Keith's Rants

DISCLAIMER

Before we begin our tour of the darkest reaches of the human soul, I have been advised by our lawyers to insist
that ladies, young children, and gentlemen of weak constitution leave the room at this time.

INTRODUCTION

What is the worst thing? Some would say Hell. Others would say tartar sauce on French fries. They would all be wrong. The worst thing in the entire world is erotic fan fiction. This document is a review, if you will, of the existing literature.

Some of you are already trying to leave the room, but I assure you that it is too late. You are about to enter another dimension: a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. You are about to enter . . .

The Twilight Zone, incidentally, is seemingly the only significant literary, television, or cinematic accomplishment since the dawn of man that has failed to push the sexual buttons of at least one semiliterate dwarf living in his parents’ basement. I know this because recently, while making fun of my girlfriend for her entirely healthy interest in actor Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Harry Potter, I made one lighthearted Google search too many and stumbled upon the world’s largest repository of erotic fan fiction, adultfanfiction.net.

This festering mass grave in the back yard of the collective human psyche is something that we are all vaguely aware of – who hasn’t made a Counselor Troi joke at the expense of some frustrated nerd – but that we’d really rather forget exists. Yet, as with a mass grave, leaving it unexamined leaves us blind to the true horror of what it contains, and the true horror of which mankind is capable. Understanding erotic fan fiction, and the weirdos who write it, helps us to understand many things, from television writing to tabloid publishing, both of which are essentially highly developed forms of erotic fan fiction.

Sit back, relax, and pour yourself a scotch on the rocks in a pilsner glass, because here comes a detailed examination of the worst thing in the entire world, ever. Seriously.

LITERATURE

I choose to divide literature-based erotic fan fiction into two main categories: Harry Potter, and Not Harry Potter. Adultfanfiction.net does essentially the same thing, with an additional category for Lord of the Rings, which I choose to ignore as I have never read anything by J.R.R. Tolkien, and do not intend to start.

As you’ll recall, it was the Harry Potter series that initially led me to this collection of literary travesties. I should admit up front that I have not read these books, either, but a complete hardback set is sitting on my bookshelf, so I feel that I have absorbed the jist of them by osmosis.

AFF.net features some 3,230 Harry Potter-themed erotic stories, broken down according to which characters are involved in the tryst. Here again I am limited by not having read the books, so it is up to you to decide which is the most appalling. I can only note some general statistics.

For instance:

The number of Male/Male stories (1,409) exceeds the number of Male/Female (1,160) and Female/Female (169) stories combined.

492 of the stories feature three or more characters.

J.K. Rowling’s creepiest fans want to see Harry with Snape more than with any other character, by a factor of ten. Snape is apparently a male professor at Hogwarts.

Some of the stories feature an original male/female character (OMC/OFC) in lieu of one of the characters from the book. While several of the characters have stories featuring them with both male and female original characters, Harry alone is featured with only male protagonists. This is particularly surprising in light of the fact that 100% of women surveyed wanted to have sex with Harry Potter. Snape, interestingly enough, has the largest number of OFC stories, indicating that he is the dream guy among both gay and straight bizarre lunatic freak-dorks.

There is also a section for people asking other people to write Harry Potter sex stories for them, demonstrating a startling lack of ambition on their part considering the low literary bar at play here. Some of the requests are frankly quite disturbing, which, coming from a man who has undertaken to write a study of erotic fan fiction, is saying a lot. For instance, the author “Taila” wants:

“. . . this Snape/Harry fic. It involes the Wizarding Child Service, which comes after Sanpe [sic] discovers the abuse the Dursley inflict upon Harry. The abuse includes cutting out the wings Harry sprouts.”

Now, I honestly don’t know if the cutting out of the wings bit is actually in the books or not, but the fact that this person gets off on it made me feel just a little bit better about the hydrogen bomb.

Nearly as disturbing is what is termed “crossover” fiction, of which there are mercifully only 173 examples. This dreck brings in characters from other fantasy universes to get it on with Harry and the Hogwarts gang. Looking at literally the first three examples, I see one involving Dragonball Z characters and another involving Anakin Skywalker from the Star Wars Episodes I-III (themselves basically fan fiction), who pairs up with Lord Voldemort.

