Frequently Asked Questions - Sexual Content

Is Tales of MU porn?

Some people seem to think so. Most of these people aren’t actually reading the story, however. My characters are college students, from backgrounds which range from the extremely permissive to the extremely repressive. They do what college students do. Granted, their experiences in some areas may not map to yours, even ignoring the fantasy elements. On the other hands, maybe they do. I’ve heard from more than a few readers who say this story reminds them of their own freshmen years.

Yes, there is sexual content in this story. Yes, it sometimes goes as explicit as you might find in a story that’s packaged and marketed as porn. However, that’s not all there is to the story… and in fact, if that’s all that you’re looking for, you’ll probably get bored and leave.

Most books take one of three different approaches to sex: they ignore it, they use it as a selling point, or they segregate it. It’s there in the middle but if you skip over it you don’t miss anything… it’s like they expect their novel to be edited for syndication at some point and want to make sure that nobody misses anything, so nothing happens during sex scenes… except for sex. Of course, this does nothing but reinforce the idea that “sex” and “story” are polar opposites that must never come into contact with each other.

My goal as a writer, with regards to this subject, is to use it simply as another element of the story. When intimate scenes occur, the characters are still fully present. They’re thinking, they’re feeling, they’re reacting, they’re growing.

I don’t write sex scenes to titillate. Some of them are uncomfortable. Some of them are awkward. Some readers have said they find this emotional honesty more stimulating than anything else, but your mileage may vary.

If it isn’t porn, why do you have so much fanservice in your stories?

What do you call fanservice? I don’t target this story to one narrow segment of the population, so it’s very rare that I can write a scene and think to myself, “Everybody’s going to love this.” For every lesbian spanking scene I include, I get at least one comment to the effect of “I enjoy this story but I’m not fully comfortable with this side of it.” (which is perfectly valid…I don’t expect many people to be equally comfortable with every part of the story.)

On the other hand, when characters are given an emotional breakthrough, or when certain popular secondary characters have a moment in the spotlight or a particularly memorable line, the crowd—as they say—goes wild. So, if I was trying to do nothing but gratuitiously pander and please, I wouldn’t do it with spanking scenes.

Okay, so why is there so much sexual content in Tales of MU?

Uh, ’cause I put it there?

Some people say that the sex doesn’t serve the plot, or further the plot, or advance the plot, or whatever… but that’s beside the point. The sex (or sexual content, of which there’s more… do I sound too much like Mackenzie there?) is an integral part of the story that I have set out to tell. It cannot be separated from “the plot.” You might as well say I should take out all the racial subtext because it doesn’t further the sex story.

I could tell a story without all the business about clitties and spankings, to be sure, but it wouldn’t be the same story. When I started out, I pretty much was doing the whole writing thing for my health, in the sense that I wasn’t making a living at it. This made “what I want” of paramount importance, so I simply concentrated on telling the story I wanted to tell. Now that I’ve made a success of it, it seems strange to think I should stop doing what I’ve been doing all along.

Why are so many of your characters gay or bisexual or otherwise queer?

What, you want my stance on the nature vs. nurture debate?

No, I mean… isn’t it unusual, unrealistic, or even unnatural for there to be so many non-straight people in the story?

How many characters have been mentioned, even in passing? Maybe a hundred? Some of those characters are indeed straight. Even if none of them were, I can credibly state that there’s at least a hundred or so gay people in the world we live in, so I don’t see how this is “unrealistic.”

Of course, the answer is that the vast majority of the people seen in the story actually are straight… but you’re mostly seeing one small group (or a few overlapping groups) that hang out with each other. To use a real-life example, McDonald’s is more popular than Wendy’s, but that doesn’t mean happening upon a group of even a dozen people who all prefer Wendy’s is unrealistic.

This story–like most stories–isn’t giving you a complete picture of a world and its inhabitants in total, but a private glimpse into the life of one person and her immediate social circle. It might be unusual, to some readers, for the social circle in question to not be predominantly heterosexual or vanilla in their sexual inclinations… but it’s hardly unrealistic and definitely not unnatural.

Aren’t you concerned about glorifying a certain lifestyle by depicting it in your stories?

I’m more concerned by the idea that anybody might think my stories glorify anything, to be perfectly honest.

Okay, then aren’t you conversely worried that you show lesbians in a bad light?

I have neither the whole of lesbianhood at my disposal nor the power to collectively light all members thereof in any way, shape, or form. I can thus do no more than show a particular (fictional) person in a particular situation.

Why don’t your characters who are involved in a Dominant/submissive relationship follow all the typical conventions of such a relationship?

The short answer to this and many questions is that no character in this story is meant to be a typical textbook example of anything.

Broadly speaking, the theme of Tales of MU is people finding their own place in the world and their own path in life… I find it more instructive to show them figuring things out for themselves than going to some website, getting a list of instructions, and cleaving to them exactly.

Do you realize actual S&M practitioners don’t routinely injure their partners, as Steff implies Viktor does?

If we had access to flawless, painless, scarless, instantaneous magical methods of healing… don’t you think that some of us might?

I certainly don’t advocate the level of “extreme masochism” which Amaranth and Steff indulge themselves in, for anybody who lives in the real world. The fact is that the behavior of the characters in this story is frequently irresponsible even given the availability of magical healing and protection, and sometimes would be downright suicidal in reality. I trust my readers to understand the distinction between real life and fantasy.