You know I have to say that I really appreciate that this wasn't a hackneyed "don't touch my daughter" thing like it could have been but rather was a "don't touch my daughter unless you have explicit consent" thing? It's so rare to actually see this play out in terms of consent rather than... idk bodily serfdom?
Yeah, just thought that was worth pointing out.
I'm glad that the distinction came across, because that was honestly one of the things that made me want to write the story in the first place. I wanted to sort of play with that trope a little bit, but I also wanted to re-write it in a way that made sense for Tryst. Because consent is something that -- for obvious reasons
-- Tryst would take very, very seriously.
There's a line in "The Body" that always sort of gets to me, when Tryst is hoping that her child will have "a body that could love, and could be loved." And that line sort of helped to illuminate this piece for me. Because I don't think that, when and if Mira grows up, Tryst would want to suppress her daughter's sexuality -- whatever that might turn out to be. In fact, I think it would be the opposite -- I think it would be really, really important to Tryst for Mira to be able to have a healthy and positive experience with sex -- again, in whatever form Mira would choose for that to take. Because that's something that Tryst herself never had.
So, yeah, the message that Tryst wants to give Kelton here isn't "don't touch my daughter." It's "respect my daughter, and respect her choices."
Anyway, that's a lot of heavy stuff to sort of freight what is, at the end of the day, a for-fun, non-canon story with. But, if you felt like that worked, then I'm really, really happy about that.