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StrixNebulosa posted:Merry Gentry 1: 300 pages in, and the queen is dressing up her royal guard like sexpot strippers and I suspect the purpose is so she can gift all of them to Merry for loving purposes. Oh you're in for a loving treat in book 4. It contains one of the most  sex scenes I've ever read. I was inspired to start a book review blog where I review books I hate-read based off that scene alone.
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Mar 25, 2020 19:48
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stabbity posted:Oh you're in for a loving treat in book 4. It contains one of the most Psycho faerie queen held a knife to Merry's eyeball and threatened her into agreeing to gently caress her hot guards, even one she chooses to be a spy for her. This book is a RIDE.
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Mar 25, 2020 22:30
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Ornamented Death posted:It's not that it doesn't apply to both groups, it's that such a position is not unexpected from those set up in opposition to Dresden, but is concerning to see coming from his allies. The underlying assumption is that, as Dresden's allies, these people are the good guys. Outside of Ebenezer, that assumption isn't really supported by the text at that point, but it's a reasonable one to have based on genre tropes. That's fair enough , rereading the scene in question I can see the argument they are making, but it seems more like careless writing on Butcher's part to imply they don't care about mortal deaths in this instance and not an intentional thing. They don't address the mortal remains found after Dresden burned down Bianca's mansion other than maybe to claim Dresden was acting in self defense inadvertently glossing over the potential that he killed them makes them seem callous, but I think Butcher felt it was clear that D didn't kill them because of Dresden's inner monologue or that he was acting in extremis and not really culpable, I still think the title bit is kind of a weird logical leap but I can sort of the basis for it. Edit:So I guess tl:dr Butcher never lets Dresden be the proper antihero that he acts like and always has to narratively justify it or just glosses over the bad parts, which makes his allies look like callous ghouls although not necessarily intentionally. I made a stupid argument trying to score dumb technical points because I got hung up on Kchama's kind of weird way of putting it and lost sight of their real argument which I agree with, and I should probably reread parts of books before I go off half-cocked. My bad. Hub Cat fucked around with this message at 13:04 on Mar 26, 2020 |
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Mar 26, 2020 00:48
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A Vampire that feeds on anger would just play any online game with mic on or... just be on the internet all day. Best take on psychic vampire is on What We Do In the Shadows series.
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Mar 26, 2020 04:31
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ZZZorcerer posted:A Vampire that feeds on anger would just play any online game with mic on or... just be on the internet all day. Internet café, rather, because presumably you need physical presence to take the energy in. Otherwise Twitter and Facebook would be loving salt mines.
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Mar 26, 2020 04:37
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Aerdan posted:Internet café, rather, because presumably you need physical presence to take the energy in. Otherwise Twitter and Facebook would be loving salt mines. I mean...
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Mar 26, 2020 06:16
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Aerdan posted:Internet café, rather, because presumably you need physical presence to take the energy in. Otherwise Twitter and Facebook would be loving salt mines. I think there is a vampire feeding on despair that is running a suicide hotline. so physical presence doesn't seem to be needed
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Mar 26, 2020 14:09
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Merry Gentry 1: finished! What a book. I love how it is completely unashamed of being a sex horror fae romp and goes for everything with gusto, from the loving descriptions of how hot Merry's harem is, to the literal plot point that she has to have sex with all of them until she gets pregnant, to the vividly gross descriptions of Merry turning her enemies into writhing bags of flesh. What a ride. I'll get to #2 at some point but I want to get back to Anita and keep going with the transition from "sex is evil" to "will date one (1) vampire and one (1) werewolf" to "harems are cool". I'm still in the love triangle stage and it's a hoot.
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Mar 26, 2020 17:02
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Also, to take a break from sexy fae I'm reading Lilith Saintcrow's Trailer Park Fae, which is also delightful. There's a plague infecting the fae, someone has a cure, and our heroes Gallows and Ragged have to somehow figure out what's going on, it's great. Mind you, I'm a complete sucker for her writing so she could write about anything and I'd read it.
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Mar 26, 2020 17:07
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Subvisual Haze posted:One of the incognito vampires was a horror movie director. Hanging around spooky movie showings seems like a less destructive way to exist. Wouldn't that mean Thomas could just hang around a porn studio or something and be perfectly fine?
