Questions for fans of The Most Unlikely Places · 3:47pm Jun 21st, 2013
So I have a few questions for people who are currently reading TMUP, and I'd like as many responses as I can get in order to help me decide how to proceed in the relatively far-flung future for the story.
First some setup. TMUP was always intended to eventually become explicit. It is the first story I've written on FimFic with both the opportunity and the value of having scenes with explicit content. The reason it isn't currently marked "Mature" is because I didn't want to imply that there were already scenes of a sexual nature before they actually existed. Tagging a story "Mature: Sex" seems incongruous to me if the story doesn't actually have any.
So now the questions. Firstly, I know sexually explicit content is sort of a sticking point with a lot of people, and I'm curious to know how strongly some of the fans of the story feel either for or against it, especially in this story. Secondly, on a more technical and procedural note, at what point does one tag a story for explicit content? Should I do it now, knowing it will eventually have some, even though it's currently 'teen' at worst, or wait until a chapter is published that is brazenly mature in nature?
Any and all opinions on any front will be greatly appreciated.
I'm all for explicit content, as long as it fits well with the story and is well written. Not that I don't expect some high-quality clop from you, sir
As for when, I'd say you've got the right of it; add the tag when it actually becomes tag-able
I enjoy sexual relations as a development to the characters personalities and relationship, as well as just meaningless clop, so I am all for this new direction.
As for timing, change it whenever you are ready :3
What?! When did No Longer Lost get a sequel?! I didn't know this!
Definitely gonna read this soon, but I'm not a quick reader. All I have to say is that I love clop, and if you spent time building up their relationship really well, then we as readers are invested in both them as characters and their romance. Thus, this will make the clop super satisfying.
I think that if you want to appeal to the widest variety of readers, you should provide an option to skip the clop for those who do not like to read it.
Either have something akin to a spoiler within a chapter such as
-----HERE BEGINS CLOP-----
-----HERE ENDS CLOP-----
or posting two versions of a chapter, one clop and one non-clop, would be an ideal compromise.
I am generally not a big fan of explicit scenes because they are rarely necessary and usually just take attention away from the actual story even when sex is a significant plot element (the details are usually not important), but there are definitely still cases where they are an important part of character development and belong in the story. I would say to wait and see how things play out and decide what you want to do when you get there and give it what it needs, no more, no less. I would also not change the rating until you get there because the current rating is valid for now and might remain true for the entire story depending on how things play out.
I suggest posting the explicit chapter by itself with a description/ warning in the main story.
1158620>>1158780
I'm usually fearful of direct interjection within the body of a story because nothing breaks immersion quite like author notes. As well, I usually spend a fair amount of time letting my characters talk and interact while they're being intimate. Dialogue spoken in the heat of lust can be uniquely revealing, and is hard to translate to a non-explicit format.
That said, I'm big on giving people who want to skip the sexual scenes the option to. I know not everyone comes here for ponysex, and I don't want to force them into it. But these are teenagers, and they're hormonal, and things will get antsy sooner or later. I like the idea of having either a separate chapter with clop therein, or posting two different chapters, one explicit and the other...suggestive. Of course, there's always the option of posting 3 chapters at once, that is, one with the lead-in, one with the denouement, and the middle with the actual act, in all its erotic glory.
One thing I'm really looking forward to, though, is the social experiment of taking an already relatively popular story without a mature tag and giving it one. I'm curious to see if I get a bump in readership with the addition of the sex tag, especially since the story already has a 96% positive rating.
1158604>>1158607>>1158715
Thanks for your thoughts. I appreciate you taking the time to share them.
1158608
Since ages ago! I put up a blog post tagged for people who were watching NLL, but apparently it didn't work properly.
1158871
That's exactly what I was going to suggest. I'll read clop, and I'll read regular stories that glaze over sex scenes, and both I'll do quite happily. What gets to me, though, is when a regular story has a portion with an all-out sex scene, there for the apparent sake of just having a sex scene. If a normal story is going to have an explicit sex scene, character development/actual relationship-building needs to be there (as opposed to a clopfic, wherein that sort of thing is optional). I'm happy that you're of a similar opinion.
As for when a story should be marked Mature and given the Sex tag, I'm of the opinion that it should be done immediately, with a note (possibly at the end of the story's description) saying that the explicit scenes come late into the story, and aren't present throughout (and in your case, probably the further note that the characters therein are most assuredly aged-up). The note is probably more important than the time at which the tags are changed, honestly—it's best to let people know beforehand that that sort of thing will be coming eventually, and the note kills two birds with one stone.
1158937
While wanton sexual romps are great fun to write, they can actually get tiresome if they don't serve some narrative purpose, so I don't usually have them. My characters will get intimate, but they'll almost always think or talk while doing so in order to add something to their character, or the plot, or something.
My primary concern in asking this now was that I don't see a really explicit chapter any time real soon--there's a lot more character and plot development to do first--but I don't want people to get real invested only to have the story suddenly become unpalatable to them because it becomes cloppy. Conversely, I don't want to draw people in thinking it's a sextastic sexcapade when it's really just a long story about two teenagers trying to figure themselves and each other out and eventually becoming lovers. It's a romance, not erotica. The note was an option I had considered, but I had put it off because I didn't really want to pollute the story description any more than was necessary. That said, I went ahead and did just that, changing the tags and adding the note. I'm still waffling on just how to approach the cloppy bits, whether to break it into its own separate--ideally optional--chapter, or to use in-line warnings to ward people off. I guess I'll figure it out when the time comes.
Always tag a story with all the tags that it will have when it's finished right from the start. The tag will cost you traders, but it is just courtesy to allow people who don't want to read something to not read it at all instead of doing so after they are invested in a story. If you start to read a book you want to know what genre it is beforehand too, don't you?
1158871>>1158980 You're welcome, and it sounds to me like you have the right approach to this so go ahead and do what you need to do. I would probably not bother breaking it up at all because everyone has different thresholds and people can skim over the parts they do not want to read. That said, it is probably best to put a flag in the chapter title when appropriate (i.e. ChapterX (explicit)) and make note of that in the description even if there are no explicit chapters yet.
Just remember, if the sex scene winds up being completely optional there is really no point to having it in the first place so you may as well condense it into a non-explicit line/paragraph and move on. The Life and Times of a Winning Pony is a particularly good example of a story that bypasses a lot of unnecessary sex because saying it happened is all that is needed, especially with the first person narration to give the feel of what happened without slowing down the story (which is more than long enough as is at almost a quarter million words and growing steadily).
I say go for it. When the time comes for the explicit scenes to be written and you are unsatisfied with the results, you can always omit them and drop the rating to teen.
you could just post the same chapter with clop and then another version with the clop.