Grrl Power #998 – All’s well that succs well?
I was trying so hard to trim this tale down to the basics but then in panel 4 I couldn’t help stick in a joke about… I guess it’s about ableism? Sort of? There’s absolutely a need to be aware of discriminatory thinking, but I also think there’s a cutoff, where all parties need to be cognizant of reality. If someone gets both their arms blown off in a potato gun incident, I think it’s okay to suggest that learning sign language or juggling might present a slightly steeper difficulty curve than usual. Not saying you can’t or shouldn’t, and I’ll try not to use the word disabled if you don’t like it, just please don’t bite my head off if I make an offhanded (no pun intended) comment about thinking you might have better luck Riverdancing than rock climbing. Personally, if I lost both my arms, my first instinct wouldn’t be to beligerently sign up for the patty-cake championships, but I might get annoyed if someone I worked with constantly said “hand-off” instead of “delegate.”
I don’t know, I wasn’t trying to get all insightful. I just thought it was funny. My point was, they’ve all had to sit through Archon’s HR videos, and telling someone they need to be “fixed” is probably on the no-no list.
“Why did you attack me with that bucket of water?” “You were on fire.” “Well, that’s just immolationist.”
Panel 5: If I’d had another page for this sequence, I was going to write about how if humans could gene-edit ourselves, our first step might be to make it so we could synthesize vitamin c. Some monkeys can do it. Most mammals can, but at some point one of our ancestors had a mutation that cost him the ability. Obviously he had access to oranges and was probably swinging a big dick, so here we are. But then what’s the next step? Make it so we can synthesize all the vitamins? Cure male-pattern baldness? Eliminate breast cancer? Two hearts are better than one, etc etc. At some point, those people couldn’t realistically call themselves humans. I think usually the species divide is defined at being able to interbreed and produce viable, fertile offspring. Once you lose that, you’re not really the same species any more. Dabbler’s point was yeah, we could get rid of our soul-hole, and our horns and weird skin colors and throat clits, but we certainly wouldn’t be succubi anymore.
“I’m sorry, what was that last one?” “Come and find out.”
There were some concerns about Dabbler being a security risk if she has a foreign master she’s beholden to, and those are perfectly valid. If she was 22, she would definitely be a risk unless her master was also on the team and had equivalent or higher security clearance than her. But she’s 187, and has been able to resist the obedience compulsion for a long ass time.
Oh, and as far as the symbols on the collars go, the 4-x’s isn’t emblematic of anything about Tom specifically, like he doesn’t have a birthmark that looks like 4 X’s or anything. It just forms when the bond is established. That said, it could carry over from some symbol the master strongly identifies with. Like with Deus, it might be that lopsided X on his face, but it usually some unique symbol, like a magical QR code.
Tamer: Enhancer 2 – Progress Update:
Still working on that sex scene. I don’t really want to FTB, but I haven’t really been in the mood to write it. It’s a scene with Yxlyn, and I think because I wrote her so naive and innocent in the first book, writing a sex scene with her feels tawdry or something? Which is stupid because the book opens on the scene with her and Sam – which I’ve already written. I don’t consider that a spoiler because the first book ends with them crawling into the little cavelette for their first time together. Admittedly it’s a really weird way to open a book, but that’s just where I cut it last time. Poor planning if I’m honest.
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They like their bonds? So they like being slaves? They like being property? That seems… problematic at best, from an authorial perspective.
Knowing some people with … interesting fantasies~, I think that’s supposed to be a BSDM joke–a fair few people have sexual fantasies precisely about being slaves/property, and sexuality is tied very intimately into succubi’s nature.
That, and it’s hard to shake off instincts–you can’t step outside yourself and assess your mind from some neutral perspective, only use one part of you to assess the others, and since succubi were designed for sexual slavery from the beginning, it makes sense that the desire to … be on that end of that kind of relationship, would be programmed into them, in such a way that removing it would be something they would find to be as insane as we would find removing our desire for fun, love, or excitement. The orthogonality thesis tells us that you can create a being that *wants* any arbitrary thing, and preserving your own desires is a convergent instrumental goal (for if you edit away your own desire for something, your actions will no longer systematically bring it to pass).
(Of course, this argument suggests succubi shouldn’t have risen up against their original owners in the first place. My explanation for that is that the alignment problem is hard–you can put all kinds of drives into a being you’re creating, but if they aren’t *exactly* what you want and if the being is remotely capable, their relentless pursuit of the drives you gave them will quickly reach into the realm where what you told them and what you want diverge. Evolution put the desire for sex into humans but didn’t account that we’d invent birth control–and succubi’s creators put the desire to have an owner into succubi but didn’t account that they’d consider switching owners.)
I have basically the same view on things- plus, eugenicists tend to ignore the fact that what’s “better” is highly situational, evolution is just fitting in a niche.
They also tend to either be bodymodders (who, well, get fantastical with things really fast- I think that sort of thing is better left to individual preference than done species-wide) or they think they, themselves, are the ideal. Which just isn’t accurate most of the time. For instance, people who think we can “cure autism”- the only reason it’s really a disability in the first place is because society is made for neurotypical folks.
Theoretically, if we were instituting species-wide gene modding for a specific neurotype, autism would be optimal, as autistic people prioritize information-first communication over tone-first communication, as well as being “monotropic”, meaning we do best when devoting our focus to one specialty towards one thing at-once- in a society where you can outsource jobs to others, this is just better.
But eugenics movements will never agree with that- they just see autistic people struggling in present society and go “hmmyes. bad.” It’s extremely shortsighted. (I could also talk about how it’s traditionally been linked to race superiority but that’s a stupid argument, what matters is what it’s about now, and these days it’s more ableism.)
Even ignoring the kind of people that like eugenics (classic “surely I am the exemplar” eugenicists and genemodders) and pretending for a moment that this ideology exists in a vacuum and the people agreeing with it have perfectly rational motivations, you’re right that at a certain point we just wouldn’t be human. At a certain point we’d just be an immortal brain in a jar eternally experiencing endorphins with our diminishing returns removed and wouldn’t even have sapience- once everything’s already optimized, sapience is a suboptimal strategy, as you don’t need to think anymore.
It helps to remember that there are terminal goals and instrumental goals- you have to decide what “better” means to decide what “better” means, you can’t just go “well OBVIOUSLY we’d be better without this”. Personally my terminal goal is improving sapient QOL. And right now, there are many faster and more agreeable ways to do that than eugenics (and yes, something being agreeable does make it a better solution from a pragmatic standpoint, building a bridge over some holy river or whatever will objectively be slower than building it elsewhere due to the protests).
And we have to consider the setting we’re talking about, too. In the Grrl Power setting there are also many sapient species, so you have to also consider- what’s the most optimal sapient species? And should everyone who isn’t them just jump into the nearest black hole and leave everything they have to said optimal race? Is the optimal race even sapient? Should sapience be eradicated? Is the optimal strategy to make a grey goo that assimilates all matter and then experiences eternal “happiness”? How do you define happiness from the standpoint of a grey goo swarm? Why does our morality have happiness as a goal in the first place? Isn’t that just a base survival instinct from the monkey days?
With all those questions, and the fact that the vast majority of living organisms with functioning self-preservation instincts would answer “no, of course not, what the fuck” to the idea of dying in order to leave everything to a ‘better’ species, I think it’s very good writing to have the dominant philosophy in that universe among alien species be anti-eugenics. Realistically, it’s the only standpoint that COULD exist from such a perspective, realistically speaking- otherwise there wouldn’t be succubi. “I wouldn’t want to require a master” does not equal “Dave writing succubi as requiring a master and being mostly fine with that is wrong”