#implicit romance

[dreamerimpossible]

He would climb into your room through your window. He would sneak in and climb on top of you, kissing and biting your exposed neck. Your shaky, pleasurable sighs only encouraged him to continue, not caring even if you made too much noise. He ripped your underwear and quickly entered you, grabbing your wrists and forcing you with his gaze to moan for him.

Your pleasurable moans made him fuck you faster and faster against your sheets, overcome with desire for you. Breaking up would still be a very bad decision. The sounds of skin clashing with yours didn't help to be discreet. A particularly deep and unexpected moan from him ended the fun, as he felt that he had filled you with all his seed.

He looked at the clock on the wall and realised that it wasn't too late yet. He, to your surprise, laid down next to you, instead of leaving, as he always did. Maybe he could stay until you fell asleep.

-Billy Loomis, Stu Macher, Jason Dean, Kurt Kunkle, Alex DeLarge, Ticci Toby, Kazutora, Ran Haitani, Rindou Haitani, Hanma, Beyond Birthday (BB)

[lonicera-caprifolium]

please consider scoundrel Crowley, and his (modified) commando droid boyfriend AZ-7

[dandelionjack]

so it was my mother’s birthday a couple of days ago, and as a present my grandma gave her (and the whole family to boot) tickets to a mini london tour with a guide, specifically focused on islington, in russian obviously since she doesn’t speak much english. led by this eccentric gentleman in a bowler hat who’s from moscow but has lived here for 19 years and has been leading guided tours for ten.

the tour was fun and informative. lots of tall tales mixed in with historical facts and local art history too. but the guide himself... man. imagine a cross between eddie redmayne and peter capaldi. 40ish. salt and pepper hair. hooked nose roman profile. educated. witty. storyteller. dresses like some kind of urban wizard or as-yet-unseen incarnation of the doctor. mischievous glint in his eye. learns the name of everybody in the group immediately and chats to you like a casual friend as you walk from destination to destination. i sound like a fucking creep now, don’t i, but what is tumblr if not a public personal diary? don’t think i’ve ever caught a crush this quickly before. started entertaining silly little clara fantasy delusions for a second.

then at one point while recounting an anecdote he mentioned his wife and kids, naturally that brought me back down to reality. here, have a regents canal photo instead

[margindoodles2407]

we can talk about my views on shipping later but i think there is a trope i've pioneered

and it's almost like forbidden love but. not quite

and it's called "i love you so much and so deeply but the circumstances of our lives have aligned such that we are not supposed to be together, so i am going to willingly sacrifice being in a romantic relationship with you as the ultimate expression of my love and respect for you"

[deliajackson]

I was reading The Atrocity of Sunsets chapter 1 again:

It is a perpollo with fem!Percy alright.

And for some reason my brain went: turn it gay perachel.

And it got wilder:

Percy cosplaying as Wonder Woman and Rachel cosplaying as BatGirl in the last Halloween they had before turning 16.

[raventrigonsdaughter]

begging they make maximus and dane a thing and give lucy a girlfriend who is also a new protagonist and NOT WHITE (because the show is lacking on both departments) next season and i can't take anymore straight bullshit into this fandom, i miss when fallout was GAY or really just not as painfully straight as it became in this hellsite after the show

[normiewizard]

actually wendell taking the adrenonoxynil from LIV'S MACGUFFIN and pouring it out on a whim was fucking out of pocket. I am so fucking glad Liv drank it and ran off I'm so glad Dang supported her I'm so glad everyone at the table called it out at least jokingly when she comes back and he's kicking rocks about how much of a dumb loser he is until she kisses him. Liv should have crashed out harder and longer idc

[odetteinherhead]

Mf will call you the angel of his doom, the muse of his desire and write an entirely discography about adoring you with the devotion of the purest priest, and still you'll ask "do you love me too?"

[hojiteaversion]

Telling him about the feelings he stirred within me that I couldn't put into words.

