Weekly Update 17/04/2021
Good afternoon!
Firstly, let me start by saying that the new prompts for this year's Monstrous May are out! You can check out the announcement post on Twitter here or on Tumblr, and they're open to absolutely any creator who feels like participating. Simply take as many prompts as you like, and create work for them - art, fiction, TikToks, sketches, edits, meta, headcanons, etc. Fanworks are welcome, as is adut work and erotica. Just post for each day in the #MonstrousMay hashtag on Twitter, or tag as Monstrous May on Tumblr!
Here's the prompts from last year, and if you peruse the #MonstrousMay and #MonstrousMayChallenge tags, you'll find people's prompt fills from last year.
Media Recommendations:
I recommended Severance a few weeks ago, but the finale has come out since then and it ripped my little brain into shreds, so I'm recommending it again:
Severance - Created by Ben Stiller (of Night At The Museum fame) and Aoife McArdle, Severance is a sci-fi thriller based around a dystopian/modern-day horror premise. It's centred around workers on what is known as a Severed floor - workers undergo a surgical procedure to formally "sever" the mental and emotional connection between their working selves and their at-leisure selves. The people they are on the job have no memory or awareness of their lives outside of working hours, and on days off, they have no memory of their time at work. It's a really, really interesting show that's digging into a lot of ideas around cybernetic advancements and also workers' rights, and what I'm loving most about it is that it's effectively a TV show where almost the entirety of the main cast are exhibiting symptoms of moderate-to-severe brain damage both in and outside of work. Moreover, it also has an unbelievably tender love story between two of the older working guys, played John Turturro and Christopher Walken, and as you guys know, I'm a sucker for old dudes in love.
Anyway, otherwise I would like to recommend:
Cucumber (2015, cr. Russell T. Davies) - Surprising nobody with a knowledge of my usual proclivities, the unapologetically and joyfully queer pirate show has imparted on me an insatiable lust for Con O'Neill, so I've been digging back thrugh a lot of the work he's in - I watched Cucumber/Banana/Tofu when it came out in bits and pieces, but I was a teenager at the time and found the whole thing pretty boring, so imagine my surprise watching it now and finding it disgustingly, painfully relatable in so many ways. This is a drama about literally the worst man you could imagine and all of his long-suffering friends - it's ultimately a series about repression and repressed desire and the trauma of just... being queer in a world that insists it isn't. It's about sex and it's about desire and it's about navigating the world when you feel fundamentally unlovable - every character is so fleshed out and so real, and the agony watching this is just palpable. There's one character in particular that made me feel like Russell T. Davies had personally reached out of my laptop screen and smacked me gently across the face and called me a stupid traumatised little twink, but that kind of personal call-out is always a good sign, I think. I really do recommend Cucumber, and while it doesn't have quite the same impact, the two companion shows - Banana and Tofu - are also worth checking out, Banana for a more light-hearted messy vibe, and Tofu as documentary for just a real insight into sex and relationships.
Bedrooms and Hallways (1998, dir. Rose Troche) - I've wanted to watch this for ages because Tom Hollander portrays some top-shelf fruit in this but couldn't find it anywhere, but someone mentioned Con O'Neill's in it too so I did another search and I got it. It's very nineties and that's constant, but it's also so messy and so joyful in how messy it is - like, have you ever wanted to get fucked on the floor of a stranger's house by Hugo Weaving? Of course you have, and now you can watch Tom Hollander do exactly that. Everyone in this is just the right kind of unbearable and ridiculous, and it's really fun seeing cis men navigate the pecularities of masculinity and sexuality when they're so bad at it, but trying so hard.
Boiling Point (2021, dir. Philip Barantini) - This is billed as a thriller and I wouldn't describe it as that, but I also wouldn't know how else to describe it. If you've ever worked in FnB, you'll feel this movie pretty viscerally - it's a window into one bustling, up-and-coming high class restaurant, and it's unbelievably compelling for being just that. It's just an everyday piece of people's lives, and it had me by the throat throughout - I've met every character in this personally, probably a dozen times apiece, and I loved that aspect of it, loved seeing the difference between customer-facing personality and that with other people, the relationships behind the counters and in the backrooms, and it's brimming with tension throughout.
