… “And now I’m trying to talk to you again, and you smack the shit out of me…”. He moved his jaw from side to side. “Shit, how much do you bench, querida?”.

They looked at each other for a long moment. Adrenaline was still surging through her, and pent-up energy was threatening to split her at the seams. Angel just stood there, looking like everything she wanted and needed just at that moment. “Look, I’m just…”, he managed, before she shut him up, by planting her lips on his. He pulled back, and looked at her confusedly; before his eyes darkened, and he grabbed her by the back of the head and kissed her back. Their kiss was frantic and wanton; one that made it clear that this was only headed in one direction. Tugging at her wet top, Nina managed to get it off, while Angel opened his pants. She quickly pulled down her shorts and panties, and used Angel’s shoulders as leverage to get her butt onto the counter. Angel took the time to – unnecessarily – spit into his hand, and make the head of his cock wet; before he sunk in to her. The hard edge of the counter was digging in to her butt, but all she could focus on, was the man between her legs. Holding on to his shoulders, and burying her face in the crook of his neck, Nina tilted her hips; to let Angel get as deep as possible inside her. With groaning whimpers, Angel thrusted possessively in to her. She dug her fingers into his shoulders, and struggled to keep her legs lifted to get the best angle. Angel grabbed one of her thighs, and held her leg around his waist. He hooked his free arm under her other leg, finally getting into a position that brought him as deep as it was possible for him to get.

They didn’t speak in words, only communicating through grunts and moans. Nina felt the coil in her lower belly tighten, and had to bite into Angel’s shoulder to keep from crying out. “I gotta… soon”, Angel croaked. “Uh huh”, Nina nodded fervently. Her walls began tightening, and the thin thread keeping her from falling over the edge finally snapped; making her spasm around him; and all the pent-up emotions wash away as if by a wave. Angel groaned when he felt her come, and it was barely a second later that his own climax came; and he spilled himself inside her.

The door swung open. “Yo, is she cool?”, Coco asked from the doorway. “Fuck, mano!”, Angel growled, and covered Nina’s mostly naked body with his own mostly clothed one. “My bad”, Coco said, and closed the door quickly. Angel looked down at Nina apologetically. “Sorry”, he muttered. Nina nodded, and gave him a slight smile.

Angel gently pulled out of her, and quickly grabbed a paper towel for her to clean up, so she wouldn’t have him dripping down her leg; before giving Nina a hand to get down from the counter. After tucking himself back into his pants, he grabbed the blanket from the cot, and handed it to her; and Nina wrapped it around her chest, to cover herself. “I’m gonna… take a shower”, Nina said quietly. “Yeah”, Angel said. “In there”, she reiterated, and gestured towards the bathroom area, which Angel’s tall frame was blocking. “Yeah, sorry”, he said, and moved for her to pass. Before she could make it all the way, he grabbed her arm. “Nina… I do want to…”. “I know”, she said. “But not now”. “When?”, Angel sighed exasperatedly. “It’s like you got all this shit going on you don’t wanna talk about, and I just want to… I want you to trust me”. Nina took his hand, and merged her fingers with his. “I hear you. I do. Just… Not tonight”, she said. “You should go”. Angel clenched his jaw, and shook his head in frustration. Nina tugged at his t-shirt under his cut. “Please”. Angel let out a defeated grunt. “Ok”, he said, and walked out the door, closing it behind him.

Nina locked up after him, and stood for a moment; leaning her forehead against the door. Then she dropped the blanket, took off her bra, and went to take a cold shower.

---

“Good morning, slugger”, Taza said, as she came out of the trailer the next morning. He and Bishop were having a smoke on the porch of the clubhouse. “I didn’t hit anyone”, Nina muttered. “No, you just almost broke the arm on one of our regular hangarounds”, Bishop said. “Sorry”, she said. Bishop shrugged. “She looked like she deserved it”, he grunted. “But let me know if you want a turn in the cage, with one of the boys, at some point. I’m sure we could make some cash on bets”. Nina chuckled embarrassedly.

EZ came out of the clubhouse, a mug of coffee in hand. He handed it to her with a smile. “From Chucky”, he said. “Thank god for that freaky-fingered, little man”, Nina said, and took a big gulp. “Is that my shirt?”, EZ asked. Nina looked down at herself. “Yeah… Daniella messed up my last clean top”, she said. “You said something about a laundromat?”. “Yeah, I can take you”, he replied.

Coco and Letty came out of the clubhouse at the same moment. Coco did his best to look anywhere but at Nina; who stifled a smile at his embarrassment. “Sorry. I need the prospect on the lot today. Laundry’s gonna have to wait”, Bishop said. “I’m fine with going on my own”, Nina said. Bishop frowned slightly at her, and she sighed. “I’ll keep my head down”. “I can take you”, Letty said. “We can use Coco’s car”. Coco nodded. “Yeah, uh huh. You… take my car. Anything”. His eyes met Nina’s for a fraction of a second, before he looked away again. Bishop grunted defeatedly, and went down the steps to talk to her. He nodded at EZ to take a hike, before looking at her meaningfully. “You carrying?”, he asked. “.38”, Nina replied shortly. Bishop nodded in recognition. “Straight to the laundromat. Straight back. Anyone asks, you’re a Mayan hangaround”. “I got it”, she said. “Hmm”, Bishop said. “I’ll send EZ by to check on you, if we can spare him”. He handed her an outdated smartphone. “Prepaid. It’s got mine and Taza’s number on it. Use it if anything comes up”. Nina nodded, and went to grab her laundry from the trailer. She wedged her gun down the waistband at the back of her shorts.

Letty was waiting behind the wheel of a black lowrider, when she came back outside. Nina got in the passenger-seat next to her. Coco came over to the driver’s window, and handed Letty a small wad of 20’s. “If you need to buy something… Like pants, or whatever”, he muttered. Letty frowned in confusion, and Nina once again had to chew her lips to keep from grinning.

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The laundromat was luckily mostly empty from people when they got there. EZ had been right in his proclamation that it smelled like feet; but Nina was overjoyed at the prospect of having clean clothes again.

Letty was reading a magazine, seated on top of one of the washers. Her phone was buzzing constantly, and the first few times, she looked at it; before finally throwing it in a pile of towels someone had left behind. “You don’t wanna get that?”, Nina asked. “Nah… It’s just some guy”, Letty replied, looking at her from the corner of her eyes. “Should I be worried?”, Nina said. “What are you, my dad?”, Letty grunted. Nina raised her brows. “Sorry”, she said. Letty looked suddenly embarrassed. “No, it’s ok. It’s just… You know when you meet a guy, and hang out for a while; and then he won’t just let up calling you?”. “Yeah, I’ve met a few of those in my day”, Nina chuckled. Letty’s face lit up. “Yeah?”. “Oh yeah!”, Nina said. “You find out you’re not on the same page, and try to break it off. And then he’s calling you, like; but baby. We had something good…”. Letty nodded fervently. “Exactly like that! And then he tries to ask you out again, even if you said no thanks, so you gotta ghost him”. “Sometimes it’s like that”, Nina shrugged. Letty jumped off the washer, and went over to help her fold her clothes. “And then he shows up at your school in his truck, with a sixpack and a gas-station bouquet of roses. And you’re just like; dude, I sucked your dick onetime…!”. Nina narrowed her eyes at the teenager. “How old are you, Letty?”, she asked. “18…”, Letty replied. “Ok…”, Nina said, feeling calmer – though not by a lot.

“Is it like that with you and Angel?”, Letty asked, catching Nina off guard. “Like what?”, she asked. “Like, you fucked, and now he won’t give up?”. Nina thought for a moment, not sure how to answer. “No… That’s different. Angel is a good guy, I think. I’m just not sure that he can deal with my shit right now”. Letty smiled crookedly, and for a moment, her family resemblance with Coco was very obvious. “For what it’s worth, I think you’d make a cute couple”. Nina chuckled, and began putting the last of her now clean clothes in the bag.

Letty’s phone buzzed again. The teenager groaned, and finally picked up the call. “What…? No… Because I said so… Yeah… So? You, and everyone else… Yeah, he is…”. When she uttered the last words, Letty’s face suddenly looked anxious. “Well, he can be. I’ll just call him, and he’ll be right here… Yeah, you do that”. She hung up the phone. “We need to go”. “Everything ok?”, Nina asked. “I just wanna get back to the clubhouse”. “Let me just get the last of my clothes”. “I’ll go start the car”, Letty said, and hurried out of the laundromat, and down the side of the building to the alley where they’d parked.

Nina got her last things from the dryer, and quickly packed up. She left the laundromat, and went to go after Letty, when she heard commotion behind a dumpster. “Let me go!”, Letty was yelling. “You can’t do that to someone. You led me on, you little slut”, a darker voice said. Nina ran over to see what was happening, and found a broad-shouldered man holding Letty against the wall, by her wrists. She had a bruise on her jaw. Fear and anger bubbled in Nina’s chest, and she stormed over to the pair. “Let go of her!”, she snarled, and pushed the man away from the teenager. “You stay out of this, bitch!”, he growled, and went to take a swing at her. He was halted, when Letty slammed him in the back with a discarded shopping-basket. The man stumbled forwards, and Nina and Letty made to run, when the man grabbed Letty by the neck, and slammed her against the wall again.

It was like her body worked of its own accord. Nina slipped her arm behind her, and grabbed her gun, before holding it to the man’s head. “Let her go”, Nina said, her voice sounding like it came from somewhere deep within her. “You’re not gonna shoot”, the man laughed. She pulled the hammer. “I said, let her go”. The man slowly released his grip on Letty, and stepped backwards; all the while, Nina still aimed her gun at him. “Listen, lady. This girl, she’s…”. “Shut your mouth, you piece of shit”, Nina hissed. The man raised his hands in the air. “What are you gonna do? I let her go. You won’t shoot me now… Right?”. Nina felt physically sick. Letty was looking at her with scared eyes. “Nina, he let me go… You can put down the gun”, she said. “No”, Nina rasped.

There was the roar of engines, as what sounded like two motorcycles came up behind them. “EZ!”, Letty yelled. “We’re back here!”. Nina heard running, before EZ’s voice called out to her. “Nina…?”. She didn’t reply, it was like her arm cramped up, and she couldn’t lower the gun. “Shit. Angel! Get back here!”. Still frozen in place, her eyes were locked on the man in front of her. Another pair of feet came running up behind her. “Nina?”, Angel said. The man began stuttering. “Shit, man. You gotta do something. We were just having a conversation, and this chick pulls a gun on me…”. A small group of onlookers had gathered, and were staring at the situation with almost vulgar interest. Nina clenched her free hand, struggling to regain control of herself; as her audience awaited her next move.

“He was going to hurt her”, Nina said. “He was going to…”. Angel looked at Letty, who nodded slightly. The biker walked over to the man, and slammed his fist into his gut; making him fall to the ground. Nina moved her gun, continuingly aiming at his head. “Fuck…”, the man groaned. “Get that crazy bitch to put away the gun!”. Angel stormed forward again. “Shut the fuck up!”, he growled, and kicked him in the ribs; making him curl up even more. “Call Coco”, he said to EZ, who fished out his phone; while leading Letty over to the car.

Nina’s arm was beginning to hurt, but she couldn’t move. What if the man got up, and went after Letty again? Angel stepped in front of her, his arms raised calmingly. “You can put the gun down, Nina”. “I can’t…”, she whispered. Angel stepped slowly closer, and put his hand on hers, gently pressing it down. “Come on, querida. You’re ok. It’s ok”. He pried her fingers from the gun, and took it; putting it in his pocket. “See? Everything’s ok”. “Fuck that!”, the man on the ground rasped. “That bitch is crazy…”.

Before Angel had a chance to stop her, Nina had attacked. She was on top of the man, pounding her fists in to his face and chest; and when he tried to cover himself with his arms, she scratched at his skin. The man got a few shots in, before Angel wrapped his arms around Nina, and managed to pull her off him. “No, querida. Stop. He’s down”. “Get off me!”, Nina hissed like an angry cat, and pushed Angel away; looking at him with wild eyes. Moving her gaze to the bystanders, her chest tensed up, and she let out a choked gasp. Their eyes felt like literal fire pokes, prodding at her skin. Angel noticed her looking at the people around them, and broadened his frame; getting between her and the onlookers. “Get the fuck out of here!”, he roared. “You didn’t see anything. Go!”. The crowd quickly scattered, and they were alone in the alley.

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#angel reyes #angel reyes fic #angel reyes smut #mayans mc #angel reyes x oc #mayans mc fic #coco cruz #ez reyes

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reflections-in-a-critical-eye · 3 years

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Thank you for answering my question. This is what I come back to. People think Jimin and Jungkook are in a relationship based on stuff from official content, not seeing them in the street on their time off. There is almost nothing outside of official content that adds to that belief, that I know of. So by analyzing content, would you say that you are indirectly adding to existing speculatory discourse about their orientation? Can those things ever be separated? Even associating with Jikook blogs and saying you read the discourse, you hint at a personal belief. I believe you believe they are not straight men, correct me if I am wrong. Talking about art and intent is worthy. A lot of blog readers are mostly in these spaces to hear their Jikook intuitions supported and that is not a crime either.

Another question I consider important is what role does personal identity play in criticism? Should being non asian or non queer, for example, be a factor of consideration for people sharing and expressing their ideas? I am going to be honest and say that I think it matters who is saying what. I like to know who I am reading. This is not to be gatekeeper about it. If you want to decenter western concepts of 'queer' from discourse about Korean performers that is commendable no matter who you are.

Is it bad that a critic's identity matters in how I recieve their criticism? I don't want to shut anyone out. But before I delve into someone's ideas, I like to have these cards on the table. Is that bigoted? I am not saying I value the critique of white, cis, non queer people less. I have experienced feelings of alienation reading criticism at times. Just look at the statistics for how many published film critics in the western sphere are white and male. Shouldn't that affect how we think about popular criticism? Thanks for taking timewith these questions. I understand how they might recieved as invading of your privacy or identity. Please feel free to ignore of course.

Anon, I got your other ask telling me that it's not necessary to publish this if I feel uncomfortable to talk about my identity. It's good that you reconsidered, realized why it's not ok and you are more than capable and have the option to choose what you want to read. I didn't answer your questions not because I was uncomfortable, but because I wanted to take some time and really think about what I'm going to say. I'm addressing it now because I want my position to be very clear for everyone because I will not repeat myself.

I will break down your ask in two parts:

All I did was to write about GCFT and how a piece of media can be analyzed. I also said that I'm aware of what is written on jikook blogs and from what perspective. But from that to immediately assume I have some beliefs is a long way to go because I never talked about this and I never will. I don't believe in anything, I look at content and write about what I see. I only plan to write about MMA Black Swan performance in the future as an artistic act that involves JM/JK and I will back it up with references that will sustain my point on view. I am aware of all shipping content (from multiple ships) that exists in this fandom and of course I know the one that involves Jimin and Jungkook. I would have to be completely ignorant and not be aware of what's been going on online to not figure that one out. I will also not address the type of content and information that is used by people who speculate and write about them, there are numerous blogs and twitter accounts who do that. This topic ends here as I clearly stated my position on what type of writing I will be doing.

I don't think my identity should be disclosed in order for my opinions to be valid. It's just that, an opinion on tumblr, nothing more. You have the right to choose what you want to read based on your own criteria. I do not hold such a view when it comes to criticism. What's important is the approach the critic has, how informed a critic can be on the topic they're writing about, regardless of racial or sexual identity. Not to mention that this should not be a demand. I certainly never had to do that or expected to see such information when I read something. And last but not least, I may write posts using criticism, but this a blog where I just publish my thoughts. Sometimes I do a bit of research, other times I just state my opinions. Everyone is free to be ok with it or not.

#asks

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jay-in-chicago · 3 years

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Know The Risk.

Summary: Jay knows sleeping with his CI is enough to get him fired, but when she’s needed for an job, Jay can’t handle it. Pairing: Jay Halstead x unnamed female character. Characters: Jay, Voight, Olinsky. Warnings: mentions of drug dealing, weapon threat (gun), the suggestion of sexual favours in exchange for work (incredibly brief and not in detail), brief mention of sex (with Jay). Words: 2092 A/N: I’m pretty nervous to be posting this, so I’ll hit post and then go and hide. While I’m not new to writing, I am new to writing for the Chicago world. Apologies if the characterisation isn’t correct, I’m still learning. Not BETA’d because this is my first time here, so all mistakes, errors and typos are completely my own.

This was a request from my patreon account.

Likes, reblogs and feedback makes me squeal with happiness.

______

Jay’s been on edge ever since she stepped out of the car and headed towards the meeting point. He’d personally wired her up as he’d tried to keep his cool. His fingers had worked meticulously, and he’d made sure the camera attached to her blouse button was hidden. They needed to see as well as hear but the thought of her going in there alone made bile rise.

“I thought you wanted to solve this case?” she’d questioned, staring him down as she’d ran her tongue over her teeth as she watched him fretting.

“I do but not at this expense.” He’d whispered back, thankful the mic wasn’t live yet. To the rest of the team, she was simply one of Jay’s informants, nothing more than that. He had a few, mostly men but there were a few women who he could call on for a favour, though she’s the only one who had managed to get under his skin. She’d left such an impression on him that he couldn’t get her off his mind.

“Admit it,” she’d grinned at him, “if you weren’t milking me for information every opportunity you have, you’d be trying to get something else out of me.” He’d held out as long as he possibly could before she’d been invited to his apartment, the two of them finally giving in to what has been building for months. Jay had taken her with such relish, desperate to savour every moment of it not thinking for a moment it would be repeated.

But it had. That first time had unlocked something within the two of them, making them unable to resist one another. They’d find a way to have the conversations at either hers or his, she’d tell him everything he needed to know with each swipe of his tongue. Jay made sure he learnt what she liked as quickly as possible. He didn’t have an ego outside of the bedroom and ensured that it stayed the same inside of it but he couldn’t help it. The more she gave him, the more he wanted to take. The more he needed to take.

She’d have given him the information regardless but the coaxing, slow drawing of it, the way she’d withhold details unless he gave her an orgasm was all part of their foreplay. And for every arrest made, every case closed thanks to her, she was rewarded with even more. When Jay reached out to her about this case, she had the right connections, provided details and information that proved to be vital. She’d managed to worm her way in, met their main suspect a few times and managed to get close to being trusted as an outsider could, enabling her to be able to slip between members without being stopped. Or at least not initially.

Which is why she was the perfect candidate for heading in there tonight. Jay sits with headphones on, eyes barely moving from the screen. He hates every word that comes from her mouth. He knows she’s putting it on, but the seductive tone to it makes his cock stir against his wishes, the words should be making him shrink back against the seat in which he sits. She’s flirting with whoever she needs, their faces show the level of interest in her, the way they lick their lips as they drag their gaze down her body and wipe their thumb over the corner of their mouth as they chuckle and click their tongue.

She slipped through the crowd, searching for the one who they’d shown her the picture of until finally he came into view on the camera. Jay felt his body tense up, watching everything unfold on the screen before him. He’d seen what happened to people who got in his way, they were either in the ground or in the morgue and one wrong thing said, one tone off, one nervous hesitation and he’d know. The last thing Jay wanted was to watch her be taken down in front of his eyes, recorded for evidence and to be used whenever needed. The thought of it turned his stomach, had him biting at his nails with anxiety until he was sitting forward, his eyes widening as Darius played straight into her hand.

Jay knew better than anyone how good she was. She played the part incredibly well, and though he knew how she appeared to others, he was the one who saw her for who she really was. The version playing out on the screen for the team to see right now, that was flawless acting. Olinsky and Voight have exchanged glances at one another, muttered under their breath no doubt not wanting Jay to hear but he has. They comment on the way she held her cool, how convincing she appeared and how if they hadn’t had a conversation with her prior to sending her in there, they’d have believed her act. Pride licks at the edges of the raw anxiety ridden wound that festered with each passing minute.

“So you’re the one I’ve been hearin’ ‘bout?” his voice could be heard over the music, the way he looked at her made Jay’s stomach turn.

“depends what you’ve been hearing.”

His tongue slipped over his lips as he’d opened his legs, his hand resting against his inner thigh, the opposite leg swings open and closed as he watched her. “that you know someone who can take twenty keys and make me a lotta money.”

“That’s enough, we can get her out now, right?” Jay asked, moving the headset from one ear to look at Voight.

“Not yet,” his husky tone remained steady as his eyes stayed fixed on the screen.

“He just adm-”

“He didn’t admit anything. We need something concrete before we bust in there and mess up the whole thing.”

Jay clenched his jaw, kept listening and waiting impatiently for Darius to say something which could be used. He wasn’t a praying man but sitting there, with the screen having his full attention and her safety fully on his mind? Yeah, Jay was praying.

“listen yeah? Imma let your guy sell 8. See how that shifts. See if I can trust him.” Darius talks slowly, his eyes never leaving hers. What he means by trusting her buying is also seeing if he could trust her too. Jay knows how this works. You tell a small secret, or a lie, see what happens with it. Build it up until you decide if you can trust a person. If she delivers him the money for 8 and keeps the money coming in, she can be trusted with more product. “After that, we’ll look at somethin’ bigger yeah?”

Darius’s gaze drops down her body, takes in the curves of her body, the ones that Jay knows too well. His blood boils but he forces his hand to remain relaxed. If he clenched his hand, showed his emotion which could be taken exactly for what it is, he’d be packing his desk in a box and walked out of the building before the ink had dried on his paperwork.

Come on you son of a bitch, give me one good reason not to land a punch on you the second I get my hands on you.

“Like what?”

“Look at you thinkin’ big.” He runs his tongue back over his lips as he watches her. “I like the way your mind works. How bout that mouth?”

“What about it?”

“Wanna taste somethin’ on mine? You gonna be sellin’ it, don’t you wanna taste first? See how good it is” he asks, the fingers of the hand that rests against his thigh drums over his clothes.

“You’re giving me a freebie?”

“Bitch, ain’t nothing free here.” He scoffs, unable to believe she really asked that. “You want my H? You gotta show me how much you want it.” His hand moves, fingers tracing over his belt, snapping it open in one fluid motion. The explanation clear.

“We go now.” Voight’s voice rings out behind Jay. His headset is snapped away from him within seconds and he’s on his feet, out of the van with the others following.

___

“Jay?” Neither have really said a word since they got back to the precinct. She wanted to, was desperate to fill the silence with mindless chatter like they would usually but the look on his face tells her he’d rather have this than talk. “Jay.” She tries again and only now do his light eyes flicker up to her face. His hands still work, removing her wires, her camera and anything else which could pick the two of them up. Anything which could be used against them. “Are you not going to say anything?”

“I will once my heart leaves my throat.”

“I did ok though, right? You’d use me again.”

“You terrified me half to death, that’s what you did.”

“But did I do ok?”

He sighs, locks his jaw and stares at her as his hands drop to his side, the devices tightly fixed in his fist. “You did and that’s the problem.”

Her brow furrows, “pro-”

“Yes, problem. Do you realise how convincing you were? If we hadn’t come in when we had? He could’ve-”

“but he didn’t.”

“But he could have.”

“I knew the risk when I agreed to do this.” She lifts her face, angles her chin defiantly at him.

“So did I but that doesn’t mean I’m happy about the way he was or how it was playing out.” Turning his back briefly to put the device into the box it came from, he can’t wipe the memory of the camera from his mind.

They’re downstairs, away from security cameras, away from mics; the only two in that area are the ones Jay has just disconnected and put away. Alone, with no footsteps approaching, she steps forward and pulls him into a hug. “I’m fine. You came at exactly the right time. Maybe if you came in minutes after? That could have been a different story. Look at me, he barely touched me.” She says, ignoring the way her head throbs at the memory of how he’d grabbed her hair so tightly she thought he planned to rip clumps from her scalp as he’d dragged her to her feet and held a gun to her temple, using her as a shield. Her heart rate had only just calmed but the intense way that Jay stared at her made it pick up a little more. “I’m ok because of you.”

“But if I hadn’t.” His voice cracks a little and that one sound? That one sound breaks her.

“Hey,” moving his hand, she presses it against her chest, “see, I’m alive because of you and your team. Don’t beat yourself up over what could be. I’m here. Unhurt. And I’d do it again if it meant I could be of use to you.”

