This Week’s Topics:
- Rundown Preamble Ramble: No Love For The Zoomies!
- Natalie’s Big FAT Talk (Skillet Didn’t Ask For This, But She’s Getting It Anyway!)
Rundown Preamble Ramble:
No Love For The Zoomies!
Let’s see, now is when I usually have my requisite tax hell post, as my boss and I are veering towards the end of a hectic tax season. And I am looking at my first 70 hour week. Orz. I am NOT happy with how my boss has been handling things. I am PISSED at how lax our clients have been about getting us their tax docs. Normally, this would drive me crazy, but… this season I am just tired and annoyed. My boss has been taking oodles of vacations, our remaining clientele are a bunch of serial procrastinators, and if we need to file late returns… whatever. Not my fault! You folks had SIX MONTHS to get us the stuff, and my boss had SIX MONTHS to get off his ass and finalize things. But nooooo! And I am SICK of taking the fall for people who don’t want to do their share of the work.
…And there’s probably some way to transition into the actual topic of this preamble, but I don’t feel like doing that!
Let’s talk about romance! …I do not fully understand or comprehend romance. It’s not that I don’t understand the concept of love, it’s more that I do not understand the many nuances of it. The desire to feel controlled yet freed, to want casual comfort, but also routine excitement as people pursue passionate gestures and hot emotions. I can understand friendships, and I can understand romance in a more structured, escapist, and fantastical manner, but in terms of how it worked in real life… I don’t quite get it.
Akumako: “That’s because you’re an aromantic, asexual, and have never so much as asked someone out on a date.”
Correct! So I am by no means qualified to talk about love or how it affects other people. It’s part of the reason why so many of the romantic relationships I write tend to be about good friends who like to have sex.
However, a trend I have noticed, as a person with eyes, is how much harder it is for people to find this much coveted romance in the modern world. Especially younger people, and by younger people, I mean Gen Z, aka Zoomers, aka Zoomies. It’s pretty widely documented that younger people are not having as much sex, are not getting into relationships as quickly, and are home to a growing gender-based political divide. With women drifting left while men drift right. However, many people still have a strong desire for romance, want to pursue relationships with people, though the way they are pursuing romance strikes me as… particularly odd and unlike how things worked in prior generations.
A Guardian article that I was directed to—
Akumako: “She saw a thread on it on ResetEra. It was either that or Brisky.”
—Examined the world of modern dating amongst Zoomies, and their behaviors struck me as particularly strange, stringent, and almost militant in their approach. With many treating the search for a romantic partner like a stringent procedure with checklists, newfangled terminology, and a careful vetting process of profile information. None of this is strictly new— people have been gaming dating apps since the day dating apps became a thing. But the high standards, unrealistic idealism, and dismissiveness of people so young and inexperienced is… remarkable.
So… Why are the children like this? Well, there are quite a few great explanations for this behavioral shift. Such as the pandemic, the economy, and the damn phones.
The pandemic has had firmly negative affects on the development of school aged people who lived through it. Firstly due to the stress of a traumatic event. Secondly due to the lack of organization throughout the pandemic, with people figuring stuff out as they went alone. And thirdly by denying them the ability to interact with and engage with people in meatspace. It becomes harder to make friends, harder to get to know people, and harder for the spark of hormones to kick off romance between people.
The pandemic was similarly disruptive to many ‘third places’ across the world, either shutting down altogether or jacking up their prices following increased expenses and costs of living. This robbed people of the ability to go out with friends, with someone they fancied, and do any number of things. People cannot just go loiter around the mall and spark a conversation with someone they recognize from school to maybe start something… when there is no mall to go to. So many things that were once cheaper to do in-person or when out and about on the town are now considerably more expensive and more limited than what one could achieve on their own. Why would four friends pay $15 for each ticket when they could just get on Discord and stream a movie that one of them paid for via a streaming service?
I’d say they could just torrent them, but some Zoomies have a deep fear of downloading things. …And file explorers.
