This Too, Is Yuri

"Don't," your girlfriend says, yanking your arm. Your thumb was up in the corner of your mouth, and you were gnawing on it slightly.

"Hey!" the grab was jarring, and honestly you weren't even aware you were nibbling your thumbnail, too focused on the movie in front of you. "Cut it out," you try and wriggle out of her grip.

She grabs the remote and pauses the movie. Her wrist is still around your arm and she jerks it up and towards your face again

"Look. Your cuticles are all peeled away and your thumb is wrinkly and red," she says.

"So?" you avoid eye contact, suddenly finding a loose thread on the couch very interesting. The hand not clenched by your girlfriend picks at it.

"So, it isn't good for your finger. Or clean, when was the last time you washed your hands?"

"Uhm..."

"That's what I thought. Next time I catch you doing it, there will be consequences."

Consequences, you think, yeah right. What's she going to do, cut my thumb off?

---

It's been bumper to bumper for what feels like forever. Your navigation app says there's an accident, on top of typical commuter traffic, plus an off ramp being worked on means you're late. Really late, for dinner with your girlfriend's parents, nonetheless.

There's a sudden tight burning feeling on your thigh. Something, or rather, someone, is pinching you. It breaks the anxious spiral you were in and you yelp, finger falling from your mouth.

"What was that for?" you turn to your girlfriend in the passenger seat, looking smug.

"Finger in the mouth. Consequences, remember?"

"Not while I'm driving! I could have crashed!"

"I wouldn't say you're actually driving right now," she says, indicating the sea of stationary cars around you.

You roll your eyes and huff, "semantics."

You consider just shutting up and letting it go, but the anxious tension in the car is making you a little edgy.

"It's not a big deal if I chew on my fingers or bite my nails. I don't get sick from it, my fingers don't get infected. Plus, I think it helps me focus sometimes."

"Not infected yet. But, that's not all it does."

"What do you mean?"

"You really haven’t noticed? Anytime you're sad, or scared, or stressed you start gnawing on your fingers like a beaver," she's smirking now, like this was some grand revelation she'd been hiding from you. "It's pretty obvious you find your fingers comforting. I'm surprised you've got any nails at all!'

"I mean, I guess..." you don't want to admit to it, but you know she's right. You do find nibbling your fingers soothing. God, how embarrassing. Who else puts their fingers in their mouth for comfort? Babies.

"This is giving me an idea!" You glance over again and can practically see the lightbulb flash over her head. She starts tapping rapidly on her phone, leaning to the side so you can't see.

"Care to share with the class?"

"No. Now focus on the road."

You're about to argue that there is literally nothing you need to be focusing on, when the car in front of you starts to inch forward. You relax your foot off the brake, and as you pick up speed the whole conversation leaves your mind.

----

"Ready?" she calls from the living room.

"Ready!" you respond behind a mouthful of popcorn. You carry the steaming and buttery smelling bowl into the living room and park yourself on the couch next to her, tossing in another mouthful.

"Before we start, close your eyes," your girlfriend says.

"Why?"

"Just do it!"

You close your eyes. You can hear a faint rustling...maybe she's digging in her pockets?

"Open your mouth,"

"Open my m-mmph!?" You don't even finish your thought before something is shoved in your mouth. It's bulbous, and hollow, and something connected to it is pressed against your lips. It's a...no, it couldn't be. Could it?

You open your eyes and go slightly crosseyed trying to look at what has been, quite abruptly, inserted between your teeth.

"A pashi-," you spit it out, "a pacifier, really?"

"Yeah!" She's beaming, for some reason. "Now you can have something in your mouth when you need to focus, or when you're anxious, or-"

"Um, I don't think so. I'm not a baby."

"This one is for grownups," she says, matter of factly.

"Well, this grownup doesn’t need a pacifier, thank you very much,"

"Says the grownup who sucks and chews their fingers,"

"I don't recall seeing an age limit on the finger-chewing-manual,"

"Just try it? Please, for tonight?"

Her sincerity catches you off guard. She really is trying to help you, it seems, even if her methods are a little humiliating.

