[Original] Untitled
This is a personal essay that I wrote that started out on the topic of writing yaoi fanfiction, and went on from there. Hopefully, it'll be the second story in my Senior Chapbook. There are references to a few real people within this essay, but I have done my best to not refer to any details that would reveal identity in order to respect the privacy of those people, and will not mention names.
Untitled
1
I write gay porn about fictional characters. Most of the situations are unrealistic, many of them aren’t physically possible, and half the time the characters are nothing more than caricatures of their canon selves. Oh yeah - it’s fanfiction. I’ve written or read stories with the characters doing things in situations that their original creators probably never had the slightest inkling of.
And do you know what?
I like it.
I think it’s fun and sexy to read or write those stories. I have no problem bastardizing the common perception of a character until people look at it and go, “Who the fuck is that?” Flame wars over the most trivial of details, usually about which pretty boy or man is fucking which pretty boy or man (and for that matter, who tops)? Bring ‘em on. I’ll rip you to shreds with my saccharine sweetness and light.
Here’s the big question: why do I like it? Why do I prefer stories about two guys getting it on instead of involving one of the female characters? I’ve got no problem pulling a magical spell out of my ass and switching the gender of one or more of the two (or three, or four…) guys involved so that he’s female, and then writing about them going at it. So it isn’t necessarily the gender of the characters involved that turns me off of them. Of course, that leaves a whole host of other possible explanations out there, or at least various factors that I need to take into account if I’m ever going to come up with an explanation other than “I don’t know.”
One of the most common explanations for liking yaoi - or slash, or BL (Boy Love), whatever you want to call it - that I’ve seen is, “If one guy is hot, then two guys together is even hotter.” Maybe that’s true for most fangirls (or fanboys, though the majority of people I’ve seen are female), but I don’t think that’s what drives me. Actually, I think that I might know at least one element that has turned me off of female participation in relationships for the most part: almost every single “self-insertion” character I have ever seen has been female. Not only have they been female, but they have usually been perfected to a fare-thee-well, and can do anything that anyone has ever thought of. Plus, everyone in the whole entire world loves them, even characters who are considered irredeemable villains. Mary Sues, as they’re called, tend to be the bane of my existence when it comes to writing characters. Similarly, I’ve seen one too many female canon characters (the characters who actually come from whatever world the story is being written about) warped from their original personalities into something more “suitable.” After seeing that treatment going on for years at a time, it’s become an unconscious loathing that generally makes me avoid most stories that involve a female as a love interest.
I wasn’t always like that, though. Despite my best efforts to scrub my brain clean of even the faintest memories of that time, I was once just another girl who was barely a teenager and desperately in love with various male characters. I created my own sets of original, perfect female characters, and wrote stories about them falling in love with the male leads. Really, I suppose that I should just be grateful that I never decided to actually publish any of those things anywhere that they could be seen. They’re pretty frighteningly bad.
My introduction to the gayer side of things came via a friend I met at summer camp, when we discovered we were both fans of a particular TV show. I was all set to tell her about some of the horribly romantic stories I had written, when she dismissed the entire topic out of hand and informed me that the various male characters were really much better off with each other. I was confused, but interested, and encouraged her to explain what she meant. I don’t even remember any of that explanation any more, except that I emerged from it with a feeling of revelation, as if I’d just had the curtains pulled from my eyes. Of course, I thought. Suddenly it all makes sense! How foolish I’d been before. Everyone is gay! I think I was thirteen years old at the time.
When I discovered yaoi, I promptly did what most new fangirls do when placed in those circumstances: I announced my utter hatred for every single female character to ever exist, be they good or bad. That’s another situation where, looking back on it, I cringe in pain. Just because I prefer to read or write two guys in a romantic relationship rather than involving a female in no way causes said females to become avatars of Evil. I wrote rants full of loathing and hatred. I joined clubs where we discussed the best ways to kill off said female characters. I laughed hysterically as I read lists of torture and death, and then promptly turned to my computer to make my own.
To this day I don’t know when I made the transition from incoherent rage to a more mature perspective in regards to female characters. I’d rather glad that I did, because some of them are really interesting when written by the right author! I’ve even gotten some compliments on my own portrayal of some of them, because I genuinely respect the character and try to write them in such a way that said respect comes across. Just…not in a relationship with whatever pairing of guys I happen to prefer. Instead of attempting to burn effigies of anything with boobs, I’ll shrug and ignore the story, and I personally find that it works a lot better than replying with a review wherein I spew flaming hatred and death at the author.
