After deciding that my original pick for this week was so terribly bad that reviewing it would be a simple unkindness to myself as much as the author, my plea for some more sapphic or queer suggestions turned up a much better replacement, Kiss of Seduction, as well as a few other books I can add to my review backlog.
This one’s a contemporary paranormal romance, a succubus and a half angel, set in the author’s version of the kinky decadent court of BDSM obsessed supernaturals trope. Demons, vampires, werewolves, fae and whatnot live in harmony with the humans they have claimed, but must fight off enemy courts at their borders. Sabor is hardly the first writer to dream up that kind of zoo, but having a not particularly unique premise doesn’t mean something can’t be executed well. Sure, the setting is somewhat of a conceit to justify the aesthetics of the various relationships (and an elaborate magic collating rite), but it’s the quality of writing that can make it break a book more than the degree of novelty it tries to have.
Of course that’s particularly true in Romance. You already expect a HEA, and usually a pretty tight formula following the kind of Romance it is, Historical, Inspirational, Amish, Cowboy, etc… Being sapphic doesn’t change any of the other expected, familiar beats either: the initially helpless character in the pair coming to recognize her power; the brooding dominant softened by true love and finally confident they can let go and be their full selves with the beloved; and of course that any side characters either become insta-family obsessed with helping the main pair come together or obstacles to be vanquished.
Predictable or not, I was still interested enough to see precisely how this horny haunted commune would resolve their challenges to be entertained by it.
I was also happy Sabor avoids some of the bad habits authors can fall into when they write linked-but-stand-alone books. Past and future series characters were very present, but neither intrusive enough to hog the spotlight, nor pointless if you hadn’t read previous books. While it was true that if the characters had already gotten their own happily ever after there would be some time to show this couple still living their best life, the Court of Chains series seems to have aimed for enough variation there’s none of the more obnoxious hive mind of happiness that late in series books can fall into.
Furthermore, as inherently silly as the concept of a friendly vampire is (and in these books every supernatural but the werewolf characters are some variation of an erotic lifeforce drainer), I also find there’s a lot more honesty in starting with the concept that your (fantasy) dominants are inherently predators and figuring out how they try to mitigate that. All too often an otherwise contemporary or more grounded in the real world setting can backfire and leave the intentionally flagged BDSM elements an awkward effort to wallpaper over actual consent issues.
This can be a particular problem in any romance series, more so when a major power imbalance is an important part of each story. One dominant billionaire/Duke/BDSM club owner is a person with a fetish, four or five, all buddies with nobody else unlike them and start feeling like a conspiracy. Sabor’s Court of Chains setting has made its characters self aware, a group of monsters agreeing that their biology makes having a thrall unavoidable and trying to figure about how to put some sort of brakes on.
Nonetheless, the ensemble setting still requires certain tolerances from the reader. While this is strictly speaking sapphic, the peril of the story, told as much for titillation (though perhaps not in as much detail), is the constant threat of enslavement by bad guys. Our sub character, Evie, is a former vampire thrall, and our dom, Natalya, is stuck on earth after killing her cruel master, and has to fear being returned to service again. It seems like all the other major female characters are capable of finding Evie attractive, but they are all in straight, male dominated relationships or headed for one.
If that’s a deal breaker, it would be understandable. Lots of people looking for femdom don’t want to be bothered with male dominance, and if you are looking for sapphic *only*, a series that is majority hetero M/f and uses those couples as the side characters is not going to fill that need.
I think it’s most accurate to say the book is bisexual, so much so that the character being set up as the male lead of the next book is causally described as doing BDSM play with a man. Evie, the literally angelic sub, is exclusively attracted to women, but her brutalization is largely in the hands of men. Natalya’s past partners were chosen in a gender blind fashion, but largely due to a choice in writing she also lives in a world where she has to fear being possessed and used by men more so than women.
There are Vampire Queens, of course, to rival the settings Vampire Kings, and nothing mechanically than makes magic women weaker than magic men, but overall the tone also gives women a bit of a sympathetic buff, that you can be shitty exes or minions of the bad guys, but your heart will ultimately be in the right place. Likewise, male characters can end up enslaved in the story, but I do think there’s a bit of tilt to treating M/f like the overall setting default.