The Kitchen (2019, dir. Andrea Berloff) - This one has received middling reviews, and frankly I'm gonna put that down to racism and the fact that a lot of people don't know how to digest flawed, complex characters, especially not when those characters have the audacity to be women or Black. This is 70s period piece following three women who are all the wives of Irish mobsters - when their husbands are jailed, they take over the local protection and intimidation rackets, struggling to learn the trade while also grappling with misogyny and anti-Blackness from within their own communities. It just does a lot of riffs on this sort of story that are a real relief, and Ruby particularly, played by Tiffany Haddish, really steals the whole film, she's got so much depth to her and for once she actually gets credit and respect as a character rather than just being killed off or thrown aside.
Apart from these, I'd also recommend Turning Red (2022, dir. Domee Shi) which is such a fun and adorable film, I really enjoyed it; The Hunt For Red October (1990, dir. John McTiernan), the first half of which is kind of dull but then really ramps up in its second half, and had me rooting for poor Sam Neill to get his round American woman and his RV vacation, and Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (2017, dir. Angela Robinson), which is a bisexual BDSM period piece that actually surprised me with how good it was. Oliver Platt doesn't have much in this but he's very hot in it if he's your thing the way he is mine.
I also had cause to rewatch Treasure Planet and Atlantis: The Lost World this week, and they're not new to me, but if they are to you, they're always worth a watch (or a rewatch!). Those two movies alongside Lilo and Stitch and the Road to El Dorado really show off that golden age for animated films, and these ones drive me wild every time.
New Works Published
Erotic Short: Caught
A thief is caught in the treasury and his punishment is delivered by the guards on duty.
Rated E, cis M/trans M/cis M, 3.2k. Unadulterated porn without plot — dubious consent, anal, vaginal, and oral sex, spitroasting, size difference, rough sex, fingering, messy sex with a bit of squirting and also messy oral, double penetration (vaginal/oral and vaginal/anal), crying, mindbreak, pussy spanking, spanking, some nipple play. Unsafe sex, no prophylactics or contraceptives are used or mentioned.
On Medium / / On Patreon
Our Flag Means Death Fanfiction: What's Hot
Rated E, 1.3k, Izzy Hands/sex worker OC, implied Lucius Spriggs/Izzy Hands. Izzy blows off steam, which does not go unobserved.
Fantasy Short: Agreements and Curses
A young man is dispatched to a fae land and joins the princes’ retinue.
20k, rated M, M/M. As part of an exchange program between the magical city from which he hails and the fae island state of Einsamal, a young man is sent as a child to explore fable and adventure, and in the process falls in love with one of the princes. The prince, a child of Loki, faces his own trials.
Some slow fantasy, a bit of romance and Norse trouble and emotions and angst. Introducing Princes Loptr and Fenris, Boniface Nottingham, aaaand with some more of Loki at his usual mischief.
On Medium / / On Patreon
Erotic Short: Archival Management
An archivist with a messy life finds himself intensively managed by his sexy, older boss.
Erotic short, 10k, cis M/M. Magical archivists in Camelot with the most mundane of delicious emotional and sexual issues. Featuring age difference, orgasm denial, oral, desperation, crying, a bit of mild humour and nastiness, delicious emotional manipulation, and a heavy dose of mind-reading.
On Medium / / On Patreon
Erotic Short: Sleeping Beauty
A sailor takes something that doesn’t belong to him, and the captain punishes him.
9.2k, cis M/trans M and cis M/M. A carpenter’s apprentice can’t resist the captain’s cabin boy while he’s meant to be performing maintenance, and afterwards, the captain and the cabin boy punish him between them — if the apprentice wants another chance at sex with the cabin boy, he has to let the captain bugger him first.
On Medium / / On Patreon