With my rampant hatred of females quite firmly in the past, I find that I actually enjoy writing my porn even more now. I’m not writing it in order to somehow get revenge on someone; I’m writing it because it’s hot!
2
The whole idea of reality versus fantasy is one that I face every time I read a piece of fanfiction online, or at least the question of my reality versus my fantasy. There’s so much about the entire realm of yaoi that tends to verge into the improbable, if not the impossible (generally involving how gay sex actually works, much less a romantic relationship between two men). It’s a genre that is, for the most part, intended for a female audience, and so often creators will go no further than to make their male protagonists pretty, or “bishie” as they’re termed. It stands for bishounen, which is Japanese for “pretty boy.” Despite the original word addressing boys and young teens, it’s migrated to the rest of the culture as well to describe an extraordinarily pretty man. Quite frankly, most guys in real life don’t look like that. And that isn’t even taking into account the personalities, which are often utterly unlike an actual guy. They are the romantic idealizations of young women, and they often stray as far from reality as possible.
I’ve had many a debate with myself as to whether that sort of idealization is a good or a bad thing, at least in terms of what I think. I have both read and written stories where characters are carried to the extremes of that idealization, as well as others where they are portrayed as being very realistic in terms of the mindsets of actual men. Then there are stories which range all across the intervening characterizations, and I’ve read them all. Which type of story is better? I’ve come to the conclusion that there isn’t one which is “better” than the other, either in terms of story or in terms of characterization. As long as the choice of attitude is carried out well by the author, I’ll read and enjoy it. For that matter, as long as I can justify it well enough to myself, I’ll write and enjoy it. That’s one of the freedoms that fanfiction provides that original fiction shies away from, at least in the settings that I’ve experienced.
When I’ve written stories for classes and workshop, I have always been encouraged to make the characters as realistic and believable as possible. Were I to present an example of the more extreme yaoi, it would probably be laughed right out of class after it was torn to metaphorical shreds. “Real” fiction has to be realistic, and the characters have to be identifiable in the eyes of the readers, or else it isn’t generally considered good fiction. That isn’t to say that I don’t write stories about gay characters in my original fiction, because I do. It’s just that I have to pay a lot more attention to their characterization and attitudes, as I can’t get away with nearly as much as I can in fanfiction.
At least in terms of freedom of writing, the scale seems to tip rather heavily toward fanfiction being the venue of choice. After all, I can get away with nearly anything there, and I don’t have to put forth that extra bit of effort to make sure it all checks out. I don’t have to worry about doing research into how real gay sex works if I don’t want to, much less how two guys in a relationship would really act around each other.
However, the battle of reality versus fantasy isn’t anywhere near finished, no matter that the freedom of the fantasy is so obvious. While I like writing fanfiction, and I love it when my stories are recognized by others, there is no future in it for me. There is no way for me to make any sort of actual career out of writing fanfiction, no matter how I might stretch it. For that matter, it will still always be fanfiction - stories written by fans about someone else’s work, using someone else’s characters. In order for me to express myself and gain a grasp of my future, I need to leave my fantasy behind, at least partially. It cannot be the driving force behind my writing, at least not any more.
If I am going to become the author I have always dreamed of, I need to start striking out on my own, with my own characters, as realistic or unrealistic as they might be. I’ll admit that I would like, some day, to see that someone has written fanfiction about my stories. I’d love to see how they might pair up the characters I’ve presented, and how they interpret their actions and emotions. Maybe my reality will be someone else’s fantasy.
3
Of course, my general dislike of female love interests and preference of gay characters in both fanfiction and original fiction often makes me question my own sexuality, because if I don’t like stories with heterosexual couples, does that mean there’s something wrong with me as a person? Or not even something wrong, but something different about me when it comes to sexuality. That questioning is enhanced by the fact that I’ve never actually fallen in love with anyone of either gender (or at least nothing that, looking back on it, I’d call love). Not only that, but I’m not even all that interested in doing so, either. I’m perfectly happy to sit back and enjoy my life as it is, without a romantic relationship with either a man or a woman, and plenty of porn to go around. As a friend of mine said, I have an appreciation for the aesthetics of the act, either romantic or sexual, but the thought of actually getting myself involved is something that I find to be oddly distasteful. I’ll leave that to the characters in my stories.
