Kio Rampas

Not to sound aggressively trite, but that's the thing with being broken, it gives you the chance to fix yourself, and get to know yourself better along the way. In my case, I think I had the ABDL fantasies first and the trauma came later.

Bravo! Read the last few chapters all in one go, great stuff! Really refreshing to see things work out, but still have it feel like it was a truly hard road. People have mentioned that the characters are all broken, but, and this is maybe just me projecting, I think it's hard to imagine anyone into this scene that isn't a little bit broken.

In a lot of stories, this would all just be a misunderstanding, Lauren would be exaggerating, and everything would soon be peachy keen again. It hurts my heart that Lauren is right, Vanessa done did some fucked up manipulative shit and Dani's now left to drift in the wind. I hope it can work out, but Dani's trust in Vanessa is basically shattered, and trust is a crucial part of maintaining a healthy relationship of any sort, and particularly a dom/sub relationship.

Poor Kailee indeed. She might be a shitty person, but even shitty people don't deserve abusive relationships.

Oh dear, this is going to go very badly wrong for Kailee. If you're going to blackmail someone you can't do it from a position of weakness, the person you're blackmailing needs to believe that you will do what you're threatening. If Kailee tries this, Aubrey will flip it on her and blackmail her back, and very likely double down on her abusive treatment. I totally understand her not wanting Kailee back in her life, but Vanessa needs to be ringing the police on her behalf, and also probably a women's shelter for advice.

Absolutely. For reals though, that was lovely. I'm so invested in these characters, I did a little victory fist pump at the end of that chapter.

If I were an evil bastard, I would say that now would be exactly the right time for Kailee and Aubrey to show up again. They're like the black mirror to what Seth and Jess have, to what Vanessa and Dani are just about to have. The Upside Down version. Maximum sweetness, then, wham! Horrible evil.

Dang it. I'm glad, I think I'd feel weird for having disturbed the flow of the story.

Narratively speaking, it would also kind of subvert expectations if you had a dom just take a sub and not punish them, but instead help them deal with the guilt in a semi-ritualised way. It's not a new idea, to be sure, it's just not something I've seen before in ABDL fiction. I'm also going to stop talking about it now before people get the impression that I'm really into bathing as a kink.

There's an interesting quirk of psychology that relates to the expression and physical act of washing your hands that I feel applies here. If you're feeling guilty about something, washing your hands reportedly helps alleviate the feeling of guilt. Maybe instead of a punishment for a mistake, Jess just needs a nice bath? Go ahead, ask me for a citation on my Chicken Soup for the Soul BS, I'll fight ya. Edit: I found one. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3937805/

I'm terribly late to the party, but... https://youtu.be/yfq3B9JvIcQ

Dang son! So many chapters at once, our cup runneth over. @bbykimmy, I couldn't find the comment to quote it, and trimming down posts to a particular quote on mobile is a pain, but I appreciate the insight that subbing, and especially bratting, requires just as much communication as domming. I don't know why it hadn't occurred to me like that, but I'm glad you said it.

Something about Aubrey's thought process smacks of childhood trauma that she's now enacting on Kailee. I think something like this has happened to Aubrey. This doesn't feel like rock bottom. It just feels like a progression in an abusive relationship, and I think it's going to get worse before it gets better. If it gets better, it's not going to be without a lot of work on both their parts.

I can easily see being into ABDL encouraging people towards being very careful in their relationships. Vanessa has to balance a professional life and a personal life and has more reason than most to need to maintain that separation and privacy. From there it's not hard to rationalize doing a bit of research, and progress quickly into stalkery behaviour to make sure that the object of your affections won't end up being the kind of person who might turn around and blow her professional veneer. It's still an invasion of privacy, but what seems to make the difference between calculating behaviour and full-blown predatory behaviour is how we see that she doesn't take advantage of Dani when she's at her most vulnerable. She knows she could, and she's deliberately not. A bit of a moral grey zone, though.

Aubrey's relationships with everyone are abusive, everyone is a tool for her to use, a resource to be exploited. Kailee is an emotional vampire though, her relationships are totally one-sided and all she seems to do is take take take. Neither of them care about consent. I can easily see Aubrey changing tack with Vanessa, getting her to teach her how to control Kailee. As much as the best thing would be for them both to learn how to have healthy relationships based on trust, maybe each of them taking the other out of the dating pool and engaging in some sort of mutually parasitic and toxic relationship might be the lesser evil.

That's certainly true. In terms of narrative, force is also a good way to set up conflict and meaningful stakes in these stories. A story in which the main character gets exactly what they want is hard to do in an interesting way.

You know, I think that's the first time I've seen express consent being sought out and received in a story on this forum. Props for a realistic and nuanced representation of what you would ethically have to do in real life, especially with regards to Aubrey's reaction.

Thoroughly enjoying the story so far. The atmosphere and world building is great, and the Ebony Zephyr is bonkers but brilliant. The Magical Realm reminds me a bit of the House from Garth Nix's Keys to the Kingdom series.

When people go to stalker levels of effort to get to know someone, it's not usually for a nice reason. When you hang out with someone or date them you're finding out about them based on questions you ask and stuff they volunteer about themselves. They are in effect consenting to you knowing this stuff. If someone goes to other sources and digs up stuff about you without your knowledge, that's an invasion. Someone who would do that might be comfortable crossing other boundaries of yours, or not take rejection peacefully, and that's why stalkery behaviour can be frightening to people on the receiving end, especially when you have no idea what the stalker's intentions are.

I think I was drawing mostly from Chasing Emily, The Promise and stories like that, the ones that had more of a realistic feel to them. I am a big fan of the original, but the others appealed

I quite like researching things that come up in ideas that I get for stories. I tend to do a fair bit of research on the mechanistic aspects of the story, like laxatives for instance. How does it work? How long does it take to work? What does it feel like? You might be forgiven for glossing over the setting a bit, because few people are going to take the time to meticulously reconstruct a mental image of your setting in their heads, but if you describe something working in a way that it just doesn't work,

The genetic thing ignores the existence of in-betweeners. You might have a situation where rather than a purely Mendelian heredity you get a sort of in-between state when the gene is heterozygous, but the fanon as it stands doesn't seem to bear that out. I don't think anyone was thinking about the heredity of the three races when writing though, so nothing's really been established.