Kink Meme/Headscratchers

• Why, when you post a prompty-thingy to a kink meme, will you get a half-dozen or so replies talking about how much they want to read this fic, and no fills. Why bother commenting and taking up space if you won't post a fic?
  • People who second prompts usually either add their own ideas for ways the prompt could be filled, or just make it apparent that more people would enjoy the fic if it were written. Both kinds could make potential authors more likely to post a fill. It just doesn't always work. I've noticed bigger kink memes like the Phoenix Wright one have this problem, just because there are more people who only lurk or request, but enough people who do write to keep the meme going even if a lot of prompts are missed.
  • Still, it's a sign to the OP or any potential answerer that the idea is good (and may get you lotsa comments if you complete it). It's a lot easier to ignore the tenth "ZOMG THIS IS SUCH AN AWESOME IDEA" replies, than the fact that nobody wants to answer or comment on that "Aeris/Bob/Unicorn" prompt that you made.
    • Yeah, I'd agree on this-- it's support for the OP and the kink. Even though everyone knows that the internet is for porn and that if it exists, it is someone's fetish, one of the big reasons kink memes are so popular is because a lot of people don't want to publically cop to their secret, deep-down kinks, the ones they wouldn't even tell their best friends. They might think "Well, yeah, it's probably out there somewhere, but I bet everyone else thinks that only really skeezy sick people are into it." Especially if what they want to see is a bit (or a lot) extreme, and their public image is of someone who's shy, quiet, and whom most people would never expect to be into anything like that. So even if most of the rest of the fandom really does go "eewww" at your kink or OTP, there's still a possibility that you can find at least one other person interested in it and one person willing to write it. And since you're anonymous, no one will ever connect it with your fandom persona. Which is why if I see someone requesting a kink that's a little offbeat but which interests me, I try to "second" it just so they know they're not alone. (Uh, not that I've ever seconded Aeris/Bob/Unicorn; it's the concept of the thing.)
  • Because it's much easier to agree that it's a good idea than to sit down and write it.
• One poster on a Kink Meme I read said they were asexual. That's not a problem, but what just bugs me is...why were they on it in the first place?
  • They may not desire sexual contact with others, but do enjoy sexual stimulation they derive from fiction and more personal methods; this is a form of human asexuality.
  • Some of us find it interesting as something besides fap-material, especially with the longer and more character-interaction-y fills you get sometimes.
  • Also, you can often find some pretty good gen and non-explicit shippingfics on certain kink memes.
  • Some of us are on kink memes for the lulz, since some find poorly written sex (or some stranger kinks) amusing. I myself have "trolled" the more fail-prone memes and asked for ridiculous things, and the results are usually hilarious.
  • Just because a person is asexual doesn't mean they can't have fetishes or enjoy explicit material. It just means they aren't sexually attracted to either sex. And a large portion of the writing there is clean.
  • To work through writer's block. You can find a huge assortment of prompts on a Kinkmeme and they can be helpful in overcoming mental blockage.
  • To improve their writing? Sex scenes are pretty hard to write well.
• Why still call it a kink meme anymore? Sure, there is a some kinky prompts of "I WANT A SEVEN-SOME ORGY INVOLVING FARM ANIMALS", but really, most of the prompts are for (and result in) non-explicit fics.
  • Artifact Title. Also, maybe to help make sure people don't come in expecting to only see family-friendly fics...
  • Well, even if there are only a few kinky fics in a meme....
• Say your name is Joe Q. Average, and you're looking to start a kink meme for Harry Potter. Ignoring why this wouldn't really work out, and the fact that people have already tried, most kink memes are on Livejournal, since they have a handy set-up for stuff like this. You make a sock journal whose name is, I dunno, PotterKink, and set the limit to adult concepts so only people over fourteen can get in, and, when you're done setting up the format and posting the first entry/round with the rules in it, you make the journal public access so that people can see it. This is all well and good; however, if you go to all the trouble of making a meme, why is the format so murky? It's white text on a black background; there's a humongous stripe of white wasting space down the side of all of the comments; the user has to navigate through a maze of links to get to the most recent round or some other thing; the text is yellow on a white backgroud, rendering it practically unreadable; you or any other mod are inaccessable at the best of times. Even taking into account the fact that only a fraction of memes get noteworthy activity, if you'd just made the format a bit clearer, or perhaps just made a commuity out of it (commuities have nice, regulated color schemes, I'm fairly sure), you'd probably double your traffic. GAH!
