Transcription: Exploring, perverting, failing, and sharing in multiple media

[sophinisba]

This is a transcription of yue_ix's and my conversation about things to do for kink_bingo besides writing fic. The recording has a lot of "uhs" and such that I didn't bother to transcribe. The original conversation also had a lot of laughter and sounds of agreement, but alas, they were mostly lost because of recording and editing issues.

Sophie: Hi! This is sophinisba.

Yue: And this is yue_ix.

Sophie: And we're here to do a podcast for as a ramp-up post for kink_bingo 2012. We want to talk a little bit about alternative ways of filling kink bingo squares. A lot of people think of fic first and we just want to remind you that there are a lot of other possibilities. So this is aimed at... I guess, two groups: we're talking to people who already make fanworks other than fics, because we want to say, "Welcome! This community is for you! This community encourages all kinds of works." And we also want to talk to people whose default is fic to try to encourage you to think of these kinks in different ways.

Yue: I want to add maybe, we also are aiming for people who do not think they're making fanworks but are, or who think that their type of work couldn't fit the kink, so they don't consider it a kinky fanwork. And we'll show you how, by being you, you are inherently kinky and you can show us this.

Sophie: So this is my third year participating in Kink Bingo, and the main thing that I've made for the challenge - even though when I started out two years ago I thought of myself mainly as a writer - but I've ended up making a lot more podfics for the challenge. I've also written some fics, written a couple of poems, I did a rec list, and last year I did a meta essay that was specifically about how podfic and this challenge, Kink Bingo, go together.

Yue: This... I'm not sure what year it is for me because I keep kind of passing on amnesty. So I have much less fanwork done for Kink Bingo than sophinisba does. But I used to think of myself as an artist, mostly a drawer, but then I ended up doing a podfic, an art, and...I did a tentacle porn manifesto.

Sophie: Right, right, right, the...sort of an essay about different ways of approaching the tentacle kink, which was wonderful, I always point people to that essay.

Yue: It started just mostly as me wanting to say that tentacles are awesome in art, and then it ….grew.

Sophie: You took it in all different directions.

Yue: Totally, because I just kept thinking about it. You know, you see the square, and there's so many possibilities with it you don't know how to start, and you kind of just end up talking about how many possibilities there are instead of having to choose.

Sophie: Tentacles are an example of a kink that really lends itself well to visual art. So a lot of people write, you know, tentacle stories, but they can also be, just, there just so interesting to look at.

Yue: They are. I love them. And I... it's one of those kinks that, just by being there, are kinky. Some are less visual or less imaged. And yet the effect of it... I don't know, I'm maybe thinking of headspace or things like that, it can be hard to tell -

Sophie: You feel a, more of a need to explain it, right.

Yue: Exactly, or maybe have this whole context with it because it goes with that. Whereas, tentacle, no matter the context, is going to be a tentacle, right?

Sophie: Right, right, right.

Sophie: We want to encourage people to think about kinks in all kinds of ways, and that includes different ways to tell a story, but also different ways things other than telling a story. So when we think about Kink Bingo in general we think about opening our minds to, you know, maybe kinks that are not our favorites, possibly things that squick us at the beginning, but you find a new way to appreciate them. And, I was just reading last night frostfire's wonderful ramp-up essay about "Making Fanworks For Kinks That Aren't Yours, or, 'Oh God, How Do I Do THAT Square?'" And we thought something we could add to that is, you can always think, if you're having trouble, you know, figuring out how to write that square, remember that you might not need to. Sometimes people say, "Oh, that kink is so unfamiliar to me, it just doesn't appeal to me, I don't know how to get my head around it". Well, remember that you don't necessarily need to get your head around it. Not to be too cheesy but maybe you want to get your voice around it, making a podfic of another story that you thought approached it really well. Use your eyes, use your hands. So we want to talk about some of the different ways you can do that.

Yue: And we noticed that on one of the mod posts about how to fill a square, they have a list of things you can do to make a kink square. Should I read the list?

Sophie: Yes, please!

Yue: So you can "write a story; make a vid; make a podfic; make a recs set; make an icon set; write an essay; make a picspam; draw some art; make a painting; make a manip; make a layout; write a song; write a filk; knit a teatowel; build a diorama! make a collage! write a dvd commentary on a story or vid or piece of artwork; and do any other form of art that focuses on that kink."

