Mpreg

[wildestranger]

So. Mpreg. Do you love it? Hate it? Can't be bothered to think about it?

I find myself curious about the phenomenon of mpreg in fandom. Some people seem to hate it with an unholy passion. Some perceive it as OMG the cutest thing eva. A plot device, a source of crackfic, an embodiment of patriarchal control system, an embodiment of feminist subversion, mostly an embodiment of bad writing?

I want to know what you think about mpreg, and most importantly, why. If you dislike it, what do you dislike about it? If you enjoy it, what do you think is good/interesting/sexy about it?

Is it the association with bad writing, silly teenagers who cannot imagine romance without babies and marriage? I used to be wary of such things until I read eutychides's Things That Change (which is not only a devastatingly well written mpreg, but a fic so moving and memorable that after finishing reading it at three in the morning, I had to go back the next day and reread the whole thing).

Also, if I were to write an mpreg fic, would you read it? That said, I am writing one so you shall be put to the test in a few weeks. ;)

Comments

[starrysummer.livejournal.com]

I have no desire to read pregnancy fic in general. MPREG, femmepreg (a word I may have made up), preg the old fashioned way, in vitro, immaculate conception.

Actually, scratch that. Immaculate conception fic could be cool, but probably only because I like blasphemy.

But anyway, where I stand I feel like fic about pregnancy is about love and creation and life. I want my fic about hate and destruction and death.

I do also feel a vague discomfort with the school of slashfic that wants no female characters anywhere near their fic. Not saying that most slashers are like that, but I have seen ficathon requests where people say that they don't want females anywhere in their fic, and while that's not an mpreg thing necessarily, it does creep me out a bit. And there's something philosophically weird about placing something that in reality only women can do and men cannot physically accomplish into the male domain. But that's me being over-analytical. Most of what bothers me about MPREG is in the PREG and not the M. To quote Eric Cartman, "don't care."

[musesfool.livejournal.com]

And there's something philosophically weird about placing something that in reality only women can do and men cannot physically accomplish into the male domain.

Yes. That's one of my issues with MPreg as well. Among many others. But I am not a slasher, and I like women in my fic, I like them to have sex- with both men and with each other - and kick ass, so...

I don't read MPreg unless it's parody, and even then I have a low tolerance for it.

[alisanne.livejournal.com]

Before I wrote HP, I used to despise Mpreg. I had even seen it done well in the Clex fandom (what I used to read and write before HP) and there was even 'alien physiology' on their side to explain it, but still, it just seemed like a no go.

The thing that makes it appealing in HP, IMO, is magic. It makes it all possible, you know? Plus, it seems like such a loving thing to do and I adore schmoop, so it seems to work where HP/DM and even HP/SS are concerned. Come to think of it, I've even written HP/LM schmoopy Mpreg! *sigh*

So yes, I've written (non-graphic) Mpreg in HP, and I definitely enjoy reading it. And I can't wait to see yours. :)

[geoviki.livejournal.com]

I say it's a plot device. As such, it can be good or horrible, depending on the skill of the writer. I don't seek it out but I don't avoid it. I fell in love with "Things That Change", too!

[http://users.livejournal.com/_emeraldgreen/]

Eee, are you writing James/Reg mpreg, or am I making that up? :D

I've only ever read mpreg in crackfic, as I really, really can't take it seriously at all. But then, seeing as I've never read it done seriously... *shrugs* But serious mpreg is just not something that appeals to me. Or any pregnancy fic, for that matter.

That said, whether yours is crackfic or deadly serious, I will most certainly read it. Especially if it is James/Reg. :)

[roz-morgan.livejournal.com]

The only pergnancy fic I like is Mpreg. I think all to often it's done as "aww! Babies!" but you can do so many things with it - I mean horror, revoltion, abandonment, the whole medical community wanting to poke you, the possibility of choosing to have an abortion. I think if Mpreg is handled more realistically and maybe even a little bit nastily its much better.

