What is it about change and transformation that seems to go hand in hand with erotic writing?

I’m not actually convinced that they do, actually.

I mean, if you look at the vast majority of erotica and romantic literature out there, the vast majority of it has no connection to either mind control or transformation at all. Most of them are just pure hetero fantasy–sexy ladies pine and fuck sexy men–the characters are so flat, that they rarely change at all over the course of a story.

That said, if we start restricting our question away from erotica at large, and start looking more closely at stories that utilize BDSM elements, both MC and transformation begin to pop up with regularity, and I think this has less to do with stories being erotic, and more to do about MC and TF being two primary methods for characters in erotic contexts to overpower and control one another.

Because that’s really what these themes are about–they’re about control, and usually about controlling people against their own judgment and wishes.

This, I think, sets up a more interesting dichotomy in erotica, I think, between what I might call “wish” fantasies and “control” fantasies. A wish fantasy is simply about a character being given what they want–whatever that might be–but the character is generally passive. They are largely receiving whatever the plot decides to give them, but in some cases, people really enjoy that feeling of helplessness, and idea that in a desperate situation a Charming can appear and whisk them off to a happy ending. Cinderella, in my opinion, is the archetype of this kind of story–she really takes very little action through out the story–instead, the plot is enabled by everyone around her–stepmother and stepsisters, fairy godmother, the prince, etc. Her passivity is rewarded, in the end, with what she desired, a man.

The other side, I think, is the control fantasy, where a character is not given what they want immediately, but they are given the means by which they can get it. They are, at their heart, power fantasies. To stick with the Disney theme, the flip side of Cinderella, I think, is probably Aladdin. He is a scrappy fellow, given a tool by which he can control and transform the world around him, in order to pursue the woman he desires, and win her over. These characters have all of the power, and they are rewarded for their cunning, their resourcefulness, and their vision.

These two archtypes exist as two diametrically opposed, gendered fantasies. The wish fantasy, in popular culture, is generally reserved for a feminine protagonist–even a story like “Frozen”, which is generally regarded as nominally feminist, relies of the wish tropes to deprive the sisters of agency in the story, and instead pass them over the the men pursuing them. On the other hand, the control fantasy is largely masculine. The protagonists of those stories are nearly always men, pursuing women who are passive/imprisoned/helpless. 

I think that when we start talking about queer fiction, these categories start to blur together and twist into something else, but a lot of homoerotic literature, in my opinion, relies on the control tropes much more heavily than wish tropes, which is, I think, why they feel a lot more universal than they are.