Oh Felicia, Where Art Thou? .. and Her Reply Is ..

a very substantial discussion topic .. and this new caption for me! Come inside please!

Might want to actually read ALL of this first before clicking on the caption!

Felicia Hextus disappeared for a number of months this year, and only returned recently as Licy Biest. She isn't hiding that who she used to be, but wanted to be a bit reborn so to speak as she had some issues with the TG captioning scene that was causing her concern.

Among what I am going to focus upon, some of her issues dealt with the writing itself, that it was hard, and there were less comments from others PLUS an influx of shitty captions that signaled a decline in quality within the community. I can agree with that, as there is a lot of crappily cut and pasted pictures with a line or two of text that has no imagination attached to it. Then she got to her main point:

Another reason was that, especially over the last couple months, I reached a seriously critical relation with capping. Bottom line of that conclusion is that capping, to a certain degree, is seriously wrong. Taking pictures of strangers and living out sexual or gender-identity-related kinks and phantasies through them is seriously wrong on many, many levels. I had that... incident where I found a cap on a blog - a really steamy cap - that, and I don't know how big the chance for this was, featured somebody I know. Personally. And it sickens me to the bone to think what she would think if she knew, and that's when many things dawned upon me. Caps obviously featuring private photography feel gutwrenching now, and caps using commercial photos aren't that much better either. Who are we to assume that these people are ok with it simply because they do porn. This realisation made me feel guilty in many ways, and made we wonder if there can actually be something like ethical capping. I am reading up a lot on the topic in regards to art in general currently.

 I have talked about this previously, and mention in the disclaimer that I do not own the source photos, that this is done in fun, and is not meant to be implied anything beyond, and that there is no monetary earnings from anything I have posted here. AND, I will pull anything down if the model or photographer asks as soon as possible, usually within 24 hours of the request. I've had this blog for eight years now (holy shit!) and I've had either 2 or 3 notices to pull down a caption that contained an image that was owned by someone else .. and I am currently about 30 away from 1500 total posts.

There was much spirited discussion afterwards about ways that could be taken, and how fair is "fair-use" and how we feel about re-appropriating someone's images into a story that has nothing to do with the original intent. Hell, it's probably worse morally for me that I tend to use non-pornographic images since they were taken with a different and non-sexual intent .. as opposed to a TG captioner that gravitates more towards explicit sexual situations.

I don't think anyone's minds were changed (you now will think like a blond bimbo!), but it was nice to have a thoughtful dialog on some things that aren't always pondered. For me, it'd been a few years I think since the last time I let this rattle around my head. Licy's decision seems to be to find source photos, and manipulate them enough in an editing program so that any subjects in the picture(s) aren't necessarily discernible enough, essentially rendering it as a new work. I liken it to taking chords from J.S. Bach and turning it into a Ramones song. The building blocks are there, but you swapped instruments, drenched it with pedal effects, and added words sung with a Noo Yawk accent.

And that leads to the caption up above. Feel free to read it now, or re-read it if you defied me above and looked at it before reading all these paragraphs. If doing this is going to keep her captioning, I am all for it. It still had that Hextus feel and story, but was more stylized in its look. I am pretty impressed if that was a regular picture and she used some plugins to make it look like that, and I'll definitely look forward to more trades from her in the future.

For me? I am going to stick on the path I've already been whacking away at for some time. If I get bored with my format, I'll try to evolve, and perhaps try a few things like this, but I'm happy with my little well-worn rut for now LOL

Please feel free to discuss in the comments section about anything talked about above, and let Licy know what you think of the caption! It's the first one she did since coming back so I'd love to see what we can do to motivate her to keep going in a new direction!