For me, I also found myself in an interesting position because I responded more to the book’s steady stream of whump than I did to the gooey, happy consenting kink parts between the leads. People are forever being shot, stabbed or otherwise maimed and in need of rescue and concern by other characters. I think that’s hot.
As a reader this is perhaps another finer point not properly talked about in the search for good femdom stories. As a dominant I am not personally attracted to dominants. I am somewhat omnisexually attracted to certain kinds of suffering and submission, but as much as I care about books with dommes, I want characters I can self insert into as a dominant that do not insult, annoy or disappoint me.
The actual on page consensual kink between our leads is mostly mild and cozy, using clear stated confirmations of consent at the bulk of its dirty talk, and showing Evie slowly warming up across the many sex scenes between the leads as a sort of mental health progress marker in her trauma recovery. Natalya is (by and large) acting as a wish fulfillment top, that creature of typically submissive fantasy that uses kink to heal and do exactly what the sub secretly wants, but behaves with a combination of shame and gratitude that she lets things go too far with the filthy things she is “making” the sub do. It’s not Sabor’s fault, I can find that romantic or interesting, but I am probably only going to find the more non-diagetic parts of the book erotic.
Likewise, Natalya’s day to day role is to run a BDSM club that provides all the heightened emotions that Fae and Fiend seem to require to eat. There, she plays a stereotypical house dominatrix-as-mentor role, coaching monsters to regulate themselves in a motherly fashion. This often gives me some reservations on the wish fulfillment front that I expect from romance, as a dominant reader.
What redeems things for me are twofold, the classic domme pedestal is framed not as the “proper” way dominants should be, but a disassociation from strong emotional connections Natalya uses because she is wary of love, and that her big pathos is around a world that tends to treat opening up and revealing your true self as submission and undermines those who do. That’s focused on a literal unwillingness to be naked before others, which is given plot reasons, but stands with its symbolism too.
As far as the power fantasy I know many readers say they want, Natalya is second in command in the collective, but perceives that more as a function of overlapping magical biology than real deference to their official leader. The blood sucking variation of Vampire functions on an ability to pool power and it is more pragmatic to leave another character with the fancy hat. Another character might be King, but the decisions are clearly determined collectively, through a fairly consensus tilted alliance.
And as much as the character is fixated on protecting and repairing Evie, the character is given lots of moments to be badass that don’t feel forced. All characters get injured a lot, but even when Natalya is most vulnerable she’s either doing the lion with a thorn in its paw thing or successfully undermining her captors.
So, Kiss of Seduction was fun. I delivers an entertaining ride, I found the characters cute, and it suggests that you can make a working book by writing a female character into a typically male role without having to change much about the characters. Now if only writers would have that kind of courage in the other direction, when they write male sub characters. Still, until there’s more options I think it’s safe to say that sapphic femdom romances do a good job of showing what’s possible.
While the bulk of my review efforts for this year intend to lean towards correcting the paucity of attention paid to femdom fiction (particularly romances), this week my chosen book is Uniquely Rika by Ms. Rika. It’s been sitting in my to-be-read pile for a while, a couple of years now in fact. Published in 2008, it’s generally on the short list of recommendations in online femdom spaces, alongside The New Topping Book, The New Bottoming Book, and The Mistress Manual. As far as placing it relative to those, it’s almost like The Mistress Manual’s aggressive opposite. It’s attempting to be a dominant pleasing first guide, for people who aren’t interested in replicating the stereotypical dungeon experience. Inversely, based on others’ comments, it’s also got a reputation for advocacy against standard practices to maintain consent. While there are some folks who treat it like their Bible, there’s many others with strong negative feelings in the other direction. That makes it popular, but controversial.
Going into it, I was therefore curious about what to expect. Was this going to be alarming or were the criticisms overblown? Additionally, I had another piece complexity as a reviewer. I run in the same circles as Ms. Rika, at least on the internet, and in my arms length observation of them, they generally give well reasoned, patient advice. Therefore I also want to stress that my feelings about their guide are not a reflection on their overall capacity to advise people, and should be limited to this text. Inversely, as I will discuss further on the review, as a somewhat seasoned part of the kink community, I have some observations about what happened when this book’s advice was put into practice over the last 17 years.