Is this the Regulus/James one? I'd read that!

[melandry.livejournal.com]

I echo starrysummer: I'm just not that interested in anyone being pregnant. That said, I will reading mpreg, especially by authors I know I enjoy, so long as it doesn't turn into a pregnancy fetish fic, if you know what I mean.

[shaggydogstail.livejournal.com]

I have very little interest in Mpreg and all the Mpreg fics I've read have been universally awful. I look on Mpreg in a fic in much the same way I look on the inclusion of an American exchange student--there's no law that says the fic has to be awful, but in practice they usually are.

My major dislike of Mpreg is the ridiculous implausibility and the fact that writers fall back on 'well, they're magic, of course it's possible!' as a justification. Um, no. As grrliz likes to say, just because you're a wizard doesn't mean you suddenly have a uterus. It is conceivable (ha!) that there might be a way of using magic to make Mpreg possible, but the writers of the fics I've seen have never bothered to come up with one--the pregnancies are always a surprise, with some ridiculously spurious reason given for how conception occured. (Werewolves can get pregnant if they bottom from the top in the seventh quarter of the moon on the second Tuesday in March! Snape spilt estrogen potion on his cock! Draco is part-Veela and therefore secretly a hermaphrodite! etc)

I did once consider writing an Mpreg fic purely to see if I could make it plausible and worked out a lot of stuff about using a combination of magic and Muggle IVF technology. I've never written it because, yuck Mpreg! ;p

I would probably read yours, mostly out of curiosity to see how you handle it. On the whole, I think it's pretty daft though.

[midnitemaraud-r.livejournal.com]

My major dislike of Mpreg is the ridiculous implausibility and the fact that writers fall back on 'well, they're magic, of course it's possible!' as a justification.

Yes, exactly!

There's the whole biology of it because there's no egg and therre's a few million sperm of only the, er, ejaculator - their sperm doesn't even... intermingle. Male Ejaculate doesn't self-ejaculate inside the arse - so the sperm of the two men doesn't even mingle, the so-called child would be the child of only one, (and then wouldn't that sort of be incest?) and considering the purpose of the rectum/arse whatever you wish to call it - it's primary biological function is evacuation. Does the guy not shit for 9 months or do they have to attach a colostomy bag?

Not to mention that the female X egg has more biological materiel than the male X sperm does, two Y's connecting is not viable, and with millions of them swimming around, which of them joins? How are there not half a million zygotes trying to implant themselves? (Not that they'd be viable because again, missing materiel) Where does it implant? (See biological function of the anus and colon and absence of rich nutrient lining of uterus, the fact that men don't menstruate every four weeks out of their arses, and the rectum is not at all elastic like the uterus.)

I just can't read it knowing about the totally impossible biology of it. Because magic or no magic, it's still a human body. I've seen science fiction story where male aliens are the ones who become impregnated, but the key is that they are aliens and their biology is designed that way. And yes, I know wizards can turn tortoises into teapots and wizards themselves can become animals, and I accept that just fine. But as far as we know, they're still human and procreate the same way we do.

Me, I've never seen an MPreg story where they magic one guy a vagina and cervix and uterus and fallopian tubes and ovaries - and then what do you do? Magic the sperm into eggs? It would obviously require forethought and planning and complicated spells because a sperm isn't going to spontaneously transform itself, not to mention, where would it? Inside the testes? It wouldn't fit through the tubes to get out, and even if it could, how would it get into the anus? Spontaneous Apparation? Although if you're clever you just transfigure the testes into ovaries and the vas defrans and all those tubey bits into fallopian tubes... *ouch*

I know people don't tend to write about the biology of it. In the MPregs I dared to read, they have anal sex and... Oops! But me - I can't ignore the biology. I can't suspend my disbelief. I suppose I accept it more in a magical universe like Harry Potter, but when I hear about people writing BackStreet Boys or N'Sync Mpreg, my brain just goes 'splodey.

