Stupid Sexy Scarlet Blogs 3: MadMaxtheBlack and Failing Really Basic Stuff · 3:35am Dec 21st, 2017
I'm not going to lie, of all of the how-to-porn blogs I've done I think I'm the most excited about this one. Why? Because I finally get to use MadMaxtheBlack as an example of how not to do something.
MadMaxtheBlack is an absurdly popular writer, with over three thousand followers. He's known for such smash hits as Your Human and You, a story where the main character craps on someone's floor because apparently that's what was missing from the plot of Planet of the Apes; and "The 'Princess'" a fic where an Irish lesbian falls in love with Princess Celestia except Celestia has a dick and is actually a guy but nobody knows but the story still uses female pronouns and so honest to god what even is this mess are the scare quotes in the title intended to piss me off what the fuck?
What I'm saying is that as E.L. James is to the BDSM community and Stephanie Meyers is to the YA romance community, so MadMaxtheBlack is to FimFiction: proof positive that no matter how mediocre the final product, you can go far in life on the back of readers who just don't give a fuck.
Today, I'll be using Max to talk about a trend that baffles me more than words can say: the trend of sex stories where I'm not sure if the protagonist or any of the characters knows anything about what sex is or why it's fun.
Today's slice of MMtB is the deliciously bad "Chris's Batty Family" an HiE Incest OC Porn Epic featuring the protagonist in an epic quest to bang his adopted sisters. This is a terrible story. The main character is bland, his sisters are collections of anime tropes strung together with bad porn movie dialogue, the sex acts are ludicrous, the structure practically unmentionable, and the plot incomprehensible. In short, 0/10, highly recommended, would hate-read again.
I could write an entire treatise on this story, because so much is wrong that it's an honest to God struggle to figure out where, in any of this, Max has done anything right. Its only saving grace is that as much as I don't recommend Max for writing erotic scenes, his prose is largely fine-to-good and he has a pretty good eye for detail when composing a scene.
Unfortunately, that eye for detail won't save us from the fact that Max has some of the worst plotting and pacing I've seen of any popular author, anywhere. This story is over fifty thousand words long, with a nearly ten-thousand word opening chapter, and it is not merciful. You will feel every single one of those words. And you will also, if you give this story five minutes of thought or more, walk away terrible confused before you even finish the first act.
A first act in erotica should set up three crucial things.
1) The protagonist
2) What they want
3) how the sex at the end will resolve that desire.
The first act of "Batty Family" sort of does that, albeit in the most ham-handed way possible. The story opens with Chris taking a picturesque walk down a happy lane to his treehouse home in Hollow Shades, where magical mushrooms provide light and character motivations are sketchy at best. We are treated to a train load of exposition that serves to justify that Chris is adopted, and is a human, and happens to live with this family. Why this family? Stop asking questions, otherwise I'll need explanations as to what animals these batponies are skinning!
The living room itself was circular in shape, with several steel bars running the diameter of the room just below the ceiling. Multiple small bookshelves had been carved into the wall, and were packed full of books of various topics. The rest of the walls were covered in odd drapings, such as tapestries, animal furs, and other odd knickknacks.
Seriously, did they kill them? Are they fake furs? Is fur even a style thing in Equestria? The fuck?
Okay. Nitpicking over. Mostly. I promise.
The real meat of where this story begins to confuse me is when Chris meets his younger sister Blue Moon, his romantic "conquest" for the chapter. I'm going to post the entire text of Chris's first encounter with her and see if you spot the things that most confuse me about it. Bear in mind that this chapter ends with Chris fucking her.
And there, in the middle of the open space, was a batpony filly.
With a coat of light blue, she was one of the rarer batponies born without a dark coat color. Her wavy mane hung down to her shoulders, the silver hair glinting in the light of the flickering lamps. A cutie mark of a moon behind some clouds adorned her flank. Standing on her hind legs, she held a cello in her forehooves. Her tiny wings were spread wide, helping her to keep her balance as she played. A music stand was positioned in front of her, its surface covered in sheet music. However, she wasn’t looking at them, her eyes closed tight.
