illustrated this comic for insider, recounting abdul-azeez sulaiman’s journey from being tricked into doing construction at the world cup to becoming an advocate for worker’s rights. you can read the full thing here
welcoming cardassia’s newest alien doctor at the docking port!
au where they kept in contact via subspace letters and struck up an epistolary long distance relationship until julian took a position on cardassia prime to be with his bf..
How do fanfic writers feel knowing that people might have been masturbating to their work?
If you’re not masturbating to my stories, what’s the fn poINT
If my shit does not make you drip, gtfo
like wtf do people really think smut authors are out here like gee there is such a huge audience of people with an ~aesthetic appreciation~ of erotica isn’t that nice jfc
Fucking seriously lmao. Who is out there publishing fucknasty sex while simultaneously assuming thatall of their readers are engaging with that content with some type of puritan intellectual detachment as the unspoken rule? That’s absolutely absurd.
Of course, there’s plenty of ways to enjoy smut. Of course people can also read or write smut with intellectual detachment as a creative exercise or a character study or for any other number of reasons. That’s not wrong, and all of that happens in fandom, which is great! I just find it bizarre when people seem positively vibrated out of their breeches about the idea that it’s not the only thing that happens.
I write porn. Of course some people are going to use it as porn! That’s why it’s there (in addition to me just having so many emotions about characters that I have to write about them getting together so I don’t collapse into myself like a dying star) !
Honestly, if no one has cranked one out at least once to something I wrote, then I have FAILED as a smut writer lmfao. Truly, that would be depressing.
I am here to implore you to remember that horny is a valid emotion.
writing a sex scene is the same as writing a fight scene, in this essay I will
Oh, it 100% is. At an industry event during a book expo I met two authors, one of which wrote spy thrillers and the other wrote erotica and they talked with glee about the similarities, down to the vocabulary!
lmao the first thing, but also there’s more to it than the emotional nature of both types of scenes (imo EVERY kind of scene should have an essential emotional element). note that i didn’t say READING a fight scene and a sex scene are the same, or that the scenes themselves are the same, but that writing them is the same
to elaborate on a shitpost i made in the middle of the night after line editing a sex scene (and feeling incredibly smug about how well it went but i haven’t checked my work in the AM and one knows never to trust these feelings), the tools you use for both types of scenes have a huge amount of overlap on a craft level. Action beats, physical reactions, emotional reactions, internalization, etc–the structures of the scenes on a line level have a lot in common. Fights and sex have their own specific rhythms that can vary, and fights often have a winner where in a sex scene one hopes everyone is a winner, but mostly it’s just.. the same. action, reaction, emotion, action, reaction, emotion (and trying to figure out how not to say “hand” five times in one paragraph, also fuCKING PRONOUNS IF THE CHARACTERS ARE THE SAME GENDER)
so yeah you dont have to uhhh worry about everyone who reblogged this being into super violent sex lmao, this post is about drawing helpful connections between one and the other that writers who are good at one but not as confident in another can use to strengthen the complementary skillset.
i personally have always found fight scenes easy breezy while sex scenes felt impossible to me until relatively recently in my writing career, so the parallels are something i think a lot about now when i write sex scenes
(also, far from the point, but the thing people love about enemies-to-lovers is the idea of someone who knows you at your worst, who’s seen you as the worst possible version of yourself, still coming to love you, and finding that connection with a person you thought was completely dissimilar to yourself etc, it’s not meant to make people point at two people irl who hate each other and say “ooooh u got a crush~” so it sucks if people do that to you)
It’s not at all about violence, it’s about how both fight scenes and sex scenes are deeply grounded in physical actions and sensations in the characters’ bodies, and involve the back-and-forth of two characters’ movements and reactions.
Writing both types of scenes feels like there are suddenly 5 verbs in the entire english language and you are tethered to them with a heavy chain.
Directing them in theatre is pretty similar too. If you don’t plan EXACTLY what everyone is doing at every moment, someone is going to get hurt.
Realizing that Amok Time, from T'Pring’s perspective, is basically the equivalent of a Vulcan Hallmark Movie, where a holiday (Pon Farr) makes our hero realize she wants hometown boy Stonn and a simple (Vulcan) life instead of big-city (space) boyfriend Spock, and it all comes to a head in an embarrassing misunderstanding in front of her family, is certainly making me feel some kind of way
when odo turns into a rat on the show I lose my marbles every time. because it’s clearly a domestic fancy rat. who on DS9 has a pet rat that odo learned to mimic off of. because if he just, like, space googled “rat” then he would have surely found a wild rat. someone on that station had a regular earth fancy rat. WHO on deep space nine had a rat!
My money is on Jake, he strikes me as someone who’d have a very well taken care of pet rat.
yknow What. Yeah. jake has two rats and they’re named after famous authors.
odo notices them one day while dropping by his and his dad’s cabin and jake notices him watching them and asks if he’d like to hold them. odo says “wh–oh, well–i… i suppose”
inside he is absolutely giddy to hold them. remember how fond he was of the tribbles. he would fall in love with rats. anyway they crawl all over him and he smiles his :] smile
ALT
