Just a thought about MG literature

[Spooky]

I know this is some viewer's turn on, but I personally don't find the magic pills, or the portions, or unstable chemicals, or tests, or anything of that to be appealing or even useful in MG literature.

One of the reasons that authors employ them is because they need a deus ex machina of sorts to be able to explain why their characters are growing unexpectedly.

While I am not saying that this should be completely ignored, I am wondering if the authors on the site would be open to inserting MG without any sort of introduction or explanation or device to explain why this is happening.

My reasoning is this: We all come to this forum expecting to see enlarged/impossible images or stories of people with large muscles. Therefore, we've already left our normal assumptions of anatomy and possibility at the login page. When someone sits down to look at a morph, no one has to explain to him why he is bigger than is humanly possible. It's because we come with a certain mindset that allows those things to go unquestioned. It's like Nancy Drew: no one needs an explanation for why this bitch is so smart. It is the genre: it is expected of her to be so.

So, if authors can make use of that same mindset, and gently and gradually introduce muscle growth without the device, it would make the story more realistic by leaving away such devices such as the pill, the potion, etc that commonly portray fantasy-like scenarios. Also, it would be less startling and more intimately woven into the story.


I don't write fiction. So I cannot produce any examples of what I am talking about. It just seems to me that many authors here are reluctant to leave behind the explanations and the potions and the whatnot that they felt necessary to be able to make the story appeal, somehow, to logic, which would make the story more believable. What I am suggesting, in short, is by attempting to rationalize such things, authors are inadvertantly making their stories to look quite unbelievable and rather fantastical by the use of magic pills and potions or government-tests-gone-wrong or any sort of permutation or combination thereof. Instead, authors could rely on the understanding of the genre that all the readers have and subtly and gradually introduce the MG into the story, making the story more believable and more organic.

Thoughts?

[hyper.trophy]

I personally think there is a wide enough strata of style and scenarios to please a lot of people. Personally I like their being somewhat of an exposition to a story. There's a great anticipation and build-up prior to the actual growth occurring. Whether or not one finds the cause of the growth to be unbelievable, you have to realize that spontaneous muscle growth in it of itself is not possible in reality either. Having the growth occur through pill, potion or magic doesn't degrade the eroticism of the story for me in the least. It's all in how the story itself is executed.

Usually in subsequent readings after my the first read-through, I must admit I tend to return just to the growth scenes anyhow!

[Spooky]

Originally Posted by PixelFX

Whether or not one finds the cause of the growth to be unbelievable, you have to realize that spontaneous muscle growth in it of itself is not possible in reality either.

Well, that is what I was saying... By trying to explain the presence of MG, something that is impossible, by a device that is itself impossible is only doubly distancing, I find. Instead, simply just introduce the MG.

It's like Harry Potter. Rowling didn't have to explain why/how/when this alternate Witch world could exist, or what cosmic event caused it to come into being, or how two worlds can exist side by side. It is innate in the genre: it is expected and allowed.

And, so, I am suggesting to authors to try once or twice to simply introduce the MG without a device. Again, some people, like yourself, get into the devices. Which is fine, I was just saying to some who would like to experiment without it: it is okay, the genre already permits the MG.

[arpeejay]

http://www.pridesites.com/omelissoko...stoppable.html

[Wild]

If I read ten stories in a row, where a character just worked hard for ten chapters to build muscles and finally got there... that'd be some boring reading.

[arpeejay]

Originally Posted by Wild

If I read ten stories in a row, where a character just worked hard for ten chapters to build muscles and finally got there... that'd be some boring reading.

Gee, thanks! :-)

xoxo

richard

[Spooky]

Originally Posted by Wild

If I read ten stories in a row, where a character just worked hard for ten chapters to build muscles and finally got there... that'd be some boring reading.

That was just my suggestion. I am also arguing that sudden muscle growth would be allowed.

So if an author wanted to go right into huge, inflated MG then go for it! Just leave the pills behind. It wouldn't seem as bizarre as it sounds, simply because we all expect it to happen.

[Demandred]

Hey Spooky,

I can see what you mean with regards to the use of a catalyst to promote growth which replaces the more realistic efforts used by your average bodybuilder.

I am aware that I am repeating what has already been said... But this site, and the stories in it, are not "average" by any means. Instead of holding up a mirror to the huge efforts but in by bodybuilders, they employ other means for growth. There's definitely a fantasy element involved in many of the stories on the site. It comes with the package really. Inhuman muscle growth tends to be associated with the unnatural - the pills, the strange devices, the inhuman gene, whatever it may be. Not every writer is aware of the work that goes into bodybuilding, so why would they put it in their work? If a story is funny, interesting and gets you hot under the collar, then they can take as many magic pills as they want for all I care though this may not be everyone's cup of tea, I believe many readers are more bothered about the steamy hot growth rather than the source of it.