Much erotic fiction, including some comparatively literate and respectable stories, includes with the title a sort of code in order to let the reader know what sorts of sexcapades the story contains. This can be a lifesaver, since no one wants to be reading along pleasantly only to be instantly turned off when someone’s fist goes up someone else’s ass. So, for instance, “FMF” means . . . hooray, threesomes! However, the writers at AFF.net tend to go way overboard in terms of content, which leaves us with:

“My Dear Hate

To be hated and loved at the same time is to [sic] much for draco [sic]. As he goes to a mental hospital he finds hate beyond reason…[sic]Or is it [sic]?

Abuse,Angst,Anthro,BDSM,Bi,B-Mod,Bond,BP,Crossover,Death,
F/F,F/M/M,Fet,Fist,H/C,HJ,Humil,Inc,Language,M/F,M/F/F,MC,Minor, N/C,OC,Oral,Preg,Racist,S&M,SH,Slave,SoloF,SoloM,Spank,Tort,Toys,Trans,Violence,WAFF,WD,WIP”

Just in case I haven’t entirely ruined the series for those of you who are legitimate fans, I’ll wrap this up with an excerpt.

“Hermione stood on her balcony watching the plant city come alive. She had always loved Corusant at night. She was so lost in her thoughts, that she didn’t hear the man walk up behind her.

“Beautiful isn’t it?”

“Ooohhh! Obi-Wan don’t sneak up on me like that,” she gasped.

“I didn’t mean to frighten you milady,” Obi-Wan Kenobi smirked.

“I forgive you,” she smiled.

Hermione sighed as he wrapped his arms around her waist. Despite it being forbidden for a Jedi to fall in love, Hermione and Obi-Wan had fallen in love anyway. Somehow they had kept it hidden from the Council.

“Where’s your Padawan?” she asked.”

Hell if I know what a padawan is, but I think you get the idea.

Non-Harry Potter literature-based erotic fan fiction is relatively much less bizarre. Some of it practically writes itself, as with the pair of stories about The Picture of Dorian Gray. One of them is as follows:

“As You Wish

When Dorian Gray mourns over the loss of Sibyl Vane, who else could possibly comfort him like his good friend Lord Henry? H/C, Oral, Slash.”

It has been about five years since I read Dorian Gray, but what surprised me most about this story was the fact that it apparently did not actually happen in the book. It was certainly implied, since the book was used as evidence in Oscar Wilde’s criminal trial for “gross indecency.” Lord knows what happened in Wilde’s imagination, but rest assured it was probably better written than whatever tripe “Avara,” the author, could come up with.

Whereas in Dorian Gray the sex was more or less written between the lines, it is hard to imagine the type of person who gets turned on by, say, Charlie and the Chocolate factory – seven stories’ worth of people, apparently. Likewise, it would seem that some of the people reading the Left Behind series aren’t getting hard so much from the stories of infidels roasting in hellfire as from the vision of the antichrist sexually dominating his chief minion, a male journalist named “Buck.” The fact that the people reading these books like to write gay erotic fiction poses as many questions as it answers, of course, but I can’t say I was surprised. If you’re gay and guilty, “Bible Belt” Christianity seems like a natural choice, as Ted Haggard demonstrated so hilariously of late, while imagining sexual urges as stemming from the devil could keep you just sane enough to avoid killing yourself.

Incidentally, “Buck” is the name of the character in the books, not the creation of the online author. That makes this one of the very few cases where the erotic fan fiction is better written than the original book.

MOVIES

Unlike a lot of the books that get twisted into sinister urges in the minds of readers, a good number of movies made in the last, say, fifty years already have a lot of sex in them. This makes the erotic stories that people come up with a little less improbable. Who saw Hostel and didn’t wish he or she could visit a youth hostel in Eastern Europe full of hot, willing women? Nobody, that’s who. On the other hand, since movies don’t leave so much to the imagination, the urge to actually write this crap is less understandable. Ten people saw fit to add on to Cruel Intentions, but after a certain point you’re basically just writing a sequel. Don’t think Hollywood hasn’t thought of it — or hired these same people to write it.