When I’ve described that attitude to others in the past, they’ve given me uncomfortable looks and asked me questions like, “Do you even…you know, get…turned on by stuff?” Yeah. Yeah, I do. It’s kind of hard to describe why when I don’t enjoy imagining myself involved in the whole thing, as I’d think most people would do, but I do find yaoi erotic. I’ll admit that I get just as uncomfortable as most of my questioners when addressing the issue, so I generally blurt out something incoherent like the above, and then frantically try to change the subject.
America is a society where sex and sexuality are almost commonplace topics, from the commercial media, to the depths of politics, to the gossip in the hallways between classes in a school. Sex is a driving force behind a lot of motivations, or at least is something that is always present within them, even if only to a small degree. That constant concentration on sex is one of the reasons why, not only is my own sexuality hard for me to talk about, but it was also hard for me to realize in the first place. I always expected that I would get a crush on some guy and possibly end up dating; and my mother told me more times than I can count, “One day you will fall in love. And when you do, you will act incredible stupid, because you’re in love.” But aside from a fleeting crush on one boy in second grade that kept me obsessed for several months before finally dissipating, nothing happened.
The high school I went to was incredibly liberal about sexuality where their students were concerned, and that made me wonder, “Maybe I’m a lesbian, or at least bisexual.” To that end, when one of my closest friends confessed that she had a crush on me - my first such confession, and thus confusing in its own right - I thought that I might as well try this relationship thing.
I ended it within a month when I realized that just kissing made me feel physically nauseated, which just upset me even more. Fortunately my friend was capable of falling out of love just as easily as she fell in love, and we retained our friendship, even after my aborted attempt at a first relationship. It was at that point where I began to really wonder if something was wrong with me, because not only was I not interested in a relationship with someone else, I tended to be oblivious to relationships around me. Even now I generally can’t tell if someone is in a relationship unless they’re incredibly physically affectionate with their partner, or someone tells me. This was not a normal mind-set, as far as I knew. Everyone else seemed to be in a relationship, or wanted to, or at least was better at picking up on subtle nuances than I was.
My mother told me that I could just be a late bloomer - she hadn’t become interested in anyone herself until just before she met my father in college, so I might just be like she had been. Alright, I thought. So I’ve got an explanation. For now I’m just not interested, and that’s okay. I began to live vicariously through my writing and reading, and I realized that I really enjoyed the stories where both romantic and/or sexual encounters happened. They interested me, and I found many stories to be extremely erotic, to the point of encouraging me to try and write my own. I did so with a good deal of fervor, as physically impossible as many of them may have been at first (hint: lube is necessary for anal sex.)
Despite my growing interest in the erotic side of fanfiction, I never grew any more interested in the people around me. Even now I’m perfectly happy to sit back and relax and let other people have their happy relationships while I settle down with a bit of gay erotica, and I have no interest in expanding my horizons outward. After years of telling people that I just wasn’t interested in a romantic relationship, I suppose I grew more comfortable with the idea that not everything had to fit into the accepted ideas of sexuality. If there could be people interested in one gender or the other, or both, or other things, then couldn’t there be people like myself, who just aren’t interested in sex at all?
There are. We’re a rare breed, though. At the moment I only really know two others, one of whom actually has a child who isn’t much younger than me; she was married at one point because it was expected of her. She wasn’t pressured into it, as far as I know, but falling in love and getting married was something that everyone simply expected her to do, and she acceded to their expectations. She is a bit different than me in that she adores romantic love as well, and it’s only the physical elements of the relationship that give her problems. I’m just happy to remain oblivious to the whole of it. My other fellow uninterested person is almost six years younger than me, and I was rather surprised to find myself playing confidant to her as she explored her sexuality in conversation and realized that she just wasn’t interested. I was actually able to be there in order to reassure her, no, there’s nothing wrong with you. It is perfectly acceptable to not have any interest in sex or a relationship.
My own lack of interest in personal involvement doesn’t preclude my aesthetic and sexual appreciation of stories or art of the act of sex; I’m simply not interested in getting into the picture myself. Perhaps it’s an element of the voyeur that comes from being a reader as well, that I prefer to read about the act.
