Revenge of Ask T Questions

[Alice Macher]

To clarify: bunnyThor, well-meaning though I know he/she is, speaks for herself/himself, as Tamar and I speak for ourselves. When we say we're not demanding anything of T, we mean it, and we are not "getting at" anything else.

Would we object to nudity being shown? I think our previous comments, here and elsewhere, show otherwise. (Naw, really, Alice? Shock!) But again, we're not asking for it, just asking about it. I'd say "scout's honour" if either of us had been scouts, but...well, you'll just have to take our word for it.

[TCampbell]

Sort of along that vein, can you tell us specifically what kinds of sexualities the comic will deal with? Will we see any asexuals? Will it pass into "squick" territory?

The title itself should tell you a lot about that. Assuming it goes on long enough, every aspect of its acronym should be represented, though sometimes one character might represent two or more things. Lisa, at least as she was in high school, has spent a lot of time in the "Questioning" and "Undetermined" camps, statuses that her liaison with Stan did not entirely erase.

It's, um, hard to answer the "squick" question, given people's varying thresholds. Some people seemed freaked out by Aggie climbing on top of Penny and saying "Hmmm, can't get away, can you, little bitch?" And, I mean, yeah, out of context, that does sounds a little rapey. But it's done, I hope, with the understanding that Aggie's basically extending their playful verbal fencing matches to the bedroom, and giving Penny a pretty big window to opt out. Readers seemed less bothered by their final sex scene, which I personally thought was much worse.

Some things, like scat play, are complete squicks for me (context or no), and I don't really trust my ability to depict them in a sexy way, so if we engage those things at all it'll probably be at a distance (it sounds like something Lisa might use to shock people). But tastes vary. Twenty years ago I was pro-gay rights but still kinda weirded out when I saw guys kissing. Today I'm weirded out when I see gay guys in fiction and the depiction is clearly avoiding showing them kissing.

[TCampbell]

Let me re-phrase what I believe Alice and Tamar are getting at above.

If you were making a comic about war, you could successfully make one where all the blood and wounds and dead people are obscured by convenient props and strange camera angles and artfully placed speech bubbles. This could be understandable if you were particularly concerned about the delicate sensibilities of your hypothetical audience. However it would detract from the seriousness of your intentions and message and undermine any sense of verisimilitude.

If you were making a comic about sexuality, you could successfully make one where all the breasts and genitals and sexual acts are obscured by convenient props and strange camera angles and artfully placed speech bubbles. This could be understandable if you were particularly concerned about the delicate sensibilities of your hypothetical audience. However it would detract from the seriousness of your intentions and message and undermine any sense of verisimilitude.

Or to make it terse: How much authenticity are you willing to sacrifice for the sake of some of your potential audience's boundaries?

That is a really tough question to answer, but I would have to say that boundaries aren't the only reason to sacrifice some authenticity.

Writers like to point to "pause words" like um, uh, eh and er as an example. Actual speech has much more of those than are depicted in fiction, and depicting them with 100% accuracy would lead the readers to conclude that you're depicting hesitant, uncertain people. It's important not to depict, say, virgin sex as smooth and mistake-free, but what you show should communicate a certain point, which might make the depiction of the experience more "streamlined" than it would be in life.

My first priority is communication. I have a hunch the modern audience can take a lot of honesty and a lot of envelope-pushing. But your imaginations are my friends. When Charlotte cuts herself off toward the end of her Youtube video by saying "She rammed--", I think it's more effective than if we had Charlotte push her way through the entire, graphic description of what came next. And in the MA3 example, I'm more concerned about perception of the series-- I don't want to lose people before I have a chance to reach them.

But see also my next answer to Alice. Some of this, we're probably going to have to decide as we go.

[TCampbell]

I hesitate even now to show bare breasts and genitalia, because just last weekend a close friend of mine told me that "showing bare breasts" in sexual contexts was one thing that led him to define Menage a 3 as "porn." I don't want to touch off a big is-it-or-isn't-it debate, but I personally have never been comfortable with that label. (In MA3's case, I prefer the term "sex comedy.") I'm all for some fanservice (Brandi's Christmas card, anyone?), but I don't want Quiltbag to be seen as nothing but sexploitation.

