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Formulation Two
Formulation One: If it is out there, the likelihood that there is erotic fan material of it becomes 100%.
“The Web brings people together because no matter what kind of a twisted sexual mutant you happen to be, you’ve got millions of pals out there. Type in ‘Find people that have sex with goats that are on fire’ and the computer will say, ‘Specify type of goat.’” --Richard Jeni
As the infamous musical number from Avenue Q tells us, "The Internet is for Porn". This isn't that far off.
Say you have a movie, or a TV show, or a video game, or a comic book, or some other form of visual media that proves popular. Ultimately, a Fandom will be built around it. Now, generally, it's a good bet that a substantial number of those fans are living their lives on MUCKs and other web outlets for their love of the media. Also, some of the fanbase may harbor a Perverse Sexual Lust for some of your characters -- even if they were too young for such thoughts before watching the media. As such, after a while, their interest in it may become darker, their thoughts turning towards more risque items of note... and they will start putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and write, draw, or render their fantasies for everyone to see.
Formulated in the dank depths of the 4chan imageboard, this is Rule #34 Of The Internet, the ubiquitous knowledge that somewhere, some small group of your franchise's fandom is probably getting their rocks off at porn of your characters. This may or may not be a problem, depending on the circumstances; most Fan Art and Fan Fiction in general are posted free of charge, so unless the owner of the franchise in question fears such scandalous depictions of their life's work damaging the franchise's and the owners' public image, it's presumed to be better for them to just let it slide instead of suing for copyright infringement. After all, if the fans like your stuff enough to have those kinds of thoughts about it, then they're obviously the kind of fans you want to keep to ensure your media's success, right? And it's not like they're going to stop making such pictures or stories, even with a court order over their head.
Of course, sometimes a fandom can go too far with this rule, which ultimately damages their public image regardless of how widespread the practice really is. And, if the fandom and the media are both widely known enough publicly, there's always the threat of the Media Watchdogs coming in with threats of censors and sanctions against the media itself for the creations of the fans. But that's just a real-life example of Viewers Are Morons, on both sides of the coin.
This is, of course, nothing new. It's just that now, in the Communication Age, all of humanity's dirty little secrets are coming out into the open. Add Memetic Mutation to that dynamic, and you get what could be considered either a revolution or a moral crisis of epic proportions. It depends on your point of view. Beauty is, after all, in the eye of the beholder.
See also Fetish Fuel and Rule Thirty Six. And see Power Perversion Potential if you really wanna blow your mind.
An oft-cited corollary to Rule Thirty-Four is as follows: 'If it is out there, the likelyhood that there is furry porn of it approaches 100%.'
Examples:
- Yoda And Padme.........no more need be said. Squick
- Dont Even Highlight the above...
- Disney is a notorious example of a corporation actively against Rule Thirty Four, or any other 'unauthorized' use of their characters, for that matter; woe be a fan artist who makes a similar character to one of theirs, or any day care centers who have murals of their characters on their walls, as they have been known to file lawsuits against such 'offenders'.
- An infamous (and probably apocryphal) story from the early days of the studio tells of a staff party where a cartoon was shown of Mickey and Minnie Mouse in an x-rated scene. Afterwards, Walt chuckled along with everyone else, invited the two guys who made the cartoon to come up and be recognized... and then fired them on the spot and ordered the film destroyed.
- Other versions of the story suggest that it was Snow White and her dwarfs having an orgy in the film which was shown at Uncle Walt's birthday party.
- Be that as it may, Minnie and Mickey did appear in a few Tijuana Bibles and Snow White, Jasmine, Ariel and Jessica Rabbit are favorite targets of internet porn maestro Julius Zimmerman (No, I'm not including a link, do a search if you must!)
- Equally infamous, and probably just as apocryphal, is the story of author Harlan Ellison's one and only day working for Disney, which started very promisingly but ended immediately after a lunch where he joked about -- and acted out -- a hypothetical Mickey Mouse porn film.
