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Your daily rambling (and then some)
This is a sort of essay-ish, ramble-ish thing that I've been dinking around with for a while, following a couple of private discussions with some different people about mpreg and my reactions to it. I finally decided to post it, with the caveat that this is, obviously, just a personal ramble -- I wouldn't even necessarily call it a rant, per se, because it's not all that ranty, but it's certainly chock-full of my personal biases, as you can clearly see from the cut tag. So don't enter expecting anything else. Also, I seem to be giving ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derry667 a run for her money in the long-winded department this time...
This is NOT meant to bash any particular writers or anyone's personal tastes. It's just something that I've been thinking about.
Let me be honest. Mpreg completely, totally and utterly creeps me out. On my personal scale of squickiness, I think it's somewhere just shy of coprophagia (and that just made me wonder if there are fanfics out there catering to a coprophagic fetish ... probably...).
I'd never really put that much thought into why, though. I mean, why that particular fetish, when others don't really bother me all that much, at least not that specifically? The topic of mpreg had come up recently in private conversations with several different people, and this has gotten me to thinking about why it's such a total creepfest for me.
I think it's not so much mpreg specifically, I mean the existence of it, that gives me that unpleasant stomach-twist, so much as the way that it's usually written. (And I'm speaking here largely from my exposure to it in other fandoms -- it seemed to be HUGE in Sentinel fandom, for example. I haven't really seen all that much of it in SGA ... a few stories, but not the prevalence that it has in some fandoms.) Most of the mpreg that I've seen was basically an excuse for the author to put the character through the most physically and emotionally degrading situations that she could come up with. I'd almost go so far as to say that it's a universal of the genre (given, obviously, that I haven't seen very much of the genre due to the squicking). Mpreg seems to be a nonstop meander through a vast garden of HUMILIATION and PAIN, including intimate bodily details that, frankly, I have ZERO desire to become acquainted with even in my closest friends, let alone fictional characters.
I think it'd be equally squicky to me if it were an in-depth account of the pregnancy of a female character; it's just that people don't really do that much. However, the idea of going through a gazillion chapters detailing Elizabeth carrying John's love child, complete with intimate details of her varicose veins and hemorrhoids ... I'm sorry. No. Not going there. And I can't figure out why so many people seem to WANT to go there.
Not that you can't do a pregnancy in fanfic, assuming that it's plausible and has some sort of plot reason for being there. For example, I haven't read much Firefly fic so I don't know if people do this very much, but I could see some really interesting character-exploration possibilities in the idea of writing a pregnant Zoe, especially in dealing with reconciling her warrior persona with the idea of being a mother (particularly a single mother). I'm not particularly interested in reading a long wallow in the details of Zoe's morning sickness, but pregnancy as a way of revealing a facet of Zoe's character that would otherwise go unexplored -- that is interesting to me. And being that Zoe does, or did, have a regular sexual relationship in canon, it's plausible that she might actually become pregnant and decide to keep the baby. Plausibility is probably the biggest hurdle to overcome in my ability to accept pregnancy in characters on most of the shows I read fic for, not that I believe the characters are celibate, but just because their lives are usually so difficult and dangerous. Obviously with mpreg you've got that vast medical-unreality barrier to overcome, which is a huge strike against it to begin with for me -- considering how very picky I am about details of accuracy and plausibility in fic. But even if you can come up with a way to do it, there are a lot of other implausibilities that are going to be very hard to write around. A pregancy for any of the SGA characters, for example, would totally take them out of Atlantis. There is just no WAY -- realistically -- that they wouldn't be knocked out of commission as active participants for at least a few months and most likely forever. Their lives are just too active and dangerous. A pregnancy is going to result in a one-way ticket to Earth. The only characters who might realistically get pregnant and stay on Atlantis would be the non-Earth people: Teyla or (since we're discussing mpreg, obviously) Ronon. But even with them, an unexpected pregnancy is so obviously detrimental to the work they do that I honestly can't, realistically, see either of them keeping it. In fact there was a really interesting Teyla short fic that I read awhile back that dealt with exactly that idea, in which she has to make a choice along those lines. It was very gripping, emotional and good. It's not that you can't write a compelling fanfic story that deals with pregnancy. It's just that most people don't seem to do so ... because I gather that it's more about wish fulfilment than anything else.
