I'm definitely interested in exploring Childe's military past. The idea of writing it does intimidate me, though. The darker the content, the more nuance I want to express. Brainwashing, grooming, etc. are so psychologically complex. And military trauma is just such a beast of its own. Almost makes me nauseated just to think of what he would have gone through.

I like what you said about the Tsaritsa and her role. She seems to be less explored in fic, as far as I've seen. I tend toward alternate universe stories, but this is one I'd love to write in the canon Genshin world. The Fatui is still very mysterious to me, maybe I'll have to check out some research on them. I'm sure there's lots of in-game text that could help me flesh out their military structure.

One particular scene I'd love to write is Childe clawing his way out of the abyss and going back home, after being missing. The coldness in his eyes, his traumatized behavior... I bet he'd have a lot of transference between Skirk and the Tsaritsa! It really appeals to me. Ah, I could go on. I already feel like I've gone on a tangent.

Anyway, I like getting peeks into what other people's fic ideas, so thank you for sharing. Looking forward to sharing my future stuff with you, and if I ever tackle this prompt, you'll be the first to know!

I reread Otto Rank's The Doppelganger recently, in addition to checking out the earlier issues of The International Journal of Psychoanalysis and the translates meeting notes from the Wednesday Psychological Society. I suppose this is research more than it's inspiration. But it's all really fascinating to see these early European theories about psychology, regardless of how accurate they actually are. I'm using all this information for my Albedorian twincest doppelganger erotic thriller period drama fic, which seems to gain new adjectives every time I introduce it.

Also, I listened to mostly Brian Eno while writing this last fic, the Freminet/Lyney one. And after rewatching Mandy (2018) and relistening to its fantastic soundtrack by the late Johann Jóhannsson, I was reminded of how excited I am to work on the gore horror Chiluc fic.

I'm glad you enjoy it, and thank you for telling me. It's nice to hear.

In all honesty, the older I get, the less advice I have. I never have things figured out for long. There's an entire industry out there of people who give advice about writing despite not being that good at it themselves. (Myself included, honestly.) These days, I think I'm at my best as a writer when I have no idea what's happening with my craft.

So, all that being said, here are the pieces of advice that have been working for me, ha.

• Free write, or at least draft with a sparse outline. Don't imagine passages before you write them. Intertwine the act of writing with the magic of creation. Let your fingers run ahead of your brain.

• On a similar note, you will never fully prepare yourself to write. Notes, outlines, anything that is about writing but isn't actual writing... They're not required. People usually use them as procrastination games, honestly. You're better off doing writing exercises, if anything.

• Don't wait around for life to make you into a writer. Anybody can write a fantastic story at any time, whether it's fiction or nonfiction. You are not an exception to this.

• It's somewhat important to read a lot, but it's more important to read carefully. And it's even more important to read outside of your comfort zone, which might include finishing things you don't love.

• Change your writing ritual often. Don't get too set in your ways. It's important to be adaptable.

• Set challenges (not deadlines) for yourself. Use a certain word or phrase. Write a passage without adjectives. Or without adverbs.

• Edit.

Yeah, when I was teaching, I worked with a female Japanese student who was researching BL and its female readers. It was a really fantastic project. I remember in one specific interview, she was speaking to a reader from Tokyo, who ended up coming out (for the first time in her life) as a lesbian when asked about how BL insulated her from misogynistic violence. Very fascinating stuff.

I'm not offended. It's probably less of a model minority thing and more just that being part Asian makes it easier for me to pass, at the cost of being read as baseline more feminine. And white people are less likely to read me as mixed, so they'll sometimes assume I'm a white trans man who is deliberately trying to look like an east Asian man. I have been accused of asianfishing before, ha. It's more confusing for other people than it is for me, I think.

It's too bad you didn't have to deconstruct all of my writing to get that result, but maybe it speaks to just how common the preference is. I don't know that many people who actively prefer to read "stories where the male character is outwardly and inwardly treated female." Maybe it's something worth looking into, though the description itself is saddled with a lot of baggage that would have to be unpacked eventually.

Well, I don't really think they're a dichotomy, even if it's set up by the American imagination to be that way. Us v. them, etc. So I'll answer it with some detachment from those institutions. I think of 'man' as a broadly inclusive category, the same as 'woman' is.

