And that, as they say, is that. I was not a huge fan of the last chapter, feeling it left too many things unresolved, the epilogue improved on that quite a bit. Though I really want to know where things go from here, still!
For a project that started as an excuse to write smut, you sure cut away a lot of smut scenes even when a chance presented itself (ie Rabbit).
I do wonder how exactly Aphrodite has literally never interacted with someone like Helen (ie someone uninterested in BDSM ). While a lot of people that sell themselves to her are doing it partially or completely for kink reasons, has there really never been someone that's just desperate for money but not enjoying the experience at all so far? From the sound of it the contracts are very lucrative. Or if every candidate like that was rejected, then Aphrodite should have a way to at least recognise those people, shouldn't she?
I do wonder how exactly Aphrodite has literally never interacted with someone like Helen (ie someone uninterested in BDSM ). While a lot of people that sell themselves to her are doing it partially or completely for kink reasons, has there really never been someone that's just desperate for money but not enjoying the experience at all so far? From the sound of it the contracts are very lucrative. Or if every candidate like that was rejected, then Aphrodite should have a way to at least recognise those people, shouldn't she?
It was a perfect storm of circumstances that led to Aphrodite getting baited, more or less. She was so invested in a particular narrative of dub-con and breaking someone into loving kink as a good thing that she ignored the warning signs, taking them to be a part of the arc of the story - and Helen played along. It probably wasn't the first person like Helen that Aphrodite interacted with, but the exact combination of factors leading to Aphrodite's carefully planned story of how things should unfold collapsing really hard in a way she didn't predict (drone resistance) was novel. I mean, it is something that was bound to happen sooner or later, but there always must be the first time.
The time skip is a day? A few days? Did Helen really forget entirely about Rabbit that entire time? That's not a sign of a very sure-footed relationship even for one as casual as theirs. Although to be fair Helen I've had a lot on her mind.
"I'm sorry!" Rabbit repeated, eyes set at the floor. "Look, I was really thinking you were just going to quit on me and then I'd have to babysit you through a crash and… But then I was kind of in this situation where I couldn't really not stew in my own thoughts and…" Rabbit slurred on. Helen refused to imagine what she meant by that, even if she knew well enough, "and I kind of realized that, uh…" she pushed her eyes closed, then threw Helen an angry look. "Are you enjoying dragging this on?"
That's another uncomfortable sign. Even if their relationship is fairly casual, seeing a friend and close lover about to go through an emotional storm it, and your first reaction is to nope the hell out because you don't want to deal with it? That is not speaking very well of Rabbit. Even if they are afraid, they really should have said or done something besides that.
If this is the last piece of the story, then it is a bit Bittersweet and feels slightly abrupt. Helen and Rowan's relationship, however you define it, was built up through the entire story, and the resolution feels very sudden. And it seems to leave a lot of unresolved. I still enjoyed reading this, but I wonder if some more closure might feel better.
Donna Haraway actually, but not the Cyborg Manifesto Donna, but her more recent (mid 2000s and on) writing - the particular text Helen is thinking about here is the Companion Species Manifesto.
Yep, that's the manifesto I was looking at, I was just saying that in a story full of cyborgs it's strange she'd not think of the older more famous one. I guess, even scoped to a particular author, Helen is invested in different media than much of the audience.
Regarding peoples' comments on the ending leaving many things unresolved:
I don't disagree that it's a bit unsatisfying, but I tend to like that kind of ending. Characters generally have lives both before and after the story, and endings that leave them without significant ongoing struggles tend to feel overly precious to me. I'd love to see how everyone's relationships develop and what becomes of Rowan, hear some of their conversations once Helen's newfound acceptance settles down a bit, and witness how Aphrodite grows and effects the world around her. But leaving those futures untouched upon and open to audience speculation has a certain appeal too.
In this particular story there's a meta aspect as well, which makes me suspect the ending went that direction intentionally. In an intellectual piece of "porn", about "becoming porn", that doesn't depict a single orgasm, there's a certain logic to giving the story an unsatisfying climax that leaves the audience on the edge.
... if the need for resolution becomes too much, the comment below could be creatively interpreted as a suggestion towards self insert fanfic.
Ah, clearly the body is nothing more or less than the text and the language of this work, which stands alone in the monumental edifice of its brute corpus, and the prison is the interpretive process by which the text is distorted by the meanings ascribed to it, rendering it unto the chaoskampf of human reason. Gnosis is the paradox of a direct union with the text which surpasses meaning and allows only experience.
Yep, that's the manifesto I was looking at, I was just saying that in a story full of cyborgs it's strange she'd not think of the older more famous one. I guess, even scoped to a particular author, Helen is invested in different media than much of the audience.