Sophie: Fabulous! And we also have the official encouragement to create different kinds of works, you can work for the multimedia, for the multi-multi-media achievement, the text-free bingo, the words words words bingo that encourages you to make different kind of written pieces that aren't necessarily fic and a bunch of other things.

Yue: Officially things that are already done on Kink Bingo include art, craft, essays, fanmixes, fic, filks, icons, meta, music, photostory, picspam, podfic, poetry, recs list, translation, vid, audio meta/oral essay; and other ramp-up posts including things like a diagrams, and just discussions we have all over the Kink Bingo Cafe.

Sophie: So here are some of the kinks from the kink list that we thought about for trying out different kinds of media. I was thinking first of all of things that are fun to look at, so you can think of different kinds of visual - piscpam and art things: pictures, obviously; bites and bruises; body modification; scars and scarification; writing on the body; tattoos; got dressup; mirrors and doubles; anonymity, things like masks, and cloaks; bodily secretions; blood; guro; watersports; wet messy dirty; all those fluid things.

Yue: Awesome with art, too, are, and by that I mean that is easy to do with art - it only takes a few strokes, or it only takes a few adjustments and you can do it - are shaving/depilation - just don't do the hair and tada! You have someone naked! Bondage, collars, ropes - easy strokes! Tentacles go everywhere! Bodily secretions are very used visually. Anything concerning textures - especially for the wet & messy- is going to work with that. Bodies and body parts is very often used in picspam of everything. How many picspam of neck, mouth, hands, have you seen? In Avengers, every picspam of their arses it's all there!

Sophie: Beautiful. You could do just a linkspam of Avengers asses posts, that would be so great.

Yue: You really can. Tattoos, piercing, body modification, possession, marking, bites/bruises. A lot of aftermath of impact play when you have just, you know, the handprint is very visual and very clear. Dressup, genderplay. Exposure and exhibitionism, because, depending on how you play with the background, if you make it the background in a bed, it's one thing. And then you make this for someone naked. And then you put the same character naked with a background of the Champs-Élysées, suddenly you have this much exhibitionism and exposure there.

Sophie: Right! And you're also - that new kink, about, settings and... places and...spaces...yes.

Yue: Yes. I think this one is very good for visual, especially, maybe?

Sophie: Oh, yeah.

Yue: Because it just fits! How come your spaceship is kinky? Just make a vid about this. It's beautiful! Make a picspam, make so many icons about landscapes and what people do with them, in them, on them.

There's also things you can make, so that are awesome to do with crafts amongst other things, which are going to be: bondage; collars; sex toys; food, how you can prepare your food ropes and chains; riding crops. You can do anything with leather/latex/rubber, silk/velvet/feathers/furs, all of these, you can make clothes. You can make or play with piercings, needleplay, writing on the body. And you can make sounds for humiliation, dirty talking, all of those.

Sophie: We think about pervertibles, relating to...gosh!

Yue: Everything. Everything!

Sophie: All kinds of... But, more than anything, for me, I think of crafts. And I think of bringing, you know, kink into areas that are thought of as very traditional, domestic, conservative somehow...

Yue: Not kinky, yes.

Sophie: Right, I love that example - I think it won a mod prize last year - of the person who did a cross-stitch of the phrase, "On your knees, boy." It's just a beautiful thing to look at, and makes you think differently about all the other times you're cross-stitching, right? Or all the other times, you know, if you look at some other cross-stitch now, I always think, "On your knees, boy."

Yue: If you start seeing your life as kinky, if you start realizing that everything you do, everything that surrounds you can be kinky, you're going to understand kinks a lot more maybe, or you're maybe going to transform kinks or suit them [to your life]. And I think both ways are perfectly cool and interesting to know about. So, in the same way, if you just, I don't know, dress up in the morning, like going to work, and suddenly you pause, and you start thinking, "Okay, how is this kinky?" And you're going to find so many ways to be, and this new way of seeing this kink, maybe dressup, maybe crossdressing, maybe... historical roleplay, all of that is going to fit in.

Sophie: Historical roleplay, genderplay, sure, any of that, yeah.

Yue: Yeah! So if you go to a convention, how much of these cosplays are crossdressing? How much of these are domestic? How much of these are, just, any type of play, and how does it relate to you? How does it relate to others? So I think that maybe just seeing your life in a kinkier ways is going to show you a lot of ways to fill your square in other things than fics, basically.