Transportation, particularly in North America, makes it difficult for people to get to/from places in general. These prohibitive costs incentivize them to go between home, work, store, and school, without exploring or interacting with their broader community. If you could even call that a community. And when people lack a community, when they are not comfortable going outside and just seeing what they can find, they are not going to know how to act when around others. I have dismissed third places in the past, but I am coming to understand that someone being there, even if one is just a hanger-on with a parent, does a lot to teach them how to interact with others. How to exist in a place full of strangers, all doing their own thing, spanning ages 8 to 80. And if you only know your house and school… you won’t get that understanding.
Shit, maybe that’s why some Zoomies I’ve chatted with struggle to really picture people beyond their age group in more grounded terms. Because… no shit a 20-year-old is not going to know what being 40 is like if they don’t see 40-year-olds in their day-to-day life or engage with them. They really need to go to a multigenerational workplace. I worked in multigenerational workplaces from ages… 19 to 25, and that was enriching.
But, for as much as I hate blaming these damn phones— for as much as it makes me feel like an old— they are changing how younger people are viewing their peers. They see how people present a curated version of their selves on… whatever platform young people use these days. They see profiles that highlight the best of their lives, see AI-enhanced photos of them, and see a profile meant to sell their brand as a person. This simultaneously creates a sense of inferiority and skepticism. One may feel unremarkable compared to someone who seems to be living the highlife, but they may also doubt this image, that this individual— if they are even real— is half the person they claim to be, and will look for warning signs.
Relationships are also a key source of content across social media, as a way for people to express clout, relate to others, and appease an algorithm, as so many people like or understand romance. However, a boring, pleasant, and unremarkable relationship is not sexy or good at garnering eyeballs. So content tends to depict idealized relationships, relationship woes, or odd idiosyncrasies that become cultural touchstones through the language of ‘virality’ and memes.
Oh, and a lot of Zoomies— especially American Zoomies— are the children of unhappy marriages. Divorces have remained a persistent thing in a lot of cultures that allow that sort of thing. Just because parents are together for their kids… that does not mean they are going to be good role models. And if children do not have good role models for healthy relationships in their lives— if their parents hate each other, and they don’t know people beyond their family and classmates— how can they understand romance? Where would they get their ideas from?
Well, the answer is from media. Influencers, relationship content creators, fan fiction designed to facilitate romantic thrills, movies, shows. These serve as a referential bedrock for many people, a means of understanding what a relationship can be, and they use this foundation to identify their ideal mate. They are told what traits are bad and to be avoided, as they are representative of an ontological evil. They are told what is valuable. They are told how to gauge who their potential partners truly are. And they are encouraged to share their findings with others, even if it means doxing themselves.
None of this is bad in moderation, but when one’s standards are too high, are based in fiction, and are simply rare in a given population, then there are going to be problems.
Now, I am not saying that people should just settle for an abusive relationship or get with somebody who’s a slacker shitbag. But if one is looking for someone perfect, they are never going to find the perfect someone. They need to find someone they like enough to accept their flaws. And they need to accept that not every romantic relationship they have will work out. There’s nothing wrong with going out with someone a few times, realize the spark is not there, and amicably end things. And they kind of need that as… I don’t think these romantic virgins actually know what they want.
You can have an idea of what you want, but you do not know if you will like it until you try it unless you have some baseline experience.
If I may be crass— too late— I think a meaningful percent of Zoomies are looking for a character who they can ship themself with, trying to manifest them into reality. They want to find someone who will uplift them in some way, prove them with monetary, household, emotional, social or sexual support to make their lives easier. Or if I want to be real nasty, I’d say that some of them just want a slave. Someone who does all the shit they don’t want to do, while offering them sexual satisfaction.
Akumako: “It’s bonked that we, as a society, don’t talk about how, historically, there’s barely a distinction between a slave and a sex slave. If you don’t think the Greeks were fucking their slaves for fun and leisure, you may as well turn your skull into an ornamental vase.”