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Mar 26, 2020 19:35
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Libluini posted:Wouldn't that mean Thomas could just hang around a porn studio or something and be perfectly fine? He was a hair dresser and found that worked perfectly well. Then he got tortured back into being a rape vampire again.
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Mar 26, 2020 20:05
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Proteus Jones posted:He was a hair dresser and found that worked perfectly well. Then he got tortured back into being a rape vampire again. But if you read it with any level of media criticism you realize that nobody forced Jim Butcher to contrive a very specific scenario where one our heroes rapes and murders a bunch of women for character growth but it wasn't really his fault.
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Mar 26, 2020 23:32
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stabbity posted:Oh you're in for a loving treat in book 4. It contains one of the most Could we get a spoilered synopsis? I was just about to start #1 on the basis that I've seen multiple people go "Oh wtf is this garbage," then I saw it was Anita Blake and realized I'd never even get past the first book.
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Mar 27, 2020 01:23
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Omi no Kami posted:Could we get a spoilered synopsis? I was just about to start #1 on the basis that I've seen multiple people go "Oh wtf is this garbage," then I saw it was Anita Blake and realized I'd never even get past the first book. Sure thing. So the entire gist of the Merry Gentry series is that Merry and her cousin Cel are in a gently caress-off to see who can either become pregnant/get someone pregnant first. Whoever conceives first becomes the official heir of the Unseelie court. This is LKH's way of writing a sex-filled series without angering her fans (like me) who loved the Anita Blake books for what they were before they became ridiculous and based very heavily on Anita having sex constantly. Anyway, in book 4 (at least I think it's early in book 4 or at some point in book 3), Merry is loving some side character guard named Amatheon in a dead garden. During their sexcapades, Amatheon SINKS INTO THE GROUND and the garden starts coming back to life. Throughout the series, Merry starts channeling their faerie goddess who obviously wants to bring life back to their dying faerie kingdom, and in this scene they kind of realize that the goddess took Amatheon as a sacrifice in order to bring life back to the garden. So, back to the scene in question, which is in chapter 38 (the second to last chapter). Merry and some other random guard, Adair, who is not one of her main dudes and really has no huge role in the series before or after this, are having sex. Here's the rest of the scene, direct from the book (bolding mine): He entered me like a sword finding, at last, its perfect sheath. The magic seemed to draw back for a moment, like a giant taking a breath. We lay on the bed in that most intimate of embraces, as close as man and woman can be, and it was like coming home. It was as if I had waited lifetimes for this man to hold me, for this body to be inside mine. I saw the same wonder in his face. I watched the glow at the center of his body begin to spread outward again. I felt the magic begin to swell, the giant was about to exhale, and with the sensation of that rising magic, Adair began to draw himself out of me. He pulled himself out until only the round head of him remained inside me. The magic blazed to life, and a heartbeat before the power took us, he slid himself home deep inside me. He brought my upper body off the bed, screaming, my nails digging into his flesh, trying to hold on to something, anything, while his body, his magic, thrust inside me again and again. Until I was no longer certain which was flesh and which was magic, pounding through my body. Then the world shifted. Through the blaze of white and yellow light that was our magic, our bodies, I saw a great dark space rearing above us. We were no longer in the queen’s chambers. Doyle, Rhys, and Frost climbed to their feet, and stood watch over us. Part of me wondered where the sithen had taken us, but most of me didn’t care. I cared for nothing in that moment but the feel for Adair between my legs. Our magic shattered the dark into shadows and dancing light, and still Adair thrust between my legs. Still the power pulsed and grew until I thought my skin could no longer hold it. That I would melt away and become the light. I screamed my pleasure into the fire-shadows of our lovemaking, and still it was not done. I felt my nails tear along his skin, watched his body bleed yellow and gold like sunlight. The ground underneath my body began to move under the thrust and push of Adair’s body, as if I would sink into the ground as Amatheon had done in vision. The ground boiled and for a moment the earth was water, pouring around my body in a thick, warm tide. The water spilled inside me, so that Adair pushed himself through it, and forced that blood-warm water deep inside me. Hands came out of that warm liquid. Hands and flesh pressed against me, following where the liquid ran. Muscles, skin, a body, whole and real, formed beneath me. I knew who it was before Amatheon raised his face up enough for me to meet his flower-petal eyes. His body was already inside me when it became solid. Inside me, as Adair thrust inside, so that their bodies shared me. Yep. Merry fucks a mud man into existence. The chapter then ends with the queen coming into the bedroom, interrupting the post-coital cuddling session before the two men had a chance to exit her. One slips out due to surprise, which causes Merry's vag to tighten down on the other dick. So the other guards in the room have to literally pull Merry off the dude to separate them. High loving literature right there. There's a ton of sex scenes in this series, but this was the one that will forever stick with me. You cannot unread that.
