A Joke Too Far

[kurrginatorX]

This is my latest, a candidate for the April Fools contest, so please read and cast your vote. Thanks.

https://www.literotica.com/s/a-joke-too-far


My other works: https://www.literotica.com/stories/memberpage.php?uid=3938682&page=submissions

 

[AwkwardMD]

I read this a couple days ago, wanting to give you feedback, and I had to hold off. I was frustrated at the end of it, and I couldn't put my finger on why. In a technical level, the story is written well. The jokes and pranks mostly worked (although I've come to opinion (read: my opinion) that writing HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA is less effective than describing a character laughing) if I stepped back and assessed them individually for their own merit. The sex was a little fast for my taste, but that's a matter of taste.

The problem I had with A Joke Too Far took me almost this entire time to put my finger on: Crying Wolf Syndrome. Classic case. Can't believe I didn't see it before.

Imagine a story where there is a woman. She runs into town screaming about a wolf chasing her. The fine, upstanding townspeople grab their handy pitchforks and torches and crusade into the darkness, but find nothing. Then, the next night, the same woman does the same thing. The townspeople still find nothing. Then, the next night, the woman comes into town crying about a wolf. A few townspeople muster the willpower to help her, but at this point their patience is thin. On the fourth night, a wolf appears and chases the woman.

And then he rapes her. For Literotica's sake, let's jusy say he's a werewolf.

Now... there will be those who dig non-con and will find that sex scene hot. There will be those who find the nonhuman angle hot. For the most part, though, the woman has used up her credibility with the townspeople at the pace that she does with the readers. Nobody feels sorry for her. Nobody feels much of anything for her except exhaustion, and that goes for the reader too.

In choosing 'escalating pranks' as your vehicle, you shot yourself in the foot in two different ways.

1) pranks are more fun to be a part of than to watch. Punk'd is a good example of this. It was a phenomenon, absurdly popular, and then it was just gone and nobody missed it. On the one hand, showing a prank unfolding from the perspective of the prankster holds zero tension because we know what is going to happen. On the other hand, being pranked is one of those things that is a split second (give or take) of experiential existence that you draw on the memory of for a long time. It's such an 'in the moment' thing that it's hard to capture at all, let alone do so in writing, which is such a slower medium. I suspect one could pull off pranks in a VR medium, but doing it with writing is tough. You unintentionally set your own difficulty level so high that it's basically unachievable.

Add on to the fact that while the characters are technically pranking each other, the reader is being subjected to each of these 'gotchas' and never gets the chance to reciprocate in the same way. We get pranked the most, and that's not a good feeling. It's synonymous to being the butt of the joke.

2) pranksters wear out their welcome. Fast. Erotica often hinges on getting the reader to be invested in a character to create emotional empathy. That way, when the character is high (or low in the case of cuck/humiliation/NTR stories), the reader feels that too. An emotional connection with a character is a silver bullet. It's a tool, or weapon, that you really want to have in your arsenal because that makes you dangerous.

Pranking, however, is inherently a betrayal of trust. It's one thing when that comes at the hands of family, where trust is (sometimes) found in limitless quantity. In others, who are basically strangers, it is a commodity not to be squandered.

In the end, I didn't care for the characters. I didn't care that they were entering a new phase of their relationship. I wasn't drawn in. It didn't matter that the dialog was good, or that the descriptions were clear, or any number of other factors you executed well. This is a good story about a bad idea, and that taints everything it touches.