Mpreg 101

I’ve been asked repeatedly during the eight years I have been writing fan fiction for advice about this that and the other. A couple times I thought seriously on starting a comm, but then realized I just didn’t have time to run one and keep up with everything else. So I thought I would just tell people what they wanted to know when they wanted to know it, and that worked fine for the most part. However I have been asked about this particular subject so often I finally decided just to write it all out once and for all so the next time someone asks I can just hand them a link.

Please note that I am not saying I am the authority on writing mpreg, or anything else. Anything I put here are strictly my own opinions and observations, and you’re free to disagree with them. Also the reason I use my own fics as examples is because I’m a damned lazy Rat and it’s easier to dig up my own stuff than look for somebody’s else’s. So here it goes, ladies and gentlemen, grab your popcorn, pull up a chair, and attend to Professor Rattie’s class:

MPREG 101

So you’ve done it. You closed your eyes, held your breath, and took the plunge. Your two male characters procreated. Now what?

The first thing to decide with mpreg is whether you are doing it for shits and giggles or whether you are doing it in a more serious vein. Shits and giggles is easy because the reasons don’t really matter why. If you are doing it for comedic reasons then the audience is likely to be pretty forgiving because they already know this isn’t meant to be taken seriously. You can blame it all on a toilet seat, a hot tub that was at a frat house party the night before, a drunken one night stand, or death rays from Mars. In my FFVII fic, “Detour”, nearly the entire cast ended up pregnant as a result of ticking off some other-worldly visitors in an eight-story mansion. Kicking rats or being bitten by foaming green parrots is another reason people have ended up pregnant in my fics. Comedy mpreg takes little more than an ability to think sideways and upside down, and is best used in a stand-alone fic, not as part of a series because the joke can wear thin over time. Comedy also works best when no one gets hurt. It’s very hard to work up a giggle over a character alone and dumped and pregnant. If you plan to go the comedy route, make sure everyone is okay at the end, or you may not gain the response you wanted.

If you want to go the more serious route, this is where things can get a little rough, because now people want the facts to line up before they buy into your storyline. In some cases I’ve noticed the author doesn’t seem to think any further than “Oh won’t it be cute to see him with a belly and a waddle!” Yes that’s very cute, but it won’t hold together a fic. Why is he pregnant? How did he get that way? You need a solid reason for how this happened if you really want it to work.

POSSIBLE CAUSES:

1) Divine Intervention.

This can work rather well, and I saw it used effectively a few times in Lord of the Rings fan fiction. The reason it worked well there is because it was already well-established in the canon of the book that the Valar would occasionally answer some really rather extreme prayers. It was not unreasonable that two lovers who had served the gods and their people in an exemplary manner would be granted a child. But in this case, remember that YOU are the Valar. Why would they do it? Remember that the gods don’t do anything unless they are getting something out of it. Will the child be a great warrior in future events only they see? Will not giving the lovers a child have grave ramifications? There needs to be a reason for this gift to be granted.

Then there is the issue regarding the people in the lives of the parents – how will they react? Chances are very good that unless this is an enlightened society, somebody is going to react very badly to something so freakish and unnatural. It’s not unreasonable that the parents would be attacked, harassed, and even driven away. Unless you are running a character with very sueish tendencies, where established canon warps to accommodate the character, chances are you’re going to start a fight. Make sure you are interested in getting into the politics and mind set of the people around your characters if you use this route.

2) Bio-Engineering.

This works really well in a setting like that in Final Fantasy VII, because we’re already familiar with the things characters like Hojo, Lucrecia, and Professor Gast get up to, and what they have done to Sephiroth, Angeal, Genesis, Zack, Cloud, and Vincent in particular. Whether their intensions are good, neutral, or just plain evil, they can’t seem to stop tinkering with living beings. It’s not out of the question that someone could turn up pregnant as a result. However you are now going to have to roll up your sleeves and do something many people are oddly reluctant to do.