From what I remember of the Cyborg Manifesto, it is less applicable here than the Companion Species, or at least can be if you go for the read of the situation that Helen has. She is less interested in Aphrodite as a cyborg (and it is arguable that if there is a cybrog in the scene, it is the drone, not Aphrodite), but more as someone belonging to a different order of beings - a different species - that she has to find a common ground with. The promises of bodily extension, modification and transsubstantiation offered by the Cyborg Manifesto are therefore less applicable than the question of cohabitation beyond the limits of the human that arises in the Companion Species.
Anyway, as I have promised, I will now try to provide some context on the references sprinkled through the text. I will be brief - I honestly don't have it in me to write lengthy explanations, but hey. If a chapter does not appear in the list below it is because I don't recall it having any explicit references in it.
i. rowan. what do you have to lose? - the chapter title is mis-quote (my memory is not what it used to be) from a song Norse Truths from Against Me!'s album Shape Shift With Me. The full stanza is Come on, shape shift with me!/ What have you got to lose?/Fuck it! People familiar with Against Me! should get why I chose those lines: both Transgender Dysphoria Blues! and Shape Shift With Me are albums that heavily deal with the disappointment, desire and urgency of wanting to live a trans life.
ii. rowan. want implies want - the title comes from Andrea Long Chu's essay On Liking Women, where she first proposed the idea that we should conceptualize transness not as an identity or practice, but rather as a form of desire. The full quote reads as follows:
Article:
I am being tendentious, dear reader, because I am trying to tell you something that few of us dare to talk about, especially in public, especially when we are trying to feel political: not the fact, boringly obvious to those of us living it, that many trans women wish they were cis women, but the darker, more difficult fact that many trans women wish they were women, period. This is most emphatically not something trans women are supposed to want. The grammar of contemporary trans activism does not brook the subjunctive. Trans women are women, we are chided with silky condescension, as if we have all confused ourselves with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, as if we were all simply trapped in the wrong politics, as if the cure for dysphoria were wokeness. How can you want to be something you already are? Desire implies deficiency; want implies want. To admit that what makes women like me transsexual is not identity but desire is to admit just how much of transition takes place in the waiting rooms of wanting things, to admit that your breasts may never come in, your voice may never pass, your parents may never call back.
There is a sense of frustration with the limitations of the language of traness in Chu's writing that heavily inspired me, as well as her attention to the conflicts between feminism and trans women. In a way, she is a successor of Julia Serano, taking on similar issues, but handling them without Serano's unwieldy desire to ground one's transness in some transcendental identity. On Liking Women and Chu's book essay Females were among the biggest inspirations for a prison, a body.
iii. helen. no such thing as a sexual relationship - the title is a concept from the French strucuturalist psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan. I am not big on Lacanism personally, but the idea - present both in the chapter title, and in the bit from the Galatea catalogue within it - is intriguing, as it proposes that desire is ultimately selfish, centred on its own fulfilment, not the object used for it. Hence, there is no such thing as a sexual relationship, because the desire is not relational.
The second bit from the catalogue is a reference to an immensely famous quip made by the French philosopher Michel Foucault who, in Discipline and Punish, noted - with his usual flourish - that the soul is the prison of the body, reverting the classical Christian notion of the body being the earthly prison of the soul. The meaning of it is, in great simplification, that our living bodies are subjected to a government by our "souls", that is our subjectivity produced through various forms of power. Our life, in the biological sense, is therefore a subject of government and politics: hence Foucault's famous introduction of the concept of biopolitics.
The blue-eyed Galatea clerk that reappears in this chapter was supposed to be a major character, but he got cut in writing. All in all, it is also the chapter I least like and most feel that I should eventually rewrite, if I ever get down to it.
v. helen. bury our friends - the chapter title is reference to a song by the riot grrrl band Sleater-Kinney: Bury Our Friends from their excellent come-back album No Cities to Love. The song Helen listens while writing is also by Sleater-Kinney: Jumpers from the album The Wild. I think that the significance of both is obvious enough.
vii. helen. the frenzy of the visible - the chapter title is a reference to a book Hard Core and the Frenzy of the Visible by the feminist porn scholar Linda Williams. Williams' study was a breakthrough in porn studies, as it was one of the first feminist works on pornography to depart from either radical feminist condemnations, or artistic impressions a la Susan Sontag. One of the key aspects of Williams' analysis is her focus on how pornography that she researched seemed hyper-focused on on the money shot as the visual proof of orgasm, and therefore desire. It's one of the neater references I've made, I feel like, because it reflects reasonably well on what Helen does in the chapter: trying to locate Rowan's desire in her body. Incidentally, it is also the only orgasm depicted on screen in the entire novel-sized pornographic fic.
