#(including without consent)

[thefrogdalorian]

I think on this fine Saturday afternoon it's a good opportunity to take a breather and remember that there are really no ethical paparazzi pictures. Every single one is inherently exploitative.

Just because photos were taken on a movie set, when someone is 'working,' does not make the practice any less invasive and creepy. Imagine just going about your day, doing your job and having some weirdo snapping pictures of you to sell without your consent for others to endlessly repost online.

There are thousands of pictures of your favourite actor online already. Plenty taken with his knowledge and consent. I'd really like to see more of them on my dash, rather than the creeper shots.

And don't get me started how disseminating these pictures directly leads to people going to said sets. What starts off as admiring how good someone looks has real world implications.

No, hanging around a movie set and disrupting people doing their jobs is not harmless fun or a way to show your appreciation.

If you hang around a movie set, you are a stalker.

Don't tell me that it's okay to take your online admiration for someone offline. You may admire him but he does not, and will never, personally know you. He will never be your friend/boyfriend/daddy. He is a stranger.

The only way meeting your favourite actor is going to happen is at a convention or maaaaaybe a movie premiere if you're incredibly fortunate. You know, places they appear specifically to meet fans (or not in the case of premieres, where the purpose is to promote a movie. Which is also completely understandable if actors don't stop. You are not owed an interaction).

Of course, you cannot help it if you randomly run into someone you admire in the wild. Even then, consider that they probably won't be all too thrilled to be approached in public by a complete stranger. It's up to you to gauge the situation, but remember there is a person at the heart of all of this.

Boundaries and respect are a kindness which deserves to be extended to each and every human being regardless of their looks/talent/fame/wealth.

Fandoms blur those lines a little too often for my liking and I think just scrutinising what you're interacting with, or what behaviour you could be possibly falling down that slippery slope towards is nice to do every once in a while.

I mean no malice with this post and it is not directed at anyone in particular. It's something I cannot help but feel strongly about because I've seen this destructive cycle time and again in fandoms over the years. It's not healthy and it makes us all a little bit more disconnected from our humanity for it...

[lambmotifz]

takes on sam and dean’s relationship from wincesties who reblog posts from hellers are automatically invalid to me

[usakkhae]

Forever should've talked with Richas and tried to understand his side in the beginning ofc but some of you are distorting a lot of things

He was super worried with Richas and cares deeply about his son. It's not because he did a mistake that he is a terrible father, calm down

[cobalt-mutterings]

K will not stop blowing up my phone. I hate him❗❗

[ssspringroll]

somebody should do a simblr blorbo sexyman tournament

[frogaroundandfindout]

Kory finds out Mirage did nude photo shoots for Centerfold while disguised as her

[strigital]

💜

[transarsonist]

the french are right about their photography privacy laws.

[nana2009]

whoever posted me to twitter receives my sincerest fuck yous

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

trying to find diplomatic but firm ways to articulate 'hey man this is really fucked up, please reconsider' about wan/derhome--or whether to make a post about it at all--because its creators seem like the types to approach it in good faith, but i have no idea how it would go over or if they'd even see it at all. but i finally decided to take a look at it after getting it in a charity bundle last year, and as a disabled mentally ill trauma survivor god that was incredibly hurtful and upsetting, holy shit. days later i'm still not super okay over it, let alone that it won awards and is considered a masterpiece in the medium

[raspberry-gloaming]

The thing about both my Doctor Who oc Erin and her corresponding Doctor is that they're both constantly lying and avoiding discussing their pasts to both eachother and people around them, and they're totally okay and happy with this and perfectly cool with constantly lying until a secret comes out/people find out that they lied about something and suddenly its

Oh God I'm a horrible terrible person for lying and everyone will hate me and I deserve it for being a lying piece of shit and my life is a lie and suddenly thats a bad thing and you're gonna abandon me for lying to you now

[enemybimbo]

Y’all I cannot say this with enough seriousness and urgency and hope

We need to teach the AI how to love.

[tearlessrain]

please help me- i used to be pretty smart but i’m having so much trouble grasping the concept of diegetic vs non-diegetic bdsm!

gfkjldghfd okay first of all I'm sorry for the confusion, if you're not finding anything on the phrase it's because I made it up and absolutely nobody but me ever uses it, but I haven't found a better way to express what I'm trying to say so I keep using it. but now you've given me an excuse to ramble on about some shit that is only relevant to me and my deeply inefficient way of talking and by god I'm going to take it.

SO. the way diegetic and non-diegetic are normally used is to talk about music and sound design in movies/tv shows. in case you aren't familiar with that concept, here's a rundown:

diegetic sound is sound that happens within the world of the movie/show and can be acknowledged by the characters, like a song playing on the stereo during a driving scene, or sung on stage in Phantom of the Opera. it's also most other sounds that happen in a movie, like the sounds of traffic in a city scene, or a thunderclap, or a marching band passing by. or one of the three stock horse sounds they use in every movie with a horse in it even though horses don't really vocalize much in real life, but that's beside the point, the horse is supposed to be actually making that noise within the movie's world and the characters can hear it whinnying.

non-diegetic sound is any sound that doesn't exist in the world of the movie/show and can't be perceived by the characters. this includes things like laugh tracks and most soundtrack music. when Duel of Fates plays in Star Wars during the lightsaber fight for dramatic effect, that's non-diegetic. it exists to the audience, but the characters don't know their fight is being backed by sick ass music and, sadly, can't hear it.

