Coming up, I've got another gender/race change story similar to "Quantum Flux." If you liked that one, you'll love what I'll be posting very soon. I'm also working on my Ogre-themed story swap.
I also wanted to share with you some thoughts I had about writing stories, some of which stemmed from watching a documentary about the board game "Monopoly." In the documentary, I learned that the game was originally called "The Landlord's Game," and was meant to essentially be an interactive parable about the evils of capitalism. As the game changed over the decades and was modified by several people, the explicit political message was lost. Today, the same dynamic that the original game wanted to promote is still there - the game ends when one person amasses all the wealth and forces everyone else to live with nothing. But in a twist, this ending is celebrated (as least by the winner), as it feels good to 'win' at capitalism.
This interesting dynamic - having a radical message become something that celebrates the status quo - led me to wonder if there are any parallels to transformation stories. Few transformation stories offer an explicitly radical message, but often they involve concepts that are a bit taboo. I've argued before that the taboo nature of many transformations, like weight gain, is part of what make them exciting. But what's fascinating to me is that many taboo ideas can be actually used to validate, rather than challenge, the status quo. In most weight gain stories I've read, and in most requests I've received, weight gain is more of a punishment than a reward, and the characters are very rarely happy to be fatter, especially at first.
For those of us who are writers and who have a genuinely radical agenda - and I could myself among them - this raises and interesting question. Should we accent that stories are a form of entertainment, or should we try to imbue our tales with a subtle message?
I'm not entirely sure myself, and I've tried both approaches. I don't know if any messages I've 'sent' have been received, or if they've been perceived as ham-handed or unnecessary.
So I suppose I have a few questions for you: Do you feel stories ought to carry the message of their authors, and what messages, if any, do you feel have been contained in my stories?