#nico will forever be my number 1 blorbo

[umm0lly]

my personal opinion on the nico vs zuko blorbo poll

i can understand if nico loses. he just probably isnt as nostalgic to a lot of people. but you need to understand. for queer kids who grew up reading those books like me?

reading HoO with nico already being my favorite character and then seeing that "oh. a boy can like a boy? that happens?" SAVED me. reading ToA with nico openly dating a boy and everyone being accepting of it? that shit was INSANE to me. little queer girl who didn't know what queer was but my first ever interaction was telling me that it was okay. and this isn't the case for just me.

nico already being my favorite character, now the only queer character, exposing me to solangelo and fandom and even tumblr. i wouldn't be here if not for that kid. i wouldn't even fucking know i was queer if not for that kid. do you realize this? i probably would've still liked harry fucking potter if not for that kid because i didn't know what 'transgender' was before nico.

that little shit who literally owns my soul made me be okay with queerness and be okay with myself being queer. i never hated myself for the sole reason i liked girls BECAUSE OF NICO. DO YOU REALIZE THIS. HOW MANY KIDS NICO SAVED.

nico can lose. but this is the queer website and if he's gonna lose, it better be by fucking 1% because no way is this icon getting beaten THAT badly.

just. i need you to understand what nico did. and understand what nico is GOING to do for SO MANY OTHER QUEER KIDS. his book comes out in less than 3 months. he's going to be in a disney show in a few years. as pjo becomes more mainstream than it already is, nico will save more and more queer kids who will accept themselves because, hey, my favorite character likes boys! why can't i?

you cannot fathom how insane it was to see queer people be so normalized when i first read the books. how insane it was to me that it was possible and okay and normal. it was normal. that was the big one. it wasn't just okay, it was normal. normal for me to like girls. that's why i accepted it so quick. so early. where so many people don't get that chance to accept it when they're still young and a teen, i got that chance because of this little gay son of hades.

i found real friends because of nico. found myself because of nico. found my mutuals and fandom and my identity because of this kid.

this may discount all that i just said but idek who zuko is. i've heard the name through friends but. never saw atla. never cared. guess it did some queer stuff towards the end? idk.

all i'm saying is that nico saved me, saved other queer kids, will continue to do so, and has had such a profound impact on my life personally that if he loses it better be so fucking close that one vote would tie it.

[kritischetheologie]

10 and 14 for the smut asks!

10: music that has inspired my smut

My #1 most played song of 2022 was the chvrches cover of do I wanna know, which always gets the job done in a pinch. Honestly, we owe the arctic monkeys so much for AM (see also: there's no need to show me round, baby, written to "one for the road"). Different fics have different moods; I tend towards the bon iver album for emma forever ago and the iron and wine album our endless numbered days for really tender stuff. When I was a teenager I used to get off listening to heavy metal which honestly explains quite a lot about me as a person.

14: favorite tropes

Like @grideon, I'm going to answer this in terms of dynamics and narrative elements rather than specific actions. Except face slapping. We love superfluous face slapping. And like grideon, we love sex that's about an absent third person. Other things you find a lot:

-complicated power dynamics that go beyond straightforward topping and bottoming, often involving a decoupling of who holds the power from who is performing the more "typically" "submissive" actions

-someone once told me that a lot of my work is animated by "the overwhelming need to be good" and I think that's right-- my characters tend to have a lot of anxiety about their ability to please their partners, worry about whether they're good enough, concern about whether they're good people, etc. It's deeper than just praise kink validation seeking, but it's also that.

-I write a lot of people who use sex as a form of deliberate self harm/punishment

-the most romantic thing I can ever write is one character feeling his heart rate slow in the presence of / in response to another, and it's the very rare romance I've written that never involves that

-this is an anti-trope, but I really struggle to write characters who are in altered states: I'm not very good at depicting drunkenness, I've never managed to write omega!pov heat porn, the sebcedes sex pollen fic stalled out immediately once the pollen hit, etc. January, 1994 is almost an exception, but even in that, it's hard to actually say what the psychological alteration is except "lmao it gives you a breeding kink roll with it." Conversely, I'm really, really good at writing characters who are quietly having an internal panic attack. I think this is because I do whatever the writing equivalent of method acting is-- I write from a position of remembering what certain things feel like. So something like anxiety, which hits me as such a torrent of words, is easy to write, whereas drunkenness or being high, which slows down that part of my brain, is harder to.

-another anti-trope: there's relatively little attention actually paid to the body in my porn. Sometimes I literally write about not thinking about the body (verdammt, for example), but a fun game to play is to take the names out of a sex scene I've written and try to guess who it's about based solely on physical description. For example:

"Protagonist pulls his black t-shirt over his head, unzipping his jeans and leaving them in a pile on the floor. He gets on the bed in his boxers, watching Blorbo remove his own clothing. He stares at the patch of dark hair on Blorbo’s chest, the trail of it leading down from his navel to the cock Protagonist’s just had in his mouth, mottled with arousal and shiny with Protagonist’s spit. This might be the worst decision he’s ever made."

If not for the process of elimination of "blorbo must not be seb or nico or mick", there is nothing that tells you whether this is an unwaxed Carlos, Pierre, fucking Toto... I'm probably being a little too hard on myself, but it nags at me sometimes.