Speaking with the broadest of generalities, I think young men want a traditional wife who will provide them with three Aryan children. A supportive yet submissive female who will, somehow, fill them with the drive and determination to be a hustler/grifter by making their problems go away. Someone who will be mother them, be sexually available 24/7, look the other way if they want to goon out to an anime babe, and stay silent if they decided to fuck a girl fresh outta in high school.
Young women want a… darn renaissance man who makes good money, is interested in them, not controlling, yet wears the pants in the relationship, respecting their opinion, while offering a careful amount of pushback. They want a good man, but often struggle to really capture the careful balance they want, in part because there is no trad husband idea that mirrors a trad wife. It’s a more nebulous concept, but it’s generally a high bar for a lot of young men to achieve and… can you really even blame them?
Young men don’t have many good role models, let alone ones developed around the desires of young women. They are burdened by vague and contradictory ideas of what a man ought to be. And they are routinely told to not view themselves as individuals, but as cogs in a machine. As soldiers, as workers, as patrons, as consumers. Whether through education or labor, they are being denied a level of individuality, and even when they are allowed that, they are told to lead a harmful existence that wades down their spirit. This is what the term toxic masculinity originally referred to. How being a big strong stoic man kills the spirit.
This is something that we’re seeing cranked into overdrive at the White House at the moment. A bunch of men— weak in every facet— going on about how they need to reclaim warrior culture. How empathy is evil. And emphasizing loyalty submission as the highest and manliest virtue. It sucks being a woman because they don’t have control of their bodies in half of the country, and sexism is still rampant across… most of the world. It sucks being trans because a lot of governments want to genocide them, just outright. And being a man sucks because… people are afraid of men, people don’t want to open up to men, and men are seen as dangerous.
A disproportionately high percentage of shooters, abusers, suiciders, rapists, and generally awful people are men. A lot of the most extreme and hateful people in the world today are men. The average guy is far more likely to be a Nazi enthusiast than a woman of the same age and background. The manosphere is effectively a suicidal death cult that radicalizes men into believing that women are etymologically evil, and must be beaten, fucked, or killed. A lot of young men have had a fucked up adolescence full of heinous shit, and this left them maladjusted. They need help, guidance, and support to work out all the poison in their head. Or else they are gonna kill themselves… or shoot up a local library.
Akumako: “How’re you going you gonna whole library in a syringe?”
Young women are looking at this and saying ‘fuck this! I’m not going to fix these guys. I don’t want to get murder-raped. And if there’s a 20% chance that a random guy is like this, then I need to make extra careful. I don’t want to get roofied and impregnated with a child that I am legally required to give birth to, fucking up my body— and my life.’
And… okay, I got it, I finally found The Point! The CORE reason why the world of love, romance, and dating is so fraught is because… people feel like they can’t trust strangers anymore. Young people have been exposed to every tragedy to happen over the past few years, in real time, and have rightfully recognized the capacity for cruelty some people have. Women are told from their peers and elders to fear what men can do to them. Children of all genders are growing up knowing that an active shooter can active shoot his way through their school at any moment. People are carted off in cars and buses, seeing the world without being in it. And with so much communication being done digitally, through curated feeds, or algorithmicly engagement slop, it hurts people’s ability to just exist around a bunch of strangers.
People are afraid. Future prospects are murky if not bleak. Social contracts are being tattered by the most powerful forces around. Laws no longer maintain the veneer of protecting commoners from the most powerful people on the planet. And in a climate like this… it’s very hard to find romance. It’s hard to find the comfort needed to sleep at night. So it’s no wonder that Zoomies are either closing out of the dating world before getting their feet wet, or collaborating to avoid getting murder-raped. You need to fix the world before you can fix this shit! …But robust social outreach programs to get kids to talk to people, socialize with each other, and participate in their community sure wouldn’t hurt
Akumako: “So, do you have any advice to youngsters looking for love?”
Uh, go outside and get to know people? Talk to people around your school, allow yourself to be cringe and awkward, and look for social groups and get togethers in your area. They probably still exist! If you just sit on your ass, swiping on dating apps, you’re probably not going to find your ideal partner. But if you get out there and look for real humans with your real eyes, you might find something.
