Caution: contains spoilers.

Yesterday morning, feeling moderately more human (but still quite stuffy), I sat up in bed to watch George Lucas’ film, Strange Magic. It was… just okay. 

For one it’s a musical, which kind of got on my nerves when the characters kept breaking into tune. For another they used (and absolutely slaughtered) some immediately recognisable existing love songs: Beyonce’s “Crazy In Love”, Mickey & Sylvia’s “Love Is Strange” (originally heard in “Dirty Dancing”), The Troggs’ “Wild Thing”, to name a few. 

The storyline is okay, relatable, and did hit me right in the feels at one point. Marianne, the main protagonist, is about to get married to another fairy, Roland (the [love] rat — that joke is not lost on me there), but Roland cheats on her, leaving Marianne distrusting in love and swearing it off completely. Meanwhile, in the adjacent kingdom — the Dark Forest — the Bog King has been rejected by the love of his life, prompting him to reject the premise of true love. as well The fairies make a love potion from primroses that grow on the border of the kingdoms, and the Bog King has ordered that the primroses be destroyed, so the love potion can’t be made, and so nobody will ever fall in love again. 

Sunny the elf sneaks into the Dark Forest to ask the Sugar Plum Fairy — who is being kept prisoner by the Bog King as the manufacturer of love potion — to make a love potion, using a smuggled primrose petal so he can splash some on Marianne’s sister, Dawn, causing her to fall in love with him. Realising that someone from the Fairy Kingdom has snuck into the Dark Forest and freed the Sugar Plum Fairy, the Bog King sends an army to invade the fairy ball that night, and Dawn — who had just been splashed with the love potion by Sunny — is bagged.

When the bag is removed from Dawn, the first thing she sees is the Bog King, causing her to fall in love with him instead. 

And the only thing stronger than the love potion, it is said, is true love itself. 

So it goes, with an adventure that sees Marianne (and Sunny) taking on a quest to rescue Dawn. Marianne launches a direct attack on the Bog King’s throne room to get Dawn back. They duel, and he is impressed by her combat abilities. They end up in a word sparring match, realizing that they have a common enemy: love. 

So they end up talking, connecting, realising they’re both guarded but need one another in their missions. They have to trust one another, and inevitably fall in love. 

The whole premise is great, but I felt somewhat underwhelmed. Like there was a tiny detail that was missing. Something that could have made this movie even more… Disney. 

When Marianne and the Bog King fall in love, the “curse” that is the darkness of the Dark Forest — the absence of love in it — could have been lifted. Flowers could have bloomed, and the forest creatures could have found love in one another too. Marianne and the Bog King (and Dawn and Sunny, for that) finding love in one another was great, but the movie ending there made it feel just fractionally unfinished to me. Sure, it would have felt like a Beauty & The Beast spin-off. But hey, who doesn’t love Beauty & The Beast? 

I am allowed to call Valkyries “Boggy Woggy Kingy Wingy” from now too, or until I grow bored of it, which may or may never happen. Master Levi has some nicknames that have stuck around for years.

The main song from Strange Magic — incidentally called “Strange Magic” — has been stuck in my head for the past 24 hours now though, and is probably (and unintentionally) the soundtrack for how this relationship — no, polycule — is.    

Last night, Valkyries caused me some alarm and confusion: he asked if I could review a Sybian machine (that is for sale on the Lovehoney website) under their affiliate programme. I had to explain how it all works; said that I can’t just grab anything I want for free. Like the tester programme there will likely be limited products and numbers of that are up for review, though I will find out more about that once I’ve applied. 

Besides, I’m not even sure that I’d want to review a Sybian machine. Not so much because of what it is (though that too. I’ve personally never found the appeal over something more portable and affordable, like a vibrator), but also because it doesn’t fit with my business model. Ten Shades & Me is about making kink safe, accessible, affordable and fun, and a £1,500 fucking machine is not something that most people can afford. Showcasing it wouldn’t fit within my business model; it would feel more like showcasing how “up” I am now, compared to my blog’s audience. 

So it’s not only a personal decision, it’s also an ethical decision.

Valkyries, though, talked about having one for entertaining guests. The idea of it made me freeze. 

Guests, plural? What’s he planning, that I don’t know about? 

After my relationship with B, “plural” language is something that I am very sensitive to: B said once that he had a “harem”, and though I wasn’t impressed with being objectified (I didn’t consent to it), I shrugged it off when he said it was just a joke. But we were supposed to be a mutually-agreed closed quad, and we were. So then when he went to meet and play with someone else (and without telling me first, which he said there wasn’t time for), it came as a huge blow to me. I felt like I’d been cheated on, and I know some poly folks agree. 

Ever since then, I’ve been very wary of “collectors” and “harem builders”. 

Nothing against those who can function in open poly networks, by the way, it’s just not a relationship dynamic that works for me. My brain likes it more when it has fewer names and dynamics it has to try and remember, it gets easily confused.

So when Valkyries spoke of “guests”, my “harem-builder” alarm went off. I huddled into myself and tried to sleep: I knew I shouldn’t have trusted him. 

There was no “goodnight” message from me. His fantasies clearly didn’t involve me, or of then did, then not wholeheartedly. I didn’t want to distract him from them.  

This morning, I wrote a journal entry about it, on the Embrace app. Not too soon after, Valkyries shared one with me, celebrating technology and its significance (and importance) in our relationship.

Within moments Valkyries messaged me in response to my diary entry. He clarified exactly what he’d meant about the Sybian, he also said he has no intentions to build a harem or to share me with anyone (besides Master Levi). Valkyries also paid credit to the importance of technology in handling crises of all kinds, and how, once again, technology had served its purpose in keeping us from blowing our world apart.