And that wish-fulfilment thing is probably why mpreg is so much more prevalent in fic than female pregnancy, especially in its tendency to wallow in all the gory and unmentionable details. Once again I'm generalizing here to a genre that I haven't really read all that much of, but it seems to me that a big part of it is the appeal, to some women, of stripping power from a male character. It may not be overtly intended by the writer, but that's what I've come away with from the mpreg that I've read or skimmed: that the theme is to take a male character and forcibly bring them low -- strip away both their physical strength and their emotional defenses. In that regard, it has a lot in common with both torture fics and rape fics. There's a similar feeling to those, to me at least. It's kind of a female power fantasy. And again, I'm not saying that it's being done on purpose, necessarily, but that really is the strongest impression that I've gotten from mpreg. It's written by women as a way of inflicting what we live with (the fear of unwanted pregnancy and the potentially nasty consequences) on the "other", the male of the species.
But it doesn't work for me on that level because it just hits too close to home. As a fertile female of childbearing age, this could potentially be me, and as a result, one of the reasons why I've gotten all squirmy when reading mpreg in the past is because it's all too easy to put myself in the pregnant character's place. I project myself into the characters when I read anyway -- don't most people? And when a character is going through something that I plausibly might go through (and something that at least half the women I know have gone through) it really takes away pretty much all of the fun. It's kind of similar to how, despite my strong h/c leanings as a fan, I'm not overly fond of stories that dwell on ALL the gory details of the characters' injuries, especially when it's reasonably close to something I've experienced in real life.
Which brings me to that SG-1 fic I mentioned earlier. Ha! Bet you thought I'd never get here, didn't you?
I've occasionally alluded, here and there, to an SG-1 story I read a number of years ago that made me stop reading SG-1 fic permanently. I've been thinking about it lately, because even though that particular story wasn't mpreg, I think that a lot of the same things that make mpreg (at least as it's generally presented in fanfic) so personally squicky to me were also true of this story.
The particular story in question -- I can't remember the title or author, and it was maybe 6 or 7 years ago that I read it. It was, of course, a Daniel-whumper (aren't they all?) and in this particular case, he had cancer, which was naturally an excuse for chapter after grueling chapter of the aforementioned PAIN and HUMILIATION.
In retrospect, I'm not entirely sure why I read the whole thing; there was kind of a train-wreck fascination to it. And I'm also not 100% sure why it had quite as severe a psychological effect as it did -- I mean, to the extent that I not only quit reading SG-1 fic for good (I haven't had a desire to pick up another ever since) but quit reading fanfic in general for a little while, and even kinda lost interest in h/c. In some ways it did have a lot to do with timing, because I was just starting to lose my fannishness for SG-1; it would be another couple of years before I quit watching the show regularly (and that's probably a whole other essay, although it had as much to do with just being insanely busy in my personal life as it did with the show itself), but that initial bloom of extreme fannishness was starting to fade. During my intensely fannish period, I'd read a LOT of SG-1 fic (I actually read, or at least skimmed for interest, the entire contents of Heliopolis) and was just generally getting tired of it. It wasn't as if I was massively fannish and then I read this story and suddenly wanted nothing to do with SG-1 fandom -- it wasn't THAT bad. It was just the nail in the coffin of a declining fannish obsession. But it was a pretty damn big nail.
Anyway, when I think about fanfics that squicked me, this one usually tops the list ... I mean, aside from the really wacked-out ideas like Chip'n'Dale slash that I've run across in the course of surfing; there is some VERY strange fanfic out there. But this one had a special effect on me, and now that I'm back in Stargate fandom (if not SG-1) I've put some thought into why that might have been. I've certainly run across any number of SGA stories that gave me a case of the creeping squickies, and they didn't turn me off the way this story did. On the other hand, I didn't generally go ahead and read them, either ...
Eventually I came up with the following three reasons for why this story weirded me out so badly.
1- I just don't want that level of intimacy with a fictional character. All fiction is voyeuristic by its nature, of course, but this made me feel like a dirty voyeur. I felt like I was peeking into aspects of the characters' lives that shouldn't be seen, that I don't WANT to see.