[skiptoyuri]

people talking about there not being enough romance is like. it IS there but its harder to identify upon first reading on account of sophie being stubborn and in denial but also kinda dense as hell 😭 also ill be so real howl alleviating sophie's rheumatism is unironically the most romantic thing ive ever read in my life like i dont think yall get it

[onewomancitadel]

Considering the treatment Persuasion - Austen's most sensitive novel - received at the hands of Netflix (caustic, dim, and ridiculous), one cannot imagine what will happen to Pride & Prejudice.

The thing critical to the novel is that it doesn't slip into modern romance novel/romance film dynamics. Elizabeth and Darcy equally develop in response to one another; it isn't a "woman fixing man" or "man fixing himself for a woman'" story, but actually about a treatment of the development of moral character partially in response to other (more reductive) novels of manners in the period. In this way, Austen is kind of funny because she's poking fun at her contemporaries as well as society itself.

Though I guess you could probably expand upon how conceivably a really bad Netflix P&P adaptation would rewrite this dynamic into our current archetypal ideal for romance, one in that it's ironic first and foremost. They reflect different anxieties and now, different commercial brands.

The "man fixing himself for a woman" angle is one I see defended a lot from the perspective of fairly harmless romance genre fare, but I am interested in mutual character development, and I don't really like stories where the female character is a saint and the male character is searching for forgiveness at her feet... not interesting to me and not really the sort of gender dynamics I want lol. It's a bit weird, since it's still a Madonna thing, not really that revolutionary (in my view) or indeed edifying. To err is to be human, etc.

I understand though that people approach these texts with their own worldview and that is appreciably relevant... on the one hand I think textual purity matters, on the other hand things always change and become transformed. I just can't expect that Netflix - given their track record - could change P&P in a better way.

[leahpardo-pa-potato]

Fyi, Jamie now goes by @tragedycoded!

hello, do you have any recs for other writeblrs to follow, especially if their wip's are targeted at adults and include queer characters/romances?

gosh, it feels like it's been a Hot Second since i've been an active part of a writeblr community like we had in its heyday but off the top of my head in no particular order: @ghostcasket (naturally) @reininginthefirewriting, @writeblrfantasy, @magic-is-something-we-create, @magnus-sm-writes,

@ashen-crest, @abalonetea, @howdywrites, @yvesdot, @albatris,

@carnivalls, @zmwrites, @mjjune, @moonshinemagpie, @badscientist,

and others i am 100% forgetting at the moment (please use this post to rec others and if i remember any more i'll add them in reblogs!).

(does anyone know where @fortunatetragedy went??)

[thefireflowermoonchild]

February Reading Wrap Up

⭐⭐⭐⭐ I set my reading goal for February to a grand total of 3 books solely because House of Flame and Shadow was 838 pages and I knew it was take the majority of the month to finish it. I already shared my thoughts about my first book of the month, The Silent Patient (⭐⭐⭐.75 rounded up), in my last post so I will link that here. I personally loved the third installment of the Crescent City…

[star-anise]

Yes, I absolutely do believe it's worth taking a critical gaze at romance novels and films, where "critical" means "assessing and evaluating" and not "find everything wrong with it". And yes, I'm okay with men doing this too.

But also, I somehow think that if I, as a woman, launched a Youtube channel where I read military novels and watched action movies and invited military women to laugh with me at all their silly or improbable or problematic bits, I would not get nearly the same reaction as men reviewing EL James novels.

It's that annoying thing where one does not have to be intentionally misogynistic to be in a misogynistic system, and being on the internet often means that the audience, reach, and social impact you plan on having frequently bears no resemblance to the audience, reach, and social impact you do have.

Also there's a bit of an accountability paradox, where making gestures towards a movement, like feminism, seems to include in its social contract an implicit agreement to be open to criticism when one fails from a feminist lens. Which means that something that seems directed to a hugely female audience feels inherently like a more fitting target for feminist criticism than other things that are objectively worse, but have never made any gestures towards feminism at all.