So I'm changing your question slightly. What does it mean to be a man, to me?

I've had this conversation with lots of trans men and transmascs who were pre-transition or in the closet. People sometimes assume that because I'm a trans man, my relationship with gender is less complicated than those who are transmasc and/or nonbinary leaning. This type of thinking comes from the annoying idea that gender is a linear spectrum, with man and woman at either end. I don't really subscribe to that.

So if it's not a location on a line, then what does it mean to be a man? Probably nothing, honestly. It's a definition that can't be properly reinforced. Like 'woman', it turns out to be incredibly flimsy when interrogated. We can actually see the splintering of womanhood in real time, with the constant stream of exceedingly specific 'experiences', like girl math, girl dinner, etc. If we accept that womanhood has little to do with biology, then we must look to social behaviors instead.

Which brings me to my next points. Gender isn't like species. It's more like a pathology. Instead of gender taking place on a single line, it is a collection of behaviors, feelings, and attributes. Symptoms, let's say. If you isolate some of them, they could be objectively feminine, but in the context of other symptoms, they are diagnosed as male.

Being a man is kind of like being hysterical. I'm sure there's more specific gender diagnoses that would describe me, but I like the freedom of being a man. It's such an expansive category. I have an attachment to many antique things, and I see no reason they have to be tossed out, maleness included. When it comes to gender, I'm less of an abolitionist and more of an advocate for reduce, reuse, and recycle.

One real purpose of any category is to create space for relation. The first men were diagnosed as such so they could have something in common. I will always take the chance to relate to somebody, rather than set myself apart and declare myself as fundamentally different. I enjoy telling cis men that I am a man in the same way that they are. It's like handing them a puzzle. Simply by existing, I challenge the category. I force the category of 'male' to defend itself, not by excluding me, but by expanding to include me.

I like the opportunity to go on my rants publicly, but you are always welcome to message me instead.

This is a long one, anon. I hope you're ready.

I will admit that I don't have my finger on the pulse of BL, so I don't really know what the newest developments are.

Here's my attempt at an explanation. Old BL pulls from a very long tradition of homosexual and homosocial practices in Japan, which I will not be recapping. Keep this in mind.

In America, gay rights are treated as modern. Especially post 9/11, we began integrating it into the mainstream. It is one way that we distinguish ourselves from other countries. Making claims (unsubstantiated or not) that a country is homophobic and then using that to paint its people as primitive and ungovernable.

It was advantageous to postwar Japan to align themselves with these modern values via cultural exports. Part of their soft diplomacy, yeah? (Even if the support for gay rights is only superficial in some ways.) So the internet becomes a major trade route for ideas and art, a lot of which is pornographic material.

The hard-working early internet weeaboos of America then internalize a specific idea of homosexuality by consuming Japanese BL. But we're still dealing with the anti-Asian propaganda of the last century, which was designed to portray Asian men, the Japanese included, as pathetic, weak, and feminine. So the gay man they think of is unavoidably molded by this anti-Asian sentiment. Men in BL become innately linked with femininity. (Also, while all of this is going on, Japanese artists have their own domestic cultural feedback loop of gay men being equated with femininity. Like I said, I won't get into it because I'm not an expert.)

And what comes of all of this? The Americans who consume BL in the 2000s further popularize the stereotype of the effeminate Asian man. They develop a fantasy of what gay Japanese men are like, untouched by the ravages of the HIV/AIDs epidemic and detached from other gay American struggles. Namely, that of labor and racism. Let's not forget that prior to the 2000s, gayness in America was associated with working-class people of color, especially sex workers.

Furthermore, by removing the BL boy from his own historical Japanese context, he becomes an easily moldable gender thing that we store in a vacuum. He doesn't have to deal with racism, because he lives in homogenous manga land. He doesn't have to deal with labor issues, because the legitimate struggles of Japanese workers are trivialized by the stereotypes we as Americans already put in place.

My god, and then this simulacra of a man is imported as an example of 'gender envy' or whatever for white transmasculine people. After deeming Asian features to be closer to femininity, it's no wonder that so many trans men think of BL and Asian men as achievable models of masculinity. That creates its own feedback loop of white trans men emulating only Asian men and further popularizing the stereotypes!

