The fact that you can’t raise taxes on billionaires even slightly without them pouring money into fascist political movements is, of itself, evidence that billionaires as a class shouldn’t be allowed to exist in the first place.
I’d just like to point out that every single thing that has happened in the 6 years since I created this post has only reinscribed its absolute moral correctness in my mind.
i wish i could join discord servers and be talkative but alas every time i’m put in one i feel like a frightened captive animal being released into the wild for the first time and i instantly shove it in a folder never to be seen again outside of a random ping every few months
Original Post: Keith Porter was tragically taken from us by an off-duty ice agent, and his family is seeking justice during this difficult time. Every donation can help support their fight for truth and accountability. Please consider clicking the link below to contribute or share it with others who might want to help. Thank you for your support! https://gofund.me/530afb61e
demisexuality can be so hard to explain because it’s misconstrued as you just wanting to trust the other person before you have sex with them. and I get why the misconception happens. But demisexuality differs in that there isn’t sexual attraction at all before that bond forms.
I think what people have difficulty with is the idea that there are people out there who aren’t experiencing sexual attraction at all until a certain point, if ever, because we’re taught that sex, libido, and sexual attraction are all the same, both in and out of queer spaces.
And when you’re learning about asexuality and demisexuality, you may learn that people have romantic and aesthetic attraction separately from sexual attraction, and that sexual and romantic attraction aren’t necessarily intertwined, and that may challenge your worldview on sex.
But “I trust you enough to have sex with you” isn’t the same as “I’m not sexually attracted to anyone but you, and the reason I’m sexually attracted to you now after we’ve established this close bond is literally because of the bond of trust we’ve been able to form”.
It’s easy to see how those can get conflated. On the surface, if you’re unfamiliar with asexuality, they may sound the same. But it’s important to acknowledge the difference between “no sex until I trust you” and “no sexual attraction unless I trust you and maybe not even then”.
Demisexuality is housed under the asexuality spectrum. It’s part of the gray area between being allosexual and asexual. It’s part of why the definition for asexuality includes “little to no sexual attraction”. It’s a mostly asexual experience with an asterisk.
While being demisexual may have impacts on a persons sexual activity, even demisexuals have a varied relationship to the act of participating in sex. Libido and sexual attraction are not always intertwined either, which can make telling the difference tricky.
I think of sexual attraction as libido that has a compass. Since I rarely ever experience sexual attraction, but do have libido, it’s noticeable for me when that libido actually has a direction to go, rather than being a floating, nebulous, independent thing.
Remember, not everyone is demisexual. There’s a difference between waiting to have sex and not having sexual attraction at all until a certain point. This also inherently ties demisexuality to romantic attraction and relationships, and not all demisexuals are alloromantic.
But if you read what demisexuality is and think “everyone is like that” or “that’s just being a woman”, you either 1) are demisexual 2) don’t understand what it is or 3) both. And it’s okay to not know. Just as long as you’re willing to try to learn.
one thing that people get thrown by is when i say that i, being demisexual, do not find any famous people sexually attractive. they can be beautiful, in the same way that art is beautiful but i don’t have any interest in fucking a good painting. and even when i have a crush on someone, i’m uncomfortable with the idea of being intimate with them, and i only start to feel interested in sex with that person if we actually get deep into a relationship. it’s really not just “trust”.
I touched on the idea of being into blorbos vs. being into story previously in some tags a few days back, and I think this episode, and the conclusion of the arc, really establishes that Campaign 4 is very much a Story campaign. I think a lot of frustrations people have with it (and, if I’m being honest, Brennan’s style as a GM) come from it very much not being a Blorbo campaign.
Fandom on the whole tends to focus on characters. This is not a bad thing on its own, but it does lead to, I think, fandom’s worst tendencies. Ship wars (or the conspiracy theories fandoms come up with when ships do not occur) are Blorbo-centric behavior. Most harassment comes from Blorbo-centric fandom: the aforementioned ship wars, policing the “right” characters to like or dislike, and overemphasis on character relatability or on character authenticity to the creator’s lived experience (which often leads to people attempting to forcibly out creators). Stan culture (which, lest we forget, takes its name from an Eminem song in which someone grows deeply and unhealthily obsessed with Eminem as a public figure, placing his entire sense of self worth and stability on him and responding violently and lethally when he does not get the response he wants) is by default a Blorbo-centric exercise. One does not stan narrative. Indeed, the focus is often on very surface-level tangible elements: amount of screentime, aesthetics, and cool one-liners. When people act like they will die without seeing The Character, or when they pick what to watch based on ships? That’s Blorbo-centric.
