Hi there. I wanted to make a request for something a bit personal. All this week, my family has been criticizing my weight (which I have struggled with my whole life) and told me point-blank that no one would ever love me because of it. That being said, I would like to request a writing with Soap. Let's say the reader has been avoiding sex with him for a while. They'll kiss and stuff, but as soon as he starts pulling her shirt up, she pulls it back down and makes some sort of excuse. This goes on for a while until Soap confronts her about it. She basically then goes off, pointing out all her bodily flaws and how fat and hideous she thinks she is and asks him how he could ever think she was sexy. And all he says is, “How can I NOT?” And he makes love to her and every time she makes a complaint about her body or calls herself ugly, she shushes her, ultimately taking her in front of a mirror and making her look at herself and how sexy she looks taking him. And when they're done, Soap should talk about how she's not fat, she's cute and squishy.
Hi anon, thank you for waiting for this! I’ve been really busy and did not want to put up anything half-arsed because this is a very important ask! Anyone who makes you feel like that sucks, and I’ve been there myself with family commenting on my weight. I had a whole rant lined up but then I realised that Soap already had it in hand, so I will let him takeover from here…
TW: MDNI 18+, bodyshaming and fatphobia, emotion support, p in v
It was getting harder and harder to make up excuses. Each time you came up with a reason you couldn’t stay over at his place, or a reason your clothes had to stay on when you did agree to sleep in the same bed, literally sleep, his eyes narrowed. You couldn’t keep this up, it was too hard, too unfair on this sweet, loving man.
Johnny had come into your life like a wrecking ball, all loud mouth and charming personality. You had been swept off your feet by him the moment you’d seen him in the pub, a rare and welcome night out with friends, and he had zeroed in on you. He’d made you feel like you were the only other person in that hot, noisy and packed pub, his eyes locked onto you the moment you spoke to him to say hi.
The last few months had been amazing, he doted on you, texting or calling each day he was away from you back at base. He worshipped you, wanting nothing more than to hear you laugh and be near you. The problem was he was getting very amorous. Kissing and cuddling on the sofa was turning into heavy make out sessions, his hands grazing over your curves and teasing just beneath the hem of your top.
It made you increasingly uncomfortable, your doubts about how he’d react to seeing under your baggy clothes ate at you. Unfortunately, you’d become so used to being put down about your weight, being told you were undeserving of love and affection, that you had never really let your walls down around him. The rot ran deep, right to your core, whispering to you that he wouldn’t stay and this was only a fling for him until he got bored and left for someone more like him.
Finally, things quickly got heated when he pushed you, trying to get you to tell him why you’d shut down and withdrawn from him completely after another failed make out session where you'd retreated to your room and shut the door in his face. He just burst in, demanding to know what the deal was.
“If I let you see me naked you’ll leave!” you blurt out finally, throat tight with the hot threat of tears. Everything seems to stop once you let the words out, and he stands there staring at you with an unreadable expression as you sit on the end of your bed.
“D’ya think I’m that shallow?” he demands into the thick silence, and the pain in his voice cuts like a knife into your heart. “D’ya really think I’d do such a thing? What have I said or done to give you that impression?” He edges closer as he speaks, until he reaches you and then kneels down in front of you.
“No, I don’t think you’re shallow,” you mumble weakly, trying to avoid his eyes but he cups your face in his large, warm hands and forces you to look into his crystal blue gaze. There’s nothing but affection in those eyes, love and concern for you blinding you like the sun.
“You are beautiful, and I want to be with you just as you are, right here and now,” he says softly, but with an edge of steel beneath the silk of his words. “Anyone who says otherwise and fuck off. If I hear them say it, it’ll be the last thing they ever do. You hear me?”
There’s no way to hide from him, and you nod, letting out a sigh of relief that’s quickly muffled by his lips.
“You’re beautiful just the way you are, have been since the moment I first saw you,” he says as his lips trail across your cheek and chin, down to your neck. “I dinnae care what size or shape you are, hen, I love you for who you are. As long as you are happy and safe, I’m the luckiest man alive to be by your side.”
