valeriehalla

[valeriehalla]

https://www.tumblr.com/valeriehalla/790195490998419456 everything else here—yes. "Sex and sexuality are unavoidable parts of human experience"—no. There are humans whose experience does not include these. They already get told enough they are less human for that.

i don’t experience a lot of things that i would nonetheless characterize as being “part of the human experience”. i accept readily and with great interest that enormous swaths of the human population experience sensations and emotions that i do not.

one of the cool things about art is that it allows me to explore, communicate and feel things that i may not otherwise experience in real life. the ability for all of us to do that freely is currently under threat from a censorship regime that considers human sexuality (and in particular queer sexuality) fundamentally shameful and inappropriate. keep your eye on the ball, okay?

[valeriehalla]

No clue if ya answered it already, but what kinda monster would you be?

my default answer to this question has historically been “lavender-scented soap slime”. however due to developments in CKC issue #2

i can’t use that one anymore. i can’t use that one anymore. i can’t use that one anymore.

[valeriehalla]

CURSE/KISS/CUTE issue #1: “Name of the Helper, Part I” is now live!

Nathan Small is as normal as humans come. Sure, he may have hopped on a train to Monster City just to interview for a job—but in this economy, who can blame him? There’s only one problem with his plan: the giggling little fairy-thing that just transfigured his slacks into a miniskirt…

CURSE/KISS/CUTE is a queer multimedia web series for adults only. Check out the homepage for more info, including the backlog of previous issues!

[valeriehalla]

what we lose when we reject porn

let me paraphrase an exchange that you’ve almost certainly seen play out many times by now:

“We can’t let the platforms we use bow to the pressure to ban porn, because conservatives consider queer existence itself to be inherently pornographic. They’ll use it as an excuse to ban all queer content.”

“That’s true, but don’t forget: porn is art, and art has a right to exist even if it is unwholesome smut.”

i agree completely with both of these points, for the record. they’re not mutually exclusive, and they are both relevant, persuasive reasons to support porn. they’re the only reasons you need, honestly. these points alone suffice for a robust defense of pornography!

i want to talk about something else, though.

i want to tell you what gets me about all this.

every time we create and enforce restrictions on pornography, we reify the idea of “pornography” as a meaningful and obligatory category. we are forced to say, for any given work of art, whether it is or isn’t pornography. if it is, we restrict it: we hide it away, we place odious limitations on where it can be seen and sold, and we never, ever talk about it in polite company.

but what about art that doesn’t fit neatly into one of these two boxes?

well, the answer is that, for the most part... it doesn’t get made! it’s just too risky. the benefits of making art in the public sphere are too huge to risk incorporating content or themes that might get your art labeled pornographic. and if you’ve decided from the get-go that you are making adult content, then there’s less than no incentive to waste your time and energy creating art that doesn’t fit cleanly into the box of “pornography”, because your opportunities to reach people outside of that box are so limited.

this sucks ass!!!

eroticism by and for itself is great. but art can be anything. art can be erotic among other things. imagine if you were only allowed to eat frosting straight out of the packet. imagine if you never got to taste a cake, because there’s massive financial disincentives to combine bread and frosting into one foodstuff!

anyone who’s into romance can tell you exactly how cathartic a real, explicit sex scene can be in a story, even when that story is not necessarily about sex. indeed, romance is just about the only genre that gets away with this forbidden combination at scale. but only to a limited extent, in limited contexts, and not without its own share of heavy policing from sales platforms.

sex and sexuality are unavoidable parts of the human experience. horniness is one of the primary colors in the spectrum of human emotions. to restrict the use of sex as a storytelling tool is to make artists forever paint with a limited palette. sure, there is lots of great, sexless art out there. for that matter, there’s tons of full-on porn that is likewise great art. but there is SUCH a huge space of possibility in between these two extremes.

and we can’t have it!