I’d say “no judgement” but that would be a lie; however, it’s worth noting that Blorbo and Story focus are not inherently at odds. There are many reasons people like romance stories, but a big one is that those are stories where the focus is on characters and a relationship - where character is the plot. I think Campaign 2’s broad appeal is that the story is so incredibly character-driven that it works for both people who want to see their blorbos, and those who want a satisfying narrative. You can very easily tell stories that are both, and indeed, a story that centers on one character but fails to do a good job of establishing them and making the reader connect will fail on a narrative level, regardless of how well-crafted the plot is (this is again my personal quarrel with Baru Cormorant). This is not a dichotomy nor is it even really a spectrum; it’s symbiotic. But I do think story can stand on its own without Blorbo in a way Blorbo cannot without story. (This is why no one gives a shit about your random OC until you tell a story about them).
There are stories that cannot, in my opinion, be understood if you focus exclusively on blorbos. I’ve found that political science fiction is something of one. Series like Terra Ignota by Ada Palmer and Thessaly by Jo Walton, or The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz are all stories that require you zoom out. None of them have a single viewpoint character and all indeed move past a particular initial viewpoint character, sometimes by hundreds or thousands of years. You can tell a story of a society intertwined with the story of a person/relationship (The Vorkosigan Saga and the Teixcalaan books do this) but if you wish to give a multifaceted and complex overview, the distance provided by focusing more on plot and place and philosophy than the relatability of specific characters is necessary, even if it’s still important to have compelling characters to draw in readers and make them care about what would otherwise read like a history text. I’d argue, in fact, that what sinks Baru Cormorant is that it should be a blorbo-centric political story a la The Vorkosigan Saga and attempts to tell a more historical narrative like Thessaly.
Campaign 4 is not at odds with a blorbo-centric viewpoint. I think it is pretty much impossible to tell a D&D actual play story that does not lend itself to blorbos, purely on the basis of the nature of PCs. The story is going to follow them, and focus on them, and give them more importance within the world than anyone else, and significant NPCs will similarly be granted this status. But campaign 4 works against I think the most entrenched blorbo-centricism, and forces you to move more towards the middle of the spectrum than the extreme.
Or to put it in very blunt terms: you will not see your favorite character every week. The ship you latched onto in the first few episodes might be between characters who are on opposite sides of the continent by now and aren’t able to interact. There are deliberate choices made in editing (notably, which cold open to use and what interlude scenes, such as the Schemer’s table first half, to show and when) that are about storytelling more so than anything else.
There was a strangely prevalent idea that I still see in the tag with some regularity: a number of people came up with the sense that Campaign 4 would rotate weekly. Now, this is a nightmare logistically and sort of defeats the “hey, now you can take a long vacation without needing to be on hiatus or filming a 12-week backlog” purpose of West Marches. It is also a nightmare narratively - it chops up the story into disparate pieces that you have to puzzle back into place. It would make for an unpleasant chronological watch - a barely tolerable binge, if tolerable at all. But this does make sense under exactly one condition: if your understanding of media is “I need to see my blorbo at least once a month.”
I suppose what this whole rambly piece is saying is that there is, genuinely, nothing wrong with being blorbo-focused, and that it’s very possible to be focused on both if you seek out the right works. But if you are primarily interested in but one character of an ensemble, and are more interested in things like them appearing in the episode than the story that surrounds them, you are limiting yourself. If you skip episodes that aren’t about your blorbo, or resent arcs where they are not in focus, you are consigning yourself to narrower and flatter experience. If you find the character who is most relatable and always follow them, you will not use fiction for what I believe to be its highest purpose: to learn about people and worlds unlike your own. I think Campaign 4 is, thus far, a very good example of how to move from blorbo to story person with training wheels, and I hope people take that opportunity.
ALT