viii. rowan. locked in with me - a very famous quote from a very famous comic. I have never read it, but it is a cultural fixture at this point, so I am not sure if I should feel bad about very distantly referencing it. It is very uncreative, though.
x. rowan. the end of you - the chapter title is a reference to yet another Sleater-Kinney song: The End of You from their album The Hot Rock. I like this reference as well, because it puts a double work: literally, it is the end of Rowan as she used to be, but the song itself indicates what the story is trying to be about. It is in that song that Carrie Brownstein sings that there's no bigger spotlight/than shone on the ones brave enough to live, after all.
xi. helen. becoming loveable - the chapter title is a reference to a concept of loveability from the writings by the American critical theorist Judith Butler. Simplifying greatly, Butler in her later (Giving an Account of Oneself/Undoing Gender) writing hovers around the question of how to construct the public sphere as to allow the dissident subject the possibility of being not just recognized, but also loved as, as she observes, one of the crucial issues of social exclusion is how the nonnormative is thrown out of the field of being worthy of love.
xii. helen. pharmacopornography - the chapter title is a reference to the concept of pharmacopornography as developed in the writings of the Spanish artist and philosopher Paul B. Preciado. For Preciado, pharmacopornography refers to the condition of late-capitalist control and production of desire and identity through the twin operation of on one hand pornographic technologies (which for him generally denote media and else aimed at constructing or directing desire) and the developments of pharamcology allowing the bodily sexual functions to be regulated, diminished or magnified (the Pill and Viagra are the two points of entry of the capital's entrance into the pharmacopornographic era). As with most of Preciado's writing, the concept is a mix of provocation and insightful critique.
Autogynephilia is a concept developed by an American sexologist Ray Blanchard as a part of his theory of transsexuality. For Blanchard, transsexuality is either a misprocessed homosexual desire, or a narcisstic tendency of loving one's image as a woman - hence autogynephilia. Despite gaining some credence in the 1990s and onwards sexology and psychiatry, even finding its way to the DSM, the concept is now widely discredited and viewed as heavily transphobic. However, certain aspects of it continue to influence the popular imagery of what trans women are like.
xiii. rowan. my innermost apocalypse - the chapter title is taken from the title of a track My Innermost Apocalypse, composed by Danny Baranowsky for the soundtrack of the video game The Binding of Isaac. The title is a play on the double-meaning of the word apocalypse: it represents both the end-times (as this is an end of Rowan), but also a revelation (which is what she receives in the chapter).
Graphic Sexual Horror is a title of a documentary movie Anna Lorentzon and Barbara Beli about the infamous pornographic studio Insex. The studio is in many ways responsible for the development of a new visual language of hardcore BDSM pornography, and its particular gritty/torture porn aesthetic is immediately recognizable. The documentary itself is notable for indicating several issues with Insex productions, including heavily implied allegations of sexual abuse on set.
xiv. helen. the blowjob engine - the chapter title is reference to passage from Paul B. Preciado's book The Testo Junkie, where indicates the impossibility of constructing a blowjob engine as one of the driving forces behind the pharmacopornographic development that requires the "human" body for its production of desire and pleasure.
The language from the Galatea pamphlet is vaguely inspired by feminist New Materialism, an intellectual movement that, among others, stresses the interconnectedness of human and non-human life, as well as questions hard-and-fast divisions such as nature/culture, human/animal or living/non-living. The most famous examples of this thought can be found in the writing of thinkers such as Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti or Jane Benett.
The look of the Courage Disaster's bassist is loosely inspired by the image of P. J. Harvey on the cover of her album White Chalk.
Pat the Bunny was a punk artist (associated with bands such as Johnny Hobo and the Freight Trains, Wingnut Dishwashers Union and Ramshackle Glory), influential in the folk punk scene until his retirement from anarcho-punk and music in late 2016. He is one of the more interesting artists in that sub-genre and a great lyricist. Song for a Chicken Named Jenny is from his EP The Volatile Utopian Real Estate Market. Initially, I planned to use words from his song the Song for a Stray Cat on the Fence in the epilogue. Ultimately, this proved to be impossible (and also would be way too on the nose), but it served as a set-up for Helen listening to Pat later, which meant I did not waste this particular element.
xvi. rowan. times worth living - the chapter title is a reference to yet another song by Pat, namely the Times Worth Living (The Tension), particularly to the following lines from it: our history's a vacant lot littered with empty bank accounts/sobbing parents, broken bones/glorious songs, lengthy prison terms/a handful of moments that were truly our own/in between desperate gasping for air worth breathing and times worth living.
xvii. helen. females - the chapter title is yet another refrence to the writings by Andrea Long Chu, this time to her book Females where she postulates that "everyone is female and everyone hates it", rewriting femaleness not as gender but as a subject position of being an object of someone's projected desires. I suggest everyone should also read that book, it is absolutely excellent.
