eva-vs-desk

[eva-vs-desk]

Malcolm Liepke: Girls Night, 2018.

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There’s always a lingering question that I ask myself, which is why do I, a cis bisexual woman, enjoy romance between two men so much?  

There are easy answers, like that it’s just fetishizing.  And like, I find men attractive, yes.  But I also find women attractive.  I don’t have a problem with enjoying het romance, assuming I can find good ones.  I enjoy stories with female characters I can relate to.

But there’s something much deeper at play, IMO.  A friend of mine who is a gender studies professor was the first person to point this out to me, but a lot of women enjoy m/m romance and gay porn because of the lack of women.  It removes a source of pressure and sexism.  Without any women present, you don’t have to constantly evaluate the sexism of their portrayal, or be reminded of negative experiences in your own life.  It allows women to experience romance and especially sexuality without all the baggage that comes with it in our patriarchal society.

This was recently illustrated to me rather dramatically.  I read a recommendation for a het romance.  And it sounded cute, and came highly recommended.  The tropes at play were fun.  Until I read a snippet and realized this was a romance between a woman and her boss.  I had a visceral negative reaction.  

Instantly I’m thinking of sexual harassment stories I’ve read and heard from other women. I’m thinking of how uncomfortable it would be to have your boss develop feelings for you.  How icky the power dynamics would be, etc.  

And then I realized…this wouldn’t bother me if it were two men.  Now, there’s no logical reason for that.  Sexual harassment is just as wrong when its object is a man.  But I know I’ve read fics with a similar premise and never thought about it.  Because when it’s two men I can accept this is just a light romance, a fantasy, meant to be fun and sexy and not to represent the real world.

But I can’t when it’s a het relationship.  There’s too much baggage there.  Too much societal history of abuse.  I can’t relax enough with the premise to enjoy that story.  

Now some people can.  And that’s fine.  And some people are never going to be okay with power imbalances like that regardless of gender.  That’s also fine.  I don’t think having either reaction makes one morally superior.  It’s okay to just enjoy light entertainment for what it is without going into deep analysis.

But it’s much more difficult for me, and I think for many women, to relax and enjoy romantic and sexual stories when they involve female characters.  We’ve been burned too many times by shitty depictions, by shallow role models, by abuse portrayed as romantic.  We have developed a stress response, a trauma response to heterosexual romance.  We are hyper-reactive to a wide variety of triggers in regards to it.   But removing women from the equation makes stories safer for us.  And maybe it shouldn’t?  In an ideal world?  But for many of us, that’s the truth.

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mmm soob

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Has this been done before? Probably. 😂

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Narrator's voice: "You wake up to the strange sensation of a vampire biting your neck. And a githyanki undoing your pants. And a wizard eating your boots."

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Astarion: Not to be a bitch, but- [Insight Success] Narrator: Oh, but Astarion was trying to be a bitch. Astarion was trying to be the bitchiest bitch who ever bitched.

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For anyone worried about missing anything in BG3 or replaying the game and wanting to find something they missed there’s a ton of checklists available online and I’m just gonna post the ones I’ve been using for all the acts in case anybody else wants to reference them!

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inspired by this tweet:

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he has two modes

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haters and losers jealous they don't have a vampire bf who will say strange and off putting things in public

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listen. wyll canonly wants to have kids. astarion canonly fantasized about getting married. you can acquire a githyanki egg in game. do you understand what im saying here its time for the worst family you've ever seen

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crying, they're so bad at this 😭

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my character: *perception successful*

me irl trying to find wtf they found:

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I am deeply appreciative of how much of a loser they made Astarion. Like he's sexy sure but the man doesn't have a single W to his name. He's been stuck in tunnels eating rats for years and his first time out and about he gets literally brainwormed and has to pull some Wil E. Coyote shit to team up with people. His whole menacing blood drinking schtick is immediately undercut by him being a massive virgin about the whole ordeal. In his centuries long flop era and trying so desperately to cover it up

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of course astarion gets mad early game when you do nice things for no reason. can you imagine getting out of the hell he was in and discovering that the world is awash in kindness, just never for you? the gods do answer prayers, just never your's. people go on long, dangerous quests for strangers with no reward guaranteed, but you just never saw those people. now that youve already done the impossible and escaped, you can see that rivers of sympathy and compassion flow all over but for some reason they always dried out before they reached you. where was all this good in the world when you needed it most?

i would be spitting mad

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BG3 gameplay be like: to end my turn I will shove this enemy, not because it does anything 9 times out of 10 but because it’s an action I’m able to take and it feels good.