Remember a couple of blogs ago... · 8:56pm Oct 24th, 2016
...when I said I was working on some Sunlight clop?
(wee bit of a rant after the break)
I've been working on it and may well finish it up tonight if I can stay awake after making a grocery run. I've been working on it pretty steady so I could get it out of the way and out of my head, but I didn't want to spam the blog all the time with lil' updates.
Just know that it has topped 12k words and all I have left is a cute scene of Sunset and Twi heading off on a date...
...Although, I guess I should give you a heads up on just what kind of story it is. If you remember my last clop fic, In the Shower, you might recall that part of the reason I wrote it was due to some gripes I had that were aimed at the state of the clop community and the "quality" of clop writing in general. I wanted to write erotica that was not just fetish fuel and avoided many of the lazy ass writing tropes that have become a part of clop stories on the site. Like I said then, I'm not calling out anyone and I myself am not innocent of using some of them. But I was pissed off. I still am.
This new Sunlight fic is like In the Shower, in that it's inspired by that same grumpiness. I'm grumpy that something I enjoy has become overrun with things I dislike. I'm grumpy that no matter how much the overall quality average drops, the way these stories are eaten up is bothersome. Yeah yeah, I know you can't expect the general public to have taste, but c'mon... Anyway, unlike In the Shower, this one has a slightly more specific clop sub-genre in its sights: Futa.
And again, let me be clear: I like futa. I like hentai. But I don't like it when futa hentai tropes that work in a visual medium like manga makes its way into writing. It's almost never done well, and 'done well' just means 'less terrible'. It's a shortcut and too many authors take it. I don't know if it's because they want to lessen the work required (but I hope that's why) or if it's because they don't know futa is a shortcut (which I hope is not the case because...damn, that would be sad). I really hope it's the former, but even if it is, that's still no excuse. Write like you mean it! Stop showing new impressionable writers a way to cheese the system for views and follows and not the power of real artistic effort, even when it's "just clop"!
sigh
Yeah...so, anyway... I took the time to research. I took the time to make it smooth and read well and make sense and touch on some prickly but necessary topics. It should still be pants tightening/moistening material. But it should also be a little thought provoking. I'm not claiming this to be some grand masterpiece with deep philosophical or sociological meaning. I just think it's time we stop ignoring the elephant in the futa room and try to write some cool characters that are realistically gender fluid rather than just a way to remove dudes but keep the dicks. They shouldn't be just a fetishized category like they are on most porn sites.
That's my two cents.
Stay classy.
-Fuzz
I agree, the amount of futa on this site is embarrassingly high I mean it was cool for a while but it just became too much and it does feel like lazy writing. Part of me thinks maybe some of these writers do futa because they don't want to be ripped to shreds by the readers for having their oc be the one fucking the main characters I could be wrong but that is just what I sorta theorize.
4269771 I think Fuzzy's point is more that too much of it has gone a rather lazy route, not so much that the amount of futa is too high. It's a trend in clop as a whole, to be honest.
4269776 Well regardless I just stopped reading futa stories all together but I do think it is overloading on here
4269780 I, personally, don't read them to begin with. I'm just offering an alternative explanation. But yes, there are a metric fuckton of futa fics.
4269787 Exactly and I don't blame you for not reading them most of them really have no story
You know, I always assumed that was what futa really was. I mean, you can't find anything on e-hentai without trawling first through about three pages of futa first. Even in the visual medium, I've never really seen it used as anything other than a way of getting dicks in with less dudes.
I've not read much in the way of futa stories (they don't really come up that often in the fandoms I do read wank-material on) but I always assumed it was because the writers were male, that they lacked a general understanding of how the female sexual organs work, so just replace it with a dick and you don't have to worry.
Well, for what it's worth, this blog post has elevated the upcoming story from my "interested" list to my "must-read" list despite my grand indifference/mild dislike of futa (balancing out my waifu-itch for Sunset).
I wish you and I were less of a minority in that, but I really do appreciate your efforts to bring quality to the genre.
One of the things that irks me about the futa I find on this site is how much it clashes with my own views of sex, gender, and sexual behaviors and pleasure. And I'm probably in a minority on that. I won't go too deep into it (hue hue), but it basically boils to two key things: most clop authors are male, and most clop readers are male. In both cases, there's little understanding of how women enjoy sex. There's a one sidedness to the events that doesn't gel with having a sex partner. And that's just from a mechanical and storytelling standpoint!
