I do not have time to yell at people right now; I have a pie in the oven and dishes on the stove and one or both of those will burn if I take too long here
@Aranfan, would it kill you to take, like, three seconds to consider that every character in this story is a person with feelings and those feelings are legitimate and matter, and that they therefore do things for intelligible reasons even if the things they do are, on balance, morally objectionable?
Because like yeah there's the superficial reading of "oh no Faust is a horrible monster how dare she do these things she's an irredeemable monster get the torches and pitchforks"
or there's the actually interesting conversation to be had about why Faust does these kinds of things; about the reasons she feels and acts like this
And step one towards having that actually interesting conversation is stopping to consider that maybe she actually fucking has emotions and reasons like a person
And when she says that she loves Lyle, she isn't lying.
I do not have time to yell at people right now; I have a pie in the oven and dishes on the stove and one or both of those will burn if I take too long here
@Aranfan, would it kill you to take, like, three seconds to consider that every character in this story is a person with feelings and those feelings are legitimate and matter, and that they therefore do things for intelligible reasons even if the things they do are, on balance, morally objectionable?
Because like yeah there's the superficial reading of "oh no Faust is a horrible monster how dare she do these things she's an irredeemable monster get the torches and pitchforks"
or there's the actually interesting conversation to be had about why Faust does these kinds of things; about the reasons she feels and acts like this
And step one towards having that actually interesting conversation is stopping to consider that maybe she actually fucking has emotions and reasons like a person
And when she says that she loves Lyle, she isn't lying.
Faust is not irredemable. Everything she does makes perfect sense from her internal logic. She is a fascinating character, and the story would be much worse without her. She doesn't need torches and pitchforks, she needs a long talk about boundaries and other people's autonomy.
She is forcing Lyle and Amy into something they are probably not ready for, not out of malicious intent, but because she is deeply concerned about her friend Blackberry. Her motivation is laudable, but her methods are monstrous. This is how she has been since chapter one, someone doing what is probably the wrong thing for good and understandable and noble reasons.
I don't hate Faust. I actually think Lyle is probably a worse person than her.
Dress-chan is the one I think should be tossed out on her ass.
She is forcing Lyle and Amy into something they are probably not ready for, not out of malicious intent, but because she is deeply concerned about her friend Blackberry. Her motivation is laudable, but her methods are monstrous.
To a certain extent I agree, Lyle and Amy are holding back due to significant hang ups regarding both themselves and each other and they might not be ready, but it feels disingenuous to say that faust is removing their autonomy. Pushing them in uncomfortable ways? Absolutely. But there's a difference between 'shitty and manipulative' and 'monstrous'. She sees Amy, literally starving physically and emotionally, and Lyle, unwilling to move forward for reasons, and decides that they both need a push. That it helps Blackberry as well almost feels like a tacked on justification tbh. Shitty, possibly even actively harmful depending on how badly she misjudged both of their needs (which I expect we'll find out next ch). But she's giving them the opportunity to do so because she thinks they both desperately want it and are too afraid to make the first move. She thinks they are ready, and I don't know if I disagree with that.
On a larger scale, one of the things I really enjoy about these characters and the arcs of their relationships is that they're so messy, so tangled up in logistics of trying to be functional and sane in a world that was made to drag them down. Miscommunication, misjudgments, trying to make something good happen for you and your partner but it backfiring because you missed a key detail. It feels very real, in a way I wished I saw more often.
They're not monsters, they're not evil, I don't even think they're abstractly 'bad'. They're broken, flawed, and desperately working to hold their loved ones together even as they personally tear at the seams. That it's working at all means something, given the setting they were born living in. Taking everything Lyle and co. do in such a pessimistic light takes away from what they've achieved.
To a certain extent I agree, Lyle and Amy are holding back due to significant hang ups regarding both themselves and each other and they might not be ready, but it feels disingenuous to say that faust is removing their autonomy. Pushing them in uncomfortable ways? Absolutely. But there's a difference between 'shitty and manipulative' and 'monstrous'. She sees Amy, literally starving physically and emotionally, and Lyle, unwilling to move forward for reasons, and decides that they both need a push. That it helps Blackberry as well almost feels like a tacked on justification tbh. Shitty, possibly even actively harmful depending on how badly she misjudged both of their needs (which I expect we'll find out next ch). But she's giving them the opportunity to do so because she thinks they both desperately want it and are too afraid to make the first move. She thinks they are ready, and I don't know if I disagree with that.
On a larger scale, one of the things I really enjoy about these characters and the arcs of their relationships is that they're so messy, so tangled up in logistics of trying to be functional and sane in a world that was made to drag them down. Miscommunication, misjudgments, trying to make something good happen for you and your partner but it backfiring because you missed a key detail. It feels very real, in a way I wished I saw more often.
They're not monsters, they're not evil, I don't even think they're abstractly 'bad'. They're broken, flawed, and desperately working to hold their loved ones together even as they personally tear at the seams. That it's working at all means something, given the setting they were born living in. Taking everything Lyle and co. do in such a pessimistic light takes away from what they've achieved.
This is entirely fair. I've been giving initial impressions, and they have been a bit critical of the characters in ways that doesn't really take into account the shitty world they live in and the systems this imposes on them.
"Monstrous" is indeed too harsh of a descriptor for Faust. "Shitty and manipulative" is better. The only one who has actually been "monstrous" to my mind so far is dress-chan. And part of that is we haven't really gotten to know her yet, so its impossible to really relate to her like the others.
I do not like Dress-chan. Lyle is dependent on Beeps, but not in any permanent way, it is theoretically possible for them to disentangle as Beeps' punishment shows. Faust made her fluids addictive, but prisoner's fruit is so plentiful that it doesn't actually render Lyle dependent on her, since he can always get his fix elsewhere.
Dress-chan? Dress-chan has apparently rendered Lyle physically dependent on her within less than a day.
Beeps and Faust we get to know well enough that they are clearly doing bad things out of good intentions. They are trying to do good but do bad because they are flawed imperfect beings, and the trying counts for a lot. Dress-chan has done nothing to show herself as anything but a stranger rapist. What little we have gotten of her perspective has been mindraping lyle in ways even more invasive than Faust at her worst.
'Yeah!? You think it's ugly? You think she's ugly? Well I like it! I think it looks like an ice cream cone! And I like ice cream! I like her too! So there!'
So...I don't really wanna speak for @The_Letter_K here. It's no secret that we're friends, but...a lot of stuff is stuff that gets touched on later in the story, even if it's kind of talked about in the thread, so let me just try and set this up properly based on my own experiences.
I can at least speak for myself, right?
Imagine, say, you're however many years old - maybe a few years younger than you probably should be, or maybe just barely old enough - and you come across a certain fan comic about a certain magical girl series. Imagine, say, you have a bit of a latex fetish, so you're interested, right? It's about a magical girl and her evil clone, and the evil clone says something like...
"Now you'll be the copy, and I'll be the original..."
And she's wrapped in black, and her mind lulled, and filled with new thoughts and feelings, and corrupted, and she ends up being turned to shiny, latex-coated evil, and proceeds to corrupt all her friends, and make them do evil things like, um...
kiss other girls?
and be their true selves?
and be happy and self-actualized on their own terms, in sexual and passionate love far distant from the 'innocence' they so displayed, loving their blank-eyed looks and latex tentacles and shiny outfits?