Whilst I agree that reading a story which uses more natural techniques for growth is nice, particularly if well written, I disagree on two main points from reading your post.

The first is that I believe the "natural" means of growth, "without a device" as you put it, are in themselves a device for muscle growth. Realistic, natural, yes, but still a device. Instead of being seperate to the pills or the potions, the lack is just another option.

The second is the appearance of disdain for the devices employed by users who submit stories on this site. Whilst I don't want to go down the whole "they do it for free and don't have to" route, people may not be impressed with being told that, actually, what they use to make the hot musle growth isn't good enough. I am unhappy with the association you seem to put with a good story, and a realistic growth device. The two do not necessarily go hand in hand, and I am sure you can appreciate this as you've clearly given the subject some thought.

As I said, if the story is well written and gets the reader going, then the writer can use whatever they like to attain the growth we are looking for.

To summarise: Appealing? That's subjective. Useful? Definitely.

[falseyedee]

yesterday i composed a thoughful response to this post...and was told i wasn't authorized to post, my log in had timed out, and when i went to log back in to post my response, there was a site "data base error" that lasted the rest of the afternoon. so, i forget exactly what i said, but it went something like this:

while i see nothing wrong with cutting to the chase and having growth happen spontaneously, as an erotic event, the lack of a back story makes for poor story telling, imho. your example of j k rowling's hp world in fact is counter to your suggestion. as in most fantasy and sci-fi writing, she has created a world that is consistent within itself. to do that she had 7 novels to set up and justify the magic...all the magic in her books was explained in terms that were consistent within the universe she created. but it took her 5,000 or 6,000 pages to do it.

i think as authors we strive to make stories that are plausible within the world that we create. the way the mg happens can be magic, pills, drugs, mind control, or just old fashioned working out, but however extreme the growth is, the growth is, in the best stories, at least plausible within the world we've created in the story. please note, plausible does not necessarily equal believable.

writing a story where growth just happens, with no rules or justification would be seriously difficult to make plausible or believable. and i think it would raise psychological issues in the characters that would have to be dealt with in some way, and that isn't always where we want to go in erotica.

i'm not suggesting that your proposal is bad or wrong headed, only that it would be seriously difficult to make it seem plausible or believable, for me anyway. others could try.

i hope that was coherent.

[Spooky]

Originally Posted by Wild

If I read ten stories in a row, where a character just worked hard for ten chapters to build muscles and finally got there... that'd be some boring reading.

That was just my suggestion. I am also arguing that sudden muscle growth would be allowed.

So if an author wanted to go right into huge, inflated MG then go for it! Just leave the pills behind. It wouldn't seem as bizarre as it sounds, simply because we all expect it to happen.

[garrix]

I've always liked the idea of applying more of a psychological element to MG stories. For example, a guy and his buddy become convinced that they cant stop transforming their body, while they're the ones eating mountains of protein-rich foods and hitting the gym hard. Yet they're still convinced that something, some force is making them train like bodybuilders, and the changes they are experiencing are the result of some kind of spell, despite the evidence that they're simply transforming themselves.

and that they somehow cave in psychologically to the "spell" or something, real or not, accept the changes occurring and they just continue to train and grow accordingly. Meanwhile the existence of this "spell" is left totally ambiguous and without explanation. Was there ever a spell at all, or was it all in their heads?

just a thought.

[Mad Dog]

Because it's not like real bodybuilders use pills and injections to get huge.

[Spooky]

Originally Posted by Mad Dog

Because it's not like real bodybuilders use pills and injections to get huge.

Because it's not like anyone has ever grown 200 lbs in 30 seconds...

[philat99]

Originally Posted by Spooky

it would make the story more realistic by leaving away such devices such as the pill, the potion, etc that commonly portray fantasy-like scenarios. Also, it would be less startling and more intimately woven into the story.


I don't write fiction. So I cannot produce any examples of what I am talking about. It just seems to me that many authors here are reluctant to leave behind the explanations and the potions and the whatnot that they felt necessary to be able to make the story appeal, somehow, to logic, which would make the story more believable. What I am suggesting, in short, is by attempting to rationalize such things, authors are inadvertantly making their stories to look quite unbelievable and rather fantastical by the use of magic pills and potions or government-tests-gone-wrong or any sort of permutation or combination thereof. Instead, authors could rely on the understanding of the genre that all the readers have and subtly and gradually introduce the MG into the story, making the story more believable and more organic.

