Math is Hard Commentary

Hey!  This is my first post of commentary on the stories I've been writing.  Do I think I've yet earned the right to do this kind of commentary?  Yes, because I have thoughts and a blog to publish them on and that is how free speech works. :)




Serena was my co-writer, and also the basis for Ryan, our heroine and narrator.  I tried quite hard to make Ryan's speech and writing similar to Serena's - she was actually pretty surprised by how well I captured her, when I first sent her a sample!  However, Ryan took on a bit more of a life of her own and deviated from Serena here and there as the story went on, by the simple necessity of having another writer putting her thoughts and actions into words.

Oh, and as Serena found necessary to mention - no, she and I have never done anything like this.  I am not interested in jeopardizing my submissive's college education!  My inspiration, as noted before, has been scenes that I will never actually do - I was interested in writing this story primarily because Serena and I would never actually do it.

I had a bit of an agenda with this story.  I had never found any bimbofication erotica that appealed to me - mostly, because I could never find any that was realistic and consensual.  (There may be such stories; however, I had not found any before starting this story.)  Contrast that to the examples I had for consensual (and occasionally realistic) robot play being depicted in erotica, and it's actually not surprising that it took me as long as it did to get into bimbofication despite taking to robotization very quickly.

I chose the name Ryan for the protagonist for the sole reason that I thought it would be kinda funny if the protagonist of a bimbofication (a kink that plays on very mainstream and very standardized femininity) erotica had an androgynous name that is more often read as masculine.  When searching for character names, I try not to overthink it and will often settle on the first thing that makes me happy.

The opening dialogue between Ryan and Jamie is mostly a tool for getting in a lot of exposition, as well as developing Ryan as a person we can care about.  The one key thing is that - well, taking a hint from the robotization erotica mentioned above, I wanted my main character to be an actual female bimbofication fetishist.  Considering I know and play with several such people, and all such people agreed that they'd never seen this in an EMCSA story before, I felt like it was an important thing to portray.  I hoped it would make bimbofication seem like a more real and possible kink for people (since it is), in much the same way that stories like My Life as a Robot, The Chip, and Robotunit8 and Robotdoll's entire respective bodies of work made robotization feel more like a kink I could actually find partners for.

The opening dialogue was also a cheap way to have the first person narrator describe herself.  I didn't want to have her just describe herself out of the blue - I HATE reading that whenever I see it.  So, I instead had her be very aware that her friend was looking her over.  Race comes up here, as well - Ryan is based on Serena, who is black, and I realized while writing that I would absolutely hate it if people reading the story imagined her as white (which most US readers will do for complicated sociological reasons).  If you read this story and imagined another white blonde bimbo, um...well, I can't say I'm not guilty of skipping the setup portion of many EMCSA stories, so I can't judge you too harshly.  But I can at least let you know that you are wrong.  :)  Also, one of the other things that squicked me about many of the bimbofication stories I had tried or read summaries of was that they often involved a physical transformation in order to better match up with a hot blonde pornstar look (or to create a cartoonishly well-endowed figure) - therefore, I took advantage of Serena's actual appearance (the main difference is that Ryan has a blue streak in her hair) to provide a character who neither looks anything like the usual bimbofication ideal nor has her appearance altered at any point to fit that ideal.

I also decided that, with a bimbofication fetishist as my main character, it would be both interesting for the story and a wise idea from a responsible storytelling perspective to bounce her off a female dominant with a completely different set of fetishes.  (By "responsible storytelling" - while I felt like it would be important for many reasons to portray a woman with a bimbofication fetish, I also felt like it would be realistic as well as interesting if her friend did not share her kinks.  Portraying the variety of human reaction is a wonderful thing.)  As such, Jamie gained new traits with every line I wrote, until she was a suave, well-spoken polyamorous Korean-American domme with an interrogation fetish.  I like her.  She will star in a spin-off if I ever figure out a good story for the occasion.

