Follow the Leader Chapter Three has been released and is available now to read! I hope it’s enjoyed. For those itching to read more Final Answer, the next chapter isn’t that far behind. As always, spoilers are below.

As I mentioned in my previous blog, it always takes me a bit to get going in a longer-form story, and this chapter was the first so far in the story where I felt confident I knew where the story was going. The trouble with making a story where revelations are meant to have meaning is that you need to show its opposite. If a story is about tragedy, you need to show happiness first, etc. It’s emotional storytelling 101, and this is one of those rules that’s pretty darn close to being absolute. Shadowplay, and using the absence of one emotion to showcase another, is important.

I wanted to have Robyn have a couple of chapters of getting her way and being stuck-up both to complicate the morals of this chapter’s events (particularly at the party) and to make her first time with Jordan important. I normally am in the habit of writing sex where people are communicative and consent is clearly established because it’s what I prefer, but it was plainly obvious Jordan wouldn’t respect this. And in stories, I think that’s a fine device. Some people enjoy seeing that kind of power dynamic in stories, where one person takes what they wants and is a bit of a blatant prick. It can be fun to lose yourself in a fantasy of having someone else be putty in your hands, or to lose your mind in the face of pleasure. Maybe some people find it even hotter if you lose your mind at the hands of a clearly unkind person. I’m not here to judge.

Well, I’m not here to judge people. In my Discord server (which in my opinion you should definitely join) there was mention recently of a story called Owning a Dominant Bitch that dominated the old blue website I was a part of. I vaguely remembered that story, and a reader, while assessing a story of mine, compared it to OaDB, while clearly having nice things to say about it. I decided to reread the first chapter and it was, to be blunt, absolutely awful from every angle (in my opinion. If you liked it, hey, that’s why we’re individuals). The sex lasts for about three sentences and is written as bluntly and unsexily as possible, and nearly comes out of nowhere, between two characters that have close to zero chemistry. The main character is some boy who’s tired of being picked on (even though we get little backstory on that) and beats up bullies who pick on him. The story does the tired trope of “quiet kid has had enough and beats up the bullies, then people respect him” and then uses this revelation in his life to conclude that the girl he likes isn’t going out with him because she wants him to be mean to her. So, he demands she go out with him, ignores not only her consent but basic conversation, has what I can only imagine to be rushed, dry, painful, unrewarding sex with her, then demands she go out with him again. It’s bizarre to say the least, but what’s more bizarre is that this character is essentially an even less verbose Jordan with a less violent streak, and the story’s rhetoric basically praises him for being such a good nice caring guy when he did exactly nothing to earn it.

I believe in the power of stories to influence our worldview, and I knew even when I read the story for the first time as a teenager I didn’t want to promote that kind of thinking in the people I write. That said, I don’t want the people I write to all be equally communicative and considerate. That gets boring and stale. Heck, I don’t enjoy writing characters that don’t make mistakes. Quinn’s probably the closest I’ve come to a consistently kind protagonist, and he’s still whiny and occasionally tactless. Even so, I don’t enjoy upholding a violent and selfish guy and going, “what a good person! everyone in the story likes this person. You, the reader, should be like this person.” I’m well aware that some people will read of Adam’s adventures and resolve to be more like him. I was the same way with the protagonists of stories I read growing up. I don’t want to present certain values as aspirational.

At the same time, I don’t like to sugarcoat the reality of a lot of high school. I don’t really take personal joy in writing a transphobic slur, for instance, but let’s be honest; a lot of people in high school, especially in the time period of my writing, don’t understand or like trans people. If I want my characters’ dialogue and motivations to be even somewhat realistic, I have some sort of obligation to depict the reality of how people are treated in a high school environment. It’s not like Jordan was going to rebut his friend’s use of “tranny” by going, “Ah, come on now, if we think about what Judith Butler said about gender identity versus gender performance…” It would make my writing come across as transparently idealistic, and I’d like to be, y’know… translucent about it, at least. You can’t pave over the ugly parts of our prejudices with idealistic denial, and then claim you like to be real. There needs to be a limit.

It’s hard to balance my idealism in this way, because Jordan is a jerk who is not only unkind but clearly sees people as things to be used. His views on age gaps don’t share my own, for instance, but he likes the idea of arguing down Robyn until she concedes, and sees nothing he’s doing as wrong. I’ve had… really only one real run-in with a disgruntled viewer in the past who genuinely thought that I endorsed those kinds of age gaps, although I’ve had a decent number of people inquiring about how much I should make my moral stance clear. I’ve had it easy, possibly up until now. I’ve never written a character this blatant about liking and endorsing certain things, and convincing a character of the same. I don’t predict I’ll run into trouble on this website, because there’s a standard of media literacy, but… let’s just say, especially with the content in question, I might be destroying my chances of posting this to other websites without a certain subset of people coming after me with pitchforks and insisting I want to lower the age of consent or something.

I’m pretty safe in this little bubble I’m in. There are more successful (both in terms of money and views) erotica writers than myself that write teenagers getting it on, sometimes in ways that… genuinely do seem like the writer themself really does enjoy the mere idea of adults getting it on with teens. Because of this, and how I try to be more careful with my writing than others of my ilk, no one is coming after me and me alone without looking like they just don’t like my writing in particular and wanted a reason to grandstand. However, especially as I explore my other prospects, I get… worried. A friend and I are making a simple video game together; a visual novel with the script written by both of us. The script itself is finished, it’s got my style yet feels crazily different than anything else I’ve ever made, and we’re just waiting for the visual art assets to be finished then we’ll start gluing the whole thing together. I’m frankly worried that if I attach my name to the story and link to the visual novel from here, it’ll eventually come out that an erotica writer that writes high school stories helped write this. Those people don’t have the context of this world, nor the nuance of why I enjoy writing high school stories. They’ll assume, with what little evidence they have, that I just like kids or something. They might even come after the person I make the game with, and accuse them of being fine with working alongside a pedophile or something. Releasing the game to a non-erotica-consuming audience, especially an online audience that has a tendency to make moral judgments quickly and absolutely, could either be a big blow to me or even trigger a downfall. I’m kind of paranoid about that.

So, I’ll say it over and over ’til I’m blue in the face. The views of Jordan Miller do not reflect mine, and while I think it’s inevitable that teenagers will have sex with each other and even the occasional misguided ones will want to have sex with an adult, I don’t endorse that. I don’t think it’s a wise idea to jump into a sex life earlier on, as I did. The dynamic of a freshman and a senior in high school is in most cases a red flag, and exceptions with healthy relationships are frankly rare and just that; exceptions. If you’ve read this far, you likely have the maturity to understand that, and might even be confused why I’m saying all this. In the unlikely circumstance where everything I predicted happens; the game is released, people from Twitter see I’m an erotica writer, see what I write, and scour my website either for dirt or an explanation, I’m comforted by the idea they find this page and realize, “Wait. Fetishes can exist without it being a reflection of real-world desires. This person seems to have their head on straight and even be defensive and hesitant against the idea of people in high school getting it on. Maybe they’re not literally Hitler.” I don’t mind my stories and their morals being questioned but if you think Jordan is problematic, I agree with you. If you don’t like reading him influencing Robyn, I understand you. And if you understand that Jordan isn’t me, I appreciate you. I’ll talk to you all next week.

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