“Your information helps enough. I don’t need you almost getting attacked or killed just so we can take someone down. There are other ways.”

“If it wasn’t me in that position Jay, it would have been someone else. Would you have felt better having someone else have that gun pressed against their head just because it wasn’t me? Because I wouldn’t.”

When he says nothing, just continues to stare at her, she nuzzles her nose against his jaw, over his throat before pressing her lips to him, feeling the rough stubble as it grazes against her soft skin. “You’re feeling this because you acted as you should.” she presses more kisses, up the underside of his jaw and finally over the curve of it, her lips dragging towards his lips until he finally moves, dipping his face to meet her lips with his own and kisses her with all the pent up emotion he’d been keeping in, now barely to hold himself back after just a taste of her again.

“We can’t do this here.” He groans, forcing himself to pull away from her. Her eyes are dilating, her chest rises and falls from the rapid breathing. “You know where the spare key is for my place right? I’ll meet you there. You need to go now before I take you into the supply closet and get fired.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll make sure I’m naked.” She says, stepping towards him and pulling his lip between her teeth, nibbling on it just enough to draw a long groan from him before letting it go with a satisfying pop.

#jay halstead imagine #jay halstead fanfiction #jay halstead fanfic #jay halstead one shot #jay halstead drabble #jay halstead smut #chicago pd fanfiction #chicago pd fanfic #chicago pd drabble #chicago pd imagine #chicago pd one shot

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hamliet · 3 years

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when does a relationship become queerbaiting? theres a book that i really like and the 2 male leads characters have a lot of storylines and arcs where they get closer and i think some of the tropes used can be similar to the typical romantic tropes, neither of them end up with anyone at the end of the story since its more about found family and the long journey the whole cast goes through. they even get shipped by another character as a running gag. personally i always saw it as being open to interpretation but recently the revised edition of the original novel came out and there were several lines those 2 characters had about each other that were kinda toned down, i didnt think much of it but i saw a post about how it was clearly baiting and the author was being homophobic for toning it down. i didnt think it counted as baiting since as far as i know, the novel was never advertised as anything with romance and the author never pretended they were gonna end up together. i am definitely a little weirded out by the decision to change those specific lines but a lot of the story stayed the same, including a lot about their relationship so idk what to think.

i guess im more confused on if it counts as baiting, or even substext??

Sooooo I am not the best person to ask about this, because I’m a cis woman who has thus far in life only been attracted in a romantic sense to cis men. I can talk a bit about baiting as a general concept in fiction, but you should definitely take it with some grains of salt.

Baiting, for me, is like deliberately playing up an aspect writers have no intention on delivering on. Usually this is done for ratings, to tease fans, fanservice, etc, but without payoff, it is just bad writing. Red herrings are good in writing, but only can be successfully used if the actual result is more satisfying than the herring. This applies to writing in general, not just to romantic ships. However, when the baiting involves historically underrepresented groups for no reason other than to get fans to spend money consuming the story, I think we can all agree that becomes something more grotesque than just bad writing: it’s insensitive, socially irresponsible, frankly hurtful.

Some common examples are Bridgerton which has a gay character, who is extremely minor, yet they played up this character in advertising. Also, Rizzoli and Isles I think actually had its producers mention deliberately playing up the lesbian subtext to hook the audience without ever intending on following through.

That said, context also matters. Like, there are aspects of the culture of the work’s author, the target audience, and such that come into play here also (so like, romantic tropes differ by culture. For example, enemies to lovers is common in Asian stories but less in the west, and the “girl who pursues a guy” is extremely common in Japanese shonen in particular, while it is very much a cringe trope that almost never results in romance in American fiction. So if a writer reads, say, tropes that are common in America into a Japanese work and says it’s baiting, that’s quite possibly not the intent even if it may have been the experience of the reader. So even if there was no intent, there can still be hurt, and that hurt can be real, if that makes sense.

The definition of what constitutes ‘baiting’ varies. I do think that, in true Tumblr fashion, the term gets thrown around a lot and loses its intended meaning, or is so rigidly defined that creators can meet the letter of the “not a bait” requirement while ignoring the spirit of it.

To start with the latter: regarding something hitting the letter of what most wouldn’t consider baiting yet not really the spirit, let’s look at The Rise of Skywalker. This movie had a genuine lesbian kiss in it... between two characters we’d never seen more than a glimpse of while others are celebrating around them. Since it has a kiss, it’s not baiting, right? Well... the director deliberately said in the lead-up to the film that he included it because he “wanted LGBT people to see themselves in the film.” If “see yourselves in the film” is like a nanosecond of background, then, like... idk. Baiting or not, it feels icky, and I know some people consider it baiting and some don’t even if they don’t like, love that representation. But I think this is more queerbaiting than like, Nobara and Maki, who don’t have explicit romantic coding.

Going back to the former, in terms of ‘queerbaiting’ losing its intended meaning... I think there are a lot of really poorly written romantic ships out there, often het, while a lot of same-gender relationships are really well written regardless of whether there’s romantic coding within the text. The main emotional energy in stories with 90% male characters (as frankly many if not most stories are, great job world) is probably between two men. There’s just so much more potential with well-written characters who share a lot of screen time, so of course people are going to ship them. In my opinion, this does not inherently make it baiting, but it certainly creates an environment that lends itself to baiting even if the writers aren’t intending to do this.

Like, you could say the main emotional energy in BNHA is Bakugou and Deku. However, Bakudeku is 100% not queerbaiting. It’ll never be canon romantically (I don’t even ship it lol). There has been nothing to imply romance between them even if the main emotional message can be seen in their development. Deku/Ochaco is likely to be canon, but there is a significant lack of genuine emotional energy between them (the story’s plots and themes don’t coalesce around their relationship), so it’s probably going to feel forced. In contrast, Naruto/Sasuke had an actual kiss in canon, which while played for laughs is a lot more direct romantic coding than anything between Bakugou/Deku. I actually don’t think the majority of Narusasu is baiting, but I definitely think that one moment in chapter like 3 was really poor fanservice for yaoi fans, and has not aged well at all.

It is also the case that fans can confuse headcanons with what is actually in the text, and that just never ends well. For example, Clover and Qrow’s ship in RWBY: a lot of people read Clover as gay, which led to “bury your gays” outrage when he died. A member of the crew stated explicitly they had never intended for Clover to be a love interest for Qrow, and truthfully here was nothing strictly romantic in their relationship--nothing like a kiss or a declaration of love or a parallel to another romantic couple. Hence, I don’t personally consider it queerbaiting or bury your gays, but a lot of fans felt that it was and their pain is legitimate even if I think textually the argument isn’t there. The one thing I do think is true about this in particular is that there was also no strict platonic coding, which encourages headcanons. Clear writing, yo. It can help.

Note the word “can” not “will,” because strict platonic coding doesn’t always fix things, either. In what was probably a reaction to the outrage over Clover’s death, you had extremely blatant platonic coding of Ruby and Penny’s relationship this season leading up to Penny’s death. Ruby refers to Penny as “our friend” three different times, wherein “friend” sends a platonic message and “our” sends an even stronger message that it’s not about the two of them despite the fact that their friendship is one of the sweetest and most interesting in the show. A lingering Ruby-Penny hug then is followed by a lingering Penny-Weiss hug, then Yang, then Blake, etc. The writers went out of their way to hit people over the head with “platonic” and yet they have still gotten accusations of bury your gays and queerbaiting because people will see what they want to see in a story.

Seeing what you want to see in a story also isn’t inherently bad. People who are underrepresented are going to have to read themselves into stories because Lord knows writers ain’t incorporating them well enough if at all. It’s why “Mary Sues” are common in fanfiction, which is primarily written by people who are not straight white men: because where the hell else are we to see ourselves in fiction? So essentially the macrocosm of culture creates this problem, both in terms of baiting and the misuse of the term, and the only fix is a shit ton more good representation.

#ask hamliet #writing stuff #Anonymous

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kuromichad · 3 years

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different subject that’s heavy on my mind rn but since i’m already being harsh let’s get into it. i wish it wasn’t automatically presumed to be some kind of truscum attitude when someone tries to express that different parts of The Trans Community have like, different needs and different risk levels and different experiences and that we have the ability to talk over each other, harm each other, etc... like when i put it that way people generally are like ‘of course that’s true!’ but is it ever really understood in practice? a number of people (not a large enough number, but still) are able to loosely understand ‘you can be trans and transphobic’ when it’s applied to the matter of transmisogyny but when a trans person tries to express distrust of or frustration with afab nb people due to how common it is that that category of person will, despite being trans/nb, espouse bioessentialist, anti-medical-transition, radfem-adjacent if not outright cryptoterf rhetoric, suddenly ‘trans people can be transphobic’ gets applied to... the person with a complaint about transphobia.

because he’s clearly an evil truscum man! regardless of if the person making the complaint is a trans man or trans woman, oops, lol. he’s a bad person who is attacking and invalidating and totally hatecriming the heckin’ valid, equally at-risk transgender identity of “an afab woman who isn’t a woman except when she pointedly categorizes themself as a woman because being afab makes them a woman who is ‘politically aligned’ with women but she’s not an icky unwoke cis woman because they don’t like being forced into womanhood although Really When You Think About It 🤔 all women are dysphoric because obviously the pathologized medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria in transgender people is something that equally applies to cis women just default existing under patriarchy 🤔, and no, equating these things totally does not imply anything reductive about or add a bizarre moral dimension to the idea of being transgender, whaaaaat, this woman who isn’t a woman doesn’t think there’s anything immoral or cowardly or misogynist or delusional about being transgender, they would never say that because THEY’RE transgender, except when she feels it’s important (constantly) to make clear that she’s Still A Woman Deep Down Inherently Despite Not Identifying As One, and none of this ever has any effect on how they treat the concept, socially and politically, of people who actually wholly identify with (and possibly medically transition to) a gender different from the one they were assigned at birth, be it ‘the opposite gender’ or abstaining from binary gender altogether or ‘politically aligning’ with the ‘opposite’ gender from their asab. never ever!”

and like maybe that sounds like a completely absurd and hateful strawman to you! but in that case you’re either like, lucky, or optimistic, or ignorant. i’m literally not looking at random nb people and declaring that in My Truscum Opinion they’re ‘really a woman’ just because they’re not medically transitioning or meeting some arbitrary standard of mine. i am looking at self-identified afab nb people, who most often use she/they because, y’know, words mean things, especially pronouns, so people who are willingly ‘aligned with womanhood’ typically intentionally use she/her (sorry that i guess that’s another truscum take now!!! that pronouns mean things!!! the bigender transmasc who deliberately uses exclusively he/him wants it to invoke a perception he’s comfortable with!), who actively say the things listed above (in a non-sarcastic manner).

like, the line between a person who says “i don’t claim to really not be my asab because i know no one would ever perceive me as anything else” because theyve internalized a defeatist attitude due to societal transphobia, and a person who says that because they... genuinely believe it’s impossible/ridiculous/an imposition to truly be transgender (in the traditional trans sense, beyond a vague nb disidentification with gender) and are actively contributing to the former person’s self loathing... is hard to define from a distance! i think plenty of people who are, in a sense, ‘tentative’ or like ‘playing close to home’ so to speak in their identity are ‘genuinely trans’ (whatever that may mean) and just going through a process. they might arrive at a different identity or might just eventually stop saying/believing defeatist stuff, who knows. but there are enough people saying it for the latter reason, or at least not caring if they sound that way, that it’s like, dangerous. it is actively incredibly harmful to other trans people. and it’s fucking ridiculous that it’s so difficult to criticize because you’ll always get the defense of “umm but i’m literally trans” and/or “well i’m just talking about ME, this doesn’t apply to other trans people” when it’s an attitude that very clearly seeps into their politics and the way they discuss gender.

because it’s just incredibly common for afab nb people (most typically those that go by she/they! since i’m aware that uh, i am also afab nb, but we clearly are extremely different, so that’s the best categorization i’ve got) to discuss gender in moralized terms, with the excuse of patriarchy/misogyny existing, which of course adds another difficult dimension to trying to criticize this because it gets the response of “don’t act like misandry is real” (it’s not, but being a dick still is) and “boohoo, let women complain about their oppressors” (this goes beyond ‘complaining’). a deliberate revocation of empathy/sympathy/compassion from men and projection of inherently malicious/brutish/cruel intent onto men (not solely in the justified generalizations ‘men suck/are dangerous’, but in specific interactions too) underpin a whole fucking lot of popular posts/discussions online, whether they’re political or casual/social, and it absolutely influences how people conceptualize and feel about transness.

because ‘maleness is evil’ is still shitty politics even when you’ve slightly reframed it from the terf ‘trans women are evil because they’re Really Men and can never escape being horrific soulless brutes just as women can never escape being fragile morally superior flowers’ to the tumblr shethey “trans women who are out to me/unclockable are tolerable i guess because they’re women and women are good; anyone i personally presume to be a cis man, though, is still automatically evil, and saying trans men are Just As Bad is progressive of me, and it’s totally unrelated and apolitical that i think we should expand the concept of afab lesbianism so broadly that you can now be basically indistinguishable from trans men on literally every single level except for a declaration of ‘but i would never claim to be a man because i’m secure in the Innate Womanhood of the body i was born into, even as i medically alter that body because it causes me great gendered discomfort.’ none of this at all indicates that i feel there’s an immense moral/political gap between being an afab nb lesbian vs a straight trans man! it says nothing at all about my concept of ‘maleness’ and there’s no way this rhetoric bleeds into my perception of trans women and no way loudly talking about all this could keep trans people around me self-loathing and closeted, because i’m Literally Trans and Not A Terf!”

again, if that sounds like a hateful strawman, sorry but it’s not. i guess i’m supposed to be like ‘all of the many people ive seen saying these shitty things is an evil outlier who Doesn’t Count, and it’s not fair to the broad identity of afab shethey to not believe that every person who doesn’t outright say terfy enough things is a perfectly earnest valid accepting trans person who’s beyond criticism’ but like. this cannot be about broad validation. this can’t be about discarding all the bad apples as not really part of the group. we can’t be walking on eggshells to coddle what are essentially, in the end, Cis Feelings, because in the best cases this kind of rhetoric comes from naive people who are early and uncertain in their gender journey or whatever and are in the process of unraveling internalized transphobia, and in the easily observable worst cases these people are very literally redefining shit so that ‘actually all afab women are trans, spiritually, all afabs have dysphoria, we are all Equally oppressed by Males uh i mean cis men <3’ because, let’s be honest, they know that the moment they call themselves trans they get to say whatever they want about gender no matter how harmful it is to the rest of us. and those ideas spread like wildfire through the afab shethey “woman that’s not a woman” community that frankly greatly outnumbers other types of trans people online, because many of those people just do not have the experiences that lead you to really understand this shit and have to push back against concepts of gender that actively harm you as a trans person.

like that’s all i want to be able to say, is Things Are Different For Different Groups. and a willful ignorance of these differences leads to bad rhetoric controlling the overall discourse which gets people hurt. and even when concepts arise from it that seem positive and helpful and inclusive, in practice or in origin those ideas can still be upholding shit that gets other people hurt. like, i don’t doubt that many people are very straightforwardly happy and comfortable with an identity like ‘afab nb lesbian on testosterone’ and it would be ridiculous and hypocritical for me, ‘afab nb who wants to pass as a guy so he can comfortably wear skirts again,’ to act like that’s something that can’t or shouldn’t exist. it’s not about the identity itself, it’s about the politics that are popular within its community, and how the use of identities as moral labels with like, fucking pokemon type interactions for oppression effectiveness which directly informs the moral correctness of your every opinion and your very existence, is a shitty practice that gets people hurt and leads us to revoke empathy from each other.

like. sorry this is all over the place and long and probably still sounds evil because i haven’t thought through and disclaimered every single statement. but i’m like exhausted from living with this self-conscious guilt that maybe i’ve turned into a horrible evil truscum misogynist etc etc due to feeling upset by this seemingly inescapable approach to gender in lgbt/online circles that like, actively harms me, because when i vent with my friends all the stuff i’ve tried to explain here gets condensed down to referencing ‘she/theys’ as a category and that feels mean and generalizing and i genuinely dislike generalizations but the dread i feel about that category gets proven right way too often. it’s just like. this is not truscum this is not misgendering this is not misogyny. this is not about me decreeing that all transmascs have to be manly enough or dysphoric enough and all nbs have to be neatly agender and androgynous or something, i’m especially not saying that nb gender isn’t real lmao or even that it’s automatically wrong to partially identify with your asab; this is not me saying you can only medically transition for specific traditional reasons or that you don’t get a say on anything if you aren’t medically transitioning for whatever reason, now or ever. i just. want to be allowed to be frank about how... when there’s different experiences in a community we should like. acknowledge those differences and be willing to say that sometimes people don’t know what they’re talking about or that what they’re saying is harmful. without the primary concern being whether people will feel invalidated by being told so. because these are like, real issues, that are more important than politely including everyone, because that method is just getting vulnerable people drowned out constantly.

#source on much of this: existing as a transmasc on tumblr for years and years.#i stopped identifying as any sort of 'woman-aligned' pretty much right before the ridiculous 'all afabs are dysphoric' stuff #but it sure did still make me hate myself and feel like a silly cowardly ugly little girl for wanting to transition!#and back when i WAS a she/they i definitely was falling for 'men are bad maleness is bad always inherently :)' rhetoric #not in the modern form outlined above but in the like. brainlessly parroted from 'baeddel tumblr' form #which was still like 'you can escape being a Bad Person by either becoming or admitting you are a girl :)'#and the only acknowledgment of trans men in this ideology was like. 'well i guess they feel like they have to do that :\'#'too bad for them. im not saying they shouldnt transition but you know. men suck though <3'#it was bad for me it was bad for other people so im saying from experience. Fucking cut it out! the end

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august-unhinged · 3 years

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Routine

Setting: modern day, unspecified Alpine university town Genre & tone: some kind of evil unhealthy romance-porn. Tone is light with dark undertones, and ditches the light halfway in. Themes: desperate approval-seeking, power imbalance, student/professor, established relationship Content: transmasc main character, m/m Kinks: servitude, rope bondage, forced orgasms, noncon, forced anal sex, praise and degradation, sadism/emotional sadism, masochism/emotional masochism, forced cheating Content warnings: Noncon. Painful sex. Unsafe kink practices. Power imbalance. Manipulative/abusive relationship. Trans person as the victim, cis men as the enactors of violence.

Word count is ~10k, there’s 3k words of setup. If you want to skip straight to the porn, scroll until you see the paragraph starting in bold.

Killian’s alarm rings every morning at seven. It rings, and he hates it with every fibre of his being for a moment before he comes to and realises where he is. It really is a blessing, he reminds himself every morning. Killian wakes up on a cramped campbed that ruins his posture, simultaneously cold and sweaty on the mornings when the mountain chill threatens at the window panes, and feels nothing but gratitude for his surroundings. The pale beauty of the alpine city sprawling below them is breathtaking, but it’s the house he’s in that really gives him pause. Because he wakes in Felix’s office. On a roll-out mattress behind the Professor’s desk. At the feet of his master, even unconscious.

He has this thought process in the time it takes for him to reach over and turn off his alarm. It used to take him ten minutes to snap out of the daze - but he quickly learned that Felix doesn’t tolerate daydreaming. Killian mutters the Lord’s Prayer as he pulls on his slippers; he’s grateful for rising another morning and for where he’s risen. He pads softly into the kitchen, floorboards becoming tile under his feet as he steps into the day’s routine.

Today is slightly different, though. Killian’s heart’s trilling in his chest, resistant to his efforts to not get his hopes up again. The past couple of months had been a litany of scattered anniversaries. There was the first time Killian had been to one of Felix’s parties, the first time Felix had read one of Killian’s papers (and said it was ‘fine’!), the first time they sat and smoked and got unreasonably high until dawn broke the clouds while Killian listened adoringly to Felix’s every word. None of these were tangible, though - hardly an accepted marker of the progression of a relationship, either. But a year ago today was when Felix casually handed Killian a key to his apartment alongside a vague explanation that it would just be easier for Killian to be able to come and go as he pleased, rather than having to interrupt Felix’s day whenever he needed something. It was an offhanded exchange that still made Killian’s heart flutter for weeks after. He is hyper-aware of the gift in his possession at all times. No matter where he keeps the key it seems to burn through layers of fabric, the cool metal branding his skin in a hopeless reminder that Killian belongs.

He sets the water to boil and sits at the counter to go through Felix’s diary. Chapter review at 11 - a pushback of a pushback, but Killian is still bracing himself for an early morning announcement that Felix has something far more important to do. Donors’ lunch at 1pm, where Killian will be ever-presently taking notes. And lectures in the afternoon. Killian always memorises Felix’s diary a week in advance but looking at it with the kettle quietly rumbling in the background always frames his day with a sense of purpose. He pencils in some notes under the donor’s lunch - names and how to remember them, jokes not to make so they’ll still give us lots of money - Felix can’t possibly be expected to remember it all. Killian puts the diary on the left of the breakfast tray so Felix can read it while he eats, fills a glass with orange juice so it won’t be too cold to drink by the time he brings it through. The kettle’s finished boiling and he fills the cafetière - a spoonful and a half of the good stuff, which sits on the shelf in front of Killian’s instant. He drops two slices of granary in the toaster and hunts for a knife.

Routine.

He thrives on it.

That being said, he’s changing it up a little today - as the coffee steeps, he steams the milk in an attempt to recreate something he saw in one of the local coffee shops Felix hates but Killian secretly enjoys. He’s in his own head, dancing to an imperceptible tune, trying to figure out how to pour it right to get the shape on top of the coffee-

And the toast pops up. Killian jumps, spilling the milk on the counter, the floor, and himself. ‘Fuck.’ The cup now contains nondescript beige liquid and a smattering of foam - it’s hopeless to begin to contemplate starting another, because Killian always times breakfast perfectly to-

Felix’s alarm starts ringing insistently, and with a heavy sigh Killian marmalades the toast, piles everything onto the tray slightly more haphazardly than usual, and brings it to Felix.

Killian misses when he could watch Felix at peace. By the time Felix is awake and Killian comes to greet him, the Professor’s face has already settled into the practiced disdain that morning brings him. ‘Morning,’ Killian calls as he opens the door with his elbow, doing his quick inhale-and-hold-it in case there’s a pretty twink in Felix’s bed.

There’s not. And breathe.

Killian sets the tray down on the bedside table and stays silent, waiting. Felix appraises the tray with a cool gaze.

‘Killian,’ he says, with enough leeway in his tone for Killian’s heart to begin pounding. ‘You know I take my first coffee of the morning black.’ He’s reproachful, less sympathetic and more pitying.

‘Quite right, Professor,’ come the automatic words as Killian picks up the cup and returns to the kitchen to start the whole tedious process again. Even tediousness has a special significance here, though. Everything Killian does, he does it for Felix.

Killian has felt even more in a daze than usual today. By the time he gets back to Felix’s place, he’s frustrated with himself. He made a fool out of himself in the chapter review, nodding along but not really listening, which became apparent after one particularly unforgiving stretch of silence where Killian was supposed to be talking. ‘We may as well leave it there, then,’ Felix had said, his tone final. They broke half an hour early.

Killian doesn’t want to go home. The simplicity of the phrase is enough to make him stop in his tracks halfway up the cobbled hill to the apartment. When did it become ‘home’? It technically isn’t - Killian still pays rent to a student-sized cardboard box twenty minutes from campus, where he returns in shifts to wash his clothes and pick up mail. But he hasn’t spent a night there since Felix gave him the key a year ago. It feels alien to sleep alone in his flat, surrounded neither by the familiar leather-and-papers scent of Felix’s office, nor the comforting knowledge that Professor is breathing quietly in the next room. The idea that he’s still sleeping in the old flat and that this was all a terrible fever dream wakes Killian up at least once a week. Killian shakes his head fiercely, as though to shake all unwanted thoughts out of his brain. He’s being ungrateful. If he’s reluctant to go to Felix’s because he’s made a tit of himself, well… he shouldn’t have made a tit of himself. He shrugs. Simple enough. Killian continues up the hill and ignores the part inside him that implores him to turn away.

