Noumena

That technique works for me too, and it is such a clever solution. It’s like using the problem against itself. It may take more of that clever thinking to imagine an explanation for this issue. It’s good to know that this isn’t happening only to me, and at least now I can type watch, even if it is a bit awkward.

I am using Firefox. I have experimented with Internet Explorer and this problem does not happen there. When I type “watch” into a forum post it vanishes as soon as a press space, period, comma, exclamation, or question mark. Other characters are safe, so for example because I ended the word with a quotation mark earlier in this post it did not disappear. If I had tried to type it without the quotation marks, then it would have looked like this: “When I type into a form post it vanishes.” I can also type watcher, watching, etc. I can also type things like Watch, wAtch, and so on, but when it is exactly w-a-t-c-h in all lower case letters, it just disappears as if I’d never typed it at all. Is this only happening to me? Are there any other words that do this? What could explain this behavior? It seems somehow deliberate.

This is exactly why erotic fan fiction is so exciting and generic porn is so boring. Generic porn excludes everything that makes sex interesting by using flat and undeveloped characters, while erotic fan fiction exploits characters that you already know to create fascinating sexual situations. If we can just stay true to the characters in our fanfics then we’ve already won because any sex they have will automatically be interesting. It is sex between characters that we know, so it can’t fail to be interesting. The hard part is finding a good excuse to make the sex happen. Sometimes you can spend hours studying canon looking for an opening. If two characters have never shown a hint of attraction for each other, then convincing yourself that your fanfic about them having sex is true to their characters can be challenging. It can be especially disheartening when you see a particularly somber episode and start to wonder if the characters having sex would be disrespectful to all that they have been through together. Is flirting even an option with someone who has fought hard-won battles at your side? How does someone transition from a long-time companion into a sexual partner?

I didn’t mean to say that at all. Quite the contrary, I think making the characters believable is the only serious challenge of writing a erotic fanfic. Writing an erotic fanfic is easier in other ways, but characterization is one area where being erotic does not help and so it is foremost in my mind. I am binge watching to try to find a good way to get the characters to do the things I want them to do, and it is all because it is so important to be faithful to the characters. In an ordinary fanfic you’re putting the characters through an adventure, and that invites direct comparison with the source material. It raises the question: if my fanfic were an episode of the show, would it be one of the better episodes, or one of the worse episodes? For an ordinary fanfic that is a huge challenge to overcome on top of making the characters believable. For an erotic fanfic there is no comparison with the source material because your fanfic could never be an episode of the show. Instead of trying to do what the show does and replicate what makes the show great, we’re trying to do something the show could never do and so we don’t have to try to replicate any greatness. We still have the challenge of bringing the characters to life, but that seems tame by comparison. There are other ways to make fanfic writing easier. Instead of writing an erotic adventure for characters of a show or movie that you like, you could write a fanfic for a video game. Even excellent video games are traditionally quite weak in their stories, so even if you don’t have any great ideas for your fanfic’s story you can still often improve upon the source material. A long time ago I once wrote a fanfic for a card game; the game had practically no story at all so it had to be mostly my own ideas, but I knew that no matter how mediocre my ideas might be they were still going to be worth writing because they were a better story than the game had to offer.

I am not a fanfic writer, but very recently I suddenly found myself in the grip of an urge to become a fanfic writer. I’ve written other things, of course, but I’ve never seen the value in a fanfic. In an ordinary fanfic, I would just be pitting my ideas against the ideas of a show that I love, and there’s no way that I can expect to meet that standard, so the whole enterprise seems pointless. I would be better off writing something original so I can see something that I couldn’t get elsewhere in superior quality. An adult fanfic is a different matter. I don’t need to match the skill of the original writers to create something interesting in an adult fanfic. The original writers would never show us these characters having sex, and that’s a very exciting idea that we just can’t get from the source material. This makes an adult fanfic far superior to an ordinary fanfic, because it’s justifying its existence by breaking new ground that the television show would not ever touch and showing us a new side of the characters that we love. The most important skill will be to stay true to the characters. Random people having sex is boring. If I can’t show off the personalities of the characters in my fanfic then my fanfic fails before it begins. If I can make the personalities shine through, then nothing else I do really matters, but that one thing seems like a daunting task. How do you get into the head of your favorite characters to decide what they will do next? How do you get them to have sex without unbelievably altering their personalities?