It was bad enough that the boy is literally just stabbing the book with a dagger and dissociating.
I picked this comic up by coincidence a few months ago and I am delighted to inform anyone curious that she wrote him in a torrid love affair with his bodyguard and completely undermined his terrifying reputation and made him a folk hero instead. He was Not Thrilled.
Mulan AU where she does get caught by the other fresh recruits while she’s bathing but Mushu helps her spin it like the lake is cursed by an evil lizard demon and will turn men into women if they stay in it for too long.
From there it’s not actually difficult to get the other soldiers onboard with covering up the fact that poor Ping took one for the team and got afflicted by the vagina curse, especially since it would have been all of them if they hadn’t gotten the warning ahead of time. So they agree to help him cover it up, because obviously the army’s not going to understand.
Shang is… tentatively glad that the men are bonding and getting along, even if they continue to be deeply weird about it.
Ling: Hey man, what’s up— you’ve got boobs?!?!
Mulan: Uh, what boobs? Huh? Where did these come from?
Mushu: *facepalms and thinks quickly* (speaks from the shadows) I AM THE SPIRIT OF THE LAKE! BEWARE MY CURSED WATERS FOR THEY WILL TURN MEN INTO WOMEN!
Ling, Yao, and Chien Po: Oh no! The spirit of the cursed waters!
It wasn’t until I saw these tags that I remembered that there was in fact a pregnancy river in journey to the west where anyone who drank from the river would get pregnant even men, so I guess a lake that turns men into women would actually be believable
The problem with trying to come up with a way to say “this book has sex in” is that there’s loads of options which all mean different things and none are perfect. Like…
clean/wholesome vs dirty - obviously this one is bullshit, we don’t need to talk about why
smut/smutty - a classique. Pretty good, but feels like its falling out of favour.
steamy - as above, really. feels slightly more vague, makes me assume it’s sexy but notexplicit. More dated - been replaced by spicy.
erotic - erotica is a whole genre to itself, with different parameters to romance. Conflating the two weakens genre defninitions for both.
explicit - does what it says on the tin, but risks sounding a bit clinical. If steamy is make outs and fondling, explicit is genitals getting described up-close.
spicy - gets a lot of complaints, but lends itself well to a rating scale and is very popular
open/closed door - this is a good shorthand, but not very familiar to people who aren’t reading romance. Again, doesn’t rate very easily - a closed door is a closed door, but the open door could lead to either slow vanilla missionary or a full-on BDSM scene.
porn/pornography - comes with a lot of assumptions which makes it harder to use in certain spaces. Sits at the 5/5 end of the scale in my head. Similar to erotica in that its a distinct genre.
saucy - this is just a Carry On film. no one is aroused.
sexy - too vague. colin firth fully clothed in a pond is sexy. gwendoline christie in plate armour is sexy. that one fish from finding nemo is sexy. brushing hands described in the right way is sexy. could mean anything.
this book has sex in it - literally no
Then you’ve got the problem that websites like tiktok and instagram, which is where most marketing happens, can surpress content that’s too sexy, especially if its queer, and authors are being forced to be over-cautious with the words they use.
And we also can’t forget too that on these platforms you have to catch people’s interest really quickly, and often they might not read the description. So you have to catch people as quickly as possible, using as few words as possible.
Join me on my journey to finally unbalance my hormones, toxify my body, boost my inflammation, maximize my cortisol and absolutely destroy my gut health.
honestly christianity really hit the jackpot with “jesus christ” rolling off the tongue as an expletive so well. the number one problem with fantasy settings is that whatever names you come up with to take in vain will never hit as well as “jesus christ”
this guy gets it!!!!! this is the kind of rock solid phonetic structural integrity you have to compete with!!!! and no amount of marika’s tits or thal’s balls or odin’s beards will ever get close because with ol jeezy boy his name alone has all the features you need
the average person with bad taste can be into some extremely banal garbage but when you get close enough to someone with otherwise good taste that they start a recommendation by going off on a preamble about how they don’t necessarily recommend it you know you’re seconds away from hearing about some real torturously wretched dogshit
friend from work will have you watch a two hour movie where you can feel every second as it passes by, but enemployed movie mutual will put you on the kind of shit that feels like crawling on cobblestone until emaciated
people are reading this as the latter friend recommending dry, pretentious cinema. that’s not the case. not that kind of situation. you’re getting no enrichment out of this. I need you to understand they’re making you watch Gooby because “it’s kinda good”
Not to insert myself here but as someone who owns Ghost Rider 1 and 2 on DVD I do actually need everyone to watch it right now because in the second one a kid asks Nick Cage as Ghost Rider how he pees and Nick Cage says “it’s like a flamethrower” and then they hard cut to a CGI skeleton in full black moto leather pissing a jet of fire and then it does a shoulder check at the camera and nods like “hell yeah brother”
a doordasher bringing mcdonalds to a group of four 25 year olds who have the exact same arrangement as the grandparents in willy wonka and the chocolate factory