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Mar 27, 2020 02:52
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That is simultaneously the funniest and most bizarre thing I have read all day, like, is absolutely the correct reaction! (Also, thanks for being a cool guy and doing that writeup! I never would've plowed through three books of that, because holy poo poo.) So, like, here's what always weirds me out with books like this: I totally get how "Sexy people doing sexy times with sex, also werewolves and vampires" sells. It's an obvious set of niches, and I can totally see how someone could go "Soft and/or hardcore porn of vampires and/or werewolves doing the dirty deed that has no name (the deed is sex)? Sign me up!" But then I hit passages like this, and, like, I just don't see how the author gets there. I don't see how the audience gets there: is there a demographic sitting around going "You know, I think that what Interview With A Vampire really needed was a scene where after Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt bone, a mud man crawls out of the remnants of their filth"?
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Mar 27, 2020 02:58
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Oh I can explain. It's a fascinating mixture of LKH's extremely vanilla kinks and her vivid body horror. A lot of Anita involves extremely gross body horror because vampires are monsters, and Merry takes that horror and works it into her series. I'm delighted to see it actually gets integrated into the sex. As for "who is the audience" it's LKH. This is straight up id-fic that normally doesn't get shared, let alone published. Reading Merry is a front row seat to the inside of LKH's horny brain, and it is fascinating.
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Mar 27, 2020 03:03
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Proteus Jones posted:He was a hair dresser and found that worked perfectly well. Then he got tortured back into being a rape vampire again. Nah he was rape-vampiring even when he was doing that, he just hid it from Harry.
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Mar 27, 2020 03:09
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StrixNebulosa posted:As for "who is the audience" it's LKH. This is straight up id-fic that normally doesn't get shared, let alone published. Reading Merry is a front row seat to the inside of LKH's horny brain, and it is fascinating. YUP. I totally feel like once the Anita Blake series got popular enough to let LKH run free with it, she went off the deep end. She's reined herself in with the last few books in that series and has tried to give it more of an early series go again (still with lots of sex thrown in, but not nearly as many chapters devoted to that), but it's just not anywhere near as good as it was before sex became a major plot point, at least in my opinion. The Merry Gentry series starts off crazy and gets even more insane. The entire series is either chapters of super boring nonsense/bickering that should have been edited out, or pedal to the floor insanity/body horror/sex.
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Mar 27, 2020 03:10
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ImpAtom posted:Nah he was rape-vampiring even when he was doing that, he just hid it from Harry. He was getting his food from his hairdresser clients in tiny harmless doses and pretending to be gay, feeding off a different kind of empathy.
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Mar 27, 2020 03:17
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Gnoman posted:He was getting his food from his hairdresser clients in tiny harmless doses and pretending to be gay, feeding off a different kind of empathy. Doesn't that one short story about the Oblivion War take place before Turn Coat?
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Mar 27, 2020 03:46
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Hub Cat posted:Doesn't that one short story about the Oblivion War take place before Turn Coat? I've not read most of the short stories, so I was unaware of Backup. From the summary, that seems to be a singular event, but it does make ImpAtom more correct.
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Mar 27, 2020 03:49
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StrixNebulosa posted:Oh I can explain. It's a fascinating mixture of LKH's extremely vanilla kinks and her vivid body horror. A lot of Anita involves extremely gross body horror because vampires are monsters, and Merry takes that horror and works it into her series. I'm delighted to see it actually gets integrated into the sex. That is absolutely amazing, and honestly makes me want to read it more than when I thought it was aimed at a specific demographic of readers who were clamoring for that specific constellation of features. I always find it interesting when you hit stuff like this, where funny slivers of the author's world view or assumptions accidentally color the text and world even where they're not intended to.
