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Lifted from a comment reply.
17 years ago
General
If I can say this without sounding pretentious... well, I probably can't, but what the hell.
First, let's talk about giant robots. Like any genre, giant robots have their own silly rules designed to make things cool, but which really don't work. Of those, let's mention two.
1) Giant robots fight at very close range. Present day weapons have much more reach than your typical giant robot weapon. I mean, we want to watch a dogfight, not an AMRAAM launch followed by a cut to someone blowing up. Fine.
2) Giant robot pilots don't typically seem to be the sort of people you'd expect to be controlling multi-million dollar battle platforms. A bit of, well, weirdness in the main characters makes for more interpersonal conflict. Again, fine. David Bowman from 2001 is the sort of guy you'd actually put in charge of the Discovery, but he's not a dramatic character. Which is sort of the point.
Do you remember the original three movie Mobile Suit Gundam? What really struck me about that series is that it had two major plot-based assumptions:
A) Radar doesn't work any more. All combat is visual range only.
B) Unless your pilot has psychic powers and can sense the enemy. In other words, your personality has much less to do with how effective you are in combat. People who would normally never be put in a cockpit end up in a cockpit, because they're psychics.
I don't want to claim that Gundam was the first series to do this, but basically, Gundam took two entirely silly, but emotionally resonant cliches and built justifications around them. For me, at least, it took that extra step and made the notion more credible and clever.
That's sort of what I'm trying to do with the Foxforce series.
I wanted to write a Women in Prison porn story. WiP porn has its own silly cliches, chosen not because they make sense, but because it's cool.
Why are the prisoners all hot women and why are they forced into a variety of lurid sexual situations? Because it's not a prison, it's a brothel.
My take on bondage is that most tops like the idea of imposing their will on a victim, but don't want to "really hurt them." I know this makes no sense, but it's the reason [I think] for every porn scene which can be parsed to "No! No! More! Harder!" We've all seen that scene a million times, and it's pretty appalling if you think of it as an attempt to depict an actual sexual assault.
So the women are not human. Heck, if you were designing a sex slave [putting aside the fact that's appalling and creepy and you wouldn't actually design a sex slave,] wouldn't you make that behavior part of the specification?
And then that opens a whole other can of worms. These characters are ultimately products -- and how far can you go in making them product while still keeping them characters?
It's a tightrope, but I'm having fun with it.
First, let's talk about giant robots. Like any genre, giant robots have their own silly rules designed to make things cool, but which really don't work. Of those, let's mention two.
1) Giant robots fight at very close range. Present day weapons have much more reach than your typical giant robot weapon. I mean, we want to watch a dogfight, not an AMRAAM launch followed by a cut to someone blowing up. Fine.
2) Giant robot pilots don't typically seem to be the sort of people you'd expect to be controlling multi-million dollar battle platforms. A bit of, well, weirdness in the main characters makes for more interpersonal conflict. Again, fine. David Bowman from 2001 is the sort of guy you'd actually put in charge of the Discovery, but he's not a dramatic character. Which is sort of the point.
Do you remember the original three movie Mobile Suit Gundam? What really struck me about that series is that it had two major plot-based assumptions:
A) Radar doesn't work any more. All combat is visual range only.
B) Unless your pilot has psychic powers and can sense the enemy. In other words, your personality has much less to do with how effective you are in combat. People who would normally never be put in a cockpit end up in a cockpit, because they're psychics.
I don't want to claim that Gundam was the first series to do this, but basically, Gundam took two entirely silly, but emotionally resonant cliches and built justifications around them. For me, at least, it took that extra step and made the notion more credible and clever.
That's sort of what I'm trying to do with the Foxforce series.
I wanted to write a Women in Prison porn story. WiP porn has its own silly cliches, chosen not because they make sense, but because it's cool.
Why are the prisoners all hot women and why are they forced into a variety of lurid sexual situations? Because it's not a prison, it's a brothel.
My take on bondage is that most tops like the idea of imposing their will on a victim, but don't want to "really hurt them." I know this makes no sense, but it's the reason [I think] for every porn scene which can be parsed to "No! No! More! Harder!" We've all seen that scene a million times, and it's pretty appalling if you think of it as an attempt to depict an actual sexual assault.
So the women are not human. Heck, if you were designing a sex slave [putting aside the fact that's appalling and creepy and you wouldn't actually design a sex slave,] wouldn't you make that behavior part of the specification?
And then that opens a whole other can of worms. These characters are ultimately products -- and how far can you go in making them product while still keeping them characters?
It's a tightrope, but I'm having fun with it.
As for brothels being prisons for their employees, this came up in one of my stories. In that setting, prostitution and slavery (actually more like indentured servitude) are both legal, and there is one scene where there is a discussion about using slaves as prostitutes, in which it is explained that having prostitutes who aren't slaves is okay, and having sex slaves who aren't prostitutes is okay, but using sex slaves as prostitutes is not okay since it's a much worse arrangement than either one or the other. This assumes by the way, that with prostitution being legal it is regulated and monitored enough to insure that it does not violate the basic rights of the prostitutes (the same is true of slavery, even sexual slavery).
Yeah, it's a trap that I think a lot of fiction falls into. As it gets more and more self-referential, it gets less and less logical; a copy of copy. And not digital.
>but using sex slaves as prostitutes is not okay since it's a much worse arrangement than either one or the other..
And I think that's a interesting take on it and it works for me.
I have to agree with what you have wrote totally. It's a real tough thing to do but I'm trying to have fun with it. Wait until you see part two of my fanfic.
http://www.canada.com/edmontonjourn.....2-deb8e38aab5e