My favorite muscle growth story (and why it should be yours, too)

[Esperanto Lives]

Mothergrinninbird (Funbird's) Emil Part 1.

The sequels, like many others, didn't capture the crazy fantasy eroticism of the original...but nothing, and I mean nothing, could ever take away how good Emil Part 1 was.

The thing I liked the most about it was what a complete fantasy it was. It was in the "real" world, and showed us what being a guy like Emil would really be LIKE. The growth was all offstage. I know this is heretical for all those muscle growth fans out there...but really, muscle growth is the least interesting part of the story, at least to me. What's most interesting is, what happens AFTER? What's it LIKE to be that big, hunky, and handsome, strong enough to do what Emil did, getting that much attention?

It's a cliche word to use, but Emil was "realistic." The most realistic muscle growth story ever. The way bullies reacted to Emil when they first saw him huge, to the quieter scenes like Emil and his buddies getting high on a lazy afternoon...it all felt like something that would really happen.

Emil had something for everybody. Emil, like many of Funbird's heroes and heroines, was a sexual omnivore. There was guy-on-girl, man-on-man action...no girl-girl stuff, but I understand the sequels corrected that. There are some days where I want to read about a virile superstud with lots of girlfriends, and there are days when I want to read about a real relationship with a little love. Emil had BOTH, amazingly enough.

Yes, occasionally Emil did some things that aren't for me. I don't find extremely large breasts sexy at all. But the story was so COMPLETE, took its time to develop its idea, that you just wait a bit, there's something more your style coming up.

That's another strength of Emil. With a lot of stories written by men, women are basically sex objects. Sonja had so much personality! And she was his girl. There was none of the cretinous, misogynistic stuff where that Neanderthal, Big Timmy, doesn't talk to women except to say "bitch, feel my load in you!"

Even compared to other stories of its type (muscle growth), Emil Part 1 did something different: little innovations unique to Funbird, that are so cool, distinctive and sexy, you go "hey, why didn't I think of that?" Emil's long tongue for instance. Wow, what must THAT feel like? Or the fact Emil has a jaw-defyingly huge body, yet his face is beautiful, almost girlishly so.
As an erotic fiction writer myself, I have to ask myself what the influence Emil had on my own writing. This is a hard question to answer because....well, I think I came on the scene with BIG DRAGON very much my own person, with my own voice and style.

But Emil did make me conscious of a few things. Namely, location and ethnicity. Many stories could be set anywhere. Emil on the other hand, was distinctly Midwestern. Not a bucolic middle American caricature, but a very NAPOLEON DYNAMITE, very real look at what life in that part of the country looks like. That influenced me in a big way...all my stories, except the historicals and far-out science fiction ones, are all New York City stories.

Likewise, there was the feature of ethnicity. Everybody came from somewhere, and Funbird was specific. Emil came from Austrian immigrants. Sonja was fom the former Yugoslavia. Sepehr was Middle Eastern.

I find it hard to close this article, except to say that Funbird is one of the most talented artists as well as a writer, and his art of muscle men are the most phenomenal handsome superstuds imaginable. When I saw the physically godlike Mike O'Hearn on AMERICAN GLADIATORS, I thought, "Wow, he's like a Funbird painting come to life!"

[Esperanto Lives]

Huh, now this is interesting.

I just found out that Funbird originally published Emil here on this forum, under the name "Florian."

Here's the thread:

http://www.musclegrowth.org/forum/showthread.php?t=2906

What I find interesting about this, is that the very thing I liked the most about Emil - that it was so "complete" a story, in one shot, you got pretty much everything. But apparently, it was only that way when it was posted on EpicLust...it was produced as a story broken up in little bite-sized chunks and only pasted in one place when it was reposted somewhere else.

I posted a lot of my early work there (because owing to the very limited nature of what I write, the audience isn't the biggest in the world and there are so few places to put it that I can't be choosy), but EpicLust skeeves me the hell out, and I don't mind saying so. It's not just the rife mysoginy, borderline homophobia and insane supergeekery that take me right back to my high school's AV club room...if my AV club had a lot of terrible poser art everywhere of nine year olds with three foot penises. A bunch of pitiful, hooting Omega Males jerking off over photoshopped pictures of elf girls with breasts like zeppelins. I go to EpicLust to post something, I swear to God, I can SMELL the acne.

I mean, I'm nerdy too, but this is the bottom of the barrel.

On the bright side though, I learned from that site what a "Twi'lek" is. I learned it, and I can't un-learn it!