I need to get romantasy out of my head.

The problem is I now have to hear about it often at work.

I ended up going back and trying to read ACOTAR; it's surprisingly readable after Fourth Wing in the sense that it's better written. Still, I wouldn't recommend it unless you are actively into that genre.

More importantly, I am now firmly of the opinion this genre is isekai for adult western women. It is the exact same formula: Normal person, who is nonetheless ~special~, is taken elsewhere, given immense powers, and has a love interest completely devoted to them with little effort on their behalf. 100% wish-fulfillment fast food media.

The thing is, people never talk about Sword Art Online as if it's actually good literature. A portion of the fans of romantasy are aware that this is junk food and will say as such, but then I personally get to hear raving about Fourth Wing while I'm trying to not bury my face in my hands because I have lab gloves on and that would be a safety violation.

Although I'm perma-banned from the bookclub, they talk about it enough that I've picked up a lot of that.

For it's part, isekai quickly ended up devolving into parody, deconstruction, and absurd niche situations. I'm curious how something similar would look for romantasy, but the cravat there is the opposite gender roles make it more complicated.

As such-- It's fascinating to me how these two genres mirror each other in how they apply the gendered archetypes with the roles flipped. These roles are ancient: They go back not just to Beauty and the Beast, but ancient Greek mythology, with Cupid and Psyche, but particularly the story of Persephone and Hades which this crowd is particularly obsessed with. When I was a child, I was shown 7 brides for 7 brothers as fun, harmless movie, and that one is based of the rape of the Sabine Women, a Roman mythos repackaged for the 1950s.

I suspect this is this is not innate, but more like an Ouroboros eating it's own tail. These stories can be see as a reclamation by rewriting the emotional stakes and focusing on female desire rather than only her subjugation. These are often stories which are strictly patriarchal, with Beauty and the Beast being written to prepare women for arranged marriages.

I fear it could almost reinforce the idea some regressionists have that women want to be controlled and will automatically fall for many with a chiseled jawline and a dominant aura. There seems to be little actual evidence that is what women desire in reality; for one, numerous people do not find these stories appealing at all. My assumption is this is due to the lifetime, if not centuries, of romanticization of captivity media. Often in these, the heroine holds his heart hostage in return, being the only individual he confides in. Sometimes, she can even be his "weakness," as having bonds wcan be framed as something for an antagonist to exploit if she gets captured again and used against him. This gives her an intimate power on top of her active powers she's usually granted magically. Still, this is always done within the context of script written by her captor, or more accurately, these ancient archetypes.

And none of that is inherently wrong. It’s fantasy, and honestly, partially just porn. It's a medium that allows for the exploration of these themes in a safe place, and what is embraced in fiction can be vastly different from real life. Presumably, most readers can separate these two concepts.

Still, these are often written poorly while being promoted in every bookstore and library out there. I went to check out a book from the library, and a pile of Maas books were stacked next to the self-checkout machines for people to grab on their way out. Many of the non-Maas romantasy stories seem to be inspired of the men ACOTAR, and thus, the Ouroboros continues to devour itself.

This makes me hungry for a deconstruction, but at the same time, it would be need to strike at the heart of these concepts.


And so, just an attempt to try to map it onto what isekai has done:

( This is honestly just rambling at this point )


For it's own part, ACOTAR deserves it's own section here:
The plot of the first book is seriously Beauty and the Beast with more masks and less fur, there's even a curse Tamlin is under that he must fall in love with a human woman or be doomed.

However, the execution is maddening. Instead of telling her any of this, they devise a whole plot involving making her think she's being held for a crime she committed against fae kind. She's a bit of a dumbass, so she never questions why she's getting better treatment than the lower fae servants despite being a prisoner. Or way, for her crimes, she's living in a luxury suit and eating dinner with the high fae.

The hilarious part is the twist is that it's not true love magic in the fairytale sense, so all of that was pointless! It's instead literal trials of love, administrated by a malevolent fae queen. For some reason, whenever the heroine fails one of them, it's Tamlin's emissary Lucien, not Tamlin himself, who gets tortured. By that I mean he's literally physically tortured, because sure, why not!

As there's no magic love involved, they could've devised a plan where they didn't even need her to actually fall in love. Lucien - as he's the only standout character in this and deserves better - could've been teaching her how to act so they could pull off fooling the whole thing. The plot could've been sabotage and gathering information on how to pass the trials considering the stakes are "or else the whole Spring Court is doomed to be my slaves for eternity." There's a different type of subversion!