Imagine you read that, and you become obsessed with all of those things, because they answer some nameless longing you don't understand - and can't understand for years, and may never understand if you're unfortunate, but if you get just the right nudges, you might just realize that what you wanted wasn't the corruption and evil after all...
but that's how you were led to this place, without really knowing why.
I'm sure a lot of people on SV would consider such a doujinshi problematic on a lot of levels, and the framing of 'lesbian as evil', and all kinds of other shit. They'd hold people to unrealistic standards. They'd consider such a depiction harmful. Maybe they're not entirely wrong, either.
But that's where our feelings live. For...girls like myself, at least.
You don't find yourself because someone told you trans people existed and you should support them. You find yourself because somewhere, in something that was never intended for such a reason, something that may well be 'bad' in fashions often disdained here, you saw something that you longed for, without really knowing why...you find something that you're drawn to, endlessly, and delve into deeply without even realizing what you are, maybe even feeling ashamed of it because you can't even admit you have a sex drive without people shaming you, let alone that you long for such a "corrupted" world of girls wrapped in black and free to kiss and love each other
Contact is a lot of things. I stuck my neck out, on a risk of people being turned off by some of this content, because I believed what K wrote was important for people to see, and this was her best chance at finding people who understood - I genuinely think it's better than anything I've ever written, or at least more meaningful. It's a comedy, it's a sexy romp, it's a story about human relationships, it's a study of a setting that's weird and frankly kinda shitty taking it as read rather than trying to clean it up or condemn it, but most of all...
it's about all of that 'messiness', to me. 'corruption', and things like it, and the lies we tell ourselves so we can have what we want.
it's about what we long for, without really knowing why.
that's Contact...
and that's Lyle.
Anyway, like...I actually think the recommendation blurb gives a bit of a false impression of things, because it's overly serious. Contact is, by and large, a bit of a comedy, a bit of a romance story, and a bit of a drama - and I'd say the 'comedy' is important to remember, most of all. You have to frame a lot of Faust's early actions in the context of something kinda silly, but turned into something really sexy, and a relationship that isn't healthy from a real-world perspective but has some real feeling behind it, and is often hilarious in turn...
It's still better than usual, though. Still upset about last month. :|
It's also real weird whiplash to judge Lyle as 'a worse person than Sally' then just whip right around like that. Just...you know, give time to let things settle in if it's a long story. You know, like, trust an author once in a while! Or like...
look, this is a smut story, chances are good that a lot of stuff that is happening may just be happening in part because it's a fetish people like, and you know, that's okay. If SV wants to live up to a pretense of being a safe space for queer people - K, Thelxiope, and to a lesser extent myself are deeply uncomfortable with the "questionable" alternative many of us are more or less forced upon because they (or at least I) feel like expressing our desires and feelings in any way is considered shameful or even problematic here - we have to accept that sometimes our thoughts are messy, and real people are arguably way worse than almost anything depicted here, frequently, all the time...
so why hold fictional characters to such high standards, when real people so frequently fall so far below that bar?
@Aranfan, to me at least, it comes off less like you're reacting to a story with your own feelings, and more like you're judging the characters and/or the author when things get messy. I do hope that wasn't your intent, and if it wasn't I apologise, but...a change in approach might be warranted, is all. Especially if you want to see more content like this around~
Lyle's withdrawal symptoms for being separated from Dress-chan include not being able to breathe. Lyle might not be physiologically dependent, but they are clearly not able to function, full stop, without Dress-chan.
@Aranfan, to me at least, it comes off less like you're reacting to a story with your own feelings, and more like you're judging the characters and/or the author when things get messy. I do hope that wasn't your intent, and if it wasn't I apologise, but...a change in approach might be warranted, is all. Especially if you want to see more content like this around~
It was not my intention to come off as a judgemental asshole. I most certainly was not intending any negative at the author, who is depicting relationships with a messiness and reality that is often sorely lacking.
This has already become one of my favorite stories on SV, and I will absolutely follow the sequel. I like these characters and want to see things work out for them.
... This deserves an effortpost, not a quick first impression.
For what it's worth, I think Faust is being too harsh on herself here. She is somewhat culpable, in a very minor way, for her house seemingly having no security at all. But Dress-chan breaking Lyle is not the fault of Faust in any way, shape, or form. It is purely the fault of Dress-chan. And yes, they are very lucky that Dress-chan got to Lyle before, say, Magenta.
The reaction to Lyle and Amy having sex is... it's a lot to unpack, Faust still clearly has some jealousy hangups. Apparently Faust and Beeps have been growing very close to each other off screen. I will admit, I panicked when Faust did. I was really worried that Beeps would hurt "the hated one". Fortunately, Beeps seems to have reconciled with Faust. So that's good. Interesting that Beeps can apparently shock herself on Faust's equipment anytime she likes. That indicates she doesn't want to be talkative, which honestly tracks with her character so far.
I was very relieved when Beeps and Faust... consummated their new relationship. I like both of them, and them hating each other was always an oof.
I hope this works out.
... wait, wasn't Blackberry supposed to be watching? Whoops. Oh well, it's not like Amy and Lyle will be reluctant to stage a repeat performance.
That sort of judgemental posting can also come from heavy immersion - does more often than not when it's that emotional, in my experience. You don't get there without having already loved the story.
Though, to @Aranfan in particular, I'd just like to say in dress-chan's defense: we're talking about a literal lovecraftian monster. Her perception of the world, of people, their desires, and her desires for herself are profoundly alien, and while it may take some reading of the source material to know for sure, by lore she plain and simply will not have had the breadth of experience in what the world she's in is like as anyone else there.
The girl is doing her best, but the results were never not going to be messy given the above. That's something to be pitied, not hated, as far as I see it. Faust making her fluids addictive was deliberate. Lyle becoming dependent on shoggoth was not.
That sort of judgemental posting can also come from heavy immersion - does more often than not when it's that emotional, in my experience. You don't get there without having already loved the story.
Though, to @Aranfan in particular, I'd just like to say in dress-chan's defense: we're talking about a literal lovecraftian monster. Her perception of the world, of people, their desires, and her desires for herself are profoundly alien, and while it may take some reading of the source material to know for sure, by lore she plain and simply will not have had the breadth of experience in what the world she's in is like as anyone else there.
The girl is doing her best, but the results were never not going to be messy given the above. That's something to be pitied, not hated, as far as I see it. Faust making her fluids addictive was deliberate. Lyle becoming dependent on shoggoth was not.
I've now quoted all the comments I've yet to respond to, and have begun organizing them into coherent groups to reply to. I haven't done any trimming yet, but right now it's 23 pages of your comments in a word doc.
..........I really need to stop procrastinating on this. I always wind up with such a volume of things to talk about.
Though, to @Aranfan in particular, I'd just like to say in dress-chan's defense: we're talking about a literal lovecraftian monster. Her perception of the world, of people, their desires, and her desires for herself are profoundly alien, and while it may take some reading of the source material to know for sure, by lore she plain and simply will not have had the breadth of experience in what the world she's in is like as anyone else there.
The girl is doing her best, but the results were never not going to be messy given the above. That's something to be pitied, not hated, as far as I see it. Faust making her fluids addictive was deliberate. Lyle becoming dependent on shoggoth was not.