Bea and Rachel are meant to evoke a certain kind of lesbian separatist feminism, blunted by age. Their cat is named for Adrienne Rich, an influential French theoretician of lesbianism, perhaps best known for the concept of the lesbian contiuum.
Phyllis Schlafly was an influential American public figure widely credited with shutting down the Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution through vigorous, anti-feminist campaigning.
Suttee is a name for a practice of widow-burning in India outlawed under the British rule. In this particular context, it is also a hidden reference to the question posted by the Indian post-colonial theoretician Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak who, in her famous essay Can the Subaltern Speak investigates, among others, the consequences of admitting that suttee might have been "really" consensual.
xviii. rowan. the years, the fear, the sleep - the chapter title is a reference to a song by the folk punk band Defiance, Ohio of the same title, in particular to the line Mary! Your new house is built concrete from all the years the fears the sleep, but in general the entire song is very indicative of where Rowan is in this chapter.
xx. rowan. a body - the line "there will always be a difference between you an me" that recurs in the final chapter is taken from the song Drinking With the Jocks by the aforementioned band Against Me!. It is not the neatest reference - I got very fixated on the line, and I have taken it entirely out of the context of the song. Well, almost.
xxi. helen. one last big job - the chapter title is yet another reference to the work of Pat the Bunny, namely his final, farewell album of the same name. It is a music of parting with your desires and fantasies, and facing the world for what it is, not what you want it to be. A great listen.
The song from Pat that Helen listens is The Hand You Reach Out Is Empty, As Mine Is, which is something of an anthem of Pat's and recurs through the entire latter half of his musical career.
xxii. helen. into the vampire castle - the chapter title is a reference to the fact that I have originally intended this story to be much closer to a gothic romance, only with a certain flip - namely, the vampire abducting the maiden to her hyper-technological castle was actually on the good side. The concept got diluted in the writing, but I had to pay tribute to it somewhere.
xxiii. helen. bad dance - the chapter title is yet another reference to a song by Sleater-Kinney, this time from their album The Centre Won't Hold. The refrence is more sonic than textual this time - I find the sound of this song well representative of the feel I've been trying to convey with Helen's perspective here.
xxiv. rowan. the argument - the chapter title is a reference to a song by the seminal post-hardcore band Fugazi titled Argument from the album The Argument. This song closes the musical history of Fugazi, as it is the last track on their last studio album. It is also contains a very particular lines: how did a difference/become a disease? which are, I guess, a thesis statement for this entire work.
epilogue. walk with you - I lied, this is the thesis statement. The chapter title is a reference to a song by the American band The Xetas titled The Bystander. The song is about as close to a thesis statement for a body, a prison as it gets, particularly the following lines: can't walk a mile in your shoes/but i can walk that mile with you/don't know what it's like but I can say/how we recall our darkest days/won't be the memory that stays.
The feminist text that Helen thinks about but can't recall is Donna Haraway's The Companion Species Manifesto.
viii. rowan. locked in with me - a very famous quote from a very famous comic. I have never read it, but it is a cultural fixture at this point, so I am not sure if I should feel bad about very distantly referencing it. It is very uncreative, though.
Funny that you mention that, because tonally and structurally your story resonates a great deal with Watchmen (the graphic novel, not the movie), and not just because both have the search for understanding in the wake of a lost/departed friend as a key story thread, that they are both commentary on or deconstructions of their respective underlying fantasy genres, or even that both have similar, "not-a-Hollywood-ending" endings.
Even the character who makes the "locked in" statement is an interesting echo, since he considers his inhuman, constantly-shifting mask to be his real face. (There's also another big parallel between the stories that I won't spell out because it's also a huge spoiler for Watchmen.)
But yeah, there are so many echoes of both major and minor themes and elements of Watchmen with your story that it's sort of uncanny if the only bit you've read of Watchmen is that quote.
The blue-eyed Galatea clerk that reappears in this chapter was supposed to be a major character, but he got cut in writing. All in all, it is also the chapter I least like and most feel that I should eventually rewrite, if I ever get down to it.
Yeah, I was actually presuming that clerk was going to be a (semi?-)retired drone, perhaps even Catty (although I ended up preferring my Mircea theory). He seemed to get a bit too much description to be never seen again, and given the stated economics of Galatea's surgical magic it made sense.
vii. helen. the frenzy of the visible - the chapter title is a reference to a book Hard Core and the Frenzy of the Visible by the feminist porn scholar Linda Williams. Williams' study was a breakthrough in porn studies, as it was one of the first feminist works on pornography to depart from either radical feminist condemnations, or artistic impressions a la Susan Sontag. One of the key aspects of Williams' analysis is her focus on how pornography that she researched seemed hyper-focused on on the money shot as the visual proof of orgasm, and therefore desire. It's one of the neater references I've made, I feel like, because it reflects reasonably well on what Helen does in the chapter: trying to locate Rowan's desire in her body. Incidentally, it is also the only orgasm depicted on screen in the entire novel-sized pornographic fic.