Suddenly, you realise that having spoken your fear out loud it holds less power over you, and your shoulder relax.
“C’mon, get up,” he says gently, and you stand up, letting him position you in front of your floor length mirror. “Tell me what you don’t like,” he instructs you, standing by your shoulder and locking eyes with you in the reflection.
“Well, the rolls around my middle,” you admit weakly, hands fluttering to cover them automatically. With a smile, he takes your hands away and crouches in front of you, lifting the front of your top to reveal the skin beneath. Stretch marks catch the light but before you can react his lips are pressed to them, the soft warmth making your breath stutter.
“Tell me another one,” he groans, peppering more kisses to your stomach while you think.
“My thighs,” you say before you can think about what he has planned. Warm hands caress your thighs through your leggings, and his breath ghosts through the fabric before kisses land. “Fucking hell…” you groan, “do you really think I’m sexy?”
“How can I not, when your this fuckin’ perfect?” he answers between kisses against you hip. It continues like this, you name a part of your body you’ve been taught to hate, and he worships it. Slowly but surely, you allow him to remove your clothing so he can fully show his adoration for every inch of skin, and you feel yourself come alive beneath his affection. The feel of his body against yours spurs on the growing heat between your thighs, and the moment you beg him to go further, he does.
You lose yourself in his loving embrace, letting him make you feel utterly beautiful as he draws wave after wave of pleasure from you. Letting yourself go, throwing alway all of your doubts and fears, it feels totally natural to feel his skin pressed against yours, sweating making your both glisten as you pant and groan. He grinds into you, spearing his cock deep into you, all the time whispering praises and prayers to your dips and curves. Only when you come undone around him does he stop, the snap and pull of his hips filling the quiet until he follows you over the edge.
“Was that okay, love?” he asks hoarsely, panting heavily as he settles you against his side under the covers. “I don’t want you to regret anything.”
“That was amazing,” you breathe in response, heading still swimming slightly.
“Good, you deserve nothing but praise. You’re mine, and you’re perfect in all your soft, squishy glory.”
You can't help but chuckle at that, especially as his rough palm rubs appreciatively over your soft hip as he says it.
"So you think I'm cute?"
"Aye, that's it," he chuckles back, placing a kiss on your forehead.
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Simon "not feeling anything"
“It was fine, it was sex” is one of those lines I keep coming back to because what does that mean. Even removed from context, in a scale of things that are supposed to be mind-blowingly fantastic or, at the very least, actually good, just "fine" will be perceived as negative. If you prepare someone a meal and they say "it was fine, it was food," you're probably going to think they didn't like it. If someone went out to pick a dress for a special occasion, and they go "it was fine, it was a dress" about the dress they picked... if you don't think they fucking hated that dress, you're likely assuming that person doesn't care about dresses at all. Like, dresses do not cause positive emotions at all. Picking a dress feels like nothing, perhaps. Maybe it's even it's even boring as hell.
A big component of that line is that it sounds dismissive, even more so because it comes with a Simon who is trying to change the subject. He would very much rather not talk and think about this at all (his final word on the matter is a dismissal as well – "it doesn't matter" – which comes in the context of highlighting the difference when you actually want it... "this is how it feels like when you're in love and turned on and so I actually want to do it, whatever works between Baz and me, as opposed to that other time when it wasn't like this and it was the opposite"). But there's something else I want to highlight here...
Fine, in the context of negative things, might not necessarily be seen as positive, but as something that you can handle.
In that sense, maybe it was "fine." In a fucked up way, maybe it was something that could be handled because it felt like nothing. (If this is something impossible for you to imagine, I invite you to look up conversations of real people who fall somewhere in the acespectrum sharing things in the vein of "I tried sex to see what all the buzz was about and it felt like literally nothing. Like washing my car: a tedious exercise. Maybe we're wired differently" – it's obviously not literally nothing, you can very much feel if something or someone touches you, but maybe you get the idea of what I'm trying to say.)