Adultfanfiction.net features many more movies than books, many of which I have not seen or do not really remember. Fortunately, all but a few have only a few stories written about them, which makes it easier to find something to make fun of. The downside to this is that the ones with a large number of stories don’t have them categorized in any way, which makes it harder to draw sweeping conclusions about the authors without actually reading every one of the stories, something which I am not about to do. With less data to go on, my analysis of movie-based erotic fan fiction will have to be confined to a quick look at which movies most inspire the public imagination, plus a survey of the most freaking bizarre examples I can find before my coffee gets cold and I finally leave the apartment for the day.

Unsurprisingly, Brokeback Mountain outscores most other movies, with 88 stories to its name. I don’t need to tell you what those stories are about, but it’s surprising to me that these people feel the need to go beyond what the movie already has to offer, which seems pretty extensive. The only movie that outshines Brokeback, surprisingly, is Predator, with 90 stories, though this isn’t really a fair comparison, as Predator is more properly a series. Unlike Brokeback Mountain, the Predator stories seem to be mainly by straight writers, which doesn’t make them any less bizarre or bad. To wit:

“Nine Lives

A girl, her cat and one damn sexy alien. Angst, Humil, Language, M/F, OC, Other, Violence, Xeno
Author [Sinvisigoth]

. . . Under normal circumstances, I have a very pleasant singing voice; my best friend once told me that if I was in a room with the world’s twenty best singers, I would not be the worst singer in the room. And I love him beyond words for that, the most beautiful truth anyone has ever told me. These circumstances not being normal by any standard, I chose to torture my kidnappers with Blue Grass sung in the voice of Daffy Duck…mostly to the tune of It’s a Small World After All. They showed their great appreciation by silencing me with what looked like a pygmy’s jock strap. Feeling around with my tongue, I had to admit that pygmies had a raw deal when it came to stereotypes; there was serious room in this thing.”

This goes on and on for pages. As near as I can tell, nothing even remotely sexual happens, and the story ends with the narrator’s cat rescuing her from her captors by clawing them. In reality, no cat would take the trouble to do any such thing. I can’t see where the “erotic” part comes in, unless the author is turned on from talking about herself – something that happens to all too many people, in my experience.

A few other movies that drew a lot of interest are Sleepy Hollow (18), Van Helsing (79), and The Matrix series (79). High School Musical has 22 stories written about it, proving that pedophiles are regular contributors to the corpus of online sex lit.

Hostel, mentioned earlier, has only three stories, all written by people who apparently thought it didn’t have enough gay sex in it. This lack of interest may at first seem surprising in a film with so much raw material, but that abundance means that if you’re going to get off to Hostel, you probably don’t have to use your imagination very much at all. More surprising, to me, was the fact that Tank Girl had ZERO (0) stories written about it, which perhaps says more about me than it does about anyone else, though admittedly the comic book Tank Girl was far sexier than the movie. Moving on.

Two sub-categories in the Movies section of AFF are Star Wars and Pirates of the Caribbean. One would think that these would be comic gold-mines, but this is not so. Pirates of the Caribbean stories are almost annoyingly predictable: women want to have sex with Jack Sparrow. So do gay men. We get it. The Star Wars section has the opposite problem. Those of you who have ever been to the sci-fi paperback section of a large bookstore may be able to guess what I’m getting at. Star Wars has an enormous preexisting body of not so erotic fan fiction, much of which has already been published by real, legitimate publishers with their own printing presses and everything. Much of this is only tangentially related to the original three movies from the 70s, and instead exists in a sort of complete fictional universe that I can’t begin to comprehend. This same universe provides the basis for most of the stories on AFF. For instance, we have this:

“Aerodynamic

After Jaina’s horrifying betray, Jagged Fel needs to learn to get over her. Can Neela, a Twilek Imperial Engineer, help? COMPLETE, H/C, M/F, OC, Oneshot
Author [Violetlight]

He had thought she loved him.

Try as he may, Jagged Fel could not get the images of betrayal out of his mind. What had happened to the Jaina he had loved, the fiery, determined “Sword of the Jedi”? How could she have betrayed his love, his respect for her by Joining with the enemy? That was the question repeating over and over again in his mind: Why?”

I have only seen episodes IV-VI of Star Wars, so I have literally no idea what to make of this. I don’t even know what some of those words mean, let alone the back story of the characters. Perhaps if this essay becomes my master’s thesis at some point in the future, I’ll go back and figure out the Star Wars Universe enough to do some original research, but for now I really can’t be bothered. So, if anyone else wants to take a crack at making fun of this stuff, be my guest, but chances are that if you know enough about Star Wars to laugh at the jokes, erotic fan fiction is as close as you’ll get to having sex with another person.