[heylavellan]

i'm starting a transcript project like daitranscripts and da2transcripts for dragon age origins.

one thing i've noticed is that zevran is such a different companion compared to the other's. he doesn't have a companion quest.

there's the list of companion quests. no zevran. he's the only one that doesn't ask you for anything, just the implicit protection being with you gives him.

he's also the only one that will offer to stay by your side at the end of the game provided you have a good relationship. he doesn't need to be romanced to stay with you. otherwise all the others go their own way and offer to let you join them.

anyway, im normal about him.

[onewomancitadel]

I think what's funny about being a very dedicated romance lover is that there definitely times where I actually don't want it in the thing I'm into or at the very least I don't want it to be bland and really boring. I get it, Zelda/Link shippers go way back, but the gestural relationship was always way more interesting as a chaste knight/lady dynamic, and it's just lazy leaning into cutesy wholesome rivals-to-lovers shenanigans. (There are no intended TOTK spoilers in this post). It could not be there, and the story wouldn't really change in BOTW (or indeed even Skyward Sword); it's not achieving overly much except finally leaning into the (ostensible) inevitability of Link and Zelda getting together. Meanwhile - yeah - if I have to draw comparisons, any implicit Beauty and Beast dynamic to Link and Midna actually transforms Midna's character arc and the ultimate tragedy of her disappearance (and inability to reconcile their partner dynamic with who they both are and the nature of the Zelda myth).

Similar to that vein I really don't like companion romances in DW, which is why I feel that (even though she was polarising) someone like River Song was more interesting if the Doctor had to have a romance, but I always preferred the Doctor as a sexless figure/professor/parent type thing. Idk, the companion romances were very clumsy and uninteresting (which is why Donna remains one of the best companions - despite the fat single woman jokes, ugh, I can't believe people say only Moffat's run was misogynistic) and just obviously there to pander to a more familiar format of storytelling by the time of the reboot (self-insert Doctor with a sexpot companion). This is why I really don't like the Thirteenth Doctor's casting as an attractive (relatively) younger woman, just because it's really apparent they weren't thinking too hard about who would actually be appropriate for a Doctor. I don't know if that makes me unfeminist (I don't even like Tennant's Doctor, and Eleven works because he's unconventional) or something, I'm not sure - I think they did her wardrobe well enough but I just can't get over the casting there (and I know she has some sort of a companion romance, again, which it seems like they didn't even commit to with a female love interest, which says a lot. What I'm really getting at here with Thirteen is that I would've preferred a less conventional actress for the Doctor).

But it really comes down to motivated versus unmotivated romance, and sometimes we're not even really talking about the same thing - fluffy superficial shit (and yeah, you can definitely argue Doctor/Rose isn't superficial, but to me it does break part of the identity of DW and the Doctor's dynamic with the companions, and the characterisation of that relationship is exhausting and so fucking boring) is just fluffy and superficial, but from a storytelling perspective I want to be thinking about what these romances achieve narratively. If anything I think what is, say, critical to writing a companion romance with the Doctor is that it should by nature be fraught and taboo, and despite Rose's parallel-world disappearance the nature of them having feelings for each other is just a foregone conclusion and the will-they won't-they shit is just boring romcom bullshit. I find the Davies era mostly unwatchable because of this nonsense now (and then Martha gets saddled with that bullshit too, which brings down her entire run as companion).

I enjoy romance which is narratively justified and I find it tedious and boring when it's shoved in my face where it's inappropriate, which is fucking hilarious because that's a common detraction to the romances I enjoy. But we know it's assigned as a bad faith criticism in these circumstances and rarely do they explain why it doesn't work. But in writing romance, what I think is valuable is asking what it achieves on multiple levels - character, plot, theme - and whether it belongs there, particularly tonally.

I understand it's not a popular opinion (Zelda/Link and Doctor/Rose are huge ships in the General Audience alone, and the reason I think the former especially has been leant into is for an obvious reason) but I think it's worth considering critically for where romance does and doesn't work, because even if those ships are nominally popular, sometimes things are just popular because they hit familiar tropes and feel inevitable and cute.