I'm also not a fan of how many authors go down the route of portraying whoever has the penis with what I consider to be some negative aspects of masculinity when it comes to sex: a sense of dominance over their partner, an overwhelming desire for sex, a focus on one's own pleasure to the ignorance of their partner's (glossed over by having one partner "triggering" the other's climax). And this is a simple view of a complex topic. There's a lot of nuance that's being glossed over. And again, a lot of this is my own personal baggage, as it were. But it does inform how I experience these stories, and some of it isn't positive.
4269780
4269787
There IS a metric fuckload of futa based stories, no lie. But ZOMG is mostly right, it's the laziness that bothers me, but laziness in large scale does lead to a faster fic turn out. Both aspects are related in a way. To be clear though, it is the lazy part that cheeses me off more than the depth of the crap. I rarely read these stories now because I have better things to do than fish through a thousand copypasta'd mare-with-a-dick has hawt sex with little to no thought input for the one that might actually explore the concept.
But that's me.
4269945
I think, futa comes up so much because it IS a way to get rid of other dudes beside the reader. It gives the reader, and in cases of a male writer, the author too...a sort of touchstone to relate to. Plus, an erect penis is a lot easier of a sign of arousal to see then the multitude of more subtle signals a non-dick-having girl would send.
The other side of the futa laziness coin is futa-on-male wherein you might as well just have two male characters. 99.9% of the time, the futa character loses all but the exterior qualities of femininity and might as well just be another dude. And again, to be clear, I have nothing against gay clop/porn of any type. But when futa is used in these stories, it becomes like an excuse, a get-out-of-gay card. That bothers me for all the same reasons of shortcutting, why not make a cool gay character? Why not take the futa/nominally female character do a little femdom?
There are a lot of fixes for these gripes, but the main issue, it seems to me, is that it requires effort.
4269954
If I can get past the mild dislike reaction and make this a story worth at least a thumbs up, then I think I'll have done what I set out to do. But I'm right there with you on the quality issue. Literature of every level can use more of it.
So I guess we'll just have to keep standing strong against the tide of cheap clickbait.
4269993
^This. So much this.^
There is a lot I agree with here, Kinsley. It does come down to a lot of not positive or pleasant sorts of behaviors. Futa characters run the gambit, but there is a distinct trend to land on the asshole/border-line rapey end of the spectrum, and I don't know why. I think, and I could be way off, but I think futa has become like a shared sort of sexual power fantasy where you can either chose the dom side or the sub side but you get zilch nuance and zilch emotional depth outside power.
That's why I wrote this story. To show how this can be good and done well beyond 'less terrible'.
4269954 I'm sure I can slip in a joke involving that itch and Sunset having a futadick if I really tried. But I'm not sure if that's something I wanna scratch ...
4269993 You mean the usual "X has a secret" thing?
4270020 Preach it, brotha. I don't really even mind the clop stuff on this site, but I'd be less "meh, clop" if I could trust that an author invested at least some level of effort into putting some emotion into it beyond the usual cheap wankery stuff.
4270044
No, I'm OK with the emotional play of being privately ashamed of some aspect of one's sexuality (whether it's nonstandard parts or a specific fetish) and having that shame erased by a caring partner. My issue with how most authors approach futa is in how the characters are used in the build up to and the act itself. Like Fuzzy said, it comes across as overly aggressive, and that's not something I like.
Again, with the way I feel about it being so personal, it's hard to explain the nuance without drowning the comments in a wall of text.
Meaning?
How is a futa a shortcut to anything?
But isn't that what futa is? A fetish?
4270852
1) In plenty of manga - allowing for style of course - you get visual metaphors and the warping of proportions and body parts to represent actions or reactions. A non-extreme but hyper common example of which would be the nose bleed. It is a stand-in reaction for a character to represent them become some form of aroused and is a visual metaphor for an erection; i.e. blood rushing to the penis is replaced with blood gushing out the nose. It's so common and understood by the audience that is used now for members of each gender, presumed ownership of a penis notwithstanding. This is a trope. By using the trope, the manga or anime/hentai is using a shortcut to let the viewer know how a character feels.
