I know you and Feynites have said that people go to the Pleasure District for things other than sex. I was wondering if Melarue had any customers like that?
Senhlen comes to them for quiet.
Not the cavernous silence of an empty room, where she spends her days as a lorekeeper for Lord Dirthamen, but the gentle, comforting silence of companionship. She lays her head in Melarue’s lap and closes her eyes, and sighs softly as Melarue cards gentle fingers through her hair.
Melarue dims the lights, and muffles the magic in the room meant to stimulate, so that there is nothing to keep Senhlen from drifting peacefully to sleep.
Sometimes Senhlen does, and other days she simply curls into Melarue, touch-starved and weary, and Melarue does what they can to put her at peace, away from the secrets and the need to know and look and remember.
The two never speak, not so much as a whispered greeting.
Melarue leaves the window open, so the two can feel the soft, cool breeze of a fine spring day, and smell the magnolia blossoms drifting in the courtyard.
A simple thing, this silence, and a simple pleasure that Melarue appreciates.
—
Sorry it’s so short! There are others who also come to Melarue for other things aside from sex even though that is what they are most sought out for. One of June’s smiths comes to them for deep body massages, and one of Ghilan’nain’s higher ups comes to listen to them play the harp and to talk. Melarue doesn’t have many clients, as they are very busy with their job as the manager of the Pleasure District. Only those of equal rank or higher can come to them for a session, so very high-ranking servants of the Evanuris or the Evanuris themselves.
Prepare yourselves
Looking glass by @feynites
“I am sorry. I did not mean to worry you,” she says.
He lets out a broken huff, just short of hysterical.
“They all said you would die,” he tells her. “The best healers are tending Mythal, and I could get none of them to see to you. The ones who came all said you would die. I was going to… I do not even know. Do something foolish, I suppose. I could not even find your mind in the Fade, until the end.”
—
Procreate has been updated and now i have to adjust all brushes again…
I often wonder what happened to authors of unfinished fanfictions.
I hope they’re having a nice life
we absolutely are not and that unfinished fic haunts us to this day
Once I lamented on Twitter about never getting to finish a really good Sherlock fic, and the author recognized it and apologized, and I felt terrible. (And I SOMEHOW RESISTED begging her to finish.)
See, here’s how I feel: One of the best things about fanfiction is that I get the chance to read stories that are never going to be ‘published’ in traditional ways. I get to read the writing of people who are doing this as a hobby rather than a profession or even a part-time gig. And as a result, I get to be showered with so many beautiful stories that I would never, ever have found through any other medium. I get to read the work of writers who would have been lost to me if the only way I had of reading was through purchasing publications. There’s just so much more out there than publication systems have ever harnessed.
And, to me, unfinished stories are kind of the ultimate expression of that story that I wasn’t supposed to be able to read, but lucked out and got a chance to read anyway. Unfinished stories almost never get published. Before the age of the internet and fanfiction, most would never have been read except by their authors and maybe a close friend or two. But, thanks to the internet and the ability of authors to write as they go, for fun, with no obligations attached, I have gotten to read these unfinished, beautiful things. And sure, if I love a story I naturally wish that it would be finished. But if the choice is between never reading that story at all, or getting to read it as far as it goes, I’ll take the latter every time.
I have been changed by unfinished stories. I’ve been amused and moved and fascinated and transported by them. Some of my all-time favorite fics are unfinished. But I’m still so happy that they live in a corner of my head.
So if you have written an unfinished fic, thank you. I’m so glad you shared it.
Inquisitor: what the fuck. What the fuck. WHAT the fuck. What the FUCK. wHAT THE FUCK!! What in the fuck! Is going on!!
Another meme? So soon? I shouldn’t have
Read Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights by Nadine Strossen
Excerpts:
“In the late 80s and early 90s there was a vocal group of radical feminists who believed that pornography inherently harms women, not just in its production but also in its consumption… These anti-pornography feminists teamed up with the religious right and managed to get anti-porn laws passed. In particular, a law was passed in Canada preventing the importation of “obscene” material”..