On the other hand, for me, it has nothing to do with the pregnancy aspect at all. If men want to give birth and have tons of babies, be my guest. I hope the epidural works for ya. (Or maybe not, depending on who it is! *g*)

[snegurochka_lee]

What starrysummer said, to the letter. :)

Pregnancy creeps me out. In fic, in RL, whatever. It also usually goes along with schmoopy established-relationship fic, which is not generally my preferred genre.

Also: mpreg fic often (IMO) involves Snape. Which... yeah. I just can't imagine a more extreme deviation from his canon persona than to get him pregnant, or doting on a pregnant partner. *shrug* But to each their own. :)

[shaggydogstail.livejournal.com]

Yeah, why is it so often about Snape? Because he features pretty damn high up on my list of Canon Characters Who Aren't Suited to parenting, whatever the circumstances.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

I really don't like it. Mostly because all the ones I've seen have been irredeemably awful, but one of my good friends is very fond of it and she writes it well, so it's not all that. Partly I don't like the way slash has to have babies and marriage and all the trappings of a fairytale romance, especially when it's about characters for whom a fairytale ending would be OOC in the extreme (Sirius/Remus, anyone?), and partly it's because it COULD NEVR HAPPEN OMG. I'll have more patience with it if the author concocts an even vaguely plausible scenario - magic gone wrong! alien abduction! - but the classically bad stories where it "just happens" are the ones that send me fleeing for the back button.

Wandering around LJ

[auctasinistra.livejournal.com]

With nothing to add about mpreg (I asked a similar question at my own LJ a while back)) and with apologies for the brief OT interjection, your post made me wonder.

the more 'masculine' the behaviour of a man becomes, the more he is transported into the feminine, the dimension of parade or, to use an old-fashioned term, seeming. The more a man today tries to behave like a real man, the more false and affected his actions appear.

So this author alleges that women's behavior is false and affected? That must be an interesting "look" into the female psyche.

(Here via Daily Snitch, btw)

[pir8fancier.livejournal.com]

I am one of those who generally shudders at mpreg. I find it, on the whole, a sneaky way to feminize one of the characters so that you have more of a traditional Barbara Cartland-type of romance. It seems to be a way for some writers to write slash (which I believe they feel conflicted about, it turns them on and it also embarasses the shit out of them). Mpreg is a way to satisfy traditional mores and get a guy in there. Some fics I've read I actually felt were almost homophobic.

That said, I have read a few pieces that were NOT like that. Yes, it worked as a character and a plot device and nothing else. Things that Change is an EXCELLENT example of that. A superb piece that rocked my world. I wrote a very detailed response to the author about why it was so antithetical to most mpreg pieces and why it was one of the few mpreg that had me screaming and clapping wilding at the end. It was a superb, superb piece on a relationship. That happened to have kids somewhere in the plot.

Why? For those reasons. It was a brilliant, insightful analysis of a relationship, where the mpreg was the McGuffin. Not a pathetic attempt to turn one of our boys into a girl.

Write a good piece of fic, I'll be there clapping along with the others.

[divinereverie.livejournal.com]

I don't like it for various reasons. It's pregnancy, and I don't really want to read about pregnancy. It shunts females over to the side, and a lot of times the author kind of adds to it by turning the females into annoying bitches. And etc. I don't really know how to describe it, really. But most of my reasons for hating MPreg turn up when the female is pregnant, because that's most of what most (ie bad, because it is a genre riddled with badfic) MPreg does: Turn one character into the equivalent of a female with a penis. Not to say that bad slash doesn't do this without the baby, but the baby just adds to the cliche heterosexual relationship, which by the way, I didn't want in het fic, let alone slash k thx.

I've read good MPreg, I don't seek out the bad, I ranted about this last year and got a lot of people mad, but basically, I don't want to read about overly cliche pregnancies and fertile colons. Cause omg surprise surprise Remmypoo, all werewolves are magical hermaphrodites for two minutes on the last day of the year, and it was just totally a coincidence that's when Siri omg so hot <3 decided to come in your mouth. In nine months you'll be spitting up some tadpoles along with your angst. Good luck!

