This should be fun. Minor spoilers ahead.
If you read the same author a lot, you’ll find that there are certain situations that seem to come up again and again. Sometimes these repeated scenarios are sexual, and you realize that you’re getting a peek into the author’s personal fetish. Some are more obvious than others. The creator of Wonder Woman famously had a bondage fetish, and many strips featured the title character getting tied up and humiliated. A few years ago I read “Wizard’s First Rule” by Terry Goodkind. It’s a good book, definitely worth checking out, but that part where the main character gets captured by BDSM assassins… Yikes. I won’t spoil it for you, but it feels like a completely different genre for a few chapters.
There’s nothing wrong with having fetishes (assuming everything's consensual), but it can feel a little creepy reading about someone else’s in a novel. Reading is an intimate activity anyway. It’s like walking around the author’s head, seeing the thoughts that would be invisible to you in real life. So when they throw something kinky in there, you have to wonder, are they showing us what they’re into? And do I really want to know that? I’m not prudish, I swear, it’s just weird to me how open some people are with their kinks.
And yet, I’ve also been accused of including a few fetishes in my own work. These aren’t serious accusations (so far), just some sort-of-kinky scenes in my work, that raised at least one reader’s eyebrow.
1. Peeing.
There’s a few mentions of urination in my books. So far it’s only been women, but that’s probably because there’s more women than men in my books. It’s mentioned with Raven because I wanted to show how her mind works - while peeing, she considers adding a waste filtration system to her robot suit. Yna mentions having to pee as a joke in “Adrift.”
Whisper pees in the “Gravity” chapter because I wanted to show how her cell worked. Also, I’m always bothered in novels when it seems like the author doesn’t take bodily functions into account. A while back I wrote a blog about "Minor Distractions in Media," and one of my big pet peeves is when we follow a character from the moment they wake up, and it's obvious they haven't had time to go to the bathroom.
It’s definitely not a fetish, though. There’s remotely nothing sexual about those scenes. The last thing I want to do is watch anyone, male or female, use a toilet.
2. Yna’s power.
Yna came about because I was sick of reading about super powers that don’t have drawbacks. So many comic book heroes have lesser-known secondary powers. How does the Flash run so fast without burning off his clothes or skin? Well, apparently he’s in tune with something called the “Speed Force,” which handwaves most of your science questions. Members of the Fantastic Four wear clothing made of “unstable particles” that transform with them when they use their powers. Ant-Man is light enough to run up your arm, but still has the strength to punch you out, because of Pym Particles.
I just wanted a character with powers that were as much a curse as they were a blessing. So yes, I wrote a character with built-in, justifiable nude scenes. So why didn’t I make her a man? Was it because I wanted an excuse to see her naked?
The truth is, she's female for the same reason most of the team is female. I just prefer writing about women. I think fiction is overstuffed with straight white male characters, and I want to do my part to balance the scales.
3. Nudity in general.
There are a fair number of nude scenes in my books. If they were to make it into a TV show, it would have to be rated for mature audiences. Honestly, I feel most of them are justified, and only a couple of them have a sexual context. In “Gravity,” the Grunthians strip Whisper because she could have hidden weapons. Tena spends a lot of time nude because she’s shameless, erratic, and likes making other people uncomfortable. Zak has to strip for the bath house so I can establish how he feels about his body. And so on.
4. Mindwipe, the entire chapter.
Honestly, I almost didn’t include that chapter in the book. I’ll be the first to admit that it sounds like some teenager’s wet dream. For the record: This is not some fantasy of mine. The story came about because of some posts I saw online, probably Reddit, where an incel mused about guilt-free rape. Basically he presented a situation where a woman is raped, but doesn’t remember it, with no risk of pegnancy or disease. The incel saw nothing wrong with the scenario, and wondered why it was so wrong. Naturally the internet tore him a new one, and rightly so.
The Mindwipe chapter is meant to call out incels for the way they think about women. Anyone who reads the chapter and thinks, “Man, I wish I had his powers” is seriously missing the point. The ending is pure revenge fantasy. I’m not saying rapists should receive the same punishment in real life, but it does feel like poetic justice.
5. Eroddicka
So, if Mindwipe was the standout offensive chapter in book 1, Eroddicka would have to be the one from book 2. That story evolved a lot. Despite appearing in the second book, it was one of the earliest Bloodhunters stories, with the first draft having been written in the 90s. I was a different person back then, and the first draft had a lot of humor that I find inappropriate today. I almost cut the chapter entirely, but it does include some elements I thought were important to the overall narrative. It contains some important character development for Raven, it touches on the plight of the Marae species, and it reminds us of the ongoing search for Vraxx. I sanitized the story a lot, but it’s still not the most family friendly chapter.
Those aren’t the only times my books delve into questionable territory, but I think they’re the most significant. I know this blog sounds a little defensive, but I just find it a fascinating subject. If someone wants to brand me as some sort of fetishist, that's fine with me. The TERFs already think I'm a pervert just for being trans, so I'm used to the accusation. It's actually pretty funny because in real life, most people think I'm so vanilla.
So if anyone was offended when they read the above scenes, I do apologize, but the stories were never intended to titilate or to demean women. I’m not a perfect writer, or a perfect person. I grow a little every day, in my efforts to become more woke. I know I can’t please everyone, but the last thing I want to do is offend people.
…Except maybe bigots.
No comments:
Post a Comment