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liminalpsych
Reina raised a painted eyebrow. "Do you even know what an actor does?"
Learning about Inazuma as a foreigner was like exploring a vast, unlit storeroom with only a single candle to show the way. After three years, Thoma sometimes thought he'd at least mapped the floor-plan of the storeroom, if not its contents. "Well, from what I saw... dressing in costume and dancing?"
And sometimes, someone looked at him with Reina's incredulous stare, and asked him a lightning-bolt of a question that illuminated the vastness of everything he did not know.
Reina cast her gaze up towards the stained ceiling with a long-suffering sigh. "Guuji Yae must be playing a prank on me," she muttered. "Look, the dancing is just a display. A kabuki theatre is a brothel."
"Really?" Thoma stared at her. He thought back to the brothel bargaining dance he'd seen, and the inexplicable conversations between actors and patrons. "So the high priestess of the Grand Narukami Shrine sent me here to find a mentor in... providing sex?"
Notes for A Matter of Duty - Chapter 11 - Protector from afar
I'm back and fully caught up with 4.0! Help, I've got Neuvillette brain rot, and I'm going feral over every crumb of additional House of the Hearth content.
Thanks again to the fantastic PancakeBeast for beta reading! Also thanks to the Hidden Akasha Records Genshin fanworks Discord for helping with all my weird questions, listening to my rambles, and hosting writing sprints.
Notes and references:
- I'm using actual NPCs whenever I can. Reina made a brief appearance at a festival event once in game and had one line, but still! She exists! A lot of OCs in this fic are original characters because they won't be around (they'd be dead/out of Inazuma/etc) by the time the game starts, or there's not an extant NPC who fits the role. A couple unnamed side characters in earlier chapters are also NPCs in game (e.g. the guy from the bathhouse last chapter - any guesses?). It's a little tricky because the story is set 9 years before the game, so I have to remember that all the NPCs in game would have been 9 years younger, and that rules out a lot of options.
- Drought does actually increase the complexity of flavor with tea, supposedly because the tea grows more slowly with less water, and thus has a chance to develop more flavor.
- In the early Edo period (and into the late Edo period in some cases), if you were a performer for the masses (as opposed to for the nobles as with noh theater), you were understood to also be available for sex to the right buyer. Kabuki actor = sex worker. Dancer = sex worker (and early Kabuki was also more dance than acting). Even some shrine maidens doing performance = sex worker (maiden as in unmarried, not maiden as in chaste).
- I'm taking some Genshin-style liberties and blending a bit of early Edo period kabuki (where everyone played the opposite gender and kabuki was inherently queer) with some later-period kabuki (when it got a little more formalized and more acting-focused, and also male-actor-only for a variety of crappy reasons). The Inazuma kabuki is not purely sex worker advertisement (which was something of the case in early kabuki: dances and prostitute-purchasing skits to show off the options and actors), it has some actual acting and scripted plays rather than just disconnected dancing and skits. But it's mostly sex worker advertisement, and it hasn't become gender segregated to the same degree, especially since the Raiden Shogunate doesn't emphasize class separation to the same degree as the Tokugawa Shogunate that it's based on.
- The clapping at the end of the performance is tejime, a kind of ceremonial rhythmic hand-clapping to conclude special events.
- Shrines and temples had their own playhouses, called Miyaji-shibai. They were under the jurisdiction of superintendents of the temples and shrines (e.g. Yae Miko and maybe the Yashiro Commission) rather than the other categories of playhouses, which were under the jurisdiction of city magistrates (Kanjou Commission and possibly Yashiro Commission depending on how one wants to define it).
- Here's a fun Twitter thread overview of Kabuki and prostitution.
- There were almost certainly more inns at Inazuma City than are portrayed in game. It's 9 years before the game started, the inn and theater could have burnt down or shut down for any number of reasons before the Traveler arrived.
- I used Ayato to walk the path from the edge of Hanamizaka where I've set the kabuki theater, down the road to the river ford to Chinju Forest, and all the way up to the Kamisato Estate. It took 12 in-game hours. Then I jogged him back down it, which took closer to 2.5 in-game hours. If you add in the jog to Tenshukaku, it takes 5 hours total. So I have decided the Kamisatos have horses, because otherwise Ayato has a commute of anywhere from 5 to 12 hours. A horse probably brings it down to 3, minimum. (Needless to say, I now understand why Ayato's gone from the estate for days or weeks at a time. I would sleep in town too if I had a 3+ hour commute.)