Thoughts?

I respect your opinion, but I find that fiction, sci-fi, unexpected muscle growth, is MADE very believable by the ingenuity of the author and the fantasy-frame-of-mind of the reader. If you are not a reader of fiction, then this entire genre would, of course, be nonsense. Actually there are MANY of us out here who thrive on fiction by authors who do NOT "inadvertently" make their stories look quite unbelievable, but because they take great pains to cleverly use such devices to create and weave a sense of believabiliy.
In your first sentence of your post you alluded to "some viewer's turn-on." I would argue with your use of the singular possessive since many of the most popular stories seem to be many viewers' turn-ons! That's based only on posted feed-back.
I guess one person's believability is another person's nonsense.
Just my thoughts.
Mike

[Spooky]

Originally Posted by philat99

I respect your opinion, but I find that fiction, sci-fi, unexpected muscle growth, is MADE very believable by the ingenuity of the author and the fantasy-frame-of-mind of the reader. If you are not a reader of fiction, then this entire genre would, of course, be nonsense. Actually there are MANY of us out here who thrive on fiction by authors who do NOT "inadvertently" make their stories look quite unbelievable, but because they take great pains to cleverly use such devices to create and weave a sense of believabiliy.
In your first sentence of your post you alluded to "some viewer's turn-on." I would argue with your use of the singular possessive since many of the most popular stories seem to be many viewers' turn-ons! That's based only on posted feed-back.
I guess one person's believability is another person's nonsense.
Just my thoughts.
Mike

Well, the singular possessive was a typo. So yeah, I was writing to the fact that many people like those devices such as the pills, and so on. But I guarantee there are people out there who don't like them just as much as those who do, because three people (including myself) have shown interest in a story where those devices are not present. For me, that technique is unbearably cheesy and seems amateur, and so it really takes away from the story. It just struck me that 99.999999% of the MG stories that I have read use some kind of device to explain the muscle growth (which are unexplainable in themselves), whereas the great amount of published literature in other sexual and non-sexual fantasy genres do not have to devote an entire side-tracking section of their story to explain the possibility of the story itself.

Again, my intention was not to tell people to stop doing it, because some people really enjoy that, and that is fine. My intention was just to open up the discussion, first, to ask if authors have thought about that possibility before, and second, for me to say my opinion that it is okay to leave those sorts of things out in a story or two.

So, it seemed to me, if you are not specifically trying to incorporate this device-eroticism then just drop the device, reclaim your lost section, and just write the mg into the story.

[Spooky]

Originally Posted by falseyedee

your example of j k rowling's hp world in fact is counter to your suggestion. as in most fantasy and sci-fi writing, she has created a world that is consistent within itself. to do that she had 7 novels to set up and justify the magic...all the magic in her books was explained in terms that were consistent within the universe she created. but it took her 5,000 or 6,000 pages to do it.

I don't believe so. A common intro to almost all of the HP books is that Harry is waiting during the Summer to get back to Hogwarts or whatever. Now, what you are suggesting is that the fact that there are two worlds side by side allows for the imagination to go along with the story unquestioningly because she introduces a second realm where these things are possible, taking the mind elsewhere than here. Fair point.

But, what she doesn't do is introduce an explanation as to how these worlds can coexist, or as to how they can interact side by side without interacting, or how magic can exist in this world (which is quite concretely protrayed by the Dudleys and their house in both the novels and the movies). What happens simply just happens, because the reader gives creative license for these possibilities.

Now, what I am arguing is that what these devices such as the pills, the potions, the powders, the injects, etc are attempting to do is what I wrote in the first paragraph of this post (creating an imaginative possibility of where this can happen) even though MG readers are already doing what's in the second paragraph (already giving the author creative license to let MG happen. It is the main reason why we read it, after all).

I mean, this is how I see it. MG literature obviously hasn't been around for more than a few decades. When a genre begins patterns develop many people start to mimic what they see when they are first exposed. I can imagine the first authors who ever started to publish this trying to create a scenario (like the devices) as to explain this growth, and to create literature out of a piece of erotic notes or scenarios or something of the like. And it's understandable how this has become infused in the genre, these devices. However, I personally find them to be cheap and bankrupt. I mean, it is awfully convenient that these thousands of characters created over the years seem to find this one single device that allows them to get big, whether it be an injection, a pill, a powder, an unstable formula, government-testing-gone-wrong, radiation, etc. They are different materials but do the exact same function in literature. And by saying that the device is bankrupt, I am merely talking about how every single possibility of this device has been employed and enhanced and employed and enhanced until the story itself just seems to be about the effects of this device instead of simply just writing MG literature: there's nothing more it can offer.


