#and it really boils down to 'it makes the tangly mess of poison and thorns in my chest feel a little easier to breathe around for a while'

[sparxwrites]

I'm not sure if you've answered something similar before (I can't find it if you have but knowing tumblrs terrible search function that's not saying much) but why do you write such dark sexual stories? What is it that you find so appealing in these twisted tales? Please understand this is from a point of good faith - I'm not judging and I enjoy dark stories and erotica both, only seperately. I'm just morbidly curious as to why you enjoy the combination as I see no appeal in it personally

oof, just a nice easy question to answer on a friday night, anon. okay. there’s a lot of answers to this question, depending on how personal i want to get and also like... which stories you’re talking about.

some stories i write that could be considered “darkly sexual” are categorically erotica. stuff involving weird, niche kinks, or monsters, or “dub-con” (which is not a real thing, i know, it’s a fantasy erotica thing)... the appeal there is, idk, whatever the fantasy is. they are, in my mind, written as fantasies - a fic where a character doesn’t want sex and then ends up "enjoying” having a monster lay eggs in them is obviously not what happens irl. eggs aside, no one ends up actually enjoying sexual assault. they’re written (from my side) with the air of “irl this would be Utterly Reprehensible, but what i’m essentially writing here is like... a roleplay session between two consenting partners where i am both partners”. it’s all fantasy! it’s all fake! it’s a bdsm scene or whatever where they’re both pretending/playing a role, except it’s just me writing it out with little finger puppets (either for my amusement/titillation, or the amusement/titillation of others).

then there’s... Other Stuff. see also, a lot of my percy and ripley fics. and i find it interesting that people often read those as fetish stuff because, whilst they do have sex in them, those are fundamentally horror stories. the appeal i get out of them is the same as whump/darkfic. when i write about horrible, traumatising sex where one person clearly doesn’t enjoy it, that is not a sexual fantasy for me. characters roleplaying at it, sure, me playing fingerpuppets with it, sure. but something deeply and fundamentally focused on the trauma and violation of that kind of thing is not, for me, sexual (and if what you’re getting off on is the actual nonconsent, rather than the playing at/silly version of nonconsent, i have some questions/concerns. this seems like a weird and not-really-there line, but it’s surprisingly obvious and disconcerting when someone/a fic crosses it tbh). what i get out of that is a deep sense of catharsis. i’ve gone into why i think i (and others) get this catharsis a little in my meta tag and this specific post - but, at the end of the day, i don’t exactly know. 

i think, perhaps, it is that i am a very sad person sometimes, and a very angry person sometimes, and in real life i spend a lot of time keeping both of those things hidden and pressed down, and... there has to be some kind of release valve for those emotions. with fiction, i have a safe way of managing that, both reading and writing - i can be both aggressor and victim, no one gets hurt (i find the thought of hurting people abhorrent; i nearly passed out once because a stranger was in pain from a dislocated shoulder, despite the lack of visible injury. hyperempathy is wild), i get to work through a whole bunch of psychological shit from various stuff i won’t go into... i often refer to writing as a release, or a valve, or a way to ease the pressure inside my head, or a form of venting. 

as to why sexual assault often shows up in these stories... i do frequently write whump without sexual assault, but it’s also like. a) a bunch of personal stuff that i don’t give enough of a shit to talk about, but it’s there, and b) sex and sex-adjacent stuff (often rape and assualt, but even consensual stuff!) has such a fascinating way of crystallising character/power dynamics, or stripping people bare, or exposing vulnerability, or dragging up really awful, messy, scary, painful, confusing stuff. and that makes it often a really good target when you (like me) want all those emotions in your writing because you’re using it as a pressure-valve vent, and as a way to safely experience and work through them. writing about difficult or traumatic relationships to the self, the body, to sex and to other people... sex is really good for all of that stuff. idk.

also, sometimes fics end up a weird mix of the two. i can’t think of any off the top of my head for cr, but for yogs (my previous fandom) i wrote a handful of things for a character that was essentially straight out of a horror movie and another monster character, with some real questionable consent stuff. 50% of that was “this is horrible and manipulative and just. really fucking Awful” and 50% of that was “hrnghghgh tentacles hot” so like. yknow. my brain is a weird mess i guess, is the takeaway message here.

(sometimes, there’s also an element of “can i get myself into this headspace” or “this is an interesting technical exercise” - i wrote something a while back about ripley masturbating to the memory of torturing percy, and that falls into this category. that wasn’t a fetish/fantasy thing, that was a character study, using sex as a medium to work through ripley’s obsessive, violent thoughts and strip away the veneer of imparitiality she so loves to pretend she has.)

idk how well this explains it - this is something i spend a lot of brain-power analysing on a regular basis, because i am constantly nosy about how my brain works and why it works in these weird, angular, fucked-up kinds of ways (not just with writing, the adventures of being autistic means i spend a Lot of time analysing myself to make sure i’m calibrating my interactions with other people correctly). i still haven’t entirely worked it out, and a lot of the stuff i have worked out is personal/messy enough i both don’t want to and can’t be arsed to explain it to strangers on the internet. i hope it’s given a Bit of an explanation tho, and if there’s a specific fic that prompted this comment, feel free to ask me about it specifically, bc i might be able to offer a little more insight as to my thought processes for like... a specific example i guess.