House Semya

There’s a lot to unpack here. My last blog post talked about why we went with family values as the theme for House Semya, now let’s talk about the rest. I had three mostly separate challenges with this story: how go about telling a fantasy story and how to do a family story and have them at least mostly succeed at being kind of sexy.

On fantasy, I thought about my own experiences reading fantasy novels and things I’ve read about other people reading them. I looked at some of the eroticism in things like Game of Thrones, and observed how even old-timey fantasy was massively horny. I concluded that from my perspective, the most attractive fantasy smut wasn’t smut at all. It was “legit” storytelling that happened to include a larger amount of horniness. I decided to risk going a little bit more plot and exposition heavy and to try to get some characterization in there instead of just throwing us into massive orgies. I felt like that would make a stronger story and make the family component more effective. That’s the approach that I’m taking. It’s not like you’ll have to wait 200 chapters before the story earns the family tag, but I needed that lewd content to unfold in a way that made sense and had stronger narrative bones than “I walked in on my sister looking at porn,” 

Meanwhile, we want there to be a real story going on in there. It has to be “legit” in that it needs “enough” world-building and a somewhat compelling conflict, but we also don’t want to go too big. What if people don’t like it? Or I don’t want to commit to a huge project? So I’m trying to lay a good enough groundwork that we can go bigger if the story is popular, or we can wrap it in a tidy way if it’s not. So, House Semya has ‘A Diplomatic Mission’ as part one. I have fully outlined that and will finish it and post it. Then we’ll look at feedback and decide what to do (or not do).

On tags and content: one thing that I think I’ve learned as I’ve written a lot of smut online is that it works best when kinks and categories are kept compartmentalized. A person usually doesn’t click on a futa story hoping to see M/F action, and if you put content in a story that doesn’t align with its brand, you risk driving readers away. I personally love having a ton of variety in a single story. My very first online smut story was like that: it had everything. It was freeform on CHYOA where the MC was a Mighty Viking that everyone wanted. He had his hot wife at home, the motherly innkeeper, his hunky best friend, his twink other best friend, and in the same story you could go around his Viking village and get it on with whoever. That story had quite a bit of content, but didn’t get even a sliver of the hits and likes that Futa Soccer Camp did. Miscellaneous is cool, but I don’t know how many readers are like “Let’s get online and look at the “Misc” tag.” This rule seems to apply across a lot of entertainment. You go to see John Wick because you want to see Keanu shoot mans. If we put a long, pensive rumination on the implications of defunding public schools in John Wick, people aren't going to be happy about it. It's not what they're there for. That's why we won't see any M/M or anything like that in House Semya. However...

I conceived the fantasy world we see in House Semya with my trappy crossdressy yaoi project in mind; I actually repurposed it for M/F. (I mean, Gaestori?) That’s part of why even though there won’t be any overtly gay content in House Semya, you might notice a lot of male characters and stuff. This world works for M/F, M/M, F/F—but each of those would need their own story. They can connect, but they can’t share a roof. I’d love to do all of that, but I have to pace myself. If there’s something you want to see in a hurry, it’s always fine to commission it.

House Semya should be updated regularly over the next few weeks, at least a couple of times each week. As always, likes and comments are helpful. The little red notifications motivate me, and I’m probably going to start looking more closely at likes as a guide to where the *effort* should be going. I hope you enjoy the stories! I need an M/F page here now.