…. Guess what was seized first? “The Joy of Gay Sex” and the like. Guess what businesses started finding all their shipments seized or delayed – sexually explicit or not – to the point where they were being put out of business? Gay bookstores. Guess what wasn’t seized at all? Mainstream porn made for straight men…..
Here’s the key point: Strossen is a legal scholar who’s looked at a lot of attempts at censorship, and you know what she found happened every time? When you try to censor pornography, even in the interests of protecting vulnerable people, that censorship will be applied first, and hardest, against the people who are most vulnerable. They won’t come for actual abusers, they’ll come for the abused, and prevent them from accessing resources, education, talking to each other, creating art to express themselves, or organising against those who are actually causing harm.
This is old, old business, we’ve seen it more than once before, and it never goes the way the antis think it will. Censorship is a tool that gives power to abusers and lets them inflict more harm on those who are abused, vulnerable and discriminated against. Don’t fall for it.
Water is wet, the research is done to confirm that water is wet, and some jerks out there are still going around saying that this time it’s different, our new authoritarianism is OK, don’t mind the screaming disenfranchised LGBTQ+ people!
Let’s circulate this post far and wide. People should know the consequences of what they’re doing.
reasonable people: hey, we should probably do something about all the rampant child pornography and the way children and teens in fandom communities are being groomed to consider the romanticization of these sorts of relationships healthy and normal
fucking weirdos who need to go outside: STOP EMPOWERING ABUSERS! STOP BEING HOMOPHOBIC!
reasonable people: we’re… literally trying to stop abuse while you’re defending abusers and trying to insulate them from any consequences within the community? and a lot of us are gay?
fucking weirdos who need to go outside: :5,000-word crytyped essay on how this is Kink Oppression:
When you try to censor pornography, even in the interests of protecting vulnerable people, that censorship will be applied first, and hardest, against the people who are most vulnerable. They won’t come for actual abusers, they’ll come for the abused.
The whole POINT of this essay is to illustrate the problem where people’s good intentions (i.e. ‘let’s stop the spread of child pornography’) get twisted, in actual practice, by those who turn around and immediately target LGBT+ communities with censorship measures instead.
You know. The same way that legislation regarding sex work somehow conveniently never takes the actual opinions of sex workers into account while ~protecting~ them by throwing ‘em in jail.
This isn’t about kink.
Censorship is very easy to abuse, and always comes at the cost of letting someone else make assessments on your behalf, or on behalf of others. That’s why it has to be used sparingly, and often does not logically follow even the most intense forms of criticism or disdain. We know censorship is preferable to some stuff (generally speaking stuff that’s already illegal, like child porn and hate speech), but it’s a very specific and risky tool to invoke. Proponents of censorship often operate under the assumption that their own values would be the guideline for its deployment. That it will be used ‘reasonably’ and with ‘common sense’. But a lot of times you cannot ever guarantee that the person doing the censorship is on the same moral/ethical page as you, and since one needs control of a situation in order to censor it, the process almost invariably favours people in power, rather than the disenfranchised.
People in power are usually the ones already perpetuating abuses, and already capable of skirting around any new ‘rules’ they make anyway.
Even if you really loathe and despise something, censorship is a very particular type of action to take against it, which may or may not even be effective against a particular problem. For example, illegal content is already skirting efforts to curtail it; and will continue to do so, as the porn bots using the ‘sfw’ tag to defeat tumblr’s algorithms ably demonstrate. Censorship requires you to trust the judgement of the person who is in charge of the censoring, in order to actually do you any good. It empowers another person or organization to filter the information you come into contact with on your behalf.
It’s like asking a stranger to blindfold you and lead you through a forest.
Maybe every once in a blue moon that’s the best solution to a dilemma, but for the most part, it’s probably not something you want to encourage. Even if the forest is full of shit you understandably don’t want to see, maybe listen when people tell you that the mysterious guides have a notorious habit of leading people off of random cliffs, too.
