What are your honest thoughts on Mpreg?
Honestly my thoughts towards mpreg are extremely conflicted and some of this may come off as a hot take to it’s more popular form so like…take my words with a grain of salt, don’t let what I say here dictate how you do things or what you feel comfortable with.
Also I’ll include a break if you just want to skip down to the things I like.
So…full disclosure, I’m extremely picky about mpreg. And one of the things that squicks me most (which also happens to be 90% of all mpreg content) is sentient babies. Especially when the art/writing is clearly horny and written from that perspective, if the baby has any chance of becoming a thinking and talking person I cannot get invested in that. Do note I have no issue with say, a happy couple having sex while one is preggo, that’s absolutely fine, sexual intimacy between is fine (not really my thing as an angst writer, but it’s fine). But the whole “baby makes me horny” thing…sorry but no. Like I could never justify having a baby for horny reasons, it’s not something I can wrap my brain around or tell myself it’s okay? If anything content like that just makes me worry constantly about the baby itself…which is why it took me so long to figure out what kinds of mpreg I do like.
Wholesome mpreg I can deal with, on a level. But I’m still an angst writer, and a lack of conflict bores me pretty quick.
Note, too, that I am 100% childfree. I don’t particularly like babies, and this may very much cloud my opinion on mpreg. In my mind, pregnancy is a huge hassle. It’s giving up a lot of your bodily functions in order to grow what is essentially at the time, a parasite. And yeh eventually you give birth to the parasite and then’s it’s a bundle of joy, but internally babies put the body through so much extra BS and it kinda sucks? Especially for humans, human pregnancy is pretty sucky in comparison to a lot of the animal realm (I mean sure we’re not sea lice levels of “ohgodWHY” but we’re not…good).
And on that coin, pregnancy is something I’m actually pretty afraid of. Not just for the shit it’d put me through, including making me feel really shitty about myself cuz it’d force me back into the female role, but any child I have would not be wanted…which is it’s own bundle of issues I’m not going to go into lol. But fear has a way of becoming kink and fascination so you might be able to tell what I’m insinuating here.
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….anyways, all that clarification stuff aside, let’s get into, well, what I’m actually into?
So as a baby-hater–I mean childfree man (lmao) who is themselves scared of pregnancy and doesn’t like the idea of sentient babies, and yet enjoys angst and fucking with characters physically and psychologically…I settled more onto non-sentient pregnancy and parasitism/surrogacy. So basically once the babies pop out, they’re pretty much good to go and run off to do animalistic things. Maybe they share one touching glance with the unfortunate fella that just had to push them out of him, but after that the deed is done and that’s that. No “bundle of joy” fluff for me, sorry.
Also, most of the characters I target for this (*coughcoughjakecough*) are themselves battling with the issue of having kids–for one reason or other it’s a conflicting thing for them and it puts them through all kinds of hell trying to come to terms with it, figuring out what to do about it, whether to try hiding it or not, etc. Basically angst that focuses on the character going through it, not so much on the brood, because it’s kind of implied the brood will be fine no matter what, there’s no worry necessary focusing on their outcome, it’s focusing more on the character torment itself and what choices the character makes.
As for nonsentients broods, I tend to use either demons or monsters as filler (lol) since both can be easily attributed animalistic qualities and not really care about the father? They can also be given more beast-like qualities, they can come in any shape or size, so they can also have cool designs? They can also have spikes and other nasty things that make it really uncomfortable for the one carrying them, because…angst. They also tend not to really care about the torment they cause or really capable of understanding it, they mostly just act as pretty nasty parasites until they’re finally birthed. At best they might later become a sort of “pet”, but there’s no real father-child bond, yet the child itself is still innocent in a sense because it doesn’t any know better, it’s just doing what it does. (granted I rarely ever use “children” or “child” in my mpreg stuff, it’s usually “brood”, “offspring”, “litter”, “spawn” that more depersonalizes it because it’s not human).
And then most of my mpreg stuff is geared to Jake since he’s by far the angstiest about it. Like in a way Jake does crave some more feminine roles (he’ll never admit it of course), but the idea of having children freaks him out completely. He knows he’s not parent material and a really bad role model, that he’s not safe in his own right (the whole living in hiding as well as just being an unpredictable predator), much less for a kid, and frankly he has no idea what decent parents would do because he doesn’t have any to refer to (he didn’t have any father figure ever, and his mother just did not care about him–high key he’s also afraid of becoming like them the second he has a kid). But at the same time he’s appealing to creatures seeking something to serve as a surrogate to their broods (think oviposition, but the broods are squirmy and not eggs). He’s stretchy so he can take on more than the average schmuck, he’s tougher on the inside so he can put up with more abuse, and his magic is extremely easy to hijack in order to allow for him to keep everything alive and thriving, and he’s always very well-fed so the brood isn’t going to risk not getting enough nutrients anytime soon. The only thing he sucks at is the delivery, but there’s plenty of ways to get around that so it’s not that much of a loss given the appeal of someone that can grow a bunch of monsters quickly. And also sucking at the delivery=angst and possible medical drama, which is good shit.
So I guess basically end of the day I’m one of those guys that mostly just sees potential in mpreg for angst content? And for forcing characters to develop and deal with emotions you don’t usually get to see? Although honestly I’d argue that what I pedal /isn’t/ mpreg, at least in the traditional sense, because the baby itself isn’t the focus, nor is it sentent. But most people don’t know what I mean when I say “monster/demon surrogacy” or “monster/demon parasitism” so I mostly just call what I do “fringe mpreg” and call it a day.