Uniquely Rika attempts to solve one issue: Dominants (or would be dominants) in F/m relationships are disproportionately dissatisfied, because they feel that how their role is presented to them prioritizes their partner’s gratification at the expense of their own. While everyone agrees a major cause of this is excessively pushy subs and a lopsided popular understanding of what is possible or how F/m works, this guide is part of the school of thought where the solution is to tell them this isn’t real submission, but also that a true sub is completely selfless. The best way to reflect this selflessness, in Rika’s mind, is constant 24/7 anticipatory service.
Where the guide is weakest is that strictness of definition, and what I would describe of as having way more good faith on her part in the people trying to put her advice into practice. While it’s never a good idea in BDSM advice to talk about a true *anything*, her other major stumbling block is something she is pretty up front about in her forward. This is written for sub dudes trying to get their wife into this; vanilla women with a sub partner; and generally kinky couples who are trying to transition intermittent play into a more encompassing dynamic. Nowhere in that list is solo dominant women, or dommes to whom this is their idea. This is an oversight that tilts things wildly, because the foundational premise leans to assuming that the dominant is starting from such a place of alienation that a sub needs to lean with all his weight in the other direction to over-correct past damage. And, if I am being honest, I find her approach to more traditional BDSM activities internally contradictory to how she frames them.
To her credit, she makes it pretty clear this is just what works for her, in a sample size of 1, an, at the time of writing, 20 year 24/7 dynamic. That is not nothing, but she doesn’t claim a PhD in counseling psychology; a lit review of the 200 most useful books; or even makes anything bigger than claiming this is her perspective after a lifetime of observing other people’s dynamics fail to work.
To place her ideas in the larger spectrum of what’s out there, she’s a Pyjama Domme (or fuzzy slippers Domme). That’s a byproduct of the late aughts to mid 2010s who collectively awakened to the problem that the conventionally understood idea of femdom was not working for most of us, since we weren’t interested in operating in a commercial context. Our actual problem was sexism (and remains so), and our mission to amplify ourselves and be heard was based on the very real need to assert that we did not need to wear a specific uniform of fetish wear and play a character to be permitted to do this. We particularly centered casual, deliberately unsexy loungewear as our symbols to emphasize this wasn’t about us performing for others. There were some significant upsides from this (omisspearl.com existing being one of them!), but Uniquely Rika also reflects some of the problems we were prone to.
At our worst, we could be very SWERFy, often lashing out more than needed at sex workers over the fact that we were immersed in the lock step advice that if you were a dominant and a woman/even vaguely femme, you needed to be an amateur dominatrix. To this day, we have both positives, but also a hard edge of a sort of heterofatalist tendency to throw a self defensive elbow in the direction of everything we have been historically harassed with, even as you aren’t prepared to give up on it entirely. That and the human tendency to simplify and ignore our own personal grey areas. A lot of dominants with criticisms of femdom culture will over state certain parts as being entirely the idea of silly and demanding men, while eliding over other parts we want to keep.
For Ms. Rika, that probably shows up most in her effort to grapple with the idea of fetish versus vanilla. Everything femdom, in her cosmology, is either the false version of submission (summarized as that craving for a corseted, whip wielding, high camp goth disciplinarian) or “normal” female sexuality. Some of this is being deliberately hands off with trying to define specifics, in an effort to make this be more universal. But in practice, her efforts to illustrate why her method is more inviting flips into being a lot more specific than she seems to realize.
Where she has her best strengths is where she breaks down why different models of how this is supposed to work fall short. Her examples of why hanging your whole dynamic on a specific fetish fails are inspired, stressing that a partner hanging their motives entirely on cock cage or similar prioritizes their accessory over their partner. Likewise, when she starts talking about the S&M side of it there’s an approach that’s relatively novel to topping if your goal is supposed to produce certain psychological outcomes in the partner. Were it not for her unfortunate attitudes towards limits and negotiations, I would actually say she tends to demonstrate a pretty good understanding of the theory of why a lot of things work.