Read Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights by Nadine Strossen
Excerpts:
“In the late 80s and early 90s there was a vocal group of radical feminists who believed that pornography inherently harms women, not just in its production but also in its consumption… These anti-pornography feminists teamed up with the religious right and managed to get anti-porn laws passed. In particular, a law was passed in Canada preventing the importation of “obscene” material”..
…. Guess what was seized first? “The Joy of Gay Sex” and the like. Guess what businesses started finding all their shipments seized or delayed – sexually explicit or not – to the point where they were being put out of business? Gay bookstores. Guess what wasn’t seized at all? Mainstream porn made for straight men…..
Here’s the key point: Strossen is a legal scholar who’s looked at a lot of attempts at censorship, and you know what she found happened every time? When you try to censor pornography, even in the interests of protecting vulnerable people, that censorship will be applied first, and hardest, against the people who are most vulnerable. They won’t come for actual abusers, they’ll come for the abused, and prevent them from accessing resources, education, talking to each other, creating art to express themselves, or organising against those who are actually causing harm.
This is old, old business, we’ve seen it more than once before, and it never goes the way the antis think it will. Censorship is a tool that gives power to abusers and lets them inflict more harm on those who are abused, vulnerable and discriminated against. Don’t fall for it.
Water is wet, the research is done to confirm that water is wet, and some jerks out there are still going around saying that this time it’s different, our new authoritarianism is OK, don’t mind the screaming disenfranchised LGBTQ+ people!
Let’s circulate this post far and wide. People should know the consequences of what they’re doing.
Neither Crowley nor Aziraphale is responsible for the Tumblr Titty Ban but both took credit for it when speaking to their respective superiors
Is now a bad time to mention I actually don’t hate this site? I hate the owners. Hate the staff. Hate the incompetence of whoever is in charge here.
But I love the site, love the format, love my mutuals, my followers and all of the amazing content creators here. I don’t know what I’ll replace this with if anything.
Prompt if you want one: Every time Selene goes with Elrogathe into Arlathan, widowed Elgar'nan offers increasingly valuable things for Selene to marry his son, Dirthamen. Selene has never actually met Dirthamen, but if he's anything like Elgar'nan or his other son, she thinks she'd rather drink paint. But when Elrogathe arranges her marriage to Haleir instead, Selene's only legal recourse is to beat him to the pass by accepting one of Elgar'nan's offers first.
Dirthamen and the Evanuris family are @feynites
It’s a last resort. The last echo oflight for a dead woman walking.
Or riding, technically. Since she’staking the train and all.
Hopefully this won’t turn out to be atremendous waste of time.
Selene lets out a slow breath, the longstems of the carefully arranged bouquet bending with the tighteningof her hands.
It’s been…five years since she waslast in Arlathan?
Ten, since she was at the EvanurisEstate in person.
And she’s actually never met the personshe’s planning to drop in on.
Selene.
Dirthamen knows that name.
people on tumblr linking all the alternative ways everyone can find them like
the first batch of my oc eye study is complete! I really enjoyed doing this (can you guess who is who?) and I think I’ll do at least one more set soon.
My prediction for Solas dialogue upon meeting Lavellan again in DA4:
Holiday fluff for Kasserole? Maybe gift shopping for Wintersend (or whatever gift giving winter holiday Thedas has?)
Kass hates shopping for Melarue.
Okay, okay she doesn’t hate it. But it’s certainly difficult to get something for someone who seems to have everything. And she quite literally means everything. Not to mention Melarue is an incredible gift giver. How they do it, she doesn’t know, but whatever it is, it probably involves using a lot of money.
She stares at a leather messenger bag and tries to think if it’s something they’d like. It’s a medium brown, soft, with some vintage looking buckles on the front. It’s definitely nice, but she thinks they have something very similar. Of course the one they have is better because they picked it out themselves and know exactly what they want. She shakes her head and makes her way to a jewelry store next.