Understood, but Tamar did mention the final arc of Cool Cat Studio, which you did write, and that featured not only the bare breasts of four characters, but also a hint of Liz's pubic hair. And that last was with Belinda shown going down on her. So my question is, was that level of explicitness (which is without doubt far more than what any of your other works, even the BDSM scenes in Fans, have ever shown) partially Gis's idea? Totally her idea? If the latter, was it a subject of much disagreement between you two, the way that the post-"Popsicle War" direction of P&A was for you at around the same time?

(Edited: Tamar wants me to add, just to make it clear, that whether there's nudity in Quiltbag or not will have no bearing whatsoever on her enjoyment of the comic. Nor will it on mine. Just so you don't get the idea that we're specifically demanding it. We wouldn't do that, no joke. Fanservice is awesome but stories with actual plot and characterization are one thing, and porn is another. Despite what Alan Moore says. And we don't read your and Jason's works for porn. Nor Gis's; we agree with you there too.)

My original script for CCS did suggest means of obscuring the "bathing suit areas," at least in the Liz-Pink scene (I'm not sure if I bothered with the later scenes-- I seem to remember writing that one in chunks, with Liz and Pink in bed ending one section), but Gisele didn't find those tactics natural. Maybe someone as gifted as she is could've found more natural-feeling alternatives, as I think she did once or twice for Penny and Aggie, but that wasn't a priority for her...

...and once that was clear to me, I didn't sweat it. The biggest reason was that Cool Cat Studio was her strip first, and her sensibility should therefore be the guide in matters like these. It was also the most experimental strip I've ever worked on, so the idea that anything could be off-limits to it just seemed wrong. Similarly, I warned her about some problems that the bare breasts in MA3 might cause her when she did the first few strips, but after that I've barely said a word about it. It's her strip and toplessness is now part of its character.

I'm not terribly prudish about this sort of thing as a reader. I'm just aware of this perception issue, and still forming the best response to it for the new strip.

(Worth one final note: sexuality != sex. I'm planning on the characters doing a lot of things, some of which have nothing to do with sexuality or sex, and some of which reflect their sexual identities, yet aren't fucking. That's honestly one big difference between strongly sexual comics and porn to me. There's good-natured, sex-positive porn like Slipshine, which is often clever and/or funny, but in which pretty much every scene is a sex scene. And then there's MA3, which is named for a sex act, but which can go entire months without depicting a single coital moment.)

[Fen]

The bare breasts might have been an issue? After the first strip depicting two men doing it?
O.o

*doesn't get boundaries*

Aaanyway. Thank you for the melody/nick story .

[TCampbell]

The bare breasts might have been an issue? After the first strip depicting two men doing it?
O.o

*doesn't get boundaries*

Aaanyway. Thank you for the melody/nick story .

Yeah, me either. I just know they're there, and protesting them by pretending they aren't there carries a price.

And you're welcome!

[Alice Macher]

Now I think of it (I'd honestly forgotten until T's "carries a price" comment reminded me), there is also the issue of negative impact on revenue. Google Ads banned Gisele from using the service on Ma3, due to the nudity and sexual situations. This puts non-porn webcartoonists who choose to include nudity in a bind, because if they're going to carry ads on their site at all, they then have to go with an ad server that may require them to carry ads for comics and possibly other sites that are unquestionably porn. Which means that their works get lumped in with the latter as porn by association. Which means a loss of hits from readers, not only at work but also, in many cases, at home.

Also, last I heard anyway, PayPal has a "no nudity on your site" condition for using their service as a customer payment method. And while that doesn't limit one's options as much as the Google Ads policy does, it's still a consideration.

[Azrael44]

Interesting about Google Ads vis a vis PayPal as I have had no issues using PayPal on any of Miss Gisele's sites for her merchandise.

[griffon8]

Also, last I heard anyway, PayPal has a "no nudity on your site" condition for using their service as a customer payment method. And while that doesn't limit one's options as much as the Google Ads policy does, it's still a consideration.