Yeah, a lot of this stuff is, as K has mentioned, just K choosing to be accurate to the lore as she understands it. It's actually scarily easy to forget that this is a fanfic, rather than an original work... although, in some chapters, we may touch on a few, um, salient differences between this fic and most others of this setting.
The whole thing with Beeps and electricity? In the Automaton's entry. The lenses Amy uses to turn into Fran? Holstaur thing. Magenta is a Demon, who are all intensely powerful and dedicated to the corruption of the human world, said to be perhaps more radical than the Demon Lord herself. Obviously they're all still their own characters, which I love, but K presents each of these entries largely as read...and, I suppose people have surmised there's one in particular that might come up later...
...Faust is just Faust, though. Sally was always a menace.
"Akubra?" I asked, "what's going on? Where are we?"
We were, as near as I could tell, in a white void around a fire, with vaguely festive looking adornments scattered around everywhere like a tornado had dropped them here along with us.
"A holiday special Lyle. Try not to think about it too much."
"Uh? Okay?"
"Oh, and I suppose we are simply meant to engage in this ridiculous chicanery completely willingly, then?" Faust asked. "Is the author even aware of other holiday traditions or is this simply a matter of pretending to be inclusive?"
"We could say we're celebrating the solstice?" Amy said, hesitantly. "That's pretty safe, right?"
"Yes," Faust said, "except we've missed that by several days at this point. Frantically searching the wiki for a canon holiday and failing to find one is no excuse for this level of sloppiness."
"Sad." Beeps said, both she and Faust looking up at some indeterminate point in the sky.
"I dunno," Blackberry said, "I think it's kind of fun!"
I followed Faust's gaze up and up and up. Way up high in the sky, I could see shapes and forms, eyes gazing at us through tiny holes that looked almost like letters cut into the void of white. I started feeling woozy.
Suddenly all I could see was Akubra, blocking my view of whatever that had been with her body. "Let's not worry about all of that. Happy holidays, everyone."
"Happy holidays!" Blackberry and Amy said together, both echoing Akubra.
"Felicitations," Beeps responded.
"And I suppose we must wish you a pleasant new year as well?" Faust sounded exasperated. She had some idea of what was going on and I got the sense she thought it was beneath her.
"Uh. Happy holidays, I guess?" I said, still confused.
A jaunty tune echoed through the air. I started to feel like maybe I should put my feelings to song, like maybe we could all come together this season and-
"No, no, absolutely not." Faust said. "That is quite enough. Happy holidays and new year, and thank you kindly for reading, but we are done with this foolishness."
"My love, what has your mind so troubled?" Faust asked, "Your performance did not suffer, but I can tell you are distracted by something unpleasant."
Beepatrice put her hand on my head. "Healthy."
We were in Faust's room, seated on her bed, and Beeps and she had fed already, as was getting to be our routine. I was up early enough that I'd probably head out with Amy on her run after this, too. Spending a little time with the rest of the girls after devoting a day to Blackberry seemed like a good call.
A loud thumping echoed from behind the sheets covering Faust's workplace from view.
"Well," I said, "On the one hand, I'm getting a little bit concerned about whatever that is. It keeps coming back again faster, louder, and more violently."
Faust pointedly ignored my implied question.
"But mostly," I said, graciously moving on, "I'm still thinking about the dreams I had last night."
"Ah, Magenta's offerings, yes? I had some myself, and I must say they are exquisite!" Faust gushed, "My time in the body of the rare Ittan-Momen has given me much to consider."
"Ittan-Momen?" I asked, momentarily distracted.
"Indeed. They are fine creatures, a type of cloth-ghost, essentially. Living fabric. I'd been considering applying the Mummy's curse to myself, to increase my flesh's sensitivity to its maximum, and it would be necessary to enshroud myself in bandages to function in the day-to-day if I do so. By taking lessons from the Ittan-Momen, I may be able to parlay those strips of cloth into a sort of series of tentacle-like appendages, not to mention turning my cloak and hat into sexual organs, nearly inseparable from myself." She sighed, happily. "To take such a thoughtful gift and make it into a piece of myself, I cannot deny the appeal of the idea. Why, even my phylactery…" She trailed off, looking embarrassed. "never mind, now is not the time. You were saying?"
"One of my dreams was… the final stages of a woman becoming a Demon." I said, quietly.
Beeps, having had me wrapped in a hug already, tightened it at my obvious distress.
"That horrible slut!" Faust said, indignant, standing up and pacing, "Doesn't she know anything of subtlety? You are a fragile creature! Not well responsive to such things!"
"Ah, I don't know about fragile…" I grumbled, halfheartedly.
"Lyle, Magenta was natural born, so she may be an exception, but for a human woman to become a Demon, rather than merely a Succubus, she must be indoctrinated! Made to believe that Monsterization is best for not only her, but for everyone, and then taught to aggressively pursue that goal. There is a reason the radical faction of Mamono are so feared. Demons are temptresses, whispering salacious words into the minds of the unwary and making Mamono of entire villages! Such a mindset is the difference between a Succubus and a Demon. It's a rather extreme position by itself, to say nothing of the way they generally treat their men as property."
She huffed, frustrated, then continued, "There is no shame in being comparatively fragile in the face of such things. A mind like that would naturally be disturbing to a gentle soul like yourself, especially being made to enjoy the process by the dream as you are along for the ride."
I frowned. "It was a little… unsettling. The worst part was definitely the way she treated Ted. I'm sure they're happy together now, but that's really no excuse. Although…"
Faust raised an eyebrow. "Although?"
I shuddered. "She was just so hungry. The scariest thing about it is that in her position, I might have acted no different."
Faust leaned in too, surrounding me on both sides with a huggy Mamono, Beepatrice stroking my back, gently.
"Lyle, that simply isn't true. You-"
"Isn't it!?" I interrupted, surprised by my own volume, "Sorry. I mean… It's just, when I was in your body…"
As I trailed off, her eyes widened. Yeah, that's right. You can't honestly have forgotten, can you?
"That… that's hardly representative, Lyle." She shuffled, uncomfortably, before burying her head in my chest. "My body is attuned to you in a way that I cannot properly describe without hours of laying the background. You cannot take that experience as the norm. Were you not more controlled in… Amy's body?"
I could see her wince as she said it, realizing her argument was, at best, flawed.
"Moo." I said. While it was true that Faust's body had been much more overwhelming, even Amy handled her first proper milking better than I had, and she'd been waiting her whole life for it, or years of it, anyway.
"Hmmm… 'Moo' indeed." Faust muttered. "As a Zombie, your instincts would be even more overpowering… But Wights tend to be quite refined and restrained. Their idea of a party is more ball gowns than ball gags. Your… affinity, let us say… for Mamono forms may actually speed your transformation to Wighthood, and then be a blessing there, rather than a curse. I did not choose your form carelessly, my love."
"If you're sure…" I said. "I guess; I mean… I know that I trust you, and this is sort of your 'thing' so if you say so… I just, I'm worried. There were more dreams in the little case she gave me, and I had to fightmyself as hard as I ever had just to avoid succumbing to temptation and downing three more. I'm not sure I want to know what's in them, but I'm sure I want them in me. I don't want to lose myself. It's frightening."