2- Cancer is real. It's something that people go through in real life, something I or someone I love may have to deal with at some point. I think that single thing, more than anything else, goes a long way towards explaining the reason why this particular story hit me with such specific squickiness ... and then I got to thinking that maybe the same is true of mpreg, too. And non-con, and pretty much ALL of my big squicks. They're real. If this had been something wholly fictional (Daniel dealing with, say, the severe physical side effects of a botched Goa'uld implantation, or the side effects of some Ancient device) it still would have gotten to me on points #1 and 3, but I don't think it would have hit me with that particular, visceral, stomach-twisting disgust that it did.
There is no reason whatsoever why you can't deal with real, life-changing situations in a fanfic. I just think that it takes an extra level of effort from the author in order to write it in a way that is plausible, tasteful and above all has some sort of fictional point to it other than just to plumb the depths of pain and humiliation. I think this is whyiamrighthere's The Known World doesn't trip my non-con squick with its treatment of rape. The forced sex in that story isn't dragged in front of the camera for all the world to stare at. It's tasteful, plausible, and the emotional fallout is dealt with in a way that gives depth to the character. Page after page of rape described in loving and lurid detail -- that's my squick, not the mere existence of such a thing in fanfic at all.
So it's not the fact that this story dealt with cancer at all, it was the way that it was dealt with, and ultimately used as a paper-thin excuse to drag the character through the depths of pain and humiliation and horror, in the process painting chemotherapy as something that it's amazing anyone survives at all. (Which is the general impression that one gets of pregnancy, from most of the mpreg that I've seen.)
3- As well as impressing upon me the voyeuristic elements of fiction in general, and fanfic in specific, this story really hit me upside the head with the wish-fulfilment aspect to it, the "because the author says so" aspect. There was really no area of h/c that was not thoroughly plumbed in this story, loosely held together by vestiges of a plot, and it left me not only feeling like my emotions had gone ten rounds with Tyson, but wondering what the point of it all had been. This ultimately ended up turning me off of not only SG-1 fic, but h/c in general for a while. Because the fanfic writer can really do ANYTHING with the characters, and if you can do anything, then what's the point of doing any of it? I don't know if I'm explaining this very well, but I can, after all, put the characters in any conceivable situation in fantasies in my head. The fanfic writer can MAKE the characters do anything "because she said so". If she doesn't give them a compelling and plausible framework in which to do those things -- a believable plot that's not just an excuse for h/c -- then there is no reason not to stick with the stories in my head, where I can manipulate all the details to get them just-so.
That, #3, was the primary reason -- at first -- why I stopped reading SG-1 fic, and fanfic in general for a while. At the time, it was the only reason I was really aware of, the "if you can do anything, what's the point to it all?" element. It wasn't until later that I started really analyzing my somewhat extreme reaction to the story -- why THAT story, and not another? -- and came up with points #1 and 2 ... and not until now that I really made the connection to the other major squicks that I have, such as fictional pregnancy and non-con.
Still, keeping on topic (sort of), mpreg does strike me in a lot of ways as the h/c equivalent of PWP. Rather than being a way of (tastefully) exploring an uncommonly seen emotional aspect to a character, it's just an excuse to rake them over the coals. And that's something that I don't have a whole lot of patience for in fic. I'm well aware this is a personal reading bias -- and don't get me wrong, I'm also aware how wonderful it is that in SGA fic I have the luxury of picking and choosing between different sorts of h/c! I've spent a number of years in anime fandoms, where h/c is rare and I pretty much had to take what I can get. In SGA, I've finally got the luxury of being a connoisseur, and what I'm realizing is that h/c for its own sake simply sets off the same "why the heck am I bothering with this when I can get it from my own fantasies?" reaction as the SG-1 story described above. Like I said up there, it needs to be held together in a framework of plot and plausibility for me to get much out of it. It can't just be PWP. I can supply myself with PWP h/c just fine in my own fantasies -- on boring car drives, in bed at night as I fall asleep. There's no real incentive, then, to get it from other people. I need something more, something I can't get from my fantasies: unpredictability, unusual ideas, a compelling plot that takes the characters to places where I haven't taken them myself.
Okay, and having said that, I'll add the caveat that I reserve the right to be inconsistent and jump on an h/c PWP wholeheartedly if it happens to coincide perfectly with my specific h/c fetishes. *grin* I can't say I wouldn't. I just can't think of too many cases where I have.