However, despite the emphasis on these being clearly important enough to figure out, her method insists that all fetish activities (the tying, the butt stuff, roleplaying, etc…) are categorized as gifts we should assume the dominant isn’t personally into, but may choose or not to give the submissive. She’s very clear that it’s a gift, not a reward, as nothing is ever owed. She also figures if these were your thing otherwise, as a dominant, you would be doing them already and your partner’s desire for them wouldn’t be potentially vexing.
Unfortunately, this misses that a lot of dominants also struggle with the thing we actually want being forced on us or given to us so awkwardly this undermines our own relationship to it. Making it a “gift” certainly gives you a cooling off period from the usual experience dommes complain of, when this is shoved down our throats. Inversely, all this distance also subtracts your own ability to take ownership of the thing. Nevermind her general tone that if you like this stuff at all without a man wanting it you are kind of weird because these are all “male centric”.
There’s no curiosity there might be a female centric version of these things, or introspection of why we needed so much emphasis on these if they are so darn distasteful. Men are from Mars and sadomasochists; women are from Venus and like cunnilingus and sex where he doesn’t finish. Because obviously he isn’t getting primary enjoyment from *that* without you forcing him too, but no woman ever saw some tall boots and thought she looked sexy in them. And this gets especially bewildering the way she keeps going back to the same scenarios of her partner kneeling with clamped nipples and clothespins on his scrotum, even as she emphasizes the bizarreness of this.
Ms. Rika is very able to break down things effectively to explain why it usually doesn’t feel dominant to be told you may (or worse, should!) do a lot of traditional fet stuff. But she has a massive blind spot around whether her own wishes should be perceived as kinky, and how 24/7 anticipatory service is over stated as the secret sauce. Sure, lots of people like to get what they want. It assumes all women are secretly wanting the upper hand in every important aspect of their relationship.
It also assumes all subs can make literally anything work, as long as they remind themselves that doing a favour for the dominant is always a privilege. Maybe this is a little bit of an absurd reach, but based on how Ms. Rika defines this, that would include collaring your partner and being the perfect dominant for her 24/7 as an act of selflessness. With no expectation of it ever stopping or getting what you want, because that other stuff is a gift.
A hypothetical extension of the Uniquely Rika system is that her version of a fake male sub could find a real sub of the gender they prefer and order them to do anything they want. You can imagine how much the average self identified femsub with a guy trying to pull that stunt would laugh them out of the room. That’s probably another problem with the pyjama domme approach, collectively. A lot of us are so personally repulsed by submission and how much the mainline scene pushes it on us that we kind of stop paying attention to how a whole other population of kinky women are navigating living with demanding partners and sexism, and how they deal with it.
An even more crotchety read here, on my part, is this abdication that you even think about your partner’s needs and get him to figure it out for himself is bordering on the dubious idea of stealth submission. And it does go there, with examples like shoe care causing the sub to realize as a foot fetishist they should be grateful to be allowed near that. What is working here is that it’s making the sub a more active participant in making space for the dominant, not just his fantasy. The problem here is that this isn’t really sustainable.
Guides like “Conquer Me” by Kacie Cunnigham can also be contrasted here. That book is preoccupied with making a sub in a M/f relationship feel submissive while the sub remains safe, and not at all with a dominant feeling dominant. But inversely to Uniquely Rika, Conquer Me emphasizes the theatrical bells and whistles matter. Which, some sort of part of that usually does. There’s a distinct paucity of magic doormats, no matter what they angrily type about how their submission is actually true and real.
Thus, the problem with Uniquely Rika’s approach is also that 24/7 anticipatory service (as she describes it) is not going to work without a whole bunch of stuff she is assuming will automatically follow. Ms. Rika talks about the hardline posture she occupies, but we don’t really get Mr. Rika’s side of things except through her reassurance men will eventually be grateful even if they seem reluctant at first. Which, I would suppose, now requires me to talk about her constant emphasis on no limits or safewords directly. She does that a lot, and believes it’s the other core part of this working.