Sophie: There have just been a few craft posts at Kink Bingo so far. And I just think of so many possibilities there are to explore with crafts, when you think about the things you can make: making sextoys, making kinky garments. And I think all of those of us who saw it were really amazed with flyingthesky's quilt that they just posted toward the end of Amnesty, where they worked all of the kinks on the list into different patterns on this quilt. It's just one of the most amazing things I've ever seen.

Yue: It's gorgeous.

Sophie: It's wonderful.

Yue: I want to go to sleep with it.

Sophie: Right, and it's something that she can take to sleep, right? That she can have on her lap, that she can have in public, have in class. And when you make works like that, you know, you're moving away from your computer - well, she actually made the patterns on the computer - but then you can take it away with you and take it into all kinds of different space in your life, and pervert those spaces. So, that was just a really reallyexciting project. Anybody who hasn't seen it should definitely check it out.

Yue: In a way, it made me think about how much "in public" things we're doing. 'Cause I listen to porny podfics on the train. I doodle things too, sometimes hiding part, if there's no kids around me, you just, "Damn it, I'm going to do it anyway." And this, that's part of that, that's exhibitionism, want it or not, and in public, and perhaps even, I don't know you're going to have...

Sophie: Vehicular!

Yue: ...all of these humiliation scenarios in mind...

Sophie: Right. Right, no, I was just thinking that when you listen to podfic on the bus or the train it's a bit of vehicular kink if you're getting jostled around and hearing all this porn in your earphones.

Yue: It is. If you're just sitting on the bus and realising that you kind of like the vibrations under you? It's totally vehicular and...all of the above. When you pass by someone in the metro dressed as military, you're going to say, "Ho, hello!" and have all of this military kink going on, whereas normally you just pass by and don't notice.

I think there's a lot to say too with, just in general, exhibiltionism in public about ads. Every advertisement you go by, what they show, what they have. All the food porn going on in tv, all of those ads too. And those are kind of classic but we don't really see them in this way. So I think there's a lot of picspam and meta and vids that could be made about that.

Sometimes when we discover a kink we don't realize that the discovery of the kink is part of it. I'm trying to say, for example, if someone is an artist and particularly prone to, I don't know, doodling. Well, just looking at pictures and doodling and making a page full of examples of that kink... is totally going to work! It's not too sketchy. There's no standard there that you have to apply to as, you know, finishing art, I think that exploration is part of the deal with kinks.

In the same way, as I was saying to Sophinisba earlier, I think sometimes, let's say you would like to write or make an essay and then you make this whole lot of research about the kink and you find all these resources and references and everything. And then you find that you still are not sure how to go about it, where to start, or you're simply running out of time. Well, how about making a resource post? Just, like, give us a list of what you've done so far, what you've found out, like, what site, what quotes, everything you used!

Sophie: Sure, give us some of the links you've found, some of the images that... maybe how they relate to characters in your fandom...

Yue: How that doesn't relate to characters in your fandom!

Sophie: Sure, write about the limitations you run into.

Yue: All of this is going to be very helpful for everybody, and is going to totally count! I mean, I think people don't think of that as meta but it is, in a way, since it's exploring facets of the kink in ten thousand ways, this diaporama you've done of the kink without meaning to.

Sophie: Exactly, exactly. And I think there is kind of a tendency, especially for people who have it in their head that what you're supposed to do is write fic, that if you aren't doing it, that you're doing something lesser. And so you hear, see people a fair amount - and I do this myself! Sometimes I say, "Oh, I can't think of anything, maybe I'll just do a podfic," uh, "I can't think of anything, maybe I'll just do a picspam." But keep in mind, that podfic or that picspam or that resource post is going to appeal to different people, and it might have a broader appeal beyond your fandom, beyond the people who would want to read a fic in your fandom.

Yue: It will because they have all of these additional aspects to it. Sophinisba did a really good post about how audiofics are inherently kinky, just by being, you know, dirty talking, phonesex, everything mixed into one, exposure. And, want it or not, it's going to give a different perspective on your kink. So, even if in your head you think it's a, you know, it's this copout, it's just a... it's "just" something? It's not "just". It's amaaazing! And, it's something.