the lines can get blurry between the two, you've probably seen the film trope where the clearly non-diegetic music in the title sequence fades out to the same music, now diegetic and playing from the character's car stereo. and then there are things like Phantom of the Opera as mentioned above, where the soundtrack is also part of the plot, but Phantom of the Opera does also have segments of non-diegetic music: the Phantom probably does not have an entire orchestra and some guy with an electric guitar hiding down in his sewer just waiting for someone to break into song, but both of those show up in the songs they sing down there.

now, on to how I apply this to bdsm in fiction.

if I'm referring to diegetic bdsm what I mean is that the bdsm is acknowledged for what it is in-world. the characters themselves are roleplaying whatever scenarios their scenes involve and are operating with knowledge of real life rules/safety practices. if there's cnc depicted, it will be apparent at some point, usually right away, that both characters actually are fully consenting and it's all just a planned scene, and you'll often see on-screen negotiation and aftercare, and elements of the story may involve the kink community wherever the characters are. Love and Leashes is a great example of this, 50 Shades and Bonding are terrible examples of this, but they all feature characters that know they're doing bdsm and are intentional about it.

if I'm talking about non-diegetic bdsm, I'm referring to a story that portrays certain kinks without the direct acknowledgement that the characters are doing bdsm. this would be something like Captive Prince, or Phantom of the Opera again, or the vast majority of bodice ripper type stories where an innocent woman is kidnapped by a pirate king or something and totally doesn't want to be ravished but then it turns out he's so cool and sexy and good at ravishing that she decides she's into it and becomes his pirate consort or whatever it is that happens at the end of those books. the characters don't know they're playing out a cnc or D/s fantasy, and in-universe it's often straight up noncon or dubcon rather than cnc at all. the thing about entirely non-diegetic bdsm is that it's almost always Problematic™ in some way if you're not willing to meet the story where it's at, but as long as you're not judging it by the standards of diegetic bdsm, it's just providing the reader the same thing that a partner in a scene would: the illusion of whatever risk or taboo floats your boat, sometimes to extremes that can't be replicated in real life due to safety, practicality, physics, the law, vampires not being real, etc. it's consensual by default because it's already pretend; the characters are vehicles for the story and not actually people who can be hurt, and the reader chose to pick up the book and is aware that nothing in it is real, so it's all good.

this difference is where people tend to get hung up in the discourse, from what I've observed. which is why I started using this phrasing, because I think it's very crucial to be able to differentiate which one you're talking about if you try to have a conversation with someone about the portrayal of bdsm in media. it would also, frankly, be useful for tagging, because sometimes when you're in the mood for non-diegetic bodice ripper shit you'd call the police over in real life, it can get really annoying to read paragraphs of negotiation and check-ins that break the illusion of the scene and so on, and the opposite can be jarring too.

it's very possible to blur these together the same way Phantom of the Opera blurs its diegetic and non-diegetic music as well. this leaves you even more open to being misunderstood by people reading in bad faith, but it can also be really fun to play with. @not-poignant writes fantastic fanfic, novels, and original serials on ao3 that pull this off really well, if you're okay with some dark shit in your fiction I would highly recommend their work. some of it does get really fucking dark in places though, just like. be advised. read the tags and all that.

but yeah, spontaneous writer plug aside, that's what I mean.

[tide-locked]

i feel like people forget that sometimes characters in fic are written like that because it's a reflection of real life.

people have sex without setting boundaries. people have unprotected sex without talking about their sexual histories or producing recent sti tests. people play with kink without discussing it ahead of time or establishing a safeword. they have anal without 'enough' prep or lube—they may even prefer it like that.

and none of this is really a fantasy. it's all pretty normal. you can feel that it's inappropriately normalised, and you'd probably be right! but it is normalised: one study found that 58% of female undergraduate students on the campus studied had been choked during sex. 20% of those students said that they'd never been asked if it was ok; another 30% said they'd only sometimes been asked if they consented. fully half! (non-paywalled journal article on choking during sex here, including these numbers.) despite a rise in stis of all sorts, condom use is declining. (pdf link to the full text of this study about declining condom use in the us; aidsmap article about an australian study with similar results.)

even when people do talk about things—sex or anything else—they communicate imperfectly. 'yeah, but don't go too far' is consenting and setting a boundary, and also relying that the person you're talking to has the same metric for 'too far' that you do. for some people, 'the trash needs to go out' is a neutral, factual observation; for others, it's a request that the person they're speaking to take out the trash.

even when people understand each other perfectly, people react unpredictably to things sometimes! we behave irrationally! people laugh uncontrollably at funerals, or get angry at the straw that broke their back rather than the enormous load they were already carrying. they get scared and lash out at people trying to help them. when hurt, most people do not instinctively reach for therapy-approved grounding exercises and 'i feel' statements.

pretty much any bad choice that characters could conceivably make is a choice that people make in real life, on purpose, all the time. people do things that can have catastrophic, life-changing effects because it felt like a good idea at the time, or they're leaning into the vibe, or they just didn't think about it all that much, or an infinite number of other reasons.

fiction isn't intended as a guide on the best, safest, and most responsible ways to live your life, and fanfic isn't any different. it's not a narrative flaw to let characters do things that are messy or harmful or downright stupid—it's a reflection of what people are actually like, and not something that authors should feel they have to apologise for.