Simon has completely convinced himself that not feeling anything is fine – it's part of why his feelings for Baz are so difficult, and not just when it comes to deciphering them... having them at all is difficult. It's so much. The lack of feelings is what he liked about dating Agatha, after all. Having different interpretations is obviously alright, my own interpretations are richer after seeing others point out things that made me see things I didn’t notice (or saying things that sound wrong and interrogating “why does reading this make me feel like I just licked a goddamn lemon”) but sometimes, somethings are just missing the point. The point is that Simon doesn’t have those feelings for Agatha. If he had been attracted to her, he would have experienced certain feelings he would need to negotiate with. But he never had to do that – he's thrown into the reality of his feelings for Baz with no map, no guidelines, no clue of what do with himself at all. His attraction for Baz throws him into uncharted territory, not just in terms of intensity, but in terms of feeling anything of that nature at all. That doesn't fit into Simon's fucked up idea of "fine." Baz notes Simon goes from 0 to 100, without realizing how much that truly applies. (I'm sure I have other posts that are basically: before discovering he loves and wants Baz, Simon's only intense emotion that he's familiar with is anger, and it would be easy to mix up that heat with attraction to Baz, with whom he's constantly picking fights with, seeking his attention...)
Part of the point is that Baz is the first time he’s dealing with what attraction and romantic love truly feel like, and on top of that, is intense as hell. It's The Love. The Attraction of a lifetime – of many lives, even. Of all of them. If Simon ever had such feelings for Agatha, she would never have felt safe. I don't think people truly realize that when they speculate "there must have been the flames of something" between them at some point. If she had awakened those things at such a precarious and controlled part of Simon's life – we can't ignore how much his emotions had an effect on his crazy magic – it would not have been "fine." She wouldn’t have been an armor, for him ("if you’re as beautiful as her" — not only conforming but standing out in terms of beauty standards is a form of “standing out” in "the right way," of being aspiration — you are untouchable — the opposite of being neglected or rejected for someone as him). "She's the type of person a boy like me is supposed to want" wouldn't have been safe by itself if she also made him feel like exploding (his attraction for Baz, when Simon tries to act on it, feels like going off).
For the record, Simon's "fine" is not the good type of fine. It's not the type of "fine" that makes you sigh in relief. This is a guy who could get shot and say "I'm fine" while bleeding out. And that's just the thing. Simon "not feeling” is necessary so he can live according to others like he does, but it’s not that he doesn’t actually feel anything. He's not made of stone. But he represses his actual feelings, even without realizing (sometimes he's not repressed he can't even identify the thing being repressed, it's just hidden away somewhere... until he can) and seeks situations that don’t awaken anything in him. It's what's more comfortable... and you have to keep in mind this is someone who's used to be uncomfortable. Discomfort is familiar. It's "fine." Being in situations he doesn't actually want to be is "fine" because he can't even identify his own wants. It's not even a factor.
But it's not really fine in the good sense of the word. If it was, he wouldn't self-harm through that conversation, for once (using physical pain to distract himself from the internal discomfort – external discomfort feels good in comparison). It's not "fine" to date someone long-term when you don't feel anything (other than friendship, very tellingly) for them. It doesn't "save you" from feelings, it just makes you sad.
Since Simon avoids processing, he lacks vocabulary to describe what’s happening. Not thinking about what he wants also means he doesn’t question what he doesn’t want... and even if it doesn't seem like a big deal, doing unwanted things still has effects, even if you avoid processing them (I'm sure I wrote that post so I'm not going to elaborate here but I''ll say: associating sex with pressure, not pleasure – only food is associated with pleasure before Simon has sex with Baz – is one such effect). “It was just going through the motions” is Penny’s vocabulary. It's something she says to Simon when he's still not ready to process that everything he believes to be just "fine" it's not. The way he's been living up to that point (according to what everyone expects of him, following a map, not ever making choices about anything ever outside of battles and stalking Baz – Simon's only "me time" is about Baz) is not fine. If you make a list of every moment Simon acts genuinely, truly happy on the page? Most of them are about him being close to Baz. Kissing Baz, touching Baz, taking to Baz. Making choices about how to live his life (by itself unfamiliar, and does not feel "fine").