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Mar 27, 2020 04:47
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StrixNebulosa posted:Psycho faerie queen held a knife to Merry's eyeball and threatened her into agreeing to gently caress her hot guards, even one she chooses to be a spy for her. This book is a RIDE.  These were actually either my first or second ish series that I read when I was like 13/14 ish that dealt with sex stuff explicitly. They are a trip and a half.
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Mar 27, 2020 06:12
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Omi no Kami posted:That is absolutely amazing, and honestly makes me want to read it more than when I thought it was aimed at a specific demographic of readers who were clamoring for that specific constellation of features. I always find it interesting when you hit stuff like this, where funny slivers of the author's world view or assumptions accidentally color the text and world even where they're not intended to. I highly recomend popcorn reading Merry Gentry because it is -hilarious- and LKH can actually write some horrifying stuff she just tends to wrap it in so much overt sexuality that most people don't even -see- the horror! It's amazing.
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Mar 27, 2020 07:00
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Anias posted:I highly recomend popcorn reading Merry Gentry because it is -hilarious- and LKH can actually write some horrifying stuff she just tends to wrap it in so much overt sexuality that most people don't even -see- the horror! I think I might actually have to give this a try, given how much hilarity I've suddenly heard about it. You know what's weird, too? Body horror and sex are a great combination when used intentionally- that's pretty much Alien's entire thing. But there's something about mixing the two by accident which is both really uncomfortable and kinda inadvertently hilarious. For some reason this reminds me of something I heard about Stephen King's Dark Tower books- apparently there's a scene, played entirely straight, in which a woman is impregnated with a demon baby who turns her uterus into steel, and so to kill it the gunslinger has to use his revolver on her like a sex toy, then when she orgasms and her cervix opens he fires so the bullet bounces around her demon baby iron uterus, whips it up into pieces, then ricochets back out of her without harming the mother. I have no clue if that's accurate or someone was messing with me, but it's probably the single weirdest thing I've ever heard about a stephen king story, and I've heard a lot of weird poo poo about that guy.
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Mar 27, 2020 09:11
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Omi no Kami posted:I think I might actually have to give this a try, given how much hilarity I've suddenly heard about it. You know what's weird, too? Body horror and sex are a great combination when used intentionally- that's pretty much Alien's entire thing. But there's something about mixing the two by accident which is both really uncomfortable and kinda inadvertently hilarious. Really? Because that's still second to the child orgy in It.
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Mar 27, 2020 10:39
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A lot of weird poo poo happens in The Dark Tower series, but I don't remember that at all. I mean, Roland fucks a demon in a mushroom circle, then later that same demon fucks the crippled black woman gunslinger and she gets pregnant with a demon spider creature, and that spider creature kills & eats the talking dog that had survived all of the books up to that point but I don't remember any gun-loving except the metaphorical kind going on and on about how cool Roland's revolvers are.
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Mar 27, 2020 11:09
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What the heck
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Mar 27, 2020 11:15
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biracial bear for uncut posted:A lot of weird poo poo happens in The Dark Tower series, but I don't remember that at all.
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Mar 27, 2020 11:50
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anilEhilated posted:It's in the very first book. Details may be wrong but the revolver insertion is definitely in there. You mean when Roland murders an entire town? I must have skipped over the gun loving for that part.
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Mar 27, 2020 13:22
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biracial bear for uncut posted:You mean when Roland murders an entire town? I must have skipped over the gun loving for that part. I want to say it was the second story right after that. I'm pretty sure it's before he meets Jake.
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Mar 27, 2020 14:01
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Seems like Roland would've been dead-set against doing that given how he reacted to some ocean water washing up onto his guns later.