"Your concerns are quite valid, Lyle. I shall look into what can be done to mitigate them." Faust continued, at a murmur, "Some potential Zombies actually rise as Wights immediately instead. If I can isolate the inciting factor, ensure its presence…"
Removing her arms from around me, she clapped her hands, and stood. "I must experiment."
I stood, too, and Beepatrice stayed wrapped around me, being dragged along limply as I walked. I'd used my tentacles again, and she was always a mess for a while afterwards. It was so cute I couldn't stop.
"Before you get all wrapped up in this," I said, glad to switch topics, "I want to know what that noise was."
Her eyes shifted rapidly around the room, looking for something to distract me with, no doubt.
"Faust…" I said, warningly.
She sulked. "Very well." She pulled the curtain back, and I slid to the side before I realized what I was doing. A sharp, familiar-looking spine sailed through the air, and embedded in the wall behind me. I turned back, looking at the table, and…
"Faust, what the hell are those!?"
She crossed her arms, looking away from me. "They are sea-sponges. My experiments with Mamono body parts utilize them, as promised."
"Faust, that is not a sea sponge with a piece of a Mamono attached, that's a piece of a Mamono with a sea sponge attached!"
It was true. The tails of many a Manitcore, presumably grown, and not stolen, wiggled around in a large glass box like so many snakes. And not small ones. That each one had a tiny sea sponge at the end of it was almost immaterial. They appeared to know I was in the room, the pussy ends all pressed against the glass. One had broken a small bit of the durable material out of their cage, and was firing their well-known poison at me. Having seen what happened to those so struck first hand, I kept dodging.
"Faust!"
"I know, I know." She shut the curtain. "I did not expect they would be full size, proportional makes much more sense." She looked at the ground, "I will have them destroyed before they learn teamwork, or worse. They have served their purpose in any case."
Served their-? "Tell me you didn't."
In answer, she turned around, showing me her ass. Quite aside from the genuinely delightful real estate generally present there, my eyes eventually stopped arguing with me and landed at the base of her spine, where, sure enough, a small, raised mound was already developing.
"With the infusion of energies I've just received," she said, chattering excitedly, "I believe we can expect full growth by the early afternoon!"
I put my head in my hands.
"Do not be such a drama queen, Lyle. My gaining of another orifice for pleasuring you with is hardly burdensome upon you."
I hummed to myself. That was true.
"I… I'll think about it."
I walked out of the room, dragging Beeps with me, her small, pleasured noises a reassuring presence. She was starting to regain herself more completely, which meant I wouldn't miss my run with Amy if I hurried.
I do think a lot of it has to do with the forum culture, like you said. QQ for whatever reason tends to encourage rapid and repeated posting in general, which can border on low-content posting but also means people are a lot more likely to respond to discussion. SV is a lot less engaged in general, and while it probably has more overall users I don't think a lot of them actually interact with the site very much. Plus, I don't think the site demographics really tend towards monstergirls, and most of the people who do like it probably already read it on the other site.
For my part, I'm really enjoying the story. All of the characters are well written and fun to read, and you do a good job of getting across the essential suckiness of the world without wallowing in it or shoving it in the reader's face. Overall I'd put this in the top three stories I'm reading right now, and you're updating a lot faster than the other two.
A super sweet moment, and honestly one of the ones in this fic that matches closest with my own preferences. The bit with the shoggoth at the beginning creeps me out (probably the most out of all of its scenes), but it's over soon enough. Amy's a good girl.
I think this is the kind of thing I like to write the most, honestly. Trying to put to paper a self-consistent yet alien perspective has been consistently rewarding.
I... don't know either. The wiki says it's being ruled over by one of the Lilim, who are all childern of the current Demon Lord. But it doesn't go into detail if she created it, or if it previously existed and she just took it over. A lot of the monsters in there were created by that Lilim though, like the Jub Jubs from Harpies and the Wonderworm from the Greenworm.
My understanding is that the Queen of Hearts is one of Lilith's first and most powerful children, and that she actually created Wonderland. It's apparently a place of her whims. What that says about allowing the entire world to come under Demonic influence remains to be seen, since the Queen of Hearts seems to be quite a bit more mercurial than other Mamono, but we might certainly expect a few things to change at least.
I'm glad you like her! The Dream Team are kind of minor characters at the moment, but they're still fun to write, and they're a nice example of what a functional group of Mamono can look like when they come together.
Sadly for their husband, they're also an example of what might happen to you on the most extreme edge case if you let yourself get too swept up with the most dangerous kinds of Mamono, but they're an interesting contrast that way too, and it's not like he's having a bad time, I guess.
Capturing this kind of emotion was what really drew me in about writing Contact, as I may have mentioned before. That and Sally taking my brain hostage, I mean.
I found this story through SV, and am happy to have done so! I've been following along on every post since I found the story. I mostly skim the smut because Lyle identifies as male, and I can't read smut with 'male' protagonists, haha. But every chapter makes me more certain that Lyle is trans, so... that might be changing soon? xD
I'm nonetheless quite invested in the characters, and am eagerly following their journey to a hopefully happy life. And also hope they can do something about this like... sex capitalism horror world, hah.
Welcome, Lady Lynn! I'm very glad you spoke up! It was sort of demoralizing not to know if I was making an impact, but learning you care so much despite such a large turn-off is rather heartening!
I'm here! Just caught up (to what's on SV, at least) after having started reading two days ago on the recommenations of the people in the Pink Flamingo Cabal thread. I probably won't be very active in the thread, posting-wise, but I've read and enjoyed the story thus far and intend to continue following it from here on out. I see no reason to expect my feelings about the sequel to be any different, if you end up deciding to post it here.
(If you don't, then I'll go catch up and follow it on QQ, I suppose. But I'd prefer that it end up here alongside this thread.)
Welcome, Tulip! I'm glad Fiona's outreach efforts have attracted some readers. I really don't deserve the enthusiasm she brings to the table, but every time I try to say something like that she tells me to shush. Hopefully you continue to enjoy the story as it goes up!
I'd absolutely love to see the sequel on here, this story is one of my recent favorites!
I'm definitely going to be reading through the rest even if you don't end up continuing to repost here, but I do want to reinforce the fact that there are newcomers reading, even if we're entirely invisible (because I'm sure I'm not alone in lurking)
Welcome, Helian! I really appreciate you and everyone else coming out of the woodwork. With confirmation there's so many of you here and interested, I don't see any reason to give up on posting here, so you lot really did make that difference!
I love how Faust can just say that, like, conversationally, without it turning into bombast or a derail or anything.
Clear and distinct style is important, especially for a character archetype as ... iconic, I guess? as the Mad Scientist.
Faust's very matter-of-fact, very self-assured, calm and composed and level brand of mad scientist speeches are really great.
She's a genius. It's a thing. It's not a big deal. She doesn't have to prove it to anyone, she's just reminding Lyle of pertinent information. Of course the necklaces are going to work, now that she's had a chance to tinker with them a bit. This is obvious.
She likes to have a good shout now and then, but if you can't tell that Faust is absolutely not bragging without any receipts I guess she feels like it would be wasted effort to try to convince you. You're clearly a simpleton at that point!
This was intensely gratifying to read, Thelxiope. I really appreciate you. I'd not heard of exquisite corpses, but that is a stellar metaphor and you deserve recognition.