MAKE FRIENDS WITH BIOLOGY.

I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say most people reading this have either a penis or a vagina, and are familiar with the workings. We know where babies come from, we know about female versus male hormones, and what sorts of things go on in the supply closet at office parties. If you can discuss these things in an open manner using correct terminology and not giggling your butt off or turning purple, congratulations, you have made friends with biology and I give you permission to write fan fiction involving bio-engineering.

HOWEVER. If you are, say, for example, not actually old enough to be a member of the communities you haunt, spend at least a third of your fic-writing time desperately trying to think of ways to have your characters have sex without actually saying that they are having sex, and use words like “it”, “thing”, and “manhood” instead of penis, then this is not for you. I actually hunt down medical info so that I can at least fake knowing what I’m talking about. If you’re not comfortable researching how different animals, including people, make babies, and how to stick one in a man without getting letters telling you that you clearly exhibit all the medical knowledge of a developmentally delayed baboon, then this probably isn’t your cup of human chorionic gonadotropin.

It’s true that you do not have to write a sex scene to have a pregnancy happen, but you will still have to have a minor knowledge of how things work and be comfortable discussing them. You are also going to have to know how a man looks on the inside and how he works if you are going to make this sound plausible. There is enough room in the male abdominal cavity for a uterus, if you take into consideration the positioning of the bladder and the seminal vesicles. For a better understanding of how things look on the inside of a guy, please refer to this site:

As you can see, you can work a vagina down between the bladder and vesicles and have it terminate roughly in the same area as it would in a woman. So now you know where to put it, but you have other things to consider. For instance, in hyenas, the females have a very high level of testosterone, which is the hormone essential for making guys… well… guys. It is so high in fact that it often interferes with female actions, such as conception and birth. Is your guy going to have the same problem? Chances are he is. The obvious solution seems to be adding oestrogen, the female hormone, to his makeup, but that can have some interesting side effects. Like boobs.

So you know where the put the baby, how to have the baby come out without having it exit either his butt (ouch) or his penis (yes I have read this, yes I still have nightmares about it) and about some of the complications he may face. Other complications are impaired balance, because women have small bones installed that help us compensate for the weight shift that men do not, painful separation of the abdominal muscles, because guys are not meant to have their bellies stretch the way women’s bellies are, and excess pressure on the prostate and vesicles. In short your guy is not going to be up and dancing. He’s going to be uncomfortable, clumsy, and really rather helpless. You can make things easier for him by explaining that he’s been engineered to have glands that produce small amounts of hormones at the right time in the right doses to help with conception and birth, had the proper balancing bones added, or even just do what I did and blame everything on busy little nanites. But he needs your help to survive this. You don’t need to know everything. But you do need to know something.

3) Magic.

This loosely falls under the heading of ‘Divine Intervention’, but with a significant difference in that the mage or witch takes the place of a god, but with much the same effect. Hermione might very well let Harry and Draco talk her into whomping up a spell to make them teen parents, but she’s going to tell them they’re out of their minds, and probably want something in return other than the bliss of knowing she helped them along the path of Twu Wuv. In my fic “The Problem With Pickles” I used a combination of the divine intervention/magic method, wherein he cast a spell to try and raise his dead lover, but was beseeching South American gods to make this happen. A misinterpretation of how to go about the spell properly resulted in the pregnancy, and following the basic canon of the show provided a basis for the situation that most readers found acceptable.

In a magic-based society a case of male pregnancy is easier to explain. “Oh you used a spell? How interesting, I had no idea there was one for such a thing.” In this case it would be more about tackling the issues of how homosexuality is perceived. Is their society okay with it? Is the child of two men going to be all right, or is it going to be hounded, harassed, outcast and vilified from the day it was born? Then there is the spell itself. How dangerous is this? Are other magicks going to affect it? What problems could possibly affect a magic-based pregnancy, and the child produced?

