My Thoughts on Captioning (Or, What I Would Tell Myself If I Could Go Back)
If you, past me, are considering getting into caption making… don’t.
Just don’t. Don’t bother with it, rid the thought from your mind. Do something more productive. Draw, sculpt, write, paint, weld, play video games, I don’t know. Just don’t make captions.
I got into captioning many years ago thinking it would be a good way to expand my writing prowess; I wrote a few captions that I ended up losing (with two saved in Bonus Material) but wouldn’t release anything until I wrote
[REDACTED FOR HIS ANONYMITY]. If I could go back in time and convince myself to turn that into a full piece, short story or perhaps even more, I would have, as that started a very long chain of events leading up to me compiling this archive. Admittedly, making captions was fun at first; it was a silly and low-complexity medium with a lot of room for experimentation. I could make what I wanted how I wanted to, without really worrying about quality or themes.
Maybe I just hung around the wrong circles, but I can say that those conceptions have long since been wiped clean from my mind.
Captioning is very strict and formulaic. It is an unspoken expectation that every caption follows a relatively similar pattern as follows.
- Reader meets subject. This subject is usually female, though a (submissive) “futanari” is allowed as well. Male subjects are allowed only if your audience is expecting one already. If they aren’t, you have already lost.
- Subject has overwhelming, simplistic feelings for the reader. This is almost always some form of contrivance in the flavor of “childhood friend”, “secret crush”, “wife”, “mother”, or “vicious, obsessive stalker with a crush”. You must pick from the list; mixing is fine but making anything new is discouraged. Forbid you make an interesting sendup, lest you diverge from what is expected of you.
- Reader and subject screw judiciously from start to climax. This must be described in detail with ludicrous amounts of dime-store level hentai writing and onomatopoeias that the reader is too much of a moron to imagine. You’re not allowed to be artfully descriptive or leave a single bit of the experience up to the reader. Rather, you are to hold the hand of the entire fantasy from start to finish. Done correctly, the reader shouldn’t need to fire a brain cell.
- Subject climaxes. This is basically an extension of Step 3 but with extra keyboard hammering. Just find a highly produced porn video and copy what the woman says in your work; befalling that, find a hentai script. The effect is the same.
- The reader and subject are now one. There’s a hook that this will continue in the future to some extent. End caption.
And I say this without a hint of irony as the captions I made that followed this formula (such as
[ALSO REDACTED FOR HIS ANONYMITY]) were far and away my most successful, whereas anything else was either damned by faint praise or ignored outright.
With this, I believe caption communities have a general problem not unlike punk communities; you are to be yourself, just like everyone else. Every captioner has a unique brand of writing, a flavor of fetishes and favors that are blended into their editing style to produce works that only they can make, not unlike how an artist or author refines their craft to give glimpses into a world only they know of – a message in a bottle from the island of the creator to the wanting eyes and hands of the consumer. But I really want you to go out and look for some captions; threads on 4chan, subreddits, and Discord communities. You look there, and you tell me what’s the most successful; it’s very, very consistently the same thing, the same formula, and it doesn’t matter where you go.
I have seen blithering captioners who could not make it through a community college creative writing course, with no concept of text design, formatting, color choice or even a grasp on their own language, become wildly successful for their willingness to crank out illegible, eye searing slop. I have seen captioners spend literal weeks pruning and preening their work only to have it kicked aside and posted over by something that’s more in-line with expectations. And it happens all the time; captioners might want something new or even be aware this is happening, but the anonymous consumers only want the same thing spoon fed to them over and over nonstop. The names change, the themes might weave here or there, but the community remains the same.
[ommitting a section on concerns about copyrighted material here]
The twenty captions in this collection are products of what I would say added up to hundreds of hours of work. What you’re looking at is a set of images I devoted years to making. But I have nothing to show for it. I can’t walk up to my parents and show them a picture of a snake’s ass with some teasing text to the side and have them be proud. I can’t attach them to a portfolio as a memoir of my image editing skills, nor can I include it as part of a writing portfolio to sell my skills. And, in good faith, I can’t exactly claim them as “mine”; that would be to discount the work of the artist who made the original art. All I can do is lock them away and move on.
I shouldn’t have made them. And you shouldn’t either.
Don’t bother with writing captions; write stories, write comics, write limericks and epics. Write for the people you care about. Write something you can be truly proud of. Hell, write something you can sell. Something you can provide in good faith that it is yours, that it has always been yours. Write something for you.
Just don’t ever write a caption.
