why are we here? just to buffer?

that shit doesn't fit bro. it sticks out like a sword thumb. it's like a scared pig in a round hole

wilson LOVES being house's only friend. if house made another friend wilson would do something totally insane like make up symptoms to have a mysterious illness only house can solve

🐺 moon-moon4w00 Follow

Friendly reminder that asking your lycan partner to turn you is incredibly insensitive! Seriously can we retire this trope already? Not only is it just offensive, but no one would ever actually choose this life! Lycanthropy is a curse. Full stop.

🐾 superhowllock69 Follow

Ok user "moon-moon" as if that original meme wasn't created to mock pack nomenclature 🙄

Anyway I'm not gonna touch that internalized lycanphobia with a ten foot pole. Being turned by your partner is something that can be incredibly intimate as long as both parties are consenting and the one being turned is 100% sure they want it. Literally the only downside to transforming once a month is the pain, but midol works just fine. No one with these "lycanthropy bad" takes ever wants to discuss the legitimate positives that come with this "curse" lmao.

🐺 moon-moon4w00 Follow

I'm literally reclaiming moon moon but go off I guess. Anyways turning your partner is absolutely disgusting and morally reprehensible and anyone who does it should be muzzled permanently.

🌜 impawssible Follow

lmao my wife literally saved my life when she turned me but i guess she should be muzzled huh? we run through the woods hunting deer together and can each haul in groceries in one trip now, but nooo she's obviously a danger to society because she cares enough about me to help me when insurance wouldn't cover my medicine

also it was confirmed that the creator of that meme literally makes and sells silver bullets so if you still wanna use moon moon for yourself that certainly is a choice. source: (X)

🦴 pupperoni Follow

I love that instead of naming the more common benefits of lycanthropy, you mentioned that you and your wife can carry all the groceries in one trip. I think that's definitely a positive that gets overlooked far too often and I commend you for speaking your truth, sir

🌜 impawssible Follow

lol thanks but I'm a woman 😅

🦴 pupperoni Follow

🦇 count-fuckula Follow

Plus werewolf blood tastes way better and is as filling as 10 humans 👍

🐺 moon-moon4w00 Follow

Oh my GOD you vampblr freaks will just flock to anything. It clearly says "vamps DNI" in my bio!

🐾 superhowllock Follow

lmaoooo of course you're a vampire exclusionist

🌕 daddy-fenris Follow

wasn't OP the same guy who said fursuits were offensive to lycanthropes and doxxed a werewolf fursuiter?

🐺 moon-moon4w00 Follow

They ARE offensive and harmful to this community and I'm tired of pretending they're not. They perpetuate harmful depictions of what a humanoid wolf is actually like.

🌜 impawssible Follow

me when I dox someone for making candy colored animal costumes that look nothing like what a real werewolf does

🦴 pupperoni Follow

K

🌕 daddy-fenris Follow

U

one of my favorite kim dokja fails is when he was telling yoo sangah his backstory and he asks sangah if she knows his mom's book and shes like "yeah I've heard of it!" then at the end hes like "im joking, that didn't happen, that book doesnt exist and my relationship to my parents is normal :)" boy backtracked so hard he tried to get rid of easily verifiable facts

started reading Martha Wells earlier Raksura series, it’s okay, I’m kind of vaugely reading through the final book. (I really like the Murderbot series she’s writing right now so I thought i’d check out her other books.)

There’s something…. something “white person writing this” about the Raksura series, even though I can pick up and appreciate some of the anthropology studies background Wells has. Eyyyyy midden piles anyone? In that short story about the boy in the woods.

Also you can see Wells’s handling of gender/sex identities start to shift through the series, though it’s still “well this character has what looks like four breasts so presumed a woman” narration at this point. (Gender identity is treated much differently in Murderbot, clearly Wells got up to date with gender stuff a bit more by then. The Raksura books were also published more in the first half of the 2010s too I guess idk. Although…. wait, Ancillary Justice came out 2014, though. Maybe Wells and probably other authors picked up on gender stuff more from that series, just speculation)

And I have some “hmm” feelings about the mixed-race ish characters. Esp in the first book. The later appearances of the mixed characters felt almost like an apology/expansion after having mixed race characters be like “the powerful evil ones”. idk. I’ve also had to deal with a lot of weird handling of mixed race characters in other books, so. (This version of ”hybrid mixed race characters are powerful and evil” is not the first time I’ve encountered this trope.)

Anyway the first three books and some of the short stories are a solid read, all that being said. I’m less enthusiastic about the 4th and 5th book so far, they’re sort of gloom and depressing.

wait is the leviathan ever coming back. did we just… leave the leviathan still apparently under control, when clearly that’s not the best state for it. I’m still reading the final book buttttt…. :/

also I tried reading Death of the Necromancer but just didn’t get into it, even though I wanted to. Maybe I just like Well’s Murderbot series? I wonder what Witch King (2022) will be about. Also when are more murderbot books coming out.

reading the books of the raksura is an experience full of so much cognitive dissonance which probably isn't helped by the fact that i gulped down the first three books in under a week i think and therefore had minimum higher thought engagement involved beyond "hey i'm. not a fan of reverse sexism as a trope."

the way it ends up feeling is like wells really wanted to play with the concept of a fully nonhuman race based off of colony insects (which is cool! i'd really love to see more delving into species that function drastically differently from humans from their pov instead of from an outsider pov!) and then did not fully engage with the fact that uuuuuh a biologically mandated caste system has some really fucked up implications when carried over to a sentient species! and a biologically evil species is also fucked up!!