Hmm. This has ended up being more ramble, less point. My whole objective with writing the above was mainly to work out, to my own satisfaction, in my own mind, why I react to mpreg the way that I do ... something more insightful than just "Ew, it's icky!" I'm posting it here not to dump on anyone's personal preferences, but mainly as a way of explaining my own. (And hey, I just wrote over 3000 words of ramblings about fandom, so it seems like a shame not to post it SOMEWHERE!)
derry667 a run for her money in the long-winded department this time...This is NOT meant to bash any particular writers or anyone's personal tastes. It's just something that I've been thinking about.
Let me be honest. Mpreg completely, totally and utterly creeps me out. On my personal scale of squickiness, I think it's somewhere just shy of coprophagia (and that just made me wonder if there are fanfics out there catering to a coprophagic fetish ... probably...).
I'd never really put that much thought into why, though. I mean, why that particular fetish, when others don't really bother me all that much, at least not that specifically? The topic of mpreg had come up recently in private conversations with several different people, and this has gotten me to thinking about why it's such a total creepfest for me.
I think it's not so much mpreg specifically, I mean the existence of it, that gives me that unpleasant stomach-twist, so much as the way that it's usually written. (And I'm speaking here largely from my exposure to it in other fandoms -- it seemed to be HUGE in Sentinel fandom, for example. I haven't really seen all that much of it in SGA ... a few stories, but not the prevalence that it has in some fandoms.) Most of the mpreg that I've seen was basically an excuse for the author to put the character through the most physically and emotionally degrading situations that she could come up with. I'd almost go so far as to say that it's a universal of the genre (given, obviously, that I haven't seen very much of the genre due to the squicking). Mpreg seems to be a nonstop meander through a vast garden of HUMILIATION and PAIN, including intimate bodily details that, frankly, I have ZERO desire to become acquainted with even in my closest friends, let alone fictional characters.
I think it'd be equally squicky to me if it were an in-depth account of the pregnancy of a female character; it's just that people don't really do that much. However, the idea of going through a gazillion chapters detailing Elizabeth carrying John's love child, complete with intimate details of her varicose veins and hemorrhoids ... I'm sorry. No. Not going there. And I can't figure out why so many people seem to WANT to go there.
Not that you can't do a pregnancy in fanfic, assuming that it's plausible and has some sort of plot reason for being there. For example, I haven't read much Firefly fic so I don't know if people do this very much, but I could see some really interesting character-exploration possibilities in the idea of writing a pregnant Zoe, especially in dealing with reconciling her warrior persona with the idea of being a mother (particularly a single mother). I'm not particularly interested in reading a long wallow in the details of Zoe's morning sickness, but pregnancy as a way of revealing a facet of Zoe's character that would otherwise go unexplored -- that is interesting to me. And being that Zoe does, or did, have a regular sexual relationship in canon, it's plausible that she might actually become pregnant and decide to keep the baby. Plausibility is probably the biggest hurdle to overcome in my ability to accept pregnancy in characters on most of the shows I read fic for, not that I believe the characters are celibate, but just because their lives are usually so difficult and dangerous. Obviously with mpreg you've got that vast medical-unreality barrier to overcome, which is a huge strike against it to begin with for me -- considering how very picky I am about details of accuracy and plausibility in fic. But even if you can come up with a way to do it, there are a lot of other implausibilities that are going to be very hard to write around. A pregancy for any of the SGA characters, for example, would totally take them out of Atlantis. There is just no WAY -- realistically -- that they wouldn't be knocked out of commission as active participants for at least a few months and most likely forever. Their lives are just too active and dangerous. A pregnancy is going to result in a one-way ticket to Earth. The only characters who might realistically get pregnant and stay on Atlantis would be the non-Earth people: Teyla or (since we're discussing mpreg, obviously) Ronon. But even with them, an unexpected pregnancy is so obviously detrimental to the work they do that I honestly can't, realistically, see either of them keeping it. In fact there was a really interesting Teyla short fic that I read awhile back that dealt with exactly that idea, in which she has to make a choice along those lines. It was very gripping, emotional and good. It's not that you can't write a compelling fanfic story that deals with pregnancy. It's just that most people don't seem to do so ... because I gather that it's more about wish fulfilment than anything else.