I'm not sure how it goes into... not kink shaming, but sometimes we want to be too perfect, in general, and perfection is not required. Just, I mean, natural is perfect too.

Sophie: Right, and I think that relates to...Let's see, something I like about Kink Bingo in general is just this sense that we are exploring and we're learning about ourselves as we create things. So maybe I'm not a very good knitter or a very advanced knitter, but by working with something with my hands, by thinking about how this kink, how a particular kink relates to knitting, I'm relating to it in a new way. And that kind of exploration is also part of what this challenge is about.

Yue: It is. And sometimes it's going to be about something not being your kink but being your character's kink, or your fandom's kink. Whole fandoms have kinks, I mean, it's clear, and people are going to be more attracted to one or another because of this. So, even just exploring this is going to be good.

Yes, I think it would be interesting to have some exploration on how things may not be our kink in a very positive way. I think the principle of "Your kink is not my kink and that's okay" is that it's okay that something is not your kink. It's okay that your characters are trying a kink and failing and being awkward and adorable! This is perfectly good! And I think a lot of people love awkwardness in mediums, just because it's so cute and normal and relatable.

In the same way I would really love to have some "Do Not Do" lists of things relating to kinks. I know that the first time - uh, may be too much information, but I tried waxplay, I did not consult any such thing, and it, you know, it did end up in laughter more than tears. But it was not a successful experience! And this is okay! This is part of the kink! It's, I think, for me, this is part of my waxplay experience. And, yeah, I would like fanworks to explore that...

Sophie: Yeah, like, "things that I learned while I was exploring this", right?

Yue: Yes.

Sophie: And that could be done in all kinds of ways, that could be done in a podcast, a conversation like this, it could be done with photographs, it could be done with drawing.

Yue: Yes. It can work with the Ikea manual. I know that, um, I think it's ell? Did one, Ikea material. And you know how Ikea works, there's always these little pictures, and one of them is crossed: "Do not do." Well, those are really cool! And it's really fun! And the post was about Safe, Sane, and Consensual kinks. And that's just amazing. I want Ikea manuals for every kink! It would be so perfect.

Sophie: Sort of like you were saying before about doing a resource post, when you're going around on the Internet and finding information about a kink. I mean, something else that occurred to me then is, sometimes when you're reviewing your canon, to think, you know, "How does this episode of the X-Files relate to a tattooing kink?" Maybe that's just gonna be the time for you to make a picspam, and give us your thoughts about it, right?

Yue: It is! How many of us have, you know, rewatched movies or episodes of things we were were watching when we were kids, and going, "Whoa! This is kinky!" All of this, tell about it!

Sophie: Exactly, exactly, and that's the time when you can bring that out, and do those screencaps, and, you know, write up a little commentary on how that kink jumped out at you. And that's something you can share with so many members of the Kink Bingo community that might not necessarily be into the fandom that you usually write in or that you usually create in these days.

Yue: Yeah, and one thing to remember is that we might think, "Ah, it's just, you know a passing thought. It's just something that always happens, everybody has that. Why should I make a post about this?" Well, I think that one of the very important parts of kink_bingo in general and kink community in general is sharing, is about relating to each other and finding yourself in a situation or, you know, exploring in general. So nothing is going to be "too normal", "too common" or, I don't know, too..."I'm not sure if this is kinky." Go for it! You have nothing to lose! I think that there's a bit of a scare sometimes that something is not kinky enough...

Sophie: Right, or not erotic enough, not sexy enough,

Yue: Right, it's not sexual enough, it's not kinky enough. Oh, it's G-rated, it's about, you know, all the Disney movies. Oh, come on! The Disney movies are all about bondage, all the time. Just go for it. And domesticity, everything is there.

Sophie: One other thing I wanted to talk about in - it relates to the idea of sharing - is that a lot of the different kinds of fanworks that we can make are actually transformative works and those can be transformative of other fan creations. So, like I mentioned before, my sort of default now for Kink Bingo is podfic, and a lot of times that means going through the tags of the community and looking for, who has written fic for this particular kink, and is that a story that I can read out loud. And so it actually encourages me to read outside my regular fandom and maybe authors I wouldn't be aware of before. And if I do go through with getting permission and making that podfic then it builds a relationship between people in the community.

