25 July 2008
And here I swore I wouldn’t talk about twincest again…
Posted by Denise Kendrick under: My Brother's Keeper; writing .
Welp, the free ebooks we posted have been downloaded a combined 315 times in less than thirty days.
I wish I knew what that meant. I should have put up some sort of poll to at least find out if people were downloading because they heard the book had twincest in it, or if they were more interested in the slave!fic concept–of which our implementation is a bit non-standard.
Maybe some of them just downloaded it because it was free–though, given the reaction people have to twincest, I find that unlikely. It’s not something people tend to feel luke-warm about. More likely they were hoping the book would be more hard core and they could skim for the sexy parts.
I can say that people are far more interested in My Brother’s Keeper than it’s non-twincest counterpart. This makes sense, as MBK is a better story. Triangulations is more of a “character development via smut” foray.
I can also say that people who read slashy!slave!fic are apparently less fazed by twincest. I suppose that makes sense…somehow. I’m basing this assumption on the stats I saw come through after we announced the story in a slave!fic friendly community.
We did not announce the story anywhere that was expressly twincest friendly. This would be because I don’t know of anywhere to announce such things. Ironically, I’m not a big twincest reader.
We did hear from a few authors since releasing My Brother’s Keeper. Apparently there is a lot of twincest lingering about in the “I would write it if anyone would publish it” stages. I would wager that if so many people want to write it, then there are likely lots of people who want to read it. Twincest friendly fandoms are, well, the word rabid comes to mind–but in a good way! And Dark Eden Press did say that twincest was far and away their best seller. So if you want to write the brotherly lurve, then go for it!
(But by the same token, I’m not sure I would do it again. Well, I would write it, for sure. But maybe not bother with the public deployment.)
On a somewhat related note, a while back I queried an epub, who shall remain nameless, about their stance on twincest. Their submissions page didn’t mention it either way, so I figured I’d ask. I had to ask more than once, which suggests to me they are not comfortable with their own stance on the subject. Their initial response managed to completely ignore the question and focus on other items in my email. But eventually they did say yes they would consider twincest if it were menage. But no for a monogamous, consensual relationship.
I was reminded of the scene from an Austin Power’s movie where Austin is presented with two hot twins dressed up as Japanese schoolgirls who want to shag him. He nearly hyperventilates and then pulls out his list of “Things to do before he dies” and crosses off “threesome with japanese twins”. Check out the clip here (top left corner).
In this light, the publisher’s response made perfect sense to me, but when I mentioned it to my sister she was horrified. Menage practically equals cheating in her mind, and that is a major no-no.
So I told another friend who is no stranger to racy material. Surprisingly, her response was the same. She expected menage to be more squicky than monogamous twincest.
I suspect in both cases that twincest gets away with what incest simply cannot. Both my sister and my friend likely would have found incest (non-twin siblings) a greater turn off than menage. Incest has an inherent power squick, for one thing; and don’t even get me started on the het implications. But personally if it’s older brother/younger brother… uh… what? I liked Boromir and Faramir! In theory, of course. *cough*
Er…
Well no, I never wrote Boromir/Faramir. But I read a slash story about them once and I remember thinking 1) it made perfect sense, *snort* and 2) it forever changed that scene from ROTK for me. Then I went back to reading other things. Becoming enamoured with Mr. Sean Bean was to be for later–and, if you want to know a secret, I had him in mind every time I wrote about Dex’s uncle. The same uncle who once taught his nephew how to give a slave a proper spanking. The man looks good in uniform, what can I say?