- Interestingly, Disney chose not to sue The Realist or Wally Wood when he did his infamous Disneyland Memorial Orgy (the image, while not showing explicit depictions of genitalia, is probably not worksafe), on the feeling that it was probably protected as parody (as well as the possibility that the lawsuit would bring unwanted publicity). They did, however, sue the poster company selling unauthorized copies of Wood's work.
- This troper once came across a rather graphic Lion King songfic. Needless to say, he stopped reading after the first mention of illicit activity, fearing further violation of his childhood.
- This troper recently found The Black Cauldron porn, after thinking that the movie was far too obscure to merit it.
- A Beauty And The Beast porn fic broke the brain of the reviewer at Godawful Fan Fiction enough that he or she could only post things like "...but he's a candle!"
- On the flip-side of the coin, Japanese manga and anime artists and companies have very little qualms about fans making erotic doujinshi of their worlds, or even selling them; in fact, many famous manga and anime artists started their careers doing just that, and some of them still dabble in the pastime. This is buffered by the very low print runs of such work.
- Kyoto Animation recently lampshaded the practice with a Shout Out to one of their other works. An episode of Lucky Star had the girls going to Comiket, a real-life doujinshi convention, with Konata marking all the tables she wanted to see. In the real Comiket of that year, all those tables sold Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuuutsu hentai.
- What's even worse is that she recruited her friends to pick up these doujinshi for her, including titles such as Dripping Brigade Chief.
- For "Goreans", fans of John Norman's Gor novels, sexual deviancy is the entire purpose of the fandom - they act out in their real lives the ritualized tradition of sex slavery described in the novels (in the context of a consensual BDSM scene, of course).
- There is a certain Image Board (that will not be linked to -- if you want to find it, it's not hard to search for) with a section dedicated to challenges on this matter; they will track down pornographic images of anything. In most cases, if they can't find one, they make it -- making the claim a Self Fulfilling Prophecy (dubbed "Rule Thirty-Five": if make it apparent there is not porn of it, someone will make porn of it). Another site dedicated to collecting examples of Rule Thirty Four has managed to amass a bit over 70,000 images.
- Fred Gallagher of Megatokyo once said that if he found Megatokyo porn, he would quit producing the comic. He later understood that he had given too powerful a weapon for anybody who didn't like the comic, and changed his mind.
- Also worth mentioning is a small portfolio of Mr. Gallagher's (written under a pen-name) called "Blurred", which has a few drawings that contain artistic nudity, and is on the whole slightly more risque than Megatokyo. Mr. Gallagher denied the existence of the Blurred portfolio for quite some time, although in the end several people involved, including a moderator on Mr. Gallagher's forums "outed" him, and upon doing so Mr. Gallagher reopened the website for public view.
- During this period, one Megatokyo fansite cheerily advised readers that creating Megatokyo porn might actually be physically dangerous: by the laws of probability, in a fandom the size of Megatokyo's, odds were good that at least one fan might be psychotic enough to track down and kill the person responsible for ending his favorite comic. Food for thought.
- Yes, Megatokyo porn is out there.
- Genshiken has this rule come up more than a few times, as its cast consists largely of otaku. Saki suffers a bit of a meltdown on learning there are hentai doujinshi of everything early on.
- An example of the degree to which this can get carried is also present: Since fair use provisions in Japanese copyright law are much different from those of the US, frequently all refrences to other anime will need to be bleeped out of the dialog. Since Genshiken revolves around a college otaku club, to avoid having to do this, the writers created a fictional anime named Kujibiki Unbalance. Several of the Genshiken epsiodes are devoted to the craft of creating, publishing, and selling a ero dojinshi of this fictional anime. As an example of life imitating art, now Kujibiki Unbalance is actually being turned into a real anime and manga, and every concievable slash fanfic and hentai dojinshi featuring it's characters are already being published.
