#bromoerotic

[bighandsomemenfolk]

#pecs #Paulo Muzy #bros #gym #video #bromoerotic

[emmersreads]

These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong | 2.5/5

The best stories feel effortless, and overburdened narratives are the opposite of that. They make you keenly aware of just how much they’re not pulling it off.

It would be wrong to say that These Violent Delights is patient zero for this phenomenon, because its not like overburdened stories were invented in 2020, but it is a definitive case study. There is a good book in here somewhere, maybe even more than one, but they’re crushed in with so many bad ones that it makes the whole thing worse.

I’m going to pull out a bunch of specific details from this book and you may think that some (or even many) of them kinda slap, but don’t get it twisted, These Violent Delights is far less than the sum of its parts.

These Violent Delights is a very thinly veiled adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, starring the scions of two opposing gangs in 1920s Shanghai whose past romance draws them together even as the blood feud between their gangs pull them apart. In addition to the plot of Romeo and Juliet, there is a second main plot in which protagonists Roma and Juliette must put their allegiances aside and work together to avert a supernatural plague of madness ravaging the city of Shanghai. That’s already one plotline too many but the book has one more, growing off of the original play’s plot like some kind of horrible fungus. This one is a meta-mystery about why Roma and Juliette were broken up the first time and the events that led to the current tensions between their two gangs. It’s a meta-mystery because there is really no reason for the third person limited narration to hide it from us — the characters should realistically be thinking about it literally every time they interact — and it ends up as a super underwhelming reveal. That’s a lot of plots, and we haven’t even got to the side characters, who also have two side arcs that have nothing to do with the overall throughline. Each of these is enough for their own book, but as more and more get introduced they crowd each other out. The narrative is pulled in more and more directions.

There are two consequences to overburdened plots: first, basically none of them get the time they need, so at best they’re not as good as they could be and at worst they feel like demeaning token inclusions; second, while all of these plots are basically fine on their own, they don’t all play well together and end up robbing each other of thematic weight. As a result the book is a mismatched jumble of plots and characters that constantly undercuts its own continuity stakes, and thematic resonance.

Lets deal with the artificially crushed pacing first. The biggest victims of this are the side characters. There are way too many and they don’t have enough to do. Part of the premise of Romeo and Juliet as a play is that its really only about those two characters. They're not the most socially significant characters in their world, or the most self aware, but their relative insignificance in the grand scheme of things serves to highlight the meaninglessness of the violent grudge that leads to their deaths. The supporting cast is mostly there to flesh out that feud. They fight and die and that's about it.

In the grand tradition of YA fanfiction everywhere These Violent Delights desperately wants to expand these roles to give them their own hopes and fears and stories, and, in the grand tradition of YA zeitgeist, add some diversity to one of the English language’s most famous heterosexual romances. This book’s version of Benvolio and Mercutio, Benedict and Marshall (and we’ll get to the fucking names), are two bros in a bromoerotic friendship. It also adds Kathleen, a Capulet faction member, Rosalind’s sister, and a trans woman.

This will be an unpopular opinion — I’ve seen fans praise Gong’s novels for the diversity and confess disappointment in its absence in more recent novels — but I kinda hated it. Both of these are good ideas — representation is a noble goal, especially of a trans woman — but I can’t overemphasize just how little time these subplots get and just how irrelevant they are to the overall plot. Benedict and Marshall get a couple of cutaways that the audience can interpolate with their prior knowledge of m/m fanfiction. Kathleen gets a little meta-mystery around her backstory reveal conveyed over about two chapters. This backstory is interesting enough to be its own novel. A Shanghainese woman transes her gender while being educated in Paris and must impersonate her tragically dead sister in order to return home, in the 1920s? Don’t mind if I do! Why is it playing fourth or fifth fiddle to the heterosexual activities of literally Romeo and Juliet. None of this has anything to do with the actual plots, which are about teen melodrama and colonialism monsters. This means that even though they’re great ideas in isolation, they end up feeling like distractions. I was tempted to skip these chapters because they just weren’t important. Put uncharitably, representation in the form of side characters who exist to be diverse rather than to influence the plot in any way isn’t good representation at all. These Violent Delights would be a better story if these side plots were cut entirely, and these characters deserve a better book.

