L is for Lust, in the days and the nights.
Lust is tricky, especially when you write the sort of fiction I do. There’s this ever-moving line between “turns someone on” and “creeps someone out,” and the exact same words in the exact same sequence will have on effect on one reader and the other on another.
I mean, just f’rinstance, both Addergoole and Tír na Cali started as fantasy settings, where “fantasy” means “sexual fantasy.” Way back when, when we were roleplaying Cali, a friend of mine called it “put your kink on a character sheet.” Kidnapping, mind control, geisha-like courtesans, emotional control, more kidnapping, violent abuse, hurt-comfort, gender transformations, and furries (and occasionally anime-ridiculous large boobs): you could get a good impression of that circle’s kink from looking at what Tír na Cali’s magic & tech can do.
Addergoole was a branch off of Tír na Cali, made more web-serial-able when I started writing (surprise) the web serial of the same name. A boarding school where people turn into faeries, and also there is magical mind control slavery? Yeah. It was intended to be in the same family as Tales of Mu, a sex-and-kink-heavy magical school.
The sex and kink are definitely still in the story, even if there ended up being a lot more plot and drama. Collars, and dubious-to-straight-out-non-consent, mind control and bondage and ooh la la.
And the thing is, it makes some people very happy and pisses other ones off a lot. Sometimes I run into mental walls, where I didn’t actually mean for someone to be read as a bad guy, but there they are, tricking someone into bondage and slavery. And it’s hard to justify them as the good guy, then.
But it’s still pretty damn hot 🙂
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