And that wish-fulfilment thing is probably why mpreg is so much more prevalent in fic than female pregnancy, especially in its tendency to wallow in all the gory and unmentionable details. Once again I'm generalizing here to a genre that I haven't really read all that much of, but it seems to me that a big part of it is the appeal, to some women, of stripping power from a male character. It may not be overtly intended by the writer, but that's what I've come away with from the mpreg that I've read or skimmed: that the theme is to take a male character and forcibly bring them low -- strip away both their physical strength and their emotional defenses. In that regard, it has a lot in common with both torture fics and rape fics. There's a similar feeling to those, to me at least. It's kind of a female power fantasy. And again, I'm not saying that it's being done on purpose, necessarily, but that really is the strongest impression that I've gotten from mpreg. It's written by women as a way of inflicting what we live with (the fear of unwanted pregnancy and the potentially nasty consequences) on the "other", the male of the species.
But it doesn't work for me on that level because it just hits too close to home. As a fertile female of childbearing age, this could potentially be me, and as a result, one of the reasons why I've gotten all squirmy when reading mpreg in the past is because it's all too easy to put myself in the pregnant character's place. I project myself into the characters when I read anyway -- don't most people? And when a character is going through something that I plausibly might go through (and something that at least half the women I know have gone through) it really takes away pretty much all of the fun. It's kind of similar to how, despite my strong h/c leanings as a fan, I'm not overly fond of stories that dwell on ALL the gory details of the characters' injuries, especially when it's reasonably close to something I've experienced in real life.
Which brings me to that SG-1 fic I mentioned earlier. Ha! Bet you thought I'd never get here, didn't you?
I've occasionally alluded, here and there, to an SG-1 story I read a number of years ago that made me stop reading SG-1 fic permanently. I've been thinking about it lately, because even though that particular story wasn't mpreg, I think that a lot of the same things that make mpreg (at least as it's generally presented in fanfic) so personally squicky to me were also true of this story.
The particular story in question -- I can't remember the title or author, and it was maybe 6 or 7 years ago that I read it. It was, of course, a Daniel-whumper (aren't they all?) and in this particular case, he had cancer, which was naturally an excuse for chapter after grueling chapter of the aforementioned PAIN and HUMILIATION.
In retrospect, I'm not entirely sure why I read the whole thing; there was kind of a train-wreck fascination to it. And I'm also not 100% sure why it had quite as severe a psychological effect as it did -- I mean, to the extent that I not only quit reading SG-1 fic for good (I haven't had a desire to pick up another ever since) but quit reading fanfic in general for a little while, and even kinda lost interest in h/c. In some ways it did have a lot to do with timing, because I was just starting to lose my fannishness for SG-1; it would be another couple of years before I quit watching the show regularly (and that's probably a whole other essay, although it had as much to do with just being insanely busy in my personal life as it did with the show itself), but that initial bloom of extreme fannishness was starting to fade. During my intensely fannish period, I'd read a LOT of SG-1 fic (I actually read, or at least skimmed for interest, the entire contents of Heliopolis) and was just generally getting tired of it. It wasn't as if I was massively fannish and then I read this story and suddenly wanted nothing to do with SG-1 fandom -- it wasn't THAT bad. It was just the nail in the coffin of a declining fannish obsession. But it was a pretty damn big nail.
Anyway, when I think about fanfics that squicked me, this one usually tops the list ... I mean, aside from the really wacked-out ideas like Chip'n'Dale slash that I've run across in the course of surfing; there is some VERY strange fanfic out there. But this one had a special effect on me, and now that I'm back in Stargate fandom (if not SG-1) I've put some thought into why that might have been. I've certainly run across any number of SGA stories that gave me a case of the creeping squickies, and they didn't turn me off the way this story did. On the other hand, I didn't generally go ahead and read them, either ...
Eventually I came up with the following three reasons for why this story weirded me out so badly.
1- I just don't want that level of intimacy with a fictional character. All fiction is voyeuristic by its nature, of course, but this made me feel like a dirty voyeur. I felt like I was peeking into aspects of the characters' lives that shouldn't be seen, that I don't WANT to see.
2- Cancer is real. It's something that people go through in real life, something I or someone I love may have to deal with at some point. I think that single thing, more than anything else, goes a long way towards explaining the reason why this particular story hit me with such specific squickiness ... and then I got to thinking that maybe the same is true of mpreg, too. And non-con, and pretty much ALL of my big squicks. They're real. If this had been something wholly fictional (Daniel dealing with, say, the severe physical side effects of a botched Goa'uld implantation, or the side effects of some Ancient device) it still would have gotten to me on points #1 and 3, but I don't think it would have hit me with that particular, visceral, stomach-twisting disgust that it did.