Yue: It does. I remember, to fill some of my - or, to have ideas how to fill some of my squares, even though I didn't go through with it, or I did and I didn't share - one of the things I like to do is to search for the kink on Pinboard, and back then it was Delicious, and find all of the people who tagged it with this or, all of the kink memes, and there you have all the prompts and all the things, and those are very informative and very inspirational.

Sophie: Sure, you can do a recs list based on what you find. You can do a, you know, a commentary noting some of the patterns that you find for what happens with that kink.

A lot of people these days are getting to be more familiar with podfic and so when we talk about transformative works you might think, "Okay, so, somebody else wrote a story and then another person can make a podfic based on that" or "Somebody wrote a story and another person can draw an illustration of that." But we want - you want to keep in mind there's all kinds of different directions you could go. You could write another story, you could write a remix, you could write some kind of DVD commentary. And that doesn't need to be based on a story, right?

Yue: And it doesn't need to be writing.

Sophie: It doesn't need to be writing.

Yue: One of the things I like in big bangs is, especially foreign big bangs, because I kind of look at the Russian Merlin big bang, and they do a lot of translation, and there's a lot of vids made on translation of a fic. And that's so amazing! It's transformative... And the language too, and how everything, each step of this transformation brings something new and something of their own. And I think that's really cool too. So I have a particular thought about how remixing doesn't have to be in the same medium. So if you see, if you're doing an alternative type of fanwork that is not fic and you're inspired, go ahead and make an illustration based on it or about it, or just, you know, a sequel, a prequel, want to make a vid... If scene is a remake of the canon, you can vid it, remake the canon yourself, make an alternate reality from the canon.

Sophie: Right, and I think, you know, both you and I had great experiences with that this year, of sort of, different ways you can work on remixing or on interactions between fic and art. So one thing that happened was, I wrote a short ficlet, and I asked you to beta it and we had some discussions about, how does the kink really fit into this? And you were also looking at your Kink Bingo card and realized some of the kinks overlapped. And you made a drawing, but that wasn't just an illustration of what I had written. That was really a remix with a different perspective and... I think especially...

Yue: Yeah, it brought a new thing, it was... It was actually pretty different, but with the same setting, it was, yeah, a different point of view.

Sophie: Right, it was bringing up some of the same kinks and some of the same sort of... images, but with a really different perspective on what that meant to the character. And I thought that was really terrific as a transformative work.

And I also wrote a fic that was inspired by a drawing that you had done. And your drawing was a really fanciful thing, and that ended up being, you know, the dream that a character had had in my fic, that was a little more realistic.

Yue: Yeah, it was about suspension and, yeah, so cool. I loved it. Yeah, you kind of took the spirit of the drawing and then made something else with it, and that's just amazing. As inspiration goes, it was really cool to see. And then I wanted to do art of your fic. And I was like, "That's a bit of a loop."

Sophie: I was thinking about that too, and two different people ended up recording podfics of that fic, but it was very different from what you had drawn, but that was a drawing that I had been, you know, looking at for I think something like a year and kept coming back to and thinking about it. And so, the character in my fic was also, she kept coming back to that image and thinking about how she could make that her own.

So there's - those are just two! That's with just fic and art, which are some of the most common kinds of fanworks, but there are so many possibilities that you can work with.

Yue: One thing I think you can do that's transformative and people would not think of it as transformative is rec lists. And... usually in fanworks there's going to be a lot of kink. It's pretty rare that there's only one. You can pretty much always find several. So, in reclists sometimes it's fun not to rec it for the most obvious but for one of the parts. And it's going to be transformative. You can say, "Okay, I'm going to rec this fic, this vid, because the feel it gave me was the feel for this kink. Even if the thing you're reccing is not actually about this, it's going to work.

The same way that if you make a fanmix, all songs in your fanmix do not have to be exactly about, what you say, the lyrics and the sounds. But you can make a fanmix about headspace, and its just going to be about how headspace feels for you, how it sounds, how it looks.

So, don't hesitate sometimes to just step out of the immediate feeling too of some kink or actually just some source you're looking at. And say, "Okay, how can I expand on this? How can I make it my own?"

And I try to see it as a challenge. You know, when you look at something, sometimes I look at one of the kinks and go, "Okay, challenge accepted!" And you try to find how to make this, how... I look at the list of the things the Kink Bingo mods have proposed, and I say, "Okay, they want knitting? How can I make knitting fit in with this foot fetish?"