It’s dark by the time Killian unlocks the door - on his walk there the streetlamps were just beginning to flicker on, breaking the dusky early-evening monotone. To his surprise, when he gets there, lights are on in the apartment. He had been expecting to be alone this evening. It’s useless to try and quash the hope that Felix has remembered, that he’s planned something, so Killian reluctantly allows himself to foster the damaging expectation that Felix would ever consider the relationship worth commemorating.

‘Hello?’ Killian calls towards the bedroom light, uncertain. The door opens and Felix steps out. He’s still in the suit he’d been wearing at work but his hair, usually tightly pushed back, is now falling in front of his face and his glasses are tucked into his jacket pocket. With the warm glow of the soft bedroom lighting behind him, filtering through the salt-and-pepper strands around his head and bringing out the warm hazel in his eyes, he looks divinely formed.

‘You’re back earlier than anticipated,’ Felix replies disapprovingly.

‘I could say the same about you,’ Killian says, attempting to be jovial. He drops his satchel by the door and bends to untie his laces.

‘I was hoping you’d spend the evening going over what we discussed earlier today.’ Killian worries at his lip.

‘I did this afternoon, Felix. It just took less time than I expected.’

‘Ah. Possibly because you spent our meeting daydreaming?’

Killian might be a silly romantic, but it gives him butterflies when Felix uses the first person plural when it’s just them in the room. It makes Killian feel like he’s a part of something worthwhile. Something bigger. ‘You’re doing it again.’

‘I’m sorry, Felix,’ Killian sighs. ‘I’m having an off day.’

‘Well, you won’t be able to afford that luxury in the future, Killian. So I suppose it’s best you have your “off days” now.’

This is Felix telling Killian he’s forgiven. He’s crossing to the kitchen now, busying himself with something Killian can’t figure out. There are cupboards that are functionally Killian’s to use, and Felix is inexplicably looking in them. ‘There’s marking on the desk, by the way. I need it before noon tomorrow.’ Killian grimaces internally.

‘Right - do you mind if I start later? I need to eat. Sorry.’ In the bustle of the donor’s lunch and the ever-present need for notetaking, he’d completely forgotten to eat and was now uncomfortably ravenous.

Felix tuts impatiently, as though at a slow child. ‘I’m cooking tonight, Killian. You have thirty-three papers to mark. Off you go.’

‘Oh. Right, okay. Yeah, I’ll just go and… do that.’ Killian hides the surprise in his voice as he answers but allows the confusion to stay on his face. It’s not that Felix can’t cook, it’s just that he has at least two meals out a week anyway, and it’s easier to delegate now Killian lives with him. Killian’s heart is fluttering again. He leaves the office door open a crack and crosses to the record player in the corner before he starts working on the papers. Well-practiced, he squats in front of the vinyl cabinet below the record player and slides out the fifth from the left - a jazz recording, one of Felix’s favourites. Reverently, he lifts the lid on the record player and sets the album A-side up, gently placing the needle onto the record’s outermost rim. The volume is already at the perfect setting for Felix to have it as background music, and Killian holds his breath.

No complaints from the kitchen.

For the first time that day, he allows himself to smile.

Dinner is gnocchi, brown butter, and sage. Killian scarfs it down, utterly and blissfully unaware of himself until the moment he drops his fork onto the plate and Felix clears his throat. For reference, Felix is less than a third of the way through his plate by this point. ‘Keeping your head firmly in the clouds is hungry work, I see,’ Felix gently mocks, and Killian laughs - breathy and embarrassing.

‘Hah, yeah, funny how that is, isn’t it,’ are all the words that tumble from his mouth before he reminds himself how to keep it shut. ‘How was your day?’

‘The lunch was frightfully tedious - it’s a constant source of horror to me that I must attend lunch after lunch to explain why the arts are worth funding ad nauseam. They’re trying to frame knowledge as a business, Killian, through the structures of client and customer and value for money - it’s reprehensible. To be frank, anyone who requires an explanation as to why the pursuit of knowledge is man’s only truly selfless act is not someone with whom I would engage anywhere other than a business lunch. Hopefully they won’t bother us for at least another year.’

Killian has been nodding furiously along the entire time - there’s just something about hearing Felix talk, in memorising every modulation in pitch and tone, that’s more relaxing to Killian than almost anything else in the world. ‘Write that down, by the way.’

‘About the pursuit of knowledge?’

‘That’s the one. Good boy.’ Felix always says these things so casually, like he doesn’t know what it does to Killian - namely, his mouth gets dry, his heart starts pounding, and a powerful ripple of heat shocks through his body. Felix is carrying on like he doesn’t know or care, though. He’s looking across at Killian’s notebook - full to bursting with Felix’s wit and opinions. ‘I am rather astute, aren’t I,’ Felix muses aloud - more to himself than Killian, really.

‘You really are, Professor,’ Killian murmurs, awestruck. He’s noting down what Felix has said in a half-daze.

‘Is that blue ink, Killian?’ Felix asks sharply, and Killian’s face contorts very briefly into a frown.

‘It is. I’m sorry, I can’t find my black pen for the life of me.’

‘Blue ink is for degenerates,’ Felix sighs, fixing Killian with a particularly withering look. But we are degenerates. Killian bites back the reply, hoping Felix can’t make out the defiance in his eyes. ‘You’d best carry on with your marking,’ Felix says pointedly, and Killian understands. He’s been dismissed.

By the time Killian emerges from the office it’s gone ten and his brain is exhausted. He’s done just under half the essays - more thoroughly than he needed to, probably - only relenting when his eyes started losing focus. Killian knows he’s tired when it takes him five minutes to piece together one sentence from the sea of quoted Greek and tiny little numbers, and is grateful that he’s forced himself to stop. As he stands to head through to the kitchen, he’s faintly aware of his head spinning, of every bone in his body grumbling. But beneath that, there’s an uncomfortable tension - a pulling together of muscles, a rush of connection at each synapse. His mind might be tired, but his body is very much awake.

He lets his breath out in an angry little huff and decides to have a bath, hoping to soak out of his skin any intention of not falling straight to sleep. The coldness of the kitchen tile radiates through his socks, grounding him to the present despite the discomfort as he gets ready to soak. Pre-bath rituals complete with some green tea now steeping in his favourite mug, he heads to the bathroom. There’s a window by the bath that overlooks the capital, high up enough that Killian can bathe without accidentally causing indecent exposure. He loves looking down at the city while wrapped in silky bathwater, dreaming about the thousands of lives bustling in the streets below.

Killian’s so wrapped up in himself, taking his time getting the water temperature right before putting the plug in, finding his favourite lavender bubble bath, that he doesn’t notice Felix’s presence until the Professor knocks on the bathroom door. Killian nearly jumps out of his skin, dropping the lavender bottle in the bath in the process. ‘Oh, shit.’ He laments.

‘...Are you quite alright in there?’

‘Yeah,’ Killian responds as he hurries to unlock the door, wiping wet hands on his shirt. He turns away from Felix once the Professor’s been let in, immediately dropping to the floor to mop up the splashed water with the bath mat.‘Yeah, I was just gonna grab a bath, then I dropped the bottle in and the lid’s still on but the water went everywhere, so right now I just need to-‘

‘You’ve been very clumsy today, haven’t you, Killian?’ Felix interrupts. It’s not really a question. Killian’s frantic movements slow, stutter, then halt entirely. He knows the tone and he nods, still kneeling, eyes on the slowly filling bath. ‘First the coffee, now this.’ Killian holds his breath as Felix sits on the edge of the bath and - after a moment that feels eternal - tangles his hand in Killian’s hair. Felix’s hand settles there, fingers pressing comfortingly against Killian’s scalp, and he can’t help but whine and lean into the touch. ‘What are we going to do with you?’ Felix murmurs. Again, not really a question. Felix already knows exactly what he’s going to do. He just knows how to tease Killian, press his buttons, work him up with anticipation. ‘Shower, and then join me in bed.’ Felix decides. Killian can’t help but find the affectionate tone under the imperative (or at least, he believes it’s there, and that makes it true enough for him). ‘I have a surprise for you. Tonight is a special occasion, after all.’ Felix gives Killian’s hair a short, sharp tug - a nonverbal reminder to hurry up - and leaves.

Killian whines helplessly again, all thumbs as he reaches into the bath to drain the water, heart thudding exponentially faster while he contemplates what Felix could possibly have for him. He can’t help but ponder the implication - that Felix has remembered, that he wants to show Killian he cares. His knees weaken under him. Absolutely pathetic, he chastises himself. For the next ten minutes, he concentrates on meticulously cleaning himself. He wants to make himself as perfect as possible, a blank canvas for Felix to ruin as he pleases. An involuntary shiver ripples through his body. He loves knowing that Felix has been planning something. That he’s been sitting contemplating new ways to get inside Killian’s mind, under his skin, and touch the raw nerves that he finds there until Killian is almost driven mad with it. The fact that Killian is important enough for Felix to even spend time considering this… surprise, whatever it is, is perhaps the greatest gift of all.

Killian shuts the water off. The sudden silence makes him hyper-aware of his short, trembling breaths. He reaches towards the bathroom cabinet where he had carefully laid his cross after taking it off, but his hand falters. He’s aware of how ridiculous this sounds - how ridiculous Felix would find it - but he wants whatever’s going to happen to be between Felix and himself only. There’s some things that he’s allowed to keep secret, he thinks.

Wrapping himself in a fluffy towel, Killian steals softly across the kitchen floor to Felix’s bedroom. Light spills under the door, which is open ajar - but Killian still feels the need to knock. The space he and Felix share may well be as much his as Felix’s, but the Professor’s bedroom still feels strangely off-limits. Killian doesn’t go in alone. And even when Felix is in there, permission is required to enter.

‘Come in and close the door behind you,’ Killian hears from beyond the door, and follows suit immediately. It’s only once he’s heard the click of the door closing and they’re fully alone together that he looks over at the bed. Felix sits on top of the covers, reading. He puts the book down, takes his glasses off, and appraises Killian slowly. There are two items to his right; a familiar length of black rope, and an unfamiliar box - also black, understated and nondescript. Killian waits for Felix’s permission to sit, which is granted by a wave of the hand. He sits on the opposite corner of the bed to Felix, legs tucked under himself, determined not to wither under Felix’s gaze. ‘Well?’ Felix prompts. Killian is tongue-tied, and can only look helplessly at his Professor as his face reddens - embarrassed at not figuring out what Felix wanted quickly enough. ‘Aren’t you going to open it?’ Felix asks softly, and the tension in Killian’s chest dissipates into something manageable.

‘Y-yes, of course. Sorry,’ he mumbles, inching closer to what he can now be sure is the surprise. He’s slightly taken aback by the weight of the box as he picks it up, and his breath catches in his throat as he lifts the lid to reveal its cargo.

It’s a wand. The head is soft black silicone, perfectly smooth and about the size of Killian’s fist - the body tapers down into a dial and cordless end. The light below the dial is green; it’s fully charged. Killian tries to swallow but his mouth is suddenly dry. He settles instead for an audibly shaky intake of breath before he looks up at Felix.

The smirk on Felix’s face is maddeningly attractive, the upturn of his lip a promise that he knows exactly what to do with Killian’s new toy. ‘Thank you,’ Killian breathes.

‘You haven’t even begun to thank me,’ Felix responds, quick as ever - Killian wishes he had his notebook, because that one was good. He feels heat melting in his abdomen, a dangerous current pulling down at the simultaneous promise-threat. ‘Tell me, have you ever used one of these before?’ Killian shakes his head silently, still in awe. It’s true that he’s never even touched a wand before, but Killian had seen one used on someone else - the unforgiving hardness pressed against writhing and desperate flesh. A flush delicately creeps his way up his neck and across the tips of his ears. ‘It seems as though you know what to expect, though,’ Felix continues, tone low and dangerous. ‘I was going to allow you to feel it on your hand first, but now I see no reason to delay ourselves any further.’

‘I-I think that’s wise, Professor,’ Killian stammers, so desperate to ingratiate himself to the man who now holds the instrument of Killian’s pleasure-torture.

‘Oh, you think it’s wise, do you?’ There it is - the low growl, almost imperceptible, giving away Felix’s quiet affront. ‘Come here, boy.’

Killian crawls across the bed and, when he’s close enough, resists the urge to fall to his knees at Felix’s feet in supplication. It’s wise to start begging for mercy now, while he still has most of his faculties. Felix cuts his train of thought short as he twists his hand into Killian’s hair, tugging sharply to lift Killian’s head. ‘I don’t need to know what you think, Killian. That’s not what I have you here for.’ The slap round the face Killian gets for his actions is almost gentle - there’s a stolen moment of a caress that Felix gives Killian’s cheek after his hand has made contact with it.

‘Yes, Professor.’ Felix pushes him away and instead reaches for the rope. There’s a moment of untethered panic Killian feels in his chest at the loss of contact which takes most of his energy to quell.

‘Take that towel off,’ Felix orders offhandedly. On shaky legs, Killian stands, and lets the towel fall on the carpet below. Out of the corner of his eye, Felix watches. The soft curve of Killian’s thighs is only magnified by the gentle dusting of hair along the contours of his body. There’s some that gathers on his chest, an expanse of pale skin disrupted by two pink scars. The surrounding skin there is so sensitive - Felix can drive Killian mad by just tracing his fingers up and down the incisions. Felix looks away as Killian moves to get back on the bed. ‘Don’t leave it on the floor,’ he says in a practiced exasperated tone. Killian bends to pick it up and Felix allows himself a rare smile of appreciation. The boy’s skin is still slightly damp from the shower - the way the light catches the beads of water is rather appealing. Felix has finished unraveling the rope by now. Killian sits cross-legged on the bed, awaiting direction. ‘Come here,’ Felix says softly, and Killian crawls towards him, presenting his wrists to be tied. He knows the score and order of things by now; Felix is nothing if not methodical.

But tonight, as Killian should have guessed, is different. Felix frowns. ‘No, turn around. Hands behind your back.’ Killian does so, and feels Felix tug at his hands, pulling his arms into an uncomfortable shape for a moment. He winces just as Felix lets go, and the relief from the discomfort makes the throbbing he feels between his legs whenever Felix touches him all the sweeter. ‘Put them together.’

‘What?’

‘Palms together. Like you’re praying.’

Killian struggles for a moment - Felix’s hands are gripped just above each of his elbows, holding his upper arms firmly in place as the young man flounders in his grip. He can sense the Professor becoming more impatient with each passing second he fails to do what is asked of him, and just as he hears the click of Felix’s tongue preparing to tut, his fingertips press together in a prayer-like pose. His little fingers jut uncomfortably between the base of his shoulder blades, and he gasps out when Felix removes his hands from his upper arms and forces his palms together.

‘There. That wasn’t so difficult, was it?’

Killian is trying to summon the will to say that it was, actually, and if this is meant to be fun he has several complaints, when he feels the rope around his wrists. Ah, shit. He tries to see the bright side; at least he can relax his muscles a little when Felix is done. Felix is tying him meticulously, spending much longer than usual, and Killian bites his lip whenever he feels the rope tug tightly against his skin. Felix announces that he has finished the tie by pushing Killian face-down onto the bed. It takes Killian aback somewhat, and he is about to move reflexively when he feels Felix’s hand on the small of his back. The discomfort from the rope is still there, but the longer he lies there with his arms aching, the more the pain is accompanied by another sensation under his skin. Deeper, in his belly and between his legs, and warmer, the heat in him building steadily. Felix gives Killian’s arm a tug, and the rope bites deliciously when he does. Killian cries out softly.

‘Oh, bless.’

Felix’s voice is dripping with condescension. Two of his fingers trace up Killian’s thigh and begin to rub his t-dick lazily. Killian whines, pushing his hips back against Felix’s fingers. He can feel himself throbbing and hard under Felix’s touch already. When they’re out together, Felix need only brush his hand against the small of Killian’s back a handful of times before he’s desperate for him; Killian has felt this need since Felix told him to come to bed. He’s just been waiting for Felix’s sign that he ought to express it. So conditioned, like a good pet ought to be. Felix hums in approval when he sees the wetness dripping down towards Killian’s cock, where the Professor’s fingers still circle tightly.

‘This is why I can never get rid of you, darling boy. It would simply be too much effort to train someone else as thoroughly as I’ve trained you.’ Killian moans at that; a deep sound barely muffled by the pillow, and he feels another gush of wetness between his legs as his pussy flutters and tightens. ‘Oh dear. I do underestimate the effect that statements like that have on you, don’t I, dearest?’

Killian writhes, incoherent mumbles dropping from his mouth at the terms of endearment Felix is lavishing on him. The writhing sends pain shooting from his arms, still tightly bound behind him, but Killian relaxes into the discomfort. ‘I think you’re ready now,’ Felix murmurs, and Killian feels something pressing against his dick, soft but unyielding, curved, and his brain is still processing this new information when Felix turns it on.

The wand is soft at first, but the vibrations go deep, shaking Killian’s core as he eagerly pushes back against the instrument, grinding his pussy happily against the wand’s head. He feels the hand Felix had been touching him with on the back of his thigh, wiping it clean before settling it on the small of his back again.

‘Good boy,’ Felix mutters, and Killian tries to turn to look at him but finds the weight of his own shoulder keeping his face in the pillows. He has a sense of something - Felix’s voice, just for a moment, has dropped from the cadence and tone he uses to praise and into something else, something more calculating. But just as Killian begins to consider this train of thought, there is a click - and then two - as Felix turns the wand up and up again, and Killian bites down against the pillow as moans shudder through his body. The best way he can describe the wand’s sensation is insistent - it ripples through him continuously, and though Felix is shifting it around every so often there is not one moment where the feeling is dampened, not one second of respite from the feedback loop being created between Killian’s legs. Killian has stopped grinding against it because he doesn’t need to, but his hips have started stuttering of their own accord, jumping every so often and snapping back down against the toy.

He is dripping, the wetness collecting in a small pool between his knees on the duvet and serving to make the wand glide against him more easily. Felix has stopped moving it and is just holding it there, right underneath the head of his dick, so that with every involuntary movement of Killian’s body he is pressing the most sensitive part of himself against it. This causes him to flinch, which causes his arms to pull away from one another, which causes the ropes to dig harder into his skin, which causes Killian to whimper and his dick to throb, which means for a moment the wand is that much stronger against him.

‘You’re in quite the predicament, aren’t you. I’m amazed you haven’t come yet, dear.’

Twisting his head as far as he can, Killian grits out: ‘you haven’t - given me permission - Professor.’ The thought hasn’t even crossed his mind. He has learned control of his body, an extension of Felix’s command over him, and it comes so naturally to him now it is difficult to even consider breaking out of it.

‘Oh, of course. Such a good little thing, aren’t you? Go on, why don’t you come for me.’ Felix says it so offhandedly as he turns the toy’s intensity up once more, and Killian keens loudly. Just the act of receiving permission changes so much in an instant; he had been fighting, and now he relaxes into the way the vibrations rumble through him. Felix wants this, he thinks to himself. Felix wants me to make a mess of myself like the stupid little toy I am. He moans loudly, and Felix’s hand lifts from Killian’s back and twists into his hair. ‘I’m thinking of doing this to you more often, you know,’ the Professor mutters, and the feeling of his soft breath against Killian’s ear has his hips desperately grinding down against the toy again. ‘You’re so needy, it’d be far easier for me to force an orgasm out of you every so often to keep you at bay. So you can focus on your true purpose.’

Killian feels tears of gratitude gather at the corners of his eyes. The sensation is building in him now - he can feel it deep inside him, the desperate contracting of his pussy as more of his slick floods out of it, the sliding and shifting of his cock against the strong vibrations of the machine pressed unyielding against him. ‘That’s right,’ Felix coos, petting the back of Killian’s hair. ‘Really savour this one, darling. I understand the more of them I force you to have, the more unpleasant it is for you.’

With a surprised, choked gasp, Killian comes, his legs closing around the toy and frantically pushing it up against himself as his dick throbs and pulses. His pussy tightens, desperate for something to fill it as the orgasm rips through him. He is moaning into the pillow, thrusting down until his cock becomes too sensitive to bear it, at which point there is a groan followed by a long silence, and then higher, whimpering cries until Felix shuts the toy off.

He leaves it where it is pressed against Killian’s cock, though. As he slowly returns to Earth, Killian notes the burn in his shoulder muscles, waiting to feel Felix’s cool hands on the knots, to slowly untie him. But in his post-orgasmic state, Killian is completely pliant and does not struggle, let alone immediately process it, when Felix starts to wrap rope around his ankles. After several seconds utterly silent, Killian twists his head and asks, ‘what you doin’?’

Felix slaps the top of his thigh enough to sting. ‘What are you doing, Professor.’

‘S-sorry, Professor… what are you doing, Professor? What’d you mean about, uh… about forcing me to have… to have more…’

‘Well, it is a special occasion.’ Killian’s heart blooms in his chest. ‘I wanted you to have something to occupy you while I’m gone.’

The tie between Killian’s ankles is finished with a sharp tug, and the Professor moves onto something on his thighs. But Killian’s mind is singularly focused now, his heart floundering against his ribs, his face creased in a deep frown as he tries to figure out what the Professor could mean.

‘While… you’re gone, Professor?’

‘It’s my daughter’s birthday.’ Felix replies simply, before gripping Killian’s shoulder to turn him over, one hand holding the unfinished tie in place as he does so. Killian’s eyes blearily focus on Felix, whose attention is solely on the rope. Killian shakes his head.

‘N-no, it would’ve been in your diary… I would’ve seen…’

The Professor looks up at him at that.

‘That diary is for my work engagements, and personal engagements that happen to overlap with my academic ones. I only tell you what I need you to know, Killian, and I’m sure you’ll understand that I don’t need the assistance of a postgraduate barely out of his Master’s to remember my child’s birthday.’ Felix’s gaze is cool as he looks at Killian. Calm. He’s just stating facts, Killian reassures himself. This is what he’s like. Tears, again, at his eyes, but hotter this time. He can feel his face burning. Felix looks back down.

‘Her mother took her to dinner this year, but Yvette’s invited me to join her and her husband for drinks, hence the late hour. I’ve got no morning tutorials tomorrow; I doubt there would be any harm done.’ Killian nods. Felix didn’t have to volunteer that information, and it would have been no right of Killian’s to ask, but he wanted Killian to know. Felix is so thoughtful, even at times like this. But still…

‘Perhaps I could- you might need- in case you say anything noteworthy-’

Felix chuckles to himself. Killian hates when he does that. Like he’s too stupid to even be in on the joke. But there’s a reason, he reminds himself, always a reason.

‘You think my daughter would appreciate my turning up to her birthday celebrations with my pet whore?’

Killian lets out one shameful sob as his hips jump under Felix’s hands. Felix tuts. ‘Be still, boy. You’re meant to enjoy this.’

Killian cranes his neck up to see what Felix is actually doing. The tie is nearly finished; the toy is now held firmly against Killian’s cock by his own legs, pulled up to sit flush against him by ties that sit above his hips. He is trapped. ‘Felix, what-’

‘I had a look at those papers you marked before I came in to see you. The last handful are sloppy, Killian, and I couldn’t have you trying to mark any more when you’re clearly exhausted and in need of… something.’ Felix’s gaze drops pointedly to the wet spot on the duvet. ‘This will keep you busy, stop you from moping while I’m out and, most importantly, keep you from attempting to finish off the rest of those papers even more pitifully than before. Also,’ and it is at this point that Felix leans over him, and Killian can see how hard he is, his cock straining against his suit trousers, ‘I rather like the idea of you tied up like this, waiting for me to come home.’ He flicks the toy on again, and Killian whimpers.

‘But Felix-’ the older man gives him a sharp look, and Killian corrects himself, ‘Professor, won’t I be… what if it’s too much?’

‘It will run out of battery,’ the Professor responds airily, ‘eventually.’ He pulls at Killian’s shoulder again until the boy is laid on his side, and turns the toy up higher until Killian is gasping for breath, his sensitive cock pulsing already with the onslaught of sensation. Killian feels his muscles throb again as the Professor releases his grip on Killian’s shoulder. ‘Remember to keep wiggling your fingers, dear. I did make that quite tight.’