Beeps chooses her words with tremendous care. And mostly, that's because she doesn't get very many to work with -
But, well, that seems to have given her a lot of practice for these kind of situations, where the wrong word wouldn't work, or would break more than it helped.
Beeps' style of speech was at least partly inspired by an original work of superhero fiction I remember reading so long ago, now, back when that stuff was all sequestered to special Yahoo interest groups. (I saw the internet in its early years, yes.)
I think it was called… Capes? Masks? Something like that.
The relevant information was that the super-intelligent characters could communicate with each other, not by babbling enormous paragraphs, but by simply knowing the other person, and using context, body language, facial expression, and a simple word or two to stand in for entire paragraphs of nuanced disagreements and conversations.
It stuck out to me as being a stunningly intelligent way to portray it. Almost like using your body and environment to create a meme in real time, and capable of conveying just as much emotion, context, and depth of thought. I think if we ever get to the point where computers are in our heads we'll see something much like it, as our additional processing power just lets us understand and model others much better and handle more information.
Beeps is my attempt at something similar. If there were ever two in a room, I think it's fair to say none of the other characters could keep up, even if Sally could likely put it together after the fact. Of course, if she starts messing about with her brain, Beeps better watch out!
Beeps also speaks that way because there was only one language when she comes from, so her code is rather rigid. It was a musical, tone based language, we see it a bit later on, and she has to piece together words on the fly from the phenomes she can speak. It's much less natural, she has to essentially create each word around her own code and restrictions on the fly, and so it's very difficult for her.
Akubra is fun! I can see why (I seem to remember you saying?) you never did an Interlewd from her perspective, though. Like, I'm not sure how that could even work.
I guess I just didn't want to really think about the actual consequences of late-stage semen capitalism.
Mamono are afraid. They live in a famine mindset all the time. Oh, oh, of course. They don't ever feel safe.
Because what if their husband leaves them?
And you end up with this state where humans burn mamono at the stake to keep them away from their villages, and entire generations of mamono cannot conceive of the idea of intimacy without absolute control over a partner.
Faust, Lyle, the entire social order needs to be burned to the ground, the earth salted, and a sombre memorial set up atop the fucking ashes while the entire basis of society gets rebuilt from the ground up in the next lot over.
I eagerly await your plans on this matter.
In the mean time, I think I'm going to go cry for a bit.
It's not quite as bad as all that, though. Or rather, it is bad, but you're missing the other half. Which is entirely fair, it hasn't really been displayed and starts to come up in the sequel, but the humans are essentially living under imperial religious fascism, which is artificially adding to scarcity.
They're taught, not incorrectly, that Mamono will take them and make them into them, and that this precludes them from their afterlife. Every human outside of the integrated countries starts out with their xenophobia stat maxed out because it's the only way human society can survive under a self-perpetuating conversion threat, and the only way they can see their loved ones again after they die.
Even one monster in a town is one too many when your soul is one the line. The problem, of course, is that these kinds of societies are stagnant and lead to terrible standards of living for the general populace, which makes Mamono more tempting, and also leaves the Mamono feeling like the people need to be rescued.
"I like the smell of that guy, oooh but he wouldn't want me to take him, maybe I can convince him? Wait, he's living like this? Will he even make it through winter? He's going to be scared of me but that's just propaganda! I have to take him home and cuddle him and then he'll see we have free food and safety and hugs and kisses and why would he ever want to leave?"
The truth is probably somewhere more in the middle, Mamono are definitely corruptive, some to a staggering extent in very specific narrow ways and circumstances, but overall they and their husbands live much more normally and fully than the humans think, and many would likely be willing to make the trade if they had the chance to really sit down and consider it free of bias. Of course, the societies of both conspire against them getting that chance, and anyone who did would be written off as corrupted even if that weren't true.
It's a twisty problem, and it goes all the way up to the top, where the new Chief God, who's been left this clusterfuck by the original is frantically turning dials and pushing buttons on her god machine, trying to save her humans, and the Demon Lord is trying to do the same for her own people, trying to prevent them from being turned back into mindless beasts of slaughter designed to control populations levels by the OG Chief God.
And of course, the same communication problems that exist between their species are present between them as well. "She's just a Monster, she's trying to trick me!" "She's the one leading the charge for the slaughter of my people and her own! Why won't she listen!? I'll just have to *make* her see!" We'll have to see what can be done, if anything. The whole setting is cosmically fucked and desperately needs a hug.
This is my problem with...basically every tabletop RPG which deals with such things since the 1990s started the whole 'tragic monsters are sad even though they have all the cool powers' trend. I'd say maybe it's a thing where people don't get the idea of what being trans is like and how we'd eagerly desire to be monsters like that if we could reclaim our beauty, but Monsterhearts does the same thing to a point with the whole 'monsters are teens with confused desires who need to Grow Up'. So maybe it's a neurotypical thing? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
...honestly, this is the kind of praise I think every amateur writer here hopes for. Personally, I'd like to see more of it~
Hm. I'm sort of...unclear on whether Wonderland actually existed in her era though, which suggests she's had some interesting adventures in the past few thousand years...
I answered this for Waffel up above, but on another but related note, I still think sometimes about doing Beepaquest, going through what she got up to before all this. It's not something that super interests me, but I do keep coming back to it. Maybe we'll see it eventually in one form or another?
I would just like to point out at this juncture that this entire thing, so I understand it, was set up by the current Demon Lord and her husband, the last great Hero, to replace a society where monsters were (save for succubi and the like) largely just the kill-and-eat-you kind. (Beeps is from that era, for the record; like Unicorns and other non-culturally-monstrous Mamono, she was altered by the demonic energy of the world and the alteration of monsters' nature.)
Let me just repeat this for emphasis: the Demon Lord - who I believe is named Lilith, seemingly to spite me personally - and her husband decided that this system, this...thing we call the 'semen economy' was superior to the prior world order.
...presumably while fucking.
I'm sorry, I realize that as a very strong proponent of 'magical realms' who thinks Homura did nothing wrong I am absolutely the last person who should be saying this, but do not rewrite the laws of the universe because you're horny and you think it'll turn your partner on if you do. Think of all the other people who live in the fucking universe!
I'm not sure I disagree with her, honestly? Remind me to chat with you a bit more about how the whole thing worked before she bootstrapped societal progress to her nether bits. It was even more of a shitshow in a lot of ways, and the current system has essentially always been meant to be transitional.
That the transition has taken so long is not really her fault.
I love all these people. Sally... sorry, Faust, is great. Blackberry is hilarious. Lyle is just smart enough to get himself into trouble. And Beeps is simply the best.
I'm really glad you do! I've said this before, but they're very much real people to me, and I often regret seeing them reach so few people. It's the nature of the niche fandom and interests I'm writing for, I guess, but it does hurt, and whenever I see someone who sees them it really makes it all worthwhile.
I really love it when people appreciate the little flourishes and brick jokes that I set up and pay off. It makes the whole process incredibly rewarding. Thanks!
Oh right. This group is dysfunctional AF. I had almost forgotten.
oof
And this is a vicious callback to that very sweet moment.
Poor girl. I do like how the stereotypes get basically instantly subverted with all these characters. They all carve out an identity for themselves pretty quickly, and I like how it shows there is variety and difference in the world.
It's the nuance and sense of continuity in their interactions that really sells it, I think. Callbacks to things that happened earlier are very natural in our everyday lives, and being able to put them in, or imply that they're there in some cases, really gives them all a sense of shared history, and so further realism.