"Fine, fine. If I think I'm going to put my fingers in my mouth, which I won't, I'll use the..." you can't quite get yourself to say the word.

"Pacifer? Binky? Paci? Soo-"

"Ok, ok I get it."

---

The popcorn bowl has been long discarded, just a few greasy kernels at the bottom. You're curled up, knees underneath you and head pressed against your girlfriend's shoulder when a particularly tense scene picks up on screen. Automatically, your fingers start creeping up your chin. Your pointer finger is hooked over your bottom lip and your teeth are clamping it in place.

Your girlfriend’s warm hand slowly tugs your finger away, and you let out a soft whine.

"Shh, shh," she says, as if soothing a fussy baby.

She slips the pacifier in your mouth, and you go to spit it out, but her fingers are pressing it tight against your lips.

"Try? For me?"

Her words trigger a deep urge in you, one to do whatever she says. It blossoms in your chest and a warm feeling you associate with blind obedience takes over. You give a little nod of your head and pull the pacifier in further, allowing her to release her fingers.

You rub your tongue over it and gently gnash your teeth on the soft rubber, getting a feel for it. Contracting your cheeks you give it a tentative suck, and find that it glides over your tongue smoothly. It takes barely any effort at all to get into a satisfying rhythm. Before you know it, your attention is back on the climaxing movie and the pacifier is bobbing on an even measure in your mouth. Any tension you'd been carrying from the day seems to melt away as you suckle. The stimulation in your mouth is helping you focus on the movie, and you don't feel the urge to give in to your typical restless squirming.

You don't think your fingers will be back in your mouth anytime soon.

I think one of the (many) things that make me so excited for deltarune 3 and 4 is that, as the game's midsection, it's going to be where we Finally get concrete insight into the game's themes and story, if that makes sense. LIKE, Obviously we do already know a whole lot about what the game is and will continue to be, But only TWO of a game's SEVEN chapters Is really not much of the game's total at all?? And it'll be so insane??? To actually have so much more of the game's meat?????

which is?? Huge???? Like in no more than a couple months an insane amount of theories are either going to be proven, completely discarded, or changed in new and unimaginable ways that NO one could've predicted. We might be seeing Follow up on things we've been theorizing and going crazy about FOR YEARS. Like, Mike?? Image Friend?? The ice palace?? The egg man??? Dess???? Etc etc, WE'RE GONNA SEE NEW SECRET BOSSES THIS YEAR. Think about that.

Also i am both excited and slightly scared of the fact that the chapter releases will probably make the game "mainstream" again 😭 Like especially cause the new chapters releasing on different consoles means more people are probably gonna play deltarune than ever before, and more Content of the game is gonna be available than ever before, for Everyone, and that's. Kind of scary BUT REALLY EXCITING. I want to see 1 trillion subscriber slop gaming youtubers playing deltarune and trying to understand what Woody Theory is

Also i think it'll be really fun when deltarune gets super popular on tumblr again. The era of when everyone was dropping the most haunting and beautiful snowgrave art pieces with 20k notes was so good. It must return.

What do you suppose an Affini hab unit actually looks like? I've been reading HDG for years now and off the top of my head I can't recall anything that describes them all that much outside of everything being bigger. Maybe I missed a story that explores the intricacies of Affini architecture and interior design, maybe I'm deeply strange for asking these kinds of questions about background details in kinky noncon comfort erotica, but I think it's important. Surely a key aspect of domesticating a sophont is making sure they're comfortable in their new surroundings? Maybe you could assume they look like typical sci-fi living quarters, but those are always SUPER depressing (why would anyone want to live in a sterile metal cube?) Considering the importance the Affini place on making sure their florets are safe and happy, I always picture them feeling incredibly vibrant and warm, a place that's somehow more like home than anywhere you've ever been before.

give that man a pussy. give that woman a dick. give him tits. give her a chest so flat you could stack cards on it. Grow up. get real

No because I NEED to hear everyone's theories for Rouxls Kaard NOW /nf

I genuinely think this silly lad is hiding something about himself like, remember this comic? IT HASN'T LEFT MY HEAD AND I HOPE IT'S CANON IN SOME WAY BECAUSE IT'S SO COOL?? HE'S THE RULES CARD I know you gotta be hiding SOMETHING