Killian opens his mouth to thank the Professor for his advice, thank him for going out of his way to do all this to save Killian from himself, to tell him to enjoy his night, but is cut off by the sound of a ringing phone from Felix’s jacket. Felix waves an impatient hand at Killian, having sensed he was going to speak, and picks it up.

‘Hello? Yes, darling, I’m almost there… traffic’s bloody awful, I’m afraid. Taxi driver’s absolutely not helping. He’s not getting a tip.’ He shares a laugh, Killian presumes, with his daughter, and he’d be pleased to see him so happy if it weren’t for the insistent buzzing between his legs, the pressure building before Felix has even left. Felix hangs up. ‘What was it you were going to say?’ Killian swallows.

‘How old is she?’

‘Yvette? She’s twenty-seven today, not that it’s any of your business.’

‘Of course, Professor. I’m sorry.’

Felix sighs.

‘You are pitiful, Killian.’ He turns the wand up one last time and goes to leave. ‘Have fun.’

Killian drops his head to the bed and starts to moan and shudder, relaxing once again into the sensation, trying to ignore the weight in his chest and the anxiety clawing at his stomach and the restless ache in his bound arms. Stopping in the door, Felix takes one look back at him, pale skin turned red and purple between the black ropes, body shifting and rippling under the onslaught, sighs, and turns off the light.

The bedroom door clicks shut, then the front door, the locks fall into place, and Killian is left alone with only the weak light of the toy between his legs to illuminate him.

He sobs his way through his next orgasm, which turns to screams as the toy doesn’t stop, the intensity felt so much more keenly in his tragic and post-orgasmic state. The boy has the decency to bite the pillow under his head as the toy rips them out of him, again and again, and all he can think of is Felix, and what the lesson here may be, and the fact that he’s four years younger than his daughter, that Felix is easily old enough to be his father, but that Felix has never remembered his birthday. When he thinks of this he comes hard and angry, tearing at the pillow with his teeth, and growling and sobbing until - mercifully - the fucking thing dies.

Killian cannot count the orgasms forced from him, but he can feel the number in his pelvic muscles, aching from the shuddering desperate motions he’d been making for hours. His arms and shoulders burn but he has run out of tears, so he sobs dry and resigned into the pillow until he falls into some kind of sleep.

The sleep is not restful; Killian only gets a few minutes at a time, sometimes half an hour, before he shifts unconsciously and sends a pain searing down his spine or his arms. Whenever he wakes, he tries to remember to wiggle his fingers. They’re tingly. He has just dropped off again when he’s woken by keys jingling, and his eyes light up. Felix is home. He hears footsteps crossing the threshold, but they’re heavy, heavier than Felix’s. Christ, he thinks, Felix has brought some musclebound twunk home. Killian lets out a sigh, waiting for the telltale click of Felix’s footsteps. The light clicks on, the front door closes. Still only one set of footsteps in the house, and if he strains his neck, Killian can make out a shadow under the door. His chest rises and falls rapidly as he turns to bite the pillow again to stay as silent as possible. Whimpers of fear are already rising in him, his sleep-deprived mind dragging forward nightmare scenarios to play with the panic.

The footsteps are getting closer. He screws his eyes shut. Tries to will himself out of existence. The door handle turns, and the door swings open. Orange bursts in front of his eyelids as the light switch clicks on, and Killian hears a sharp inhale and a long exhale. Hyperventilating, he scrambles to look; at some point in the night he fell forwards, and he struggles around on the bed to flip over and see this intruder. His thrashing around is useless, and soon he feels broad, warm hands lifting him onto his back. Killian squints up against the bright light, and is shocked to see that he… recognises this man. The man is physically imposing, tall and wide, with the weathered-muscle shoulders of someone past their physical prime but so set in himself that the structures of strength remain, stubborn against the greying stubble on the man’s jaw and the soft curve of his belly. His eyes are dark and glint down at Killian with menace, with glee.

It takes him a second to place, but no, this is-

‘Josef…’ Killian says. The bouncer at the fancy bar downtown where Felix tends to host his… parties. He turns a blind eye to a lot, provided Felix tips him generously at the end of each semester. ‘What are you doing in m- in Felix’s house? Why do you have the keys?’ His mind already begins to run through the infinite horrible possibilities - that the security guard, tired of his job, maybe, had snapped, assaulted Felix and had come here to find what valuables he could before fleeing the country. Maybe he was here to kidnap Killian. Maybe-

‘Felix sends his apologies,’ the man laughs, grinning down at Killian’s bound and aching body. ‘He was just about to head back to you when this kid walked in - exactly his type. Like you, y’know, but… kinda skinnier.’ He tilts his head. ‘Less tired-looking. Had to ID him and all. Anyway, the prof was fretting about you being here, all…’ he gestures to Killian’s predicament. ‘So I told him I’d come back here and take care of you. As a favour. He was very grateful.’ He smiles. Killian feels sick, and tries to concentrate on what Josef said - that Felix was worried about him. It warms his heart a little. But Josef still hasn’t taken his hands off him.

‘I refuse to believe he allowed this,’ Killian stammers, trying indignantly to struggle out of Josef’s grip. ‘He told me he’d be back. He told me he was coming home.’

‘Well, he told me to take his keys and get you out of this. Just in time, too. You’re looking pretty rough back there.’ Now that he mentions it, Killian has to admit that his arms are fucking killing him. Josef reaches into a drawer in the side table, and Killian thinks of protesting before he sees a familiar flash of silver. ‘Right where he said they’d be,’ he says to Killian, holding the safety scissors aloft. ‘Now do you believe me?’ Killian wavers still. ‘Look, you can say no if you want, but Felix looked pretty determined to fuck that guy.’

Killian imagines what this boy looks like. If he knows Felix, Killian doubts he’s over twenty. Probably exactly like him, a fresher wandering about and exploring, waiting for someone to take pity. His lip curls into a small sneer. Not exactly like him, though. Because Felix had said he was indispensable. That he could never get rid of him. He turns to Josef.

‘Then cut me free, please.’

Josef obliges, flipping Killian back over and making short work of the intricate ties binding Killian’s arms together. He hisses in pain as the movement and feeling return to his forearms, his wrists, his fingers, and he allows them to fall uselessly to his sides. Josef then turns his attention to the rope around Killian’s hips and between his legs, and pulls the toy out from between Killian’s thighs. Killian winces when he pulls it away, the head of his cock still so sensitive, the wand making a soft sound as it is pulled from the wetness between Killian’s legs. Last to go are the ties on his ankles. Killian shifts, intending to move, before noticing that Josef is still straddling him at the knees. The man’s body weight shifts up until he is astride Killian’s ass. Had he missed some rope? Killian flexes his arms; no, nothing still wrapped around him, no reason for him to…

He feels a rough hand caress his back. ‘It’s so close to the end of the semester, right… Felix said he thought I should take my own bonus tonight.’ Killian’s blood runs cold.

‘H…’ the sound dies on his tongue, his mouth suddenly dry. ‘He wouldn’t.’

‘But he did, darlin’.’ Killian feels something pressing against the crack of his ass, clad in jeans, rough against his soft skin. ‘Now, listen, I’ve helped you out here. Think I deserve a little something in return.’

Christ, Killian thinks, and his mind jumps to his cross - still where he left it on the bathroom shelf. He is alone in this place. And so he tries, really tries, to fight. But he’s so tired. He’s had less than an hour of sleep, his arms are useless, all pins and needles when he tries to force them to move, and he aches between his legs. He tries to kick Josef, bringing his heels up to catch the man in the back, but the bouncer catches his foot easily and twists it as Killian yelps.

‘Yeah, I thought so… see, I was thinkin’ about not lettin’ you out first first, then I took one look at you and knew, even untied, you’d be too weak to stop it from happening.’

Killian hears the sick metallic crunch of a zipper. Josef moves back between his legs, one strong hand on each of Killian’s thighs. And Killian feels himself leaning into the touch. Felix so rarely touches him like this. His hands always feel so dispassionate, but Josef’s…

No. No, this is wrong; Felix can’t have meant for Josef to do this. They’ve never talked about it. Killian shakes his head. ‘Stop.’ He mumbles.

Josef pushes his legs apart. Killian tenses in fear at the sensation of the fat head of Josef’s cock rubbing against his hole. ‘What’s that?’

‘Stop it.’

‘Ah, you’re all wet still… gotta thank Felix for gettin’ you ready like that. I can just slide right in.’

He does, and Killian lets out a choked cry. ‘Stop it,’ he tries to insist, wriggling pitifully, but the movement just makes Josef groan as he fills Killian’s pussy with his thick cock, forcing the boy’s legs apart farther to gaze down at the way the boy’s hole is swallowing him.

‘You know, fr’a boy who’s tryna tell me you don’t want it, you’re taking my cock awful well,’ he sneers, and Killian winces as the zipper brushes his cock with every thrust the man makes inside of him, but he doesn’t reply.

‘Aw, silent treatment, is it? Tha’s alright. Don’t need you to talk. Just need you to keep your legs open.’ His thrusts are rough and hard, and Killian’s body shifts and rocks with every movement. Killian’s head is turned to one side. He imagines it’s Felix fucking him like this. But Felix’s touches are so different; his hands are cool, smaller than Josef’s, and he rarely holds Killian down like Josef is. He’s usually pinching, scratching, slapping, pulling Killian’s hair; a constant onslaught of attack, physical and often verbal, always designed to make Killian arch his back in a more pleasing way, or take him deeper, or moan differently.

‘Felix…’ Killian whispers, eyes closed, pretending.

‘No,’ says Josef as he rolls his hips hard against the boy beneath him. ‘Don’t do that,’ he says between breaths. ‘Impolite.’ One of his hands moves from its place on Killian’s thigh, round to his front, groping and feeling for his dick. Killian tries to remain impassive, but can’t hide the way he jumps, gripping Josef’s cock tighter as his thumb presses down against the sensitive flesh. ‘You’re here.’ Josef mutters. He starts rubbing Killian’s cock in time with his thrusts. ‘Right here. With me.’ The man’s insistent toying with his cock combined with the rough thrusts into him begins to drag small moans and whimpers out of Killian. He whines helplessly every time Josef bottoms out inside him, a pathetic little mewl that he hates to admit sounds, ever so slightly, like he is enjoying this.

‘Yeah, fuck,’ Josef murmurs, and Killian thinks he’s talking to himself at first. ‘Said you’d be like this. Said it wouldn’t take you- long- to warm up to me.’

‘No he didn’t,’ Killian insists desperately, but Josef’s cock fills him so deeply for a moment that his last word is drawn into a whine. Josef laughs again. His laugh is crackly, a smoker’s chuckle, a laugh that Killian had come to appreciate over time. Not now, though. Not any more.

‘Yeah, he did. Talks to me ‘bout you. Tells me you’re a whore.’ Killian feels Josef’s elbow at the top of his spine as the man puts more of his weight onto him, leaving himself freer to thrust up harder into him. Every inch of the man’s dick ebbs and fuels the ache in Killian’s pussy at once, and his eyes squeeze shut as the man’s nicotine-laced breath tickles his earlobe. ‘Said he’s been thinkin’- ‘bout doing this - fr’a while. Whorin’ you out. Teachin’ you your place.’

Killian’s pussy spasms around Josef’s cock.

‘Like fucking clockwork.’

That’s what makes Killian lose it. How dare he? How dare he have the audacity to say these things, to assume he knows Killian, knows him like Felix does? He twists and wriggles, and the burst of adrenaline combined with the surprise of it allows him to struggle off Josef’s cock and up the bed slightly. There is a silence from behind him, before Josef grabs his hair and pulls his head upwards. Killian yelps in fear. Jesus, did he really think this would be enough?

‘Oh, you stupid bitch.’ Josef throws him back down on the bed, hard enough to make the frame shudder. Breathing heavily, he pushes Killian’s legs further apart.

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ Killian stammers.

‘Shut it. Need an incentive to keep still? I’ll give you a fucking incentive.’ Josef positions his cock, still dripping with Killian’s wetness, at Killian’s asshole. ‘Whore. Felix said you didn’t have it in you to fight. That you’d agree to it soon as I told you he allowed it. Didn’t say anything about having to teach you a fucking lesson.’

Killian begins to shake his head frantically. It’s rare that Felix fucks his ass, and Killian secretly relishes it because it’s one of the only times Felix really is careful with him. ‘Please don’t. It won’t go in. It won’t, I’m not ready, I don’t know where the lube is.’

‘Keep your fucking mouth shut, boy,’ Josef says, twisting his hand in Killian’s hair tighter as he grunts and pushes the slick head of his cock against Killian’s ass again. He’s pushing and pushing, and Killian is still, breathing fast like a frightened animal. Josef has his elbow screwed against Killian’s spine. There is no escaping it. He just has to wait until Josef realises he can’t fuck him like this. But Josef is still pushing, holding his cock with his free hand, forcing and forcing against the first tight ring of muscle until-

Killian howls in pain. He feels something give, and Josef’s cock, thick enough to have made his pussy feel stretched, sore, bruised, slides into his ass. Josef shoves Killian’s face down into the pillow, forearm on the back of his neck as Killian screams and sobs at the feeling, so alien, tearing through him. His arms are still weak but they are flailing in an attempt to grip onto anything as some kind of tether. He finds the bedpost and grips for dear life. Josef settles himself inside Killian and just as the pain starts to ebb away, Josef begins to move.

It does not feel like Killian remembered it. Josef is so big, and the slow burn of the stretch and endorphins from the pain are morphing into some kind of pleasurable haze, with the punctuation of a loud, low groan from the man on top of him. Josef lets himself fall onto Killian, keeping him still through the weight of muscle and flesh alone, as his cock pumps in and out of him. His stubble scratches Killian’s back. Killian is somewhat aware that he is still crying.

‘Shh, don’t cry,’ Josef mutters, and Killian lets out a moan-whimper at the sensation of Josef’s cock filling and stretching him completely once again. ‘Fuck, so tight. So good. See, you are good, aren’t you. You know how to be good.’

‘Mm-hmm,’ Killian whines.

‘Felix knows what’s best for you, see,’ Josef mutters, and Killian can smell the whiskey on his breath now he’s so close. ‘Wouldn’t’ve sent me here if he din’t know there was somethin’ I could give you.’

His hand slides beneath Killian’s body again, and Killian allows it.

‘Yeah, tha’s it. G’na make you come, baby boy,’ and Killian cringes at the pet name even as his cock twitches under Josef’s fingers. ‘G’na make you come before I fill you up.’

Panic sets in again.

‘Please don’t come in me,’ Killian whispers, ‘please, Felix will be angry.’

‘Shh, shh,’ Josef mutters. He is moving slower than when he was fucking Killian’s pussy, but there’s more weight behind his thrusts, and Killian feels each one ripple through him. There is some deep satisfaction in the way Josef’s cock stretches him open. Killian thinks about how he will look in the morning, hole puffy and abused, dripping with another man’s cum. He hates the sick thrill it gives him to know that Felix will see that. It runs down the back of his neck like a hot knife, and he doesn’t know if the sensation is driven by arousal or fear.

‘I’m gonna come in you, pretty boy.’ His rough fingers rub side-to-side over Killian’s throbbing cock. ‘Gonna fill you up like a whore. Felix must’ve known I’d do that to you. And he knows what you need, don’t he?’

Killian nods. He can’t not.

‘You just lie there n’take it, pretty whore. Take it for Felix.’

Killian allows himself, for a moment, to really think about Felix’s responsibility in all this. He thinks about how, yes, Felix has known Josef for a very long time and, yes, is probably able to make some fairly astute guesses as to what Josef might do to whatever poor thing he was burying himself in. And Felix has decided he needs this.

‘I need this,’ Killian murmurs to himself as Josef thrusts into him. ‘I need this.’ It becomes louder, and Josef nods.

‘Tha’s it. Good boy,’ he mutters approvingly, still stroking Killian’s cock.

‘Need to be good for him,’ says Killian, pressing his hips down into Josef’s hand. The feeling of Josef stretching and fucking his ass open is mixing with the sparks of pleasure Killian feels when Josef’s fingers brush his cock. Mouth open, Killian is panting, arching his back to meet Josef’s thrusts, letting the man rub his cock until he is moaning underneath him.

‘Faster,’ Killian pleads. ‘Harder.’ He’s not even sure what he’s asking for but Josef picks the pace of his thrusts up. Their skin slaps together as Josef grunts in exertion, burying himself in Killian’s ass over and over, forcing the boy’s tight hole open around him. Josef shifts his hand, sliding his fingers into Killian’s wet pussy and pressing the base of his callused palm against Killian’s cock. His movements are imprecise but consistent, his rough hand dragging over Killian’s dick as his thick fingers rub insistently at Killian’s g-spot. Killian can feel himself trapped, Josef’s fingers crowding into his pussy, Josef’s cock pounding into his hole, and all that weight pressed down to force Killian to grind his desperate cock against Josef’s open hand. Killian feels his muscles starting to tense erratically. His pussy clenches around Josef’s fingers.

He needs this.

‘I need you to come in me,’ Killian whimpers.

‘Not till you do first, baby boy.’

Killian thinks of how proud Felix will be of him when he finds out how well he took Josef’s cock, and comes all over Josef’s hand with a shuddering cry. His cock spasms and pulses, he feels his pussy and ass tighten desperately and spasmodically, and he hears Josef groan behind him as that - apparently - is what has pushed him over the edge. Killian feels his ass fill with cum, warm and thick, deep inside him.

Killian muses that he and Felix have never come at the same time as Josef collapses onto him.

He is dimly aware, some time later, of the man pulling out and getting off him, walking away and running the shower in the bathroom. His eyelids are heavy, and he knows sleep is about to take him. Killian smiles softly, thinking about Felix coming home the next morning. Maybe he’ll bring breakfast from the pastry shop they stop at sometimes. He’ll forgive Killian, he’s sure.

‘One minute,’ Felix says to the impressionable young gentleman with whom he’s spent the night and sunrise. ‘I just have to take care of something in the apartment.’ Leaving the boy in the hall, he steps into his home. It reeks of sex. The bedroom door is open, as are some of the kitchen cupboards. Josef had made his way here, he notes with a smile. Peering around the bedroom door, he sees Killian fast asleep, naked, ass in the air, cum dripping down his leg. He frowns. He didn’t recall giving Josef permission to do that. Well, Killian should have known better than to just allow him. They’ll be having words later, Felix imagines. He tears a sheet of notepaper out of one of Killian’s books - there are a few lines of uninspiring poetry tarnishing the page, so he draws a line through them and writes a note below. The black biro block capitals read: ‘Out for breakfast. Lunch seminar as per usual. Do try to turn up somewhat presentably. Professor.’

Replacing the pen in his blazer pocket, Felix grabs his umbrella from the coat rack - the weather is pitiful today - and slips back out of the front door to his young friend. ‘Thank you for waiting, dear boy,’ he murmurs. The boy grins at him. His teeth are crooked. Felix internally sighs.

Killian’s alarm rings at seven. It takes him longer to wake up, as it’s slightly muted through the bedroom wall. But when he does, he wakes aching and alone, eyes blurred and burning with sleep, and cold, so cold, from the mountain air.

#my work #10k #felix and killian

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innuendostudios · 5 years

Video

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Here’s How to Radicalize a Normie, a video essay on how the Alt-Right and their fellow travelers recruit. Clocking in at 41 minutes, 6756 words, 633 individual drawings, and 27 sources (including three full books), it is by far the longest and most heavily-researched video in The Alt-Right Playbook. I am very tired.

It took so long to put this behemoth together that my Patreon started to dip. So, maybe a little more than usual, if you want to keep seeing videos like these, please consider backing me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

Say, for the sake of argument, your friend Gabe is starting to worry you.

Gabe’s always been just, you know, a regular guy. Not very political. He likes video games, sci-fi, comics, Star Wars, and anime. White guy shit. The only offbeat thing about him is you suspect there’s like a 20% chance he’s a furry. For all intents and purposes, Gabe is a normie.

But recently Gabe’s been spending a lot of time on some radically conservative forums, and listening to radically conservative podcasts, and picking some radically conservative arguments with you and your friends. You never would have expected this, not from Gabe, and, given the speed it’s happened, it’s worrying to think where it might be headed.

How have the Alt-Right gotten their hooks into your friend?

If you’ve ever known a Gabe, this video is for you. Here’s How to Radicalize a Normie.

Step 1: Identify the Audience

What you need to know before we begin is: around 2013, the Nazis went online.

Hate groups in the US, as tracked by the Southern Poverty Law Center, had been growing in number since the noughts, but, between 2012 and 2014, they dropped by almost a quarter. Patriot groups dropped by over a third. However, hate crimes stayed about the same. Radical conservatism was not shrinking, but decentralizing. Still radical, still often violent, but now full of white nationalist nomads unlikely to join a formal organization.

This didn’t make them harmless. What it did was protect their asses from the typical hate group cycle: getting the public’s attention, making allies in conservative media, swelling their numbers, and then eventually disgracing themselves with failures, infighting, and, often enough, members committing horrific acts of violence, which come with social and sometimes legal consequences for all the other members.

So the Alt-Right and their fellow travelers these days don’t so much have members. They have hashtags, followers, viewers, and subscribers. This insulates them from their own audience. If Gabe, as a member of that audience, were to go out and commit a crime on their behalf, there’d be little doubt they had a hand in radicalizing him, but it’d be very hard to claim they told him to do it. On some of these sites, where Gabe spends hours and hours of his day, he’s never created an account or left a comment; the people radicalizing him don’t even know he’s there.

This distributed nature is what makes the Alt-Right, and the movements connected to it, unique. (You may remember a notable proof-of-concept for this strategy.) Doing almost everything online has, as compared with traditional hate movements, dramatically increased their reach and inoculated them from consequence. The trade-off, as we will see, is a lack of control.

And so we come to Gabe.

Gabe exists at the intersection of the kinds of people the Alt-Right is looking for - straight white cis men who feel emasculated by modern society, primarily, though they do make exceptions - and the kinds of people who are vulnerable to recruitment. Gabe fits the first profile in that he got bullied in high school, and often feels he has to hide his nerdy side for fear of getting ridiculed. The Alt-Right also has success with men who can’t get laid or recently got divorced or feel anxious about an influx of non-white people in their community. These things can make one feel like less than the confident white man they’re “supposed” to be. And it’s the closest they will ever come to being minoritized.

Regarding the second profile, it’s important to know that Gabe is not categorically different from you or me. He’s a cishet white dude - his problems are not unique. There isn’t a ton of research into the demography of the Alt-Right, but there may be a higher-than-average chance Gabe has a history of being abused or comes from a broken home. You don’t know if it’s true of Gabe, he’s never said. But most abuse survivors don’t become Nazis. The things that make people like Gabe recruitable tend to be situational: it happens often during periods of transition, as dramatic as the death of a loved or as benign as moving to a new city. Things that make people ask big life questions. Gabe has concerns like economic precarity, not knowing his place in a changing world, stressful working conditions. In other words, Gabe is suffering under late capitalism, same as everyone, and it’s entirely plausible he could have gone down the path to becoming a Leftist.

This is not to make an “economic anxiety” argument: the animating force of the Far Right is and always has been bigotry. But the Alt-Right targets Gabe by treating his “economic anxiety” as one of many things bigotry can be sold as a solution to. It is their aim that, when dissatisfied white men go looking for answers, they find the Alt-Right before they find us.

Step Two: Establish a Community

Were Gabe pledging an old-school hate movement, there would probably be a recruiter to usher him into an existing community. But that’s the kind of formalized interaction modern extremists try to avoid. Online extremism has many points of entry, and everybody’s journey is unique, so rather than be comprehensive we will focus on what are, in my estimation, the two most common pathways: the Far Right creates a community Gabe is likely to stumble into, or infiltrates a community Gabe is already in.

The stumble-upon method has two main branches, one of which is just “Gabe ends up on a chan board,” which we’ve already done a video about. The other is kind of the polar opposite of 4chan’s cult of anonymity: Gabe ends up in the fandom of a Far Right thought leader.