because pornography exists as a category in all of our minds, and because we are compelled to reify that category at monetary gunpoint by the jesus freaks upstairs, art must only ever at most orbit the pornographic: if it touches the event horizon, there is no going back.

we don’t just need to fight back against the censorship of pornography. we need to fight aggressively to normalize the existence of pornography. we need to make pornography mundane.

finally: it goes without saying, but there are, in fact, people who are making the kind of art i’m talking about. including me! that’s one of the great things about the internet: it democratized art for a lot of people in a lot of ways. for all its faults, the internet has enabled a golden age of horny queer art that’s allowed to be anything it wants. that’s why many of us are so distraught by the recent waves of censorship at steam and itch.io. if you’ve read this far, please take a moment to consider giving the payment processors responsible a phone call to let them know how you feel about it.

[valeriehalla]

thoughts about language-learning

i'm going to tell you something that you may find kind of cringe, especially coming from the mouth of a native english speaker. however, it's true. the trueness of this statement will become clear to you shortly. for now, you're just going to have to lay eyes upon it and accept it.

here it is:

"I like manga and anime" is actually a pretty good reason to learn Japanese.

okay. alright? are we good? let's talk about it.

maybe you read that sentence and your immediate thought was something like, "that seems like a shallow reason to learn a language." maybe you feel that learning a language for the fulfillment of mundane desires is in some way disrespectful. you might think of it as akin to becoming catholic just because you can't get enough of those little biscuits.

well: maybe it is? like, sure. it might be like that. i think that's a discussion you can have. language is, after all, culture.

but here's the thing:

the only way to acquire a language is through thousands of hours of exposure. and the only reason anyone commits to that sort of thing is if it gets them something that they really really want.

if you want to know what i mean, please follow me to my chambers.

listen:

nobody acquires a language out of pure academic curiosity.

did you know most linguists are monolingual? a linguist might know the grammar, history and even vocabulary of a half-dozen languages like the back of their hand, yet not necessarily be able to speak any of them in a way that's useful on a day-to-day basis. this is because there is a fundamental difference between having an academic understanding of a language and being fluent in a language.

some linguists distinguish between these two kinds of knowledge. they say that the former is the result of "learning" a language, and the latter is the result of "acquiring" a language.

language acquisition is the reason you can read this post and understand it without each sentence feeling like a mental sudoku puzzle. for most of the people reading this, including many of the ones for whom english is a second language, i'm willing to bet that you're not translating what i'm saying word-by-word as you read it. you simply read the words, and the meaning appears in your head, unbidden.

you just get it.

that's what fluency is. that's what it means to acquire a language.

but here's the thing, and it cannot be stressed enough: language acquisition only happens through long-term exposure.

and we're not talking about a little bit of exposure. we're talking about, like, a lot. how many words does a baby have to hear before they figure out how to say their first grammatically-correct sentence? how many before they can understand a whole bedtime story?

of course, your prospects as an adult aren't quite that grim. i mean, a baby also has to learn every single other thing about the world in addition to their first language. a baby has to learn what the hell a dog is before they can truly appreciate the majesty of a Big Red One Named Clifford. in this respect you already have a foot in the door of every language on earth.

still: you don't acquire a language without exposure. and the amount of exposure required is so huge that within a rounding error of zero people will ever get off their ass and do it—unless they have external motivation.

consider two guys:

guy A wants to learn Japanese because it's an interesting language with a rich history and it'll look great on his résumé.

guy B wants to learn Japanese so he can read untranslated yaoi.

maybe this will come as a surprise to you, but it's simply a fact: guy B is about 10,000× more likely to actually acquire Japanese.

if he does, guy B will definitely come to understand that japanese is an interesting language with a rich history, and it will look great on his résumé. but he'll get there because he's going to read millions of words' worth of raw japanese input, as much as he can possibly stuff his head with, and he's going to do so happily because it's what he wanted to do anyway.

nobody gets good at anything without a good reason. and if acquiring a language is your goal, then what counts for a "good reason" is just whatever gets you to use the language, as much as possible, as often as possible.

