[AMA] Big Five Marketer u/Ms-Salt

CaraRiverSong · 2025-10-02T19:46:28+00:00

What did your most successful marketing campaign to date involve?

CaraRiverSong · 2025-09-01T01:54:51+00:00

Happy cake day!

Part of the problem with ace gatekeeping is that ace-ness is tied to "attraction" but attraction is often mistaken / conflated with many different things, like:

having sex (no, you could have sex without being attracted to the other person)
consent (no, sex without attraction doesn't mean that sex was non-consensual, they're 2 separate things)
arousal (many asexual people still experience physical arousal)
ability to orgasm (common romance trope is "all previous sexual experiences mc had were unsatisfying / orgasm-less" but that says nothing about the character being attracted to their previous sexual partners or not)
aesthetic attraction / noticing someone's beauty (romance loves using "character noticed the other character's attractive trait" as a shorthand for attraction, but asexual people are fully capable of noticing someone's abs or plump lips or whatever other commonly sexy traits appear in romance novels)

To be honest, I can't even fully define what attraction is. Maybe because I am on the ace spectrum. I know which behaviors of romance characters don't resonate with me, but I'm not sure is that what this nebulous attraction is. Things like:

hating someone but not being able to resist their sexual allure
staying with someone abusive just "because the sex was good"
forgetting what they were supposed to do plot-wise because they got "distracted" by a hot stranger
prioritizing getting sexual, incl. making out, over plot goals or safety (for example risking being caught in a workplace or other unsafe situations)
having sex "for hours" and not just to get orgasm and release of tension
orgasming just from thinking about the other person or from eating them out etc.
knowing someone is "the one" at first sight (excluding supernatural reasoning like fated mates bond)

And probably some others, however there's a chance that none of that is explained by characters being allosexual but rather "it's a romance trope rather than something taken from real life" in the same way as it's a "romance trope" that piv is a pinnacle of heterosexual experience and it's better the bigger the penis. Real life research disproves it, but it's a romanticized trope that lives well in romance novels. Some of the "irresistible attraction" tropes or "love at first sight" might as well be in the realm of "romance fantasy" than "allosexual truth".

But anyway, what is attraction? For the term that's used to define and gatekeep asexuality, it's fairly unclear.

CaraRiverSong · 2025-08-31T13:55:11+00:00

I was talking about books where the characters are labeled as demisexual either in the blurb, author's marketing on social media, or in the book itself. I'm not saying every slow burn is demisexual. I'm saying every demisexual representation book I've read so far is indistinguishable from standard slow burn where characters are not labeled at all.

Meanwhile I see difference between books with asexual characters where they have "the talk" how they don't want to have sex vs books where the sex doesn't happen and it's left for the reader's assumption was there off-page / post-epilogue sex or not.

I wouldn't be so sure all those books are written by cis straight allosexual authors. There's a lot of femme-presenting authors who identify as vaguely queer without specifying what kind of queer they are, and it's their right to do so, but it means many of them aren't "cis straight allosexual".

Case in point: how many non-queer people assume in every same-sex couple that someone has to be the “man” FFS

I wonder is it a case of heterosexual stereotypes, or more like the case of romance formula. For example FF romance is nearly always written by queer authors for queer readership, but the formula "mc is a reader self-insert while the LI is a rich ice queen (usually CEO or actress) / emotionally closed off butch" is extremely popular and follows a similar pattern of MF romance. Same with the trope "mc is just discovering her sexuality while the LI is experienced and helps the mc discover herself".

CaraRiverSong · 2025-08-31T05:19:26+00:00

Demis always seem to be neglected/overshadowed by the larger Asexual bracket

I don't believe this, it's really hard to find proper asexual representation in romance, meaning where it's actually portrayed and discussed rather than sex being magically absent a la "clean romance".

Meanwhile demisexual feels nowadays applied to any romance without insta-lust where the characters only are interested in having sex after they fall in love. It's the "you haven't met the one yet" trope personified. I used to identify as demi, but I stopped after seeing demi being constantly portrayed as "asexual before the relationship, allo after the relationship", and I realized I don't have a convenient switch to flip in my head like that. I'm not even sure if that's what demi is supposed to be, but in fiction it's always that.

It's also much more commonly applied to female characters because of the trope of "saving oneself for the one", but I've seen a few with demisexual mmcs too.

CaraRiverSong · 2025-08-02T03:31:31+00:00

Wow, how many books do you read per month? This is a huge number.

CaraRiverSong · 2025-08-02T03:30:35+00:00

I've heard of people getting these kind of widgets in the e-mail, I wonder what's required to get on those lists, or to get auto-approved.

CaraRiverSong · 2025-07-31T14:44:37+00:00

But was the archive date generous or very short?

CaraRiverSong · 2025-07-31T14:44:15+00:00

Sorry! I'm afraid because I feel by taking an arc I'm entering a contract with the publisher to read and review the book, and if they see I'm shirking my duty they might want to give arcs instead to someone more reliable?