These folks are charismatic media personalities (that’s charismatic according to Gabe’s tastes, not ours; I don’t understand it, either). These personalities may gain traction on any number of platforms, from podcasts to reportage to blogging, though the most effective platform for redpilling is, and yes I am biting the hand that feeds me, YouTube. They may get Gabe’s attention through fairly standard means, like talking about or even generating controversy to get themselves trending, while some of the more committed will employ dubious SEO tactics like clickbait, google bombing, and data voids (just pause for definitions, we don’t have time).

What they tend to have in common, especially the most accessible ones, is that they don’t present themselves as entry points to the radical Right. In fact, many did not set out to be Far Right thought leaders, and may not think of themselves as such (though they are often selling products, of which the Alt-Right are among their biggest purchasers, and it’s not like they’re turning the money away). How they present is the same way anyone presents who wants to be successful on social media: accessible, approachable, authentic. The face-to-face relationship a budding extremist forms with their recruiter or the leader of their hate group’s local chapter are here folded into one parasocial relationship with a complete stranger.

Why this person appeals to Gabe is they’re not selling politics as politics, but conservatism as a kind of lifestyle brand. They rely heavily on criticizing or ridiculing the Left: feminists are oversensitive, Black people unintelligent, queer folks doomed to loneliness, and trans people insane; I dunno if it’s a coincidence that these are all things Gabe thinks about himself in his low moments. By contrast, they don’t sell conservatism as having sounder policies or a more coherent moral framework, but that abandoning progressive principles and embracing conservative ones will make Gabe happier. Remember, Gabe isn’t looking for white nationalism or misogyny, what he wants is the cure to soul-sickness, and these friendly micro-celebs are here to offer a shot of life advice with politics as the chaser. It is extremely important that politics be presented as a set of affects, not a set of beliefs.

The second pathway is infiltration, which is its own beast. Media personalities sometimes become gateways to the Right almost by accident: they do something edgy, a part of their audience reacts positively, and, facing no real consequence, they do it more; this leads to further positive reinforcement from conservative fans, the rest of the audience acclimates, and the cycle repeats, the personality pushing the envelope further and further based on what flies with their increasingly conservative audience. In this way, they become a right-wing figure by both radicalizing and being radicalized by their audience.

Infiltration is deliberate.

The Far Right will reliably target any community that has 1) a large, white, male population, 2) whose niche interests allow them to feel vaguely marginalized, and 3) who are not used to progressive critique of said interests. This isn’t to say progressive critique doesn’t exist, or hasn’t been baked into the property from the beginning, but that it has been, so far, easy for white guys to ignore. As such, progressives within that community probably don’t talk politics much, and women and minorities are perfectly welcome to post, same as anyone, but just, you know, don’t, don’t make identity politics, you know, like, a thing.

Given Gabe’s proclivities, he’s probably already in a number of fan communities where he can geek out and not get teased. And this is where the Far Right will go looking for him

Communities are at their most vulnerable to infiltration at times of political discord. This can happen naturally - say, a new property in the fandom has a Black protagonist - or it can be provoked - say, a bunch of channers join the forum and say provocative things about race to get people arguing - or both. Left to its own devices, the community might sort out its differences and maybe even come out more progressive than they started. But, with the right pressure applied in the right moment, these communities can devolve into arguments about the need to remove a nebulously-defined “politics” from the conversation.

The adage about bros on the internet is “‘political’ means anything I disagree with,” but it’d be more accurate to say, here, “‘political’ means anything on which the community disagrees.” For instance, “Nazis are bad” is an apolitical statement because everyone in the community agrees. It’s common sense, and therefore neutral. But, paradoxically, “Nazis are good” is also apolitical; because “Nazis are bad” is the consensus, “Nazis are good” must be just an edgy joke, and, even if not, the community already believes the opposite, so the statement is harmless. Tolerable. However, “feminism is good” is a political statement, because the community hasn’t reached consensus. It is debatable, and therefore political, and you should stop talking about it. And making political arguments, no matter how rational, is having an agenda, and having an agenda is ruining the community.

(Now, it is curious how the things that provoke the most disagreement tend to be whichever ones make white dudes uncomfortable. One of life’s great, unanswerable mysteries.)

You can gather where this is going: a community that doesn’t tolerate progressivism but does tolerate Nazism is going to start collecting Nazis, Nazis whose goal is to drive a wedge between the community and the Left. Once the Left acknowledges, “Hey, your community’s developing a Nazi problem,” the Nazis - who are, remember, trusted, apolitical members of the community who might just be kidding about all the Nazi shit - say, “Did you hear that, guys?! Those cultural Marxists just called all of us Nazis!” Wedge. Similarly, any community members who say, “but Nazis though” are framed as infiltrators pushing an agenda, even if they’ve been there longer than the Nazis have. They get the wedge, too.

This is how fandoms radicalize. They are built as - yeah, I’ll say it - safe spaces for nerds, weebs, and furries, and are told that the Left is a threat to their safety. Given a choice between leaving a community that has mattered to him for years and simply adjusting to the community’s shifting politics, the assumption is that Gabe will stay. This assumption is right often enough that a lot of fandoms have been colonized.

What is true of both of these methods - Gabe finding the Right or the Right finding him - is that Gabe does not come nor stay for the ideology. He’s here for the community, the sense of belonging, of being with his people, of having his fears validated and his enjoyment shared. The ideology is simply the price of admission.

Step Three: Isolate

There is a vast, interconnected network of Far Right communities out there, and Gabe is, at this point, only on the periphery. In order to keep him in, they need to disrupt his relationships to other communities, and become, more and more, his primary online social space. Having made this space hostile to the Left, they now seek to break his connections to progressives elsewhere in his life.

This is hard to do online. The whole appeal of moving radicalism to the internet is that your away-from-keyboard life doesn’t have to change. You are crypto the moment you log off. Some thought leaders will encourage their audience to cut ties with Family of Origin, or “deFOO,” but, even then, they can’t monitor whether the audience has actually done it the way an in-person movement could. And so alienating Gabe from the Left is less controlled, and, consequently, may be less total. How much Gabe isolates is up to him.

But the vast majority of Far Right media presumes an alienation from the Left. Part of conservative bloggers and YouTubers making the Left look pathetic is doing a lot take-downs and responses. This is a constant repetition of the Left’s arguments for the purpose of mockery, and, for Gabe, it starts to replace any engagement with progressive media directly. He soon knows the Left only through caricature. It also trains him, if he does directly engage, to approach the Left with the same combative stance as his role models. (For reference, see my comment section.) And this is only if he doesn’t partake in one of the many active boycotts of “SJW media.”

In addition to mocking the Left’s arguments, they also, curiously, appropriate them. This is one part sanitization: liberal centrism is more socially acceptable; indeed, many figures on the outer layers think of themselves as moderates, even as they serve as gateways to radicalism. But, also, many of Gabe’s problems could be addressed by progressive leftism, so they sell him racist, sexist versions of it. Yes, there is a problem with workers being underpaid and overextended, but the solution isn’t unions, it’s deporting immigrants; yes, there is a chronic loneliness and anger to being a man in the modern age, but it’s not because of the toxic masculine expectations placed on you by the patriarchy, it’s women being slutty; yes, wealth disparity does mean a tiny percentage of elites have more influence over culture and politics than the rest of us combined, but the problem isn’t capitalism, it’s the Jews. And it’s hard for Gabe to reject these ideas without, in the process, rejecting the progressive ideas they’re copied from; the Right’s “take the red pill” is, to the untrained eye, similar to the Left’s “get woke.” (Or, at least, the bowdlerized version of “get woke” that is no longer specifically about race which came to fashion when white people started saying it, grumble grumble.)

Take the red pill or reject them both; either is a step to the right.

As this rhetoric slips into his day-to-day conversation, even as seemingly harmless “irreverence,” it may strain relationships with people who are not entertained by this shit. Off-color comments about race and gender can certainly be wearying for female and non-white friends, which can lead to a passive distance or an eventual confrontation [“why is everyone but me so sensitive?!”], which only seem to confirm what his reactionary community says about liberal snowflakes. If he says these things on social media, he may get his account suspended, and, if he comes back under an alt, you can bet his new reactionary friends will be the first to reconnect, applaud the behavior that got him banned, and repeat should he get banned again. A few cycles of this and he’s lost touch with everyone else.

Also, his adoption of the insular, meme-laden terminology of this community makes him less and less comprehensible to outsiders.

Over time, sources of information get replaced with community-approved ones: conservative news, conservative YouTube, conservative Wikipedia if he’s really committed. The Algorithm soon takes note and stops recommending media from the Left. He stops watching shows with a “liberal agenda,” which usually means shows starring women and people of color. Now, there is evidence that the human mind responds to fictional characters similarly to real people, and that consuming diverse media can decrease bigotry in ways roughly analogous to having a diverse group of friends, which is one of many reasons we say representation matters. By consuming a homogenous media diet, Gabe stymies his ability to have even parasocial relationships with anyone who isn’t a cishet conservative white dude or one of their approved exceptions.

To the extent that any of this happens, it happens at Gabe’s discretion and at his own chosen pace. It has not been forced on him, only encouraged and rewarded. But the fact that it hasn’t been forced can make him all the more willing to accept it, because it seems safe to consider; even though his life and social circle are changing to accommodate, he does not feel committed. But many Gabes have walked these halls, and, if they close the door behind them, there’s nowhere left to go but down.

Step Four: Raise their Power Level

(...and they say we ruined anime.)

Consider the ecosystem of the Alt-Right as layers of an onion, with Gabe sitting at the edge and ready to traverse towards the center. (No, I’m not just going to reiterate the PewDiePipeline, though, if you haven’t seen it, go do that.)

The outer layer of the onion is extremism at its most plausibly deniable. Without careful scrutiny, the public-facing figureheads could pass as dispassionate, and the websites as merely problematic rather than softly fascist. It is valuable if Gabe believes this as well; that, at this stage, he believe the bigotry is simply trolling, the extremists an insignificant minority, and any report of harassment faked. That he believe where he is is as deep as the rabbit hole goes. And that he continue to believe this at each successive layer.

People in the deepest crevices of the Alt-Right self-report getting redpilled on multiple issues at different times in their journey to the center of the onion. If Gabe’s first red pill is about the SJWs coming for his free speech, he’ll think that’s all anyone in his community believes; there’s no racism here, people are just making a point about their right to use slurs. Then, when he gets redpilled on the white genocide, he’ll laugh at those Alt-Lite cucks who tried to sweep the race realists under the rug, and at himself for having once been one, but acknowledge that those channels and websites are still useful for onboarding people, so he won’t denounce them. At the same time, nobody takes those manosphere betas seriously.

And this process is reiterated with every pill swallowed: gender essentialism, autogynephilia, birtherism, Sandy Hook truth, pizzagate, QAnon if he’s really out there. The heart of the onion is typically the Jewish Question, but these can happen in any order, and in any number. But each layer sells itself as being, finally, the ultimate truth. Each denies the validity of the others; the layers ahead don’t exist, they’re made up my liberals, while the people behind are asleep where you are now awake. That’s why they chose “the red pill” as their metaphor: take it, and everything will be revealed. That’s why it cozies up with conspiracism. But what’s supposed to follow is that this knowledge help Gabe in some way, and it doesn’t. Blaming immigrants doesn’t actually fix the economy, and hating women doesn’t make men less lonely. But, having been alienated from everything outside the onion, once that sinks in, the only recourse on offer is to seek out the next pill.

And pills are easy to find. Those within the network have laissez-faire relationships, even as they, on paper, disavow one another. When they need a source or a guest host, they aren’t going to go to the Left; they’re going to feature each other. The Left is the enemy; their ideas are beneath consideration, and the only reason to engage them is for public humiliation. [Shapiro’s book.] But you can interview “western chauvinists” and that doesn’t mean you’re endorsing them, just, you know, it’s fine to hear ‘em out, nothing should be off-limits in the marketplace of ideas. Besides, Nazis are apolitical.

And because these folks keep showing up in each others’ metadata, regardless of what they say, Google thinks there is definitely a relationship between the guy “just asking questions” and the guy denying the Holocaust. Gabe is softly exposed to many flavors of conservatism just slightly more radical than he is now, and is expected, at the very least, to not question their presence. This is an environment where deradicalizing - listening to the Left - would be sleeping with the enemy, but radicalizing further? You do you, buddy.

Gabe’s emotional journey, however, is somewhat more complex. If you’ve spent any time reading or watching reactionary media you’ve probably noticed it’s really. fucking. repetitive. It’s a few thousand phrasings of the same handful of arguments. Like, there’s only so many jokes about attack helicopters! But these people just crank out content, and most of it’s derivative; the reason to pick one personality over another isn’t because they say something different, but because they say it differently. Gabe just picks the affect it’s delivered in.

Repetition dulls the shock of the most egregious statements, making them appear normal and prepping him for more extreme ideas. Meanwhile, the arguments themselves? They’re not good. (BreadTube will never run out of shit to debunk.) They are repetitive because they’re not good. They’re mantric. A good argument you only need to hear one time; if you can follow it, internalize it, and explain it to someone else, you know you’ve understood it. But a bad argument can’t convince you on its own merits, so it will often rely on affect. This can be the snappy, thought-terminating cliche, or the long, winding diatribe that sounds really sensible while you’re hearing it but when someone asks you for the gist you can only say “go watch these 17 videos and it’ll all make sense.” Both these approaches are largely devoid of content, but, gosh, if they don’t sound sure of themselves.

And that mode can be very persuasive, but it doesn’t stick the way a coherent argument does. It needs to be repeated, the affect replenished, because the words matter less than the delivery. There needs to be a steady stream of confident voices saying “we’ve got this figured out and everyone else is stupid” or Gabe’s gonna notice the flaws. They are not well-hidden.

And the catch-22 of returning to that stream over and over is that these communities are stressful even as they are calming. People afraid they will die virgins go to forums with people who share and validate that fear, and also say, “Yes, you will die a virgin.” People afraid Syrians are coming to kill us all watch videos by people who share and validate that fear, and also say, “Yes, Syrians are coming to kill us all.” Others have already pointed out that rubbing your face in your worst anxieties is a form of digital self-harm, but I need to you understand the toxic recursion of it: Gabe is going to these communities to get upset. Every emotion is converted into anger, because sadness, fear, and despair are paralyzing but anger is motivating; Gabe feels less helpless when he’s pissed off. And so, while he’s topping up on reassuring nonsense, he’s also topping up on stress. And, being cut off from everything outside the network, the only place he knows to go to release that stress is back to the place that gives it to him. It’s a feedback loop, pulling him deeper and deeper on the promise that, at some point, relief will come.

It is a similar dynamic that keeps people in abusive relationships.

When someone in Gabe’s community makes a racist joke, they are presenting Gabe with a choice between the human interaction of laughing with his friends and his societal responsibility not to be a fuckin’ racist. And not laughing seems ridiculous; everybody’s friends here; no one’s getting hurt; this is harmless. And so the irreverent race joke draws a line between the personal and the political, and suggests that one can be safely prioritized over the other. One way to look at radicalization is being asked to stick with that seemingly innocuous decision as the stakes are raised incrementally: first with edgier humor, and then comments that are funny because they’re shocking but you couldn’t really call them jokes, and then “funny” comments that are also sincerely angry, but, in each instance, since he laughed with his bros last time, it stands to reason he should keep favoring the personal over some abstracted notion of “politics.”

This is why the progressive adage “the personal is political” is among the most threatening things you can say in these spaces.

I’m not trying to make a slippery slope argument. Most of us who laughed at edgy jokes when we were teenagers didn’t grow up to be Nazis. It is a slippery slope in the specific context of being in community with people trying to radicalize you. Gabe is a lonely white boy in need of friends, and laughing at a racist joke is personal, while not laughing is political. Staying in a community that has Nazis in it is personal, and leaving is political. The personal is what brings people together and the political drives them apart. (The “only if some of them are bigots” part of that sentence is usually lopped off). There’s this joke on the internet that nerds perceive only two races: white and political. Following that logic, what could be more apolitical than an ethnostate?

They are banking on his willingness to adapt his beliefs to suit an environment that meets a need. That same need can be satisfied by white nationalism. There are few things more seductive to people who doubt their own worth than being told you are valuable simply for being white. And you can sub in male, cis, straight, allosexual, or able-bodied. It just takes priming: by the time Gabe officially embraces bigotry, he’s already been acting like a bigot for months. The red pill is simply the moment he says it out loud.

Change Gabe’s surroundings, and you change Gabe.

Step Five: ???

The final step in a traditional extremist group would be getting a mission. But that is one thing the Alt-Right can’t do. Once you start giving clear directives, you can’t play yourselves off as a bunch of unaffiliated hashtags and think tanks; you are now a formalized movement accountable to its followers, and can be judged and policed as such.

To my mind, Charlottesville was an attempt to become such a movement, taking things offline and getting all the different groups working collectively. And, as so often happens when these people get in the same space - especially with no official leaders or means of control over their members - it backfired. Their true colors came out before they were ready and a counter-protester lost her life.

This would be the point where, historically, an extremist group starts to disintegrate. Their veneer of respectability gone, they’re now hated by the public, the media wants nothing more to do with them, and everyone not in jail turns on each other or goes underground. This is also the point where the liberal establishment says, “My job here is done,” and utterly fails to retake control of the narrative, allowing the next batch of radicals to pick up more or less where the last one left off.

But to an already-decentralized group like the Alt-Right, Charlottesville was bad but eminently survivable. People retreated back to the internet, with its code words and anonymous forums, but that’s where much of the work was already done anyway. The platforms where they organized kept tolerating them, the authorities still didn’t classify them as terrorists, and any disgraced figureheads were replaced with up-and-comers.

The major change in strategy is that it doesn’t seem anyone has tried to formalize the Alt-Right since.

So where does that leave Gabe? He’s gone through this whole process of largely hands-off indoctrination - and I should stress his journey may look like what we’ve outlined or it may look different in places, this video is not comprehensive - but now he’s swallowed every pill he cares to, he blames half a dozen minorities for everything he sees as wrong with the world, and no one will give him anything to do. You’ve got this ad hoc movement frothing young men into a militant fervor and then just leaving them to stew in their own hate. Should we really be surprised at how many commit mass shootings?

This is a machine for producing lone wolves.

Leaving men to take up arms of their own volition is a way of enacting terror while being just outside the popular conception of a terror cell. There are also, of course, more classic militias that will offer Gabe clear directives - they’re recruiting from the same pool. And Gabe may stop short of this step, settling in a middle layer that suits him or finding the inner layers too extreme. But violence is the logical conclusion of an ideology of hate, and, should Gabe take this step, he can approach violence in the same incremental fashion he approached conservatism.

He can start with yelling at people on Twitter, and then maybe collective brigading, DDoS attacks, sharing dox, leaking nudes, calling their phone numbers, texting them pictures of their houses from the sidewalk. These acts of cruelty become games of oneupmanship within his community. All this can start as far back as Step 2, and get more intense the deeper he goes. Some people join explicitly partake in harassment and violence the way Gabe joined to talk about anime.

But this behavior can serve as a kind of buy-in. The Left and the feminists and the LGBTQs and the Muslims and the immigrants are all, within his community, subhuman. You’ve maybe heard the conservative catchphrase “feminism is cancer”; well don’t treat cancer by having a respectful exchange of ideas with it, but by eradicating it down to the last cell. Cruelty against the Left is framed as righteous.

From any other perspective, posting someone’s bank information is something you might feel ashamed of. Which creates a psychological imperative not to consider other perspectives. A thing that keeps people in is staving off the guilt they will reckon with the moment they step out. Gabe is also aware that anything he’s done to the Left could be done to him if he leaves; some communities even keep dox on their members as insurance. And the things he’s been encouraged to do to the Left will likely make him feel that the Left would never take him now; the radical Right is the only home he’s got. Harassment becomes another tool of isolation.

Steadily, options for Gabe are whittled down to being a vigilante or a nihilist. There are periods of elation: moments the Alt-Right feels it’s winning - or, more accurately, the people they hate are losing - are like cocaine. They are authoritarians, after all. But the times in between are mean and angry. They are antisocial, starved of emotional connection, consuming incompatible conspiracies that may at any point run them afoul of one another, devoted to figureheads who cater to but cannot risk leading them, and living under constant threat of being outed to the Left or turned on by the Right for stepping out of line. Gabe took this journey for the sense of community and purpose, and, but for the rare moments everything goes their way, the Alt-Right can’t maintain either. They can only keep promising his day will come, a story he could get from a $5 palm reading.

The feeling there’s nothing left but to kill yourself or someone else is so common it’s a meme.

But there is always a third option: Gabe can leave.

Pre-Conclusion: For Fuck’s Sake Do Not Make Gabe Your Whole-Ass Praxis

Before we continue, I want to state plainly that Gabe went off the deep end because he found a community willing to tell him that, because he is a cishet white man, the world revolves around him. Do not treat him like this is true.

If a fraction of the energy spent having debates with America’s Gabes were spent instead on voter re-enfranchisement, prisoner’s rights, protections for immigrants, statehood for DC and Puerto Rico, and redistricting, Gabe’s opinions, in the societal sense, wouldn’t matter. Reactionary conservatism is a small and largely unpopular ideology that is only so represented in our culture and politics because they’ve learned how to game the system.

And I get it. Those are huge problems that are going to take years to address, where, if you know a Gabe, that’s a conversation you could have today. And, if you think you can get through to him, it is worthwhile to try. This is a fight on many fronts and deradicalization is one of them. But it is only one, so please keep it in perspective. It sends an awful message when we spend more time trying to get bigots back on our side than we do the people they are bigoted against.

Your value as a lefty does not hinge on whether you can change Gabe’s mind.

Conclusion: How Gabe Gets Out

He may just grow out of it. These communities skew young, and some folks hit a point where hanging with edgy teens doesn’t feel cool anymore.

He may become disillusioned after the movement fails to deliver on its promises.

He may become disillusioned if something goes wrong in his life and his community isn’t there for him, if he feels they like his race and his gender but don’t actually care about him.

He may be shocked if he sees the Alt-Right at its worst before being appropriately conditioned. Charlottesville was a step too far for a lot of people.

His community may turn on him for any perceived unorthodoxy, and he may leave out of necessity.

He may be separated by circumstance from the community - a trip with no internet, hospitalization, arrest - and not be able to top up on the rhetoric. This may lead him to question his beliefs.

His community may disappear, either tearing itself apart or getting shut down by authorities.

He may have incidental contact with populations he’s supposed to hate, and have trouble reconciling who they are in person with what he’s been told about them. In his community, people bond over shared intolerance, but, suddenly, being tolerant helps him make friends. (This is one reason the Alt-Right has made a battleground of the college campus.)

He may form or revisit relationships outside the network, people who can offer him the connection he’s been looking for. This may reintroduce outside perspectives. More importantly, it rekindles his ability to have healthy relationships at all, something the Alt-Right has estranged him from.

As with recruiters, it seems these “escape hatch” relationships can sometimes be parasocial; coming to respect a public figure who is on the Left, or is critical of the Alt-Right.

Someone he is close to may compel him to choose, “me or the movement.” A lot of young men leave to save a romantic relationship.

Hearing stories from people who’ve already jumped may help; there aren’t a lot of public formers, and some raise suspicions as to their sincerity, but it is getting more common, and may be the closest we get to exit counseling for the Alt-Right.

He may become aware of the ways he’s being manipulated, or have them revealed to him, maybe because he stumbled into BreadTube, I dunno. Knowledge that you are being indoctrinated is no guarantee it won’t work - you are not immune to propaganda - but it can help one resist.

And he may revisit a core belief system that used to guide him, be it religion or social justice or a really wholesome fandom, and be reminded of the identity he used to have.

Moments like these, in isolation or in aggregate, can inspire Gabe to jump. They are also good times for friends to intervene. The reach and the impunity that comes with the internet means it has never been easier to fall into reactionary extremism. It has also never been easier to get out. People who exit skinhead gangs often fear for their lives; for Gabe, there’s a chance getting out is as simple as going to a different website. Much of his community does not know his name or his face and he may not important enough to dox.

What doesn’t get Gabe out - not reliably, not that I have seen - is an argument with a stranger who proves all his facts wrong and his ideology bunk. Facts don’t always work because facts don’t care about his feelings. This was about staying in a community, and holding onto an identity, that mattered to him. It was about belonging, and that is something a rando from the other side of the culture war can’t give him and probably shouldn’t be responsible for.