I've always thought there was something inherently romantic in the relationship between hero and villain, superhuman and mastermind, archenemies always circling each other…
Mmm… Couldn't resist putting it to page pretty explicitly. Imagine my delight when people responded.
How old is Lyle/Faust exactly? Cause Morningwood seems pretty established. Like, I'd expect it to be at least 20 years old from how its described on the street level, but I also hadn't gotten the impression that Lyle and Sally were older than like... 24ish?
Also, Faust is a much bigger deal than I had thought if she's the co-founder of the primary cultural center for the mamono. Like, holy shit. Unless Lyle is exaggerating, then Sally's backstory is packed full.
They are 25, I believe. I'll check my notes later.
It is a little bit of an exaggeration. Morningwood is definitely a huge deal, culturally, but the world they live in is further back along the tech tree than ours, so Lyle's idea of 'the world' is much smaller than the actual planet. He's pretty aware of surrounding kingdoms, which I have not bothered to define even in my notes., but that's basically it. I have very little worldbuilding outside the city, honestly. The capital city of the country they came from is Chalté, but that's about it.
Still, it sprung up pretty quickly for a lot of reasons. Mamono are better enchanters, magic users, and inventors than humans and are completely unafraid of change, pursuing anything that improves their husband's lives or chances of getting one, so industry moves quickly, and Mamono themselves often have specialized interests where they supernaturally excel as a species, which pushes them forward faster still.
They also have super strength, which helps with building things, and they don't get tired, or have to worry about where to get food or drink or security, assuming there's enough unmarried incubi to service the unmarried Mamono.
They also also canonically have a lot of absurd advantages like ancient technologies and honest-to-god portal networks connecting their major cities.
KC really goes all out when he wanks his setting. I just wish the information was organized better on the wiki. It is a nightmare to try to learn about it because all anyone cares about are the monsters themselves.
Ugh. I could whine about this all day. Most of the lore is just… untranslated, or tucked away behind a login-wall on some forum I had to actively search to find, or on the wiki, but only as part of huge list on the page for each translated book.
An entire lorebook's worth of info all on one wiki page without any real effort to index or get each item/cultural phenomenon/location/spell/animal/whatever its own page on the wiki I SWEAR TO GOD I'LL
Ahem. It's a frustration of mine.
It isn't even just one lorebook either. They did this crime against information multiple times.
Also, it's weird that someone who is so obviously a lesbian is so smitten with a dude. Although if Lyle does turn out to be a transgirl, it would make a lot more sense.
The more I learn about Beeps the more interested I am to learn more.
Oof. Blackberry isn't quite as innocent as she appears. She's just also internalized a bunch of really toxic shit.
And Amy is desperate for connection and deeply traumatized by the social reaction to her lack of a bustline.
The characters information pages have a lot more info on each one, however there's also some spoilers on them, so I won't be posting them here until the end of this fic. If you're really curious, you can find them on QQ.
Fair warning, the backstories of these characters don't play nice. Beeps in particular has done a lot to portray herself a certain way to Lyle while hiding things from him. I try not to hide from the fact that they are all very much Mamono, but most of what's objectionable from a human perspective about Beeps is something that needs to be read between the lines in the story itself because Lyle hasn't really picked up on it. He does start to, later in the story than you've gotten so far, though.
Actually! While this sort of thing isn't out of character for Mamono, and you could really argue that Lyle is addicted to her demonic energies anyway, and she to his, this is just about flavor. It just tastes like Prisoner Fruit.
And I have a thing for hats. Not sure why. Love big hats.
Magenta... yikes. There is a lot to unpack with magenta. She was a great example of how toxic Mamano society can be. Just, how she utterly disregarded Lyle as a person rather than a semen dispenser. I consider her changing her tune so suddenly evidence towards my alp theory. "good" to know that sexism is alive and well in Mamano society, just reversed.
Magenta is very much meant to fill this role, but like the others, she has reasons for the way she is, and she's unique in her distaste for men for reasons that have not even been revealed in the sequel yet but have more to do with her own issues than anything else.
To be honest, this is something I'm just kind of into? A domineering woman who knows what you want even if you don't and shows you how much you like it. It's not like she limits herself to Lyle's sex life, either. She very much believes she knows what's best for his entire life (and afterlife). It's part of who she is, and Lyle himself sort of relies on her for this at this point. He can be pretty passive and indecisive without someone pushing him.
Part of this is just story dynamics. It would have been intensely difficult to give each of these girls goals and motivations and strong personalities if Lyle was the traditional protagonist that had all of these things himself. By shifting him into a more passive, supportive role, I can bring each of the other girls into much sharper clarity in each of their scenes, because his main concern is making sure their main concerns are dealt with. It's a bit of a writing trick, and his internal monologue and sense of humor is what helps set him apart from basically an empty husk.
Part of it tho is I'm def into girls who are just demonstrably better than me, and I'm writing this story for you guys, but also for myself, you know?
This is also something I'm just kind of into, sorry. That said, the characters themselves are just aware of the setting they live in, and how this is very much just a part of their normal lives. They all grew up knowing this was something that could happen to them, and they've dealt with that idea long before now.
Regarding all of that, though, Subrosian_Smithy puts it much better than I could in an earlier quote which I'll re-use here;
I do not have time to yell at people right now; I have a pie in the oven and dishes on the stove and one or both of those will burn if I take too long here
@Aranfan, would it kill you to take, like, three seconds to consider that every character in this story is a person with feelings and those feelings are legitimate and matter, and that they therefore do things for intelligible reasons even if the things they do are, on balance, morally objectionable?
Because like yeah there's the superficial reading of "oh no Faust is a horrible monster how dare she do these things she's an irredeemable monster get the torches and pitchforks"
or there's the actually interesting conversation to be had about why Faust does these kinds of things; about the reasons she feels and acts like this
And step one towards having that actually interesting conversation is stopping to consider that maybe she actually fucking has emotions and reasons like a person
And when she says that she loves Lyle, she isn't lying.
This seems to have basically resolved itself without my input, so I'll just say, thanks for sticking up for all my girls, Thelxiope. It means a lot that you care so much. I'll share a little bit about myself and my own experiences at the end of this string of comments, as a sort of reply to the entire central idea being discussed.
You don't find yourself because someone told you trans people existed and you should support them. You find yourself because somewhere, in something that was never intended for such a reason, something that may well be 'bad' in fashions often disdained here, you saw something that you longed for, without really knowing why...you find something that you're drawn to, endlessly, and delve into deeply without even realizing what you are, maybe even feeling ashamed of it because you can't even admit you have a sex drive without people shaming you, let alone that you long for such a "corrupted" world of girls wrapped in black and free to kiss and love each other
Contact is a lot of things. I stuck my neck out, on a risk of people being turned off by some of this content, because I believed what K wrote was important for people to see, and this was her best chance at finding people who understood - I genuinely think it's better than anything I've ever written, or at least more meaningful. It's a comedy, it's a sexy romp, it's a story about human relationships, it's a study of a setting that's weird and frankly kinda shitty taking it as read rather than trying to clean it up or condemn it, but most of all...
it's about all of that 'messiness', to me. 'corruption', and things like it, and the lies we tell ourselves so we can have what we want.
it's about what we long for, without really knowing why.
that's Contact...
and that's Lyle.
look, this is a smut story, chances are good that a lot of stuff that is happening may just be happening in part because it's a fetish people like, and you know, that's okay. If SV wants to live up to a pretense of being a safe space for queer people - K, Thelxiope, and to a lesser extent myself are deeply uncomfortable with the "questionable" alternative many of us are more or less forced upon because they (or at least I) feel like expressing our desires and feelings in any way is considered shameful or even problematic here - we have to accept that sometimes our thoughts are messy, and real people are arguably way worse than almost anything depicted here, frequently, all the time...
so why hold fictional characters to such high standards, when real people so frequently fall so far below that bar?