Honestly would've been hilarious if, in the core plot, she feel in love with Lucien since he's normally the one actually helping her and literally bleeding here anyway. All of that plotting and withholding information, and so she falls for the assistant! It's kind of crazy that didn't happen to begin with, but then, Lucien is allowed to be funny, something forbidden by these love interests for whatever reason.

Also, guess how many female fae of note there are in this book? Just the main antagonist!

Sure, there's a random servant woman, but she has no real role in the plot. Hm. Empowerment!

All that aside, I will say Fourth Wing is the tamest of all of these I've read, as Xaden (Xader? Xmen? Xanax? I can't be bothered) still has that controlling edge, but it's far less severe in comparison. Also, she's not kidnapped by him.

Per the dw_news post regarding the MS/TN blocks, we are doing a small code push shortly in order to get the code live. As per usual, please let us know if you see anything wonky.

There is some code cleanup we've been doing that is going out with this push but I don't think there is any new/reworked functionality, so it should be pretty invisible if all goes well.

A reminder to everyone that starting tomorrow, we are being forced to block access to any IP address that geolocates to the state of Mississippi for legal reasons while we and Netchoice continue fighting the law in court. People whose IP addresses geolocate to Mississippi will only be able to access a page that explains the issue and lets them know that we'll be back to offer them service as soon as the legal risk to us is less existential.

The block page will include the apology but I'll repeat it here: we don't do geolocation ourselves, so we're limited to the geolocation ability of our network provider. Our anti-spam geolocation blocks have shown us that their geolocation database has a number of mistakes in it. If one of your friends who doesn't live in Mississippi gets the block message, there is nothing we can do on our end to adjust the block, because we don't control it. The only way to fix a mistaken block is to change your IP address to one that doesn't register as being in Mississippi, either by disconnecting your internet connection and reconnecting it (if you don't have a static IP address) or using a VPN.

In related news, the judge in our challenge to Tennessee's social media age verification, parental consent, and parental surveillance law (which we are also part of the fight against!) ruled last month that we had not met the threshold for a temporary injunction preventing the state from enforcing the law while the court case proceeds.

The Tennesee law is less onerous than the Mississippi law and the fines for violating it are slightly less ruinous (slightly), but it's still a risk to us. While the fight goes on, we've decided to prevent any new account signups from anyone under 18 in Tennessee to protect ourselves against risk. We do not need to block access from the whole state: this only applies to new account creation.

Because we don't do any geolocation on our users and our network provider's geolocation services only apply to blocking access to the site entirely, the way we're implementing this is a new mandatory question on the account creation form asking if you live in Tennessee. If you do, you'll be unable to register an account if you're under 18, not just the under 13 restriction mandated by COPPA. Like the restrictions on the state of Mississippi, we absolutely hate having to do this, we're sorry, and we hope we'll be able to undo it as soon as possible.

Finally, I'd like to thank every one of you who's commented with a message of support for this fight or who's bought paid time to help keep us running. The fact we're entirely user-supported and you all genuinely understand why this fight is so important for everyone is a huge part of why we can continue to do this work. I've also sent a lot of your comments to the lawyers who are fighting the actual battles in court, and they find your wholehearted support just as encouraging and motivating as I do. Thank you all once again for being the best users any social media site could ever hope for. You make me proud and even more determined to yell at state attorneys general on your behalf.

I'll start with the tl;dr summary to make sure everyone sees it and then explain further: As of September 1, we will temporarily be forced to block access to Dreamwidth from all IP addresses that geolocate to Mississippi for legal reasons. This block will need to continue until we either win the legal case entirely, or the district court issues another injunction preventing Mississippi from enforcing their social media age verification and parental consent law against us.

Mississippi residents, we are so, so sorry. We really don't want to do this, but the legal fight we and Netchoice have been fighting for you had a temporary setback last week. We genuinely and honestly believe that we're going to win it in the end, but the Fifth Circuit appellate court said that the district judge was wrong to issue the preliminary injunction back in June that would have maintained the status quo and prevented the state from enforcing the law requiring any social media website (which is very broadly defined, and which we definitely qualify as) to deanonymize and age-verify all users and obtain parental permission from the parent of anyone under 18 who wants to open an account.

