Reading a forcefem porn fic (dead dove do not eat) and feeling the urge to nitpick it, but maybe it's more than a nitpick.
OK, the way the hunt is described makes it sound like the hunters usually win. I suspect that's kind of load-bearing to the fantasy; the author sure sounds like they're enjoying telling you how fucked (figuratively and literally) you'd be in that situation. In fact, they outright say that "the majority" of the Blessed get caught. But they started out by saying that community has two men for every three women. That's an adult gender ratio of 1.5-1, i.e. their adult population is 40% male. Since the ritual is the big secret that explains this and it sounds like it's something they do to more-or-less every young male, this implies four-fifths of the Blessed win. Getting put through that ritual is not actually a "you're probably fucked lol" situation, it's a "unless you are disabled or unlucky you will probably be OK" situation (do they do this shit to obviously disabled boys too, or is letting a polio victim with withered legs drag himself a short distance and then gang-raping him a bit too much of an "are we the baddies?" moment for them?).
Which on one level has a lot more verisimilitude. Men are actually pretty useful to have around if you've got a heavily muscle-dependent tech base, especially if you face military threats and aren't a demilitarized subaltern population. And letting most of the Blessed win keeps the potentially rebellious subaltern class manageably small; patriarchy can probably stay stable if the subaltern gender is 60% of the population instead of 50%, it might get a lot less stable if it starts to look more like a Spartiate/Helot situation. Also, it sounds like most of these hunters are just weekend warrior peasants, so probably not particularly impressive. You wouldn't be running away from some scary badasses, you'd be running away from the weedy kid one farm over and his malnutrition-stunted 4'11 uncle who walks with a limp cause his family's one cow stepped on his left foot ten years back, they both have syndromes cause a lifetime of malnutrition, hard labor, and more-or-less untreated infections is slowly destroying their bodies; people like that usually lost or fled or fawned when professional war-fighters showed up.
On the other hand, a success rate of 20% is actually kind of embarrassing considering how much these fuckers stack the deck to favor the hunters. Maybe those drugs are just some random swamp weed somebody conned them into thinking is magic and don't actually do anything (except by placebo effect). Also, if we're being even slightly psychologically realistic about this I expect there might be a lot of "conscript soldier shoots rifle into the air instead of at the enemy" type dynamics; the hunters and the Blessed come from the same community and the Blessed aren't a hereditary subaltern class.
Maybe I'm misreading the situation and only a small subset of the male population ever go through the ritual as Blessed, but that makes the hunters less impressive in a different way, in a similar way to how the Spartan kings start to look less impressive when you read that they were usually exempted from the agoge; it makes their superiority claim even more unwarranted lol, they can't even dubiously claim to have proved themselves stronger or faster or cleverer than their victims.
On one level I feel kind of silly bothering to commit this to a post, like, yeah, short online fapfic has arguably not the most rigorous worldbuilding, shocker, holding up well to this sort of analysis probably isn't even something it's trying to do. On the other hand, I feel like this does maybe get to a significant difference I've noticed between how dubcon fantasies and rape fantasies usually seem to work in other people and how my dubcon fantasies work.
Other people's noncon/dubcon fantasies usually seem to emphasize the unchallengeable power and security in power of the dom and a sort of ontological rightness of the power relationship. I'm thinking of some other things that person wrote (e.g. that they like war rape as a sexual fantasy because the perpetrators don't have to worry about being arrested), but also I've had this thought before so it's not just them, and also as a recent example thinking of a sub blog I scrolled through that had a ton of, like, self-describing as inherently a particular kind of (degraded) being as a kink thing. It feels related to Medieval Great Chain of Being psychology, and that neoreactionary ideal that if somebody has social power we should declare it explicitly and give them a shiny badge, and some of the things Corey Robin said in The Reactionary Mind, specifically;
"Because we thought ourself thy lawful king:
And if we be, how dare thy joints forget
To pay their awful duty to our presence?
If we be not, show us the hand of God
That hath dismissed us from our stewardship;
For well we know, no hand of blood and bone
Can gripe the sacred handle of our sceptre,
Unless he do profane, steal, or usurp.
And though you think that all, as you have done,
Have torn their souls by turning them from us,
And we are barren and bereft of friends;
Yet know, my master, God omnipotent,
Is mustering in his clouds on our behalf
Armies of pestilence; and they shall strike
Your children yet unborn and unbegot,
That lift your vassal hands against my head
And threat the glory of my precious crown."
