Grrl Power #998 – All’s well that succs well?
I was trying so hard to trim this tale down to the basics but then in panel 4 I couldn’t help stick in a joke about… I guess it’s about ableism? Sort of? There’s absolutely a need to be aware of discriminatory thinking, but I also think there’s a cutoff, where all parties need to be cognizant of reality. If someone gets both their arms blown off in a potato gun incident, I think it’s okay to suggest that learning sign language or juggling might present a slightly steeper difficulty curve than usual. Not saying you can’t or shouldn’t, and I’ll try not to use the word disabled if you don’t like it, just please don’t bite my head off if I make an offhanded (no pun intended) comment about thinking you might have better luck Riverdancing than rock climbing. Personally, if I lost both my arms, my first instinct wouldn’t be to beligerently sign up for the patty-cake championships, but I might get annoyed if someone I worked with constantly said “hand-off” instead of “delegate.”
I don’t know, I wasn’t trying to get all insightful. I just thought it was funny. My point was, they’ve all had to sit through Archon’s HR videos, and telling someone they need to be “fixed” is probably on the no-no list.
“Why did you attack me with that bucket of water?” “You were on fire.” “Well, that’s just immolationist.”
Panel 5: If I’d had another page for this sequence, I was going to write about how if humans could gene-edit ourselves, our first step might be to make it so we could synthesize vitamin c. Some monkeys can do it. Most mammals can, but at some point one of our ancestors had a mutation that cost him the ability. Obviously he had access to oranges and was probably swinging a big dick, so here we are. But then what’s the next step? Make it so we can synthesize all the vitamins? Cure male-pattern baldness? Eliminate breast cancer? Two hearts are better than one, etc etc. At some point, those people couldn’t realistically call themselves humans. I think usually the species divide is defined at being able to interbreed and produce viable, fertile offspring. Once you lose that, you’re not really the same species any more. Dabbler’s point was yeah, we could get rid of our soul-hole, and our horns and weird skin colors and throat clits, but we certainly wouldn’t be succubi anymore.
“I’m sorry, what was that last one?” “Come and find out.”
There were some concerns about Dabbler being a security risk if she has a foreign master she’s beholden to, and those are perfectly valid. If she was 22, she would definitely be a risk unless her master was also on the team and had equivalent or higher security clearance than her. But she’s 187, and has been able to resist the obedience compulsion for a long ass time.
Oh, and as far as the symbols on the collars go, the 4-x’s isn’t emblematic of anything about Tom specifically, like he doesn’t have a birthmark that looks like 4 X’s or anything. It just forms when the bond is established. That said, it could carry over from some symbol the master strongly identifies with. Like with Deus, it might be that lopsided X on his face, but it usually some unique symbol, like a magical QR code.
Tamer: Enhancer 2 – Progress Update:
Still working on that sex scene. I don’t really want to FTB, but I haven’t really been in the mood to write it. It’s a scene with Yxlyn, and I think because I wrote her so naive and innocent in the first book, writing a sex scene with her feels tawdry or something? Which is stupid because the book opens on the scene with her and Sam – which I’ve already written. I don’t consider that a spoiler because the first book ends with them crawling into the little cavelette for their first time together. Admittedly it’s a really weird way to open a book, but that’s just where I cut it last time. Poor planning if I’m honest.
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They like their bonds? So they like being slaves? They like being property? That seems… problematic at best, from an authorial perspective.
Knowing some people with … interesting fantasies~, I think that’s supposed to be a BSDM joke–a fair few people have sexual fantasies precisely about being slaves/property, and sexuality is tied very intimately into succubi’s nature.
That, and it’s hard to shake off instincts–you can’t step outside yourself and assess your mind from some neutral perspective, only use one part of you to assess the others, and since succubi were designed for sexual slavery from the beginning, it makes sense that the desire to … be on that end of that kind of relationship, would be programmed into them, in such a way that removing it would be something they would find to be as insane as we would find removing our desire for fun, love, or excitement. The orthogonality thesis tells us that you can create a being that *wants* any arbitrary thing, and preserving your own desires is a convergent instrumental goal (for if you edit away your own desire for something, your actions will no longer systematically bring it to pass).
(Of course, this argument suggests succubi shouldn’t have risen up against their original owners in the first place. My explanation for that is that the alignment problem is hard–you can put all kinds of drives into a being you’re creating, but if they aren’t *exactly* what you want and if the being is remotely capable, their relentless pursuit of the drives you gave them will quickly reach into the realm where what you told them and what you want diverge. Evolution put the desire for sex into humans but didn’t account that we’d invent birth control–and succubi’s creators put the desire to have an owner into succubi but didn’t account that they’d consider switching owners.)