The side characters are the most egregious victims of the limited narrative space, but far from the only ones. Juliette and Roma get one internal character problem each — after four years in New York, Juliette feels like a foreigner in her own city, and Roma’s relationship to his violent father is on the precipice of total breakdown — which look like the beginning of a character arc, but vanish from the second half of the story. They are replaced by the feud meta-mystery stuff, which is much more predictable and much less interesting than the threads it replaced. The succession drama within the gangs is supposed to be important, but has so little relation to the actual plot that it only succeeds in establishing that Tyler (our Tybalt) sure is a character. Each gang has a loose affiliation with China’s two major political factions, the communists and the RoC nationalists, but this too is dismissed because there is not enough room for this book to be about both internal Chinese politics, the western foreigners slowly taking over the city, the animosity between the gangs, and a teen love story. Roma also has a sister! I guess!

The biggest space hogs are the Romeo and Juliet interpretation and the colonialism mystery, which are uneasy bedfellows. Romeo and Juliet is a play about the tragic deaths of two teens as a result of their uncompromisingly feuding families; part of the whole tragedy is how little external pressure is on the two groups. There’s no reason for them to hold this grudge and there’s no resources that they’re competing over. The fact that neither Capulet nor Montague really understand why they’re making such bad decisions is a major part of what makes the story so hopeless and tragic. There is no room in there for ‘also they unite to solve a supernatural mystery.’ Similarly, ‘a Shanghainese returnee discovers that the supernatural plague destroying her city is a hostile takeover by an English merchant’ is its own plot. ‘She also has this on-again off-again thing with a historical gang rival’ feels like a distraction. The high stakes of the supernatural plague and the systematic wrong of colonialism makes the comparatively lower stakes of teen melodrama seem meaningless and absurd. The two plots meet catastrophically in the climax. In one scene Juliette confronts Paul, the Englishman responsible for the disease and Roma is also there, standing awkwardly in the background. Paul sometimes makes a half-hearted cutting remark at Roma, but he might as well not be there, because Paul is Juliette’s antagonist, not Roma’s. Roma’s antagonist is his father, and that plotline never gets resolved. The two plots have so little to do with each other that at best all they do is take time away from each other. At worst, they deeply undermine each other, which brings us to the second problem with all these plots: they ruin each other’s thematic impact.

To put it succinctly: teenage romance and the violence of colonialism cannot be the same importance at the same time.

Romeo and Juliet is a very personal tragedy that is essentially a melodrama. It’s about the purity of young love. It’s about the overwhelming emotion of young love. It is fundamentally unimportant in the face of a systemic violence like colonialism.[[ It has become super trendy these days, especially in YA, to juxtapose a systemic injustice with an intimate emotional story, often but not always romantic. It is easy to see the motivation behind this: any particular experience of oppression is also extremely personal, and on the other hand an intimate emotional plot line may be used to add levity or hope to a situation that the protagonist is otherwise individually incapable of changing. However, a reasonable motivation doesn’t make this technique effective. At the end of the day systemic problems are structural by nature and are a fundamentally different scale from individual level conflicts.]] It is ludicrously naive to imagine colonialism defeated by the power of young love and in the face of the higher stakes of the slow takeover of Shanghai by westeners rich enough to buy it out from under the locals, the woes of two nineteen-year-olds who can’t be together are a distraction. The idea that there would be anything more important than either this relationship of the fuel ruins the context of the original play; the whole point of Romeo and Juliet is that there is no greater crisis going on and that the families have backed themselves into this corner. In These Violent Delights the plot is precipitated by events outside of the gangs’ control and with only one exception (Tyler’s attempt to kill Roma’s sister Alisa post-climax) all the major plot events happen because of someone outside of the gangs. I found myself often wondering, ‘why the heck is this a Romeo and Juliet adaptation at all?’