Akumako: “You make it sound sooooo simple.”
What do you expect from me, woman? I’m some shut-in who is content with only having online friends. However, I know that if you don’t do anything, you won’t get anywhere. You need motivation, and drive, and if you don’t have any, you need to find it. Otherwise… what are you doing? Why are you here? You’re alive, so you should have goals, dreams, and motivations. There may be crap weighing you down, and compromises will need to be made, but either you can try… or you can just stagnate in your unhappiness.
Natalie’s Big FAT Talk
(Skillet Didn’t Ask For This, But She’s Getting It Anyway!)
Okay, so this is a random topic for me to throw in here. But after certain conversations with Natalie.TF’s resident dog girl, Skillet la Caso— also known by her emcee name Missy Scrumptious, I felt the need to turn this concept into content. So, let’s talk about weight. Let’s talk about fatness. And how it reflects my roster of creations, and myself as a person. This topic can go pretty much anywhere to start off, so I may as well start what I know best, a li’l White bitch named me.
For pretty much all of my life, I have been pretty skinny. I had a great metabolism as a child, grew to a brisk 177 cm (bust out the calculators, imperialist hosers) and was a trim 55kg by the time I was 18 in 2012. Following this, I filled out to maybe 59 kg in 2019, after HRT and college life. During the pandemic, where I stopped commuting to the office, going outside, and started having more household snacks, I packed on the pounds to become 63 kg. And by the time I turned 30 in 2024, I reached a girthy 67 kg, and did not like it. I hated how bloated my belly felt, how it slid while I laid on my side, so I decided to do something about it. I started exercising more, exercising harder, and cut back on the number of sweets I was having each day. Now I’m at a manageable 63 to 65, and do the same exercise every night just to prevent my body from atrophying.
By all accounts, I am a skinny person, have been that way all my life, and per that little story, I have zero interest in packing on pounds, like many have told me I should over the years. People always asked my mother if I was eating enough— I was— and I was very good at portion control, always reading the serving sizes like a good little kid. I still ate plenty of crap over the years. Highly processed sweets, fast food, chips, soda, et cetera, but largely stopped after entering my twenties, preventing me from ever having a college weight gain phase that I’d imagine most people do. At least in the United States.
Because I have always been pretty skinny, this influence the way I assign weights and proportions to most of my characters, generally making them skinny, fit, or just ‘not fat.’ And the number of characters I have written who are fat is… limited. And the reasons why are rather complicated and worth reciting. I am a tail-end Millennial who was raised in post 9/11 America, where fatphobia was rampant and children were encouraged to avoid getting fat through eating right and exercising. My mother has been a healthy eater since I was born, and always encouraged me to eat healthily, even while giving me crap. Hot dogs in crescent roles for dinner, bologna sandwiches for lunch, and various sugary cereals for breakfast. I always had stuff like carrots and celery to balance that out, fruit too, but that does not discount the crap!
In my lived experience, I have routinely perceived the act of being overweight as undesirable. Weight is so consistently presented as an issue, a burden, something to be struggled against and prevented. I have lost track of the number of people who I have heard comment on their “weight issues.” Something that disempowers them, brings them shame, makes them feel bad both socially and physically. While those people who have beaten their ‘weight issues’ tend to view it as a personal victory.
This perception is everywhere. From cartoons to advertisements, to turns of phrase, to PSAs— hell, fat jokes are a load-bearing pillar in the entire concept of comedy. Fat is seen as negative, and I have perceived this across those close to me.
My sister is easily past 100 kilograms, and her weight has been a major source of hardship throughout her life. She stress eats, struggles to find clothes she is comfortable in, struggles to maintain any sort of diet or regiment, has all sorts of health issues, particularly related to her feet. My father, while skinny back in his teens and twenties, put on a lot of weight in his core adulthood, and it has been the source of his own series of health issues. From a general malaise, lack of energy, inability to perform the demanding feats of breaking down production equipment, and breathing issues. Seriously, you could hear him breathe even when he was 10 feet away. Weight also negatively impacted the health of my grandmothers, whose sweet tooths and general lack of activity have contributed to their gradual atrophy, and also deaths. Hell, I have family members who died of heart issues because of their weight.