The theme here is human connection. Before he can do the work of disentangling himself, and facing the guilt of what he’s believed and maybe done, he has to know there’s somewhere for him on the other end of it. That the Right hasn’t ruined him. They’ve told him all of history is groups fighting each other over status, and, without his clan, he’ll be an exile. He needs a better story.

I don’t know that lefty spaces are ideal for this, in no small part because bringing someone who’s a bit of a Nazi but working on it into diverse communities is… questionable. And it probably wouldn’t be good for him, either; having just gotten out of a toxic belief system, he’s going to be deeply skeptical of all ideologies. In a perfect world, people who care about Gabe could build for him - to use a therapy term - a holding space. Someplace private - physical or digital - where Gabe can work out his feelings, where he is both encouraged and expected to be better but is not, in the moment, judged. That comes later. It is delicate and time-consuming work that should not be done in public, but we find these beliefs, built up over the course of months or years, tend to fall away very quickly with a shift of environment. Change Gabe’s surroundings and you change Gabe.

But, instead, a lot of people who jump are functionally deprogramming themselves, which is working for a lot of them, but it’s haphazard, and there are recidivists.

If you don’t personally know a Gabe, or have training as a counselor, you may not be in a position to help him. Possibly there are things you can do to disrupt the recruitment process or prevent infiltration of spaces you’re in - I’m looking into it, but talk to your mods - but, elephant in the room: meaningful change will require reform on the part of platform holders. Tools to disrupt this process already exist and are being used on groups like ISIS, but they’re not being used on the Alt-Right because they try oh so very hard not to get classified as terrorists (and also any functioning anti-radicalization policy would require banning a lot of conservative politicians, so there’s that...).

But what makes our story better than theirs is that the fight for social and economic justice, though it is long, and difficult, and frustrating, when it works, it fulfills the promise the Right can’t keep: it materially make people’s lives better. I am not prone to sentimentality, or to giving these videos happy endings. But one thing we have that the Alt-Right doesn’t is hope.

#video essay

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la5t-res0rt · 4 years

Text

this was written several weeks ago in response to asks i was receiving i am posting it now it is very long the longest i have ever made and it is not very well edited but here it is in this final essay i talk about how shitty rae is about black people in her writing as well as just me talking about how her writing sucks in general lets begin

hello everyone

as you may know i have received a lot of anons in the last week or so about issues of racism in the beetlejuice community both just generally speaking and also within specific spaces

i was very frustrated to not be getting the answers i wanted because i typically do not talk about what i do not see but in an effort to be better about discourse i went looking through discourse from before my time in the fandom and i also received some receipts and information from my followers and from some friends

keep in mind that the voices and thoughts of bipoc are not only incredibly important at all times but in this circumstance it is important that if a bipoc has something to add you listen and learn and be better

i admit that when this happened i wasnt aware of the extent of what occurred and im angry at myself for not doing more at that time and i want to work harder to make sure something like this doesnt go unnoticed again

im a hesitant to talk about months old discourse because i have been criticized for bringing up quote old new unquote but this is very important and i am willing to face whatever comes from to me

lets talk about this

content from our local racist idiot that may be months old but its important

putting my thoughts under a cut to spare the dash but before i begin obviously this is awful

lets fucking unpack this folks

right out the gate op states that she supports artistic freedom but then within a couple words she goes against that statement

being entirely canon compliant isnt artistic freedom and even so if this person has so much respect for canon they wouldnt be out here erasing lydias obvious disgust for beetlejuice in the movie or ignoring lydias age for the sake of shipping that shit isnt canon either

also we love the quick jab at the musical there hilarious we love it dont we because god forbid a licensed and successful branch on a media have any standing in this conversation but whatever

now lets scroll down and talk about the term racebending

the term racebending was coined around 2009 in response to the avatar the last airbender movie a film in which the east asian races of the characters were erased by casting white actors in the three leading roles of aang sokka and katara

whenever the term racebending is used in a negative light it is almost always a case of whitewashing like casting scarlett johansen in ghost in the shell or the casting of white actors of the prince of persia sands of time instead of iranian ones

this kind of racebending erases minorities from beeing seen in media and is wrong

all that being said however racebending has also been noted to have very positive after effects like the 1997 adaptation of cinderella or casting samuel jackson as nick fury in the marvel movies nick fury was originally a white guy can you even imagine

i read this piece from an academic that said quote writers can change the race and cultural specificity of central characters or pull a secondary character of color from the margins transforming them into the central protagonist unquote

racebending like the kind that rae is so heated about is the kind of creative freedom that leads to more representation of bipoc in media which will never be a bad thing ever no matter how pissy you get about it

designing a version of a character as a poc isnt serving to make them necessarily better it serves to give new perspective and perhaps the opportunity to connect even more deeply with a character it doesnt marginalize or erase white people it can uplift poc and if you think uplifting poc is wrong because it tears down white people or whatever youre a fucking moron and you need to get out of your podunk white folk town and see the real world

the numbers of times a bipoc particularly a bipoc that is also lgbt+ has been represented in media are dwarfed by what i as a white dude have seen myself represented in media is and that isnt okay that isnt equality and its something that should change not only in mainstream media but in fandom spaces as well

lets move down a bit further to the part about bullying straight people which is hilarious and lets also talk about the term fetishistic as well lets start with that

this person literally writes explicit pornography of a minor and an adult are we really going to let someone like that dictate what is and what isnt fetishistic

similarly to doing a positive racebend situation people may project lgbt+ headcanons on a character because its part of who they are and it helps them feel closer to the character and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that

depicting lgbt+ subject matter on existing characters isnt an inherently fetishistic action generally things only really become fetishistic when the media is being crafted and hyped by people who are outside of lgbt+ community for example how young teens used to flip a tit about yaoi or how chasers fetishize trans people

but drawing a character with top surgery scars or headcanoning them as trans is harmless and its just another way to interpret a character literally anone could be trans unless if their character bio says theyre cis and most of them dont go that deep so it really is open to interpretation and on the whole most creators encourage this sort of exploration because it is a good thing to get healthy representation out in the world

as for it being used to bully straights thats just funny i dont have anything else on that like if youre straight and you feel threatened and bullied because of someone headcanoning someone as anything that isnt cishet youre a fucking idiot and a weak baby idiot at that like the real world must fucking suck for you because lgbt+ people are everywhere and statistically a big chunk of your favorite characters arent cishet sorry be mad about it

lets roll down a bit further about the big meat of the issue which was when several artists were drawing interpretations of lydia as a black girl which i loved but clearly this person didnt love it because they have a very narrow and very racist and problematic view of what it means to be a black person

and before i move forward i must reiderate that i am a white person and you should listen to the thoughts of poc people like @fright-of-their-lives or @gender-chaotic it is not my place to explain what the black experience is like and it certainly isnt this persons either

implying that the story of a black person isnt worth telling unless if the character faces struggles like racism and prejudice is downright moronic

why use the word kissable to describe a black persons lips now thats what i call fetishistic and its to another extreme if youre talking about a black version of lydia on top of that

the author of this post says herself that shes white so clearly shes the person whos an authority on the black experience and what it means to be a black person right am i reading that right or am i having a fucking conniption

how about allowing black characters to exist without having to struggle why cant a black version of lydia just be a goth teenager with a ghost problem who likes photography and is also black like she doesnt have to move to a hick town and get abused by racist folks she doesnt have to go through any more shit than she already goes through and if you honestly think thats the only way to tell a black persons story you need to get your brain cleaned

you know nothing about the complexities about being a black person and i dont either but you know wh odo black people who are doing black versions of canon characters they fucking know

lets squiggle down just a bit further

so the writer has issues with giving characters traits like a broad nose or larger lips if theyre a woman but if theyre a man suddenly its totally okay to go all ryan murphy ahs coven papa legba appropriation when approaching character design like are you fucking stupid do you hear yourself is that really how you see black men like what the fuck is wrong with you

none of the shit youre spewing takes bravery it takes ignorance and supreme levels of stupidity

do you really think you with your fic where a black lgbt+ woman is tortured and abused where you use the n word with a hard r to refer to her like that shits not okay its fucking depraved and yeah we know you love being shitty but like christ on a bike thats so much

can we also talk about this

what the fuck is this fetishistic bull roar garbage calling this black character beyonce dressing her up in quote fuck me heels unquote are you are you seriously gonna write this and say its a shining example of how to write a black character youre basically saying ope here she is shes a sex icon haha im so progressive and i clealry understand the black experience hahahaha fuck you oh my god

on top of that theres a point where this character is only referred to as curly hair or the fact that the n word is used in the fic with the hard r like thats hands down not okay for you to use especially not in a manner like this jesus christ

oop heres a little more a sampling for you of the hell i am enduring in reading this drivel

oh boy lets put a leash on the angry black woman character lets put her in a leash and have the man imply hes a master like are you kidding me are you for real and what the fuck is with calling her shit like j lo and beyonce do you actually think thats clever at all are you just thinking of any poc that comes into your head for this

also lydia fucking tells this girl that she shouldnt have lost her temper like she got fucking leashed im so tired why is this writing so problematic and also so bad

hold up before i lose my head lets look at some of her own comments on the matter of this character and what happens to her

hi hello youre just casually tossing the word lynch out there in the wide open world as if thats not a problem that is still real like are you fucking unhinged there have been multiple cases of this exact thing happening in our firepit of a country in the last five months alone like how can you still have shit like this up for people to read how can you be proud of work like this in this climate

and also what the fuck is that last bit

what the actual fuck

i dont speak for black people as a white person but you do!? im sorry i had to get my punctuation out for that because wow thats fucking asinine just because one black person read your fic and didnt find the torture and abuse of your one black character abhorrant doesnt mean that the vast majority of people not only in the fandom but in the human population with decency are going to think its okay because its not

i started this post hoping to be level headed and professional but jesus fucking christ this woman is something else white nationalism is alive and well folks and its name is rae

if you defend this woman you defend some truly abhorrant raecism

editors notes

in order to get some perspective on these issues more fully some of the writing by the author was examined and on the whole it was pretty unreadable but i want to just call back to the very beginning of this essay where the person in question talked about holding canon in high regard but then in their writing they just go around giving people magic and shit and ignoring the end of the movie entirely like are you canon compliant or nah

the writing doesnt even read like beetlejuice fanfic it reads as self indulgent fiction you could easily change the names and its just a bad fanfic from 2007

also can we talk about writing the lesbian character as an angry man hater like its 2020 dude and als olets touch on that girl on girl pandering while beetlejuice is just there like here we go fetishizing again wee

i cant find a way to work this into this already massive post but

im going to throw up

okay so thats a lot we have covered a lot today and im sure my ask box will regret it but this definitely should have been more picked apart when it happened

please feel free to add more to this i would love more perspectives than just my own.

#long post #racism #raecism #im so tired #thanks for reading

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lookwhatilost · 3 years

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conversations that people aren’t ready for (but I’ve probably whines about on my own time): letting go of The Fear

I’d consider The Fear to be the primary thing that isolates me from the women around me as i really don’t have a lot of patience where it concerns entertaining it. I’ve met few of them who don’t participate in this culture of panic, and I get sick of male friends treating what I tell them as though I do.

The Fear as I define it is the practice of women making one another more afraid of men than the actions of the men in their proximity themselves. it’s your mom sending you an article about a sexual harassment incident a mile away from you, in a part of town you never visit, with “just so you know”. it’s the well meaning idiot who brings up the word “grooming” in relation to your, an adult’s, partner whos a few years older than you, or pulls out “abuse” or “gaslighting” because you had an argument. it’s the stranger who comes up to the bar and asks if everything is alright because you’re there alone, and asks you if you’re safe to walk back after two drinks in two hours. it’s the mutual on social media who circulates the copypasta about poisoned m&ms. she’s usually white, cis, and straight. she’s almost always smart enough to know that victim blaming is wrong, and typically smart enough to know that gender is not a set of essential characteristics. but she keeps doing this. she really wants you to believe that being perceived as a woman puts you in a world of danger. why?

I suppose there are a couple reasons: “not all men, but all women”. this being used here to mean that all women have experienced some flavor of unwanted sexual attention. and, sure, I have. but I don’t really think I’m in any sort of danger of violation because some guy parked at a red light yelled something at me. in fact, lately I’ve been getting a rise out of yelling “drink cyanide” back to them. it’s funny. they look like you just insulted their mother. I’ve been pestered at bars by men I wasn’t interested in plenty, but they’ve not been particularly fussy if i express disinterest. i can only name two times in the span of 9 years when I had interactions that concerned me. i had plenty a sketchy interaction with the lead bartender at b&b, but he cut his shit out the second he realized that I was going to fire back and humiliate him. i don’t enjoy when any of these things happen, but they’re not potent enough sources of stress to build my decisions around. for every street I’ve walked down to be met with a cat caller, I’ve crossed 50 more where I was left alone. For every creep at a bar or concert, there have been hundreds of others who either ignored my presence entirely, carried on a casual conversation without subtext, or said “sorry for making assumptions. enjoy your night!” when I told them I didn’t share their intentions.

the one that I think is the more likely culprit stems from a quote I came across while researching a video, a temporarily-shelved commentary piece about true crime, that mentioned something about “the shared trauma of womanhood”, a phrase so fucking presumptive I almost had to laugh at it. if my anecdotal evidence proves nothing, neither does anyone else’s. it’s all one giant empirical smear. perhaps the matter could be shut down by disclosing that my mother was the abusive parent, or that I was sexually assaulted by a woman, but no stranger is entitled to this information about me. and even if the genders were changed, what would this really change? was any violence against a woman prevented by the knowledge that it could happen? was there any benefit to the fear?

the subtextual panacea, the don’t do this, don’t do that, scans eerily similar to misogynistic gender prescriptions. don’t act as though a man does it. you’re unfit for, uhhh, I mean, you’re unsafe if you behave this way. a woman’s place is in fear of the world around her. and it’s never men telling me this, it’s women. if men echo it, it’s coming from a place informed by women in their lives. it’s the greatest trick the devil ever pulled.

if someone’s working through a traumatic experience, then, like, they’re entitled to do that in their own time and space. but let’s be fucking real here for a second – I’m white. I come off in my day to day more as a woman in frumpy clothing than I do nonbinary or anything other. my current partner is a man, so homophobic violence isn’t really something I need to be vigilant about. statistically speaking, I’m fucking fine. really. even then, men are more likely to be victims of violent crimes, but men don’t have an analogous tradition of scary stories to tell in the dark. there’s really no reason to implicate the people around you in this narrative, and surrounding yourself with the narrative that the world is a dangerous place for a woman to be begets nothing in the healing process. traumatized people traumatizing one another, over and over again. I’d rather be mugged again then spend a single second enabling it.

so I don’t. I’m going to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars – be part of the scene, listening, anonymous, recording. I’m going to talk to everyone as deeply as I can, travel West, and walk freely at night. All of it spoiled by nothing, because I’m not going to let anyone spoil that for me.

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hellomynameisbisexual · 4 years

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5 Ways That Bi Erasure Hurts More Than Just Bisexual People

December 2, 2014 by Milo Todd

This year, Bisexual Awareness Day/Celebrate Bisexuality Day was on September 23rd.

That same day, the National LGBTQ Task Force thought it’d be a good idea to post an article entitled “Bye Bye Bi, Hello Queer,” in which leadership programs director Evangeline Weiss said “she is ready ‘to say bye bye to the word bisexuality.’

She said it does not describe her sexual orientation, and she encouraged readers to cease using the word as well as she felt it reinforced a binary concept of gender.

Let me drive that home a little more. The National LGBTQ Task Force not only thought it would be a good idea to publish an article insulting, misrepresenting, and forsaking the bisexual letter in their own name, but did so on Celebrate Bisexuality Day.

Rude.

And a fantastic example of the constant, ongoing erasure bisexual people have to deal with. This one just happened to be incredibly blatant.

What happened as a result of that article? People got pissed.

People got so pissed that the Task Force not only removed the article from their website, but posted in its place this non-apology (it keeps being referred to as an apology, but I’m not so easily pleased): “Having listened to a wide array of feedback on the timing and content, we recognize that this blog offended people. For this we sincerely apologize. It has been removed.”

In other words, “Sorry you got pissed off. Hopefully you’ll shut up if we take it down.” Which, as far as I can tell, isn’t much of an apology for a blatant disregard of an entire community of people.

Misunderstanding of the bisexual community has been the crux of biphobia’s history and the ongoing battle to erase bisexuality from the LGBTQIA+ community.

It’s a scary time to be bi, especially when your lesbian, gay, pansexual, and queer siblings and allies are calling for your blood simply because they’ve fallen victim to the mainstream agenda without realizing it. (Say what?! Jump to #5.)

It’s time for a change.

It’s time for all of us to properly understand one another and to — hope of hopes — become allies for our incredibly similar endeavors. To help initiate that friendship, I ask you, dear reader, to go through the following three steps.

Step 1: Look below. If I’ve played my cards right, virtually every reader should find at least one category with which they identify.

Step 2: Approach your designated section(s) with an open mind, an unprejudiced heart, and a desire to further enhance your own community/ies. It’s difficult for people to learn new things and see different views if they automatically approach them with resistance, which is often the case with bisexual topics.

Step 3: See how bi erasure hurts you as a person and, while you’re at it, likely hurts the people you care about. Because it really is happening.

So here are five ways in which bi erasure is hurting people of layered identities.

1. Female-Identified People and Feminists

Bisexuality is one of the only non-monosexual* identities currently recognized in the English-speaking world. If bisexuality is kept underground, it suppresses our limited, precious resources for open discussion about non-monosexuality. This hurts female-identified people and feminists regardless of their sexual orientation.

To this day, female-identified people can’t get a fair shake. Pay is unequal, birth control access is limited, and objectification is a daily thing. Non-monosexual women in particular are often not taken seriously because they’re seen as sluts, greedy, or unable to make up their minds.

Also, the general fetishizing of women is particularly intensified in the bisexual realm by (straight-identified) men, turning the very act of women’s sexual freedom, empowerment, and self-expression into nothing more than something for male gazes. (This is most often seen through the relentless prompts for female-female-male threesomes and masculine catcalls in bars when two femme-appearing women make out.)

By participating in or casually allowing bi erasure to happen, we’re ignoring the specific plights and abuses of bisexual women, thereby contributing to the ongoing problem of female inequality, objectification, and silence.

As feminists, we can’t pick and choose which women to fight for. The complexities of womanhood — and all of its cultural suppressions — are an all-or-none deal.

*Note: Non-monosexuality usually refers to someone who is interested in more than one sex or gender. (In other words, somebody who isn’t gay, lesbian, or straight.) Another way to say “non-monosexuality” would be “polysexuality” to help keep it from sounding negative.

2. Male-Identified People and Male Liberationists*

Just like with female-identified people and feminists, bi erasure hurts male-identified people and male liberationists regardless of their sexual orientation.

Allow me to make this pretty basic: Men continue to be fed the message that being gay is bad. Being gay means you’re not really a man, which means you lose your dude membership and the bulk of your male privilege. And since gayness equals the slightest shred of attraction to or intimacy with another male, all manners of bromance must be squashed.

In short, many guys live in a state of silent terror in this regard.

Bi men are afraid of being banished from the world of lady-loving, gay men are worried about losing all of their connections to hetero land, and nothing is worse for a straight man than being called a fag.

Constant monitoring, constant filtering, constant stress: Is this really the kind of world we guys want to keep living in?

By being able to talk about bisexuality — remember: one of our only non-monosexual identities — male-identified people can begin to break free from the masculine ideal.

Bi talk helps bridge the gap between being a man (straight) and not being a man (gay) and realizing, hey, having some manner of attraction to or intimate interaction with another guy is totally okay, masculinity unscathed.

Gay men can begin to regain their identities as men, bi men can finally start coming out, and “fag” will lose its strength as an insult from one straight man to another.

*Note: Male liberationists are more or less seen as allies to feminists and vice versa. Both will argue that patriarchy is bad, but while feminists talk of how it’s bad for females, male liberationists talk of how it’s bad for males. Examples include the inability to romantically or sexually love another male, the emasculation of men of color, and the physical, verbal, and mental abuse that comes from society’s expectations to be stereotypically masculine.

3. People Who Identify as Trans Sexual, Trans Gender, Genderfluid, Genderqueer, or Gender Non-Conforming

This one’s pretty easy. Some people on the trans spectrum identify as bisexual. But then they’re told they can’t or that it’s an insult to their trans siblings because bisexuality is believed to be trans-exclusive.

The problem with bi erasure is it adds to the ongoing problem of cis people — LGQ or not — telling trans people what to think. Cis people have a bad habit of thinking they need to speak for people on the trans spectrum even when trans people are quite capable of speaking for themselves. This is even more frustrating when it comes from a community supposedly meant to support them.

Despite the personhood for which they’re continuing to fight, trans people can receive backlash from the lesbian, gay, and queer communities as their identities and bodies are turned into political battlegrounds.

Sometimes, they’re used without consent by some cis individuals so that points can be made for non-trans-specific agendas, and sometimes they’re ironically used in the attempts for cis identities to help better the trans worlds.

For instance, automatically dismissing bisexuality as trans-exclusive and guilting any person on the trans spectrum that wants to identity as bisexual, if I may make so fine a point.

As blogger Aud Traher writes, “If you want to support trans people like me, don’t erase me or speak over me or cause me harm out of self-righteous biphobia. Look into yourself and deal with that internalized biphobia and then help others get over theirs. Don’t advocate for the destruction of a community in the name of ‘saving’ it. And, especially, don’t do it in my name.”

4. People Who Identify as Gay, Lesbian, or — Yes — Straight

Quite simply, it makes gays and lesbians (and straight people) look bad, too.

Bisexual people get a bad rap for apparently upholding the gender binary by saying they love only (cis) men or (cis) women, but isn’t that pretty much exactly what gays, lesbians, and straight people are saying when they identify as gay, lesbian, or straight? That they’ll only love either (cis) men or (cis) women?

But where’s their rampant backlash from the rest of the community for upholding the gender binary? I’m just sayin’.

Even when these groups extend their definitions to include trans people and people on the gender non-conforming spectrum, it’s often still as long as those trans people exhibit some manner of gender representation that falls into the lover’s category of desire.

Now, I’m honestly not trying to rag on gays, lesbians, or even straight people. They have as much right to identify how they want as anybody else. And there’s nothing wrong with feeling primarily attracted to only, say, cis or trans men if your brain simply tells you that you only like guys. That’s fine. Go ahead and do that. I’m not saying you can’t.

What I am saying is you can’t be spewing bi hate or letting bi erasure slide because 1) it’s incredibly one-sided and unfair, and 2) in the end, it’s making you look bad, too.

What do you think will happen if bi erasure is a success? You’ll be next, dears.

*cue Jaws theme*

5. People Who Identify as Queer, Pansexual, or Another Fellow Non-Monosexual

In late October, Lizzy the Lezzy — who I quite enjoy, by the way — shared a photo on her Facebook timeline explaining sexuality in terms of guests at a BBQ.

This would be all well and good if it didn’t include a glaring misconception about bisexual people, especially when compared to pansexuals. While bisexual people were defined as getting both hot dogs and hamburgers, pansexuals were defined as getting hot dogs, hamburgers, “and a salad.” Oops. What year is this again?

I’m going to make something very plain to you, dear reader: Bisexual people don’t just love (cis) men or (cis) women. That’s not how the ballpark definition goes. The “bi” in “bisexual” does not indicate a binary. Well, okay, it does indicate a binary, but probably not the one you think.

Instead of “bi” meaning a love for only cis men or cis women or otherwise putting men and women at two opposite ends of a spectrum, “bi” means a love for identities bisexual people identify with themselves and identities that they don’t.

Or, as the popular Robyn Ochs definition goes: “I call myself bisexual because I acknowledge that I have in myself the potential to be attracted – romantically and/or sexually – to people of more than one sex and/or gender, not necessarily at the same time, not necessarily in the same way, and not necessarily to the same degree.”

Look at that very closely. That’s still a binary. That’s still “bi.” And there isn’t a thing wrong with it, no exclusion to be seen.

When compared with the general concepts of pansexuals and queers, our orientations suddenly sound pretty darn similar: We love everyone.