Unfortunately, the alternative isn’t necessarily better. The book’s version of Paris is Paul, son of an English merchant trying to set up drug deals with Juliette’s gang. As the story progresses, we discover that the plague of madness was brought to Shanghai in order to bend the city to his will. He has been intentionally it to his enemies and to the native Shanghainese this whole time. Also, the plague is spread via the vector of a shapeshifting fish-man who shoots infectious bugs out of his back as he swims through the river. It’s fine for the bad guy to have been colonialism the whole time, but saying that colonialism is a supernatural fish monster is, dare I say it, losing the thread of the metaphor a bit. Actually, I do dare say it. The subgenre of YA that deals with social justice plots like this one is at its best when it is at its most serious. These Violent Delights sucks because it is so fucking goofy. It is so reductive for colonialism to be a fish monster that I used it as a joke earlier in this paragraph. These two things are fine on their own but when they are thrown together they absolutely suck the soul out of each other.

The novel follows the details of Romeo and Juliet very closely despite having dropped the overall thematic message in favour of the colonialism thing, so there are a bunch of characters that have no reason to be there other than the fact that they appear in the play. Why is Rosalind here? Why would a 1920s Shanghai gang have an experimental physician on the payroll? Well, friar Lawrence needs to be here somehow and for whatever reason he can’t just be cooking drugs. It is too much like Romeo and Juliet to not be a straight up retelling and it is not a retelling.

As you may have noticed, all the characters have been named the kidzbop version of their names from the play. I can’t even begin to guess why. A lot of hay is made out of how many different places all the characters are from and how that affects their sense of belonging. Roma is Russian, technically a foreigner, but he has lived in Shanghai his whole life, unlike Juliette, whose western education makes her an outsider — but they’re all named like a Say Yes to the Dress wedding party. Marshall is unusual in that he’s the only central character who is both poor and Shanghainese. If any character ought to represent the people Roma and Juliette are ostensibly trying to protect, its this one, but you’d never know it because his name is fucking Marshall. Juliette directly addresses that she is ambivalent about using an English version of her name and feels like an outsider compared to her cousin, so why does he also have an English name? Names are a hugely meaningful place to express personal identity and narrative worldbuilding. As an example, in Babel protagonist Robin chooses that name when he is required by his English patron to choose a name befitting of his new country; we never learn his original Chinese name. Babel uses this to represent the colonization of the individual mind via language. It is a familiar topic for These Violent Delights, where the characters are the globe-trotting new generation of the 1920s, but that detail is fundamentally superfluous because the simplest opportunity to show rather than tell is dismissed in favour of naming them more like Romeo and Juliet.

There’s a lot more stuff in here that simply needs removing. Either a cause or a symptom of the overburdened narrative is that the book feels poorly edited. It badly needed a second pass. The turning point of the ending is that Juliette diffuses an encounter between White Flowers and Scarlets by pretending to betray Roma and faking Marshall’s death by shooting him with an empty handgun. It does not take a firearms expert to know that an empty gun clicks. It is extremely obvious that it is empty. It’s a whole trope! The foreboding click as the protagonist hasn’t counted their shots. Or perhaps the moment of tension diffuses as the villain realizes they’ve run out of firepower. Blanks are rounds that include gunpowder but no bullet, but that combustion is where the noise comes from. I’m complaining this much because this is a pivotal scene. The way the gun works is crucial to the relationship between all the major characters and the social premise of the sequel. This is not a small detail you can fudge for everyone except the true obsessives. It needed to be corrected. (Also, by the way, even a blank round can seriously injure a person at close range as the still combusting gunpowder exits the barrel). There’s a bunch more of these. A friend of mine who knows more (read: anything) about Chinese history pointed out that it is ahistorical for the qipaos to be described as ‘tight-fitting’ especially as tighter-fitting than a western flapper dress. In reality, both garments were much looser than our preconceived notions suggest. Why is Juliette the heir of the Scarlet gang when her male cousin really ought to be due to male-precedence primogeniture. It wouldn’t even change anything material about the plot for Juliette to be trying to seize the heir role from Tyler rather than to be defending it from him.

