At the end of the day, the MC/TF genre is very, very small, and lacks any sort of foothold in any sort of broader publishing industry. As such, I want to state, first, how thankful I am for the various people who run sites like the NCMC, CYOC, and all the rest of the sites I mentioned, because without them, there most certainly wouldn’t be any of these stories on this here blog of mine at all. That said, these various sites also exert tremendous influence on the kinds of stories that tend to proliferate in the genre, because of how they are structured. I spent a moment talking about various ways these sites might be “improved”, but because I don’t necessarily value the sorts of stories and approaches some of these sites use, it’s difficult for me to be very objective here. More than anything, I’m a relativist, which puts me in a contradiction. On one hand, I think it’s vital to this genre that we be open to as many kinds and forms of story as we possibly can, which puts me directly at odds with a site like the NCMC, which is structurally designed to inhibit certain kinds of work. But at the same time, the moderator of the NCMC ought to be able to do with their site what they want–if they want to focus the stories towards a certain format, that should be their prerogative. More than anything, what I wish for is a larger, more neutral archive of the size of something like MCStories, but with a better system of curation and organization like some of the features of the NCMC. But as always, if wishes were horses, etc. etc. etc. I might have a bit of a radical solution, however, but first, onto the main topic–newness.

In this sea of repetition superficial and thematic, purposeful and accidental, between authors and within one’s own work, how is anything new possible? Certainly one easy way of thinking about newness is simply a new story, but it seems that the main problem we have is that not every new addition to a collection is necessarily “new”. After all, if a story simply retreads the same themes and superficial features of hundreds of stories that have come before, what is really new about it? For lack of a better term I’m going to term this a “conservative story”, a story which fits neatly within the themes and features of stories that have come before it. It treads no particularly innovative ground, it doesn’t stretch the genre in a different direction, all it does is reinforce the themes and superficial features which are already prominent within a genre. Conservative writing isn’t necessarily politically conservative of course, but I merely mean that it sits comfortably within the confines of a space already defined. There’s also nothing necessarily wrong with writing and enjoying a conservative story–I would say the vast majority of stories put out, especially by new authors, are conservative in form and substance. If we don’t bother cutting our teeth on the writing that’s come before us, then we’ll never understand the genre well enough to produce anything original at all. I would also say that people who complain about the fact that these types of stories are prominent aren’t really complaining about the fact that they are conservative in nature–they’re complaining that the current conservative form doesn’t cater to their particular desires, both thematic and superficial, in the same way that people who ask for more of the same want more of the same precisely because all of their boxes are being sufficiently ticked.

So then what exactly is newness? Obviously it stands in opposition to conservatism, but I think it’s more complicated than an either-or. After all, a story which might be radically new in superficial qualities might be perfectly conservative in terms of its thematic undertones, like, say, someone like Pericedskin writing a story not about skinheads but perhaps twinks, but with the same fundamental story structure as his other work. Would that story really be new? New to Peircedskin’s work, certainly, but new to the NCMC, where stories like that are posted on a daily basis? How new would it be then? It could also occur in the reverse–a story might appear to be, on the surface, very similar to previous stories, and yet on a thematic level diverge wildly, which is the best description I can give of my own anti-porn posts. So how do we go about trying to define the new at all? The best definition I can give is a story which bucks the conservative norms of the canon that it is placed within, but this creates a few kinks.

First, it means that a whether or not something is “new” relies on the context of the other stories it is being placed with. This might seem a bit odd–shouldn’t newness be rather objective?–but it actually helps explain how some stories can be received wildly differently in different communities. For example, “Daddy’s Little Man”, in the context of my own work, was not particularly new–perhaps in the extremeness of it, but nothing that I hadn’t tread before in previous work. But as soon as I placed that story in the context of the canon at the NCMC, it was deemed radical–too radical, in fact–and it was removed. If we tried to understand newness as an objective fact, this response would be impossible to understand. Second, it means that newness isn’t a static feature, but rather a sliding scale, depending on how much the story pushes back against the established norms of a context. A story can be just a little new, say, if it just introduces a new wrinkle or variation in an established trope, or it can be extremely new, it it bears no resemblance to anything in the canon that came before it. Similarly, this means that no story can be entirely new–there will always lie at least some conservatism within any story, or else it would simply be incomprehensible. Third, it means that newness is necessarily disruptive. No story can be new without upsetting expectations and the status quo, and it is this disruption which I find most fascinating of all.