Perhaps it's just how I am.
Untitled
1
I write gay porn about fictional characters. Most of the situations are unrealistic, many of them aren’t physically possible, and half the time the characters are nothing more than caricatures of their canon selves. Oh yeah - it’s fanfiction. I’ve written or read stories with the characters doing things in situations that their original creators probably never had the slightest inkling of.
And do you know what?
I like it.
I think it’s fun and sexy to read or write those stories. I have no problem bastardizing the common perception of a character until people look at it and go, “Who the fuck is that?” Flame wars over the most trivial of details, usually about which pretty boy or man is fucking which pretty boy or man (and for that matter, who tops)? Bring ‘em on. I’ll rip you to shreds with my saccharine sweetness and light.
Here’s the big question: why do I like it? Why do I prefer stories about two guys getting it on instead of involving one of the female characters? I’ve got no problem pulling a magical spell out of my ass and switching the gender of one or more of the two (or three, or four…) guys involved so that he’s female, and then writing about them going at it. So it isn’t necessarily the gender of the characters involved that turns me off of them. Of course, that leaves a whole host of other possible explanations out there, or at least various factors that I need to take into account if I’m ever going to come up with an explanation other than “I don’t know.”
One of the most common explanations for liking yaoi - or slash, or BL (Boy Love), whatever you want to call it - that I’ve seen is, “If one guy is hot, then two guys together is even hotter.” Maybe that’s true for most fangirls (or fanboys, though the majority of people I’ve seen are female), but I don’t think that’s what drives me. Actually, I think that I might know at least one element that has turned me off of female participation in relationships for the most part: almost every single “self-insertion” character I have ever seen has been female. Not only have they been female, but they have usually been perfected to a fare-thee-well, and can do anything that anyone has ever thought of. Plus, everyone in the whole entire world loves them, even characters who are considered irredeemable villains. Mary Sues, as they’re called, tend to be the bane of my existence when it comes to writing characters. Similarly, I’ve seen one too many female canon characters (the characters who actually come from whatever world the story is being written about) warped from their original personalities into something more “suitable.” After seeing that treatment going on for years at a time, it’s become an unconscious loathing that generally makes me avoid most stories that involve a female as a love interest.
I wasn’t always like that, though. Despite my best efforts to scrub my brain clean of even the faintest memories of that time, I was once just another girl who was barely a teenager and desperately in love with various male characters. I created my own sets of original, perfect female characters, and wrote stories about them falling in love with the male leads. Really, I suppose that I should just be grateful that I never decided to actually publish any of those things anywhere that they could be seen. They’re pretty frighteningly bad.
My introduction to the gayer side of things came via a friend I met at summer camp, when we discovered we were both fans of a particular TV show. I was all set to tell her about some of the horribly romantic stories I had written, when she dismissed the entire topic out of hand and informed me that the various male characters were really much better off with each other. I was confused, but interested, and encouraged her to explain what she meant. I don’t even remember any of that explanation any more, except that I emerged from it with a feeling of revelation, as if I’d just had the curtains pulled from my eyes. Of course, I thought. Suddenly it all makes sense! How foolish I’d been before. Everyone is gay! I think I was thirteen years old at the time.
When I discovered yaoi, I promptly did what most new fangirls do when placed in those circumstances: I announced my utter hatred for every single female character to ever exist, be they good or bad. That’s another situation where, looking back on it, I cringe in pain. Just because I prefer to read or write two guys in a romantic relationship rather than involving a female in no way causes said females to become avatars of Evil. I wrote rants full of loathing and hatred. I joined clubs where we discussed the best ways to kill off said female characters. I laughed hysterically as I read lists of torture and death, and then promptly turned to my computer to make my own.
To this day I don’t know when I made the transition from incoherent rage to a more mature perspective in regards to female characters. I’d rather glad that I did, because some of them are really interesting when written by the right author! I’ve even gotten some compliments on my own portrayal of some of them, because I genuinely respect the character and try to write them in such a way that said respect comes across. Just…not in a relationship with whatever pairing of guys I happen to prefer. Instead of attempting to burn effigies of anything with boobs, I’ll shrug and ignore the story, and I personally find that it works a lot better than replying with a review wherein I spew flaming hatred and death at the author.