  • Rrrgh seconding this so hard. Is it that hard to make a post collecting titled! organized! links to the different ficlet things?
    • Don't know if this is what you're talking about, but most recent kink memes have fill posts and update posts, in which writer!anons can post completed fills or alret readers when they have updates. Almost every recent kink meme also has a Delicio.us index that collects each fill. So that solves that matter, I suppose.
• Request freezes. Just...argh. What's the point of having a page where you can request fics, and then not letting you do it except for 15 minutes once a week? I'm looking at you, Hetalia Kink Meme. And then I DID make requests...and they didn't show up!
  • The HKM has an immense quantity of traffic. There's more requesters than fillers and, of course, is more easy to make multiple request than fills so people tend to make a lot of request and not filling older ones. Also, there's the problem that some things are requested various times over, so what you're looking for maybe has already been fill previously. To avoid that the mods install the delicious system and the fill list plus some independent fans have there own fill and request list for certain characters to help keep track but, regardless of that, they're still human and there's only as much they can do. So request freezes are there to give them some time to organized things and also as an incentive for people to write more fills. It might be frustrating to miss the unfreeze from time to time, but the alternative is much more chaotic, and the benefits are worth the wait.
• Well, is not as much as it bugs me, as it makes me curious: Do guys write/read in kink memes? And I mean particularly the more Ho Yay orientated of the bunch.
  • Can't say it's particularly slashy (then again, I don't have too much to compare it too), but I spend a fair amount of time on the Fallout Kink Meme. There's actually a pretty good amount of gen there, much of it very well-written.
  • No. They're essentially only an lj fangirl thing. I wouldn't even post/read a femmeslash one, and I also dislike them on how they dominate a lot of fandoms so that they almost become porn machines, and how it's almost exclusively OOC slash. Most guys I've spoken to feel the same way. It's just not a guy thing.
    • Er... sorry, I just can't buy this. Two things: one, I have quite a few guy friends who've admitted to, if not posting anything, then at least lurking/reading on kink memes. This may be just that we know different sorts of guys, though, so I won't fault you your own conclusions. But, second thing: how does the reading (or not) of kink memes by guys relate to the memes "dominating" fandoms and being almost exclusively OOC slash? I won't deny there is a wide spectrum of writers on memes, but I've generally found the quality of works, whether gen, PWP, or anything in between, to be somewhat better on kink memes than on, say, Fanfiction.net, maybe because the person who originally thought of the idea isn't required to write it out themselves. (I'm speaking from the TRON, Inception, Sherlock BBC, and Good Omens fandoms mostly, so if you usually frequent different memes, that might be the source of the divergence in opinions, in which case, sorry for my wordbarf.)
    • This troper has also noticed that the overall quality of fics seems to be higher on kink memes, surprisingly enough.
    • I suspect there's a few reasons for any possible variance in quality level; firstly, as someone else noted, the person who came up with the idea (and might not be a writer themselves) doesn't have to write it, they can let someone else who might be better than them have a go. Secondly, if you're looking through a list of writing prompts, that presumably means you're expressly looking for something to write about, which kind of suggests that you have an active interest in writing something, which by extension usually suggests a desire to do it as well as you can. Thirdly, you're also writing for at least one other person -- the person who originally wrote the prompt, and who presumably wrote it with the intention of reading whatever people came up with for it. If you upload something on FF.net, especially if it's a huge fandom, the sheer quantity of material means there's a good chance few-to-nobody might ever read it; you're really just doing it for yourself, so unless you really care about quality and put the effort in there's less incentive to do it well. If you're writing for someone else however (especially if it's a 'gift' to someone you like), usually you'll want to impress them, so you'll put a bit more effort into getting it right.
  • Guy here, and I've read around and even written for a few kink-meme style things (mainly general or het, though with an occasional Ho Yay or Les Yay). I actually found it quite a fun writing exercise; it's a neat little way of getting you out of your writing comfort zone by allowing you to write something you otherwise normally wouldn't, plus every so often I came across a prompt that I wouldn't have thought would interest me but actually provoked a pretty funny / interesting idea for a story.