Pretty much all of my life, I have viewed being fat, gaining weight, as an issue to solve, to prevent, and to fight against. It literally shortens peoples lives, leads them to an early grave, and makes them see as less desirable by society as a whole.
Now, this does not mean I think negatively of fat people. I’m in America, lots of people here are fat. My sister and father are fat. My boss is fat. But my viewpoints on this matter have been shaped by my lived experience and culture. I view being fat as a negative, undesirable, trait.
This has caught some pushback from Skillet, who has asked me why I do not have fatter characters or weight gain in my creative works, and the answer is pretty simple. Because my imagination has been limited. The idea of making fatter characters has not been a priority of mine. I tend to take a lot of inspiration from anime and games, where characters are typically skinny or fit and rarely extend beyond a pair of basic body types.
I am also pretty bad with my weight assignment process. Back when I was assigning character weights, I used primitive calculators to determine the ‘ideal’ weight for a person based on their height, while fully knowing that a lot of this math is a bunch of phooey. I know I should’ve used something like Meshcapade to figure out the right proportions I want for a character, but I didn’t feel like playing with that creepy doll to determine weight.
…In fact, doing some tests, I think I need to revise, like, *half *of my character’s weight, because I did the math wrong. My calculator said that Haruki Kurokawa, a 23-year-old woman from Verde’s Doohickey 2.0, who is 165 cm tall, would have an ideal weight of somewhere between 57 and 60 kg. I wanted her to be fatter, so I added 10 kilograms to that weight, making her 71 kg. …But actually visualizing this, that is not as significant of a weight increase as the 17% increase I had in mind. I thought it would increase the volume of the body by 17%, and mostly be concentrated in the stomach area. And 17% of a human is a lot of meat! I thought it would be like adding 22 pounds of ground chicken around her gut and tights. And I know how much a pound of ground chicken is. But no, that’s not how weight actually work. Using that Meshcapade visualizer, I should have made her at least 80 kilograms. Maybe even 90!
Or, in other words, I just do not understand how numbers correlate to visuals in terms of weight, yet I am committed to using numbers to represent these things.
Akumako: “Yo Nat! Here’s your new rule. Just like how heights go from 150 to 200 centimeters— in our stupid shared mind— you should have your weights go from 50 kilograms to 100 kilograms. For males, 50 kg at 150 cm is average, 75 kg at 175 cm is average, and 100 kg at 200 centimeters is average. Multiple average female weights by .9. So Abigale Quinlan, who’s 2 meters tall, should probably be 90 kilograms. Not 76 kilograms like you’ve written down. She’d be emaciated if that were the case, ya dumbass!”
Okay, okay, fine, I’ll need to rejigger the weights of my characters to reflect reality, and not anime. Stop yelling at me!
Moving past that diversion, and impromptu workaround, where was I? …Oh, right!
To some people, in certain communities, cultures, or general environments, fat is not only normal, but seen as preferential, seen as comfortable, and even desirable over people with slimmer figures. This makes sense given the amount of people who are fat in this world, and, well, fat used to be seen as an attractive thing, a sign of affluence, of being well-fed, able to survive some days without food. However, the problem with defining fat here is that fat can come in so many literal different forms, it is a— pun intended— wide spectrum.
Skinny is skinny. The range is narrow like skinny folks waistlines and clothes. But when it comes to fatness, there is not an upper limit to what that can mean. Someone can be 80 kilograms and be considered fat. Someone can be 200 kilograms and that is still fat. It depends on how the weight is distributed, how tall someone is, what their physical makeup and body shape is. Not everybody accumulates fat in the same way, pace, or shape. And the quantity of fat, where it is distributed, can make a lot of difference. This is probably best seen in the distinction between muscle weight and fat weight, how the two interlink, and how a 180 centimeter tall man who weighs 100 kilograms can either looked jacked or sorta pudgy, depending on where that weight is going.