Swaying side to side, she pulled the bow across the strings with conviction. Music filled the room with each swipe of the hairs, causing the very air to practically thrum. The piece was a slow yet powerful one, the deep notes accentuated by quick flicks to the upper octaves. As the piece continued, the long notes steadily grew faster, but still retained their presence. After a while she started to hum along with her own melody, letting the music consume her.
Chris paused and smiled as he listened to his youngest sister, letting himself get lost in the enchanting music. He was always quite fond of her talents, even if the rest of his ‘unique’ family didn’t appreciate the free concerts as much. It was never really an issue for him, though. Even when she was first discovering her place in life, he would often let her perform for him as an impromptu audience so she could practice and get some honest feedback. However, she was pretty talented in his eyes and his criticisms always seemed to come out as praise, for which she would scold him, as she could never really take a compliment well.
Still, it was strange seeing her home at this hour. He could have sworn she was supposed to be tutoring a few of the new musicians at Eventide’s Elementary School.
This is a very pretty scene on a surface level. It's easy to imagine this character the way Chris sees her: standing in the middle of a room, swaying, playing some pretty classical music on a stringed instrument. I could fire a few nitpicks at the prose but, well, glass houses.
What I'd like to focus on instead is a combination of two very weird details about this passage.
First, Chris doesn't really seem to look at his sister sexually.
Incest isn't really my thing on the best of days, but I get how it's supposed to work. There's supposed to be lust, forbidden desire, an overwhelming oh-god-my-sister's-super-hot that just sort of overwhelms the character and drives them to despair. Usually that desire to have kinky sex with your next of kin is the driving conflict of the story. Character wants a thing, social taboos tell them they can't have the thing, they have sex in spite of the taboo and that resolves the tension. Classic three-act dramatic structure complete, everyone can go home now.
This intro doesn't really emphasize anything overtly sexual about Blue Moon though. It emphasizes that she's pretty, and mysterious, and plays music really well. That's it. Chris isn't really thinking of her sexually. If anything the prose indicates he regards her with a kind of fraternal fondness. He just thinks she plays nice music and that her music is impressive. That's it.
Which leads to a kind of interesting question:
If this fic is about Chris banging his sisters, and he doesn't really seem to want to bang his sisters, what tension is being resolved by his banging his sisters in the climax?
We'll get back to that in a moment, but for now let's look at the other problem with this passage: It makes no god damned sense.
This story is presented entirely from Third-Person Limited as a narrative POV. Third-Person LImited as a voice is inherently characterized by how the viewpoint character sees things. Most of the early paragraphs emphasize this, with Chris taking in details of his walk home from school and the scents of home. And then he sees his sister, and then the above paragraphs happen. And the thing is, I do'nt know about you, but even when it's a surprise?
I don't react this way to seeing my sister.
I don't moon about her appearance in a weird, platonic but descriptive way. I don't stare at her like she's a classical sculpture. I just realize my sister's in the next room playing music. I have a younger sister who plays music who lives one floor up from me, this is a thing that I do on a regular basis. What Chris is seeing here is something relatively mundane, but the story treats it like it's some kind of dramatic, momentous event. The prose is fucking falling over itself.
What irks me about this is that if you moved this paragraph later into the story, or tweaked it slightly, you could establish that this is the moment Chris begins to see Blue Moon as a woman, and then spin that into the whole incest-taboo dramatic structure I was talking about before. The problem is that in a MadMax fic, nobody can have anything resembling a healthy sex drive, apparently. Because instead of making this a story about kids who want each other when society says they shouldn't and break rules and get messy, he turns what's already a kind of awkward fetish into...
...look this is what leads up to the sex.
“Help with what?” he asked curiously, not quite following.
