First and foremost, apologies for only getting back to your rambling post about 1 month later, but I started typing an answer on the same day you posted this, then got caught up in other things (and dms/replies, as before late October I've been on a bit of a break from f95 for about 3 months due to IRL issues) and forgot about it, so sorry about that and I'll try to address everything now!
Thanks, old friend!
Considering our shared love for long, rambling posts, I appreciate your answer very much. As for "The Renaissance", I have to say I haven't played it yet (I was kind of waiting for it to become bigger so the story would be more fleshed out before digging into it). Would you recommend it at this stage -- or is it the kind of piece that just leaves you frustrated because you want to know what happens next?...)
I assumed you played it given you mentioned the "Dostoievskian inevitability" of the plot and you believing "Raskolnikov" would be an adequate name for MC - looking back on your old post, I realise I misread it at the time. As for recommending it now, I stand by what I said in my previous post and I'm quite certain I'll enjoy the downfall of the MC in the Renaissance more than the one of the MC in Moving Down or Vicious Circle, and the story already ties together the lore of the expanded Miron Universe quite a bit so to speak, but if you also want a decent amount of femdom scenes in it you might prefer to wait for a couple more updates. (as for now the dev is mostly "setting the stage" for "the (femdom) renaissance")
Speaking of Dostoyevski, have you ever read a short novel by him called "The Gambler"? It's written all the way back in 1866, but that novel was legit the first femdom porn I encountered in my life - before I even spoke English properly and only had femdom fantasies in my mind I accidentally borrowed a copy of that book from my school's library, (I think I must've been about 13 at the time) and the main character was very obsessed with a young woman, briefly fantasized a couple times about becoming her slave, and there even was a short foot and sock worship scene with the 2 of them in bed, where she was all giggly and playful and not really weirded out at all by his way of expressing his love!
To this day it still blows my mind that that book was written in the middle of the Victorian era, and at least back when I was younger, and also learned that Voltaire was into dominant women, it fueled a bit this conspiracy theory of mine that intellectual men are likelier to be sexual submissives and crave the whip of a beautiful intelligent woman.
Anyway, old stories aside, "The Gambler" is still a good and pretty light read as far as classical literature goes, (certainly lighter than "Crime and Punishment"), so I'd certainly recommend it to you, especially if you're also interested in early literary depiction of femdom! (there's very little of it, as this isn't a book full of smut like "Les Liaisons dangereuses", but interesting nonetheless)
That might be a good idea; I had written some parts of it (not much, but still) in full, and others were in the form of notes and suggestions for further developments. We may talk about that in a DM if you're willing to listen... But as in your case, RL fell on me like a ton of bricks (starting after Trump's election, and especially in the last year or so), so everything remains pretty much were it was the last time I talked about it. I even had found someone who was interested in helping me with pictures (I really suck at drawing, on paper or with a computer...)... and that is no longer the case. And now it doesn't look like I'll be able to return to it any time soon ... Still, I'm personally very interested in these "world-slowly-changing" kind of stories because I think, in a sense, they mirror the evolution inside us kinksters from when we first become aware that we're not exactly in the sexual mainstream through our evolution and doubts to our current final stages... but at the social level. Also, I've always had a passion for utopias and utopian fiction (one way to try social ideas as a kind of thought experiment), but I was sad that most works said more about the end stage, when the utopia was already established, than about how easy or hard it was for our world to change into it. I guess in the end it is my own personal curiosity about how social change, especially deep, radical social change, is possible at all, and whether it really improves anything or just dresses old evils in new clothes.
Can certainly relate, and will send you a DM about your game idea - would be glad to help in any way I can if you have writer's block, or even if you don't I'd love to give you some friendly feedback!
Speaking of stories that tackle more achieving utopian societies, (eg the revolutionary process of getting there, more than the established utopia) have I ever recommended to you the erotica book series
You must be registered to see the links
by Will Lowtide? It's quite a loveless hardcore Femdom book with NTR in it as well, but it deals with establishing a Matriarchy in a patriarchal fantasy universe that is at the same level of technological development as 18th century Europe, and all but the last volume of the book, Dictatresses, deal mostly with establishing the Utopian (or dystopian if you wish) Gynarchic society, the budding revolution and societal transformation, so you might like this trilogy!
I only like Lesbian NTR myself (eg the mistress cheating on the sub with another woman) or situations where multiple males worship the same mistress as submissives, but certainly not femdom NTR where the mistress prefers stronger male "jocks" to submissives, (as I feel that undermines the femdom dynamic in the first place and unnecessarily inserts elements of maledom in a femdom narrative) and I remember one or two scenes like that from those novels, but the story still kept me reading till the end regardless. They're decent novels that have a bit into what you wished for in this post and the main mistress in the story was pretty cruel and ruthless to the poor male MC, not unlike our beloved Maria from Moving Down!
It suddenly occurs to me that my reaction to Maria the character may be seen as some kind of smug criticism of MironY's talent. I will say, he is a good writer of dialogues, he is great at creating interesting settings and ambiances, and his love for what he does is evident in every word! Now, I think, for instance, that the MC character is well-written, perhaps because he is deep down one of us, a subbie who is not at first aware of that and who hides his desires between the simple façade of vanilla romance. MironY captures him quite well, and I find it easy to both empathize and understand MC as a person, despite finding some of his decisions stupid (borrowing that money, for instance). I think MironY does great when showing how MC never actually gets angry at Maria for turning into a bitch, and how he half-accepts that he himself is at least partially to blame for it ('if only you had stood up for yourself and been better at selling contracts!...'): it's a mixture of not thinking much of himself and his own talents, plus his own hidden submissiveness, plus his love for Maria. That is very well done, with many good examples of him behaving exactly as he should, given this personality--nothing to complain about there.