Sex with Baz is not fine. And it's not just because it's better than fine on a scale of "was it good?" (even acknowledging something like "I had sex and it wasn't good" it's feeling something – negative feelings are also not fine if the full force of them are processed, they're only fine if they can be pushed aside and repressed). It's not fine because it makes Simon feel so much, and after being so used to nothingness, it's a complete shock to his system. It's going from 0 to 100. It's bigger than magic – even the one he had (and back then, releasing his magic was the only type of release he knew... it's no wonder that another type of release would be so difficult, after all, the only type of release he's used to is destructive... but that's another post, too)
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I'd like to know your opinion on why ts songs are considered so good lyrically by her fans. That one line in cardigan is hailed as the peak writing skill by them. The one that says you drew stars around my scars. Am I missing something or are they just gaslighting me?
Hello- sorry it took me sooooo long to get back to you :) I am a busy little bee these days- but I love chatting with people too! <3
So, the line “you drew stars around my scars / but now I’m bleeding” is perhaps good writing, when we only compare Taylor Swift to her own work. It’s certainly a change from “the players gonna play, play, play,” but it is not somehow a gift to lyricism. I know that swifties tend to use lines like these to say that “look see, she is a talented writer” when the truth is that it’s just a boring metaphor that essentially goes nowhere in the song.
Yeah- They are literally gaslighting you. It’s an alright line- but it’s not genius. The reason swifties think this line is amazing is because of the alliteration between "scars" and "stars." Apparently one alliteration is enough to make someone into literary genius? Just one repetitive sound- and they think she’s pulling off something amazing.
Compare this line to a full narrative arc in an alliterative verse epic poem from early Germanic Literature- and Swift's writing is basically loose change on the dashboard compared to gold bar- lyricism.
So, her line "you drew stars around my scars / but now I'm bleeding" is mostly incoherent. She's honestly saying word salad in most of her songs- with vague rhymes at the end of each phrase- but I digress.
I think you're keying into a thoughtful observation here. Putting aside my comment on its general incoherence, let me first speak to the fact that this line is an attempt at metaphor.
She is saying "you drew stars" in effort to merge the conceptual point of "drawing stars" to someone reaching out- or creating interpersonal connection. She continues "around my scars" to showcase how this new connection sees her past, the “scars,” and is encapsulating it with a drawn star instead of, for instance, marking it out with a black mark or something. The connotative value of the word star, in this case, calls forward the idea of goodness and since it is tied to her connotative value of "scars" as a past hurt- the line ultimately means that some new interpersonal connection is viewing her past and approving of it rather than hating it. It's meant to ring as a redemptive arc- yet nothing in the song actually needs redemption or ever mentions it again. The theme drops immediately after the line finishes.
The line finishes, "but now I'm bleeding" which is meant to mean that the scar is reopened- because the connection she made is no longer interested in her. This analysis, however, requires many leaps in logic. I cannot point to any specific linguistic markers that would denote the connection between "scar" and "bleeding." Though Swift clearly means to interconnect these two points, scars don’t bleed. So, she’s trying to say that the scar has reopened- perhaps because the person who drew the stars is leaving. However, there is nothing in the language itself that suggests this conclusion; rather she relies on audience reception to jump from point "a" to point "b." She never calls it a wound, she mentions "bloodstain" is a later line- but the connection between all the different phrasing is tenuous at best. I mean that there is no storyline within the line itself that is suggestive of the meaning Swift is attempting to lay out.
Beyond this line- nothing in the whole song ever revisits the thematic purpose of the metaphor. She never mentions stars, or scars, and does not revisit the theme of redemptive love. She barely even lays out the idea of redemption in love in the first place- and further drops the imagery by never going back to the same theme again. She conjures up this image just to drop it immediately.
This is a pattern in her work- she writes one thing, and then drops the idea.
I mean it sounds clever- without actually being clever.
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