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Snowflake Challenge: Day 10
Jan. 22nd, 2017 11:58 pm
Day 10
In your own space, share your love for a trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme. (More than one is okay, too.) Tell us about it, tell us why you love it, give us some examples and recs. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
Thinking about this, I actually found the underlying element that ties together a lot of my kinks, both sexual (clothed/naked, humiliation) and narrative (hurt/comfort, forced confessions). That is forced vulnerability. Sometimes in my favourite fics that vulnerability is respected, and other characters are kind in the face of it. Sometimes they’re very much not, which is also fabulous :D
I feel like it’s totally obvious why I love it - it’s deep enough in my id that it’s hard to explain, and of course you share it you just nodded like “yes, of course.” Enemy ships often involve a moment where the enemies recognise that the other person is really a person in the same way they are, and not unrelatedly, vulnerable to hurt - and my love for enemy ships and forced vulnerability is probably pretty chicken-and-egg. (Buffy/Faith, my ultimate OTP, is sooooo good for this. I also have a theory that it’s a significant part of why Harry/Draco shippers love the Sectrumsempra scene so much, and the idea that Harry left scars.) And on the kinkier side, part of why I love Draco getting beaten down so much is his privileged background getting turned all around. The fluffier kinkfic I write does this backwards: it tends to linger on doms being careful of their subs’ sore spots.
It plays into my darker kinks to have vulnerability exploited, and my softer side to have people be kind in the face of it. And I really do believe that respecting vulnerability, whether or not the vulnerable people are good people, is a fundamental requirement of morality and civilisation. It’s a fundamental tenet of my lefty liberalism, now that I think about it. I have strong feelings about civil liberties, about prison reform, and about the end of the death penalty worldwide. For me all those things are deeply connected to the idea that just because the government has physical & legal & psychological power over you doesn’t mean they should use it - in fact, very much the opposite.
( Let’s get to the recs before I get any more pompous :D )
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