Magic is an iffy way to make a baby, and lends itself well to more angsty fics. In the case of Divine Intervention, anyone who wants to cause trouble for the family will likely find themselves on the wrong end of an angry god, and that’s a lot of incentive to leave mother and child alone. However in the case of Magic, any mage who disapproves is free to take a shot via spells and potions, and the chance that the baby or mother or both could be hurt or killed is much higher.

4) Natural.

This is the easiest way to go about mpreg; creating a hermaphroditic race wherein this is a natural part of their existence and biology. It takes a lot of brain work out of the scenario, which makes it easier for you, but it takes you right back to situation 2 – make friends with biology.

I personally had a great deal of luck with this particular scenario – my Plains Elves remain my most popular characters.

OKAY HE’S PREGNANT. NOW WHAT?

This is actually the tricky part, because guess what – you just made an OC.

It’s really funny how many people completely overlook this small fact. Unless you are fan-ficcing a canon gay couple that somehow made a canon baby, then you are now dipping your toe into the strange and scary waters of Original Fiction. What’s your baby’s name? Is it a boy or a girl? Does s/he have any birth defects? Health issues? Is s/he a premie? Late? Ugly? Hairy? Cute? Who is this person?

Writing mpreg is a tiny bit like making a baby in real life. You now have another person on your hands that you’re responsible for, and it’s your job to make sure your new parents act like parents. Who is going to do the midnight feedings and diaper changes? If they want to go out for an evening, who is babysitting? What kind of a baby did the characters have? Babies have personalities. Some are easy-going and calm. Some upset very easily. The one I personally gave birth to was so laid-back I thought he was deaf until the doctors finally told me “He can hear just fine, he’s just not interested.” This of course was a prelude for his years as a teenager. However my point is this; unless you are planning on stopping your story at the moment of birth, you now have a bouncing baby OC on your hands, and the lives of the parents have just changed radically.

OKAY YOU COULD, NOW ASK IF YOU SHOULD.

Some characters are not fit to be parents. Just because you love them and they are your OTP does not mean they should reproduce. A dark angry character prone to lashing out violently, drinking heavily, and fighting should not have a baby in him. Nor should a character who is deranged, drug-addicted, and prone to vanishing for days at a time. I’m not saying you can’t make parents out of them, but mpreg is a genre where you really have to think about how your audience will react.

Most people find the idea of an infant in constant danger from a parent extremely upsetting. Do not assume your readers will not be bothered by the idea of child abuse because it’s “only fiction". Most people have seen or heard of cases of child abuse, whether on the news or in real life. They may have even been abused themselves, or lost a child. Making an infant character for the purposes of basically getting its tiny helpless ass kicked by mama is not going to gain you any readers, other than trolls. Remember that, just because the baby is not real, does not mean the emotions of your readers will not be affected by this.

If your idea is to give a baby to a disturbed character to slowly have him become a better human being out of love for his child, that’s a very different animal, but again it is not without dangers. People who like his darkness may not like him developing into a warm and fuzzy mama, and that could cost you readers as well. On the other hand people who feel the character has been treated harshly or unjustly and deserves a break may really enjoy seeing him get a second chance at life, and they will love you for giving it to him.

I WANNA WRITE IT BUT MY FRIENDS THINK IT’S GROSS.

Well ya know it’s not for everyone. But then you can’t please everybody. Some people like het, some slash, some gender-bending, some even love mary-sues. I like mpreg. I’m known for it, and my readers seem to like the way I do it. Some of my closest friends won’t read it. Some people write me and say “Hey I never liked this until I found you.” The thing is not everything you write is going to go over like gang-busters. But the great thing about fan fiction is it doesn’t have to, because in the end we write the fan fiction for ourselves. Fan fiction is a great learning tool, it’s fun, it’s easy, and a lot of professional writers start their careers by writing it, gradually branching into original fiction. So what I say is if YOU want to try mpreg, then by all means try it. Because at the end of the day only one person needs to love your fic, your world, and your characters. You.

Go forth and impregnate.