With my rampant hatred of females quite firmly in the past, I find that I actually enjoy writing my porn even more now. I’m not writing it in order to somehow get revenge on someone; I’m writing it because it’s hot!
2
The whole idea of reality versus fantasy is one that I face every time I read a piece of fanfiction online, or at least the question of my reality versus my fantasy. There’s so much about the entire realm of yaoi that tends to verge into the improbable, if not the impossible (generally involving how gay sex actually works, much less a romantic relationship between two men). It’s a genre that is, for the most part, intended for a female audience, and so often creators will go no further than to make their male protagonists pretty, or “bishie” as they’re termed. It stands for bishounen, which is Japanese for “pretty boy.” Despite the original word addressing boys and young teens, it’s migrated to the rest of the culture as well to describe an extraordinarily pretty man. Quite frankly, most guys in real life don’t look like that. And that isn’t even taking into account the personalities, which are often utterly unlike an actual guy. They are the romantic idealizations of young women, and they often stray as far from reality as possible.
I’ve had many a debate with myself as to whether that sort of idealization is a good or a bad thing, at least in terms of what I think. I have both read and written stories where characters are carried to the extremes of that idealization, as well as others where they are portrayed as being very realistic in terms of the mindsets of actual men. Then there are stories which range all across the intervening characterizations, and I’ve read them all. Which type of story is better? I’ve come to the conclusion that there isn’t one which is “better” than the other, either in terms of story or in terms of characterization. As long as the choice of attitude is carried out well by the author, I’ll read and enjoy it. For that matter, as long as I can justify it well enough to myself, I’ll write and enjoy it. That’s one of the freedoms that fanfiction provides that original fiction shies away from, at least in the settings that I’ve experienced.
When I’ve written stories for classes and workshop, I have always been encouraged to make the characters as realistic and believable as possible. Were I to present an example of the more extreme yaoi, it would probably be laughed right out of class after it was torn to metaphorical shreds. “Real” fiction has to be realistic, and the characters have to be identifiable in the eyes of the readers, or else it isn’t generally considered good fiction. That isn’t to say that I don’t write stories about gay characters in my original fiction, because I do. It’s just that I have to pay a lot more attention to their characterization and attitudes, as I can’t get away with nearly as much as I can in fanfiction.
At least in terms of freedom of writing, the scale seems to tip rather heavily toward fanfiction being the venue of choice. After all, I can get away with nearly anything there, and I don’t have to put forth that extra bit of effort to make sure it all checks out. I don’t have to worry about doing research into how real gay sex works if I don’t want to, much less how two guys in a relationship would really act around each other.
However, the battle of reality versus fantasy isn’t anywhere near finished, no matter that the freedom of the fantasy is so obvious. While I like writing fanfiction, and I love it when my stories are recognized by others, there is no future in it for me. There is no way for me to make any sort of actual career out of writing fanfiction, no matter how I might stretch it. For that matter, it will still always be fanfiction - stories written by fans about someone else’s work, using someone else’s characters. In order for me to express myself and gain a grasp of my future, I need to leave my fantasy behind, at least partially. It cannot be the driving force behind my writing, at least not any more.
If I am going to become the author I have always dreamed of, I need to start striking out on my own, with my own characters, as realistic or unrealistic as they might be. I’ll admit that I would like, some day, to see that someone has written fanfiction about my stories. I’d love to see how they might pair up the characters I’ve presented, and how they interpret their actions and emotions. Maybe my reality will be someone else’s fantasy.
3
Of course, my general dislike of female love interests and preference of gay characters in both fanfiction and original fiction often makes me question my own sexuality, because if I don’t like stories with heterosexual couples, does that mean there’s something wrong with me as a person? Or not even something wrong, but something different about me when it comes to sexuality. That questioning is enhanced by the fact that I’ve never actually fallen in love with anyone of either gender (or at least nothing that, looking back on it, I’d call love). Not only that, but I’m not even all that interested in doing so, either. I’m perfectly happy to sit back and enjoy my life as it is, without a romantic relationship with either a man or a woman, and plenty of porn to go around. As a friend of mine said, I have an appreciation for the aesthetics of the act, either romantic or sexual, but the thought of actually getting myself involved is something that I find to be oddly distasteful. I’ll leave that to the characters in my stories.