“Well, according to Dawn, this isn’t going to go away for a while... at least not by itself.” she said matter-of-factly, still facing away from him. “However, she told me there was a way to… relieve myself faster, but I... I need your help to do it.”
This caused Chris to stiffen and his eyes to widen. He stood there, staring at his younger sibling for a while before starting to laugh. “Oh, good one! You had me going for a second!”
She didn’t respond, her back still facing him as her wings twitched and her tail flicked in annoyance.
“Y-you’re serious?” Chris asked when he didn’t get the laugh he was expecting from her. All thoughts of the bed waiting for him upstairs left his mind completely as he stared incredulously at his little sister. “You… do know what you’re asking of me, right? You know... your big brother?”
Blue sniffed the air again, her body shivering slightly. “Of course I do. Do you really think I would be so careless?”
“But you can’t be serious... I’m your brother!”
“Adopted brother,” she snapped, an ear twitching. “We aren’t related by anything more than paperwork, so is it really that big of a deal that I would ask you for help with this?”
To be clear, what happens to kick off the sex in this sex story is that Chris's little sister emotionally blackmails him into fucking her, a process he is never entirely comfortable with, feels guilty about afterward, and just sort of lets happen because it's easier than arguing. He doesn't seem to particularly find her sexy, he doesn't really get as much out of the sex as she does, and his prevailing mood throughout the story is "awkward straight man".
It feels weird to say this but the sexual politics of how and why Chris has sex with any of his siblings in this story are the most fucked up thing about it. And this is a story where, at various points, someone gets a horsehair-bow rubbed up against their exposed clitoris, someone else uses their ejaculate as a culinary substitute in pancake batter, and where someone honest-to-god makes nerd jokes about taking action figures out of their box to reduce collector value.
(I repeat: This story is very hate-readable).
Let me make something clear: I'm not saying that your story has to be about two partners who both want to have sex just as much as the other one. I'm saying that if it isn't - if one partner is reluctant and has to be bullied into it with name-calling or emotional blackmail or shaming - you're writing something that isn't just cute sexytimes. You're writing a goddamn rape scene. It doesn't matter what the gender of each partner is, that's borderline rape-y.
Variations on this happen to Chris three goddamn times. The fact that he's just kind of "eh, whatever" about it after the fact can't really paper over the fact that this is his siblings shaming him into fucking them. If that happened in my family I'm fairly certain I'd be goddamn suicidal and think I was losing my mind. No, it doesn't matter that chris is the older sibling in this case. No, it doesn't matter that he's a guy and she's not. This is literally what emotional blackmail looks like.
This story is billed as a sex comedy.
I'm not saying that MadMaxtheBlack is advocating sexual assault, incidentally. If anything, I think he was quasi-aware of this dynamic. Chris at multiple points sort of shrugs and plays along after creepy sex happens to make it retroactively less creepy. The problem is that putting all of this at the end of the scene means it doesn't read any less creepy going forward, and it also suggests less that what's happening isn't fucked up and more that Chris is making the most of a situation he really doesn't want to be in. The guy just wants to go to bed and have a normal life where he isn't being looked at as a sex object by his family members.
What boggles my goddamn mind is that there's no real reason for the story to have this problem. The incest-taboo structure may not be for everyone, but generally the breaking point should be finding the idea of sibling sex creepy at all, not wondering if this story was written by someone who vaguely understands that sex is supposed to be a thing guys like, but can't quite understand why.
I feel weird bringing up my fiance again, but fuck it, he's the master. ChuckFinley's "Spring in Her Step" is also about sexytimes restricted by a social taboo, but it's way better on four levels. First, it's mercifully short compared to the godawful bloated mess that is "Batty Family". Second, the prose is better. Third, the ratio of sex scenes to fluff is better managed. Fourth and most importantly, though, everyone in this story wants to pork each other prior to sex happening. Sweetie tries to seduce Mac, yes, but that's after she knows he's into her.