∗ ∗ ∗

one more analogy, just to really hammer it in:

i could stand to exercise more. i know that exercise is good for me, and i already own a bike and everything. but the fact of the matter is that abstract rewards like "it's healthy" aren't enough to motivate me to get on my bike.

you know what does get me on it?

the fact that i don't own a car!!

if i want to go somewhere, i gotta get on that freaking bike! the bike is the means by which i am able to fulfill my base desires, such as "food" and "beverages" and "being anywhere at all other than my house".

yet though my desires are base, the benefits of riding a bike nonetheless attend their fulfillment. my stamina is way up, my resting heart rate is down, and my pant legs keep getting caught on my big-ass calves.

as with the bike, so with japanese.

∗ ∗ ∗

over the past few weeks i've read a half dozen novels in japanese. for the most part, it's all stuff i would have been thrilled to read in english. but most of those books had no english editions; and for the ones that did—well, that would have amounted to Buying A Car.

i've been learning japanese for a long time, and almost 100% of that time has been spent on immersion. when i first started this process, it was like pulling teeth in a haystack. i understood maybe 10% of what i was reading at any given moment. but, i had important business to attend to that absolutely required that i read japanese. and yes, that business was untranslated yuri VNs.

it turns out that 10% is enough. that 10% is the working end of the crowbar. 10% becomes 20% easier than you'd think. many years later, i'd say i'm up to about 98% depending on what i'm reading. i couldn't tell you when it happened; it happens slowly and unconsciously. you never feel like you're making progress, the same way you never feel the earth spinning.

∗ ∗ ∗

anyway, that's all i wanted to say. if i were you, i wouldn't construe anything in this post as advice, per se. these are just observations of things i believe strongly (and from experience) to be true.

in particular, one thing i don't think you should take away from this post is the idea that academic language study is pointless. it's super pointful! it's just that it's step one of a multi-step process.

it's been my experience that a lot of people—most people—get stuck at that step and never move on. they study and study and study, but they never get to a point where they feel like they're "ready" to "move on" to reading "real stuff".

if you want my two cents, it's this: i don't think you can get to that point through study alone. i don't think most people are ever going to feel like they're "ready".

you just have to want to do it, and you have to be patient enough with yourself to put up with doing it badly for a long time.

so, like, you might as well be reading about boys kissing or whatever while you work on it, is what i'm saying.

[valeriehalla]

What are wisps and sprites? Are they as diverse as monsters or are they mostly homogeneous?

Also, do some form from a monster’s magic, like a monster with a living shadow?

we'll learn more about these incidental creatures later, but the basic gist is:

"sprite" is a catch-all term for the gods and spirits of the Middle Wood. they range from little fairy-things all the way up to the Phosphor itself. sprites are intelligent in the same way that monsters and humans are intelligent; the main difference is that, rather than being born from flesh, sprites are embodiments of different aspects of nature. a sprite may be associated with a particular tree or brook, for example. it can sometimes be hard to tell a sprite from a sprite-shaped monster, though as soon as they open their mouth the difference usually becomes clear. sprites are Weird and Temperamental. negotiating with them is a full-time job, and pissing them off has capital-C Consequences.

"wisps", also called "primordial sprites", are mindless embodiments that appear and disappear in response to movements in the psychosphere. will-o'-wisps are an example: they spawn in the river and disappear quickly. some people speculate that wisps can eventually "graduate" into sprites if they stick around long enough; how long they do stick around is up to the local psychosphere.

now you're asking, "what is the psychosphere?" uh, it's sort of just a fancy way of saying "the vibe". here's an example:

a house burns down and isn't rebuilt. over the years, the local children spread rumors about the ruins being haunted. wisps appear in response to the rumors. a group of kids spot the wisps hovering in the ruins one night, and now it's not just a rumor: everyone knows that the old house is haunted. so the wisps never go away. decades pass. now the burned-out lot has a patron sprite. their hobbies include rattling chains and emitting ghastly shrieks in the dead of night. you can offer them gifts of freshly-burned oak cinders in exchange for piping the fuck down. nobody can build on that lot anymore. it's fine. that's just nature's balance.

