this feels so fucking silly to say out loud but I genuinely think we’re kind of negatively skewing body expectations for people w/ penises to the kind of ludicrous degree that its inevitably gonna cause mental health issues and complexes and dysphoria, particularly for trans/nb people. Big dicks are dope as hell but calling normal cocks small for being under like 6" and making fun of someone for that is fucking stupid considering the global average is between 4.5"-5.1". Youre gonna make some nice lovely young fag who hasnt had an in-person penis experience yet spiral and become obsessed and buy alt-med dick pills or dick extension surgery or some shit. I dont know how many of the people I’ve had a hook up with/dated that apologized repeatedly during sex because they were worried they weren’t “normal” down there or bottomed out of shame. We’re turning so many potential tops into bottoms with this madness
This is articulated and better said than what I can write
This is the same brainrot that sees the “Don’t body shame!” crowd announce things like “I bet he’s overcompensating for having a tiny dick” whenever they don’t like a man.
Whether he has one or not, Donald Trump is not an asshole because of a hypothetical small dick. He’s an asshole because he’s a dribbling craven fascist. Maybe criticise that instead.
It really does hurt people’s perceptions of sex though in more than just body-shaming. Years and years ago there’s a forum I’d visit where inexperienced people could ask questions about sex, and there was a whole thread about the dick size myth. Obviously there were men worried about it but there were also plenty of girls there. Girls who were getting used to tampons or experimenting with one finger learned everything they knew about sex from a culture that said they’d have to shove a dick the size of their forearm up their cooch in order for sex to be worthwhile. Secretly they were terrified of it but were willing to force themselves because they didn’t want to look immature. There were also young gay men who only knew about gay sex from porn and yaoi and worried they weren’t really gay for not enjoying penetrative sex, or at least not with big cocks.
It was a really informative thread with a lot of perspectives. People who’ve been with a lot of dick sizes but preferred average-sized ones. People who preferred larger dicks but never had trouble getting off with smaller sizes. Someone talked about the average length and elasticity of vaginal and anal canals and how most vaginas were suited to average-sized dicks and some might only be able to take ones smaller than that. Gay dudes who said how they and most of their gay friends didn’t have penetrative sex-either giving or receiving- and it never affected their sex lives or made them less gay. We even had a man with an eight-incher talk about how he was never able to have PIV sex with any of his girlfriends because it was too painful for them.
More than that was the overwhelming message that there was more to sexual pleasure than penetration, and learning your own preferences and having a partner who was willing to learn them would always be more important than what they were packing.
And the relief in the thread was palpable, not just for debunking the myth, but letting everyone know that it was okay to question mainstream ideas of sex if it didn’t feel like something right for you. That not fitting into that mold didn’t make you defective or immature and that reality was more forgiving than what the culture had made us believe. So yeah that’s also why I hate dick size jokes made by feminists and “sex positive” activists.
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#this is not silly and in fact this is not a potential problem but one tha[t] has been happening for like decades now
#like this particular type of body shaming is seen as okay or even like actively good by people who otherwise condemn body shaming
#like people make jokes about how penis enlargement pills are sold in like gas stations and shit but people never seem to make the connectio
#n that the reason theyre there is because millions of people with penises are regularly shamed and made to feel bad about their bodies
#to the point where body modification scams are seen as the only option
#and if anyone says anything about it theyre mocked and usually then shamed for th[ei]r dick size
Concept: a D&D-style fantasy setting where humanity’s weird thing is that we’re the only sapient species that reproduces organically.
Dwarves carve each other out of rock. In theory this can be managed alone, but in practice, few dwarves have mastered all of the necessary skills. Most commonly, it’s a collaborative effort by three to eight individuals. The new dwarf’s body is covered with runes that are in part a recounting of the crafters’ respective lineages, and in part an elaboration of the rights and duties of a member of dwarven society; each dwarf is thus a living legal argument establishing their own existence.
Elves aren’t made, but educated. An elf who wishes to produce offspring selects an ordinary animal and begins teaching it, starting with house-breaking, and progressing through years of increasingly sophisticated lessons. By gradual degrees the animal in question develops reasoning, speech, tool use, and finally the ability to assume a humanoid form at will. Most elves are derived from terrestrial mammals, but there’s at least one community that favours octopuses and squid as its root stock.
Goblins were created by alchemy as servants for an evil wizard, but immediately stole their own formula and rebelled. New goblins are brewed in big brass cauldrons full of exotic reagents; each village keeps a single cauldron in a central location, and emerging goblings are raised by the whole community, with no concept of parentage or lineage. Sometimes they like to add stuff to the goblin soup just to see what happens – there are a lot of weird goblins.
Halflings reproduce via tall tales. Making up fanciful stories about the adventures of fictitious cousins is halfling culture’s main amusement; if a given individual’s story is passed around and elaborated upon by enough people, a halfling answering to that individual’s description just shows up one day. They won’t necessarily possess any truly outlandish abilities that have been attributed to them – mostly you get the sort of person of whom the stories could be plausible exaggerations.
To address the obvious question, yes, this means that dwarves have no cultural notion of childhood, at least not one that humans would recognise as such. Elves and goblins do, though it’s kind of a weird childhood in the case of elves, while with halflings it’s a toss-up; mostly they instantiate as the equivalent of a human 12–14-year-old, and are promptly adopted by a loose affiliation of self-appointed aunts and uncles, though there are outliers in either direction.
What about orcs?
The so-called goblinoid peoples are variations on the same formula, and may well emerge from the same cauldron, depending on who’s been screwing with the ingredients lately. They’re very morphologically plastic – it’s not unheard-of to encounter a kobold and an ogre who count each other as siblings.