I forgot all about that bit of the testing, so much for my theory on the ending.
I also took this as an indirect reference to feminist film theory in general, and it's 3 looks. So when Helen consistently skips over the Eye-view monitoring option in favor of the third person Live monitoring, that can be taken as an expression of her inability to empathize with Rowan by declining to share her gaze (and maybe also a foreshadowing of her eventually getting on surprisingly well with the AI whose gaze she chooses to follow).
xxii. helen. into the vampire castle - the chapter title is a reference to the fact that I have originally intended this story to be much closer to a gothic romance, only with a certain flip - namely, the vampire abducting the maiden to her hyper-technological castle was actually on the good side. The concept got diluted in the writing, but I had to pay tribute to it somewhere.
Interesting, I like the image, but at the time I actually thought that might be a reference to something else.
Leaving aside the references to Sleater-Kinney songs (which I probably ought to give more of a shot given the quality of the other musical references); I missed some references but caught more than I was expecting. Thanks for listing this out .
also took this as an indirect reference to feminist film theory in general, and it's 3 looks. So when Helen consistently skips over the Eye-view monitoring option in favor of the third person Live monitoring, that can be taken as an expression of her inability to empathize with Rowan by declining to share her gaze (and maybe also a foreshadowing of her eventually getting on surprisingly well with the AI whose gaze she chooses to follow).
I like this read a lot, and there is a fair bit of that there, too. The issue of gaze features quite a lot in the early chapters, and I am kind of sad I have not figured a way to tackle it in full without having the characters sit down and pontificate about the issues of visibility, voyeurism and such.
I always am sad when I see a good story end. I really enjoyed how Helen got some time with Aphrodite at the end there. Rabbit coming back was fun, still wish we would have gotten to see more of their scene. I would love to read more kink/bdsm stuff from you in the future. As for all the feminist theory stuff, I honestly don't have the background to talk about that at a high level. It's enjoyable to watch you all talk about it though.
I like this read a lot, and there is a fair bit of that there, too. The issue of gaze features quite a lot in the early chapters, and I am kind of sad I have not figured a way to tackle it in full without having the characters sit down and pontificate about the issues of visibility, voyeurism and such.
Yeah, I seem to remember Williams wrote about sight being the most distancing of the senses. And of course that goes with the general theme of the story in terms of feeling distant despite 24/7 monitoring (and maybe with Helen seeming like a fairly audio/visually oriented person as well).
And Rowan even did a little pontificating about the panopticon, and while she was working on what might have been the flawed assumption that everything wasn't watched all the time, that actually highlighted the distinction between Aphrodite's subjectivity in terms of what she perceives (and passes on to Helen) and Galatea's gaze as felt by Rowan (either one of which would be an interesting topic on it's own).
I expect there's plenty more subtleties I'm not noticing or remembering...
I think that personally, I'd have enjoyed a little more occasional pontification. I can see how it would be easy to go overboard and descend into unbelievable dialogues, and it would risk undermining some of the suspense around Helen's reactions, and I'm not sure how many would share my taste in this, but I'd have been interested to hear a bit more about the viewpoints and arguments particular characters found most compelling or concerning at times.
As for all the feminist theory stuff, I honestly don't have the background to talk about that at a high level. It's enjoyable to watch you all talk about it though.
I don't really have the proper background to discuss it either, just an occasional enthusiasm, and an interest in getting all I can out of a good story.
Now that the story is receiving more traffic than it did in months, I am getting some comments and questions in PMs/profile posts; and since they tend to lead to interesting discussion, I figured I would give this thread a bump so that the scary notification at the bottom goes away and people are more comfortable posting here.
Now that the story is receiving more traffic than it did in months, I am getting some comments and questions in PMs/profile posts; and since they tend to lead to interesting discussion, I figured I would give this thread a bump so that the scary notification at the bottom goes away and people are more comfortable posting here.
This was most likely prompted by me, incidentally, as I commented on @Gargulec's profile page about how this story bears some similarities to another story I know of, that being Eudeamon by Erica Moak (also known as EvilDolly): mainly the themes of depersonalization, latex fetishism, identity-crisis/depression, artificial intelligence, corporate capitalism and exploitation, feminism, and the question of love. The plot, setting, and direction of both works are significantly different from each other, but they do touch on many of the same concepts, if approached in different directions and for different purposes.