When I’ve described that attitude to others in the past, they’ve given me uncomfortable looks and asked me questions like, “Do you even…you know, get…turned on by stuff?” Yeah. Yeah, I do. It’s kind of hard to describe why when I don’t enjoy imagining myself involved in the whole thing, as I’d think most people would do, but I do find yaoi erotic. I’ll admit that I get just as uncomfortable as most of my questioners when addressing the issue, so I generally blurt out something incoherent like the above, and then frantically try to change the subject.
America is a society where sex and sexuality are almost commonplace topics, from the commercial media, to the depths of politics, to the gossip in the hallways between classes in a school. Sex is a driving force behind a lot of motivations, or at least is something that is always present within them, even if only to a small degree. That constant concentration on sex is one of the reasons why, not only is my own sexuality hard for me to talk about, but it was also hard for me to realize in the first place. I always expected that I would get a crush on some guy and possibly end up dating; and my mother told me more times than I can count, “One day you will fall in love. And when you do, you will act incredible stupid, because you’re in love.” But aside from a fleeting crush on one boy in second grade that kept me obsessed for several months before finally dissipating, nothing happened.
The high school I went to was incredibly liberal about sexuality where their students were concerned, and that made me wonder, “Maybe I’m a lesbian, or at least bisexual.” To that end, when one of my closest friends confessed that she had a crush on me - my first such confession, and thus confusing in its own right - I thought that I might as well try this relationship thing.
I ended it within a month when I realized that just kissing made me feel physically nauseated, which just upset me even more. Fortunately my friend was capable of falling out of love just as easily as she fell in love, and we retained our friendship, even after my aborted attempt at a first relationship. It was at that point where I began to really wonder if something was wrong with me, because not only was I not interested in a relationship with someone else, I tended to be oblivious to relationships around me. Even now I generally can’t tell if someone is in a relationship unless they’re incredibly physically affectionate with their partner, or someone tells me. This was not a normal mind-set, as far as I knew. Everyone else seemed to be in a relationship, or wanted to, or at least was better at picking up on subtle nuances than I was.
My mother told me that I could just be a late bloomer - she hadn’t become interested in anyone herself until just before she met my father in college, so I might just be like she had been. Alright, I thought. So I’ve got an explanation. For now I’m just not interested, and that’s okay. I began to live vicariously through my writing and reading, and I realized that I really enjoyed the stories where both romantic and/or sexual encounters happened. They interested me, and I found many stories to be extremely erotic, to the point of encouraging me to try and write my own. I did so with a good deal of fervor, as physically impossible as many of them may have been at first (hint: lube is necessary for anal sex.)
Despite my growing interest in the erotic side of fanfiction, I never grew any more interested in the people around me. Even now I’m perfectly happy to sit back and relax and let other people have their happy relationships while I settle down with a bit of gay erotica, and I have no interest in expanding my horizons outward. After years of telling people that I just wasn’t interested in a romantic relationship, I suppose I grew more comfortable with the idea that not everything had to fit into the accepted ideas of sexuality. If there could be people interested in one gender or the other, or both, or other things, then couldn’t there be people like myself, who just aren’t interested in sex at all?
There are. We’re a rare breed, though. At the moment I only really know two others, one of whom actually has a child who isn’t much younger than me; she was married at one point because it was expected of her. She wasn’t pressured into it, as far as I know, but falling in love and getting married was something that everyone simply expected her to do, and she acceded to their expectations. She is a bit different than me in that she adores romantic love as well, and it’s only the physical elements of the relationship that give her problems. I’m just happy to remain oblivious to the whole of it. My other fellow uninterested person is almost six years younger than me, and I was rather surprised to find myself playing confidant to her as she explored her sexuality in conversation and realized that she just wasn’t interested. I was actually able to be there in order to reassure her, no, there’s nothing wrong with you. It is perfectly acceptable to not have any interest in sex or a relationship.
My own lack of interest in personal involvement doesn’t preclude my aesthetic and sexual appreciation of stories or art of the act of sex; I’m simply not interested in getting into the picture myself. Perhaps it’s an element of the voyeur that comes from being a reader as well, that I prefer to read about the act.
Perhaps it's just how I am.