[Article] My idea of writing a porn story.

Hey guys! I didn't feel right about doing a long post without leading with a picture, so I rendered the above one out. It's not an exclusive though! I'll post it on Tumblr too. The article however, is exclusive. So here goes:

As you probably know, the upcoming exclusive Kayla Meets Marcella set is going to be heavily story driven, so as I'm working on getting the first 20 shots for that set up, I want to dive a bit into my philosophy behind writing. I'll reveal a bit more about the LU narrative, as well as outline how I think a good porn story is written as well as where I take my inspiration from.

The premise behind Lust Unleashed is political, much as it may surprise some of you. I've suggested as much previously when I spoke about a House of Cards style story with a bit of Deus Ex mixed in. Not exactly the vibe that the above image suggests, but I think my Glam Noir and Pristine releases have done a better job at setting up that atmosphere. I've also dropped some other hints about the girls: Kayla both having a cock as well as not having a cock, depending on the set you see her in. Yelena's set being titled Queen. Mari being played with by the other girls, and being served up to Marcella. All of these things suggest a power balance, a way these girls relate to each other in a way that serves the overall narrative I'm building.

Lust Unleashed is going to focus on all six girls and is probably going to wind up introducing many more as side characters or world populating characters. But primarily, the plot will be driven by the ambitions of two women: Breanna and Yelena. Not incidentally, neither have cocks. Yelena's premise is that she is the Tsarina of a refounded Russia some decades into the future. Breanna's premise is that she is a political up and comer in the United States, a girl driven by an unrivalled sense of hedonism and a great ambition for power. I will suggest more about how their paths are going to cross in the Kayla Meets Marcella set.

But that's all just the worldbuilding stage. That's me sitting down and wondering what kind of setting appeals to me. The characters and their motivations sort of flow from there. The real question to me, though, is one that I struggled with from the outside: if I'm going to write porn, does that mean it has to be erotic all the time? Does it always have to be about sex and genitalia, and girls being perpetually horny?

For a good porn story, ironically the answer is no. If it is, you get pizza delivery porn. Plumber porn. Then, the whole story becomes nothing more than an excuse to get two people together to have sex. And as time goes on, neither the audience nor the writer takes anything seriously anymore anymore. The excuse is done away with in favour of just immediately skipping to the sex. This is a development we've seen in live action porn, and it's also kinda where I started out as a 3DX artist myself: people want to see fucking, so let's make renders that involve fucking.

So in a funny way, my development as an artist is inverse to the development of the porn industry as a whole. Because having started out as someone delivering gonzo 3DX, I'm now watching myself move into the narrative corner to deliver something that I don't think porn is very good at doing: telling an erotically charged story without relying on sex the whole time, all the time.

So how do you do it? Well, of course there's no saying if I'll even succeed at it, but I can tell you where I went for inspiration: the definition of the word porn. What is porn? Forget the dictionary, just look at porn and describe what it is you're seeing. Here's what I see: an immediate and unrelenting focus on what stimulates. Porn dispenses with unstimulating moments and actions, and replaces them with anything that arouses or excites.

By that definition, there are other genres of entertainment that can be seen as porn. Action movies are certainly porn, with stories that are often as paperthin as those of porn movies. Nothing more than excuses to get tough looking guys on camera blowing stuff up. Michael Bay is arguably the king of porn, if this definition is followed: his Transformers movies exist only as excuses to sell explosions, women, cars, and fighting robots to people. The movies are overlong, but that's only because people never want to stop looking at robots beating up robots, and cars racing in low angles, and things majestically exploding in slow motion.

So that covers the gratification aspect of porn. We've established that it's easy to write a story in such a way that it serves up moments of excitement steadily. But ultimately, Michael Bay's stories have some fatal flows: they're pretty boring. And so is the story in most porn.

Where might we find examples of things that do this idea better? For me, the best example is found in gaming: Doom. Specifically, Doom 2016. It has no trouble serving up the excitement in large scoops, and does this without sacrificing and interesting and engaging backstory that's worth exploring. Better still, it does this with extremely limited means, working mostly through implication, suggestion, and visual storytelling.

Doom is a great example of a story that could've gone wrong, and if you watch the No Clip documentary on the making of Doom you can see this in how the developers talk about the game as well. Here's a game that was conceived with the porn as I defined it in mind: all the action, spectacle and slaughter existed long before there was any inkling of what the story was supposed to be. And arguably, they could've served it up to us on that basis and it would've been perfectly enjoyable. Forgettable (like most porn), but enjoyable. The story they added was what took it to the next level.

At first sight, the premise is utterly hilarious. A reckless corporation gets humanity hooked on Hell as an energy supply, which of course does not work out and then demons invade the facility where the energy is being extracted. Flimsy at first sight? Perhaps. The game itself suggests that perhaps the story should not be taken that seriously in beginning, by showing you a "demonic invasion in progress" screen as though this were some kind of value that the computer was pre-programmed to track.

But the story does get quite serious, and not because you're being told about how bad this all is, or because of how spooky Hell looks by the time you get there.

The soul of the game's story is located in the Lazarus Labs level, named after the facility that functions as the ground zero for where it all went wrong. It starts of funny enough: the holograms you've been hearing throughout the game no longer spout optimistic corporate propaganda in an upbeat voice. They now perform demonic chants with an upbeat voice! After that, however, things get grim quick.

You discover how the facility staff, lead by one Olivia Pierce, fell under the lure of Hell's whispers. You see how they relinquished their minds, their volition, and through it their humanity. You see old images of them performing satanistic chants and sacrifices. You see meeting rooms turned into blood chapels. The walls are inscribed with demonic runes, ceiling lights have been replaced with burning candles, and blood and intestines coat the walls and floors.

Interestingly, this is also where the game offers the least amount of shooting. The shooting in this mission is mostly done in pre-ordained industrial looking chambers with crates and walkways. The halls, the offices, the corridors, these are all kept quiet so that the gravity of the situation is fully impressed on you. This is a place where humans surrendered themselves to something primal, to something base. This is where they relinquished their soul.

As far from porn as it gets, you might think. What do satanic rituals and intestine-covered walls have to do with anything? But I think that if porn can be defined as a dismissal of the unexciting, it by definition appeals to something base in us too. Whether we're watching car chases on TV, coffe commercials, or dickgirls fucking each other into orgasmic cumshots. All of these things are designed to stimulate us into arousal. In Dutch, the words for excitement and arousal are the same: to wind you up. the implication could not be clearer.

If Lust Unleashed's story is going to work, it needs to understand the same thing that Doom's developers understood: that it can't be in your face about the things that it's about. Doom is not disturbing because you can shoot demons, it's disturbing because of what it implies about how the demons got there in the first place. The same way, Lust Unleashed isn't going to be arousing because it's going to show you girls fucking every single time. I mean, just like Doom has a lot of demon shooting, LU will have a lot of fucking, but at the heart of it all is going to rest a story that has elements that will themselves arouse you, without involving a single bit of pornographic imagery.

Surrender of the human spirit to lust and desire are, to me, powerful ideas. They will be even more powerful when combined with the stripping away of decency, taboo, and shame. That's why the name Lust Unleashed works so well. I didn't post a render of that giant cock statue for no reason :D I have so much more to say and hint at, but I think it's best if time will tell. More updates soon!