Maybe I’m just too ace. It’s not an activity I feel strongly enough about to dislike, but it’s kinda boring. Also if the person has facial hair, it’s going to hurt the incredibly sensitive skin around my mouth if they’re rubbing our faces together, especially as the abrasion continues. And then my face will be slightly damp, which I do actually hate. No matter how skilled you are at kissing, there’s just no getting around the fact that mouths are wet. There’s gonna be some moisture. I’ve still enjoyed kissing a lot of people, usually not open mouthed and with tongue, but sometimes. I would emphatically not be interested in a tongue war for domination myself. An expression of passion or desperation is fine. Slow and languid is also fine. I just need something handy to wipe my face with. No one has ever spent any amount of time attentively licking my teeth. That sounds bizarre. I’d be confused. Curling your tongue up behind someone’s front teeth can be nice because the ridge there doesn’t tend to be so sensitive it’s overly ticklish or uncomfortable, which you risk if you touch much further back on the roof of the mouth. But going for the teeth specifically? Exactly how is this physically working, really? Not just with how far you can reach with your own tongue. Where is the other person’s tongue supposed to go? Open your mouth not uncomfortably wide and notice exactly how much area your tongue covers resting at the bottom of your mouth. Now try to move it real far to one side, then use a finger to poke at your molars on the other side. Notice how very much tongue is still there. Twisting it out of the way is slightly more effective, but you’d really just need to pull it in as far as possible and curl it in some way in the back of your mouth to really expose your molars to something as large as another person’s tongue, which is not actually very narrow in terms of mouth space, even at the tip. That does not sound comfortable. I just don’t think there’s enough room for more than one tongue to comfortably fit very far inside a single mouth. Imagine trying to take turns...
A lot of fanfic that tries to give very detailed body-part descriptions of kissing ends up sounding like everyone has prehensile woodpecker tongues.
I have enough trouble seeing the appeal in those stupid-looking visual porn kisses where they hold their mouths open an inch away from each other and lick in each other's tongue's vague direction.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen that. I might actually like that, I’m not sure. I do have a keen appreciation for how much more obscene things can seem when they’re pantomimed with a bit of distance between the actors. You can see exactly what’s happening between bodies in a way you couldn’t if they were physically pressed together, and your brain is then given plenty of material for imagining, which it probably then does whether you like it or not just for the sense of closure. I appreciate it because of an extremely ill advised rule at the high school I used to attend. They mandated that prom attendees keep at least a foot of space between their bodies while dancing because some adults got freaked out by grinding. It was a few years after my class and most of my friends had graduated, but we were offended and honestly sorta confused on behalf of the students still stuck there. A friend and I immediately started asking, but wouldn’t that be so much worse if you could just like, see everything? So we ended up trying it out, and it was indeed the stupidest yet most graphic dance I have ever participated in. Not sure how much I’d get from looking at people not quite kissing, especially as I don’t really find visual porn very exciting even when it’s aesthetic, unless it’s a comic or something. But I appreciate the notion.
I'm imagining the character who's intent on memorizing their kiss partner's teeth as an immortal who wants to create a secret copy of dental records for identifying the body decades later... maybe this is a kind of romantic?
tfw you want cafe au fic for a soul crushingly depressing series and there just aren't any at all. i can and will make my baru cafe au fic myself but like. there is none. there is no cafe au yet!! i am so used to them existing!!!
I don't know the fandom, but Das Sporking just posted an entry about a Fire Emblem fic in which... The reviewers' response: If it was supposed to be set on an un-Earth-like planet or plane, I'd forgive it, but apparently not.
Not to be like that but literally why are people nitpicking the sexy furry chess nonsense worldbuilding. This isn't an expansively built highly structures and scientifically reasoned sci-fi epos, it's a game about a person who was abducted as a baby due to Funky Fun Genetics Bullshit that mean they can shapeshift into a dragon, control the magical energies of the country, and have pocket dimension babies. The fact nohr is a mountain range country without grass is really the least of the nitpick worthy things about it, and I'd argue you shouldn't nitpick the worldbuilding at all because it's just not that deep, the point of fire emblem is to play high stakes strategy games and date waifus??? Sometimes Das Sporking really displays a fundamental inability to understand what the focus of media is and can be.
