January 13th, 2026, Section 1

The Strength to say "No More"

This book is terrifying. This book is mortifying. I read a little bit and I was on the edge of my seat. I had to take a break to scream into a pillow. Pathologic (2) is an unflinching master. Pathologic 2 held me down and hurt me and until I begged and pleaded to be let go. Still more it sank it's teeth into me. Pause? Yellow? Red? I did not say these things. I did not take my break. I did not lower the difficulty. I did not log off or back away. I felt like I had a difficult time understanding what life would be like without affection of the person who told me to play it, and so I felt incapable of saying no to this thing that operated as her proxy.

I just read Leash by Jane DeLynn. There was a quiet, real terror in the anonymous sex "Chris" engages in with the person that holds the mask. Too familiar to me is the sensation of the safe word at the tip of my tongue. Too familiar to me is the sensation of the end of the world if only I ceased to obey, if only I ceased to advocate for myself. She really did love me though, and so in that is the even greater tragedy, which I prayed did not befall "Chris," the tragedy that I hurt myself for nobody, not even her. I wanted to be pet again, that's all. Now I'm pet every day. Now fingers through my hair do not feel like the graces of angels but mere flesh through dead tendrils. I'm loved so much and it's become very easy for me to say no. I wonder what will happen when I play Pathologic 3; I feel less scared of it having written this than before.

Back to Leash, it's effectively divided into a couple parts. The first part is written very well in an unflinching tone. The second part is frankly bizzare and beyond the plausible imagination, and the last bit is simply wish fulfillment (what if the human traffickers were actually based and consensual?). Above is mostly in response to the first part, where Jane DeLynn describes some rather normal BDSM, and the lengths the main character Chris is willing to go for her dominatrix. The second half is an imaginative fantasy where shit is eaten, disease is ignored, and the physical tactile experience no longer mirrors anything possible in reality. This also happens after the inflection point where Chris is caned 200 times, and her dom has to use the safe word because she no longer feels comfortable hitting her anymore. If this were a book about BDSM, the horrors of intimacy and the nature of boundaries, the perspective should have switched here. It's more about being bored I think. Even Chris's live becomes boring to her, but she doesn't really admit it. In that sense, it's not really about the hedonistic treadmill. The ending is so rushed, I don't actually feel like it's about anything. It's shocking, but in the way that the schlocky sex of Philosophy in the Budoir is shocking: "DOLMANCE, measuring - Yes, right you are: fourteen long, eight and a half around. I've never seen a larger. 'Tis what is called a superb prick." Leash started so gripping, but then devolved into something truly eye rolling (a fist in the esophagus?), and then it kind of lost me.