Because stories are always judged against a prior context, “newness” is really outside of the author’s control. Once they make the choice to insert their work into a given context through the act of publishing, what sort of reception it receives depends entirely on its audience, and it is here that the structure of communities as I discussed before becomes so important. Communities built like the NCMC can’t tolerate newness in the same way a site like CYOC can. This isn’t necessarily because the audience doesn’t have an open mind, because the audience at the NCMC is so larger I doubt any broad statement like that could ever apply. Rather, what it means is that the vocal minority who use the rating systems and leave comments have an outsized influence on what sorts of stories and authors are encouraged to keep contributing or not, and it is much more likely that these sorts of active users are going to prefer more conservative stories. CYOC has a different structural problem–while the new is able to proliferate easily, this is largely because these stories don’t receive enough of an audience to spread widely and gain momentum. As such, it falls victim to what might be called enclaves–small groups of devotees to a certain kind of story who exist in their own interactive universes. These universes possess the same weakness at the NCMC—stories that don’t fit their conservative vision are squashed and ignored.

The original question then, that began all of this was, “Why aren’t there more ‘new’ stories?” Here we have a bit of an answer–most of our communities have no real support system for new authors or new ideas, meaning they are either crushed by conservative trolls, or buried underneath a steady stream of conservative fiction. This is the core problem–not that there aren’t people who want to produce new stories, both radical and conservative, but that the communities we rely on as publishing platforms provide no real support for new authors or their visions. So, what’s the radical change I mentioned at the beginning? If we could find a way to use these platforms to better encourage and highlight new authors and new ideas, in order to counteract the natural advantage conservative repetition holds over the genre. I don’t have any particular ideas how to do this, unfortunately. I doubt a site like the NCMC could ever change itself to prioritize this, nor do I think the moderator would have much interest in doing so. CYOC might be more capable, by finding a better way to highlight and encourage the growth of younger story branches written by new authors. Until then, newness is simply going to rely on the courage of new and established authors to challenge the conventions and conservatism latent in these communities, and on those communities to be open minded to other sorts of themes and ideas which might not cater to their established desires.

Over the years, I have been a member of any number of writing communities, and by and large, I have always been struck by how all of them are generally unhealthy environments for encouraging writers to produce good writing and improve their craft. My concerns have roots beyond erotica, and are perhaps more inspired by various writing groups I have led and attended during college and the years after. Generally, I have been disappointed in these sorts of groups for any number of reasons, although by far the greatest reason is that spectre of “constructive criticism”, which tends to force everyone in the room to praise pieces of writing which are exceedingly poor, leading to what essentially becomes a system of providing critical blowjobs for every writer present, whether they want to or not. Generally, the greatest sin someone can commit is being too critical–all writing is redeemable, any act of writing is fundamentally good. Online communities, on the other hand, have a distinctly different problem. The ease and pleasure of trolling allows online communities to effectively police, discourage, and even outright censor stories and writing which they deem offensive to their particular desires. I am convinced that there must be some needle hole to thread in the middle, but it eludes me, and I doubt such a perfect middle-ground actually exists anyway. Still, it presents a problem–what exactly is the role of these sorts of online communities and collections? Is it to help authors improve and encourage them to write more? Is it to provide an audience with a particular kind of story? What exactly are they designed to accomplish? I believe the phenomenon of inter-authorial thematic repetition I presented before can shed a bit of light on these questions.

Of course, there aren’t exactly a bevy of collections to discuss in this genre, so some of these conclusions will by necessity be based on a rather small sample size. In particular, I will be discussing the NCMC, CYOC, MCStories, the Nifty Archive, and both of Maelstrom’s now defunct archives focused on TF fiction and tobacco fetish fiction respectively. This, I think, is a large enough base to draw a few broad conclusions about the various techniques these communities are based on, and how they affect the sorts of stories and themes these collections accumulate.

