Writing sussily
There is a piece of advice I often see on social media, along the lines of write for yourself, not for people who would cancel you. I always thought I was pretty good at doing that even when making stuff for others to read.
But, since resolving to write something for myself only, I feel so much more free to be... weird and sus about things. And I wanted to talk about how good that feels...?
I'm currently writing a story called LatP. The fact LatP is purely for myself, and one of the big goals is to create a kind of latently horny premise for porn side stories, has led me to write some stuff that would alienate perfectly nice readers.
For example, the treatment of the main character's gender. Lark starts as a cis female character, then crossdresses as male (on the suggestion of another character) and gets a lot out of it. However, they occasionally present themselves as female when it would be advantageous. They are gendered/misgendered various ways by different characters and the narration itself. At one point they get force-feminised. After escaping they get forced into masculinity and magically start to have more masculine traits.
What is Lark's real gender? I don't think want to go into that in canon...
I feel like there is a lot of pressure to be clear about a character's traits, to give them a label and then judge whether they are good representation for that label. If I were writing this for others I'd probably have just made Lark unambiguously female. They would have been one of those characters like Kashima from GSNK or the mom in Uchouten Kazoku who just goes around as a hot guy because they can.
Because I'm writing for myself instead, I get to force my character through a contrived obstacle course of gendered experiences in a way which is, probably, offensive and upsetting in the wrong context. Is it gender essentialist, fetishistic, backwards, etc. But it nourishes my soul to write a character who gets to experience gender in various ways and feel both suffering and euphoria from it. Gender really freaks me out and Lark is a way for me to explore that. And sexualise it. Hehe.
Before I started I didn't know how much I liked all this stuff or how rewarding I would find it to play around with it. Sometimes I think that creative pursuits are all about communicating with others and sharing your perspective. But creativity is also about free exploration. Creative social media panopticon brainrot goes deep and it's worth it to try to escape sometimes.