Maria, I think, has the problems I mentioned. I think MironY had, as you say, a concept of her. That happens. Umberto Eco said, about The Name of the Rose, that it all started from him suddenly want to have a monk commit murder in the setting of an old, 15th-century abbey. Vince Gilligan said his Walter White (from Breaking Bad) came from him wanting to see 'Mr. Chips slowly turn into Scarface.' In this way, I think MironY wanted to see the transformation of a sweet wife into a Bitchy Femsupremacist Mistress. But where, say, Gilligan chronicled the changes in Walter White -- who already started out with the potential to 'break bad', given that he took the path of crystal meth despite there being other possibilities for solving his financial problems -- as they should be: with him believing most of the way through that he was a hero, that he was doing it 'for his family', and with him slowly indulging in bigger and bigger crimes until he himself had to admit he was being selfish, that it was all About Him, not his family. You can believe in everything he goes trough. If, OTOH, Walter White had been done the way Maria was, he would have become quickly interested in being the big king of crystal meth and dropping (at least in his internal monologue) the pretense of caring about his family by the end of Season 1, with his "I am the danger!" and "I am the one who knocks!" tirades delivered right there.
Man, if you told me 5 years ago I will be talking about Umberto Eco and his "Il Nome della Rosa" on the thread of a porn game, I will have laughed you out of the room, but here we are!
Tbf I've just read some of Eco's antifascist political work and not much else, but I've seen a pretty good TV series adaptation of Name of the Rose from 2019 and never watched Breaking Bad
(or Game of thrones for that matter - I think the only big mainstream American TV show that I watched was "Dexter", and maybe "Buffy: The Vampire Slayer" as an edgy teen craving femdom before I knew porn existed - does Buffy count I wonder?
), so probably some of your analagies here are lost on me, but I agree with the overall point you're making. In fact, we are in agreement on most of your points about Maria, so I will not reply to all of them.
Which is an interesting point. In MironY's other work, Vicious Circle, we already see this theme of a woman who at first loves someone, then loses all respect for him and submits him to all humiliation -- but apparently can't get rid of him! If he's the piece of garbage she keeps telling him he is, why would it be any difficult for her to just throw him into the garbage can and move on to other guys to humiliate? But it never is... In fact, in Moving Down, we even see several scenes where she is delighted by her power to humiliate him and make him sink lower and lower -- HIM, not other people. It as if she wanted him, specifically him, around; as if she actually did love him, in some weird kind of way. I'm sure MironY would want to go in the direction of him being simply a possession, and her being possessive: what's mine is mine, and nobody else can have it! (the way some people are about, I dunno, their cellphones, or their cars) But if she is that possessive about all her things, well, this is never shown -- again it comes out of the blue, at the right moment for her to be Super-Bitch again, i.e. a fantasy wifu.
It's even a choice that MironY would have to make: what is Maria's final (emotional) relationship with MC? None at all? He's just an object that could disappear or be lost, and she'd just shrug her shoulders and buy another and forget about him (especially after slavery becomes legal)? Or does he have some value, some uniqueness, in her eyes to the very end?
Which is also a plausible endstate for the Maria-MC relationship, and I could buy it as being the result of different decisions and more evolution of her character -- let's say, the Lisa escape ending happened while she still cared about him, while the Maria bad ending happened when she finally freed herself from these feelings. But again -- the whole problem is how to make the changes in her believable, rather than having her be whatever she has to be for the current fantasy to be possible. (Sometimes, I think, it's almost as if it were all just one of MC's dreams, and he was just about to wake up and realize things in reality were far from that.)
That's a good point, that perhaps she "freed herself" of those feelings for MC only in the aftermath of the escape ending decision. She does tell him she doesn't love him anymore and acts as if he isn't anything more than an object to be used by her long before that point though, so if the idea was tha she only stopped caring about MC in the short time after Lisa gives you the option to run away with her and the bad ending, that's also not very well-reflected in the writing, as she becomes cold to MC long before that juncture. The story of the game is still very hot and everything, but I very much agree that Maria is more like a blank slate to project our perfect domme upon than she is a cohesive character whose thouhts and motivation are knowable to the player, (or even to the author at times) so she might be pretty or one of the focal points of the story, but I'd say Deborah, Megan, Alex and plenty of the other dommes are better written characters. (as they are less like vehicles for making a specific fantasy possible and more consistent characters with a set of very immoral, but not self-contradictory or unbelievable, principles throughout the story)
Hmm... That makes me curious. Maybe I shouldn't wait for more of the project to become ready... So these 'innocent' characters already start out less innocent that Maria was here?
To varying degrees yes. I mean, without spoiling much, Megan is a recurring character, and "The Renaissance" is happening concomitantly with the late game of "Moving Down", (it's not 100% a sequel, but it basically starts not long before Alex's gynarchist faction, which Maria was fully welcomed into towards the end of MD, takes over the country) and she cetainly starts off as far less innocent than Maria...
And of course we all love to grovel! By all means, let them walk all over MC and use him for their devious scientific experiments and make his tongue longer so he can reach deeper into their asses! With the added bonus that he'll talk like a retard and they can tease him about that.
Take care, friend, and stay kinky!
Ofc - all the best to you as well, stay kinky and talk to you soon!