These Violent Delights is a poor love story, and a worse thriller, and a deeply unoriginal comment on colonialism. It is trying to do too many things to do any of them well. The most depressing part of this is that the book is so messy and its use of the play so diluted by all the other crap going on, that the use of Romeo and Juliet comes across as little more than a cynical feature of a popular play to get classics girlie dollars. A vicious end indeed.

#book review #read in 2023 #bookblr #book blogging #bookstagram #these violent delights #chloe gong #historical fantasy #historical fiction #ya #i know i've had a couple negative reviews in a row here i promise i've got some positive ones coming #also no pics because its been ages since i read this thing

[banannabethchase]

Not Really a Dick Pic - also on AO3

~

Pairing: Danny/Yuta

Rating: T, for excessive discussion of boners

For @wrestleprompts Week 4: asking permission to send a dick pic. This is a crackfic. This is chaos and nonsense and...I almost feel the need to apologize. Warnings for: excessive use of the word dick, mildly horny medical concerns, and bromoerotic interactions.

~

Wheeler blinks down at the phone. He closes the text app, and opens it again to make sure he’s reading it right.

Yup.

dude I think u broke my dick can u check

Wheeler sighs. He’d been hoping he’d been struck with an acute case of wishful thinking or word-based hallucinations, but nope. This was Danny Garcia, who he had just flattened in a tag match, asking him to check his dick.

Am I really the one to ask? I’m not a doctor.

yah but ur the 1 who did it so

Wheeler is sure he’s going to regret this. Go ahead and send me the picture.

He braces himself and tries to convince himself he won’t be a creepy combination of unprofessional and horny. It’s not really a dick pic. It’s a medical concern, possibly medical emergency, that his colleague is asking for help about. A boner is inappropriate. His, or Danny’s. He’s about to see Danny’s boner.

Oh boy.

His phone dings and Wheeler’s hands are, to be fair, a little shaky. It’s not because he’s into it. He’s not anticipating anything. He’s concerned for the wellbeing of his colleague.

Exhaling slowly, he opens the photo.

“Huh.”

It’s clinical, he tells himself, the way he examines the image. He notes a gentle curve to the left, a red-purple color, and thinks about the gory parts of Grey’s Anatomy to remind himself he’s here as a clinical support.

What’s the issue?

its bent it doesnt usually bend

Yeah, go to the doctor, man. This is not my area of expertise.

There’s a few minutes, and then there’s a phone call. “Why’d you land on my dick, anyway?”

“Hello, Daniel, nice to speak to you,” Wheeler grumbles. “Your dick looks fine.”

“But, like,” he huffs on the other end of the line. “You fell on my dick during the match. Why’d you fall on my dick?”

“I don’t know, man!” Wheeler finally says, throwing his free hand in the air. “Jesus, you can’t send a guy a dick pic and expect him to know how to deal with it.”

The other end of the line is quiet. “It wasn’t really a dick pic, technically.”

“It was close and I got flustered,” Wheeler retorts. He takes a deep breath. “Okay. I don’t notice anything wrong with your dick, okay? But, I, uh. I might not be the best reference, since I’ve never seen your dick before.”

“Would you want to?”

Now it’s Wheeler’s turn to go silent. “What?”

“Ignore that,” Danny says. “Fuck. I don’t know. I’m gonna, like, go to urgent care, get this checked out. And then next Wednesday I’ll come find you and – and apologize for the dick pic.”

