vesper (commissions open!)

it's pretty neat! i found myself kind of making stuff up to explain what put cherry in those situations but ultimately it's the kinda thing that really doesn't matter. it's kinda nice to just leave it up to interpretation.

i used to write a whole spiel on just "here's why my monhun OC found herself in this situation" until i realized that it's like kind of unnecessary; nobody needs to justify smut and there is nothing to prove wrt why it happens it's like

sometimes it's just allowed to be.

Wow, what a great breakdown of what it means to post art online these days too! I hadn't thought about all the things that go through my mind when I'm posting something, like how much context I give even in the description. Thank you for your art and for this thoughtful mini essay!

as someone who has done narrative-less kink/fetish art before and wanted to tie a narrative in to it - the desire for a story comes from our perception of time and what causes us to seek pleasure. a narrative can serve as justification, but it also serves as something to solidify the fantasy, to take us to that specific place and time for that pleasure. it helps us relate - and even with or without a narrative required, and letting the viewer decide whether the situation is to their liking or not - it helps imagine.

i think there's a difference in viewing a photo or video of BDSM compared to a drawing. while yes, there are easy explanations, the element of roleplay is an incredibly strong drive behind creating that porn in the first place. the idea of "punishing the bad girl," or "rewarding the good pet," this is the real meat of what some of your questioners want to know. rarely is there ever a video or photoset simply to showcase BDSM as an sex act, especially in the amateur/homemade scene - the narrative may come from a title as simple as "naughty kitten." most things will try to imply some kind of setup because we want to believe that there is a time and a place for our fantasy. and we apply the same logic to a drawing, regardless of knowing that it's been created purely for titillation.

iunno. musing, but i quite like this perspective, and i apologise if anything i said doesn't really make sense - the hows/whys behind many kinks/fetishes is something i think should be talked about more.

I wonder if it has to do with the kinds of enjoyment people get from those different mediums. I know personally, I tend to enjoy RL porn (live porn? is there a general umbrella term for "porn involving real human people"?) as something to very directly project myself onto. I'm imagining myself as one of the people in the scene, and there's not much backstory needed to do so - most of the time, the scene is just "humans fucking", and I can just imagine that this is a scenario where I, a human, have met up with other humans to fuck.

On the other hand, with drawn or written porn, I find it's much more enjoyable as fuel when I'm fantasizing. I like to speculate on what it must be like to be in that scenario, but I'm not directly trying to imagine the in-the-moment reality of the scene, I'm moreso constructing a satisfying narrative in my head with the piece as inspiration.

So with that being said, I think I get where some people are coming from, in being curious what the creator's "intended" read of the piece is. It's great fun to imagine what might be the surrounding context, but it's also great hearing what other people thought about it, and who better to ask than the creator themself?

EDIT: also, I touched on this a tad in that first paragraph, but art tends to lean into its capacity to create impossible or unlikely scenes. Most RL porn (again, is that really the best term?) is, for good reason, pictures or videos of two human adults fucking in a setting that two human adults might find themselves in when they want to fuck. Some might suggest a narrative surrounding the fucking, or hint at fantastical elements (I've seen lots of vids of people getting off with toys while captions give you an idea of what to imagine the toy is supposed to represent), but for the most part it's two or sometimes more folks boning. Not something we need much imagination to process!

But art is going to very often be much less mundane. Fantastical creatures like dragons and minotaurs and androids, new and exciting ways to explore kink such as titillating uses of magic, or scenarios that don't really arise in modern life such as a court of nobles having an orgy. That kind of scene requires more imagining, which means one's imagination is already revving with regards to at least some elements - it's not uncommon for that imagination to then lay into the other elements as well.

It's an interesting question, especially because i find myself creating narratives when i look at photographic pornography. i think i tend to do that less often when i'm looking at artwork of what appears to be someone's personal characters, because i assume there's lore behind the image that i'm not aware of.

When it comes to drawing my own, i fall into two camps: fanart, where the context is already known by viewers because the characters have already been established; and my OCs, where i keep track of backstories and try to fit the depicted event into a consolidated timeline in my OneNote. In the latter case i think i still have dreams of making comics about my OCs in which i can tell their entire backstory. Since so many of the kinks, pairings, and scenarios they engage in are based on sexual fantasies i developed years ago, i really want to convey those stories. But i think your observation is true; some people really do want to know the Lore (i've had at least one person ask, which was enormously gratifying), and others, i assume, just enjoy the spectacle as-is.

"how much we desire it--perhaps to justify to ourselves that we're allowed to desire what we see in the work"

I think that's very much it in a lot of cases. To a certain degree it's about validating one's interpretations, knowing if we can apply our kinks to it. But as someone who really enjoys having that backstory - including up to making stuff up on behalf of my friends' OCs when I feel inspired to - having definite answers about a situation's backstory helps open ways of interpretating a character and defining them. Sometimes you just want to 'do a thing' and not care about a hypothetical canon, but I like knowing there's a semi-logical causal link that led to what's happening.

We've had related convos, re: sometimes some people are afraid of the indefinite. words, word of god, narrative, any scaffolding will make the exact same picture acceptable or unacceptable, hot or not. it Is very interesting!