Let me be clear: if you want to end your chapter or your fic with cathartic sex-having, it needs to be cathartic for the central character. If they're a reluctant participant, if they barely seem to be interested in what's going on, the sex is going to read differently. And in this case, it reads like maybe Chris should consider. Like. Leaving home.
Yesterday.
Fun fact: This story was so weird and rape-y with its first act that this started as a blog on how to badly structure a first act, but I got so overwhelmed by how badly written the sexual politics were that I realized it just had to take over the essay.
God. I need a drink and I don't even like alcohol. Jesus. Sex ruined forever.
I sometimes wonder how much the "nobody's having fun" thing in mainstream porn causes this issue? (And how much of that is just the plain result of people who do it for a living, on camera, on not-fun conditions forgetting that it can and should be fun under normal circumstances.)
I'm not sure because tbh I never watch mainstream porn. Because it's not fun. But I feel like it causes a lot of very strange attitudes and expectations about sex.
4754948 There is such a thing as "Ethical Porn." Basically, this is stuff where people actually enjoy what happens because everyone has a say in what is going to happen.
I can't recommend the following channel enough when it comes to getting the truth on sex and sexuality.
...Thank you, Scarlet, I believe I may have a new target this weekend.
Oddly enough, this is the dynamic in Mad Max's most famous work, when one gets through hundreds of thousands of words of build up to the actual sex scene: Twilight, who can't control herself, since she's in heat (it's one of those fics), rapes the protagonist, who more or less just shrugs and goes along with it. The same guy who shat on her rug.
I gave up on the fic completely after that.
You know, the later parts of the story do seem to justify the earlier parts. Specifically, you were saying how the opening act doesn't really show him as being attracted to his sisters, which makes perfect sense in the later context when he doesn't seem to be overly attracted to them in the sex scenes.
So like, I guess that part makes sense.
Everything else can go die in a fire.
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This is hilarious!
Exactly! Just how we planned it! I think we nailed it right on the head. Hahaha. I mean we literally took lines from bad hentai tropes and stuck them in there. That was the point.
You keep saying this is a MadMax fic, but it was a collaborative project for fun... WHERE THE HELL IS MY HIT PIECE!? HOW COME MAX GETS ALL THE CREDIT!?
I-I... I even made the cover art...
OMG! Please, please, please read the next chapter! If you hated this one, then you are going to loooooove the next one!
I wonder if this had something to do with anime as well. I've been going out and watching a bunch of anime recently, after taking a bit of hiatus for a few years, and realizing why I quit watching most of it (although Kemono Friends was a breath of fresh air, despite the crap production quality). It's disturbing how much of the sex or sexual situations in anime are forced, are borderline rape if not outright rape, and treated utterly cavalierly, as if that's just how things are and everyone is okay with it. This sounds an awful lot like some of the anime that I've encountered in my latest binge.
4755662
Exactly. 👍
4755656
That's about the funniest thing I've read all day. Cheap half-assed porn will always get more likes than intelligent creative writing, because reading intelligent creative writing takes effort, and very few people are into making that much effort; while reading half-assed porn only required a spare sock. Cheap porn always wins the popularity contest because people in general are dumb and lazy and think with their genitalia more than their brains.
4755670
Thank you for so ably illustrating my point.
4755677
4755664
4755656
Bye, Felicia.
Yeah we're moderating comments now. Guys, MMTB has way more success on this site than I do. i don't think he needs the extra defenders to show up to my blog and rant about it. He's already won the game of fandom success, and me not liking his story or finding the character dynamics fucked up is really not going to change that, as you've amply demonstrated.
4755627
Bye felicia. Also, never met the guy. I don't like his stories. There's a difference.
4755642
I mean, if you want the additional credit, I'll be happy to edit that in.
4755634
Bye Felicia.
4755652
I actually referenced future events. I have read the entire story.
It's bad.
4755708
I mean, between you and me, I don't know why I'm so popular. If I'm being serious, I don't consider myself that good of a writer.
