I didn't want to post anything before you responded Niara as to not dogpile and also in case my information was outdated, but that also struck me as the opposite of what Loviatar is about -- Loviatar in many ways represents the opposite of what I'd think of as a healthy bdsm practice would be. A Loviataran is the kind of person who'd care about your limits and don'ts only so they can abuse them to hurt you even more. Loviatarans don't want you do die because when you die the suffering stops. But I'd much more expect them to want to leave marks, scars, chronic damage and similar (including emotional scars because they are equally into mental anguish and suffering) just because they know every time you hurt it will bring back memories of the suffering.
I get where you're coming from, but my view is that any way that they harm a supplicant, in which they will not make a full recovery from, is thereby one way that you cannot harm them again. You could destroy one of their eyes, but do it twice and then you won't be able to inflict that suffering on them ever again. Suffering without actual debilitation is important, in that regard.
I can agree about our differences but I have to return to this -- the reason I think differently about this is that while I get the feeling you think of Loviatarans as being just about physical pain and the moment of it, the Loviataran lore as I know it paints them as being all about
every kind of suffering and anguish, from banal things like heartbreak and being betrayed by friends to life-altering things like life crises or ptsd. And an eye broken beyond repair is going to bring so many times more kinds of suffering than one that didn't get permanently marked. If they make a full recovery, did you even damage them particularly much? If they get restored, even if you can "break it again", you lose out on all the suffering they will feel for the rest of their lives. There is no perfect wound without a scar to make them remember it forever.
I feel that the main way in which Illmater followers and Loviatar followers differ is not in the practice, as it is the purpose and the feelings evoked. Loviatans draw pleasure, ecstacy even, from the acts of giving and receiving pain - pain is personal and intimate, and it exemplifies being alive. Illmater, on the other hand, views pain only as suffering; pain is a negative, which it is noble to shoulder the burden of, for the sake of others. One views pain as intrinsically good, while the other views it as intrinsically bad, and that is where they clash.
As far as I understand, Sharess is all about sensual fulfillment, and is inherently a pleasure goddess, and I'd certainly not mind spending a sojourn getting caught up in the endless revel if it passes by my town... but I'd not expect to find any, if many, practicing masochists in her ranks.
Ilmater was mostly a bondage joke, but if I were to make a thing out of it, I could easily see there being sects of flaggilants and religious pain-seekers within it -- the Ilmataran equivalent of sin-eaters, people who devote themselves to punishment out of some belief that it metaphysically spares others from suffering, somehow. But I don't think Ilmater would approve of frivolous masochism, maybe even regard such sects as heretical.
As for Sharess, if you want a deity that would understand and encourage the sexual and arousing parts of bdsm, that would be her garden. She is very much the deity of hedonism of all kinds, not just the ones entirely pleasurable. Loviatar to me would be more the deity of anti-bdsm, or just sadism, the victims gaining anything from it would be against her purposes. If anything as far as she relates to sex she is the deity of sexual predators of all kinds.