This is what I would call Ms. Rika not realizing what a good, loving and patient person she is, and having the smart and thoughtful person blunder of not understanding just how dumb and terrible other people are.
Ms. Rika assumes your love and appreciation for your partner makes doing the things she classifies as “gifts” fairly regularly a natural extension of that love. She clearly sees the want for these things as an extension of who your partner is, and something that ultimately needs to be warmly accepted. In a lot of ways the unspoken foundation of her theory functioning for her is she is offering her partner the reassurance that when she does these things it is because she wants to and he doesn’t have to worry this is under duress.
Since a lot of subs, particularly dudes, think their desires are an icky box of spiders, that can be powerful. Wow, no more begging, it was even her idea! But, because a lot of people think the theatrical stuff actually is icky spiders AND the idea of subs being a limitless well of support is hot enough to forget most people can’t sustain the practice of that, evidence shows that the average person trying to do her method eventually runs into a wall.
In practice, you can’t hold Ms. Rika entirely responsible here, but it fucks up so many couples to basically decide that the sub is not to be trusted with their wants. It’s like even the folks who agree we need to start with an egalitarian foundation take the sub’s half of it, and rather than emphasize it’s to be weighted equally to the dominant, throw it out the window.
As a submissive, you do not get to decide what makes a dominant feel dominant. Inversely, as a dominant you do not get to decide what makes a submissive feel submissive. If this gulf is too big to bridge, that doesn’t make either of you invalid, just incompatible.
You can tweak what you are doing to see where compatibility is, but you can’t fix things by deciding that one of you just needs to suck it up and deal. That’s a sexy premise to a fantasy, but so is being kidnapped and forced to marry a fairy prince, or having a permanent residence in a cage in someone’s basement.
Ms. Rika goes one step worse here, because she sort of loses the plot when she transitions from the loving egalitarian relationship she says you need to start with and how you should conduct yourself in the D/s relationship she puts on top of it. Specifically she thinks you get there via a my-way-or-the-highway approach to BDSM, complete with withdrawal of the right to serve at all if they ever balk at anything, with an emphasis on no negotiation other than consciously assuming the dynamic itself. Otherwise, she places a repeated emphasis on dommes having no obligation for the dynamic other than honest feedback and being calm, firm and unyielding. If they refuse to do anything ever, you simply end the dynamic. First, as a warning shot for 24 hours, but you make it clear you will easily make it permanent if they don’t both change their mind about the refusal and apologize.
This is fucking bananas. I can’t stress how bad the advice here is. Ms. Rika says this is just what works for her, and maybe it would work for you, but she has really poor insight into how this will go down for other people and the actual role of limits play in a relationship for the benefit of both parties.
Ms. Rika is assuming that not only do you not want to cause real harm to your partner (because you love them), but that you will be very good at determining your partner’s level of distress as it approaches lasting harm, and that it is appropriate to incentivize cooperation with only your one version of submission with no input from them. She also assumes that you are so otherwise indifferent to receiving his submission that anything less than the extreme is worthless to you. Therefore if he cannot do that, you would prefer he stop asking at all.
If you use her method you also need to assume that you are a better judge of what your partner is capable of than they are. And that your partner is not to be trusted, and without an imminent threat of losing your interest in BDSM all together they will sabotage the submission they supposedly want.
I try to avoid the whole “are the straights ok???” thing because honestly the whole business of BDSM, even done badly, is as queer as a three dollar bill, but this book does have a giant begged question of why you are tolerating someone who is apparently so shit at basic relationship skills. It’s very “control your husband by withholding sex, because as a woman you could take or leave it.” For a person who spent a lot of time telling you not to act like their mom, Ms. Rika still tends to lean that way, that your underlying vanilla dynamic is adversarial and your partner is at best lazy and at worst out ot get everything they can get too. Tirelessly work on this submission to me, young man, or we throw it away! Men are idiots. That’s just how men are, honey. You gotta break’em in or they will walk all over you. (etc..) Yes, this was written in 2008, and there’s a generational gap in how compulsory relationships were to Ms. Rika’s generation versus my own, but it is already a hostage situation just get a fucking divorce already.