Well, I read this over two days, and considering how much it affected me, I thought I should say something.
Well, I think the first thing I should say was that I found it overwhelming at times. Like, physically overwhelming. I'm a Highly Sensitive Person with low blood pressure who found some of the stuff going on early on very hot and found some of the other stuff later on absolutely horrifying, so when I say that I experienced a slightly altered state of consciousness while reading this story and had to take one or two breaks for my own sanity, I mean that very literally. That's why it took me two days to finish instead of one. Not that this is a bad thing. I've heard it said that the point of art isn't to make you feel good, it's to make you feel, and this did. Now that it's over, I'm kind of missing it. I haven't felt that powerfully in a way that way that wasn't horrible in years.
I can't talk about this story like a story because for me, it wasn't a story, it was an experience, so I'm going to talk about it like that. I'm going to talk about it in two parts: before the phrase "Let me in" in chapter xx, and after that, because that's where I took my break.
In the beginning, I thought it was really hot. I'm not going to pretend that, for me, the scene where Rowan undergoes conditioning was not the hottest thing I've ever read. It was. And the Helen sections were great too, though for different reasons. It felt liberating to read about her experiences on the internet with all of the crazy conspiracy theories, because I feel like I'm not allowed to say that half of the internet (and that's being charitable) has gone completely insane. It felt real, in a way that I've never seen before. And that also extends to the portrayal of Helen and those around her. I went to college with a lot of people like her, and I had the kinds of negative experiences that LuckyLadyLily describes, and for the longest time, I didn't realize that it actually traumatized me, and I have trouble communicating that because I'm afraid I won't be believed or that someone will have a reason that my pain either isn't real or doesn't matter. So seeing Helen and those like her portrayed as they are, which is people who, among other things, are very sure that they are right, is deeply cathartic.
And there was a whole bunch of other stuff I was going to write about this story, about how it used tropes and all that other stuff to build a variety of mind control that was significantly less ethically dubious than most stuff out that, which in turn, made it significantly more enjoyable for me, and also bring up a few things where I thought that human brains don't quite work that way. But then I read the second part of the story. And my thoughts and feeling changed a whole bunch.
See, after that, I stopped finding what Rowan was going through hot, and started finding it horrifying. I started empathizing with Helen a lot more in that I couldn't understand what Rowan found attractive about this whole thing. Reading the Rowan chapters from then on, that hurt. But, unlike Helen, I can describe what inhibits my empathy. I'm terrified. I don't, I can't, trust anyone that much, and giving up control to someone else to the extent that Rowan did is something I cannot do. I also just don't get the objectification/depersonalization thing. Several years ago, I learned how to see and all but worship humans in all that they are, and in doing so, I achieved my highest happiness. To attempt to reduce a person to something other than that is almost...sacrilegious to me. But then this exchange happened:
And that blew my mind, though my mind was barely held together at this point, so it took me a while to notice. Because if this is true, and given how in control of herself Rowan seemed to be at that moment I have no reason to doubt that, it means that the hard shell and the faceless helmet, that is how Rowan...wants to be seen? is comfortable being seen? I feel like I'm not finding the right words. But anyway, given that, now I'm all the way back around in just plain confused. Because that's just alien to me, and I don't understand it. But when it's just a lack of understanding, not horror or revulsion or something else, I know how to deal with that. So if I was going to understand, Rowan would have to tell me what about this experience she loves.
And a couple of other extraneous thoughts: 1) Rabbit, what were you thinking not having a safeword? This is one of those things that everyone in the scene knows not to do, and you went and did it. I know you knew better, and you did it anyway. You have only youself to blame. 2) Whatever happened to that girl with the prosthetic leg from the earlier chapters? I know she was probably just a throwaway character, but I'm real curious anyway.
So, my closing thoughts. Regardless of everything else I said, I fucking loved this story. I feel most alive when I get to connect with people, and this story let(made) me empathize and perspective take on a level I haven't done in a long time. And I feel more alive than I have in a long time for it. So thank you for writing this story, and making such wonderful humans in it and making it about them.
And thank you for putting your thoughts into words. It is a fact well observed that reading detailed feedback on their work produces results similar to cocaine in the brains of amateur writers.
To answer your questions:
1) I know a lot of people who play without safewords, and quite often the rationale given is something along the lines of "I don't trust myself with not using it too early, I would deny myself fun". That was the logic Rabbit operated under, and got burned.
2) The girl with a prosthetic leg was a sad casualty of story rewrites; I don't even remember what role I had planned for her, but just like the blue-eyed clerk, she never lived to see it.