[valeriehalla]

What does the child of two monsters look like? Do they begin with a mix of monster traits of their parents or do they just begin looking human? I’d imagine it’s the later but I can see it going either way.

Also, how are slimes born? I mean, I know Lucy said they came from a vat, but I’m just wondering how? Is it just like Pokemon logic where they were born from the surrounding area, like grimer or vanillite, created like a homunculus, or something else?

i've deliberately left the question of "what does a monster baby look like" a mystery, if only because we probably won't meet one any time soon, and because i think answering it explicitly is less interesting than leaving it be. we will learn fairly soon that, under at least some circumstances, the child of two monsters is another monster of the same type. but the Curse affects monsters in exactly the same way it affects humans, so in most cases this fact is inconsequential.

it was mally who claimed to have "been green since the day [they] crawled outta [their] vat," but i wouldn't extrapolate this statement to all slimes. in fact, i wouldn't even necessarily extrapolate it to mally......

[valeriehalla]

it’s femboy friday!!! improve your day by reading about this one.

(but don’t tell him i said that. nathan small is pretty sure “femboy” is an offensive thing to call someone and he really doesn’t want to be seen whipping around such loaded terminology, like surely it’s not his word to reclaim, and

CURSE/KISS/CUTE issue #1: “Name of the Helper, Part I” is now live!

Nathan Small is as normal as humans come. Sure, he may have hopped on a train to Monster City just to interview for a job—but in this economy, who can blame him? There’s only one problem with his plan: the giggling little fairy-thing that just transfigured his slacks into a miniskirt…

CURSE/KISS/CUTE is a queer multimedia web series for adults only. Check out the homepage for more info, including the backlog of previous issues!

[valeriehalla]

Finished issue #1 and gosh it is so good! It was so fun finally meeting the boy again! An extremely normal boy with an extremely put-upon protector~

Your writing is just SUCH a delight~ I really love your narrative voice! Especially the little tongue-in-cheek asides, like "You can tell he’s normal because he’s wearing a button-down and a tie." >u<

And of course the music adds SO MUCH to the story! This mixed-media presentation is SO good, it's so fun to read~

I wish you the best of luck in making the rest of CURSE/KISS/CUTE!! 💜

thank you very much. here’s a paragraph you didn’t ask me to write:

if you ask a writer why one might prefer to write a story in the present tense as opposed to the past tense, they’ll usually cite “immediacy”. the present tense is good for action; it’s good for stories that are strongly grounded “in the moment”. i mostly agree with this sentiment, and that’s part of why i like to write in present tense. however, arguably the bigger part is that it enables my dipshit witticism habit. i really enjoy framing a narrative as something more like a conversation with the reader than the finite recounting of a story: “you could tell he was normal because he was wearing a button-down and a tie” simply doesn’t cut it for me

[valeriehalla]

I was initially a bit disappointed seeing you scrapped the plan to make C/K/C a VN but for your stated goal of making it immediately readable on a phone it works so good and your website design is as perfect as i could imagine and oh so cute - I'm also really enjoying your prose style here I can only describe it as even more cute - well I'm gonna subscribe to your patreon about it I suppose even though I probably wont read the updates until the chapters are finished - really delightful thanks for this

love to get this comment!!

i was also a bit disappointed by my decision to scrap the visual novel stuff in favor of just making a Novel With Visuals. there's a lot of reasons why i made that choice, but wanting something that Just Works on a phone was a big one.

i'm a desktop fucker; i basically don't even touch my phone most days. a lot of the design decisions i had to make here would have been way, way easier if i simply ignored phone users. and if i had, there likely would have been a bit more VN DNA in the final product. but i wanted to prioritize accessibility over everything else. a scrolling text column isn't exactly innovative and it's not particularly interactive, but it's something that desktops and phones both do exceedingly well, so here we are. at the end of the day, i wanted the user to be able to click exactly one link and begin reading CURSE/KISS/CUTE within five seconds of finding out it exists.

