(( The more I think about it the more I realize there's an unspoken hierarchy to Miranda's partners, a hierarchy that's absolutely more natural to her in both her culture and in being a royal in their own specific subculture, but one that's a lot harder to describe to anyone else.

I think touch is a pretty good measure of it. Miranda does like to be touched and even has a preference for receiving, but most of her partners are discouraged from or just don't touch her. She can touch them and she gets them off, likewise getting off from more sight and a demonstration of her skills and the ability to pleasure someone else, but she doesn't want them to touch her. They are not allowed to touch her, and they are not allowed to enter her. They are her toys and she will do with them what she wants, but what she wants has very specific uses.

Partners that she likes more and is closer to, she allows to them to touch more or to enter her. This isn't to say she can't do so as a form of domination in its own right, but it's a different sort of preference, something that Miranda doesn't talk about. She doesn't talk about it or directly mention it, beyond telling people that they aren't allowed to touch her, or where she wants them to touch, but it's still there. Her preferred partners, those that she likes and wants the most, are most encouraged to touch her and to hold her, or even allowed to get a little rough with her.

Honestly, Miranda has... A complicated relationship with sex. There's already her existing sexual trauma, but then comes the cultural issues adding on top of it, making it hard for her to communicate intentions or emotions or even basic standards and wants. People don't understand things that are simple to her, and they don't understand why certain things are more complicated than they appear. She doesn't know how to communicate to landfolk what a casual merfolk fling looks like and how it's different from what she does with a landfolk, and she doesn't know how to talk about all of the tiny differences that make her tense up with a landfolk but be more than happy with another merfolk. Especially it doesn't help to add in her own trauma, and how her brain manages and compartmentalizes it in a merfolk lens that won't necessarily make sense to explain to a landfolk.

Especially not with how the land can treat her sometimes. It's often very rough for her, coming from a species and a culture which treats sex as a casual thing done for simple bonding and connection without a whole lot of pretense, a subculture which treats sex as a form of agreement that means that she has to be extra careful with even mentioning it without it potentially being used for blackmail or to lie about her, and going up to a place which often demeans her and treats her as an animal for her body and the way it functions, or fetishes her as less of a person and moreso just a sexual object. She can't do what she was taught to do without being labelled a prude, she can't do what her culture tells her is a simple social function without being labelled a freak or only isolated down to a sex object, she can't have sex in a way that doesn't feel upsetting or traumatizing to her without forcing someone through intense discussion of her people that she's not fully capable of doing and that they tell her to just stop before she even gets partially through it all.

She keeps getting conflicting messaging when it comes to social relationships and the merfolk relationship hierarchy, and that extends to sex too, where it feels like things break apart on too many axes for Miranda to ever truly want someone else to touch her.