Bisexual people get a bad rap for apparently being transphobic. While we’ve already seen a little bit in #3 as to why we aren’t, I want to further drive the point home here. A large portion of the transphobic accusations toward us come from the queer and pansexual communities, which in turn seem to derive from some serious misinformation and misdirection by the mainstream.

For the record, queers and pansexuals are cool. I like them. But the fact of the matter is that the misconception of the “bi” in “bisexual” as meaning an attraction to only (cis) men or (cis) women — and therefore upholding the gender binary — was created and imposed upon bisexual people by the mainstream. You know, the people that want the gender binary to stick around.

And some queers and pansexuals ate the propaganda they were fed? That’s terrifying. It starts to show just how large and sneaky the mainstream’s gender binary monster truly is.

By defining and erasing bisexuality on the grounds that it upholds the gender binary, pansexuals and queers are not only reinforcing the binary they so sorely wish to dismantle, but they are losing important focus on where the problem actually resides: the mainstream’s insistence to force the gender binary on non-mainstream groups such as bisexual people.

Further, holding bisexual people responsible for the abuse they’ve suffered is simply wrong. All that’s doing is blaming the victim. But, by recognizing and respecting bisexual people as they truly are, bisexual people can not only help dismantle the gender binary and put a new definition on the concept of the spectrum, but finally be allowed to team up with pansexuals and queers to crush mainstream abuse on non-mainstream identities.

Doesn’t that sound nice? I think it sounds nice.

TL;DR

Dear non-bisexual identities, please stop shooting yourselves in the foot and then wondering why you’re missing toes.

We’re here for the same reasons you are: for the right to love whoever we want and for the right for others to do the same.

So let’s finally be friends. We’re never going to get anything done if we keep spending our time putting each other down.

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noladyme · 3 years

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La Cuervo - Chapter 25

TW: violence, blood, drug use, alcohol, smut, fluff, angst

In the spirit of "The Crown Princess of Charming", this is a story about O.C. Nina and Angel Reyes. It is obviously non-canon, as characters who have passed on, on Mayans M.C., are present in it, and others have been excluded completely. Nina is written as a cis-female, but I have tried to keep her race and looks as ambiguous as possible. Should you find any of this story offensive, please let me know.

25.

After their middle of the night conversation and subsequent make-up sex, Nina and Angel got a few hours of sleep.

The sound of the birds in the tree outside, and a hard knocking on the front door, woke Nina up. Turning her head, she saw that Angel was still sound asleep, with Bug nuzzled up in the crook of his neck. Finding the sight too adorable to disturb, Nina quietly crawled out of bed, and put on her sleeping shorts, and one of Angel’s shirts. Putting a bit more weight on her pained leg than she’d been able to a few days earlier, she made her way to the front door, and looked out the peep hole; before opening.

“Good morning”, EZ said; holding up two paper cups of coffee. “He’s still sleeping”, Nina said, and moved so he could enter. “In the bed?”, EZ asked disbelievingly. “He told you…”, she muttered. “He’s my brother. He told me you guys weren’t doing so good… But, you’re better now?”. “We’re working on it”, Nina shrugged. “I’ll go get him, so you can give him that”. She nodded towards the coffee. “No, this is for you”. EZ held out a cup for her, and she took it confusedly.

She limped over to sit on the couch, and lit one of the cigarettes from Angel’s pack. Bug slipped out through the crack of the bedroom door, and when he saw EZ, he hissed. “What the hell is that?”, the prospect asked. “Bug… Her cat”, Angel grunted, as he came out after the cat; rubbing his eyes. He’d taken time to put on sweatpants and a beater. “Our cat”, Nina reiterated. “It looks… sick”, EZ said, giving Bug’s one and a half ear and skinny body a hesitant look. Angel walked over, and gave the cat a quick scratch behind the ears. “He’s a fighter”, he said, and went over to sit down next to Nina.

EZ sat down on the recliner, and looked down at his own coffee. “I would have gotten you one, but I didn’t know if you’d already left”, he muttered at Angel. “It’s good bro”, Angel said, and nabbed Nina’s cigarette. The prospect gave Nina a half smile. “It was kind of a peace-offering. You’ve been staying away from the clubhouse”. “I’m not mad at you”, Nina said. “I’m just… I don’t know if I’m ready to face Bishop and Taza”. “Taza hasn’t been around either”, Angel said. “You guys didn’t… He’s ok, right?”, Nina asked worriedly. She was angry, but she didn’t want Taza hurt. “We haven’t done anything to him… But we have a vote later today”, Angel said. “We need to decide whether he and Bish’ are keeping their posts”. “Why?”, Nina guffawed. “Because they went behind the club’s back; pulling that shit with you and Palo”, Angel said. “Bishop has stepped down temporarily, until we decide what to do. He’s been around, but Tranq’s taken the head of the table for now… He ain’t president material, though”. “And Taza?”, Nina said. “If we vote Bish’ back in, I’m guessing he’s gonna want him back as VP… If we let Taza come back at all”, Angel said.

EZ took a sip of his coffee, and leaned forwards; giving his brother a hesitant look. “Where do you stand on all that?”. Angel took a deep draw from the cigarette, and blew out the smoke while shaking his head. “I’m not sure, man…”, he admitted. “As prez’ and VP, I didn’t ever have a problem with them before. But they lied to the club… And this shit was personal to me. They put Nina in danger”. “You don’t have a problem with Taza being…”, EZ said, trailing off. “It’s called gay… homosexual… He likes men. You can say it”, Nina scolded him. “Yeah, I can say it…!”, EZ exclaimed. “It’s just one of those rules I’ve had trouble dealing with. I follow the club on a lot of things; but that…”. Nina gave him slight smile; happy that he felt like she did. “I don’t have a problem with that”, Angel shrugged. “No one should”.

Taking sip from the cup, Nina then traded Angel the coffee for the cigarette. She took a deep drag, before stubbing it out. “Well, it looks like you have stuff to do today”, she said. “I guess me and Bug will just hang out here”. The cat came over to brush against her good leg. He’d been good with leaving the pained one alone. “Hank wants you at the clubhouse…”, EZ muttered, giving her a hesitant look. “He sent me to get you… We didn’t know if you and Angel were talking”. Nina sighed. “I don’t know… EZ, all that shit that went down…”. “That’s why he wants you there”, EZ said. “He wants the club to hear your side, before they take the vote”.

Looking up to meet Angel’s eyes, Nina found nothing but warmth and support in them. “I’m not gonna make you do anything. It’s up to you, ma’”. She took the cup from him, and emptied it; before getting to her feet. “I’m gonna need more coffee…”, she grunted, and limped in to the bedroom to get dressed.

---

The scrapyard seemed like a completely different place to the last time Nina had been there. There was tension in the air, as EZ and Angel – with Nina behind him – rode up to the clubhouse. Chucky gave her slight wave from the front office, when they passed it.

Coco and Gilly came down from the porch to greet them as they arrived, and Nina gave both of them a warm hug. “Are you ok?”, she asked. “I know there was at least some fighting the other day…”. “We’re good, niña”, Coco said. “How’s the leg?”. “Much better”, Nina said. Letting Angel put his arm around her waist, they all walked up to the porch, and into the clubhouse together.

Inside, the rest of the charter – except for Taza – were spread throughout the room. Bishop sat alone by a table in the corner; and gave her short look. He almost looked embarrassed. Hank walked straight up to Nina, and put a hand on her shoulder. “Thanks for coming”, he said warmly. “We need your take on all this”. “I don’t know what you want me to say… I’m not happy about what happened”, Nina said. “We just need you to be honest”, Riz said, having come over to join them. “Shouldn’t come as a problem…”, Creeper muttered sarcastically, and stubbed out his cigarette. Nina frowned confusedly in his direction. “Where are we doing this?”, Angel asked. “Templo…”, Hank said. “And we should get to it. We got Reaper incoming soon”. Nina swallowed thickly. Being in the room with Bishop was hard enough, but having to face Filip was something she hadn’t been prepared for. “It’ll be ok, cuervo”, Angel said below his breath. The nickname struck her as odd at the moment, but Nina decided against challenging him on it; and simply let him lead her into templo. EZ stayed behind in the bar area, looking worried, and prepared for anything to happen.

Letting his hand brush against his usual chair, Hank went to sit at the head of the table. He looked very uncomfortable with his current station. “Please…”, he said, and gestured for Nina to take the seat at the other end of the table. The rest of the Mayans took to their own seats; with Bishop taking the one furthest from his regular seat. This meant he sat just around the corner of the table from Nina, making her unable to ignore him. Angel shot her a comforting smile, before looking to his temporary president.

Seemingly waiting for someone else to begin, Hank finally realized that was his job; and cleared his throat. “I guess… we should get started”, he said. “Nina; thanks for coming. I asked the prospect to bring you, because we have an important vote coming up; but we need to know what to base our decision on”. Riz let Hank out of his misery, by taking over. “We already heard from Bishop. He let us know that you weren’t aware of his and Taza’s decision to go behind our backs…” “Yeah, they behind our backs, but so did she…”, Creeper interrupted. He looked hard at Nina. “You might not have known the real plan, but you went against the club’s decision; and snuck off to do your own shit”. “Sure, but she’s not a member of the club”, Gilly said. “Pretty damn close”, Creeper said.

Angel looked at Creeper; the promise of a serious beating almost written in neon over his head. “What are you trying to say? You wanna punish her?”, he said. “I didn’t bring her here to get…”. “I’m just telling it like it is”, Creeper said. “Nina tricked me in to letting her sneak away”. Bishop chuckled slightly. “Maybe you shouldn’t be so easily tricked…”, he said. “Careful, Bishop”, Riz said. “You’re the one on trial here, and Creep isn’t wrong”. Nina threw up her hands, and sighed. “Why don’t you just get to it then. Punch me around, and degrade me to toilet-cleaner. I’ve been through much worse lately!”. “Everyone calm down!”, Hank said. “Nina, you did go against the club. You broke our trust…”. “At the time, you didn’t even know Bishop was in on it; so, on top of that, you went against the president’s direct orders”, Riz said. Creeper nodded in agreement.

“Ok”, Nina said. Every face at the table turned to her. “What? You wanted me to apologize? I was trying to save your asses”. “Technically, she did”, Coco said. He grabbed a cigarette from his back and lit it; before sliding both the pack and his lighter down the table to Nina. She took one of the smokes, and lit it; sending Coco a slight smile. “If we’d gone to war with VM… fuck”, Coco said, visibly shuddering. “We voted for war”, Creeper said. “You didn’t seem like that’s what you wanted at the time…”, Gilly said. “But that’s how this shit works!”, Creeper said. “This club is a democracy…”. “El Padrino was in on it”, Angel said. “At the end of the day…”. “He doesn’t call the shots here”, Riz said.

Nina took a deep drag of her cigarette. “Riz… I’m sorry you’re angry that I went against the club by going with Taza. I’m not gonna apologize for actually doing it, though. If the plan he told me about had worked out, it would have been the best move for your club. That’s a fact you can’t deny”. Unable to come up with a reply, Riz shrugged in something resembling agreement. “It didn’t work out, though”, Creeper said. “That’s not my fault”, Nina retorted. “And honestly, I think your butthurt mostly has to do with the fact that another woman managed to trick you”. “Nina…”, Angel said warily. Creeper’s expression grew saddened. “If you’re talking about Camille, you’re right. She got to me. But that was just a fling with a hangaround…”. His brows furrowed, and he shook his head defeatedly. “You’re family… You were supposed to have our back… My back. Not lie to me”. Nina swallowed thickly, feeling choked and ashamed. “You’re right… I’m sorry for lying. I don’t want you to feel like you can’t trust me anymore; but I understand it”. She sighed deeply. “I’ll take whatever punishment the club decides to give me”. “There won’t be no punishment”, Angel said. “If there is, I’m out of here”. “Angel!”, Nina exclaimed. “Nah, mami… They ain’t touching you”.

“We’re not going to punish Nina”, Hank declared. “She’s right. Taza’s fake plan would have been a good move; and she did what she did to help the club. She wasn’t a part of the official vote, and she’s not a patch. She doesn’t owe us to follow orders; and she didn’t owe us to try to help the way she did”. He looked deep into Nina’s eyes. “You risked your life for the MC… Thank you”. Angel relaxed in his seat. “I get what you’re saying, but…”, Creeper began. Hank slammed his fist into the table. He looked angrier than Nina had ever seen him; but then again, digging through her memories, she’d never seen him angry. “I’ll be happy to take it to a vote; but even with Angel stepping out for being biased, it still looks like punishment will be off the table”. Creeper raised his hands in defeat, and leaned back in his seat.

“If no one else has anything to say, then let’s get to why we’re here”, Hank said. “Nina, what’s your view on what happened the other day?”. Nina took another drag of her cigarette. “Taza called. He said he had a way of avoiding a full-blown war, and asked me to meet him; so we could go see Palo”. “Did you know he’d told Palo that he would hand you over?”, Riz asked. “Yes…”, Nina said, meeting Angel’s eyes for a short second. Anger ghosted his face, but he held his tongue. “He told me we’d be able to reason with Palo, and I thought so too. He seemed about to go for it as well, but… He said he wanted his pound of flesh; and that’s when they brought in Angel”. “Which wouldn’t have happened if…”, Bishop began. “Fuck you, Bish’!”, Angel said. “You ain’t president right now. I’d be happy to show you around the cage…”. “Angel!”, Hank said. “Nina, please…”. “Palo wanted me to shoot Angel, but Bishop and the rest of them arrived in time to…”. She couldn’t finish the sentence; feeling tears welling up. “Taza killed Palo, and that was it”, she finished, and wiped her eyes. “And how do you feel about being lied to about what the real plan was?”, Riz asked. “Come on, Riz…”, Coco said. “I’m not trying to stir shit up, man”, Riz said. “We asked her to come here, to tell us about her experience with all this”. “Yeah, but this ain’t Oprah”, Gilly said. “It’s fine… I’ll answer”, Nina said. “I feel like shit. My decision to go with Taza on this, was based on me not wanting anyone else to get hurt… But Sala was shot, and Palo’s neck was slit right in front of me”. She stubbed out her cigarette. “I might be safe from VM and Palo, but it came at the cost of even more lives… Daniella; Camille; Sala; Palo… Those were all because of me, and what I did to Gael in that alley two months ago…”.

Self-hatred washed over her, and she got her feet. “I don’t think you should punish Bishop, or kick Taza out of the MC… All of this is my fault. I’m sorry I came here and messed up your club”. Ignoring the pain in her leg, Nina stormed out of templo. EZ and Chucky – who’d come in to the clubhouse, while she was in templo – gave her confused looks, as she ran out of the clubhouse, and slammed the door shut behind her. She sat down on the stairs, and buried her face in her hands, letting her tears fall.

The door opened and closed behind her, and she looked up; confused to see Creeper sit down next to her. “This isn’t your fault, Nina”, he said. “I thought you were pissed at me…”. “I was… I am. But not because I think you’re to blame for all this. You worried me… us. Putting yourself in danger like that…”. He sighed deeply. “The thing about you going behind our backs… You’re a part of the family. I expected you to act like a patch; but that’s not fair. We won’t let you wear a cut, so I can’t assume that you’ll act like you are”. “I’m sorry for tricking you”, Nina croaked. “I should never have come here… You lost your president, your VP… You almost went in to full on war!”. Creeper put his arm around Nina’s shoulders. “We haven’t decided on Bishop and Taza yet”, he said. “And war with the Vatos has been under way for a long time. Even before you got here”.

Nina sighed, and looked intently at Creeper. “Don’t punish Bishop and Taza. Don’t take away their flashes”, she said. “They had to make a quick decision; and they wouldn’t have done it if they didn’t think they were doing what was best for the MC… Just because they’re leaders, doesn’t mean they’re infallible. Give them a chance”. Creeper narrowed his eyes at her. “I know Angel said you were smart; but that was almost sage wisdom”, he smirked. “Where do you get it from?”. Nina let out a soft laugh, and wiped her eyes. “I knew a guy who had to make a lot of hard decisions”, she said. “Some of them were really shitty, but they all came from a place of love for his club and his family”. Creeper pressed a kiss to her forehead; then got to his feet, and helped Nina up to stand. “I’ll tell them what you said”, he smiled. “But I won’t use words like infallible. I don’t think half of them know what that means”. There was the sound of glass shattering from inside the clubhouse. “You should get back inside. Gilly’s physically holding Angel down in there”.

He supported her weight back to the door, and opened it for her. Chucky was sweeping up a broken beer bottle, and Angel was struggling to get free from Gilly’s grasp on his arms. Nina walked over to him, and as Gilly let him free, Angel wrapped her into his arms. “Are you ok?”, he whispered into her ear. “Yeah… I’m ok”, Nina said. “He…?”. “We’re good. Really”. She got on her toes, and caught his lips in a warm kiss. “Go vote… Make good decisions”. Angel nodded, and stole another kiss from her, before following his brothers back in to templo.

Nina limped over to sit down by a table, and blew out a deep breath. After four days of hiding at the house, eating microwave dinners, and cursing her own inability to cook; she was overjoyed when EZ came over, and placed a Tupperware box in front of her. “Gaby?”, she asked with bated breath. “Uh huh”, EZ smiled. “I’m serious, Ezekiel. I will marry her myself, if you don’t!”. The prospect let out a warm laugh, and sat down next to her, producing two forks. Chucky came over with two cold cokes for them, before going over to count the chairs in the room, for some reason. “Chuck? What are you doing?”, EZ asked. “I need to make sure we have enough seats for the wedding”. Nina laughed, feeling herself brighten up slightly.

They were seated, eating straight out of the box, and trying to keep each other’s moods up, when the door opened, and Taza stepped inside; his cut hung over his arm. He nodded solemnly at them, and walked over to the ornate door of templo; seemingly taking a deep breath before stepping inside, and closing the door behind him again. “What do you think that means?”, Nina muttered. “I don’t know…”, EZ said. “Hopefully it’s good news”. He noticed Nina’s strained expression, and squeezed her shoulder. “Are you ok? I know you’re not happy about how things went down…”. Nina sighed. “You all keep telling me I’m family… But they forced me to be a part of something I was trying so hard to avoid. Is that how you treat kin?”. “If family doesn’t know what’s best for them, then maybe… yeah”, EZ said. “Palo wouldn’t have let you go. You’d be looking over your shoulder for the rest of your life. Hurt feelings; you can get over shit like that. But death is kind of final”. “Maybe… But I wish they’d told me the truth”.

They sat in silence for a long moment. “Is you dad mad at me, for stealing his truck?”, Nina asked quietly. “You parked it by his shop. He was ok”, EZ replied. “Yeah, but…”. “Nina, you make Angel happy; and pap’ sees grandkids in his future”, EZ chuckled. “You can do no wrong in his eyes”. “I’m not pregnant!”. “Not for lack of my brother trying, I’m guessing”, EZ smirked. “We’re not having this conversation!”, Nina said. Ezekiel shrugged in surrender. “Just… If you do make me a tío, don’t let Angel name the baby”. “Why?”. “He named your cat Bug!”, EZ laughed. Nina punched his shoulder. “That was me…”, she pouted.

The door to templo opened, and Hank stepped out, giving them a warm smile. Bishop came out behind him, and they gave each other a warm and very masculine hug. “Thanks for taking the gavel when needed”, Bishop said. “Thanks for taking it back”, Hank smiled. “That chair is uncomfortable”. Nina couldn’t help but smile, and Bishop met her eyes; giving her a half smile in return.

The rest of the Mayans emerged from the room, with Taza coming out lastly; wearing his cut. Nina let out an audible, relieved gasp. Getting to her feet, Angel went over to support her. He let her lean against him, as she walked up to Bishop and Taza. “It looks like we have you to thank for keeping these flashes”, Bishop said. “I think we’ve got more than that to thank you for”, Taza smiled softly. Nina shook her head. “Just… trust your family with the truth in the future. It might be painful, but it’s the better way out”, she said. “Alright”, Bishop said. “Still; thank you…”. Nina grinned at him. “You’re fishing for a hug again, aren’t you…?”. “Yes he is”, Taza said.

Nina put her arms around the president, and hugged him tightly. He gave as good as he got, and turned to whisper in her ear. “I’m sorry, mija…”. “I forgive you”, she replied. Taza was next, and Nina gave him a short kiss on the cheek. “I forgive you too, Scarecrow”. Taza pulled back, and looked down at her. “I’m not that sharp on my Judy Garland, but I’m pretty sure the line is I’ll miss you the most… Are you going somewhere?”. “Nah”, Nina said, and looked around at the faces of her family. “There’s no place like home”.

There was a rumbling of bikes outside, and EZ looked out of the window. “SOA”, he said. Nina took Angel’s hand, and let herself be tucked into his side. “Better break out the Jameson”, she said. “Can’t Chibs drink anything else?”, Angel asked. Nina sighed. “It’s for me…”.

---

Happy, Tig and Rat came through the door, and made a beeline for Nina. It was a clusterhug, that ended with her having to waving her hands in the air, to be allowed to breathe. Once released from their grasp, Nina looked behind them with a confused expression. “Chibs?”, she said quietly. “Outside…”, Tig said. “Did you vote yet?”, Nina asked hesitantly. “What vote?”, Happy asked. “You think we’d take the chance to let Tiggy be president?”. Rat visibly shuddered, and Tig smacked the back of his head; making the younger biker let out a yelp. “We get why he did it”, Tig said. “We didn’t like it, but… He’s not the first SAMCRO president to make decisions behind the club’s back, to protect a family-member”. “That’s what he was doing. You know that”, Happy said. Nina sighed, and began moving towards the door. Rat grabbed her arm to halt her. “Rat, I’m sorry for tricking you, but…”, she began. “No… I get it”, he said. “I just wanted to say; don’t be too hard on him. He loves you”. Nina nodded, and went outside.

Filip was leaning against his bike, when she came down from the porch. “Hi…”, she said quietly. “Hello… I didn’t want to come inside, if you didn’t want me there”, Filip said. “It’s not my house”. “Yes, it is”, he smiled softly. Limping halfway over to him, Filip hurried over to grab Nina’s arm. “Is that leg not doing better?”, he asked. “Yeah. I’m just cutting down on the painkillers”, she said. “Good… That’s smart. But you shouldn’t overexert yourself”.

He led her over to lean against his bike. “How angry are you?”, he asked. “Very… You knew how I felt about the bloodshed… Too many people had died already”, Nina said. “But I understand why you did it. You were trying to protect me”. “I really was, luv’”, Filip sighed. “But it’s like you didn’t respect me enough to make me part of the plan”. “I respected you too much, Nina!”. Filip grabbed her hand, and held it tightly. “You’re too good for decisions like the ones we had to make that day… And what you said about Jax…”. “I shouldn’t have brought him up”, Nina said. “No, you were within your rights to”, Filip said. “But… I think he would have made the same decision, little sister. Anything to keep you safe”.

Sighing deeply, Nina pulled at Filip’s hand, to make him wrap his arms around her. She threw her own arms around his neck. “I love you, big brother…”, she croaked. “But don’t ever lie to me again, or I’ll stab you in the balls with a rusty screwdriver”. “That’s oddly specific”, Filip muttered. “I wanna make sure it’s extra painful”. “Fair enough”.

He kissed her temple, and together they made their way back to the clubhouse.

---

“That’s a long ass ride to take, just to come see me”, Nina said, as she sat on Angel’s lap, surrounded by her SAMCRO brothers. Apparently, the Mayan felt that they’d spent too much time apart in the last four days, and after she came back inside with Filip, he hadn’t left her side. “We never left”, Happy said. “We’ve been staying at Vicky’s… It’s quite comfortable there”, Filip smirked. “Venus good with that?”, Nina asked Tig. “We’ve been doing facetime”, Tig winked at her. “I don’t need any of Vicky’s girls, when I got a woman at home waiting for me”. “You thinking about putting a ring on that?”, Angel asked. “She wants to fully transition first”, Tig shrugged. “I told her, I don’t care, but it’s important to her”.