You can’t go wrong with diamonds right?
Except you can definitely go wrong with the diamond price tag. Ouch. She may have a joint bank account with Melarue, they may be married, but spending this much still feels terrifying in a way. It’s a bit scary to think she could blow a few thousand on diamond earrings and still be absolutely okay financially.
Kass then wanders into a designer store she know they like.
“May I help you?” An associate immediately comes up to her and she nods.
“Yes, I am looking for a gift for my spouse. They’re the person who has everything, y’know? They’re very elegant and beautiful, and I want something…them.”
“Oh yes, we just got in a new shipment of scarves. Right off the runway.” He takes her to a rack with absolutely stunning scarves. There is an emerald one with small gold motifs around the ends that resemble scales.
“This is perfect,” she says, imagining them wearing the scarf with one of their coats. They look good in just about everything (especially in nothing) so she knows they will look wonderful in this.
“It is a stunning scarf…” the sales associate goes on to talk as Kass catches sight of the price tag.
“Eight hundred?!” She exclaims, interrupting him.
“Er, yes, of course,” he says as if it’s a reasonable and expected price for a scarf.
“It’s a scarf,” she argues, in shock. Once upon a time, this single scarf would be rent and the power bill. Eight hundred. She glances at the scarf again and sighs. They’re worth it, and she can afford it, she knows.
“Okay,” she says, picking it up. The associate is thrilled as he rings her up. She isn’t having his “and for an extra forty we can wrap it for you!” bullshit though. She’s a big girl, she can wrap the damn scarf herself.
One present down! A few more to go.
She is walking along the market street, heading to her car, when she sees a small stationary store. In the window is a scrapbook, but the pictures in the book are painted, not just photos. Curious, Kass heads in.
There is a cheerful dwarven woman bustling around who greets Kass happily.
“The display with the scrap book, did you paint those?” She asks and the woman nods.
“Yes! It’s a little side thing I do. People give me their pictures and I paint them like those older portraits and put them into a scrapbook.”
“Yes,” Kass says immediately, “that is absolutely perfect.” The woman beams and they start going through the process of selecting the features of the book. They settle on mint-green binding, with six front and back total pages. She wants it to tell their story of falling in love with the pictures she has - all saved on her phone for easy emailing of course. The first half of the book focuses on Kass and Mel, while the last few pages focus on their kids. Ash on a tire swing, Aanda coming home from the hospital, and Aelynthi not just holding his baby sisters, but smiling too.
The total doesn’t even phase Kass this time as she hands over the card. She can’t put a price on these, not for Melarue.
Melarue belongs to @justanartsysideblog
hot take:
Gloin is the sexiest dwarf by dwarf standards.
Kili is the sexiest dwarf by elf standards.
Thorin is the sexiest dwarf by human standards
& Bombur is the sexiest dwarf by hobbit standards
#ITS TRUE AND YOU SHOULD SAY IT #(ALSO THORIN AND KILI BEING ‘UGLY’ BY DWARF STANDARDS IS AMUSING CONTENT)
further take: Kili is straight-up ugly by dwarf standards. Thorin is like, the dwarf equivalent of Benedict Cumberbatch. Some dwarves think he’s an absolutely dreamboat, others think he is super weird looking, there’s very little middle ground.
omg now i’m like. what does this make frodo by hobbit standards
by hobbit standards, I’m afraid Frodo is probably. not conventionally attractive at all.
Frodo is the sexiest hobbit by elf standards
@femmefaramir this is some fucking galaxy brain level tags and im crying out of sheer horror
Okay but it might be worth mentioning that in the LotR books, the Frodo and co. have a fifth friend who got cut from the films, called Fatty Bolger.
So like, by human standards, this is obviously kind of a mean nickname.
But does that mean they were basically calling him Hot Stuff by hobbit standards...?
More pressingly, is that his given name? Is Fatty Bolger named the hobbit equivalent of Hotty Bigcock?