(Of course, not all of this is/was purely perpetrated by white Americans. There is some truth to the fact that certain subcategories of the men in Asia are, all things considered, quite feminine. That's the only disclaimer I'll give. I'm trusting you to understand that I can't address every nuance.)

I'm bitter because I'm also partly Asian, if that wasn't clear. And a lot of the racism and homophobia/transphobia I've experienced has been from white fans of BL.

Anyway. We can move on.

Hmm. Interesting analysis of me. You're probably right. I imagine it's probably a dysphoric thing on some level; I spent enough of my life as a woman, so now I don't really enjoy fetishistic, hyperfeminine portrayals of men. It almost feels like forcible feminization. (If my entire rant above hadn't given it away, I have complicated thoughts about being feminized.)

There's this pervasive, overarching trope in BL of men becoming feminine in the presence of a more masculine man. Bottomification, if you will. I think it's tied to anxiety about being a perpetrator of violence. Patriarchal guilt, even. It's more socially acceptable to be the passive role in a violent situation, and so a lot of BL (original and fanworks) aim to align the viewer/reader with the bottom.

I think I am tired of stories that follow passive individuals. So as a result, I care less about these BL narratives that seek to appeal to a female audience. (Not because women are passive, but because of the way the marketing has molded gay male characters to suit societally female anxieties.)

Now I've really laid bare some of my psychology. Not that I think any of it would surprise anybody. I try to be open.

We'll find another name for you anon. One that's shorter and less explicit.

Something you might find interesting is that not even computers can be completely random. They operate on more of a pseudo-randomness, pulling from a pre-existing seed. This MIT snippet explains more: https://engineering.mit.edu/engage/ask-an-engineer/can-a-computer-generate-a-truly-random-number/.

The brain, similar to the computer, functions most effectively if using precedents and patterns. Randomness manifests relative to its source of data. I'll explain with an example. If I ask you to randomly name a color, you will only be able to give me a color with a name. If I ask you to randomly think of a color, then you might have more options, but you still won't have an equal chance of guessing any color. It's very likely that you will be predisposed to first think of colors that you see regularly. You'd actually have to exert effort to think of a color that you don't regularly see, and then the action ceases to be random.

Like computers, we are also at the mercy of our programming. One possible explanation for foot fetishes, which can manifest differently than other fetishes, is a neurological one. The feet are located close to the genitals in the somatosensory cortex, so there could be neural crosstalk in some individuals. The brain comes to associate feet with genitals, vice versa.

The brain is a highly sensitive organ, and randomness isn't much of a thing in other organs either. So why would the brain be any different? It might also help to clarify what "deep-rooted" means. For something to be the result of a subconscious process doesn't necessarily mean it has to be traumatic or integral to the person's psyche.

To explain, let's pick on the foot fetishists again, ha. Somebody might have a foot fetish because they endured a foot-related trauma as a child. But another person might like feet because of the neurological reason we discussed earlier. A third person might appear to like them completely randomly, but it's actually because of a overlapping experiences causing neural pathways to intersect. (Kind of like smelling a perfume and thinking of a specific time.)

For example, perhaps this particular foot fetishist grew up in a very cold place, and so they rarely saw other people's skin. When they moved to a warmer climate in middle school, as they were going through the throes of puberty, they began to see bare arms, legs, and feet for the first time. A pivotal experience for them was sitting on the beach, digging their hands and feet into the sand, being touched by the world in so many new ways, and watching their peers play in the ocean. To them, these first sexual experiences may not have necessarily even been about feet, but as they experiences multiple new things simultaneously, it's not impossible that their burgeoning sexuality would have considerable neural overlap with the idea of feet. Not something 'deep-rooted', really, but psychologically substantiated nonetheless.

I was only imagining what early psychoanalysis under Freud would have looked like in the omegaverse world, but now... you've got me thinking about an omega Freud. That's excellent. I think his cocaine addiction would have made his heats miserable, though.

