Quote:
Originally Posted by VydorScope
Romance - The primary story is about the relationships, and interactions. Sexual activities are just one optional factor in that.
Erotica - The primary story is still mainly about the relationships, but the sexual activity becomes a major player in the plot.
Porn - There may or may not even be a relationship, or much of a story, as the primary focus is on the sexual activities.
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If there's a strong focus is on sexual activities, *and* there's a strong plot and romantic relationship, where does it fall? How do you identify a book's "primary focus?"
I don't exactly disagree with those distinctions, but I don't think they're useful at all. Fanfic has a lot of what we call "PWP"--porn without plot--but the focus is on the characters and their relationship; the stories are focused on the personalities involved and how those are expressed through sex. There may not be a plot, or there may be a thin one ("it's Character A's birthday; Character B wakes up A with surprise birthday sex"), but it's obvious the main story is the sex.
However, the story is *about* the characters--how they deal with sensuality, how they relate to each other, what they like or don't like, whether they're responsive, or dominant, or energetic, or perceptive, or vulnerable, or mischievous, or something else.
We call it "porn" but it's nothing like mainstream "porn" literature. And while we sense a difference, we can't point to anything objective and say, "this, THIS, is what makes Fanfic Story X 'erotica' and Mainstream Lurid Novel Y 'porn'."
And we're *really* not sure whether to call things "romance" or not. Does it stop being "romance" if there's enough explicit sex involved? Is the label an identifier of the contents, or the intended readership?