...

...It just occurred to me to wonder if 'gorgeous glittery boy in nightclub' counts as a kinkfic type, same as say... spanking. o_0 But then, once you start calling things 'kink', where do you stop?
    At least, I wonder if not liking the boys to be uber-gorgeous and amazingly muscled/dressed/etc counts as a kink. I mean, I love the club!fics! I do! How can I dislike an excuse for blatant public groping! It's just. I just hate it when so much attention is spent on clothes and random hot guys and 'looking sexy'; this is related to me hating characters being made into sex-objects, I guess, mostly because the type of things most people find stunningly attractive, I just find lame. So if you write about 'emerald eyes and shining skin', my reaction wouldn't be properly star-struck. I mean... being cute is one thing; it's just being pretty the way a flower or a kitten is 'pretty' & cute. Being 'drop-dead gorgeous'-- that's an image projection. It's not who you are, it's how you act, and people who act 'drop-dead gorgeous' can come off as... vain & arrogant. I guess it's the difference between natural charm and forced attention-seeking; it just 'feels' wrong to me.

I don't feel like hardcore porn dumbs me down, but all the focus on clothes and eyeliner does, silly as that sounds. -.-;;; And yeah, I realize how ridiculous it is to split shallowness hairs when you're talking club!fic. Heh. I think I'm just a bit overwhelmed with too many clothes descriptions in my fantasy book, too. And y'know, I -like- fashion... just not described. I like it... visual. ^^;;;;

...But that gets into a whole -thing- about how much physical description is too much and what is it -good- for in stories and why-oh-why do so many really great writers go overboard (including me, back before I stopped writing much description at all). Maybe I'm just spoiled by manga, I dunno. Nary an over-descriptive paragraph in sight there, man.

Speaking of manga & traumatic experiences....
    I should've known better, of course, but I was reading Asami Tohjoh's latest hardcore yaoi scanslation, and in a public lab, and... suddenly this guy comes up to me & says: 'Not to be rude, but can you tell me the name of that manga?' And he's a boy and tall, black and vaguely attractive and I just sat there trying to remember the name or -my- name or -anything-, because basically no sound would come out. Omg, the sheer... shock. And embarrassment. And shock. Wah. I think I was expecting him to shake his finger at me and call me a bad girl, which he didn't, but I dunno if taking an interest in gay smut makes me any more comfortable, actually~:))

[meta third-removed]

Another day, another semi-wank in the HP fandom, and-- thinking about what bothers me in the type of discourse here (well, not just fandom, it's really predominant in public discourse), I finally come to some sort of empathy & understanding of the Cult of Nice. Except... what I want isn't niceness-- that's a misnomer & wouldn't be helpful in the long run; what I'd want is to have a Cult of Understanding ('empathy' just sounds silly).

See, people are almost never 'too mean' or too blunt or too harsh for me; what they are, I'd realized, is too aggressive. Instead of stating things softly, like between friends discussing issues and having a two-way conversation, many people claim things, disclaim things, make spurious exaggerations and mocking arguments and generally act like this is All So Important Omg (or alternatively, so unimportant as to be laughable). I mean, who wants to be told to go to hell, but politely (in theory)? What I'd like is some attempt to understand without laying blame and picking sides: that's the truly civilized thing to be doing, isn't it?

The idea is obviously hopeless; you're never going to get people (esp. strangers) to 'just talk' in a heated discussion anymore than you're going to teach pigs to tap-dance; all I've realized is that 'niceness' is a veil for people needing something deeper and harder to fake with an act. You can't fake understanding, patience and subtlety the way you can 'act' nice, so of course most people don't demand it. Of course, my problem is that once I understand, I accept unless I think the person's saying something truly heinous and wrong instead of just... not right enough or deluded, and then people accuse me of siding with the person I accept. *sigh*

To come back to the idea of 'too aggressive': I think it's just that people tend to put things too firmly for my liking, whether they're polite or not, and -that's- what annoys me. It's like, they don't tend to question themselves, and if they do, they question themselves so much they can't tell their front from their back. It's the difference between wondering (open-ended) and claiming (definitive). When people 'wonder' in practice, generally, that means they just ask questions and -other- people get to be definitive, but that's not what I mean at all; I mean for people to question the presumptions that lead them to question-- and to think for themselves as far as possible solutions go, so that the ensuing conversation has some natural balance to it.

I was also thinking that I'm often accused of being 'too certain' and of saying 'this is just how the world is', and in a way I'm saying that right now. I think it's more like I'm always confused & unresolved, but keep myself trapped by constantly seeing other possibilities. Is there such a thing as seeing too much context??