TELEVISION: THE CONCLUSION

Researching television-based AFF gave me some of the same problems as did the movies: there are thousands of programs, of which I have seen relatively few. At this point I should probably brag that we don’t even own a TV. This means that the more recent the program, the less likely it is that I’ve heard of it, let alone watched it. That said, there’s so much material that I should have no trouble writing as much as I care to, and if you are disappointed that I didn’t cover your favorite soap opera, feel free to do your own research, God help you.

To begin with, we have the obvious shows: The X-Files (144), Xena (101), That 70s Show (19), and Friends (30). One would think that people who watch the X-Files would want to see Mulder and Scully get it on, as the show’s writers intended, but a quick look through the directory shows a surprising number of gay-oriented stories featuring Mulder with Skinner, which apparently makes David Duchovny a gay icon up there with Harry Potter and Marilyn Monroe. In contrast, Xena has a surprising number of M/F pairings, considering the fact that Xena and Gabrielle actually ARE gay icons. In the first two pages, containing about two dozen stories, I found only two stories in which the author wants to imagine Lucy Lawless getting it on with another girl, and in neither case was it Gabrielle who, to reiterate, is Xena’s girlfriend on the show. Go figure. I quit trying to decipher these people long ago.

Friends and That 70s Show, refreshingly, follow the pattern that you’d expect. Friends-based writers, working off a program whose entire dramatic base stemmed from unfulfilled sexual tension between characters, seem to almost always just tack a barely-modified alternative ending onto existing episodes. The exception to this is one fellow who introduces his story with the tagline: “In this world, Chandler is a gay slut.” Likewise, That 70s Show stories mainly cover the sex that always happened off screen in the actual episodes, with a few of the seemingly obligatory “what if everyone was gay” stories written by gay authors.

Star Trek provides ample base for AFF, as one would expect. TOS comes in with 54 stories, outshining Enterprise, with 48, TNG with 37, and DSN with 29. I don’t think this would surprise anyone, as obviously Kirk got a lot more alien pussy than dopey Jonathan Archer ever did. Enterprise had more and better regular female characters than TOS, which means a relatively greater percentage of the stories are M/F pairings. This is regardless of Kirk’s obvious status as a space player, which is demonstrated in no fewer than four episodes, as well as Star Trek II in which he is shown to have an illegitimate son.

Star Trek Voyager, of course, outshines them all with 72 stories. Seven of Nine is a popular character, seeing as she brought about the first lesbian kiss in Star Trek history. Likewise, if you ever wanted to read about Chakotay topping the hell out of Captain Janeway, as she obviously wanted him to do from the very beginning, you’ve got your choice of really shitty authors to get it from.

Two short paragraphs about Star Trek are all I dare write, lest I further reveal my familiarity with the show.

The most popular show, surprisingly enough, is Power Rangers, with a whopping 197 stories. Now, I never watched the show as a kid, so I could give a shit, but it brings up an important point about television-based AFF. This is that television, much more so than cinema or literature, provides the core of our common cultural heritage, particularly on an intragenerational level. Everyone who was alive during the 50s, say, remembers Beaver Cleaver and instantly understands everything that the show symbolizes and stands for, and can identify the different character types in the show. One can compare someone to Eddie Haskell, for example, or describe a town as “Beaver Cleaverville,” and guarantee certain understanding. Likewise, if you’re my age and want to try chatting with a cute girl with whom you have nothing in common, you can always bring up what a great show Pete and Pete was and guarantee instant agreement and possibly giggles.

The problem with this is that, by drastically altering the content of these programs to suit their own twisted desires, the AFF authors are altering our culture’s most basic common myths and archetypes. It’s as if someone went through Hellenic mythology and re-wrote it all mixed up, because he just HAD to see Athena get it on with a titan. It would alter one of the common reference points to which anyone can allude, making mutual understanding all the more difficult. If all of a sudden for some people Eddie Haskell is Mr. Cleaver’s gay lover, and keeps him locked in a dungeon dressed in leather chaps 23 hours a day, then our culture can no longer draw on those characters as common ground.