Wheeler can’t fight a smile. “I thought you said it wasn’t a dick pic.”

“It wasn’t!” Danny says. “Stop – you broke my dick, and you’re making fun of me.”

“Wait a second,” Wheeler says, “does that mean – did you have a boner during our match?!”

“You and Claudio were – I had to – shut up!”

“Danny,” Wheeler says, “do you wanna get railed by Claudio?”

“No!”

The only other option hits Wheeler like a train. “Um. Do – do you want to –”

“Signal’s going out,” Danny says, “can’t hear you. Talk to you next week.”

Wheeler is left, baffled, staring at his cell phone. When the call closes, it goes back to the photo of Danny’s dick.

He allows himself to look at it, for real this time. “Goddamnit,” he mumbles. “This is the best dick I’ve ever seen.”

~

Full disclosure, this started as a HangMox fic, and then I realized that Mox isn't quite this much of a dumbass. But you know who is? Danny Garcia.

#DannYuta #Fucking dweebs JUST FUCK ABOUT IT #Anyway #This fic went seven directions into the sun I'm sorry #wtf i like wrestling now??? #in which sara writes

[weirwoodsugar]

the ned lie thing is sexy bc he, the supposedly most honorable man ever, kept up a facade for literal decades. Like this man straight up lied to his bromoerotic bestie or whatever for! Decades! And he didn't get caught! He was out here just straight up to MR TAGARYEN killer like haha this my bastard son. Mine. The most honorable man. Like!! AND ROBERT BOUGHT IT.. THE CUNT OF IT ALL.. THE AUDACITY.

like just DARING people to call him a liar but nobody ever did. the longest con of all time is being extremely honest and trustworthy in all of your dealings with people your whole life and saving it all up for one REALLY REALLY BIG lie. also rereading ned chapters is hysterical. he is constantly like the Secret......... nay ..... i shan't think it

[pepsi-maxwell]

I’m a bit late and most of the things you write drive me completely feral but that one line raven says in your ravenpunk fic

“It doesn’t make you a bad person, […] From someone who’s stood where you are right now. It doesn’t make you bad, or wrong, or fucked up. Just human. Keep it in mind.”

stayed with me to the point where it was in my mind for weeks and I still can’t watch the end of the dog collar match without remembering it, the whole way you characterized them both so well in that fic is so amazingly personal to me, and that line genuinely had more impact on me than most of my required readings for philosophy JIFSIFKDK the way you write roh!punk is just SO !!!

also you’re responsible for like 90% of my max^2 brainrot I hope you know that

the way i've tried to answer this about 3 times and failed because i just end up keysmashing

i think the ravenpunk fic rewired my brain in a number of ways during the process of writing it, so i'm very happy that it has a similar effect on others... and ngl i wavered on the ending as to whether it should be how it ended up, or... a lot nastier to punk, but i'm more confident in ending it how i did!!! <3333

and eeee yay more people should be into max², the history! the devotion! their weird bromoerotic relationship going back years!!!

thank you <3333

#emeritusterzo #godiva answers

[wweassets]

🥉trick and Melo. The swagger of their own cabana. The erections. The Champaign. It’s suuuchhhhh A vibe.

🥈( 2nd and 1st were soooo close) but Seth. The jock strap. The backwards fed hat. The hairy ass. The “I know I’m hot shit, now worship me” grin. It’s EVERYTHING.

🥇mjf and Adam Cole. Their friendship. The banter of building a sand castle on mjf ass as they laugh. Cole’s named oiled body. Mjf twerking making Cole have to rebuild so they can spend more time together. It’s bromoerotic in the best way. Very fraternity x vibes. But wholesome.

Honorable mentions. Cody. I mean he is Ken. His job is beach. Need I say more? And pretty deadly as mermaids???? Sign me fucking up for tag team merbussy.

