One thing that reading all the activist timelines I have on birbsite and elsewhere has really driven home for me is the sense that I'm better off writing second-world fantasy, because if I tried to write "my native culture," I'd be accused of creating unrealistic characters.

My culture is inherently queer. My culture doesn't think twice about people deciding on a day-to-day basis that they're a new gender, a new species, a new material. Identity changes are signs of discovery and understanding, and they're things to be celebrated. Any plot that can be solved by people having a ten-minute talk is not a real plot in my world.

My culture is inherently poly. I have a wife and two pets. One of my housemates is in a polycule that crosses multiple state lines and can't be graphed on a two-dimensional surface without overlap. The worst I've ever gotten or given when negotiating sex outside the relationship was "be home by this time" and "I'm not interested but I want you to have fun." We had to INVENT WORDS to describe the relationships forms we were creating just so we could talk about them.

@literorrery Wait which polycule? Did it get non-planar finally? Last I tried I could only get K3,3 by including 'regular hookup' dotted lines. ;)

@indi I was pretty sure Em's couldn't be flattened any more, but if I'm wrong, I'll cop to that and blame narrative auxesis.