And really, the problem is that as a result there is no room for most dominants in her method, because we are incentivized to also want this. At best her method is playing chicken, counting on your partner having lower self worth or higher desperation. At worst this is dominant fap, as much a fantasy as the Surrendered Wife teaching you how to get your husband to do everything you want by selectively ceasing to do anything you don’t want to do.
I don’t think Ms. Rika wants anyone doing anything unsafe to their partners when she repeatedly emphasizes a no limits approach. I just think that, in the history of people in fetish communities emphasizing the absence of their limits, she does the usual thing of assuming the actual limits someone might have are so radioactive (and so universal) if they were ever transgressed it would immediately end the dynamic… so it doesn’t count. Then she doesn’t need to think about it because it maintains the mutual fiction of greater power.
All this no limits business is also a kind of an emotional security blanket from self reflection about the other elephant in the room. Ms. Rika says she doesn’t feel dominant from doing traditional sadomasochistic stuff, but she takes enjoyment in knowing her partner is inconvenienced. This is where the strictness of her world view gets in her own way. What she’s describing is a flavour of sadism. This is a fetish. Ditto the way she tries to sell sex where he doesn’t come by default. A lot of people would feel as uncomfortable doing what she is describing as they would scowling in thigh high boots. And by the time you get to the sex manual part where she keeps talking about removing your partner’s choices (push them past them saying no!), over and over again you really get a feeling that the lady is protesting too much. There’s only so much you can say you aren’t all that invested in your partner’s fetishes when you won’t stop talking about the thought you have put into them.
Essentially, the core of Uniquely Rika is her effort to create a space where she feels safe being unreasonable. Just as much as she observes her spouse becoming more open minded about what he can work with to feel submissive over, she’s given herself breathing room to get comfortable with what he wants and figure out how to make it work for her. What’s missing here as point of emphasis is that 20 year marriage with implied years and years of exploring and experimenting and knowing each other’s personal quirks.
And I can, through my own experience, see how she arrived where she did, even if I think the result is bad advice. As a baby dominant, how everything is presented to you is basically two versions. You are either here to master giving your partner the physical and psychological ride of their life or you are a dangerous psychopath to be strictly reigned in. More frustratingly, you get to be treated like the latter, and your partners often get deeply offended if they are asked to do otherwise than pretend you are a villain… but also somehow still entirely here for their benefit.
Also I was often really bad at the skill parts, or wouldn’t always nail what my partner(s) were looking for, and the culture of communication was that I deserved lots of feedback on how well I was doing for them, but my ability to feel dominant was something I was just supposed to figure out how to extract for myself by doing this. I think Ms. Rika was under the same pressure. Seriously, nothing was more discouraging that much of the aftercare I got from people amounted to “I have a few notes about how you can do this better for me next time…”
Now I am becoming an old, and have been doing this almost as long as Ms. Rika did when she wrote her guide, what I realize was there was no room for me to be vulnerable and imperfect.
The problem is flipping this on its head (no actually, subs are villains who are entirely here for my benefit!) would have been a wild over correction. And the Uniquely Rika school of doing things, now with plenty of people trying to put it in practice, we can see where it goes wrong. For couples trying to get a dynamic off the ground, even with a bit of kinky bedroom play, suddenly jettisoning all your feedback tools and pretending all the sub’s needs are invalid.
Ms. Rika’s approach to safewords, etc… are that these are things that the sub uses against dominants to correct and control their behaviour. Safewords, properly used, actually benefit the dominant because they require the sub to do the work in self introspection, such that the dominant can relax a bit of the pressure in monitoring everything. The sub skill learning curve is usually about getting away from needing the dominant to be a mind reader, and a mandatory safeword demands subs always keep one foot on the ground and never lose sight of your experience of this.
Uniquely Rika’s hardline approach removes most of the lopsided burden from dominants, to let them find their own joy, but it never really realizes it’s simultaneously just as much a set of training wheels and is foundationally resting on her having the sort of trust with her partner she can push him a little bit or the distinction that she is actually only asking him to approach what she wants with the same open minded way she makes what he wants work for her.
