Wholesome wholesome wholesome

The latest in well-reasoned, meticulously planned things that are definitely not tone deaf and impulsive! In addition to taking commissions, I had two projects planned for this summer: FSCR and some kind of trappy crossdressy yaoi thing. To fully understand what has happened, we must go back 3000 years to when I first started taking commissions. I noticed a pattern back then: there were a lot of commissions about Riley and Kayla, a lot of commissions about Riley and Mary, sometimes a commission about Kayla and Mary, and then a lot more commissions about Riley, Kayla, AND Mary. It wasn’t like I’d never been to the internet before; I knew about the ’family’ tag on CHYOA and even back then a casual glance at the front of Pornhub was heavily loaded with Step-Bro/Step-Mom coded stuff that slapped you in the face with the truth. But you know what? That was never really *my* thing. I like trappy hentai and Sean Bean and Michelle Yeoh. And Colin Firth. Hentai anime from the 90s. I’m very normal.

But then something happened that the ring, and by the ring I mean me, did not intend: I consumed a piece of media that quietly signaled weird sexual tension between family members that clicked with me in a “Reach for the chromebrook and write something” way. That got me thinking. Fast forward to a few days ago when I decided to try watching Game of Thrones for the first time (yes I know I reference it, but I’d never sat there and watched it) and LOL but we didn’t even get through the first episode before we had a brother and sister hooking up. Onscreen! Not even implied! I had to accept that this is a popular fantasy. So, I did what anyone would do and made a hard pivot to wanting to write some fantasy that absolutely, certainly, 100% had nothing to do with me watching Game of Thrones and having a history of capriciously hopping genres at the drop of a hat, and I decided to just own it. Taboo stuff has to stay a fantasy, and what better place to have fantasies than fantasy? Thus, my planned trappy yaoi project became an M/F project about wholesome family values.

But how to go about it? A quick look at the family-themed fiction world showed me a lot of contrivance in contemporary homes, blackmail, and mind control as the mechanisms for lewdness. What followed was (unironically) a lot of thought about how to do something in this genre that would be OK with VFU values but still hit the right notes and not suck. The pivot was impulsive, but I did think pretty hard about the execution. As therapeutic as it would be to write a gazillion pages of my thought process, what I finally decided to do was not to commit to anything too crazy when I didn’t know if people would even like it. We’re doing an experiment. Unlike FSCR, this isn’t something that’s months and months away. A new swords and sorcery story with the family tag will launch on CHYOA pretty soon. It’s separate from our 7-day schedule and will be its own thing for now. It’ll have choices and interactive lewd scenes, but no branches because it’s meant to be self-contained. If it’s successful, I’ll look at expanding it on CHYOA or Twine or both, but I’ll need to see how it does and listen to feedback before I get too carried away.

Incidentally, I’m less of a poser with fantasy fiction than I am with soccer (which I haven’t played since middle school and don’t really watch or follow) and F1 (I watch Drive to Survive religiously and went to see the movie already and I’m casually following the season, but I’m not a true F1 person because I don’t watch the races) because while I know my beloved LotR movies and now GoT are basic entry level stuff, I did read a bunch of legit swords and sorcery fiction in high school and a little in undergrad too. It was actually discovering Judge Dredd omnibus volumes in the library that got to move off of fantasy at the time. I still remember the Michael Moorcock book that I was in the middle of when I switched to Judge Dredd and didn’t look back (after Dredd I discovered Sons of Anarchy and hyper fixated on that for a while). Anyway, tldr: we’re doing a fantasy “family values” thing on CHYOA soon, as in July, and if that interests you at all, please check it out, and I welcome all feedback. I realize yuri/futa readers might not be the target audience for this one. And on the subject of M/F content, is there any interest in something FSCish, but with a male lead, 2^nd person POV, set in Gurlberg? If you have an opinion, I’m seeing if the poll function at Ko-fi works. This is for once not an underhanded way to get you to the Ko-fi, I just want to see the votes. Here’s the poll. Yes, I'm accepting the risk that a hilariously small number of people will vote, but that would also answer my question.