In Which I Kinda Sorta Finally Get the Mpreg Thing

[douqi]

Mpreg in slash has never done very much for me. I would go so far as to say that pregnancy in fic has never done very much for me, as I cannot stop the nagging worry about who is going to look after the offspring that will ensue, and how terribly overworked they're going to be. Look, I'm one of nature's jiejies, this is just how my brain works all of the time.

And then, while scrolling idly through JJWXC, I came across a plot synopsis for a xianxia yanqing that ran basically like this. A young, powerful female cultivator has just beaten her male nemesis (and eventual love interest, though she doesn't know it yet) in a duel. She's about to deliver the coup de grace when he screams 'DON'T DO IT I AM PREGNANT WITH YOUR CHILD.' The female cultivator, shocked by this news but determined to take responsibility for her eventual offspring and their gestational parent, stops short of killing her male nemesis, installs him in a comfortable house and tells him in what I imagine is a gruff male lead voice, 'Don't worry about anything, just focus on taking good care of yourself and the baby.'

In that moment I thought: yeah, I get it now.

I don't really want to interrogate too deeply at this point what this says about how I think of pregnancy and how I think of 'straight' relationships. I do want to note that my favourite f/m pairings across c-media are the ones in Eldest Princess Above and Dong Lan Xue. Yes, they are mini-dramas and there are issues with production quality and plotting and pacing, but I utterly love that gender role subversion and the fact that the female leads are allowed to be wild and violent and sexual in a way I have not really encountered in all my years of drama-watching.

Comments

[profiterole_reads]

Interesting!

If mpreg is when 2 guys have a baby and fpreg is when 2 women have a baby, is there a special word when a guy gets pregnant from a woman? (a situation I had never encountered so far)

[profiterole_reads]

I googled "hetero mpreg" and it seems to be a wording in use.

[douqi]

:O And here I'd thought mpreg was just... mpreg (regardless of gender of impregnator).

I also thought fpreg was just... preg, haha.

[profiterole_reads]

Well, I'm sure both definitions are in use out there.

[meikuree]

I’m squicked by pregnancy in fiction too (everyone came from a stork in the sky as far as I care) but sometimes when you change the script up and subvert some, or a lot of things I get it too! so strange and fascinating. and f-> mpreg is one of the few permutations that would appeal to me.

one time I thought about one of my faves (from JJK) going through an Oedipus arc and knocking up her mother and it was fucked up enough that it rounded back from squick to interesting to me. she already kills her father in canon, so it only needs one extra step.

[geraineon]

I've always thought mpreg is just a guy getting pregnant, regardless of who is the impregnator too, so you're not the only one.

[geraineon]

... My preference for pregnancy in fic/stories is when it involves monsterfucking and also horror. XD

Otherwise, it's just fine. I'm neither squicked by it, nor am I particularly interested in it.

[skuzzybunny]

This title made me wheeze, summary to follow only made me nod my head in agreement. sure sure i accept this XD

[douqi]

One of the very few times I have ever found a yanqing premise intriguing!

[douqi]

I have a lot of time for the monstrous/horror view of pregnancy (I mean, a THING is IN YOUR BODY and it's FEEDING OFF YOU).

I don't know if it's just me, but I feel like there's a lot of horror vibes embedded in the Asian (or maybe specifically femme Asian) view of marriage and pregnancy/childbirth? That isn't necessarily present to that degree (or at all) in Western-Anglo culture. I remember having a friendly argument with an American friend over whether marriage was romantic (me: well of course there's nothing romantic about marriage).

[douqi]

Oh god LESBIAN OEDIPUS why has this never occurred to me before. SO HOT??

[meikuree]

I agree with you in that conversation!

I’ve always privately felt that pregnancy is a socially accepted form of body horror, and the institution of the family accepted cultural horror.

I’m curious about the resonances/divergences between eg. Victorian anxieties about sexuality, social contamination, and “the marriage plot” + colonial entanglements with raising children well as… you know, part of the whole manifest destiny “we must groom our future colonial administrators” plan, and the very different set of cultural discourses in Asian literature on this. There doesn’t seem to be the same preoccupation with heterofuturity, although there is misogyny, see Raise The Red Lantern/大红灯笼高高挂.

[meikuree]

someone needs to write a Lesbian Oedipus adaptation!

[douqi]

Oh yeah that is SUPER interesting! A friend and I were kicking around the idea of how David Copperfield might be adapted as a c-drama and I kept getting the sense that a Republican Era setting would fit well (there's modernity, and disruptions of settled class/family hierarchies etc, and the anxieties around that). A key point of divergence I guess is the colonial/expansionist approach of the Victorian age vs Republican Era China being the target of said expansion. Would really love to see someone who knows more about this than me delve into it!