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Mar 27, 2020 15:29
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biracial bear for uncut posted:Seems like Roland would've been dead-set against doing that given how he reacted to some ocean water washing up onto his guns later. Well, there is a bit of difference between putting them a couple of inches into a wet bodily opening and having the bullets (and the powder in them) get soaked with saltwater. Otherwise gunslingers would be pretty much useless every time it rained. As for Thomas, he's definitely problematic, especially in the #MeToo era. I always kind of figured that Butcher's take on Thomas and the White Court in general was that they had a supernatural version of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHCRWfV1q5A
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Mar 27, 2020 18:11
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anilEhilated posted:It's in the very first book. Details may be wrong but the revolver insertion is definitely in there. Huh, I couldn't find the reference with 15 seconds of bad googling so I assumed I'd been getting my wires crossed, and somehow confused Dark Tower with The Stand, in which apparently a psychotic kid tries to get one of the characters to sleep with him, the guy is like "I'm not gay and also I'm not really into you," then the kid shoves a gun up his rear and the guy goes "On second thought this is kinda turning me on now, let's do this." Also, from the description I am genuinely unable to tell if this is an actual kid, or an adult little person. You know what's weird though? The child orgy is by far the weirder and more disturbing bit, to the extent that my brain straight-up segfaulted when I first learned that was a thing, but it just doesn't have the same weirdness staying power as revolver demon abortion. I was about to go "Man, wtf is wrong with stephen king," but the fact that I've never read any of these books but can still recite like 4-5 obscure, horrifying sequences off the top of my head honestly says pretty impressive things about his marketing and ability to write memorable crap.
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Mar 27, 2020 18:24
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Omi no Kami posted:Huh, I couldn't find the reference with 15 seconds of bad googling so I assumed I'd been getting my wires crossed, and somehow confused Dark Tower with The Stand, in which apparently a psychotic kid tries to get one of the characters to sleep with him, the guy is like "I'm not gay and also I'm not really into you," then the kid shoves a gun up his rear and the guy goes "On second thought this is kinda turning me on now, let's do this." Also, from the description I am genuinely unable to tell if this is an actual kid, or an adult little person. Hoo boy I wish I didn’t know this stuff but here we are. The lady is or says she has been impregnated by the Man in Black/Flagg Roland does put the tip of his gun in her pussy and the “holiness” or whatever of the “Big guns with Sandalwood Grips” makes her convulse and she tells him “you’ve killed the child.” No steel uterus or gunfire in that scene. In the Stand, there’s a weird rockabilly psycho who calls himself “The Kid” as in “Billy The.” He DOES stick his gun in Trashcan Man’s rear end. Trash does not like it but pretends to because psycho-rear end-gun. Join us next week for child orgy in IT and loofa handjob in Pet Sematery
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Mar 27, 2020 18:34
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Gnoman posted:He was getting his food from his hairdresser clients in tiny harmless doses and pretending to be gay, feeding off a different kind of empathy. Thomas character arc was so weird. First it looks like he is on his way to learn to live with his condition without killing/maiming people, then it suddenly takes a wrong turn and he gets all "I was tortured, and so I must rape" Nowadays it looks like all Thomas-related problems could be solved with a stake or a garotte if the problem-solving happens at Mab's court
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Mar 27, 2020 22:14
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Libluini posted:Thomas character arc was so weird. First it looks like he is on his way to learn to live with his condition without killing/maiming people, then it suddenly takes a wrong turn and he gets all "I was tortured, and so I must rape" What even happened there? Was there even a point to it? Like did it fundamentally change his relationship with any of the rest of the main cast or lead into any new plotlines or anything, it seems like it just became "oh Thomas is back on his bullshit". How do you not setup and now Thomas and Dresden must fight or something idk. Hub Cat fucked around with this message at 01:18 on Mar 28, 2020 |
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Mar 28, 2020 01:13
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Hub Cat posted:What even happened there? Was there even a point to it? Like did it fundamentally change his relationship with any of the rest of the main cast or lead into any new plotlines or anything, it seems like it just became "oh Thomas is back on his bullshit". It got him back into the White Court but that's about it. And of course his rape got solved by threesomes.
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Mar 28, 2020 01:17
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I mean, feels like thomas barely shows up in the books after that so hooray!
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Mar 28, 2020 04:49
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I’m pretty sure that was a set up to show how !!evil!! the skinwalker was and what a ~tortured soul~ Thomas is. Remember, it was the one that tortured Thomas and then also the one that dragged the victims to him while the ‘demon was in control’.
DreamingofRoses fucked around with this message at 12:51 on Mar 28, 2020 |
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Mar 28, 2020 12:49
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