[shaggydogstail.livejournal.com]

In nine months you'll be spitting up some tadpoles along with your angst.

*scrubs brain with industrial strength bleach*

Thanks for that!

And there I was thinking that Mpreg was all about the assbabies. I never knew there were blowjob babies as well. Oh, joy.

[tesseract-5.livejournal.com]

The only MPREG fic I've liked is Casira's body switch with Sirius and Lily. It's just too AU for me, and yeah, it usually isn't well done.

[darth-cabal.livejournal.com]

I'm not crazy about mpreg. It's anatomically impossible and weird.

Also, if I were to write an mpreg fic, would you read it?

Of course! Forget everything I just said.

[stephanometra.livejournal.com]

I generally dislike mpreg because it is all-too-often written by the stupid kind of slasher that thinks M/M relationships are just like M/F relationships, except with double the penis. I don't read slash in order to find watered-down, feminized versions of the characters I like, and those are the sorts of characterizations that usually show up in mpreg fics.

I don't hate it on principle, and will read it when a story is recommended to me by someone in whose taste I have a great deal of faith. Amanuensis (gods, I think it was her) wrote a truly spectacular Snape/Sirius, Lucius/Harry dystopic fic that centered on mpreg, and I loved it beyond measure. There was a HBP alternate-perspective Harry/Draco called "Genesis" (I feel awful because I can't remember the author now) that I really adored as well. But it doesn't kink me in the slightest, so I don't seek it out. There could be a whole lot more fantastic mpreg fic out there, I dunno.

And I'd read anything you wrote, just fyi.

[sambethe.livejournal.com]

Like some others have said, I have no general interest in pregnancy - both RL and in my fic. So mpreg fics already have a hard sell to make if I read them.

I've read only a few mpreg fics but the ones that I did all hit me with their overly saccharine, generally schmoopy feel. I like fluff, I think it serves a role in fanfic, but these stories generally went over the top in their fluffiness. These fics also seemed to come with some pretty OOC interpretations of characters I like, which really didn't help their case. Also, most of the time the mpreg just seems to be a random whim rather being essential to the heart of what the writer wants to say about the character. So if it really served a purpose, that might make me be more inclined to read it.

And as you said in your comments, they also do hit a nerve with me in respect to the idea that with love marriage and babies must follow. But like my general feelings about pregnancy, this has more to do about me and my own feelings on the subjects than the merits of any of the fics.

Would I read another mpreg fic? Maybe. Would depend on who is in it and who wrote it. Since I've liked most of your other fic I'd say possibly. That's not much of an answer, is that?

[penknife.livejournal.com]

I don't tend to read mpreg except when it's silly humor, partly because I find it so hard to suspend disbelief about the biology involved. I did go read the story you linked and didn't have that problem with it, but it's not what I think of as classic mpreg -- Draco spends most of the story physically intersexed, with all the appropriate organs for conception, pregnancy and childbirth. And at that point, no, I don't have a realism problem; if magic can change tortoises into teapots, I'll accept it can change sperm into eggs or give a man a uterus and vagina.

I still don't really like even partial-sex-change mpreg, though, and I think that's partly because I feel like mpreg stories tend to make their characters lives revolve around pregnancy so much -- if a female character's pregnancy was that totally the focus of a story, I'd be saying "you know, it's not like the rest of her life has totally stopped just because she's pregnant." I suppose I'm just not that interested in stories about pregnancy as such, as opposed to stories about becoming a parent.

[arimel.livejournal.com]

This is what I don't like --

It's a gay story. About gay characters. Presumably having gay sex, with neither magically sprouting vaginas (in the instance of mpreg.)

Why would I want to read about babies?

Like, really. Pregnancy is sometimes interesting, but I mean -- come on. Why do we have to ALWAYS feminize the gay characters? WHY? Why can't the gay characters be completely masculine, no sobbing, no pregnancy?

