collection of posts for a very specific dynamic

one-sided platonic feelings always hit me so hard. like. i want you to love me like a son, but to you i’m not much more than a servant. i swore our oath of brotherhood out of real devotion, and you swore it out of convenience. i want to go to the ends of the earth and the depths of hell for you and follow you until the end of time, and in your mind that’s no more than what i owe you

Nonhuman expressions of affection are great. Purring. Exposing weak points as a show of trust. Head bonks. Preening and chewing. Nuzzling. Biting. Intertwining tails. Feeding each other. Little chuffs, chatters, beeps and squeaks. Fluffing up of feathers, fur or other things. Dancing to impress. Cleaning their fur, scales, feathers or skin. Sharing body heat. Ears pointing toward those you care about to show your full attention is on them. Slow blinking.

“To be loved is to be changed” but instead of well worn and lovely I’m jagged and sharp. I’m ruined like a feral dog off its chain. I’m chasing after the scraps of myself with you at my heals, holding me far from who I used to be. I’m bloody and disgusting. Love has turned me into something dark and dangerous and evil, something consumed, something consumable.

@avrablake

Dialogue Response

"I want to kiss you."

All the Dialogue Responses can be found here.

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character pairing prompts

You know what I think its grossly under-rated in fandom? Second loves.

What it's like to love and lose and then love again. To suffer through either the death of a loved one or the death of a love you used to share. To know that loss, to know that hurt, and to still make yourself vulnerable to someone again. To love scared, to love wounded, to love anyway.

By under rated in fandom I mean so often past loves are either erased completely or downplayed like "oh yeah they weren't really in love.". I think it flattens the character. Humans are capable of so much love. Each relationship is different and you can learn from each one! And yes, there's something brave in learning to love again, something incredible romantic, why pass it by?

i love unrequited love, i love blind devotion, i love guard dogs. i love being desperately obsessed with the object of your affections. i love when devotion rots into cruelty, i love when love doesn't know any better, i love when love is ugly. i love defanging and declawing yourself just to be loved. i love when a character will wait for the next time they will be loved like a bird or a dog at their beloved’s door. i love when love is insanity and by the LORD do i love betting on losing dogs

inspired by @ crimeronan & @ ghostzzy's respective codependency polls. cue round 3, ft. dynamics i've encountered in the wild with my own ocs 👍

i love it when characters are codependent. i love it when losing someone feels like losing a limb. i love it when two people "complete" each other so wholly and terribly that one can barely function without the other. i love it when the fear of losing the only person who understands them is so all-consuming they'll destroy anything to stay together, including themselves.

i keep seeing misinformation about this, so: queerplatonic relationships do not have a set definition. the name comes from the idea that it's "queering" the platonic relationship, tailoring it to the individual relationships' own desires. it isn't necessarily romance lite, but it also isn't necessarily whatever definition you want to impose on it. the point of queering the platonic relationship is to break away from strict allonormative views on friendship, romance, and sex, not to make a new categorical box to fit in.

the answer to "what is a qpr?" is "whatever you want it to be." sometimes that is romance lite. sometimes it's a deeply committed friendship. sometimes it's friends who have a sexual relationship. sometimes it's based on an entirely different mode of attraction. sometimes it's fluid and impossible to put into words. it's whatever you want it to be. it's queer.

collection of posts for a very specific dynamic

romance is lame and overrated i love mentor/mentee relationships in fiction and especially when theyre sort of fucked up

greatest hits:

- You started out as a bet/challenge to see if I could successfully wrangle the infamous Problem Child but oh whoops I got attached!

- You are my kind, bright-eyed protegé who would never do so much as rip a tag off a mattress. anyway I am going to acquaint you with Criminal Activity

- I showed you genuine kindness and it was maybe the first time you’d ever experienced it and accidentally ended up becoming more of a parent to you than your “real” blood family ever was. Uh. Do you want to play catch in the park or

- I will gladly take any punishment meant for you. I would go to the ends of the earth to protect you, even if it meant I had to die in the process. I would do it a thousand times over, and I wouldn’t regret any of it.

- I taught you how to fight, and now through some circumstance or another, I’m forced to engage you in life-or-death combat without holding back.

- I put you through training from hell to make you the person you are today, for “your own good”, and now you’ve realized that you can hit back. And you can hit hard.

- I have made you into something greater than yourself - but you are changing from how I have designed you, and this is something I cannot allow.

- I taught you everything you know, and it was the greatest mistake I’ve ever made.

