I've never really considered myself a Darren Aronofsky fan. I'd seen parts of Pi, I've seen The Fountain, both of which were very intense, and very expressive. On the recommendation of  mendes who came to visit over New Years, we went to see Black Swan, Aronofsky's latest venture. "It has transformation in it" was all I needed to hear, haha.

If you imagine a comfy chair (go on, do it), and you can picture the plush upholstery, you can imagine a chair of practically any shape that would be just as comfortable. I don't want to give too much away, but often when we TF people try to make a story that's not a "typical" transformation story (i.e. it's not just another self-insertion fantasy) it's just taking an already comfy chair and moulding it into a different form. However, the transformational content of Black Swan really does succeed in reinventing transformation in film. It's body horror, sure, but that's maybe not the full picture.

I think this is really where we as fans, fetishists, and content creators separate from the mainstream of culture. We're willing to do lip service to metaphor as long as the content presses some emotional or sensual button, which is obviously a kind of limiting perspective because it prevents us from accessing all sorts of metaphors and symbols inherent in the genre. Transformation stories have been around for a while, and have run the gamut from the Homeric horror of Circe to the transcendentally kitchy Teen Wolf, there's no denying that our circle of TF writers isn't all that adventuresome. You know, true novelty in art requires a bit of detachment from the familiar, especially at this point in history when we find ourselves dissatisfied with the lowbrow cult of postmodernism. To use transformation in a truly free and expressive way, we'd have to not only be repulsed by the familiar and cozy and controlled transformation that we're accustomed to, we'd also have to dedicate ourselves intellectually to a semiotically different understanding of changing shape.

Now we're a keen-eyed bunch, enough to tell that there are certain tropes and clichés in TF fiction produced by our particular community. We see them and we call them our pet peeves, but I wonder if there isn't something more subtle going on there. Why would you want to create "not your typical TF story"? What does "typical" in this sense mean? This is definitely a source of angst within the authorial side of transformation fandom. "Transformation porn", even if there's no adult situations involved, is basically the status quo: a description of a metamorphosis, how it makes us feel, the compromising situations it puts us in. Pressing buttons. See, every now and then we all feel like that's a rut that we need to break out of. But is that something we actually want? After seeing Aronofsky's take on Swan Lake, I'm really skeptical that we should go that route. Our hearts probably aren't in the right place.