4755713
FWIW, as much as I hate these stories, and I do, I don't consider it your fault. You can't help the fact that people like what you do. I'm not happy I live in a world where that's what's popular, but I do. I also probably wouldn't have been as cranky in-post if I'd realized I apparently have a high enough profile that you'd actually show up to interact with me. I kinda figured having 3000 or so followers means that a semi-regular blogger isn't high enough on your radar to bother with.
Or your fans for that matter.
4755715
Someone shared the blog with me, most likely because it's about me.
As for my follower count, I don't put much stock in the number of followers because I've seen people with 4000 followers who just spam one-shot mediocre works and get popular off that, and I've seen people with 300 followers write stories that were masterpieces and barely anyone reads them. In the end it's just a number that means nothing. I didn't even know I broke 3000 followers until someone else pointed it out to me.
I write for fun, not fame.
4755725
I can definitely agree with that, and I'm legit sorry if it felt like the tone of this post was accusing you of deliberately being famous. The E.L. James comparison probably wasn't entirely fair in that regard, since she legit did game the system to get her work out to a wider audience.
The only reason this blog exists is that your story is... like, I'm (now) aware that all the trope-y-ness was on purpose, but I still kind of hate it beyond reason. It's not particularly subversive or funny except in a very hate-ready-y way, and it's a sex comedy where, so far as I can tell, the protagonist doens't really seem to be that into having sex. And that's a creepy dynamic even in an incest story. Stuff like that bothers me, particularly when it's a popular trend, so I blogged about it because one of the ways to get people to try writing things that push against those trends is to show that they exist.
To be clear, this blog is not really about you, even if your name is in the title. You were just the most popular example I could think of and your stories kind of have a habit of pulling this. There are other authors I could have used, but none of them are nearly big enough. It had to be someone actually popular, because otherwise it would have been me picking on someone. You seemed relatively insulated, given literally nothing I can say will likely result in any kind of backlash towards you.
Like, given my comments section, I'd say it's rather the opposite tbh.
For a blog trying to critique it appears you are awfully shy of receiving said critiques
4755741
Sure.
4755742
I'll address this one since you were moderately polite: Hon, I used my own blog as a platform for a reason. I'm not obligated to share it with you. You want to critique me, fine, but like... do it literally anywhere else.
Yes! Delete them! Let the hate and stupidity flow through you, my young abomination!
4755752
Actually, I might start leaving yours intact as a record of the time MMTB's fans showed up to be shitlords on my blog.
4755749
thats not how public platforms work, you put your thoughts and creations out in a public platform you have to deal with public critiques. you dont wanna deal with said critiques start your own private website where you only invite those you like. this basically creates an echo chamber and you will never hear an opposing opinion and never, ever improve in anything.
also, just because someone is "famous" that doesnt mean they deserve to be critiqued harder than someone that isnt. objective opposition doesnt care about the individuals level of fame, but the credibility of what was created.
4755753
Awwww! You failed me, Anakin... You failed me.
4755711
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4755755
IF this were my thread in a forum, I'd agree with you. This is my blog on a website. I have the ability to moderate comments, therefore I choose to.
Also, objectively people don't deserve harder critique, but I'm also aware of the internet's potential for backlash. Max has a massive, devoted fanbase. That means that any traffic I drive away from him probably won't affect his reader turnout, and any younger fans of mine who try to start shit like... well, like Blessed One's pulling in this comments section, are going to be drowned out by Max's supporters. I don't want to accidentally provoke fans into dog-piling someone who, say, has less of a follower base than me. If I'm going to be this salty about a story I don't like, I'd rather be doing it in a place and to a person where the worst that happens is that they find out a critic posted a very negative review.
Worse things have happened to better authors.
Though to be honest, my week has been very busy and unfun. Seeing a triggered queen of salt in her natural habitat was just what I needed to relax and have some fun. You've made my night, so thank you. XD
4755759
I mean you're entitled to disagree, but we're at an impasse then.
4755761
I mean, you're welcome.