Netchoice took that appellate ruling up to the Supreme Court, who declined to overrule the Fifth Circuit with no explanation -- except for Justice Kavanaugh agreeing that we are likely to win the fight in the end, but saying that it's no big deal to let the state enforce the law in the meantime.

Needless to say, it's a big deal to let the state enforce the law in the meantime. The Mississippi law is a breathtaking state overreach: it forces us to verify the identity and age of every person who accesses Dreamwidth from the state of Mississippi and determine who's under the age of 18 by collecting identity documents, to save that highly personal and sensitive information, and then to obtain a permission slip from those users' parents to allow them to finish creating an account. It also forces us to change our moderation policies and stop anyone under 18 from accessing a wide variety of legal and beneficial speech because the state of Mississippi doesn't like it -- which, given the way Dreamwidth works, would mean blocking people from talking about those things at all. (And if you think you know exactly what kind of content the state of Mississippi doesn't like, you're absolutely right.)

Needless to say, we don't want to do that, either. Even if we wanted to, though, we can't: the resources it would take for us to build the systems that would let us do it are well beyond our capacity. You can read the sworn declaration I provided to the court for some examples of how unworkable these requirements are in practice. (That isn't even everything! The lawyers gave me a page limit!)

Unfortunately, the penalties for failing to comply with the Mississippi law are incredibly steep: fines of $10,000 per user from Mississippi who we don't have identity documents verifying age for, per incident -- which means every time someone from Mississippi loaded Dreamwidth, we'd potentially owe Mississippi $10,000. Even a single $10,000 fine would be rough for us, but the per-user, per-incident nature of the actual fine structure is an existential threat. And because we're part of the organization suing Mississippi over it, and were explicitly named in the now-overturned preliminary injunction, we think the risk of the state deciding to engage in retaliatory prosecution while the full legal challenge continues to work its way through the courts is a lot higher than we're comfortable with. Mississippi has been itching to issue those fines for a while, and while normally we wouldn't worry much because we're a small and obscure site, the fact that we've been yelling at them in court about the law being unconstitutional means the chance of them lumping us in with the big social media giants and trying to fine us is just too high for us to want to risk it. (The excellent lawyers we've been working with are Netchoice's lawyers, not ours!)

All of this means we've made the extremely painful decision that our only possible option for the time being is to block Mississippi IP addresses from accessing Dreamwidth, until we win the case. (And I repeat: I am absolutely incredibly confident we'll win the case. And apparently Justice Kavanaugh agrees!) I repeat: I am so, so sorry. This is the last thing we wanted to do, and I've been fighting my ass off for the last three years to prevent it. But, as everyone who follows the legal system knows, the Fifth Circuit is gonna do what it's gonna do, whether or not what they want to do has any relationship to the actual law.

We don't collect geolocation information ourselves, and we have no idea which of our users are residents of Mississippi. (We also don't want to know that, unless you choose to tell us.) Because of that, and because access to highly accurate geolocation databases is extremely expensive, our only option is to use our network provider's geolocation-based blocking to prevent connections from IP addresses they identify as being from Mississippi from even reaching Dreamwidth in the first place. I have no idea how accurate their geolocation is, and it's possible that some people not in Mississippi might also be affected by this block. (The inaccuracy of geolocation is only, like, the 27th most important reason on the list of "why this law is practically impossible for any site to comply with, much less a tiny site like us".)

If your IP address is identified as coming from Mississippi, beginning on September 1, you'll see a shorter, simpler version of this message and be unable to proceed to the site itself. If you would otherwise be affected, but you have a VPN or proxy service that masks your IP address and changes where your connection appears to come from, you won't get the block message, and you can keep using Dreamwidth the way you usually would.

On a completely unrelated note while I have you all here, have I mentioned lately that I really like ProtonVPN's service, privacy practices, and pricing? They also have a free tier available that, although limited to one device, has no ads or data caps and doesn't log your activity, unlike most of the free VPN services out there. VPNs are an excellent privacy and security tool that every user of the internet should be familiar with! We aren't affiliated with Proton and we don't get any kickbacks if you sign up with them, but I'm a satisfied customer and I wanted to take this chance to let you know that.

Again, we're so incredibly sorry to have to make this announcement, and I personally promise you that I will continue to fight this law, and all of the others like it that various states are passing, with every inch of the New Jersey-bred stubborn fightiness you've come to know and love over the last 16 years. The instant we think it's less legally risky for us to allow connections from Mississippi IP addresses, we'll undo the block and let you know.