However, the big area where weight is celebrated, explored, and loved tends to be on women. Over the past decade, there has been an outpouring of love for women who are seen as curvy, fully-bodied, or thick. Women with big boobs, wide hips, big butts, and enough belly that prevents them from looking like some Barbie hentai cryptid. To use a snippet from Skillet, she considers this to be a peak body type. And, I mean, she’s not wrong. This woman has a gorgeous figure. Anybody who says otherwise… is probably the sort to jerk off to dog birthing videos.
However, I need to ask if this woman qualifies as fat. And I would say, no, she does not. I would say she has pronounced curves, is thick, has humungous tits, and is built like a damn fertility goddess. However, I can tell from looks alone that she would be past the ideal weight of the calculators I was using. Ergo, she would be overweight, and by extension, fat through some metric. But, as I said before, I know these metrics are bullcrap. I would sooner say that fat is a perceived visual trait, something that is not strictly determined by one’s eyes, rather than something gleaned from their BMI.
Thick women, men with bearish physique, those are a modern kind of sexy that people have been shouting from the rooftops for so long that I’d say they are mainstream. People like being with a bigger fuller person with more to love. But I would not say that people in this nebulous group are subject to the same health issues that come with ‘being fat.’ They might be more at risk for stuff like diabetes or heart conditions, but I’m not going to pretend to know diddly squat about that crap. Especially when this shape is… the natural form that plenty of people’s bodies gravitate towards. And if someone’s body is predisposed, from birth, from pre-pubescence, from adolescence, to be a certain shape or weight proportional to their height… does even it make sense to call them overweight?
…But obesity— a term that I have come to view as synonymous with fat— that is a different matter. I’m not talking about a specific measurement when I say obesity, as I think BMI is too quick and easy. I am talking about when someone has a massive gut hanging off of them, fat hanging across the rest of their body, and is genuinely at risk of various health issues, if not death, because they got too fat.
Now, do I understand why people would find this to be hot and want to fuck or jerk off to people like this? Uh… duh! I understand why people would jerk off to funny cat videos. (Why do you think those are so popular? 5% of all viewers are jerking off to them!) But do I get why people would want to be obese, to have this huge ball of fat lingering around their gut, weighing down their body? No. No I don’t. I have no problem with them choosing this life, but of the 30% of Americans who are obese… I doubt that more than an eighth of them would want to be obese.
There ain’t nothing sexy to me about obesity.
…And when I think about weight gain, I think about obesity. Some stuff I tend to view as funny, as farcical, but the idea of embodying a form quite like this… sounds kinda miserable to me. Like, in the range of being age progressed to someone in their 70s. I get why that might work as a fantasy, just like how I get the appeal in having sex with a man old enough to be required to take out his RMDs every year. But physically embodying them in the world of Transformation Fantasy? …No. There are limits to what I think would warrant being a hot punishment, and what would just be a punishment. (Especially if you assume that every TF just… keeps going on, like I often do.)
Also, I don’t think there is that much transformation fantasy juice to someone gaining weight, just in general. I saw a weight gain movie in school. It was called Super Size Me (2004). And I know that all you need to do to achieve weight gain is to eat like garbage, which is… well, not cheap, because food is stupid expensive these days due to corporate consolidation and greedmaxxing. But it is achievable in real life.
Also-also, I do still have some ‘lingering’ fatphobia bouncing around my head. The week before I was writing this, I was going back to this daytime fantasy where I imagined [REDACTED] gaining a kilogram every passing day, putting greater strain on their body as they became unable to sustain themself. This would continue until they become a pseudo-humanoid amorphous blob of pure obesity whose heart eventually stops. They would die, leaving behind a corpse as vile as their very soul. All because killing that person would be too overt.
Akumako: “You are gonna die in prison at this rate.”
Bitch, I’m gonna make sure they kill me before going to prison AND that put that shit on TikTok, where all murders— and hardcore anal gangbangs— belong! …The best thing about The Gaza War is that people are remembering what a dead body looks like for real-real, on the real. Covet the truth, enjoy the sights, it will make you stronger!