(and i wanted to make it look and feel nice enough to use that that doesn't seem like a compromise...)

[valeriehalla]

as always, i hugely appreciate all the kind words in my inbox. i read all of them deliciously!! if i don’t respond, it’s only in the interest of not cluttering up everyone’s feed too much. thank you everyone!

[valeriehalla]

Read the first issue and HOLY COW was it cute and extremely well written (also hot 😳)

More art should be beautifully written stories about shy boys being forced to wear slutty mini skirts

thank you. i also think this

[valeriehalla]

Just read the first part of name of the helper, it’s SO GOOD. IVE BEEN CRAVING SOMETHING LIKE THIS, THANK YOU!

(btw, weird question, where did you get the name “Ashcaster”? I legit had a moment where i swore id heard it somewhere, but cant find anything lol)

thank you!

the source of “ashcaster” is that i made it up. if it sounds familiar it’s probably because it kinda sounds like “manchester” etc. there’s an art to coming up with believable place names i think... it helps to know a lot of word roots and etymologies, because place names often preserve words and meanings that have fallen out of use in modern english. “cast” can mean “spread seeds (by throwing)”, so we can presume that “ashcaster” is named for someone who planted ash trees.

[valeriehalla]

CURSE/KISS/CUTE issue #1: “Name of the Helper, Part I” is now live!

Nathan Small is as normal as humans come. Sure, he may have hopped on a train to Monster City just to interview for a job—but in this economy, who can blame him? There’s only one problem with his plan: the giggling little fairy-thing that just transfigured his slacks into a miniskirt…

CURSE/KISS/CUTE is a queer multimedia web series for adults only. Check out the homepage for more info, including the backlog of previous issues!

[valeriehalla]

I realized I have an infinitely better way of asking this question. Has there ever been a time when the Curse kept a monster completely human?

Like, sure their teeth are straighter and clearly whitened, but you wouldn’t be able to know that they were a monster even if they were naked.

well, i think episode 0 is more or less explicitly about this exact scenario, isn’t it? aster’s changes aren’t quite as invisible as that, but if you observe them at any single point in time there is nothing about their appearance that would imply they’re not human. it’s sorta the theme of the whole thing!

in the Middle Wood, humans are just another kind of monster. it is not remotely uncommon for the Curse to turn a human into another, differently-shaped human. this happens most often to out-of-towners, whose self-image has been influenced mainly by other humans.

still, for the curse to change nothing (or almost nothing) about your body requires unusual circumstances. aster gives one example. likewise, if aster’s relatively unimpressive transformation(s) are the result of a thousand-way tug-of-war in their heart over what kind of monster they want to be, we can also imagine a sort of anti-aster who remains the same despite the Curse because they’re already the thing they most want to be. neither of these scenarios is particularly common.

in episode 1, we will encounter an individual whose body is, mysteriously, perfectly unchanged by the Curse. well—depending on how you define “body”...

[valeriehalla]

CURSE/KISS/CUTE - “Name of the Helper, Part I” - Scene Two is now up on Patreon!

in which Nathan Small navigates dire social straits, has a breakdown in the bathroom, and looks in a mirror.

[valeriehalla]

happy TDoV. while i, a trans person, only become visible once per year on this holiest of holidays, i'll tell you what's visible all year round: CURSE/KISS/CUTE, my free, ad-free, 100% handmade, fully illustrated adult queer web novel whose novella-length pilot is already out!!!!!

→ https://www.dicot.moe/ckc ←