Sophie: "What haven't I don't before?" And a lot of times those'll end up fitting into some of the monthly mini-challenges that happen during Amnesty. I know this year - I think twice - there have been mini-challenges specifically about remixes or transformative works. Sometimes... right, trying new things, fitting in a lot of different kinks in one work.

Yue: Yeah. So, maybe... We're not saying, maybe, you need to do it, but if you start thinking about it, it could be really nice to just, I don't know, find new ways of having fun. The important part of doing Kink Bingo I think is to have fun. So if you start writing and it doesn't work, you don't have to pull out your hair. You can make a post about how it doesn't work, and that's going to be way more fun. You can have a chat with a friend about what you think. You can, just, maybe find some ways that you feel more comfortable with. Sometimes kinks are not going to work with the medium you're going for immediately. Find something else! You're not confined to what you think you specialise in. You're not confined to anything, actually! Or, unless you want to, that's awesome too! I like cages.

Sophie: Bondage.

Yue: Bondage, oh yes!

Sophie: I feel bound to work with this particular medium and this particular kink.

Yue: I think this could be a really good way to talk about bondage and even humiliation in public in fandom.

Sophie: Sure, I was thinking about that too! That if I tried to draw something, I would find putting that on the Internet to be humiliating...

Yue: Good!

Sophie: In public even. You know, as I generally find putting my podfics on the Internet to be pretty humiliating! But that is also a way that I'm growing through this challenge and having new experiences.

Yue: Yeah! And, just, I don't know how this relates to you suddenly... I know that, too... usually podfics don't really humiliate me that much. But when I was recording a part for meri's... meri made a post for a humiliation square and I read a quote I had talked. And I definitely felt it there that what I had written - seamlessly, with ease - saying it out loud and recording it and then listening to myself when I edited was a completely different experience. And it was, it felt good, actually, just to try this. Even if the actual act doesn't feel good, it felt good to try. And I think that's an important part of why I keep trying new stuff, that even if they don't work out, it's interesting and it's fun to just have tried at least once.

I also want to say that one way of doing kinky work that people might not think about as doing a kinky fanwork is to create a community. And by that I mean on any type of platform: you can do it on LiveJournal, you can do it on Dreamwidth, you can do it on Tumblr. You can just have a fangroup on DeviantArt. You're going to encourage kink or a kinky place, and that's going to be awesome! And it's not less work and not less valid. I'm not sure how it could count for your kink square? But... I think you should do it anyway!

Sophie: And I bet you could figure out a way. I bet you and the mods could figure out a way to make it count for your kink square.

Yue: I'm pretty sure that if I just went up to them and asked. Or, if you just make one, and then rec the five, the first posts that people do, it counts. And you're double-amazing for doing it. So sometimes your kink activity can simply be to encourage others to do it, the same way that we're doing right now. We're not actually doing a kink; we're talking and we're trying to encourage others to do it. Those are also a very important part of the kink community. An essential, maybe, part of doing it. And this was brought up because I know that anatsuno just recorded the mod post for round five kinks, which was the mod post, and we were talking about how mod posts are kinky fanworks, by themselves. And so, you totally can just go out there and record, or make an interpretation or make a graphic for all of those. And it's really good! Those will count and those can count. If you have a question just ask the mods - they're very nice people! And I think there's a very good chance they're going to say yes to pretty much anything, because that's how awesome they are.

So, in conclusion, we wanted to make sure you knew that all fanworks are awesome, no matter what, no matter how you feel about them. Even, especially maybe, no matter how. You're awesome, for making them, for trying, for doing it. And original works too, it's not only fanworks. Second, don't be scared to try a new thing, don't be scared to always make something else, or even the same thing! It's all good! I mean, yes! Be comfortable if you want, and be uncomfortable if you want too. Mistakes and exploration are okay. And, more, maybe most importantly, we're all here to have fun and to have more kinks. So, whatever you do, if you keep this in mind I think that everybody's always going to love it and have a good time. Thank you!

Sophie: Yes, thanks so much for listening.

Yue: and thank you kink_bingo for letting us do this kind of post!

Sophie: And thanks to the mods and everyone for making a post like this welcome at the community.



Please see the podcast post at kink_bingo for listening options, links, and discussion!