Commentary: ChatChange

To get this started off, here’s the photos that inspired this last week’s story:

DaddySugarBear

Cub90909

Cub90909 as a skin slut person thing

I’ll offer a bit more commentary below, including a honest question: Why in the world do ya’ll like these chat stories so much?

Seriously though. Every time I’ve done a story or caption in this form, people seem to enjoy it. It’s kind of a pain to write–there’s a lot of copy and pasting involved, and the evolution of these usernames is like a puzzle game, but for whatever reason, people dig it, at least according to some of the metrics I look at, mostly total notes. 

Generally, the average first chapter of a story gets about 25 notes or so. A story that I consider to be a success generally hits about 50 after a week, which is about where the first chapter of ChatChange has landed. Rarely I’ll have something bust over 100, but that is very uncommon (as in, it’s happened, like, two or three times, and usually only after a picture caption got it’s caption removed. I just think tumblr has something against literacy). Notes on later chunks always taper off–I can tell most people have lost interest when they start dipping into the ten note range, and I know I pushed it too far. 

All that said, the popularity of this kind of story is a bit of a mystery to me, so if you’d like to offer me your theories etc., I’d be interested in hearing them. Beyond that, I don’t have too much to say about this story in particular–I think it fell off the rails in the last chunk, and I probably could have developed a more interesting ending beyond essentially killing off the cub. Thinking on it now, it would have been more interesting for SugarDaddyBear to give the skincub the program, letting him make Ogar into the perfect master for himself, but that thought hadn’t occurred to me as I was writing this one out.