Thus Ms. Rika identifies correctly identifies that cock cages or cross dressing alone cannot sustain a dynamic, but neither can defence mechanisms. For a few folks, coming from a foundation of trust, it will take the pressure off long enough to let things feel most natural. But for most people, this is just going to cause even more resentment and insecurity.
Therefore, I don’t think this is a good beginner book, or even really one I would personally suggest, even as something to follow at all. I think if you take it as a personal snapshot of how someone constructed their dynamic, its value is a lot more that there’s not many other books like it. It’s not trying to be a universal work like The New Topping/Bottoming Books, appealing to every possible permutation of kinky. Neither is it like most other femdom manuals, either concerned with appealing to hubby’s fantasies with the same indulgence you might learning your mother in law’s holiday dishes; but neither is it stealth porn, which a distressing number of other manuals turn out to be.
What she offers is there in the title, that to be a lifestyle dominant and not want to claw your own eyes out in frustration, there has to be space to uniquely be yourself. Where it falters is a lack of trust in your partners to ever be able to follow through without some sort of pressure beyond that being your preference.
I would be interested to see, nearly two decades later, what if anything Ms. Rika would change on a re-write. It’s a 17 year old sex and relationship manual, daringly novel in its approach, but if you are remotely following the discussions people have around lifestyle femdom, it’s also somewhat blatantly of its era. But that’s not a bad thing. No Individual Lifestyle only Domme is going to have it nailed down in every aspect, and we can’t really ignore that Ms. Rika’s commitment to being herself.
This is a tabloid thriller romp meets gothic romance into what I would probably describe more as caretaker whump appreciation of bad things happening to a male captive than anything traditionally femdom. Still, if your entry to this kink is more focused on the hurt/comfort male suffering part and the power fantasy of being a rescuer, this book has a lot to offer. And, if last week’s review (What Was Meant To Be) was too cozy for you, this one definitely won’t be.
Our protagonist is a mixed background, loose cannon artist, Lilith Bresson, coerced by a wealthy aristocratic Blaine Albermarle to come to her remote castle resort and produce a commission. There Lilith, or “Lily” meets Blaine’s pretty but damaged boytoy Finn, and comes to discover that the resort offers more than a relaxing getaway to discerning patrons. Our heroine has stumbled into one of those rich people sex-torture clubs where everything is available for the right price, and Finn is one of the prize victims in Blaine’s stable.
After a prickly start, Finn and Lilith begin to form a connection, even as Blaine seeks to ensnare more subjects in a web of blackmail. A cascade of badness follows. Everything and the kitchen sink happens to Finn in loving and lurid detail, while Lilith tries to fight back and wrestle with her own demons.
The tabloid framing, one with a paparazzi lurking for her as a minor celebrity they aren’t sure if they should destroy or worship, and the tawdry glamor of Lilith’s politician father, are equally integral to the setting, seaming together to amp up the drama while giving the audience a taste of a power fantasy of our own, one where it’s plausible one very angry young woman can destroy a criminal network in the manner of a more traditional hero slaying a dragon. If the BDSM without limits brothel with real sex slaves angle is a bit far fetched to read straight (not to mention the logistical overhead of the sheer level of blackmail gluing everyone to the situation), the added concerns of talk shows and award ceremonies almost serve to ground the story’s violent conspiracy excesses as precisely the sort of thing that same sort of media purports to be true.
Thus you can just absolutely feel the nasty, UK Grim atmosphere leaking through, a sort of tonal filter much like a Russian novel’s typical, almost hysterical bleakness. If the characters are largely trapped on an island castle at the whims of its master, so also is the setting one where leaving the resort is just being on a different sort of covert island torture prison.
There isn’t anything you would associate with Lilith being a traditional dominant, and indeed she’s put through almost as much shit as the male lead. However, the fanfiction classified aesthetic of whump is something I talked about before as a place where a lot of the porn for dommes hides. If the damsel-in-distress trope has a lengthy history of being a covert excuse for bondage and lingering over a helpless feminine victim and her suffering, here too is the gender flip option.