I want to begin with the NCMC, which I’m sure surprises no one. There’s more reason to this than one might think, however. The NCMC is unique among the various sites I just mentioned for a number of, what I consider to be, very illustrative reasons. In particular because, more than any other collection still operating, it possesses a collection with a much more cohesive theme than any other. Now, as a bit of disclaimer, because the NCMC is a constantly evolving community and collection, the ideas and themes it tends to accumulate are always in a state of flux. Anything I say now could very well no longer be true six months from now, or even sooner. One particularly good story can spawn a bevy of imitators, old ruts which fell out of fashion years ago can suddenly reappear stronger than ever, so I hesitate to say say that the NCMC possesses a “defined” theme or set of ideas, but loosely examined, there are a few ideas which can be drawn from the kinds of stories the NCMC tends to attract. More often than not, the stories are driven by wish fulfillment rather than revenge. They are stories which are interested in making men more “typically desirable” (i.e. muscular, twinkish but not necessarily femme, sexually promiscuous bottoms, etc.) If a revenge fantasy is a plot point, it is less about punishing someone by turning them into what they hate, and more about turning them into something which will bring pleasure to the person correcting the injustice. When I say that the NCMC is generally not receptive to the kinds of stories I write, that’s because most of my story arcs tend to aim in the exact opposite directions. On the other hand, MaelstromX’s TF site possess themes more similar to mine, where revenge is more often about punishment than pleasure, where men become “atypically desirable,” though the site also possess a strong line of wish fulfillment as well. His old site focusing on smoke TF stories is different from the other two as well, with a stronger focus on cross generational nurturing relationships more than anything else. All of this might seem rather unimportant, or merely academic in nature, but what I want to point out is that the reason these sites possess any sort of specific focus in their themes is because of how these communities and collections are structured.

As a counterexample, let’s look at CYOC, the Nifty Archive and MCStories. All three of these are sizable archives, all of them possessing much more content than the NCMC, however none of these sites possesses anything like the strong thematic consistency the NCMC. Part of this is because these sites allow a much broader range of submissions, and thereby deal with a greater volume of stories in general. Themes then, multiply. This is especially obvious on CYOC, where this repetition is made even more direct through the continuation of another person’s story, or through the lengthening of your own work with the addition of further chapters. Thus, because there are so many threads, it makes more sense to start looking at subsections of these sites, where themes become clearer. the CYOC interactive “Ty’s Power”, for example, tends to be revenge focused, but also examines themes of puberty and becoming an adult, as well as what it means to be a part of family–especially in terms of siblings. The Nifty Archive possesses some themes once the site is divided into various genres, but these become harder to trace without the interactive structure of CYOC. MCStories is perhaps the most difficult, because stories are treated more as isolated chunks than as part of a larger system of categories. The site does possess fetish tags, but these are largely underutilized and deal more with superficial elements than anything else. As such, finding a story of a similar deep theme quickly becomes the task of finding needles in haystacks.

So what’s the difference? Why does the NCMC possess a clear set of themes, while CYOC, Nifty, and MCStories do not? The biggest difference between these two sets of sites is that the NCMC is the only one with any sort of numerical rating system, and it also possesses the most robust comment system. The NCMC is really the only website that provides an author with immediate feedback on their story, both quantitative and qualitative. I would argue this does little for the author–because these numbers and comments aren’t generally feedback an author can use to improve their work–but it does show that the audience possesses a great deal of power at the NCMC. The power to rate a story means that if an audience finds the themes, ideas, and content of a story distasteful, they can immediately communicate that with poor scores and trollish comments. This more than anything is what determines whether or not an author will keep contributing to the site. In this way, the NCMC doesn’t necessarily encourage authors to express a particular viewpoint, rather it’s structure allows the site’s audience to quickly discourage and downrate content which does not reflect the themes and ideas they want to see. It also possesses silent moderation, who can strip stories from the site without appeal. If anyone has the most power to shape the NCMC, it would be them.