Akumako: “I wonder if the insanity defense holds water these days…”
Progress Report 2025-10-12
You will get nothing from me this week, because LOOK AT THIS FUCKING TIME SHEET! And if you don’t know what a time sheet is… do you know what a 72 hour work week looks like? I can respect the “worked 60 hours last week, that’s seven-hundred bucks, now I can pay my speeding ticket and buy a blunt” lifestyle (funny how wages have not risen in the past 15 years). But this is BEYOND that. I’m making Spizzy look lazy!
No, I don’t know why I have been so Spose-brained as of late. (Dudes like him and Adventures of Duane and Princess Jaime were my gateway into being a casual rap enjoyer. I’m so tired I almost wrote rape enjoyer. Orz…)
2025-10-05: Watched Treasure Planet and 2001: A Space Odyssey with my friends as part of a 6 hour call, did more travel planning stuff, did work stuff that came in, and read the second part of this month’s TSF Showcase, deciding that it would be a single showcase, coming out October 28. Meaning NO SHOWCASE ON OCTOBER 21! I WAS WRONG!
2025-10-06: 14 Hour Day, didn’t do SHIT for anything!
2025-10-07: 12 Hour Day. I don’t wanna do dinny fuchus, but I worked on the weight segment a bit. XXXX words.
2025-10-08: Another 14 Hour Day! We still have to do six returns a day if we want to not fuck anyone over. UGH!
2025-10-09: 13 to 14 hour day, no exercise for me, because I needed to get some fucking sleep! No work was done on this because, bruh, I am 54 hours deep into a work week! …Actually, I started drafting a header image, because I could just post this without proofing it.
2025-10-10: A breezy ten hour day— I think, time is getting hard to measure— meaning I got to edit this Rundown, make the header, and get this shit ret-2-go!
2025-10-11: 9-ish hour day, with 1.5 hours of chores. Yay! Managed to squirrel away some time to write 2,000 words for next week’s Rundown preamble. Which was fun to write, as it was a big messy thought experiment.
Wow, even having seen previews of the headers, I was not expecting an entire rundown all about me — even if the first half isn’t explicit! I suppose it’s fair enough considering I’ve incidentally taken up so much of your precious free time lately. I feel the need, then, to get my testimony out there first before everyone else (who may be no one!) throws their own hats in the ring.
Regarding young love, the consensus I have observed from years of online discourse is that, when men approach women these days, they are not competing against each other, but rather, against her own peace of mind she keeps by being single — like you said, no one wants to be a slave. And so a lot less guys are approaching at all, because they just don’t want to be seen as a bother, or worse.
For me, personally, transfemininity is kind of a bitch (who’da thought?) because it means my IRL dating pool is suddenly way smaller, at least for the first few years, and that I’m basically getting the worst of all worlds: I’m scared of being seen as creepy or predatory like a man, scared of getting hate-crimed like a trans person, and scared of getting… normal crimed, like a woman.
I also fear approaching women especially would lead to the false expectation that I’d fulfill the “man’s role” in any prospective relationship, when we know damn well I’d be a sorry excuse for that, especially considering the kinda shit I’m into. Which is… probably the same mindset a lot of cis girls have about it.
I don’t yet have my own place, and I don’t really see the point of dating as an adult if you don’t have, bare minimum, that free access to privacy and autonomy — especially if you’re doing the approaching. But because the world is evil now, it’s basically impossible to afford apartment rent by oneself, so that’s yet another compounding factor to young people being so single. Who knows, maybe in the next 10 years the social norms will readjust accordingly, but… ehhhh. I feel like it reflects poorly on me as a partner to still rely on my mom for paying the bills.
I dunno, maybe the problem is that everyone is mentally 12 now and is looking for “real adults” to survive — hence the trendy romanticization of older partners in the past decade, especially women (because older men have always been in the dating scene, for better and usually probably worse).