AMAZING amazing amazing choices here book x

#book-writing-anon #ask

[cortexreaver]

sammy and mjfs idk what youd call it bromoerotic alliance Thing theyve been doing is very entertaining to me im sorry to admit

#sports entertaining you might say

[poisonparadise]

Jorge & Diego Castro by Josep Tienza

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#Jorge castro #Diego castro #Josep tienza #spanish #men #fav #shirtless #twins #homoerotic #bromoerotic #tiktoker

[grey-oceans]

Do you think that when Sirius used to turn into a huge black dog to keep Lupin company as a werewolf, they would sniff each other’s butts? 

#harry potter #sirius black #remus lupin #werewolf #animagus #bromoerotic #soory not sorry

[f1esbian]

tmg + text posts (pt. 3)

#FINALLY had time to finish this one up #hell yeah #as always if you see this on the tmg tag i dont actually ship them #no one really does #it's just incredibly fun to play with their dynamic and to put bromoerotic words on top of their faces #LMAO #so anyways enjoy my friends #tmg #tiny meat gang #cody ko #noel miller #cody and noel #youtube #my edit #tmgtextposts

[bornwanderer]

Just Guys Being Dudes

All Vaughn had done was close his eyes for a moment, and he forgot how he got there-- uncomfortably hot and succumbed to a feeling that he knew meant he’d had too much to drink.

There was something else, too... a weight on his stomach, and a sight which would have normally inspired revulsion, that instead only left him passively perplexed once it came into focus.

“Hell’re you doin’...?” He slurred in response, the reflection of a flame flickering off his eyes in the dimly lit room.

#fencedinheart #Neil and Vaughn's bromoerotic piercing adventure is a go #(3)

[tiktaalic]

my personal take on jensen “tone it down bro” ackles is that he hated deancas for the following reasons:

he was coming off of 3 seasons of j2 shippers who should be in jail wanting to talk to him about incest and stalking him to prove that he was fucking his costar

he went to high school in dallas texas in the 90s and had a dad who told him that drinking out of straws was gay

maybe not a universal experience but i definitely did group work with guys in high school who were straight but would also in the middle of class do an extended riff about blowing each other after class behind the school and when i looked at them like. uh. what? they scrambled to be like. no we’re straight. it’s a joke. we’re straight. and i think spiritually jensen is the same vein as bromoerotic who gets offended if people THINK he’s bromoerotic for the above reasons

#etxt #spnwatch

[illwynd]

I have a yearning for those good old bromoerotic Avengers-era nemesis days, Illy

I’m not sure whether this counts. Also I might still have mpreg on the brain oops.

*

Taking his brother captive is always simply too much fun.

His legs Loki leaves unbound at the start of their night, knowing he will perhaps regret it, yet he wants to see where it might lead. Otherwise he chains Thor down, works the spell, teases till his brother welcomes his fingers. 

“Villain, you dare not—!” Thor protests. 

A smirk. “Don’t I?”

Blinking blue eyes, uncertain mouth. And as Loki moves himself lower, Thor’s feet cease trying to kick him and instead… 

Loki’s smirk remains, smeared in wetness, as Thor clamps his thighs around his wicked brother’s head while he licks.

#replies #ty!! #thorki #my fic #drabble project #gorgeousgalatea

[metalbatandzenko]

Badd is deep into bromoerotic twitter you can’t convince me otherwise

#metal bat #mumen rider #opm #my edit

[sidecast-main]

purple and red,,, but like. in a platonic way

bromoerotic tension innit

#hshshsh its like #look i would gladly offer my hand in marriage if it meant i got to spend more time with my friends #achilles <3 #baby theres no need to fear me not for you at least

[poisonparadise]

Jorge & Diego Castro by Josep Tienza

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#Jorge castro #Diego castro #josep tienza #spanish #men #tiktoker #shirtless #homoerotic #bromoerotic #twins