So, for reasons that are none of your business I'm a bit familiar with the BDSM scene.
You would think one is submissive because they do have a passive personality, which is in stark contrast with Elliot (and other troons) proverbial aggressiveness (it was once "common knowledge" that troons had passive personalities).
But this is very much not the case. While there may be a lot of reasons one might want to be a sub in a BDSM relationship, one of them, the one that informs the likes of Elliot or Kevin Gibes is the actual desire to be sexualised.
They wanna be the dark object of desire turned into object of pleasure. They want to feel validated sexually by having somebody find them attractive. Not just find them attractive, using and abusing them.
We're not talking here hot girls who will flaunt bimbo looks and never fucking anybody, getting off a sense of power out of being desired and never had. Elliot and co can't afford this because no one really will have them. They veer on the BDSM because this is the only way they can feel sexualised and object of desire.
Truth is, of course, a lot of doms or "sadists" are not really all that much right in their minds. Plenty of folks who get off destruction. Of corruption. Of turning something untouched into something used. They don't either have a big, big pool of potential mates for this and really they may not care that much about what their partners actually physically looks like.
And you may be wondering why Keffals choose to be a dom. Keffals is as much of a control freak as Elliot is, and Keffals drive to sexualise himself is constant and constantly failing.
He also started off as an uwu sub kawaii girl who blushed after farting, this was a grift to get money from porn with a bizarre sense of plausible deniability, as was Clara the Machete dominatrix where he expected people to pay him for being insulted and threatened. Then he gave up on being sexy until relentless mocking from this forum's resident bitches and close contact with e-thots who are sexualised the way he wishes he was made him go trying again.
But this is not about Keffals. This is about Elliot. Elliot is by no means a submissive, and the fact that he has a wife-husband who looks like a doormat, let alone the aggresive power mongering attempted when trying to take over the internet or as a meaningless bureaucrat there at Google and the constant stream of consent accidents suggest he is quite a predator in fact.
But he wanted to be sexualised, he wants to be all "uwu please, no, silly, stahp" hentai bullshit. But he can't. No one really finds him attractive. His sex circle is a pity party and he can only rely on fetishists who would get it on with a rock as long as the rock fulfilled their particular kink.