The bit about degradation in particular is inspired by something a one-time play partner told me about her own humiliation and degradation kink, and which resonated with Serena.  I took the opportunities to both out Jamie as polyamorous (since it added to the number of partners she mentions) and to get some fun dialogue out of the contrast.

I've spent a lot of time on the opening conversation - part of that is that there was a lot going on in my head with writing it.  The other part is that it was just freaking fun to write, and when I finished it, I felt incredibly confident that it was a great way to start a story.

It was Serena's idea to include supporting characters at all, which in my opinion saved this story from being repetitive and lifeless.  Jamie, as such, represents actual prying eyes into the exhibitionistic fun that Ryan is enjoying.  Karla, meanwhile, is a representative of the clueless classroom attendees who have no context for what Ryan is doing and don't notice anything.  Karla only notices that anything at all happened because Ryan happens to be her friend.

Oh, and the math teacher is a woman.  That was another thing for me that seemed like a wise choice - bimbofication is a kink kinda built on misogyny, and I felt like I could counter that a bit by loading up the story with markedly different female characters from our soon-to-be-ditzy protagonist.

Ethan is, as you might have guessed, basically me.  He gets a laughably small amount of development.  In my head, he looks like TNA wrestler Ethan Carter III AKA EC3 AKA WWE's Derrick Bateman.  Male doms are likely to get underrepresented in my fiction because they tend to come out too much like myself for my own tastes - as such, I limit their involvement in the story.   That way, I don't fill my oeuvre with too much of myself, and give the other characters (whom I find much more interesting) more time to shine.

The trickiest part of this story was to show continual progress on the bimbofication front, climaxing in Ryan's sex-crazed ramble at the end.  I tried to allow the "like"s and "totally"s to slowly creep into Ryan's vocabulary, starting as an occasional tic until they became fixtures of every sentence.  This was mostly done to make the story more readable and less repetitive, but it also allowed for better story structure (IE, there is some kind of rising action in seeing Ryan's faculties get altered more and more as the story goes on).

Oh, and the math problems.  One of my standard routines for bimbofication scenes is to give my partner math problems to try (and fail) to solve, as a way to emphasize the "lowered intelligence" (or in some cases, "distracted by arousal") element of the headspace.  Just about everyone told me it was an awesome idea that none of them had ever seen before - I figured, if it was such an original and fitting idea for play, it was a strong topic for a story.

I went with functions because it was the right level of difficulty (12th grade/college crossover), but even moreso because the problems mentioned were capable of being written in a .txt document.  No graphs, illustrations of Ryan's scrap paper, or fancy figures available, so I had to stick with letters, numbers, and basic symbols.  I actually had forgotten how to do these problems - I looked up a worksheet on Google to find grade-appropriate math (which was also necessary because I never took a proper math course in college).  My fumbling failures to solve the problems inspired some of Ryan's bimbofiction-induced methodology errors.  The math problems provided another way of showing progression of the bimbofication - I tried to ensure that Ryan's reaction to each problem showed a progressively more altered response, climaxing in her inability to solve 2+2.

It amuses me to know that multiple people found the math more engrossing than the rest of the story. :)

Homestuck fans will get the joke theme of the screen names that all of the characters use.

There are a bunch of errors that only matter to me.  Ryan's IMs are supposed to have little signals that she is using autocomplete, but several lines are lacking these signals.  Ethan does not use autocomplete.  There was meant to be a noticeable contrast, but I messed up.  NOW YOU KNOW.

With my first few stories, I experimented with narration to find out which style worked best for me.  This story showed me the hard way that first person narration is not, to my surprise, a good choice for me.  Writing in a different voice the entire time was exhausting - I second-guessed practically every word choice to ensure everything sounded enough like Ryan.  I am not sure if I could have done it without Serena going over everything I wrote and adjusting it slightly.  As such, I will be focusing on third person narration for a while.