Anyway — weight! To be clear, I wasn’t trying to hound you for not having fat characters, or moralize or anything like that — at the end of the day, your work is for your own pleasure. But to me, I just see fat, at least below the threshold of morbidity, as… just another typical dimension of human variation that one would want to feature in ensemble works of body swap fiction, just the same as age, sex, height, race, etc. I understand why TSF visual novel authors working with preused porn game assets are more limited, but when/if I ever get into that sort of ambitious creative writing, it’s on my agenda to feature that sort of variation, because… that’s how humans be, yo.
You mentioned that fat is sort of becoming a new beauty standard, and like… yes, but also no. If we wanna get into the social politics of it, skinny women have been the beauty standard since Victorian times because being underweight means being more frail, less able, more diminutive, and always scrutinizing yourself in pursuit of an impossible purity. In that sense, the body positivity movement was a sort of a politicized new cool, but it’s struggled against the conservative pivot across the country (exacerbated by Ozempic), which has been trying to make big curves (including surgeries like BBLs) uncool again… not so secretly because they’re historically associated with Black women. And that’s your crazy-woke-liberal-gender-major skillet take of the week.
Also… oh gosh, how often does a REAL person get featured on Natalie.TF (besides Nat-Nat herself)? I feel like never! Which only makes me more worried about others scrutinizing my tastes — if I’d known you were going to show an IRL example, I would’ve sent a photo, rather than a paused frame of video. Feels kinda embarrassing to even think about what women I think are sexy after all that heavy talk (pun not intended) — presenting it as the social issue of our time as if I don’t just find it attractive. But hey, two things can coexist!
… Man, what a long comment. Consider this a post-launch update that fills the holes in this short rundown!
P.S. — it’s funny how absolutely random the other two images in the fat segment are without proper context. Just thrown in with no explanation!
It was a rush job! No time for Kontext!
…Okay, so your perspective is less that people are timid around strangers, and more 12-year-olds who are shuffled into a school dance, too afraid to make a move because the entire world is awkward, hostile to traditional ideas of romance, and also public to varying degrees. Yep, going with that metaphor. Young people are 12-year-olds trying to figure out how to spark a romance at a school dance!
Also, you raise a point I forgot to mention. Most people have no places where they can get intimate, due to this dumb cost of living crisis!
Nah, you weren’t trying to hound me, and this is something I wanted to self-assess, because I admit, and admitted, that I have a tendency to forget about the variety of human body types sometimes, and just give people the same sorta skinny physique. Also, I COMPLETELY misunderstood how weight distribution and density worked! I want to feature more flavors of different people, as I firmly believe that diversity makes things better, just in general, and think it is BORING to just have a bunch of characters who fit the same three templates.
You live in a red state where cultural values are being pushed backwards, so you’re probably seeing more pushback towards curvy women, as conservative guys like to fuck curvy women, but marry Barbie dolls. They want power, and this whole cultural moment is just them desperately trying to become cultural overlords again. I just get this stuff from the internet, and my purview is still that a lot of people prefer fuller women. It’s probably just how my feeds are organized. Or maybe I just ignore skinny White women because of how BORING they are!
I wanted to surprise you specifically with the video frame and NOT ask for a photo. Also, this was a super rushed last minute Rundown, and this is what made sense to a Nat After Midnight.
I would feature more real life photos of humans if I had a need to, but I don’t have a reason to most of the time!
Spent a bit trying to type up a comment on why I myself am not too fond of ‘thicc’ characters, nor find them attractice in anime or reality but it eventually culminated in the realisation that I don’t like any variant of the human form and only accept some more than others because I am either used to them or they aren’t as bad.
Not like the non-human bodies around are much if any better. Why do RL gotta be so uncomfy?
Turn me into a non-corporeal concept!
Cassie is a simple girl who likes things to be arranged in a certain way, bodies included.
*Turns Cassie into a wiggly anime girl ghost*
Phone bad, go outside.
Outside is expensive.
Cry.
I love thinking about my future
Yep, it’s a crappy situation all around and we’re still trying to figure out a remedy…