Contact is fundamentally a story about communication. Between the characters, sure but also between me and the audience, in a really sad way.
Much like these girls want to be accepted by each other, I'd… well… It'd be nice if I didn't have to hide my interests from everyone, you know? If their first response wasn't always; "Uh, no this is problematic and scary and hurtful and wrong and bad!"
Sometimes! Sometimes for someone it's not! Sometimes someone gets it and that's super worthwhile! But usually it's torches and pitchforks, even when I couch the things I love so many layers deep and removed, and do my best to communicate to the audience what I see in these things through a viewpoint character that can enjoy them and… Ugh.
It just hurts a lot. Like I said, I'll get into it more below.
Everything else you've said in this vein I sort of took with a wince and a sigh, but I genuinely don't get this at all and would love for you to elaborate a little.
On a larger scale, one of the things I really enjoy about these characters and the arcs of their relationships is that they're so messy, so tangled up in logistics of trying to be functional and sane in a world that was made to drag them down. Miscommunication, misjudgments, trying to make something good happen for you and your partner but it backfiring because you missed a key detail. It feels very real, in a way I wished I saw more often.
They're not monsters, they're not evil, I don't even think they're abstractly 'bad'. They're broken, flawed, and desperately working to hold their loved ones together even as they personally tear at the seams. That it's working at all means something, given the setting they were born living in. Taking everything Lyle and co. do in such a pessimistic light takes away from what they've achieved.
Thanks very much, Helian. I really love to see it when I genuinely manage to reach out to someone like this, and it sparks an understanding of what I'm going for.
That sort of judgemental posting can also come from heavy immersion - does more often than not when it's that emotional, in my experience. You don't get there without having already loved the story.
Though, to @Aranfan in particular, I'd just like to say in dress-chan's defense: we're talking about a literal lovecraftian monster. Her perception of the world, of people, their desires, and her desires for herself are profoundly alien, and while it may take some reading of the source material to know for sure, by lore she plain and simply will not have had the breadth of experience in what the world she's in is like as anyone else there.
The girl is doing her best, but the results were never not going to be messy given the above. That's something to be pitied, not hated, as far as I see it. Faust making her fluids addictive was deliberate. Lyle becoming dependent on shoggoth was not.
Lyle's withdrawal symptoms for being separated from Dress-chan include not being able to breathe. Lyle might not be physiologically dependent, but they are clearly not able to function, full stop, without Dress-chan.
For what it's worth, I think Faust is being too harsh on herself here. She is somewhat culpable, in a very minor way, for her house seemingly having no security at all. But Dress-chan breaking Lyle is not the fault of Faust in any way, shape, or form. It is purely the fault of Dress-chan. And yes, they are very lucky that Dress-chan got to Lyle before, say, Magenta.
It's not quite that he can't breathe so much as that the air no longer tastes super good like the Shoggoth was making it taste, nor is it as effortless to breathe as it was when she was in his lungs.
You aren't wrong that he basically can't handle the world without her, but, like… think of it in terms of cybernetics, maybe? A bunch of implants that provide all sorts of conveniences and enhancements and problem-free good feelings and a personal ever-present friend just suddenly getting ripped out of you…
I mean, that shit's traumatic. Of course it is. That's not really sinister so much as common sense.
It was not my intention to come off as a judgemental asshole. I most certainly was not intending any negative at the author, who is depicting relationships with a messiness and reality that is often sorely lacking.
This has already become one of my favorite stories on SV, and I will absolutely follow the sequel. I like these characters and want to see things work out for them.
I'm really glad you enjoy it, Aranfan, genuinely. I hope that everyone talking you through it helps you enjoy the parts that were getting your feathers all fluffed, but if not, my own reply to the general idea follows below.
Taking a page from Fiona's book, let's all have a lil imagination party, shall we?
-
Let's say there's a young girl who lives in a hyper-conservative, controlling, and all around toxic family. The exact details aren't important, but it's bad. "Gay people are evil" bad. "Racism is normal" bad. Bad enough in enough ways that the young girl starts to question things at a very young age because her parents are so self-evidently wrong that she's inventing leftist viewpoints in her own head because she's got no one to talk to about it but something's clearly wrong.
Like how they keep calling her "he". That feels wrong. But there's no word for it, it's something that no one's ever talked about as far as she knows, it must mean this is one of those evil desires, probably, there's nothing coming from the pulpit about this, it's not in the bible, so it's probably like, Satan or something. But they're so wrong about everything else…
This girl desperately wants an imaginary friend, but the world she wants to live in is evil, she knows this. What kind of friend would help lead her into something so bad for her?
What about… an imaginary enemy? Yeah! Someone… she gets to go do all the cool bad stuff, and be happy and have cool friends and be pretty and look the way she wants. Someone who shares all the young girls interests, likes the same fictional worlds…
Maybe they even fight there? Yeah! And… sometimes, when the young girl loses… just sometimes… for a while she doesn't have to isn't allowed to go back home because her archenemy has her captured! And they go and do all the things which are obviously bad and evil, but seem kind of fun, because… uh… well, she's being tempted! And sure, for a moment it seems like her enemy is actually a cool friend who actually knows she's a girl, and can make everyone else see it too, but…
Well, a good child wouldn't let someone do that, so I guess the young girl has to be forced to experience that stuff! It's not her fault that way! She can't be blamed for what she was forced to do by her archenemy, whether by threats, or hostages, or mind control, it's not her fault if evil tempts her…
So long as she always goes back home in the end. Aware that no one anywhere would ever accept this kind of thing. Alone. Except for the super scary forces of evil, who make her feel so understood for just a minute.
But then, one day, on the internet… she finds something. An Encyclopedia of Monster Girls? What's that…? Huh. What… what's an Alp? It's one of the first entries but she's never heard of anything called an Alp.
So she reads it.
And suddenly, somewhere out there, she understands there's people who see her. They know she's there. She's REAL! And… and they think she's cute? And they wanna do… like boyfriend/girlfriend stuff even though she's really weird?
That… that can't be right? Can it?
Oh, but it's… it's a demon. It's a monster! Is she…?
Crushed, she realizes that there's others out there like her but they're all bad. She can't join them. It wouldn't be right.
But what if… what if they made her? What if it wasn't her fault? What if she was forced to like it?
It can't be her sin if she didn't do it, right?
-
Ahem…
I'm sure you can imagine the rest from there.
I… I don't think it's quite as bad as all that, is it?
Frankly I wish I could add more than one "hugs" reaction to that post, because I'm having trouble putting together words in a dignified fashion to elaborate on how much I want to reaffirm that both you and your story and the feelings underlying it are interesting and appreciated and have lots and lots of value.
