Translating Discord Emotes to Lit story

[Lydra]

Hey all, I'm considering a new story that would include characters connecting over Discord. For the uninitiated -- there's quite a few kinky NSFW Discord servers that are quite active. A big part of the culture of those places is emotes. I don't mean people spamming POGGERS because lulz, they really add tone and a little emotion to text on a screen.

How might one try to do that in a way that would render in a story submission here? I'm sure the direct Discord emotes wouldn't work, but maybe kaomoji to emulate it -- things like ( ﾟ▽ﾟ)/ for example. Those tend to use a lot of special characters, and I've no idea how well or poorly they'd render here.

Thoughts? Best to simply stay clear and stick to regular dialog?

Thanks,
Lydra

 

[NotWise]

It's hard to guess what will work on Lit because they translate stories to a simplified character set. Some kaomojis might work, but some contain characters that Lit might edit, remove, or fail to display.

Unicode (and I think Lit uses Unicode) contains a large number of codes for emojis (there's a list and some documentation here. In order to work, Lit would have to provide a character set that provides a glyph for the codes, and it appears that there aren't standardized glyphs. I've used one on the forum (a steaming cup of coffee), but I have no reason to think that Lit's story pages will work that way.

Edit: Also, if Lit leaves the code alone, then your browser might be able to supply the glyph. I'm hazy on how all that works.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Hey all, I'm considering a new story that would include characters connecting over Discord. For the uninitiated -- there's quite a few kinky NSFW Discord servers that are quite active. A big part of the culture of those places is emotes. I don't mean people spamming POGGERS because lulz, they really add tone and a little emotion to text on a screen.

How might one try to do that in a way that would render in a story submission here? I'm sure the direct Discord emotes wouldn't work, but maybe kaomoji to emulate it -- things like ( ﾟ▽ﾟ)/ for example. Those tend to use a lot of special characters, and I've no idea how well or poorly they'd render here.

Thoughts? Best to simply stay clear and stick to regular dialog?

Thanks,
Lydra

If you mouse over a Discord emote, you'll see a text description e.g. :sparkling_heart:. Giving that description might be a more reliable if less visual way to convey it, but translating between media is often tricky.

 

[Handley_Page]

It strikes me that if there is a known meaning to these symbols, it should be fairly easy to write it is words.
Or perhaps I'm being over simplistic ?

 

[PennameWombat]

If you mouse over a Discord emote, you'll see a text description e.g. :sparkling_heart:. Giving that description might be a more reliable if less visual way to convey it, but translating between media is often tricky.

I'm not an expert and spend little time on Discord but looking at page source and such it appears most of these eventually resolve to a png image file or a gif for animated emotes. Which means that you could, with some effort, track back all of them to an actual file and probably download/acquire it. There are websites dedicated to helping you build your own emotes.

The concern here then is licensing. Are these free to use outside of Discord? Not something I'm going to chase, but would be a concern.

But, that simply means you'd need to provide inline links in your story. Each Lit story seems to be encapuslated in a series of css files, one per Lit page. Charset is utf-8 and html. So links could work to pull in images.

My guess, you'd have to put it into Illustrated stories? A quick look and they're doing "<img src="https://" that resolves to a Literotica server. No idea how you submit an Illustrated story.

It strikes me that if there is a known meaning to these symbols, it should be fairly easy to write it is words.
Or perhaps I'm being over simplistic ?

Yup. But from how I read the OP's request, that would sort of defeat the purpose. Although, you could indeed simply use the tags and meaning.

A story using the actual emotes wouldn't be anything I'd care about, but I'm not the audience. Technically, it seems feasible. But no idea about the actual mechanics nor the policies.

 

[jsmiam]

...

Thoughts? Best to simply stay clear and stick to regular dialog?

Thanks,
Lydra

Three things.

Go through the motions of submitting a story with your Webdings until you get to the preview and submit. Then preview only (but don’t submit). Then preview on phone, tablet, the app if you trust apps (nobody should), etc. (no guarantee it would look the same published though. )

Two. Try just describing the emojis? {raised eyebrow}

Because three, do you want a story only discord users will understand? {shrug}

 

[marlowesaintlouis]

I approach texted conversations the same way I do spoken dialogue, but I format them in italics rather than in quotation marks. When characters use emoji, I describe them in very basic terms and leave that description un-italicized. That's what I personally find to look the most polished and the least distracting, and I would be turned off by a story with actual embedded emotes or emoji (and I don't think it's even possible to do that,) or ASCII art.

I do try to give enough context that a reader doesn't need to understand the full nuance of an emoji to follow the thread of the conversation. Used sparingly, I think it helps build character voice and a sense of realism. But there's definitely a breaking point where it becomes unreadable. I consider it on par with writing out a character's accent phonetically--that is, I try to err on the side of less is more, haha.

FWIW here's an example of how I implement this in my own writing, so you can decide for yourself if you think it would work for you:

Elllllieee, I texted her, knowing as I was doing it that she was going to be annoyed. guess what I’m doing tonightttt

Her answer came a few minutes later. Let me guess… getting exploited by a shady-ass art dealer? Eye-roll emoji.

I rolled my eyes back. Why couldn’t she just be excited for me? Yeah that sounds about right. Help me pick an outfit?

Shouldn’t you be thinking about your portfolio instead of what you’re wearing? Or have we just accepted that it’s more about tongue emoji, peace-sign emoji than woman artist emoji.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

I agree with the above - less is more, and you want readers to understand what the emojis mean (I'm not sure about tongue and peace in that context)

I tend to use single quotes to denote texts, with some characters failing to use proper spelling or punctuation. This exchange takes place in 2010 hence not using the word emoji, and only the younger one using smileys at all:

I mix up the curry. And shortly after, text Dan. 'Added a tub of yoghurt to the lamb ceylon like you said. Tastes ace! Ta.'

His reply is the word 'Wuss!' with a smiley.

I refuse to send a smiley back. After finishing my plateful, I know what to say.

'Thats not what you said on Friday night!'

His next text is a grinning smiley.

I'm grinning too, looking forward to seeing him tomorrow.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I agree with the above - less is more, and you want readers to understand what the emojis mean (I'm not sure about tongue and peace in that context)

Even on platforms that do display emoji, there's a risk of misunderstanding, because different OSes may use quite different artwork for the same emoji. Something that looks friendly on a Samsung could look quite different on Google: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/516048/22-emojis-look-completely-different-different-phones