ratcreature | Thirty Days of Fanart Meme: Day 14

14 – Ratings – how high are you comfortable with going, and is your comfort zone different for showing sex than for violence/gore? Have you ever gone higher? If you're comfortable with NC-17, have you ever been shocked by finding that the art you're making is G-rated instead?

My comfort zone pretty much ends at "teen audiences" level. Visual porn doesn't do much for me, and I'm fairly sure I'd feel ridiculous drawing it. So when I do show pairings I'm more likely to pick a situation that just shows intimacy, like cuddling or an embrace, or moments of tension for example when the participants are still clothed, but eager to change that. That is not to say that my sexual kinks don't show through my art, such as power dynamics, but the end result won't be explicit, because that is not what attracts me. So it's no coincidence that for example kneeling people aren't uncommon in my pictures. I can imagine having an idea that would be higher rated due to violence or gore more easily than doing explicit sex, but it's not that likely either.

Also, I'm aggravated to find that I still can't even post comments on LJ. What are they doing to their site over there? It's been over a day. *grumble grumble*

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

After trying a lot I finally got one comment through, everything else was swallowed by the goat. I've given up for now.

So when I do show pairings I'm more likely to pick a situation that just shows intimacy, like cuddling or an embrace, or moments of tension for example when the participants are still clothed, but eager to change that.

Yeah, same here. That's also what I find most appealing on screen... unresolved sexual tension, or intimate moments like cuddling for comfort, or the moment just before the clothes drop and the screen fades to black. I'm quite content if it fades to black then and leaves the rest to the imagination.

This is an interesting meme.

I'm glad to hear you find the meme interesting, and I'm not the only one thinking that these memes would be cool for fanartist to do and not just fanwriters.

I think part of my dislike of just showing the sex is that I need to be taken to the right mental place for something to work as porn, and just having the climax scene dumped on me visually doesn't work to create arousal. Not even when it matches my kinks. Written sex can take me inside the head of the participants to create the identification and attraction, so depending on what happens a written sex scene can work for me when it is very explicit. For example I find written orgasm denial scenes hot, but a picture of a restrained penis just doesn't do the same thing.

So with a picture just showing a snapshot I prefer those other, less explicit kinds of scenes because those can work for me to show emotions of the couple, and connect on that level to me as viewer, but I don't need to be as immersed for it to work. I mean, you can see a cute picture of a tender moment and think "awww!" and the picture more or less works as intended, because you connected to the tenderness of the couple. But with arousal a single picture is unlikely to get me further than the first interest, so to speak, so it is better for the picture to match that emotional stage, e.g. a characters beginning to undress each other, or even art showing off the attractiveness as a character as eye candy if the artist has a style suited to that. And very explicit art doesn't even work well on a mere eye candy level for me because frankly erect penises in particular just aren't the most attractive body parts, IMO.

Meanwhile my own style tends more towards the cartoony, so I'm more likely to try make the narrative of the picture convey the sexual attraction rather than the bodies as they are shown. (Of course with very photorealistic explicit art I tend to run into my actor RPF squick or with manips sometimes into an uncanny valley kind of thing, where then the picture creeps me out.)

Heh, your icon! :D

or with manips sometimes into an uncanny valley kind of thing, where then the picture creeps me out.

Uh, yeah. It's uncanny valley effect + embarrassment squick. Not really my thing.

And very explicit art doesn't even work well on a mere eye candy level for me because frankly erect penises in particular just aren't the most attractive body parts, IMO.

Indeed.

Sex scenes in doujinshi work as a huge turn-off for me (generally those have been the only times I even stumbled across explicit art, since I'm more of a gen/UST type anyway). There's something about the depiction of sex in manga and doujinshi, no matter whether it's het or yaoi, that manages to hit on a dubcon squick I wasn't even aware I had. Or maybe it's not so much the fact that it's dubcon but the way the woman/uke is portrayed, that just screams *sexist* to me. (And I'm generalizing but every single one that I've seen was like that and now I stay away from everything with a rating higher than R.)