In some ways, this is mostly just my outrage at seeing the television programs that we all grew up with corrupted by a relative handful who, armed with the publishing power of the internet, can now spread their twisted fantasies far and wide, such that even I could accidentally stumble upon them.

For instance, one of my favorite television shows, both when I was younger and to this day, is Daria, a Beavis & Butthead spinoff which was one of the last good shows that MTV produced. I don’t pretend that this show, a personal favorite, is a cultural icon on the scale of Beaver Cleaver, but it is well enough known, at least among my generation, to earn the titular character a cameo on Drawn Together along with Fred Flintstone and Scooby Doo.

The freaks on AFF, of course, would ruin Daria forever if you let them. I dare not read even one entire story for fear of ruining one of my fondest childhood memories, but the synopses alone make my blood boil. For instance:

“Fashion Love

Quinn is at a crossroads. Can she reveal her feelings to her true love? Quinn/F Angst, Slave, Yuri, FemSlash, Shojo-Ai, F/F/F, Anal, BDSM, Bond, DP, D/s, Exhib, FemDom, Fet, Fist, H/C, HJ, Humil, Oral, Rim
Author [Love]”

Fucking no. All right? Quinn does not do anal, BDSM, fisting, rimjobs, or anything else up there. She is 14 and likes getting attention from boys but is uncomfortable with sexuality such that she freaks out when she even thinks that her older sister had sex. That is the essence of the character and is entirely normal for a 14 year old girl. That’s what makes it a good show with believable, sympathetic characters, you morons.

It’s not as if the Daria characters are completely asexual – it wouldn’t be a very good show about teenagers if they were – it’s that the overall point of the show isn’t about them getting busy with each other in every possible grotesque combination. That’s what allows it to be a plausible and inspiring coming of age show and why it was continued for five seasons and two feature-length movies. You can make a ten minute porno out of kinky sex alone, but you can’t make a hit TV series, be it Daria, Friends, or Murphy Brown, without dealing with realistic relationships between characters that actually have personalities. Of course, the virgin shut-ins who write this crap have never had a relationship of any kind with a real person, so they don’t get it.

Now, most of you are probably not huge Daria fans, which is fine, but I’m sure all of you can think of some TV show, or book, or movie, that was inspiring or thought-provoking in some way – some fictional role model, or hero, or some situation you identified with, or whatever. That’s part of what makes good fiction, and what lets fiction help us come to terms with the real world. As a people, do we really want to see Tom Sawyer, Samson, and Mickey Mouse in a hot D/s/s threeway? I contend that we do not – nay, must not.

Now, at this point many of you are raising objections to my condemnation of these people, saying that what gets them off is no one’s business but theirs, and that they have a right to free speech. They do indeed have that right, and I’m not suggesting for a moment that the government censor this website or others like it. I’m merely suggesting that if the authors of adultfanfiction.net were to accidentally suffocate themselves while masturbating to A Charlie Brown Christmas, the world would be a better place.

On the other end of the spectrum, some will agree with me and go on to say that AFF.net is just a symptom of our oversexualized culture, with its readily available pornography, scantily clad starlets, and women leaving their burkas at home when they go to the market. I disagree with this also. There’s no reason that the sexualization and proliferation of what can be generalized as “low” entertainment – Pants off Dance Off, Briana Loves Jenna, and America’s Next Top Model – should have any effect on higher forms of culture. The Romans, our cultural ancestors, gave us Marcus Aurelius at the same time that they were watching slaves battle to the death on warships in a flooded colosseum. Indeed, in some ways, raunch culture gives us an acceptable, harmless outlet for our baser urges. All that is important is that we understand the value of our deeper creations and the fact that it is that depth that makes them special.

A broader conclusion might be that every fictional character is inextricably linked to its creator. Comic strips written by committee long after the creator’s death are invariably a shadow of his work, and no fan fiction, even written by professionals and published for profit, ever measures up to the original. If you’re an aspiring writer, dare to create. Let other people’s characters stand as they are: testaments to their writers’ talent and intent.

Incidentally, there is an entire section of AFF.net, containing no fewer than 400 stories, devoted entirely to the band My Chemical Romance, which, as regular readers of alexrock.com are aware, sucks. Just thought I should put that out there.