There is no reason whatsoever why you can't deal with real, life-changing situations in a fanfic. I just think that it takes an extra level of effort from the author in order to write it in a way that is plausible, tasteful and above all has some sort of fictional point to it other than just to plumb the depths of pain and humiliation. I think this is why
iamrighthere's The Known World doesn't trip my non-con squick with its treatment of rape. The forced sex in that story isn't dragged in front of the camera for all the world to stare at. It's tasteful, plausible, and the emotional fallout is dealt with in a way that gives depth to the character. Page after page of rape described in loving and lurid detail -- that's my squick, not the mere existence of such a thing in fanfic at all.So it's not the fact that this story dealt with cancer at all, it was the way that it was dealt with, and ultimately used as a paper-thin excuse to drag the character through the depths of pain and humiliation and horror, in the process painting chemotherapy as something that it's amazing anyone survives at all. (Which is the general impression that one gets of pregnancy, from most of the mpreg that I've seen.)
3- As well as impressing upon me the voyeuristic elements of fiction in general, and fanfic in specific, this story really hit me upside the head with the wish-fulfilment aspect to it, the "because the author says so" aspect. There was really no area of h/c that was not thoroughly plumbed in this story, loosely held together by vestiges of a plot, and it left me not only feeling like my emotions had gone ten rounds with Tyson, but wondering what the point of it all had been. This ultimately ended up turning me off of not only SG-1 fic, but h/c in general for a while. Because the fanfic writer can really do ANYTHING with the characters, and if you can do anything, then what's the point of doing any of it? I don't know if I'm explaining this very well, but I can, after all, put the characters in any conceivable situation in fantasies in my head. The fanfic writer can MAKE the characters do anything "because she said so". If she doesn't give them a compelling and plausible framework in which to do those things -- a believable plot that's not just an excuse for h/c -- then there is no reason not to stick with the stories in my head, where I can manipulate all the details to get them just-so.
That, #3, was the primary reason -- at first -- why I stopped reading SG-1 fic, and fanfic in general for a while. At the time, it was the only reason I was really aware of, the "if you can do anything, what's the point to it all?" element. It wasn't until later that I started really analyzing my somewhat extreme reaction to the story -- why THAT story, and not another? -- and came up with points #1 and 2 ... and not until now that I really made the connection to the other major squicks that I have, such as fictional pregnancy and non-con.
Still, keeping on topic (sort of), mpreg does strike me in a lot of ways as the h/c equivalent of PWP. Rather than being a way of (tastefully) exploring an uncommonly seen emotional aspect to a character, it's just an excuse to rake them over the coals. And that's something that I don't have a whole lot of patience for in fic. I'm well aware this is a personal reading bias -- and don't get me wrong, I'm also aware how wonderful it is that in SGA fic I have the luxury of picking and choosing between different sorts of h/c! I've spent a number of years in anime fandoms, where h/c is rare and I pretty much had to take what I can get. In SGA, I've finally got the luxury of being a connoisseur, and what I'm realizing is that h/c for its own sake simply sets off the same "why the heck am I bothering with this when I can get it from my own fantasies?" reaction as the SG-1 story described above. Like I said up there, it needs to be held together in a framework of plot and plausibility for me to get much out of it. It can't just be PWP. I can supply myself with PWP h/c just fine in my own fantasies -- on boring car drives, in bed at night as I fall asleep. There's no real incentive, then, to get it from other people. I need something more, something I can't get from my fantasies: unpredictability, unusual ideas, a compelling plot that takes the characters to places where I haven't taken them myself.
Okay, and having said that, I'll add the caveat that I reserve the right to be inconsistent and jump on an h/c PWP wholeheartedly if it happens to coincide perfectly with my specific h/c fetishes. *grin* I can't say I wouldn't. I just can't think of too many cases where I have.
Hmm. This has ended up being more ramble, less point. My whole objective with writing the above was mainly to work out, to my own satisfaction, in my own mind, why I react to mpreg the way that I do ... something more insightful than just "Ew, it's icky!" I'm posting it here not to dump on anyone's personal preferences, but mainly as a way of explaining my own. (And hey, I just wrote over 3000 words of ramblings about fandom, so it seems like a shame not to post it SOMEWHERE!)