Shakespeare, Richard II.
Corey Robin said (in different words, and without this specific literary reference) the reactionary fantasy is not one in which Richard II is never challenged and therefore never has a reason to give this speech, the reactionary fantasy is one in which Richard II gives this speech and then kicks Henry Bolingbroke's ass. The kinky fantasies I'm talking about often include some element of rebellion or the possibility of it, but give the vibe that it's an important element of the fantasy that this rebellion has no real possibility of succeeding; the rebellion exists fundamentally as a prop to more assertions of power by the dominant party.
I don't think these people actually believe in this model of how power works, by-in-large, but they seem to find it appealing as a fantasy!
I suspect in the kink context a lot of this is just about desire for superstimulus? Corey Robin described reaction as the experience of having power, having it challenged, and trying to re-establish and re-assert it, and I think what a lot of doms want is a mutually safe and mutually consensual version of the experience of successfully doing that, and conversely what a lot of subs want is a mutually safe and mutually consensual version of the experience of somebody else doing that to them. Stressing the undefeatable power, security in power, and unity of motivation of the dom and the ontological rightness of the power relationship makes the emotions associated with subjecting others to power or being subjected to power maximally intense.
Whereas ... my kinky fantasies are informed by a view of how power works fundamentally aligned with this:
"Shamanism differs from most religious traditions which are hierarchical–I see me and all beings I meet, up to gods themselves, as creatures in a big landscape. Maybe we play, maybe we fight, maybe we avoid each other. But I don’t go worshiping some bigger animal down the block, that’s silly. Nor do I cage it. And I certainly don’t let it cage me in some rulebook, like you Muslims and Christians! Now THAT’S silly.” - Chris Wayan, "Fire In the Crucible."
I'm a materialist atheist, not a shamanist, but:
1) If I had to rank major human cosmology traditions in order of how believable I find them, that kind of shamanism would be a solid third, distantly trailing materialism and more closely trailing Deism with some profoundly alien watchmaker god that probably doesn't care much about humans.
2) Materialist atheism is also very conducive to basically that kind of worldview. An amoral accidental clockwork cosmic is horrible in a lot of ways, but it has two great consolations; it contains no such thing as Hell, and it contains no such thing as a God-ordained hierarchy.
Of course, "everything is just things and creatures in a big landscape" doesn't mean domination can't happen. These creatures often meet in situations of considerable power imbalance, and there are many possible needs and motivations that may cause a creature to try to exploit and/or dominate other creatures. What this worldview does imply is that power is often contingent, fragile, constrained, contested, uncomfortable, and fleeting. The wolf may be killed by a spear and lives in fear of hunger. Conquerors live in dread of the day when they are shown to be, not superior, but simply lucky. The powerful live in the shadow of potential calamity, and the wiser of them know it.
Maybe more to the point here, it implies that domination and submission are strategies and circumstances, not essences. Domination is a thing you can do, in approximately the same tone as "sex is a thing you can do." Submission is also a thing you can do in that sense. This has some significant implications, e.g. people with power are often not particularly optimized for domination, and who's the dom and who's the sub in a relationship is often contingent on very specific circumstances.
Which gets to the other disconnect between me and fantasies like that fic I was just talking about; fantasies that stress the unchallengeable power, security in power, and unity of motivation of the dom(s) tend to cash out to stories where bad people win really hard and get everything they want and get to hurt others with no negative consequences to themselves whatsoever (that is exactly how I'd describe that fic I linked to), and I find that just unpleasant and unpleasant in a kind of fundamentally boring way; something something that Ursula K. Le Guin quote about the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If I want to see bad people getting what they want and hurting others with no significant blowback I can just watch the evening news.
I tend to find it much more interesting if the dominant party doesn't have a perfect unity of motivations, i.e. is not too good at it, i.e. is at some risk of moral injury. Or if I don't have things work that way, it's usually cause I made the dommes pretty nice, cause a giant chunk of this is just that I'm a big softy who likes niceness and cuddles lol.
In a post a little back I said I think my sexuality may be similar to normative straight male sexuality in the same kind of way a whale is similar to a fish. I think something similar may apply to what I get out of dubcon fantasies vs. what a lot of other people get out of dubcon/noncon fantasies.