(also between the way raksura courts work and handwaving mensah's planet in murderbot as a utopia i'm feeling an overarching tendency towards "this one place is a great place where everything works well all the time because of reasons.")

from a reader's perspective it really grinds some of my gears (let moon actually fight a queen already!!) but from a writer's and worldbuilding perspective there is So Much fascinating, juicy stuff to play around with. (also frustrating stuff. how come everybody is afraid of shifters because fell and nobody has ever seen raksura but raksura can't convince anybody fell are real and very dangerous and also how has nobody heard of raksura when there's a whole bunch of them in that forest and they have enough regular friendly contact with other species to speak the trade language but have no concept of how valuable gemstones are and??????????)

BUT FASCINATING. courts seem to be technically run like large extended families. my memory is not the best and i've not done an actual analysis but i'm pretty sure courts only have like a few hundred people in them?? except they live in trees so huge they support platforms the size of islands? like every court is an independent small town. everybody knows everybody else. they're all more or less self-sufficient, apparently. there's no over-arching government between courts, just allies. how big are the reaches? how many courts are there? it seems like the populations of fell and of raksura are actually pretty tiny, but why? hey, is the narrative ever going to engage with the fact that the only non-fell descendants of the forerunners are in a tight symbiotic relationship with a totally different species where they're always on top of the political structure and don't contribute to the running of the court except as scholars and a "better" warrior class?

Having read two (2) of Martha Wells’s series I conclude that her specialty is writing books about nonhuman loners forcibly adopted by a found family which they regard with intense doubt and suspicion because it turns out spending most of one’s life as a loner does not prepare you well for important life events like trust and intimacy, a.k.a. Moon is just a more well-socialized fantasy Murderbot and I would die for him

Just in case you were wondering: any piece of media that creates “good” and “bad” races (Skyrim, Fallout, LOTR, D&D, etc), is racist. Any piece of media that presents a single “good” member of an “evil” race, or in which the “evil” members of a race far outnumber the “good” members, is racist. Any piece of media that uses the fact that the evil races are permanently and unchangingly evil - even though there may or may not be exceptions! - to justify the genocide and extermination of that race, is racist.

This is not a Watsonian argument. The relative goodness or evilness of a good or evil race, in that piece of media, is irrelevant. The fact is, if you write a story that pits two different races against one another, and one is deemed good and one is deemed evil, that is racist.

It’s the biological essentialism

i love the moon-stone relationship. moon like "hi i'm moon my hobbies are hunting flying babysitting reflexively lying and deliberately provoking my cranky grandpa who is four times bigger than me 🥰" and stone showing up somewhere to pick up moon like "where's my kid what have you fuckheads done with my kid if you hurt my kid i will tear every last one of you into little - oh there you are. dumbass. get in the car"

books of the raksura is so great man Martha Wells was just like "ok so the mc is a bitchy little man and everyone's a humanoid dragonlike shapeshifter. Their social structure is like a bee colony. Everyone is girlboss for malewife and also queer and poly as fuck but also human societal standards of romance do not apply to them. There is no one who's not ready to physically throw down at a moments notice. The series is about healing from trauma and alienation and learning to trust people. My characterization is Peak. Now watch this entire society fight over their only bratty sub. Somehow I'm doing this without it being Weirdly Fetishy at all. Now go explore these ancient ruins bc I the author am incapable of resisting some ancient ruins. There's a 20 foot tall grandpa and he Fucks."

this is my "oh. oh" moment

moon seeing a drawing of a raksuran queen for the first time, thinking of it as "unexpectedly sensual", then "trying to page to the back of the book to see if there were any more drawings of queens" is soooooo funny like okay local man discovers erotica of his own species and suddenly develops whatever the opposite of a monsterfucker kink is

shut up chime! DILFs can have a little calling moon feral. as a treat

now i'm having fun reinterpreting this "power" that moon says queens have as just good ol' fashioned sexual attraction. moon is so turned on by a member of his own species trying to dominate him that he thinks they're exerting some kind of raksura-specific power over him when really he just finds them Big Sexy and that turns his brain off. if it's some kind of instinctual queen power, then why can consorts (shadow) do it too? and if consorts can do it, why doesn't moon ever have this reaction to stone, the biggest, baddest consort of all? because stone is his grandpa and he's not sexually into stone even a little bit! whereas moon is practically salivating after a bit of chin-touching from shadow. that's because you want his hands on you!

and the original source of his idea that it's a special queen power, the scene where pearl hits him with the whammy in front of the whole court? moon has been bopping along for the last few decades experiencing ho-hum levels of attraction to groundlings, and then once surrounded by hotties from his own species he gets turbo turned on for the first time ever and thinks "what is this feeling, so sudden and new? it must be a mystical Raksuran Queen Power (TM)." but babe there is nothing fancy happening here, you are just 1) the opposite of a monsterfucker at heart who is meeting some fuckable non-monsters for the first time in your adult life and/or 2) a submissive who's finally found people who don't expect you to dom. of course you're having a brand new reaction!

do the math buddy. maybe this is what attraction is supposed to feel like for you, you've just never been this attracted to anyone before? but no, it must be the magical queen power thingy. sexual attraction is a scam probably but the species-specific hypnosis is for real. everyone knows sex is for getting people to be nice to you, not because you think they're sexy. what kind of world would that be! ridiculous!!