Gargulec, I have a more detailed opinion of the piece that I want to articulate, but it's late and I have exams tomorrow so I'll append this with poor plot summary:
"I can't believe that the guy who made Super DeepThroat created a self-aware dommy virtual GF AI, which somehow became the S&M industry equivalent of Valve"
DW about not realizing it, not reading an entire thread is common and socially normal.
It would be hillarious because Questionable Questing is, overall, not the best place for trans & queer stories such as this.
It has a few philosophical works that can and do have provoked good discussion. However, those tended to primarily remain cis-normative, and only touch trans-narratives in a a way much less identity-deconstructing than this one. (Which reminds us that we ought to post our own perspective on a prison, a body).
Thus, hillarity may arise due to how people there might reject this story, despite it being full of many things they ordinarily like to read about.
(And yes: this is a complicated way to say "QQ has way too many transphobic people for this stories thread to not get bogged down by that, and not much interesting discussion that could not be had here to arise").
Congratulations on the staff recommendation Gargulec, it's nice to see this thread alive again with the variety of other people's reactions.
It's been a really long week, so I'm just getting to reply to this now; I may add more later as some of the new replies have started me thinking about this again.
For now, they say humor is tragedy plus time, so on that note I think I'll contribute an image that this fic evokes for me these days. It's a riff on the changes the story brought to our heroines' outlooks and their misalignment, in a similar vein to the DTWOF speculative episodes:
At stage right, Rowan adorkably flirts with a webcam: "You see, as I'm remade into a drone, I'm becoming the means of production..." she theorizes, hugging herself and shifting her eyes shyly away for a moment before boldly returning it's gaze, "so seize me!"
Entering from stage left, Helen offers her remarkably shifted reassurances: "Oh, I'd never betray your personal right to commit yourself to economic intercourse. Especially since your new corporate owner is people, my friend!"
Meanwhile, in the background, onlooking drones face-palm in artful synchronicity, silent but for the sharp crack of impact on their plasticized shells.
For now, they say humor is tragedy plus time, so on that note I think I'll contribute an image that this fic evokes for me these days. It's a riff on the changes the story brought to our heroines' outlooks and their misalignment, in a similar vein to the DTWOF speculative episodes:
At stage right, Rowan adorkably flirts with a webcam: "You see, as I'm remade into a drone, I'm becoming the means of production..." she theorizes, hugging herself and shifting her eyes shyly away for a moment before boldly returning it's gaze, "so seize me!"
Entering from stage left, Helen offers her remarkably shifted reassurances: "Oh, I'd never betray your personal right to commit yourself to economic intercourse. Especially since your new corporate owner is people, my friend!"
Meanwhile, in the background, onlooking drones face-palm in artful synchronicity, silent but for the sharp crack of impact on their plasticized shells.
Humorously enough, the whole "AI + latexdrone" setup found both here and Eudeamon is (at least by my observation), simultaneously both totalitarian and anarchist in functionality: totalitarian in the fact that the drones have pretty much no individual identity and their lives are effectively governed entirely by an AI, but anarchist in the sense that they are completely detached from the 'normal' capitalist economy and are practically-speaking completely autonomous units that have no need for any outside interaction or intervention aside from what they actively desire.
For all intents and purposes they are an Outside Context Problem that is completely off the Political Compass and would scare the piss out of every established ideological movement currently in existence.
Humorously enough, the whole "AI + latexdrone" setup found both here and Eudeamon is (at least by my observation), simultaneously both totalitarian and anarchist in functionality: totalitarian in the fact that the drones have pretty much no individual identity and their lives are effectively governed entirely by an AI, but anarchist in the sense that they are completely detached from the 'normal' capitalist economy and are practically-speaking completely autonomous units that have no need for any outside interaction or intervention aside from what they actively desire.
For all intents and purposes they are an Outside Context Problem that is completely off the Political Compass and would scare the piss out of every established ideological movement currently in existence.
Maybe... I haven't read Eudeamon, but it seems like even with the attendant medical advances the drones here in this story are a money pit, requiring a whole libidinal industrial complex to even start to defray their costs. Those costs are just absorbed by Aphrodite for reasons of her own, so I think the political hot potato here has more to do with Aphrodite and her facility for getting humans to do what she wants than the drones themselves.
I suspect a lot of political movements would hardly care about the drones' perspectives and focus more on wanting better AIs to run their own libidinal engineering operations, as getting people to act even less like rational actors en masse on demand certainly would have huge political consequences.
I might naively hope that is a self defeating attitude, given the level of personalization that seems to go into producing the drones, but I suppose they don't have to care about people/drones if they can control an AI that does. Though that premise actually reminds me of A Deepness in the Sky and what happens when you brainwash people into superhumanly empathizing with people you haven't brainwashed and don't understand. There's a failure mode to consider there.
