i really think having an emotional connection is so important to bakugou sexually.
like, i think he has to be in the exact right mood in order to get off by himself at home alone. can't be too tired, can't be too stressed out, can't have too much on his mind regarding work or other things, and even if it's been a while and his body is sensitive and wanting for it—if his head is not right, he can sit there for hours and never reach his peak.
which is why i think ultimately he doesn't do it that often, because it pisses him off to waste the time and not find the release. makes him more agitated. i think porn for the most part doesn't help him because he's too picky, literature probably helps a bit more, but he's still picky, and his imagination can get him there, but his headspace has to be right.
i think he's slow to hands-on stuff, when your relationship starts, and you can tell he's going to be like that pretty quickly. he responds to your touch like it's an accident; you reach out to hold his hand and he pulls his back like your knuckles have knocked by chance, like you're too close. it's not meant to be a rejection of any kind, it's just—he doesn't want you to touch him if you don't want to. if you don't mean to.
but when he realizes that you mean to, that you want to—
it has him skyrocketing. surprises him terribly, the affect you have on his body, and how quickly, because not even he can always have that affect on his own body.
you reach up to push some hair out of his face and your fingers skirt his cheekbone and he feels like a stupid gross disgusting puddle of mush. you loop your arm through his and lean into him while you're walking and he feels like a prize, like he's yours and you're his and you want everybody to know and that gives him a rush of pride that makes his head woozy.
he's dropping you off at home after date number he-doesn't-know and you're staring up at him outside your front door and he knows he should kiss you so he does and his whole body lights up with a heat he doesn't recognize at all. just from that.
and then he finally gets it: that heart-aching, stomach turning, body shaking want he's only ever heard about, and now finally feels.
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Hot take: Laios wouldn't actually mind an arranged marriage.
Obviously "reluctant royal being pressured into marriage" is very fun for shipping purposes. But I have harlequin blood, so bear with me. Join me on this journey of character theorizing/shipping nonsense that makes it abundantly clear I have a Scrivener document I'm neglecting.
Laios was promised to someone from a young age. He and Falin both were; it's probably how their parents ended up together. They both broke it off by leaving their village, but it didn't seem to be a factor in Laios's own decision. And when Marcille, presumably, asks about his hypothetical love life (bicorn chapter), he not only brings it up readily, but actually seems kind of flattered? lmao
I love when smug Laios comes out. Underrated factor of Laios's personality for me is how much he enjoys being seen as cool. I think you'd expect Laios to be embarrassed or uneasy over this line of questioning, and the fact that he isn't is fun to me.
So when Yaad and his other old advisors bring up his need for a wife, Laios is ready to go along with it. Not necessarily thrilled by the prospect, but he was raised to think of marriage as a business arrangement you do because it's beneficial for your household/bloodline (as was often the case historically). He's already made the big step to claim a throne, and the idea of becoming village chief after his father seemed to have been vaguely in the back of his head all his life. Besides, if he has to do it anyway, I think he'd take comfort that there was a formalized process for an otherwise socially messy undertaking.
This dovetails neatly with my personal headcanon that Laios is gay but unaware of it. He comes from kind of a repressed culture- or at least I can imagine he does based on context clues- and has spent most of his life being ostracized in one way or another, feeling like he's on the outside of humanity. So he doesn't realize that his lack of attraction to women is unusual- he assumes that nobody really enjoys romance that much. It's not like his own parents married for love. It's just something people play up for stories, right?
It's all tangled up with his fraught desire for human connection and platonic companionship anyway. Meanwhile he's blithely unaware that the things he says about Toshiro are not normal bro things. Oh you'd totally marry Toshiro, Laios? Tell me more.
I see this in Marcille too. Firstly due to her unstable development, which has only recently allowed her to reach maturity (I headcanon her as somewhere between 20-22) and secondly due to her being a half-elf (infertile+a too-long lifespan), I think she has the expectation that she's simply not destined for love. The half-elf character she relates to in her favorite books says as much. So she, too, confuses a genuine lack of heterosexual attraction with the belief that this is just because of her half-elf status distancing her from it. Plus, she spent over a decade as a student/researcher in a nice little sheltered academic bubble, at an all-girls academy populated by adolescents. She's the most sheltered of all the characters: she's only spent the past year in the "real world", and she still focuses all her romantic attention on living vicariously through her favorite characters or her friends (except for Falin, conveniently!).
And Marcille would absolutely want to live vicariously through Laios and his future wife. She would not want him to go through a dispassionate formalized process: she wants her bestie to have a fairytale romance! What is the point of being a heroic king in a mythic castle if you can't even get a love story for the ages out of it?
This would result in a lot of Laios meeting with eligible bachelorettes at Marcille's urging, looking to Kabru for help the entire time and being grilled by Marcille afterwards about what he liked best about each girl. "She had nice, um, teeth?" They're both so close to getting it.
Kabru, meanwhile, is agitating for Yaad and the other advisors not lock the country into a hereditary monarchy, they have the chance to do something radical here, to break away from the systems that the elves and dwarves uphold. At the very least, let Laios marry for love, or formally adopt an heir and name them his successor if he wants, he's already sacrificed enough for the sake of Melini. Don't make him jump through these circus hoops for the chance of some trade agreements, we can get those without a royal marriage. And even if Laios was willing to go along with it, he does look at Kabru like he's his hero for sticking up for him.
The vague unhappiness Kabru feels at the idea of Laios being married off is easy for him to ignore. Kabru didn't actually get better at honoring or even recognizing his own wants just because he's moved past the dungeon. And Laios hasn't gotten the hint about his crush on Toshiro and is still 50/50 on saying casually shocking things, so when he remarks that he doesn't need a wife anyway when he has Kabru, he has no idea why that gets him the looks it does. After all, where he's from, men marry women to run their households, but Laios has castle staff for that, and Kabru is handling the rest?
That comment alone ticks one month off their collective gay awakening countdown.
Anyway. How many repressed gays in their twenties does it take to run a country?
Answer: Yaad can tell you.
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u know how people (rightfully) leap to wei wuxian’s defense when someone tries to say that he’s stupid because 1) he is a quite literally a genius and 2) there is no reason for him to have assumed that lan wangji wanted to be more than friends. well i’m abt to do the same for shen qingqiu. he’s not stupid for not figuring out how to con the system, he’s not stupid for not realizing what was going on with binghe, and for all intents and purposes him acting out of assumption because of the plot of pidw was not an act of stupidity, but survival. the tragedy of scum villain is that shen qingqiu couldn’t have known better (like the book literally says “in this world, there is no ‘if only i had known’”). the tragedy of scum villain is that he assumes he knows what the plot is. the tragedy of scum villain is that the system is a neutral yet vague force that leads shen qingqiu to doing what he does. u just can’t suspend ur disbelief enough to see that shen qingqiu doesn’t know he’s in a genre subversion romance novel; he thinks he’s in a survival horror novel.
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