The whole idea of him not talking normally because if he does it triggers his powers and whatever he says instantly becomes a rule is so good

and yeAH I know he's also probably just a silly comic relief... unless...?

dude the doom syndicate designs are so ass that its making me have ideas. i want to try my hand at giving them new designs

The last part really resonates with me because recently I've disconnected almost entirely from franchise movies, current releases, anything in "the industry". At this point, the wells of Hollywood and big-budget videogames have been irreversibly poisoned for me and the only way I can connect with art anymore is either when it's something created by individuals, small teams, anything independent, or it's something I've created myself (and I am an individual). I think once you take that step back you really see how bad it's gotten. I feel like corporations have taken such insane steps to commodify and reduce what is, at its core, the very medium of human expression. All the talk of "IP" and "content" and "canon" and "consuming", is so sterile and lifeless, and I feel like the normalization of this kind of language is seriously affecting how people relate to anything creative. Someone else said it better than I ever could- "why on earth do you let a company buy the right to determine what you think and feel? Make them "the legal owners of what happens in your mind?""

I love the practice of requisitioning, remixing and reworking books, comics, movies etc. through any means you like, but I hate hate hate the way so much vocabulary that used to be rooted in individual creativity has been taken over by this kind of fucked up deference to mainstream publishing and ip.

easy example: everyone calls the characters they work up for their projects 'OCs' now. that genie is out of the bottle, I'm not even going to try and cram it back in. it's universal terminology. but I do want to reflect - why is the default position to assume that when someone says 'my characters' they mean something derivative, unless they specify 'my Original characters'?

similarly, all character relationships are 'ships'. but what's wrong with that? you say, it's just short for 'relationship'. and you would be right, by merit of completely ignoring the fandom ancestry and common understanding of that term in order to win an argument. because you know as well as I do that 'ships' aren't 'relationships', they're hypothetical romances that the speaker is rooting for. so why do I keep seeing people talk about shipping their OCs? why is a hypothetical relationship entertained and enjoyed by the creator of the work described using fan terminology?

I have for real no joke seen people talk about their 'headcanons' for their own characters, in their own stories. that's not a headcanon babe, that's canon!!! that's YOUR WORK. moreover, why are we even talking about the canonicity of your personal original writing? this isn't the star wars extended universe, why are international franchise IPs setting the baseline for the relationship you have with your writing and the terminology you use to conceptualise it?

tbc this is not a 'fandom brainrot' post. because I don't think it's fanwork that's the root of the problem. I think it's the insidious creep of capitalism and the ever more draconian weaponisation of copyright law that has rewritten our capacity for talking about creative work so that it revolves at all times around ownership and precedent. there is a deep learned anxiety about describing fictional works as fictional properties, that echoes in our vocabulary as we constantly make clear what is owned and what is not, what has been established on the record and what exists in the realm of speculation.

the reason 'fandom brainrot' is such a compeling stand-in for this issue is that it's really just one step downstream from all that voracious rent-seeking behaviour by publishers. if the only things you ever read or watch are in the milieu of those franchise copyright lawyers, that is the understanding of fiction-as-property you develop. if you're not exposed to a broader spectrum of art and artists, living and dead, who talk about their work as work - as expression, as experimentation, as a personal process and as a shared space with their audience - you will quickly be alienated from your own creative practice by design.

the point i want to make is this: going off the beaten track, exploring outside the franchises and bestsellers and box office babies, is not just a matter of good taste. imo it is a necessary act of solidarity with artists who still live, work and speak as individuals. it's a healthier environment for you as an artist. you deserve a relationship with your own work, not a ship.

Chapter 6: A fullfilling night

Chapter 5

Haha who could possibly fall asleep on a bar's counter ??? Haha, No One !... No one......

I have so many memories of walking friends home and be walked/carried home... Good times...

Of course, stay safe, take care of your friends !

And as always, big shout out to @lutiaslayton with the translation !