Writing sussily

There is a piece of advice I often see on social media, along the lines of write for yourself, not for bozos who would cancel you. I always thought I was pretty good at doing that even when making stuff for others to read.

But, since resolving to write something for myself only, I feel so much more free to be… weird and sus about things. And I wanted to talk about how good that feels…?

Warning: Discussion of gender stuff, kink, sexuality and sexual violence ahead

I’m currently writing a story called LatP. The fact LatP is purely for myself, and one of the big goals is to create a kind of latently horny premise for porn side stories, has led me to write some stuff that would alienate perfectly nice readers.

The biggest such example is definitely the treatment of the main character’s gender. Lark starts as a cis female character, then crossdresses as male (on the suggestion of another character) and enjoys it and uses it to cope with trauma. However, they occasionally present themselves as female when it would be advantageous. They are gendered/misgendered various ways by different characters and the narration itself. At one point they get force-feminised. After escaping they get forced into masculinity and magically start to have more masculine traits.

Pretty much all of this is hot to me. Yeah, I have a lot of kinks I didn’t know about till I started writing.

What is Lark’s real gender? I don’t think want to go into that in canon…

If I were writing this for others I’d probably have just made Lark unambiguously female and secure in their gender the whole time. They would have been one of those characters like Kashima from GSNK or the mom in Uchouten Kazoku who just goes around as a hot guy because they can.

Because I’m writing for myself instead, I get to force my character through a contrived obstacle course of gendered experiences in a way which is, probably, offensive and upsetting in the wrong context. But it nourishes my soul to write a character who gets to experience gender in various ways and feel both suffering and euphoria from it. Gender really freaks me out and Lark is a way for me to explore that. And sexualise it. Hehe.

So yeah. Reminder that creative social media panopticon brainrot goes deep and it’s worth it to genuinely try to escape sometimes. Creativity is not just about communicating with others, it’s also about exploration, and freedom is needed to explore.