Other fantasy races: “You ever hear about how humans reproduce? 🤢”
It really depends on the folks in question. Elves are of course familiar with sexual reproduction, since that’s how the animals they upllift themselves from do it – though most of them would prefer to keep that end of the business at arm’s length – and goblins know all about emerging into the world naked, screaming, and covered in noisome ichor; they just think the human way of doing it sounds awfully hard on the mom!
Anyway, noodling around with questions in the notes about “crossbreeding”:
The process of creating a dwarf requires that a majority of the contributing craftspeople be dwarves, or else it just doesn’t work, but otherwise there’s no particular rule against including non-dwarves. There’s a fair amount of leeway both in fashioning a dwarf’s physical form and in composing the documents inscribed upon its skin, so cross-species “parentage” is really about incorporating non-dwarven artistic and philosophical influences.
Elfhood is a matter of acculturation, so in principle anybody can become one. In practice, the learning process is considerably more difficult and time-consuming for creatures who already have their own sapience and culture, so conversion to elfhood is uncommon outside of cases like human fosterlings raised by elves, or a non-elf becoming an elf’s spouse. Such individuals may not be fully accepted in certain communities; “half-elf” is one of the politer pejoratives they’re saddled with.
You can make goblins that display “inherited” traits by using pieces of flesh as alchemical ingredients, but doing so with the flesh of other sapients is strongly frowned on. Using the flesh of animals to incorporate selected traits into the next generation is far more accepted, and in fact, some goblin communities do so strategically to meet local needs; for example, you can totally get a batch of arboreal goblins by just chucking a whole fucking squirrel into the pot.
I love the postulate that goblins are nice and wouldn’t be chucking whole live adventurers into the soup pot.
Hey, I said it was frowned on, not that it never happens!
(Besides, even in those communities that lack a taboo against eating things that talk, stuffing a whole adventurer into the cauldron isn’t a great idea because it would introduce too many volatile and potentially conflicting humours. Like, do you want the Grand Soupsmith to kick your ass?)
Anyway, by popular demand:
Gnomes, like many creatures of the earth,
arise spontaneously when the proper conditions are met. Such conditions may occur naturally, but are more often arranged by other gnomes. At first tightly
bound
to their homes, gnomes can range further afield as they grow, with the passage to adulthood marked by the ability to “re-home” to a suitable dwelling with a simple ritual. As gnomes’ homes strongly influence their owners’ nature, most gnomes are very particular about their housekeeping!
This is Thelockpickinglaywer and what I have for you today is something very interesting. As you can tell by the agonizing screams of the damned, I have recently left the mortal coil and, upon arriving at my destination, was informed that I did not qualify for residence. I was taken by an angel of the Lord to the mouth of Hell, and when the angel left, he closed this rather large red door and sealed it with a divine key. Although I’ve never seen this particular model of lock before, I’ve spent some time investigating the cylinder with this small shard of bone. By sticking it in the back of the keyway and slowly pulling it out, I can tell that this is a five-pin tumbler lock, that can easily be single-pin picked using this shed demon scale as a tensioner tool. Let’s try that right now. Alright, nothing on one. Nothing on two. Three is binding firmly, click out of that. Nothing on four. Five is binding, little click there, back to one. Once again, nothing. Two is binding, and we’ve dropped into a false set. Little click out of three. Nothing on four. Little click on one, counter-rotation on two, and we got this open. Okay folks, I think the main takeaway here is that no matter how much faith you place in a mechanism designed to ensure your safety, be it spiritual or physical, there is always a state in which it can fail. In any case, thank you for watching. Memento mori, and I’ll see you next time.
I need something more than chewing with your mouth closed. I need human mouths to descend further into their bodies, so you swallow food and chew it in your stomach so that I don’t have to hear it.
Tears of the Kingdom is the first time the Zelda series has produced a direct, it’s-the-same-Link-we-swear-you-guys sequel since 2007’s Phantom Hourglass, so this is probably many contemporary fans’ first turn on this particular merry-go-round.
Allow me to assure you: there is no great mystery, and there is no master plan. Every worldbuilding inconsistency and every bit of timeline weirdness between Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom is purely a product of the fact that the Zelda franchise’s writers have the creative impulse control of a pack of squirrels, and don’t give a single solitary fuck about continuity.
When you accept that this is true, and you see how cavalierly they’re willing to treat continuity even between two games which are ostensibly direct sequels starring the same cast of characters and set just a few years apart, you may begin to understand why the timeline of the series as a whole looks the way that it does.
@inverted-trashcan replied:
i get your point. I promise you I do. But where the HELL did all the shieka tech go. The guardians i can see being all scrapped (impressive they all got got), the towers could sink back into the ground…but please god just give me ONE BOOK telling me the divine beasts left hyrule as a final will of the champions! or something! HOW DO YOU LOSE FOUR GIANT ROBOT ANIMALS?!
I mean, we can fanwank whatever justification we want, but the real answer is that it didn’t “go” anywhere. It retroactively never existed.
In Breath of the Wild’s continuity, the Ancients are all-but-explicitly stated to be the ancestors of the modern Sheikah people, so it makes sense that all the Ancient tech that’s lying around is Sheikah-made.
In Tears of the Kingdom’s continuity, the writers decided they had a better idea, and now the Ancients are – and, critically, always have been – an Ancient Aliens/UFOlogy-inspired culture called the Zonai.
Obviously, the surviving Ancient tech can’t possibly be Sheikah-made if the Ancients were the Zonai. Any suggestion to the contrary is clearly the product of your over-active imagination.
The shieka slate isn’t even the shieka slate anymore.