- I will make you just like me - by force, if necessary.

narratives about doomed love that aren’t romantic in nature. the love between siblings who understand each other the most but are growing apart no matter how much they try to come back to one another. the love between friends whose life paths pull them apart and they never see each other again, only remembering the face of a once kind childhood. the love for a hometown that year by year becomes less and less the one that raised you until you are a foreigner in your own backyard. there was no stopping it. the love was there and it mattered and you can never come back again.

One of the really fun and interesting things about writing a polyamorous romance as someone who is ambiamorous/polyamorous is finding new ways to make sure the narrative hits the expected genre beats without just sort of... mushing it into a pre-existing monogamous romance mold, which is what I'm afraid happens a lot of the time.

Trust me, it was my job in the publishing house to make them fit that mold. I hated it.

Reading other poly-centric romances, I can always somewhat tell when someone is writing polyamory from a sexual fantasy aspect (zero shade; I'm here for all the group sex) without actually considering how it functions as a relationship dynamic, which can often come off as... well.

It's lacking for me as a romance.

Erotica-wise, it's fine. But it misses the romantic beats for me that I want as a polyamorous-leaning person.

There's so much emphasis on the polycule and never the individual dyads within the larger relationship.

For example, in a triad, there are actually four relationships to handle.

The dyad between A + B. The dyad between A + C. The dyad between B + C. And the overarching relationship between A + B + C.

With monogamous-leaning authors or authors that've been pressed into conforming to the pre-existing genre beats, there's a tendency to treat the relationship as a homogenous mass where everything is fair and equal, and you treat all your partners the exact same way.

And I get it. It's easier to write everything as peachy-keen and to have external conflict be resolved with either acceptance or a brave confrontation.

But it doesn't always land for me as someone who wants to see my style of love represented in the genre.

In healthy polyamory, either closed or open, each relationship is unique in its own way. Taking the example of a triad again, the way A acts with C likely differs from how A acts with B.

And that's a good thing!

Because C might not want the same things as B, so trying to treat them both the exact same is a surefire way to make sure someone isn't getting their needs met, and that will lead to conflict.

Polyamory isn't striving for equality between partners but rather equity.

What are your individual needs, and how do I meet them, as well as meet the needs of my other partner(s)? What do you want from the larger relationship as a whole? How do we accommodate everyone without making someone feel neglected or uncomfortable? How do we show this in the narrative? How do we make sure character A isn't just treating B the same as C in every interaction? Do they ever fall into that pitfall? How do they remedy it?

It seems like common sense when you write it out like that, but it's a major pitfall I see time and time again. The characters never alternate their approach between partners, if there's any focus on the individuals at all.

The other major telltale thing I've noticed is that taking time to be with one partner is seen as a step down from the "goal" of the greater polycule.

The narrative is framed in such a way that they might start out with individual dates, but the end goal of the romance is to eventually be together 100% of the time all the time, and wanting individual time alone with any one partner is somehow "lesser."

Which is the goal of romance in monogamy, but it's not the goal of romance in polyamory.

Granted, you do need to end on a Happy Ever After or Happy For Now for it to fit the genre requirement. And a nice way of tying that up is to have everyone together at the end as a happy polycule all together all at once. I'm not disputing that as a narrative tool. I'm just pointing out that there's a tendency to present those moments as the sum total of the relationship when in actuality, there are multiple relationships that need to end happily ever after.

The joy of polyamorous love is the joy of multitudes. It's the joy of experiencing new things, both as individuals and as a polycule. If you're not taking care of the individual dyads, however, your polycule is going to crash and burn. You cannot avoid that. So why, then, is there such avoidance of it in stories meant to appeal to us?

Is it simply inexperience on behalf of the author? Or is it that they're not actually being written for us? Is it continued pressure to meet certain genre beats in a largely monogamous-centric genre? All of the above?

Either way, I'm having fun playing around with it and doing all the things we were warned against in the publishing house.

I'm having fun with Nathan and Vlad enjoying their own private dynamic that is theirs and theirs alone. I'm having fun with Ursula and Nathan being so careful and vulnerable around each other. I'm absolutely 100% here for the chaos of Vlad and Ursula without a chaperone. And I'm here for the chaos of Vlad and Ursula together and Nathan's fond, loving eye roll as he trails after them, too enamored to tell either of them no because where would the fun in that be...

Anyway. Don't mind me. Just getting my thoughts out while everyone else is in bed.

I just love duos I love when characters are matched sets I love when you can’t have one without the other. Not necessarily in a romantic way. It often is but this also applies to besties and mortal enemies etc

Sometimes characters get pair-bonded for life like parrots and it’s so good. Makes me go insane every time