Interesting that PayPal is a payment option for the Adam & Eve website…

[Alice Macher]

Huh. Maybe they've changed their policy. I do recall in the past seeing more than one subscription-based site addressing, in their FAQ, the question of why they don't offer PayPal as an option, by stating that they can't because of the nudity. Maybe PayPal only enforces it if someone squeals on them? I don't know.

[griffon8]

No idea. It probably helps that whatever is ordered, there's no mention of the names of the products in the PayPal transaction.

[Alice Macher]

A link to PayPal's policy on sexually-oriented goods and services. Not that this definitively clears things up much. On the one hand, they prohibit "Sexually oriented digital goods or content delivered through a digital medium. Downloadable pictures or videos and website subscriptions are examples of digital goods." On the other, they list a number of considerations they use in deciding which sexually-oriented things to allow, so as with governmental laws and customs regulations on the same topic, there seems to be a deliberately built-in subjectivity. Anyway, I'll stop with the non-question posts now.

[Valerie]

Sort of along that vein, can you tell us specifically what kinds of sexualities the comic will deal with? Will we see any asexuals? Will it pass into "squick" territory?

-snip-

It's, um, hard to answer the "squick" question, given people's varying thresholds. Some people seemed freaked out by Aggie climbing on top of Penny and saying "Hmmm, can't get away, can you, little bitch?" And, I mean, yeah, out of context, that does sounds a little rapey. But it's done, I hope, with the understanding that Aggie's basically extending their playful verbal fencing matches to the bedroom, and giving Penny a pretty big window to opt out. Readers seemed less bothered by their final sex scene, which I personally thought was much worse.

Some things, like scat play, are complete squicks for me (context or no), and I don't really trust my ability to depict them in a sexy way, so if we engage those things at all it'll probably be at a distance (it sounds like something Lisa might use to shock people). But tastes vary. Twenty years ago I was pro-gay rights but still kinda weirded out when I saw guys kissing. Today I'm weirded out when I see gay guys in fiction and the depiction is clearly avoiding showing them kissing.

Honestly, specifically, I was thinking of furries. It's a fetish that the majority of people find weird or unsettling, which is about as controversial and alternative as it gets. There are tons of furry-based comics, but they seem to be completely about "furry sex" and not about "people who enjoy dressing as animals but are basically otherwise not that weird."

I'm not a furry, and I do find it a little odd, but I've always been of the opinion that, if you're not hurting anyone*, do what you do. So I'd like to see them presented as people instead of that-guy-who's-wearing-a-squirrel-suit.

*From what I know of it, furry...ness? doesn't seem to be the same thing as bestiality. Bestiality involves animals who can't really give their consent, and so it's perfectly reasonable to assume that someone is getting hurt in that situation.

That's not to say you're obligated to include them, of course. Just, gays/lesbians are a lot more accepted by the general public now. Things are not perfect, obviously, but it feels a little... behind... to have them in a shocking light. Bisexuals are slowly getting a little more acceptance. Asexuals need some (platonic) love, as I've mentioned a couple other times around here, but I do understand that it's hard to do a sexuality-based comic on someone whose sexuality is that they have no sexuality. Trans gendered/sexual people could use a little more sympathetic spotlight, too. So, in all, I think you've got a lot to work with just from the QUILTBAG acronym, but furries seem to fall outside of it, as I'm sure a lot of other minorities do. It's not really feasible to include every single sexuality that exists, especially when you've got a lot of people who just plain don't care to identify themselves as anything. I'm kind of an example. I'm closest to a weird mix of demi-sexual/bisexual-with-a-low-sex-drive, but at the end of the day, I'll just tell you that I like who I like and that's all that really matters to me.

[Louisa]

at the end of the day, I'll just tell you that I like who I like and that's all that really matters to me.

I applaud your definition and would gladly become one of your wives.

[Valerie]

at the end of the day, I'll just tell you that I like who I like and that's all that really matters to me.

I applaud your definition and would gladly become one of your wives.

I'll get a ring ready. <3