It's also interesting to consider the assertion that "the drones have pretty much no individual identity", since it may or may not be true depending on which side of the drone shell you're looking from and how you're defining identity. The degree to which one can feel more themselves as a drone than not seems like a central theme of the story. And that leads to the question of how different a drone controlled by stimulus from their AI and a human controlled by stimulus from the more conventional social pressures of their environment really are. Aside from concentration of control of those stimuli under a single actor, could the most important distinction be that one of them is constantly aware of building the personal brand of their identity while the other is somewhat freed of that pressure? I think that may lead to the answer Schielman was looking for here:
And that blew my mind, though my mind was barely held together at this point, so it took me a while to notice. Because if this is true, and given how in control of herself Rowan seemed to be at that moment I have no reason to doubt that, it means that the hard shell and the faceless helmet, that is how Rowan...wants to be seen? is comfortable being seen? I feel like I'm not finding the right words. But anyway, given that, now I'm all the way back around in just plain confused. Because that's just alien to me, and I don't understand it. But when it's just a lack of understanding, not horror or revulsion or something else, I know how to deal with that. So if I was going to understand, Rowan would have to tell me what about this experience she loves.
I kind of suspect that the right words here might be along the lines of "is not uncomfortable being seen" for the reason mentioned above, although at a certain point the distinction between pleasure and the lack of pain gets very thin (especially if you pile on the gratification of pleasing those around you and lots of drugs and conditioning). Maintaining a public facing identity can be a hell of a stressor, probably even for people who have a less contentious identity and can fit into it better when compared to Rowan. A vacation from that, mentally via the programing and physically via the drone shell, must be a hell of a thing. When it comes along with permission via control to do what you would have liked to do anyway, it might actually feel quite freeing.
Some of the above might be me missing a point, as while parts of this story are quite hot to me, the total latex encasement thing taken alone isn't one of them, and Rowan might feel differently.
I agree. Surrendering control of your own volition in an environment where you can be supported by someone benevolent towards you can be extremely powerful.
For all intents and purposes they are an Outside Context Problem that is completely off the Political Compass and would scare the piss out of every established ideological movement currently in existence.
I am not so sure. There is a reason why Sorry to Bother You, a movie about slavery reinvented as a Silicone Valley app thing, is referenced in the story. Ultimately, one of the questions that float around the story - I hope I attended to it enough, but I am not certain - is of how much you can reduce a human body to a commodity. As I explain below, I did not explore the relationship of capitalism and droneification kink at length for variety of reasons, but the removal of drones from the capitalist economy has more to do with them ceasing to be classified as labour and becoming more... well, factory tooling. Means of production, if you will. I wish my grasp of the finer points of Marxist thought would be better, so that I could spin this yarn in full.
Maybe... I haven't read Eudeamon, but it seems like even with the attendant medical advances the drones here in this story are a money pit, requiring a whole libidinal industrial complex to even start to defray their costs. Those costs are just absorbed by Aphrodite for reasons of her own, so I think the political hot potato here has more to do with Aphrodite and her facility for getting humans to do what she wants than the drones themselves.
One of the things I had initially assumed I would touch on more in this story, but ended up not was the economic side of the entire Galatea deal. Setting aside monetary exploitation kink - which is one of those things I just do not share even in a very abstract level - there is a rather unpleasant undercurrent of financial exploitation to things that Galatea does that I handled through simply leaving it out of the picture. I suppose I could justify it by noting how Galatea screens its potential contracts for people who are in only f or the money, but that wouldn't make sense, and any attempt to make it "clean" would just end up painfully convoluted in the end. So I just did not go there, for better or worse. Which, I suppose, is a shame, because writing about the relation of reification to objectification could be funny, if even more morally suspect than the rest of the story.
But yeah, you are right here - the entire sex industry part of Galatea observation is just a huge, huge money sink that would be plainly unsustainable if Galatea didn't have a Basically Magic biotech division raking in monstrous amounts of money. Even then, if the corporation was administered in any "rational" way the thing would get cut because it generates bad PR, sullies the brand and is simply unprofitable. But Galatea does not exist for a profit motive. I think there is some interesting exploration to be done here, but I just do not have the general level of knowledge of the world of finance and business to write that story.
Some of the above might be me missing a point, as while parts of this story are quite hot to me, the total latex encasement thing taken alone isn't one of them, and Rowan might feel differently.
Another thing I did not go in the story - this time mostly because it wasn't relevant to the kinks I wanted to hit in my misaimed attempt at making it mostly a porn thing - is that the Galatea "range" of sexual services is quite diverse. Although objectification (and a degree of mental control) is a common denominator, latex drones are not the only workers that Galatea can produce for its clients. There are other resorts specialized in different sort of entertainments. It's a perversity utopia, or a porn site tag search realised in the flesh.