EZ came over with a tray of shots. “What’s this?”, Rat asked. “Mezcal”, EZ said, and shot a smirk at Nina. “In that case, I’m out”, she said. “Just plain old tequila, then?”, Creeper asked, and set down a full shot glass in front of her. Nina rolled her eyes, and picked up the glass; cheering with the bikers. “It is time for us to go, though”, Filip declared, once he’d finished his drink. “We have a business to run”. “Wouldn’t want the line in front of the shop get too long”, Angel smirked. “People need their ice-cream”. “We do milkshakes too”, Rat smiled brightly. The rest of the Sons laughed at their endearingly naïve brother, and got to their feet.

Saying goodbye was less melancholic this time around. Nina managed to avoid completely soaking Angel’s shirt, as she hid her face against his chest, after waving goodbye to her Charming brothers; when they drove off the lot. Chucky, on the other hand, had to take a few minutes to himself in the garage. Coco went after him, and they emerged moments later, with Chucky wiping his eyes, as Coco muttered encouraging words in his ear.

After they all went back inside, Bishop cleared his throat. “Yo. Listen up”, he barked. “It’s time to get back to business around here. We’ve got a few runs to prepare for, and the yard looks like shit”. “It’s a scrapyard, jefe”, Coco said. “It’s supposed to look that way”. “Let’s take the day off”, Taza said. “We can get back to it tomorrow”. Bishop grunted in agreement, and the Mayans all looked like excited frat boys. Creeper and Gilly got to work, calling in some hangarounds for an impromptu party.

Nina – tears dry, and peaceful at heart – got on her toes, and kissed Angel’s cheek. “You can stay… I’m not really in the mood for partying”, she muttered. Angel snaked an arm around her waist, and brushed his lips against his ear. “Nah… I’ll go with you. The only party I wanna go to, is in your panties”, he hummed. “You’re so eloquent”, Nina chuckled. “So elegant…”, Angel nodded, and squeezed her butt; before quietly leading her out the clubhouse.

---

“Ow!”. “Sorry, mami… Maybe try turning the other way”. “My hair is stuck in the handlebars…”. “There… You’re free”. “Someone might see!”. “No, we’re good… Fuck! Don’t stop moving like that”. “Ok, yeah… Wow… Angel, please…”. “Fuck, yes! Put your foot on the fender… That’s right. Take it!”. “I’m so close… Angel!”. “You gonna come?”. “Uh huh… Holy, shit… Harder!”. “Me too… You feel so good…”. “Yes!”. “Oh fuck… I’m coming…! Ahh… Shit, I love you…”. “Te amo, papi… Wow. That was…”. “Uh huh…! I can’t believe we pulled it off…”. “Yeah… Now we just gotta figure out how to get your bike out of the front door again”.

---

To be continued…

tags: @cole-winchester @doloreschanal

#angel reyes #angel reyes fic #angel reyes x oc #angel reyes smut #mayans mc #mayans mc fic #ex reyes #coco cruz #sons of anarchy

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bourneblack · 3 years

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thanks for being a willing ear, bb. honestly i'm not sure if this counts as discussing fandom discourse because it doesn't actually deal with discourse and it's just so venty and more personal; it barely even has to do with fandom, really. i also get nsfw at points and i'm not sure if some of it counts as tmi but i'm warning for that here too. please know that you can delete this ask if it makes you uncomfortable or you just don't like it.

okay, so basically...i'm not sure how to be gay or trans correctly? cause uh, god this is mortifying but, you know a/b/o and mpreg right? those really awful sex tropes in fic? i used to read them constantly. i used to read a/b/o because i found it super hot and it aroused me enough that i was capable of ignoring my bottom dysphoria, and because of that i was able to masturbate regularly and enjoy myself. i read mpreg for the same reasons, but also because it was a way of indulging my impregnation and pregnancy kink without triggering my bottom dysphoria.

this was of course before i learned that those tropes were misogynistic, homophobic, and transphobic. and even though i hadn't known then, to this day i still feel awful that i couldn't figure that out on my own, as a trans man myself. i truly did let my people down, reading those fics, even if it was unknowingly.

and so, i haven't read any a/b/o or mpreg since...late 2019, i think, maybe earlier than that, and i haven't masturbated since then. well no, that's not right, i tried to consume other gay erotica in 2019--i already had tried visual porn but it does absolutely nothing for me--without a/b/o or mpreg, just basic vanilla stuff with p-i-v sex, and it either ended with me feeling not aroused enough to ignore my dysphoria, thoroughly unaroused, extremely uncomfortable, or outright in tears in the case of reading p-i-v; just overall nowhere near in the vicinity of an orgasm. so i just...haven't masturbated since, it just hasn't been worth it to do.

i wanted to say that i'm not asking you to tell me that the fic sex tropes listed above are Fine, Actually, i just wanted to talk to you about this because i...would like some direction on what to do? like how do i get rid of the bottom dysphoria? and if i can't get rid of it, how do i make it feel so insignificant that it doesn't matter. same with my pitiful and severe hang ups surrounding p-i-v sex.

i'm just asking for a little direction from someone who i think knows what they're about; what else erotica/kinks are gay trans men supposed to read, because i just...haven't been able to consume the usual stuff trans men like. and because of that i feel wrong, but mostly broken, and i don't know how to fix it. i honestly don't know what's wrong with me, and why i can't be like everyone else.

that's...all i have to say. and uh, sorry, as well. this is probably awful. have a good day, for me?

*cracks knuckles*

First things first, and this sounds cliche, but it's true, and will be true, until the end of time:

there’s no right way to be gay or trans. In fact, it’s the other way around. “Queer” came about when a human being who realized they did not fit under the standards of straight and cis decided to give themselves an identity. In that identity, sub-labels of gay, trans, lesbian, bi, asexual, etc etc formed to specify that experience. But we all forget that no one is obligated to take any of these labels, nor or they obligated to fit *one* experience. I bring this all up because while labels are important identifiers, you should never feel limited by them.

There is no ‘supposed’ to. There is only you.

And that shit’s scary!

But I’m here to tell you that you are not alone in this.

I can’t tell you straight up what is the *right* erotic experience and what is the *wrong* one, because the truth is is that the things that get you off are things you cannot control, and are things that probably won’t match even another gay/trans person. It’s also important to not assign shame to what it takes for you to get there, because what gets individual humans aroused is something that scientists don’t even fully understand.

We can only control what we do with it, and how we let it shape us.

I can give you is my experience, and hope it helps. I don’t have the answers to everything, but I’m hoping something about the process I had to go through to get here might help?

I started reading m/m stories, usually with cismen, and m/f stories, cis on both sides. I felt the p i v was, well, nice, but something about it wasn’t super appealing. It took me a few years to realize that I was transgender, that’s what was missing in the equation.

Makes sense, now I read (and write) mostly m/m stories, still with cismen, because that’s what gets me off. I sometimes enjoy m/f fics, but only if the women is written well, and mostly because I think oral is gr8.

I still do read a/b/o, get off to it a lot, because I more believe that its the not the trope that’s problematic, but its execution. It’s relieving to me to have an omega male character because look! that’s me! I recognize this is not the tropes primary use.

The latest thing I’ve gotten into is m/ftm which has lately been my niche, especially when the story is written by a trans author. My favorite is stories about transmen that top, that have bottom surgery, that are strong and muscular and powerful, because that’s the image I have in my head of who I want to be and look like. I love them paired with brats because I have a type it seems, and I also love them because I’ve figured out through this whole process what I actually see myself as. I’ve spent a long time trying to fit into identities, and now I’ve found myself and can pick a direction and take it.

There is also power in dark fiction. I went through a period of time where I enjoyed those types of stories because it not only represented what I was feeling about myself at the time, it gave me the ability to act on those feelings in a manner that hurt nobody while I figured out where to find my self-worth. Dark fiction can play an important role in processing struggle.

There are probably other things. Silly novels that use funny names for dirty bits are a good way to take the intensity out of sex. Audio is fun, whether it be dirty talking, or simply just the *sounds* of someone getting off. I still enjoy those as well.

And lastly, if none of these fit... write your own version of what you want to see. I’m serious. I started writing because I wasn’t finding what I wanted to read. My first drafts of everything are absolutely atrocious, I still have them, but it represented myself and I’m so proud of it. Even if you write it on a sheet of paper then shred it before anyone sees, getting that out of you will help you understand what you are really looking for.

I honestly hoped I could help, at least if not by my response, by lending an ear. My bottom dysphoria is less related to sex and mostly related to image, and my fixes for that have been to buy and wear boxer, pack a sock (or two if I want to impress) and bind my chest.

My ask box is always open for stuff like this, never feel like it’s a burden coming here and needing a place to vent. I wish you well, and I hope that you can find your way through this struggle.

Lots of love, BB

#trans #dysphoria #lgbt #fanfic #slight work unsafe #long post #Anonymous

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drake-the-incubus · 3 years

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What’s Bad for You is Good for Me

Or otherwise called, conflicting needs in representation. Which is most certainly a thing.

Sometimes we have specific needs ton representation that isn’t met due to certain circumstances. Recently I posted something about how Lazy Eyes are portrayed as inherently ableist, despite the fact I grew up with it being incredibly disabling and being treated poorly for having one, and in a discussion with other people, have been told they feel the same way.

Today, I saw a post about how someone being transphobic, complained about how trans characters gave him dysphoria. While he was incredibly transphobic about him, I realized that there’s intersectionality on representation no one really talks about.

We don’t talk about how it’s weird to define representation as good and bad depending on how stereotyped it looks. We just sort of do it.

Like, for example, a flamboyantly gay, gender-nonconforming man who is very open about his sexuality and might even be sexual. This is considered a horrible stereotype. I... I've known gay men like that who genuinely enjoyed the nice representation of those characters.

I think the issue is the difference between how it's played off, and why it's being done. And I'll use a few examples.

Power Puff Girls has the Devil who suspiciously borders on a transmisogynistic and homophobic stereotype, being a villain. The femininity that the character displays is part of the villainous routine, and there's not much to the character outside of this. When the character feels like it, he drops his femininity to become masculine and aggressive. Top it off with being the devil, it's pretty bad. This is bad representation, if not for the villain part, then for the fact that there's no substance to it at all.

Which is actually what the problem with representation usually is. It's two-dimensional, and it's villanizing. The character is not only that way because it makes them more villainous, but it also helps make us look horrifying to the viewers.

What changes when you include Lil Nas X's recent release, MONTERO (Call me by your name)? It's a form of self-expression and it's inherently fighting back against the need to sanitize oneself for an oppressing class. It's fighting back against the idea that in order to exist, we need to be pure. To be accepted into heaven we atone for being gay. It's a rejection of Modern Religion and society's base treatment of us.

And it's necessary. We can't have the soft, loving, sanitized rep. It can suit plenty of us. Being accepted into heaven- in spite of our flaw of being gay? I've been told that before- isn't what everyone wants. In order to have reached acceptance, we must not readily display the "bad" part of ourselves.

If a straight woman was to want for a dude, it's highly more accepted than if a man were to do it. Regardless of the man's input?

I can't go to a conversation, openly as a trans man, and discuss my attraction to men as a man, and not get shut down, "because it's weird" but I do have to sit there and hear talk about anime boobs. Sometimes for hours. Because you know, that's acceptable in society, me liking men as a dude isn't.

And the thing is, neither is bad. A gay man being openly sexual and open about his sexuality in media, so long as it's not his defining trait and he's not demonized for it in the media- aka villainizing a gay man who is flamboyantly gay and gnc is very common- it's good.

A gay man who is soft, caring and understanding for his partner, emotionally mature and shies away from his sexuality is also good. It's not representation I need, but for younger audiences it is.

A gay man who is selective in his men vs a man who isn't. We need both.

Representation makes us feel human. Like we're not horrible for existing, and one set is never going to be enough.

For example. I'm a very androgynous trans man. I wear dresses and makeup.

I enjoy the feminine trans characters because they can exist and so can I. I also enjoy the masculine trans characters.

I hate the written trans experience and I absolutely cannot stand fanfiction regarding trans man, regardless of which it is.

It's dysphoria-inducing. Why? Because it focuses on the aspect of being trans rather than the aspect of existing as a man, and those aspects tend to center around dysphoria or being AFAB. Either way, the experience is uncomfortable for me to interact with and can really bother me.

That form of representation isn't for me. I live the trans experience. I don't need it in my media. I want a person who lives the average life and happens to be trans. Where being trans isn't the center of the story.

Other people need it the exact opposite, and if being trans isn't integral it bothers them. They feel like being trans is on a higher level of their identity and their rep needs to reflect that.

In fact, I talked to another trans friend of mine, who said that the kind of stories that focus on the body being AFAB was reaffirming to them and it helped them along. They loved content like that. Where as I couldn't bear it, it caused me issues and I saw it personally as harmful.

The thing about rep isn't actually the stereotypes, most of the time. IE a feminine trans man character isn't bad rep, so long as he's an actual human being.

I also think the person making it and the intent behind the character are important.

Example 1: A cis woman who makes a trans woman villain the epitome of masculinity who is pretending to be a woman, and is defeated by a woman, is just bad rep.

Why? Because a) it targets and puts down another minority to uplift women. b) it intentionally tries to erase trans women from being women. c) it reinforces the stereotype that trans women are just men trying to pretend to be women and are inherently violent. d) it demonized masculine trans women who may have been denied- or do not want- to medically transition.

Example 2: Created by someone who is LGBT+ with input from a trans man. A trans man is flamboyantly gay, talks about how much he loves men quite a lot, and is known for being fairly feminine. He enjoys hobbies such as boating and fishing, and his story is about connecting with his community and accepting himself as a person without needing to give a part of himself up.

Is example 2 real? I hope it is, I'd enjoy that. But this is good rep. Yes, it plays on stereotypes, but this is a person. Their story is about their identity and they have traits outside of the stereotype. For a flamboyantly gay trans man, this would be perfect. If you challenged toxic masculinity in the movie and addressed how trans men feel the need to overperform into toxic masculinity for acceptance and how it ruins our connections with our emotions, it would be pretty great.

Example 3: Created based on a real person. A character who is clearly autistic, and struggles with communication, who acts childish and clearly has a prominent lazy eye. This character struggles with tasks but gets them right. This is done with input and the person's input

Bad Rep?

If you said yes you'd be wrong. A character based on a real human being can't be bad representation. Because a) they're human, and b) there's a nuance to people that needs to be addressed.

Human beings will never be a monolith and having a monolith idea of representation to show oppressors what we're like ignores the fact of human diversity.

I can only speak for myself. This means the topic of race and how to handle racial issues in media vs the sanitization of the culture people of colour have, is not one I can speak on, and I wish I could have input on it.

I'll add if I'm not cohesive enough, it's usually because of Autism and possible Comorbid ADHD fighting each other.

If someone better at the topic can handle this, feel free to reblog and add on, I'll reblog additions and reply to any concerns made.

#representation #diversity in media #what's bad for you is good for me

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venusmages · 3 years

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Cyberpunk 2077 non-spoiler review

Anyways here’s my writeup about my least favorite parts of 2077 for people who are interested in seeing if it’s for them. Both going to talk about content as well as gameplay. This is for PC version, too, because I know last gen consoles are suffering terribly rn and I wouldn’t recommend the game if you’re not going to be playing on PC. At least not until it’s on sale or the issues have been resolved. It really, really shouldn’t have been released on last gen consoles at all in my opinion - or at least should’ve been released on consoles LATER.

If you like Saints Row, GTA, Mass Effect, Shadowrun, or the Cyberpunk genre in general - I definitely think this is something you might want to take a peek at! I wasn’t anticipating the game until about a month or two before release - so maybe that’s why I’m having a blast - but It’s one of my favorite stories from the past decade as far as sci-fi goes. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it, and It’s really impressed me. I can’t even go into detail about all the things I LOVE because I really want folks to experience it themselves. Just know there’s a very intricately detailed world, all the characters are memorable and insanely well realized and complex, and the story is great fun. Also made me cry like 5 times. It’s become one of my FAVORITE games very quickly.

I’d also recommend Neon Arcade if you want someone who’s been covering the game for quite a while, including the technical and game industry aspect. He does well to go into some detail and even though he’s a fan, I’ve found him to be largely unbiased. I’m not going to go into industry politics here because I feel that’s up for everyone to decide on their own terms.

No spoilers, things to keep in mind, content warnings, etc. below!

CONTENT WARNINGS and issues with plot/story

this setting is dark. very dark. if you struggle stomaching things like dystopian landscapes, body horror, physical, mental and sexual abuse, corporate and gang violence, abuse of children, harsh language, and concepts that mess with the perception of reality - this game might not be for you. It’s a very mature setting, and I don’t mean that in the Adult Swim kind of way. I mean it in the ‘oh shit, it went there’ way. In my opinion I haven’t run across anything in it that was handled distastefully when it dipped into the depressing, but dark and gritty isn’t everyone’s cup of tea and I wanted to give a disclaimer.

The game’s universe in advertising and working for the lower class also exploits sex/sex work quite a bit. This is part of the lore itself because in this universe everyone’s become desensitized to sex and violence to the point that marketing embraces it and makes it ridiculous. I feel it’s very obvious that it doesn’t condone this message and is instead a commentary on consumerism - but people still might be uncomfortable seeing a lot of suggestive stuff all over the place regardless.

Women in game are naked more often than men - even though there is nudity for both. This is likely a mix of appealing to the Gamer Boy demographic (even though the story does NOT actually), or the fact that media is way more cool with seeing naked women than seeing full frontal nudity on men. They probably had to tone some of it down to avoid going above an M rating.

The story is amazing, but sometimes it dumps a lot onto you at once. It’s one of those sci-fi stories that you have to really be following the names, faces, and concepts continually to get it all down. There’s a lot of betrayal, background players, etc. I think by the mid-way point I’d mostly had it, but It’s pretty dense. However it’s still amazing. You might just need two playthroughs before every tiny detail clicks - because there’s a LOT of details.

Honestly I think it would help to read up on the lore first so you’re not going ‘what’ constantly. But people have seemed to manage fine without that also! Neon Arcade has a really nice series of videos (like 2 or 3) that get you up to speed with the universe. It also helps you decide if the tone is right for you.

I think the main story should’ve been longer, also. I don’t mind a 20 hr story, especially in a massive RPG, but It feels like they really struggled to cram as much into that time frame as possible. It skirts the edge of being nice and concise, snappy, and tight - and needing just a few more moments to take a breath and wait a second. This is helped if you do a lot of side quests.

The straight male romance option, River, is INCREDIBLY well written but he doesn’t tie into the main plot in any way whatsoever. It’s very strange and feels like they either ran out of time with him, or slapped together a romance with him at the last second. All the other romances at least know what’s going on with V’s story - meanwhile River has no idea, and you can never tell him. He’s an amazing guy though and I highly recommend his questline. He appears in ACT 2.

In general I’d say not to bother with the romances. There are only 4 total, and while the romancible characters on their own are really well written, the romances themselves are just kinda meh. One romance you don’t even meet until act 3. I don’t think they should’ve been included in the game at all, because they definitely don’t feel as fleshed out as everything else.

CDPR also sometimes forget that women players or gay men exist. Panam and Judy have a lot more content than River and Kerry for example. I don’t think this is intentional, they just have a large fanbase of dudebros. It only shows in the romance content and the nudity thing though.

Johnny, Takemura, and Claire should’ve been romances and I will fight to the death on that.

There are gay and trans characters in the game and their stories don’t revolve around their sexualities. It’s very Fallout: New Vegas in it’s approach to characters: IE. you’re going to love them. All of them.

V’s gender isn’t locked to their body type or their genitals- but to to their voice. I don’t think it’s the best solution they could’ve used but given how the game is heavily voice acted I assume that was what they had to work with.

Some of the romances are locked to both cis voices AND body types (not genitals if I recall but body shapes). That’s disappointing but I assume it was because of scripted scene issues and/or ignorance on the dev’s part considering the LGBT NPCS are so AMAZINGLY done. There’s no homophobic or transphobic language in the game - though there are gendered curse words and insults if that bothers you.

Some characters MAY suffer from ‘bilingual people don’t talk like that’ syndrome. But it can be hard to say for sure given that translators exist in this universe and the way they operate aren’t fully described. It’s only momentarily distracting, not enough to take away from how charming the NPCs are.

The endings are really good don’t get me wrong but I want fix it fic :(. All of the endings out of like 6 (?) in the game are bittersweet.

Both gender V’s are very good but female V’s voice acting is out of this world. If you don’t know what voice to go with/are neutral I’d highly recommend female V. Male V is charming and good but he feels much more monotone compared to female V.

V has their own personality. To some this won’t be a detractor - but a lot of people thought they’d be making absolutely everything from the ground up. V is more of a commander shepard or geralt than a skyrim or d&d pc, if that makes sense. You can customize and influence them to a HUGE degree, some aspects of V will always be the same.

Streetkid is the most boring background - at least for it’s introduction/prologue.

GAMEPLAY/TECHNICAL

If you can run your game on ultra, don’t. It actually looks best with a mix of high and medium settings. Unless you have a beast that has ray-tracing - then by all means use ray tracing and see how absolutely insanely good it looks.

There are color blind modes for the UI, but not for some of the AI/Netrunning segments in cutscenes. Idk how much this will effect folks with colorblindness but those segments are thankfully short.

There was an issue with braindances being an epilepsy trigger because for some reason they decided to mirror the flashing pattern after real epilepsy tests - probably because it ‘looks cool’. I don’t have epilepsy but it even hurt my eyes and gave me a headache. Massive oversight and really goddamn weird. Thankfully this was fixed.

There is no driving AI. Like at all. If you leave your car in the street the traffic is just going to pile up behind it. It’s one of the very few immersion breaking things I’ve encountered.

Sometimes when an NPC is driving with you in the car, they’ll drive on the curb and/or run into people. It’s kind of funny but can occasionally result in something weird. Feels very GTA - but nothing excruciating.

The camera angle feels a little too low in first person mode when driving on cars. You get used to it though.

The police in this game feel slapped on and I hope they improve it. Right now if you commit a crime, you can never tell what will actually trigger it. And if you just run away a few blocks the police forget about it.

Bikes are just way more fun to ride than the cars are.

You CANNOT respec your character after you make them. Ever. it sucks. Go in with an idea ahead of time what you wanna do - it’s better than being a jack of all trades.

as of now you also CANNOT change their appearance after you exit the character creator. This, also, sucks. Make sure you REALLY like your V or you’re gonna be replaying the openings over and over like I did.

Photomode on PC is the N key. Had to look it up. The mode itself is great though

Shooting and Mele fighting feel pretty standard. I don’t have a lot of shooter experience besides Bethesda games so anything feels better than that to me. So far I’ve enjoyed stealth and mele the best, but that’s just my own taste! The combat and driving aren’t groundbreaking by any means, but they’re still very fun. I look forward to running at people with swords or mantis blades, and zipping around the city on a motorcycle to see the sights. The story, lore, and interesting quests and characters are the real draw here.

I haven’t encountered any game breaking bugs in 80-ish hours of play time. One or two T-poses, a few overlays not loading or floating objects - but nothing terrible. Again, my experience is with Bethesda games. This is all usually fixed by either opening your inventory and closing it again, or exiting out and reloading your save.

The C button is mapped for crouching AND skipping dialogue by default. That’s terrible. Change it in the settings to be HOLDING C skips dialogue and you’ll be gucci.

There’s apparently a crafting system. I have never been inclined to touch it. But I also play on easy like a pleb so IDK how it all scales otherwise.

The mirror reflections can be a little bit weird, at least on my end. They always end up a teeny bit grainy despite my computer being able to run everything on Ultra Max. You can still get good screens out of it though!

So many people text me to sell me cars and I want them to stop. Please. also the texting menu is abysmal. The rest is ok tho

It’s pretty clear when you’re going to go into a ‘cutscene’. all cutscenes are rendered in-engine BUT you often will be talking to other characters at a specific angle or setting. The game locks you into this usually by having you sit down. It works for me - after all we do a lot of sitting- but it IS very obvious that it’s a way for the game to get you in the frame it wants to display.

That’s all I can think of rn! If you’re interested but wanted to get a slightly better idea of whats going on, I hope this helps. I’m really enjoying it and despite my issues it’s exceeding my expectations. I’m going to be thinking about and replaying this game for quite a while.

#cyberpunk 2077 #cyberpunk 2077 review #2077 review #cp2077 #rosetxt #txt

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