But this same gag doesn't really work out in text. You have to possess a tight control over your scenery and a certain level of mastery over your descriptions for even something as basic as the anime nose bleed to make sense in a written format. Especially if what is being written is not otherwise related to a manga or anime. It loses all that communal context. So as the tropes get more and more specific and niche, the harder and harder of a time that context is going to have making it across from the writer's intent to the reader's understanding.
Plus, if you write about a character's eyes suddenly morphing into throbbing pink hearts, you aren't communicating that that character really likes whatever caused that, you are using a shortcut from a different medium of storytelling. It comes off as lazy and that the author in question doesn't know how to tell the audience critical information without falling back on a medium they assume the reader will be familiar with.
And all of this isn't to say those tropes are bad, or that they shouldn't be used, or even that some of them can't be translated over from one medium to another. What I'm saying is if your only way of communicating an idea is the way you saw it in a doujinshi once, then you need to read more and broaden your horizons.
2) Like the nose bleed example I mentioned above, 'futa' (such as it exists modernly) is a type of shortcut that originated in a mostly visual medium. It's a shortcut that allows an artist or writer to get out of creating dynamic characters that they just don't want to - usually male but not always - or to add a dynamic to a otherwise bland character. Either way, it's still net minus of potential characters. In the context of our online environment, futa is also a easy way to grab views/likes/subscribes/whathaveyou without building up that same result based on the work and care that could go into the story.
On a practical storytelling point, futa adds nothing to a scene that a strap-on couldn't with less questions. That's why it's a shortcut.
3) Futa, at least the way we use the term online, is a fetish. But the origin of the term ties back in with trans and gender fluid people, who are people and not, you know...a fetish. That's what I meant by that. I wanted to show a trans character in a positive way that wasn't over sexualized. I didn't want to just write another porn character with all the depth of a rain puddle.
4270020
Congratulations, you popped my clop-cherry.
Very different from other futa stories and comics, that is for sure... And I kind of felt that this... Well, it kind of felt like it touched on trans issues more than regular futa, and I did like the way Sunset was dancing around the issue... but it still felt like it fetishized the whole thing...
I don't know, maybe that is just something common in futa (and to an extent Trans) porn... Maybe that is inescapable unless it is written by a trans person themselves.
Hard to say, as futa isn't on of my kinks... Seriously, if I want more dicks I just read some bara... So maybe my perspective is particularly skewed in that regards.
4271924
Yeah it was supposed to be more trans positive than futa anyway. I can see what you mean by it still being somewhat fetishized, and I wonder if that is a part of drawing attention to it. I mean, I'm not trans and I don't claim to know any one that openly identifies as trans well enough to get that sort of characterization 100%.
But I tried, and that was my mine gripe from the beginning: futa is frequently done in a very lazy manner and totally glosses over the whole trans connection.
Still, I'm glad you read it and it provoked enough thought to comment on.
4272133
Actually, I wonder if my seeing it as fetishistic might also be due to being a CIS male myself. I mean, honestly, if you dropped the gender pronouns, made it Sunset Glare and Dusk Shine, with maybe it being Sunset's first time with another guy… and honestly, I would not have read that as fetishised AT ALL.
It would have been pretty much 100% along the lines of most gay porn stories I read anyway; so perhaps my perceiving it as fetishising it is just due to my own CIS perspective.
So congratulations… your story did end up becoming thought provoking.
4272988
I would argue that your perception of fetish-y content is mostly a result of our shared online environment and the cavalier way most users seem to handle adult content, rather than a result of your gender and orientation.
i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/163/378/39a.jpg
posting a relevant meme in a sticky!
Now might those factor have influenced how we learned/developed that cavalier attitude? Eh...very possibly, but I doubt it was in a overwhelming way. Though now that I'm thinking about it, the biggest factor in picking up that "online communal" attitude probably has more to do with age and when you started using the internet in a social manner. But that's likely a far larger sort of conversation than we really have space for and ventures a bit too far into speculation and anecdotal evidence.
Either way, I'm glad my story got a bunch of us thinking and talking about something that's bothered me for a while without pissing off a truckload of other people.
4271223
First off, that word is stupid don't use it.
It does add things that a strap on does not. Granted it's usually done lazily but should be "male sexual physiology on female firmware".
And no, "futa" has always been the Jap / weeb word for "hermaphrodite" and never had any connection to trans.