This is a great read for a chilly autumn evening, where you want something juicy and just a little bit horrific to titillate you into the shivers.
TL;DR
Imagine a role reversal Orpheus and Eurydice, if the captive was in as close to actual hell as possible. Caretaker + whump victim struggle their way to an escape, with very much a flavour of a fox trying to get out of wolf’s den, only to exit into a forest where the hounds are already baying for a hunt.
“Pawn of the Cruel Princess” by Rebecca F. Kenney is a dark romance aiming for the trope of enemies to lovers. It’s got an ostensible femdom premise (male war captive of female royalty) but a decidedly switchy tone. Like many works trying to focus on sexual slavery while also trying to keep the characters likable, it relies heavily on external pressures pushing the couple together and forcing the female lead, Ruelle, into a more carnal dynamic with Ducayne.
There is a plot here, as well, with shades of Gideon the Ninth. After our main characters’ introduction and torture room meet cute, we learn the flower of the youthful nobility (and their pleasure thralls) must congregate in one isolated place to party. Once at the resort, bad things must be grappled with and whodoneit mystery is presented. Ruelle brings enemy captain Ducayne to spite her Crown Princess sister, but also because she is attempting to politic her way into her own survival when her wicked sister eventually ascends the throne. Despite having virtually no time to train Ducayne, with the help of a magic tattoo and some negotiation, Ruelle secures his cooperation to at least vaguely attempt to pass as her submissive thrall.
The sister and the family dynamic here is extravagantly abusive. The society, for their part, is hypersexual with a great deal of focus on the owning and training of their thralls. This appears to be a common practice on the island shared by both Ruelle and Ducayne’s respective nations. Our framing device for why any of this needs explaining is that Ruelle is a virgin who has yet to cooperate with debauchery expected of a noble.
Ducayne, for his part, instantly decides he doesn’t care about the side of a war he is on, but maintains an intense quantity of pride and belief in his own right to autonomy. He is also spends a lot of time thinking about the bad relationship he has with his mother.
Both characters speculate they are kinky thanks to abuse from their parents. Much hay is made of the heroine’s inherent masochism, something that she is deeply uncomfortable with. The hero is forever pinning her against things and making threats. In this society, being aroused by bottoming is apparently shameful, and both characters grapple with discomfort that they are aroused by it, Ruelle more so than her thrall. There is something here about space for switches and lovers of primal, but if you are turned off by the sub manhandling the dominant and at least one scene of pretty much flat out non-con with another man for Ruelle, you might be annoyed.
I know this is a hot button issue for a lot of femdoms that even in fiction we don’t get to avoid being disempowered,, not to mention the external pressure that we are just feisty subs who will eventually be taught better. If anything that could even hint of that is triggering, you might want to skip this one.
On the other hand, for all of Ducayne’s bluster, his growing feelings for Ruelle quickly come to form an ongoing basis for his willing cooperation with his own subjugation, and he’s clearly aroused by being sliced up, verbally abused and manhandled by Ruelle. There’s more turbo brat here than full dominant from him, and his own violence towards Ruelle rapidly starts to resemble a sort of service topping. Ruelle is incredibly erotophobic and Ducayne’s role is to largely safely confront her with her own desire in a way that she can eventually accept. Inversely Ducayne shifts from being horny-for-his-enemy to deciding that she’s almost as much a prisoner as him and assuming a role of rescuer.
Also expect interludes with all the background characters, who are of every possible orientation. There will even be a sort of light love triangle with potential for a thruple explored, but this book isn’t aiming to be menage, just keeping most of the focus on kinky sex, more kinky sex and rather intense violence.
To its credit, when we get to the ending, while all romances must have a happily ever after (HEA), we also don’t get the sense this pair will transform to vanilla. They will probably remain stabby and primal, but ultimately the hero decides to accept something that keeps him subjugated to the heroine.
TL;DR
Domme-to-switch non-con with a brat and a very violent, gory plot. A lot of stabbing and slicing from the heroine. I found it perfectly readable, but the emphasis on the heroine’s masochism still needs flagging.