Nifty and MCStories possess no such system at all. The stories are simply posted, with a link to an email if you’d like to send a comment (assuming the author allowed it to be accessible). Feedback is very inconsistent and not very meaningful; trolls are sparse and easily ignored. As such, no one is actively discouraged from posting, allowing the number of stories it hosts to grow rapidly. CYOC is somewhat different from the others, in that it does provide a means of giving feedback, but in a very different way than the NCMC. The most meaningful feedback that someone on CYOC can give a story is validation by continuing it. As such, rather than discouraging authors from contributing, CYOC’s structure encourages readers to become writers, to provide feedback on their favorite ideas and themes by adding to them and amplifying them. It does possess a rather robust forum, of course, but rarely is it used to discuss and rate particular chapters and threads. This, in my opinion, is what makes CYOC so fantastic as a collection–its design encourages both participation and proliferation, in a way the NCMC will never be able to do as it’s currently structured.

I’m sure that, at this point, it sounds like I detest the NCMC with all passion. In fact, the NCMC’s ability to hone down their thematic focus allows a range of stories there which are highly creative which no other site could produce, such as this odd postmodern work, “Too Meta”. While CYOC is capable of a wide range of stories with disparate themes, without any moderation it quickly can devolve in poorly written, overly short chapters with no development at all. Each tool has its place, and CYOC could use more moderation, while the NCMC, in my opinion, could use less (or simply moderation wielded equally). The question, I think, is who do we want these sites to serve? The readers and audience, or the authors themselves? The NCMC is firmly in the audience camp–everything about the site’s design is focused on providing its audience with the kinds of thematic content they desire, and making it easy for the reader to find stories similar one’s they’ve liked before. Whether or not this model helps writer’s improve or encourages more submissions is completely secondary. On the other hand, CYOC is much more author-focused. It urges readers to stop being passive consumers of content and instead generate their own. Feedback is less concerned with how well a story is written or whether it fits the desired theme of an audience, and more about whether it contains ideas and themes that inspire other people to continue the story further. Is one model better than the other? It depends on what you value more than anything else.  

There is one more aspect of this discussion I want to address in a third post (sorry, not sorry) which is what it means to say that we wish there were more “new” stories in the context of this repetition. An author’s constant foe is the threat of stagnation, of retreading the same old theme without any sort of development and nuance, and I want to talk about how I, as an author, do my best to avoid ruts. Further, when an author does do something “new”, how various communities deal with this newness is also something worth examining. Then I’ll be done with this for now.

In the last few weeks, since I wrote that short rant about some of my issues with the NCMC, I’ve had a few people send me notes and asks commenting on repetition–either complaining about how some sites and authors tend to produce the same stories over and over again, or noting that I myself tend to fall into a rut on occasion, something I can be as bad about as any other author. I think everyone sort of knows what is meant by repetition here, and I’ve touched on the subject before in previous metawriting posts. Many stories in this genre can feel like they are retreading the same old ground over and over again, an endless parade of men becoming whores, twinks, bears, chubs, slobs, etc., and readers can become frustrated by the lack of “newness”, though what this newness entails is usually something difficult to describe. I want to argue here that not all forms of repetition are bad for writers, and further, some of it is simply unavoidable, and it is this form of repetition I want to discuss further.

I want to start off with a short point about something I might call “surface level” repetition–which would be the repetition of fetishes and other superficial tropes across stories. This repetition is very common–after all, how many stories have been written involving things like leather and bondage play, or involving bears, chubs, and cubs? All authors have fetishes–it would be silly to expect that authors wouldn’t repeat these sorts of things, but these kinds of similarities actually tell us very little about the stories themselves. As I’ve discussed before, fetish and character tropes are actually fairly superficial aspects of stories–what lies beneath are deeper structures largely concerning the power relations between character archetypes. Some stories are about wish fulfillment, others are about revenge, others are about masochism and self-degradation. Two stories can share a large number of surface level similarities, and yet be very different at a deeper level of story, and it is these sorts of similarities that I want to discuss. I would say that some of the asks I’ve received have been talking more about these surface level concerns than something much deeper, and I would say a writer ought to avoid falling into trope and fetish ruts whenever possible, but “deep story” repetition, what I might also call “thematic” repetition, is unavoidable, and in my opinion, is something which a strong author ought to develop over time.

