Amagire

great discussion on this!! Also great tip on the KJ Charles books. I love love loved the Kim Darling series! Her f/f stuff has left me cold-to-meh though so I'm extremely excited to hear a recc for another m/m story.

Gotta say, that last example smacks of trying to avoid Getting Canceled™. The defensive "can't have Unhealthy Relationships/BDSM™ depicted in media, people will get mad!" voice is strong sometimes, I can't imagine it's easy figuring out how to satisfy and/or ignore it. Good to remember that it can kill a scene's tension/eroticism though.

have him stop if the wizard says 'stop'. like a normal person would. you only need a safeword if 'stop' is not actually 'stop'

So many people don't get this but YES, SERIOUSLY. "Don't stop even if I tell you to" is its own specific kind of play and not the default any time anything kinky is happening! mean, how dangerous would it be to assume that? Especially with a new partner?

"Forgot the safeword" is sort of a comedy staple I guess, but c'mon, people's brains don't completely fall out when they're doing kink, if someone says "hey, seriously, I don't feel good," a good dom who hasn't very specifically agreed to this roleplay is not going to respond "that's not the magic wooooord"

You are so wise

I agree! However, I'm going to be finicky just because, and excuse it by the fact that truth to the cultural specificity of the past is the point here.

When you say "they may not want to have a difficult conversation spelling out what they want, because they're men in england in a period before therapy", I infer that part of what's implied there is "it's England, so they're going to be repressed and emotionally inarticulate, right?" Which seems like reading a modern stereotype back into an era where its applicability is debatable.

I mean regarding the example given, the Regency era was in the midst of the transition from the 18th-century culture of tender, emotionally voluble "sensibility", something which seems to have been particularly pronounced in England, and the Victorian heyday of the stiff upper lip. The backlash had begun in the late 18th century, and (as you would expect) it came first for men, who (as you would expect) had never been as widely engaged by sensibility as women, but such cultural currents don't turn overnight, and queerness obviously complicates the workings of masculinity. Move to an example a few decades earlier and the supposition breaks down further. The direction of cultural change is itself changeable, and the idea of enduring "national character" is a fiction.