[How does a sub justifiably end up 'into that', on your view?]

[I don't really understand the appeal myself, I'm not a sub. I'm leaning back in the direction of the 'saw porn and had a crisis' hypothesis though.]

Thellim manages to notice this time that the English word 'porn' is matching against her horrifying memory, though with some strange-feeling internal missed connections, and that 'porn' also refers to something artificial.  Hope flickers up in her.  [Wait.  Maybe I've just been really stupid.  If I see a video of somebody being hurt is that not real any more than somebody apparently dying in a TV show?]

[Depends on the porn. If it looked like somebody died, yeah that's fake. If somebody's just having an interesting time with a horsewhip that's probably real but if they're pretending they're not having any fun that is most likely fake.]

[I - I don't know how to say this and I've been messing up this whole conversation but please listen to me, I can see how the dominants might have been - having fun - the thing I don't know how to say - in my world - we would think the submissive was a person too and it would matter that they were not having fun.  Please hear me out.  Please.]

[...the submissives are in point of fact having fun. There are some who are not into being hurt and they find doms who aren't into hurting them.]

Thellim is confused and it's not nearly as much fun as when it was about bad economics.  Maybe the video she saw was fake and Isabella is talking about a different class of videos that are real.  [No, she wasn't having fun, so maybe it wasn't real, then, the submissive I saw was -]  Thellim describes it like she's trying to spit out the words as quickly as possible so the memory will stop burning her, which it does anyways.

[I don't watch porn myself so I'm not going to recognize the specific performers or anything but subs like things that do not seem like fun to people who are not subs, it's correlated with masochism and stuff. ...I imagine Jackson didn't tell you much about how we met?]

[Keep talking...?]

[Jackson and I went to the same school and originally became acquainted because he was sexually harassing me, among other doms. It put us in kind of an awkward situation, see, because telling him to go away would be giving him an order, wouldn't it. Some of the others got fed up enough to kick him pretty hard and he kept coming back. 'Cause, you know, he's into that. He cut it out when he wasn't single any more.]

[Can you explain things... to a much stupider and more ignorant person than you are currently explaining them to.  What's 'masochism'.  What's 'into that' in context.]

[- yeah, sure. Some people are wired such that they are - sexually entertained by - imagining, or actually experiencing, things like pain, humiliation, fear, restraint, and other stuff that isn't universally popular. This is admittedly peculiar prima facie, but - do people on dath ilan eat spicy food, or ride roller coasters, or like weighted blankets, or play games that involve revealing embarrassing secrets -]

[How do you get from WEIGHTED BLANKETS to THAT.]

[...and how much work by psions is involved?]

[...I'm sure some psion somewhere has at least considered working on a power to get people more masochistic to solve relationship compatibility issues but it's not the sort of thing you hear about happening all the time, plenty of people are subs and plenty of subs are masochists all on their own. To varying degrees; porn tends to disproportionately feature the varietal with more extreme tastes.]

[So according to you there is not a known process that designates people as subs, or any known process that turns them into masochists, it just happens.  Can psions not make people not be masochists?  Can most subs not afford that, even if they'd only have to pay for that work to be done once?]

[I don't expect there to be any psions working on reducing masochism because that doesn't... seem obviously desirable? Anyone who could afford that would also be able to afford mage healing insurance coverage to get patched up if their dom overshot. People designate themselves as subs or doms - or switches, or even nondynamics.]

[Is there by any chance an early guessing program where some prettier teenagers who'd be more valuable to dominants get told they're probably submissives and then exposed to particular forms of carefully crafted pornography.  Does anybody ever decide to stop being a submissive and what kind of explicit or implicit obstacles do they face in that.]

[...I guess particularly creative child abuse grooming might take that form but otherwise no. And yeah, people sometimes say they're a sub for a while and then decide that actually they need to change their paperwork when they're like seventeen or even early twenties, sometimes even later if they're older people and got wedged into being subs because they're women and grew up when those were more conflated, and they do have to do some annoying bureaucracy and might get weird looks but it's not intentionally difficult or anything.]

[How does 'child abuse grooming' work in your society?]

[...it's not something we are collectively intentionally tolerating, it's just a thing people sometimes do if they want to abuse children, they set them up to be more compliant or less likely to tell people about it or something.]

[Isabella, listen to me.  Your world is not - coherent.  Human beings or general intelligent agents can successfully band together and create 'police forces' that stop horrible things from happening.  Moons don't grant people mage and psion powers.  There is not naturally an enormous class of people who want to be hurt, that is not how evolutionary biology works, organisms do not evolve to want to be damaged.  Airplanes that serve better meals attract more customers, and people who run airplane flights know that, and they put good meals on board in order to attract gainful-trades away from their competitors.  Nothing in your world makes any sense, nothing is at the balancing point of the fitness gradients, and something is preventing the people inside from noticing, and I can see it because I'm not a native.  Have you never read any stories like that?  No, probably you haven't, people here probably aren't allowed to write them.  And I don't know what it feels like from the inside to end up being transformed by lunar forces or whatever into a 'masochist', but from what I saw on the video the pain is still there she was screaming and bleeding and this world is not interestingly different it is broken it is a horror and something has to be done.]

[We have freedom of the press in this country, people can write whatever they want. Do I need to take the rest of the day off to prevent World War III?]

[The moon is not letting you think about it.  Or whatever strange feature of this world allows lunar eclipses to grant powers.  It's just a wild guess but I can see it and I can see you not seeing it.  And I'm going to write up as much of this as I can before the next lunar eclipse hits me in case I can't think about it any more after that.]

[You do not need to take the day off to prevent me from damaging this world.  I don't know how to do that, and would do a great deal more research before considering anything that violated deontology.]

[You can write whatever you want, though I don't think your English install will have given you much of a typing speed. I do not think I'm being prohibited from thinking thoughts, I think I just grew up in a very different situation from you and have different assumptions and expectations, and I would for that reason kind of like more information about what you mean by 'violating deontology' before I decide that I'm definitely not taking the rest of the day off.]