And no, Fiona is not helping you more than you deserve, you silly. XD
During my ... well, I wasn't outwardly chuuni but from, like 7th-9th grades I was constantly in my own head, having elaborate magical fantasies of being cool and important; so, like, the shy version of being chuuni I guess?
But anyway during my chuuni phase it -
It wasn't just that all of the elaborate magical fantasies of being cool and important featured me being a girl.
It was that, nearly always, there was an element of ... loss of agency, involved. As a patch, a way of getting to the fantasy of being a cute girl without directly acknowledging my feelings? Because coming out, even to yourself, is scary and traumatic and hard.
It wasn't just that I was a cute witch who stole power from demons to protect the boring ordinary people, it was that I'd stolen some from a dangerous succubus and oh no, been turned into a girl
Or - I remember this one distinctly, because it came to me in a fever dream while trying to sleep off H1N1 - that I was the angel of some distant but benevolent goddess, who had, for some reason, needed to disguise myself as a boy - needed this whole identity as a boy - and that the goddess was pulling on the connection between our souls to shatter the false boy-identity and let her cute angel out
(no, this particular fantasy did not make me realize I was a girl. Egg denial is really strong.)
Or, that the teacher who ran Homework Club, who was a Zen Buddhist and big into tai chi and ... reiki, I think it's called? Like, the chi version of laying on hands. Anyway, that she'd try to heal me and what she'd end doing was making me not have to be a gross awful boy anymore. Fixing me so I could be a girl.
(no, this didn't make me realize I was a girl either.)
Or ... I fantasized about meeting a cute girl who was really like me, who shared a lot of interests with me and who got along well and then like asking her out and maybe going on a walk - I can pinpoint the exact location on my high school campus where I imagined this walk being - and kissing her and then
like
it turning out that she was me from an alternate universe? Wow selfcest flag there, there were a lot of signs that teenage Thel was just a huge neurodivergent lil' deviant.
Also just want to clarify that we're talking, like, a super-chaste, lips pressing against closed lips for a moment sort of kiss, because even teenage me had realized that french kissing is disgusting.
And anyway we'd kiss, and, like, somehow that would turn me into a girl too; and we could hold hands and be cute girlfriends together.
(this did not clue me onto the fact that I'm a girl either. There is a theme starting to emerge here.)
But ... it was important that these fantasies always had the magic girl-fication effect be ... out of my control.
Because if I'd admitted that I desperately wanted to be a girl, well
Society kills girls like us for that.
For a trans girl to realize that she's trans, even in the privacy of her own head, is scary and dangerous.
And so not having to choose makes ... makes us feel safe, when we're questioning.
Because it makes it someone else's fault. It means we can't be blamed, and maybe we won't be beaten to death in an alley for wanting to be ourselves if it's someone else's fault?
And for a lot of us, I think that the whole ... losing control element kind of sticks with us?
I still have a ... like ... 'compassionate submissive mindcontrol' fetish, I guess is the best way to phrase it?
The idea of someone coming along, and helping some poor, repressed girl who is too afraid to do something she really wants to do, to express some desire she feels she has to hide; of someone taking away her control so she doesn't have to be afraid; because it's not her doing this, it's her mistress, who loves her and cares for her and just wants her to be happy; who can force her to do things that make her happy, no matter what her shame or fear or anxiety have to say about things.
(never me, of course, because my libido doesn't work that way, can't self-reference; my brain needs the distance of this lucky cutie being someone else to find the scenario arousing)
I guess ...
Like, can people at least see how that could be liberating? Even people who aren't into mind control or submission or anything like that?
The idea of someone trusted, someone caring, coming along and helping you through the difficult choices, the fear, the shame, the I-want-to-do-this-but-I-can't
And not because they're evil and want to make you their slave or whatever; but because they want to help you. Because they want you to be happy.
...this is probably oversharing but w/e let's be crazy I guess
Faust comes at it from a slightly different angle, but I'm pretty sure that, like
her breathtaking lack of boundaries and willingness to just ... force her loved ones to do things
comes from the same source
She loves them, and wants them to be happy, and knows that they're dragging their feet, or repressing, or letting stuff get in the way of doing what they actually want to
So, she, just ... cuts through that for them.
And yeah, that doesn't ... always work.
People are complicated. Situations are complicated.
But she meddles from a place of love.
To be honest, this is something I'm just kind of into? A domineering woman who knows what you want even if you don't and shows you how much you like it. It's not like she limits herself to Lyle's sex life, either. She very much believes she knows what's best for his entire life (and afterlife). It's part of who she is, and Lyle himself sort of relies on her for this at this point. He can be pretty passive and indecisive without someone pushing him.
This is also something I'm just kind of into, sorry. That said, the characters themselves are just aware of the setting they live in, and how this is very much just a part of their normal lives. They all grew up knowing this was something that could happen to them, and they've dealt with that idea long before now.
Everything else you've said in this vein I sort of took with a wince and a sigh, but I genuinely don't get this at all and would love for you to elaborate a little.
So... I don't actually think Sally is a bad person. If she was should wouldn't have tried to work things out with Lyle and Beeps, she'd have just killed Beeps from surprise or something. She hasn't used her vast magical power as a lich for revenge or to hurt people, but instead she is trying to make things better for those she cares about and those they care abouteven if she doesn't like those people. She is actively trying to do good and avoid real harm, and while she fucks it up that's because she is an imperfect being in a shitty world subject to horrible systems that she can't change.
Lyle, meanwhile, is almost entirely passive. He has good opinions, mostly, but only rarely exerts himself to make things better in the world. The only time I can really think of is rescuing Amy.
I dunno, I guess I'm just more forgiving of error in pursuit of good action than passiveness with good opinions. Maybe that's just my self loathing leaking through, but it is what it is.
Beeps, meanwhile, while she is the best, also seems to be kind of a bitch. I still like her tho.
God exactly, yes. I didn't 'get it' for years after all of this, I streamlined for clarity's sake. I remember being like 12 years old and having to get a brain scan for some reason. The doctor told me I had a very feminine brain, and my world went bright like a lightbulb, again, I didn't understand why.
I also remember how I could feel the terror take me as my father calmly asked "does that mean anything?"
Thank everything good and evil the doctor saw me vigorously shaking my eyes left and right without moving my head.
I didn't really understand what was going on but I knew absolutely that that was not information I could let anyone in authority get a hold of.
The idea of someone coming along, and helping some poor, repressed girl who is too afraid to do something she really wants to do, to express some desire she feels she has to hide; of someone taking away her control so she doesn't have to be afraid; because it's not her doing this, it's her mistress, who loves her and cares for her and just wants her to be happy; who can force her to do things that make her happy, no matter what her shame or fear or anxiety have to say about things.
(never me, of course, because my libido doesn't work that way, can't self-reference; my brain needs the distance of this lucky cutie being someone else to find the scenario arousing)
I guess ...
Like, can people at least see how that could be liberating?
I don't get it. But enough cis girls and trans girls have expressed this opinion that I would be an asshole to not realize that my not getting it comes from a place of privilege.
I'm sorry. I do not mean to denigrate or deny you.
I guess I should stop commenting about how I percieve the morality of stuff, and just focus on wordplay and jokes and quality of writing? I don't want to hurt people.
I'm only awake because of medication problems anyway, sorry.