When I say theme, I’m talking about the deeper, central concerns of the story and author. For example, regardless of what kinds of characters and fetishes I choose to write about, it’s highly likely that the story I end up writing is going to be a revenge fantasy–whether it’s about twinks or bears, or involves rubber transformations or no kink at all. Other authors tend to focus on other themes–Onix, I would say, writes especially about hubris and the problems men face when dealing with power they can’t completely control. Peircedskin writes about skinheads, sure–but his stories, at a deeper level, are also about ordinary men being forced into lifestyles and personas completely alien to their prior lives, and how they adjust to these new selves. These themes are present in every story, and they tend to be repeated. This deep repetition is unavoidable–it simply occurs as stories accumulate. It can also provide a better understanding of an author’s work both in general and in the particular.

I can only speak with any real authority about my own work, so I’ll start there before attempting to extrapolating anything out further. For me, thematic repetition tends to most often signalled through the repetition of setting. Pigtown, Louisiana Acres, the stories involving the Special Investigations Bureau, and City of Bears of course, are all linked up by the superficial repetition of place, and the characters who inhabit those places, but more than anything else, the stories in these settings are tied together by deeper themes. As such, it can happen that some stories in these settings are not always planned to happen there–for example, I didn’t start writing “The Wrong Side of Pigtown” intending for the bar they visit to be Pigtown–I simply realized that there was no other place that the story could take place about halfway through the story. Similarly, I only realized as I was finishing this vignette that the narrator was the ringleader of Louisiana Acres, popping up once more. These repetitions occur because particular kinds of stories tend to gravitate towards ideas and story structures these various places represent for me. For example, Louisiana Acres is about class conflict, whether the trailer park is attacking suburbanites, frat houses, or businessmen in bars. Pigtown stories are about temptation, escapism and death. SIB stories have varying settings, but the larger scope is a world filled with magic and artifacts that men attempt to wield out of hubris, and fail to control. City of Bears is about even larger questions–‘What would a world of bears look like?’; ‘Would such a world be just, or would it have it’s own systemic problems?’; ‘How do we understand the terms ‘birth’ and ‘death’ in a world without children?’. Furthermore, many stories that don’t obviously exist in any of these settings in fact do belong to one of these categories. “Rick and the Beast” and “The Power of Belief” might as well be outtakes from City of Bears, while “Mr. Drake’s Games” is an instance of Louisiana Acres situated in a cul-de-sac instead of in a trailer park.

It’s my theory that most authors function in similar ways–we begin with these larger questions and themes, and reiterate them across stories that may not, on the surface, have much to do with each other at all. The notion that writing in this genre is driven by themes, and not simply by the desire to get off, will probably be difficult for some people to swallow. I’ll admit that some writing is less idea driven than others, certainly. Newer authors in particular are less guided by these sorts of drives than more established writers, not necessarily because people who write more are more inclined to have ideas, but rather because the sheer accumulation of content forces relations to appear between stories regardless of whether the author intended to put them there or not. Even newer writers aren’t immune to thematic connections, because their writing certainly doesn’t exist within a vacuum. Authors can and often do repeat and reiterate themes from each other’s work as well. In the past, I have noted that the two biggest inspirations for me were stories written by Onix and Peircedskin. In fact, I would say that my first story, “Losing Control”, essentially reads as a mash-up of those two authors in a single story, and some of the fundamental themes of both authors are present. Thematic repetition then, is more than a single author reiterating their own thoughts into the world, it is a collective act of reiteration and amplification, taking ideas from other people and building on them, and someone else taking your work and pushing it in their own direction. A new author then, rather than being taken as some sort of clean slate, is simply borrowing and stealing thematic content, characters, settings and tropes from other authors, and generally continue to do so until they develop their own distinct viewpoint and style.

And so, we come to my real interest in this discussion. If we take seriously the notion that thematic repetition occurs at not only within an author’s own canon, but between authors as well, that means that larger collections of the work of multiple authors, particularly story collections like the NCMC or MaelstromX’s old archives, also possess these same sorts of thematic currents running through them. I’ll have more to say on this Thursday. Yes, Thursday. This is going to be a long one, but I’ll get back to porn soon enough–I think this is important.