On the path to fame you will take many small steps. Long before you puke pure cocaine onto your own star on Hollywood Boulevard, you will celebrate minor milestones that feel revelatory at the time: The day a fanpage is founded, your own Wikipedia entry, the first time you get recognized when you really wish you werenāt (disheveled and hungover while ordering the worst thing at a burrito cart for me!) but thereās nothing quite like your very own slashfiction. The day an Internet Morlock writes several thousand words about the way you might fuck is the day you know youāve made it. Thatās why I was so intensely jealous of my old coworkers Dan OāBrien and Michael Swaim, when they were graced with this lovely bit of prose:
Even if thereās no fucking in your fanfiction, your fanfiction is still about fucking. It might be on an esoteric level, but fucks will be had. So any piece of fanfiction would belong on Fucking Day as well as any other day, but bear with me, because there absolutely is fucking here. Itās brief and last minute, as all fucking should be, but itās here. I will deliver.
This is a tough piece for me to write, because I know both of these people, and itās tricky to walk the line between keeping a respectful distance from their private lives and making loud, explicit jokes about their dicks touching. Itās a problem Iāve struggled with in literally every single friendship Iāve had, and I have never made the right choice. So Iām going to try to confine my criticism only to the text itself, and not address the elephant dong in the room unless absolutely necessary.
I appreciate the writer trying to mimic the Cracked style, throwing in our casual absurdity and liberal hints of violence. But this is almost the start of two jokes and no punchlines. You canāt just say āhe did some heroin in an unexpected wayā without further commentary; thatās just an accurate report of what bored junkies do. Itās not funny to explain that drug addicts gonna drug. Thatās just an excuse that never works at any of my exit interviews.
And you canāt just say āhe threatened to burn my momās house downā and leave it at that — thatās genuinely what psychopaths do. Arson is your foundation, and you have to build comedy upon it. Maybe he made a Molotov cocktail in a zany fashion, like in a sippy cup. Maybe he was being metaphorical, and it turns out he āburned your momās house downā with his good, good fuckinā. Maybe your mom flipped the script on him and burned his house down. I guess what Iām really asking is for you to take a second pass on the text after you cum, when the clarity of mind can help you build out the jokes.
This is a novice mistake. Itās what takes so many people out of horror movies. Your protagonist canāt be making so many obviously stupid decisions just so you can move the pieces around the board, then set them on top of each other and make grinding motions. Especially since weāre aware that this is slashfiction — we already know somebody is going to get railed that would probably prefer to not get railed quite so hard. Youāre going to have to work even harder to make it look like that might not happen.
There always has to be just a whiff of rape in slashfiction, doesnāt there? Itās never fully consensual. Even if the author later makes it very clear that both characters came to want this, it always has to start like a sketch in a self-defense class. Slashfiction writers think that foreplay is a loophole for consent. The only pickup line slashfiction writers know is attempted kidnapping. Slashfiction writers think the most erotic part of the body is the nose because thatās where the chloroform goes.
Okay, the author gets points back here: I do like how real they kept Swaimās living conditions. He resides in a modest apartment far from the office, and owns nothing but a small grey couch and a television. Itās like they really get the internet writerās plight.
You see what I mean? As soon as two people show affection toward one another, a slashfiction author has to dive into their own skull Inside Out-style to see exactly how Lust manages to choke Consent out this time.
I donāt know what human pretzel pornography this author gets off to, but I can tell you with authority that Michael Swaim is not a fuck-snake. Heās not a blowjob boa constrictor, able to keep a man on his lap while also fellating him. Heās like any of us: he has to choose between the two.
It is true that the early columnists all had lube. They got it as a gag gift from a fan, and only used it once for an office Slip ān Slide party.
Wait, did I just fall for the least effort ever put into a cover story?!
The human imagination is a bizarre and terrible thing. That you can look at a regular person making comedy sketches on the internet and be so overcome with inspiration that you simply must pen three thousand words on how they probably feel about anal creampies — itās almost noble. I am a professional writer and I could only get 1,092 words out of that, at best.
Leaving the door so plainly open for a sequel is always a bold move — it shows a degree of faith and certainty that I have never had in anything Iāve ever done. The blind, hopeless trust inherent in that faulty assumption just breaks my heart. Itās like a disabled orphan believing with all his heart that thereās no way youāll steal his wheelchair for a third time. People that type āTHE ENDā¦?ā are still waiting for OJ to find the real killer. If you tell them āthe check is in the mailā and it never arrives, theyāll go hold up the line at the Post Office just to drag an already broken postal worker over coals they stopped being able to feel long ago. This author was so very sure that the people would clamor for more textual erotica about two awkward internet comedians fucking in a budget Burbank apartment that they couldnāt even commit to a hard stop. But thatās not an epic saga that needs more exploration, itās just a Tuesday we donāt talk about.
THE END
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