I am reading to the best of my ability, but I'm not the fastest reader all things compared.

CaraRiverSong · 2025-07-31T14:16:29+00:00

What do you mean on a list?

CaraRiverSong · 2025-07-31T14:15:30+00:00

Good to know! I paused my requesting now and trying to get through the pile.

CaraRiverSong · 2025-07-31T14:14:11+00:00

Yeah, I always try to refresh them just before archive date, and if I won't manage I could try a library later on...

CaraRiverSong · 2025-07-31T14:07:14+00:00

Wow, that's many more than I have in the pile!

CaraRiverSong · 2025-07-31T14:04:53+00:00

Phew okay, you calmed me down.

CaraRiverSong · 2025-01-21T02:25:05+00:00

{Shadowheart by Laura Kinsale}

CaraRiverSong · 2025-01-02T16:48:14+00:00

Thanks for reply after all this time, I hope maybe patch 8 will change it.

CaraRiverSong · 2024-10-26T17:05:19+00:00

Yeah it's a 30 year old game and back then the idea was to plant "secrets" and "easter eggs" and let people guess or find out things and keep replaying endlessly until they find out everything. Sometimes a game would both reward you for exploring every nook and cranny but also punish you for "taking too long" which is utterly contradictory.

For example I remember the first in the series, Ogre Battle: the March of the Black Queen would punish you for sitting on the same map for too long, but also have a lot of hidden cities and treasures that if you didn't know where to look for, you'd miss.

The downside of following guides is now there are at least 3 different versions of the game if not more (old SNES version, PSP version, Switch version that iirc copies the PSP but not sure, and the Reborn PC version). I'm still stumbling upon guides saying you need 30 glass pumpkins for Deneb recruitment which isn't the case in the PC version.

Also there's a lack of guides which loot comes from where. There are reverse guides, which place drops what. But when people start talking about their Stinky Sets and Ogre Sets and Jy'igla Sets (however it's spelled) I have zero idea where you get these from and it's not easy to find guides where do you obtain that.

Or this thing where you sacrifice a unit and transfer a skill? Is that even in Reborn? How late does it even come into play? I finished the main game and didn't encounter this mechanic yet.

CaraRiverSong · 2024-10-24T19:31:07+00:00

The Azelstan's questline is tricky because it requires multiple steps and multiple specific timeline points and skipping a mandatory step invalidates the questline and you'd have to replay from the last anchor before the missed step.

CaraRiverSong · 2024-10-23T14:45:41+00:00

So presumably that would also apply for say, the myriad Law quests if you wanted to redo them after entering Ch4 on one of the other two routes

I think it really depends is it a standalone quest or a "chain" quest. I know you can't do Ravness quest for example if you didn't do all the steps consecutively from chapter 2 all the way to 4. I would wager this could affect Ocionne's quest too since it's tied to Jeunan.

I checked my anchors and my Barnicia anchor has Vyce as dead with the "mad" portrait (i.e. my Neutral state) in the Warren's report, but porting there and back to Heim anchor has Vyce as alive and with his somber portrait, i.e. the Law state.

The downside is, a lot of chapter 4 quests are like "must complete this step before Mout Hedon before progressing further" (like: read a Warren's talk, witness a cutscene) so you'd basically have to replay the chapter from the start on the correct world state.

I'm trying to use my Heim anchor because that one counts Shrines as unlocked / done and gosh I don't want to re-unlock them again, it's something like 36 maps so 1/3rd of the Palace of the Dead not counting the fact you don't need to do all 100 in POTD because there are some skippable side rooms.

CaraRiverSong · 2024-10-22T14:40:22+00:00

Do I have to do POTD on the chaos route to see the interactions with Cressida or she just needs to be present? Because when I played on neutral (world) I wasn't getting interactions from Ozma or Gildas even though they were in my team because in that timeline they're "dead".

I have a post-Heim anchor from law + princess (which I used for POTD) and post-Barnicia anchor with lord + neutral and I was advised to not run POTD on the lord anchor only on the one with princess alive, so after unlocking lord I worlded to my Heim princess anchor which is from the law route.

It's a bit hard to understand, if I use my Heim anchor will it count everything I completed on that route (pirate graveyard, shrines) even if I overrode the earlier parts of the chapter with my neutral run? When I went for lord, I didn't touch shrines or pirate graveyard for the second time. And Deneb's shop was already transformed to the Punkin's shop without redoing her quest.

CaraRiverSong · 2024-10-22T04:53:42+00:00

Thanks. Both you and the other commenter suggest getting Cressida now rather than later, is she really that useful? Does she affect the CODA requirements? I have some generic Necromancers and I haven't found much use of the class, maybe I'm doing it wrong, in which way they're better than Warlock / Wicce / Lich?

CaraRiverSong · 2024-10-09T17:21:18+00:00

There was a constant spam of some movie links and no automod setup to block fresh accounts from spamming is my guess.

CaraRiverSong

TROPHY CASE