I mean, come on ...

[coffeejunkii.livejournal.com]

the icon speaks for itself, i think. i both read and write mpreg. there are a number of very good mpreg stories in hp fandom, including things that change. i'd definitely read your mpreg fic!

[red_squared]

Personally? I neither love nor hate mpreg. I don't seek it out, but I don't avoid it, either. And most of the mpreg stuff that I've read has been simply hilarious.

Usually because the author is clearly staking out one of the men as the woman in the pairing, with clear and obvious "see? he's PREGNANT! that makes him the GIRL!" overtones, and who *wouldn't* find that hilarious?

Then again, I should say I'm not particularly offended by fics where one of the two is portrayed as a girl (in R/S this usually involves Remus craving chocolate, being bookish and unwilling to put out, etc etc etc). I mean, they're probably not realistic, but a fic doesn't have to be realistic to make my reading list.

Not sure if *any* of that was useful...

[thistlerose.livejournal.com]

I've only ever seen it work (that is to say, capture my interest) in parody. And in Casira's fabulous body-switch fic, which I'm not sure counts. I read one fic (not in HP) where a guy appeared to be pregnant, but it turned out his body was playing host to this alien... That was pretty cool. :)

But in general...why? Seriously, why? I think that the majority of MPreg writers are people who truly do not get that these men are, well, MEN. It's feminization taken to an extreme.

[sasha-davidovna.livejournal.com]

I agree with several others in that I'm just not very interested in reading pregnancy fic in general - it tends to be too schmoopy for my taste - unless there are interesting implications or points of view involved (I love the midwifery sections of The Red Tent, for example, even though other parts of the book annoy me). The biological impossibilty of mpreg, combined with the tendency of its writers to treat an m/m relationship like a m/f one with two penises, also irritates the heck out of me. I've read one or two parodies I've enjoyed - maurauderthesn's Made With Our Love in particular - but ordinarily it's something I avoid.

Reasons I don't like MPreg

[cleverthylacine]

1) One of the reasons I read slash is that I like male bodies. I'm a mostly straight woman, though I have taken a few vacations in Lesbos and don't completely rule out the possibility of this in the future. Taking a male body and distending the belly and breasts in pregnancy and putting it through all the complaints of pregnancy is like the Anti-Hot to me.

2) I really think that if the Sufficiently Advanced Technology (magickal or otherwise) is of a high enough level to make it possible for people of the same sex to have their own children together, the Sufficiently Advanced Technology would also be of a high enough level that this could be done outside the human body. For instance, there are uterine replicators in Lois Bujold's Vorkosigan series, and there is a whole world, Athos, on which there are no women. They use cloned ovaries to provide eggs, so the babies aren't the actual product of two men, but...they have babies, without women. Because Lois thinks that it would actually be harder to make babies out of sperm and sperm than to simply make a place where babies can grow, I suspect--that seems logical to me. And I'm sure magick could make it possible for an egg to become a sperm or vice versa, but I don't see why it wouldn't be possible to create a container in which a baby could grow magickally.

3) I really don't like reading about the problems of pregnancy in fic. I know more than I want to know about it in real life and I find it utterly squicktastic.

[lucy-lupin.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't say that I hate it, but to me it seems like the idea of it ties in with how when some writers do a slash pairing, the characters in the pairing seem to replicate traditional gender roles. Unless it's done in a comic way, I just don't see much point in it.

[sulky-rhino.livejournal.com]

I've liked some of the Mpreg stories I've read. Things That Change was one of them. :D It all depends on how they're written though. I don't really like "shmoopy" stories in general, so I don't like those that are like that. But I really like those Mpreg that are written well and have good characterisation (but I guess that would go for all fic I read...). Also, I love those that have some smart magic in it. Not just the whole "You're a wizard, so you can get pregnant. Ooops, didn't you know?" And Mpreg can make a good crack!fic as well. ;)