- This one's a thorough but highly readable overview of the history of Kabuki theatre with a focus on prostitution and gender/sex roles: Birk, Sara K., "Sex, androgyny, prostitution and the development of onnagata roles in Kabuki theatre" (2006). Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers. 3537.
- Super useful and had information I couldn't find in the various online resources I was reading: Nakane, C., Totman, C., & Masakatsu, G. (1997). Kabuki and its social background. In Tokugawa Japan: The Social and economic antecedents of modern Japan (pp. 192–292). essay, Univ. of Tokyo Press.
- This one's fabulous; it's a translation of a text from 1687. The introduction is fascinating context, the first half of the stories are all samurai m/m love stories, and the second half are all kabuki theater m/m love stories which was super helpful for getting context (such as the average cost of a night with a kabuki actor-prostitute). (Also, content warning for age gaps and references to sex with minors, a norm of the time.) Ihara, Saikaku, and Paul Gordon Schalow. The Great Mirror of Male Love. Stanford University Press, 1990.
- This book details specific plays, and provides cultural context and history for each of them. Really useful read when trying to figure out what Inazuman kabuki might look like. Crandall, David, and Kesako Matsui. Kabuki, a Mirror of Japan: Ten Plays That Offer a Glimpse into Evolving Sensibilities. Japan Publishing Industry Foundation for Culture, 2019.
- Life of the courtesans in Japan's floating world: An interesting read, if somewhat pearl-clutching in tone at times.
A year after the death of Ayato and Ayaka's parents, the clan succession is contested from within and without. Kamisato Ayato will do anything—anything—to ensure the safety of his family and the stability of his clan.
But powerful supporters come at an unimaginable price. When Ayato's own sacrifices aren't enough, he is forced to involve Thoma in a web of intrigue and exploitation that will push them to the breaking points of their bodies, their minds, and their very hearts.
or: Kushiel's Dart meets Genshin Impact in a quick-scorch-to-slow-burn romantic drama of court intrigue, sexual politics, and sacrifice.
Note: Mind the tags. More specific content warnings will be given at the beginning of each chapter, and the story tags will be updated as needed. All characters in sex scenes are adults.
Rating: Explicit. It's porn with plot. Porn as a vehicle for plot, or plot as a vehicle for porn, you can interpret it either way. (I prefer: porn and plot as a vehicle for ~feels~)
Tags that I'm not actually turning into tags here, but it gives you an idea of what you're in for: Kamisato Ayato/Thoma (Genshin Impact), dubious consent but not between Ayato and Thoma, slow burn, sex ed, first time, self-sacrifice, humiliation, exhibitionism, oral sex, anal sex, bdsm, bad bdsm etiquette, rough sex, breath play, impact play, bondage, service kink, abuse, sadism, codependency, shame, guilt, jealousy, possessiveness, trauma, ptsd, dissociation, political sex work, or sex work for political maneuvering, or political survival sex work if that’s a thing, exploitation, blackmail, political machinations, political intrigue, no aftercare, maybe someday some aftercare, hurt/comfort, mostly hurt for a long time but eventually comfort, oblivious disaster gays, for such socially savvy people they are terrible at personal relationships, dominant Ayato, submissive Thoma, top Ayato, bottom Thoma, Ayato is incredibly parentified, Thoma has no sense of self-preservation, self-sacrifice isn't a contest but don't tell Ayato and Thoma that, it's like the snipe-the-check game at restaurants but with sex and politics, Kushiel's Impact, no really this was in my drafts for the longest time as Kusheline Thomato Fic, everyone's an adult in this timeline except Ayaka, she gets protected at all costs, original characters out of necessity, finding appropriate existing Inazuma npcs for some of these roles was impossible
Full fic: A Matter of Duty on Archive Of Our Own
Chapter 11 - Protector from afar - Ayato navigates a web of family intrigue. Thoma follows Yae Miko's clues into the kabuki theater to find a mentor.
Chapter contains: Family politics, guilt/shame attempts, discussion of sex work, implied sex wor