And yeah. This is kind of why, up until recently, I've said that I could like any trope if it is written well. Because, yes... If it's thoughtful and nuanced, I will find it well-written. If it's accomplished poorly, I won't. That sounds redundant, but I feel like I have to say it that plainly. There's potential for excellent storytelling in every trope. I've said this to friends, privately, that I enjoy when omegaverse subverts its own structures. In fact, I think an omegaverse fic that solely focuses on betas would be brilliant! I even considered writing one because I found it so entertaining. I believe there's a Chiluc fic out there that has a beta Childe topping alpha Diluc, and I like how that one gave some psychosexual heft to the subjugation of omegas and such.

That being said, I don't really care about instinct as a theme, so it's no wonder that omegaverse fails to appeal to me. It's sort of the reason I was always more of a sci-fi fan than a fantasy fan. I suppose I'm interested in instinct from a programmatic perspective, like with sci-fi and androids and such. Omegaverse feels too bestial and interested in what is 'natural', which isn't really my cup of tea.

YEIALD's power dynamics are rooted in its world's geopolitical and racial conflicts. Those are the primary forces that have shaped the gender roles therein. I'm assuming you're asking more specifically about the dynamics between Kaeya and other men? (Forgive me, this is a roundabout answer.) What a lot of BL misses out on is that within gender roles, we see questionable race science utilized to differentiate 'types' of men and women. YEIALD is no exception. Part of why Diluc thinks of Kaeya as yielding is because colonized peoples are treated as yielding, to justify the narrative of imperialism. Oh, I could go on about how American interpretations of BL are funhouse mirrors of racialized gender, but I'm sure it'd be very convoluted and boring. My main point is that BL's gender roles are not protected from Western orientalism, Japanese traditions of pederasty, and the overlapping of both. In fact, BL's gender roles are a direct result of those things.

I'd like to call myself a generalist, but I don't know. Maybe you can tell me, anon. Based on my writing and how I talk, what do you think my preference is? I ask genuinely, because sometimes in the process of trying to understand my tastes, I misinterpret them.

Every type of person is capable of liking every type of trope. I won't argue with that! However, liking a "bottom twink with a self-slicking ass" is anything but simple. And I find it troublesome to believe that any kink is uncomplicated or unpsychological.

(A quick aside. I was laughing to myself while writing that answer because I purposefully went through and removed a lot of "some", "maybe", and "kind of". I think it ought to be a given that when I'm answering a question as broad as "what is your opinion on omegaverse", that my answer will be equally broad. I can't really anticipate every single person's taste. If somebody asks me my opinion on swimming cats, and I say cats dislike swimming, I think we can both agree that there are, indeed, cats who not only like swimming, but excel at it.)

Psychosexual depth. I basically mean that every decision we make is the tip of the iceberg, while the reasoning lies underneath. In fact, the seemingly less intellectual the action is, the more likely it has a large subconscious foundation. Kinks are especially included in this. Some kinks are traumatic in origin, while others are merely experiential. It's the same reason I take issue with the "curtains are just blue for the sake of being blue" argument. The human brain is not a random number generator!

Let's take a closer look at that self-slicking ass as an example, ha. Why do some people think it's hot? Here's some ideas. Anal sex has historically been an issue for spontaneous sex in BL. Anal sex requires forethought and preparation, so a self-slicking passage is much easier to fuck. It also indicates arousal, much like a vagina, which can signal consent nonverbally. So a self-slicking ass is very communicative and optimized! No wonder people like it! It removes the often awkward and difficult mechanics of the bottom having to predict the encounter, clean up, etc. It also makes it easier for the sex itself to proceed, as no lube is necessary. There's other things to say, how it queers the sex, how it makes the anus seem like less of a shit delivery system and more of a natural sex organ, etc. And people who like this motif aren't even necessarily aware of these reasonings. People aren't pre-analyzing the kink to decide whether it works for them; that's the job of the analyst, no pun intended.

So, interestingly enough, the statement that "for some people it is as simple as..." is exemplary of why I think omegaverse facilitates the omission of psychosexual reasoning in its own world. Omegaverse is about hormone-fueled impulses triumphing over psychological sublimations. And I'm not saying it's a bad thing. Plenty of people don't want psychology in their fantasy porn. But I do, so I'm not as interested in it.

Thank you for sharing, anon. I hope my answers made sense.