It is heavily implied it does not, or at least Corrin hardly sees any because they were growing up isolated to a literal fairy tale Evil Mountain Top Castle In A Wasteland Mountainrange. There are so many things to criticize Fire Emblem Fates for but 'some of the worldbuilding makes no sense' is really not it. But that would require having a passing familiarity with the source material. But again. Literally Who Cares, Fire Emblem is about making people marry and training up sexy chess pieces to beat up other sexy chess pieces. Both the worldbuilding and narrative are formulaic JRPG Struggle Of Light Against Dark to the point of parody and that's part of the charm???
It certainly doesn't have a lot of green. edit: Also I would describe that as significantly more than "overcast" myself.
It can be fun to try to make up explanations for video game worldbuilding that makes no goddamn sense (ask me about military ranks in the English translation of Radiant Historia), but it's super not the responsibility of every fanfic author to take time away from whatever it is they actually want to write to answer questions about things like "where does the food to support an army this large come from" and "how large is this country" and "what are the economic impacts of random encounter monsters" and "what are the travel times." I don't know enough about Fire Emblem Fates to know the details of the ominous evil cloud cover, but off the top of my head they could be importing most of their food because the castle is isolated from the more fertile parts of the country, what plants grow there could be adapted to the ominous evil cloud cover and not particularly green, or a lot of their food could be animal products and stuff like mushrooms than can be grown indoors, all of which would be compatible with a character not really having seen green plants their whole life. So like, I get the nitpicking impulse. But if they're going to get mad that someone isn't taking the time to explore the cultural and ecological roots and consequences of big fantasy environmental setpieces and just wants to use them for character beats, why are they reading Fire Emblem Fates fanfic. Go read Dungeon Meshi or the Stormlight Archive or something.
Yeah that's a good point, and I concede, you can nitpick for you own enjoyment but don't demand other people nitpick sexy chess land :P
This feels petty to complain about but after going through 1200+ works (65 pages, filtering out reader inserts and OCs) of the "Bulkhead (Transformers)" tag on Ao3, I've discovered three things: 1) Nobody in the Prime fandom knows how to tag for ensemble, and will tag in characters who are literally just mentioned, not even featured as a nonspeaking role. Out of those 1200, I can confidently say 20% at the very least were outright false positives. 2) "Fic is well-written", "fic has characterisation that isn't 100% offputting" and "fic is actually about Bulkhead specifically" is a pick-two. I see you BDBH shippers vibing over there, I can respect that, your tastes are valid as hell, I just can't stand how you write Bulkhead specifically. 3) I admire the boldness of people who will not tag in "Original Character" but will just blatantly state in the summary that the protagonist is a human OC, but see 1) about false positives.
I guess the next step is to lower my standards one more notch and see if any of those multichapter fics from the perspective of characters I don't really care to read about actually have any good Bulkhead content in them, but out of the ensemble fics I already sampled my hopes are not high. Or I guess I could re-include reader insert even though it does jack shit to me, at least that's written by people who actually like Bulkhead as a character.
I'm not even the one reading the fic, but the screenshots are enough to make me glad of that. "Slave-owners' right to not have their property stolen trumps the slaves' right to be free" is not a take i would expect to come out of Obi-Wan Kenobi, or indeed any Jedi who was not actively undercover as an unsavory type in an effort to (for example) free slaves.
Yeah... the Republic may be a bunch of filthy libs but they're not that far gone. Like slavery was illegal, it was just that there was a lot of Outer Rim and comparatively few Jedi.
I don't really know where else to put this, but I got so mad about a post on Tumblr about how writers have to beg for scraps of engagement and still get fucking nothing, so I made a userscript that turns every pointless "you've already left kudos here :)" message into an "extra kudos" comment. I also feel super vindicated for my neutral-to-negative relationship with the kudos button. I don't understand writers who feel incredibly valued and validated and engaged with when they get a lot of kudos because for me the effect is opposite. It's literally like "I couldn't think of anything to say about your fic, so here's a consolation prize. :)"