- Through some mishap of how search engines work, the webcomic Mac Hall somehow got associated with Digimon porn. This resulted in a large number of people coming to the site for this exact purpose. As a joke, the writer posted a few spoofs to make fun of this. ...which resulted in Internet Search engines and furry sites associating them with Digimon porn even more. Then there was one last indignity that just made it look like the universe has it in for them.
- This editor was disturbed when a friend of hers insisted on linking her to a site featuring Pokemon porn.
- Given the height of Pokémon's popularity at one point, that there would be porn of it isn't too surprising. However, you are allowed to be disturbed by the fact that porn exists for every single species - all 493 of them, not counting interspecies! Now that is Rule 34 in action.
- At least there's still a good chunk of it dedicated to the humans in the Pokemon world, e.g. Misty, May, Dawn, Mrs. Ketchum...
- In fact, many Nintendo games are targets. Let's not get started on Zelda OOT selfcest, or Twillight Princess furry porn. And that's when they are not attempting a crossover with Okami...
- This Troper scanned the first article on the new Sonic The Hedgehog RPG, and is sad to say that the female character supposedly got porn within hours. Which is odd, because the character is covered in species-obstructing armor, and its gender would be ambiguous if not for the use of the word "she" with the caption.
- This gets particularly bad with regards to Transformers. There are perfectly serviceable audience-surrogate human characters... but no, pretty much always the robots themselves being the victims of yaoi fangirls, despite some of them transforming in ways that... You know what? We're better off changing the subject very, very quickly.
- Dora from Questionable Content calls this rule "Quantum Fetish Mechanics."
- The webcomic Chugworth Academy is an unusual example, as most of the pornography based off it was drawn by the original artist, Scribblekid (who had an interest in pornographic art). Sadly, the artist was tempermental, and the comic spontaneously vanished from the Internet, leaving only the porn.
- This xkcd strip probably explains the process behind this phenomenon.
- There's fanfic written with Biblical characters, including slash (Jesus/Judas, anyone?).
- Star Wars porn is an obvious example, especially with the Princess Leia in slave girl costume. The most unusual one is probably two Imperial AT-ATs humping. A nature documentary about elephants comes to mind. Amusingly, the D6 RPR book "Fragments From the Rim" has an exerpt from a comedic newsbulitien claiming to have identified an "AT-AT Stud farm". It promises pictures. There is also a kama sutra for AT-S Ts
- How many fanfics do you know that have caused international incidents? "Agony in Pink" was a Power Rangers fanfic where the Pink Ranger gets tortured and killed -- in lengthy detail -- by a monster created by Lord Zedd. It resulted in the newsgroup it was posted on getting banned in Australia, and is believed to be responsible for the complete removal of adult fanfic from Fan Fiction.net.
- The creators of webcomics CRFH!!! and Queen of Wands politely asked their fanbase that if they were going to produce porn based on the webcomic to please not post it or links to it in the comic's forum as the creator didn't want to see it. As far as I know, both fanbases complied.
- The Walkyverse fanbase, on the other hand, is the complete opposite, with much of the explicit material contained in the site's own fanart gallery.
- Likewise, the author of Keychain of Creation has a separate adult fanart gallery. Granted, it only has one picture so far, but that's not bad for a Stick Figure Comic that has yet to reach one hundred pages.
- This editor could have lived her life happily without knowing that there is Soreike! Anpanman hentai by Zaou Taishi.
- A small subset of Radiohead fans fantasize about Thom/Jonny/Colin love triangles-it would be pretty minor if it weren't for the fact that Jonny is Colin's little brother and they're all married w/ kids.
- There is an entire thread based around this trope on the Order of the Stick forums. Made even more disturbing by the fact that they're stick figures.
- This particular troper has seen quite a bit of Rule Thirty-Four being implemented in the Warhammer 40000 fandom, and certainly not just in the obvious places, such as Slaaneshi cultists, Dark Eldar, and the Sisters of Battle. On 4chan's Traditional Games board, he's seen everything from Space Marines (the term "Battle Brothers" and "geneseed" taking on whole new contexts) Tau, Kroot, Tyranids, and even the Necrons.
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