And so my intentions were not to get rid of them wholesale, but to create a window of possibility where one author might take it on himself to just experiment with it, because it just seems so unnecessary at this point, if the eroticism that comes along with the device is not intentionally trying to be incorporated into the piece.

[helliot]

I think it all depends on the story. In some, the entire plot is driven by the cause of the growth (like Second Puberty) and some just include two sentences ("I got the pills from the mysterious gypsy"). In the latter case, they could probably be removed, but for those of us who enjoy a good plot, it's often unavoidable. Though when I look in my own writing, sometimes I explain the source of the growth and some I don't. I just go with what seems natural to the story. To eliminate devices from all stories would be very artificial and sometimes go against the very grain of the story. Just my two cents.

[Spooky]

Originally Posted by helliot

I think it all depends on the story. In some, the entire plot is driven by the cause of the growth (like Second Puberty) and some just include two sentences ("I got the pills from the mysterious gypsy"). In the latter case, they could probably be removed, but for those of us who enjoy a good plot, it's often unavoidable. Though when I look in my own writing, sometimes I explain the source of the growth and some I don't. I just go with what seems natural to the story. To eliminate devices from all stories would be very artificial and sometimes go against the very grain of the story. Just my two cents.

Yeah, I agree completely with you. It all depends on the story, but there are some stories that I have read where it was just the most bizarre thing ever. So, for those stories where those devices work... great! Keep them in. But if you have a MG story along the lines of a bildungsroman, and you have to introduce the fact that he is a witch or that he was in some bizarrely impossible clinical drug testings or something just to make him grow, then it would seem totally out of place and inappropriate, and as I've emphasized the most, amateur.

So, yeah, I agree.

[Mdlftr]

Originally Posted by arpeejay

Gee, thanks! :-)

xoxo

richard

Richard gives you a link to a story that is nothing but muscle growth. The workouts are mentioned, but there is absolutely NO explanation for why Roger, then Ricky experience the accelerated growth.

That SOUNDS like the definition of the type of story you are espousing. Yet you seem to find it "boring".

So, if you DON'T want the "deus ex machina", you don't want the explanation as to HOW, you find the GROWTH part tedious by itself --- what do you think a Muscle Growth story is all about, anyway?

As other commenters have noted, the context and details of the story are what make it interesting. To take another genre of fiction which is much maligned: romance novels. The ultimate story is about a relationship that develops between two people. How and why it gets there is what makes the story interesting.

Muscle fiction is the same way. As the muscle grows, why it grows, how big it grows, how fast it grows, how people react to it, how the grower reacts, etc. etc. that is where the story is.

So the details are hokey and contrived. That doesn't make the story any less fun!

Mdlftr

[Bull]

Interesting discussion. Speaking for myself, I would find a story that focussed only on the muscle growth without giving any explanation for it to be unsatisfying. There are only so many ways MG can be described, and they have all been exploited ad nauseum. What gives each story it's interest are the other elements: characterization, plotting, and so forth. And you really can't get into those things without exploring WHY the growth is happening. Given that extreme MG is, by definition, fantastical, how can the
explanation be anything but?

Of course, I always prefer fantasy and sci-fi over naturalistic fiction, so it is also a matter of taste. If I want realism, I'll turn my PC off and go deal with my actual life; lol Every genre has conventions you must accept. I think the potions, pills, and so forth in MG stories fall under that heading.

[Spooky]

Originally Posted by Mdlftr

Richard gives you a link to a story that is nothing but muscle growth. The workouts are mentioned, but there is absolutely NO explanation for why Roger, then Ricky experience the accelerated growth.

That SOUNDS like the definition of the type of story you are espousing. Yet you seem to find it "boring".

So, if you DON'T want the "deus ex machina", you don't want the explanation as to HOW, you find the GROWTH part tedious by itself --- what do you think a Muscle Growth story is all about, anyway?

As other commenters have noted, the context and details of the story are what make it interesting. To take another genre of fiction which is much maligned: romance novels. The ultimate story is about a relationship that develops between two people. How and why it gets there is what makes the story interesting.

Muscle fiction is the same way. As the muscle grows, why it grows, how big it grows, how fast it grows, how people react to it, how the grower reacts, etc. etc. that is where the story is.

So the details are hokey and contrived. That doesn't make the story any less fun!

Mdlftr

Yes, the story that was linked is one of the possibilities I was thinking about, and enjoyed it. You just misread that I thought it was boring... too much quoting going on.