Thursday, April 12, 2012

Love but not at first

Yup... I wrote about Love.



So I've been exploring some areas of capping that I've shied away from in the past.  For example I made "The Journal" so that I could play with complete memory loss.  The reason, was that I don't particularly like memory loss captions.  Well another thing that I don't particularly like is full acceptance caps.  This isn't something that's really listed at a preference at the Haven, but it IS something that you get a feel for from certain people.

Now I look at acceptance from a couple different views.  One of them is when a person wants to be transformed.  They want to be a woman, and the in the cap they become a woman, and are happy about it.  It seems to be a rare cap, but I have seen some like that.    The type I see most often, are caps where a guy is transformed accidentally or against his will, but he comes to accept and even embrace his new femininity. And then there are the ones where through some magic or technology the person is made to crave his new life, and through that action comes to love it.

The last example there, I consider a mental manipulation.  It is changing the person, and more or less killing the original.  Just like memory loss, I don't like those.  But I also put it in that category.   The person that got transformed never liked or loved his transformation... the new person they made did.  The first category is fine, but it seems to lack a point of contention or friction.   And like any type of story, that just doesn't make a good story.  I think that's why you don't see it that often.

But the middle category... where the man comes to love his new life on his own... I've never been a fan of that.  I know changes happens to everyone, but it takes a long time, and those changes are rarely as radical as learning to love being a woman when you were content and even happy as a man.

Now I've fumbled my way through caps like this before.  Someone asked for it in their preferences, and I obliged them.  But I wasn't happy about it.  And I always tried to write it so that it could also read as the person not accepting it.  Not loving it.  The easiest trick is to write the story as a narrator, and talking about the characters actions... leaving their inner thoughts for the reader to add.  So I can say that I never set off to make a cap about a man being transformed into a woman and coming to love it, and leaving no question about it.  No wiggle room to give you the squirmy humiliated feeling that I so often go after.

That changed today.  I didn't start the day wanting to do this, but it was in the back of my head.  And when I found these images (just randomly browsing images to cap, without a story in mind), I thought they would make a good story in this vein.  Specifically the three images I chose here.  I think the first one represents how 'Calvin' felt in the beginning.  The second is showing a growing acceptance of parts of his femininity, and the last one shows a full embrace of his new self.  That last image in particular.... I think it shows a woman happy with who she is, loving her man.

I can't imagine being there myself, and no alternate story came to mind (again, as my normal ideas just wouldn't fit that type of image).  So I saved the images and swung for the trees.  My goal was to make a nice soft 'awww thats lovely' style story.  I still had to start with him not wanting this change, to emphasize that he was happy with himself and wasn't secretly desiring the change.

The writing was... well it was surprisingly fluid.  It felt like it came out without me having to push it.  Yes, I did take longer to write as I don't often try to convey these feelings... but I didn't struggle like I assumed I would.

In the end, I think its a pretty nice cap.  Certainly not my cup of tea.... but I like it.

Oh... and I just had to share this image from the set:


I was SO close to using this image in place of the second panel.   My biggest problem with it, and what kept me from using it, was that I think it showed far to much pleasure.  I didn't want to diminish the pleasure that Caitlyn was feeling, but I didn't want to hint that her physical pleasure was driving her mental changes.

1 comment:

  1. What a beautiful love story! You does fantastic job of conveying Calvin coming to terms with his circumstances.

    About being made to accept the change erasing o you are, I think that would depend on how you define who a person is. There are certainly people who would use man or woman as the first word o define themselves, but people are so much more than their gender. If all the spell/machine does is make hem accepting of their new body, an still leaves their memories, talents, an interests in tact, then I would argue that they're still the same person, just a different sex.

    Of course there are the changes that force the victim to accept by changing something about them, such as making them a bimbo or a sex addict. Those i would consider as making the victim into a new person.

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