How Low Can You Go? Pushing Limits

[usable001]

1) Have you ever had the urge to push your writing and see exactly how much darkness you are capable of realistically presenting? The kind of stuff that dances very close to the limits allowed on sites such as this? Not because you enjoy the topic, but rather like a long-distance runner trying to finish one more mile after they are exhausted.

2) If so, have you also worried that—should you complete the thing, and both you and your work avoid getting banned—presenting this work with your name attached to it will poleaxe your popularity with readers?

In the past, retelling the story of Apollo and Daphne from Apollo's POV, with all the self-justification that horror story requires. [Apollo attempts
to rape Daphne, and she permanently turns into a tree while trying to escape.]

In the present, a man full of self-loathing is surrounded by people who agree that he deserves everything they do to him.


***

In case we need the link later... https://www.literotica.com/resources/content-guidelines

 

[NuclearFairy]

The darkest story I have, doesn't push the limits of the rules, because it has no erotic or political content. The MC might even be dying at the end though. So it is a pretty dark tale.

 

[anthrodisiac]

I've written incredibly dark stuff, but it's not erotic. I've pushed boundaries and played with transgressive shock content before. I wouldn't want to write anything that went against the rules here though, erotic-wise, because that's not really my think to go full dark with erotica. My first story is erotic horror and involves physical, psychological, emotional, and sexual torture, but it also has a humorous vein running through it and everything resolves pretty peaceably.

 

[SmilingLez]

The darkest flash fiction story I wrote, Under the Sea was an erotic horror tainted love tale. Unfortunately it's no longer on the site. My short free verse rhyme Paper Dolls and Razor Wires is a walk on the dark side

 

[PennyThompson]

Not really, none of the prohibited content topics are interesting to me.

I've dabbled in erotic horror a bit, but I'm more interested in cosmic dread, not "Blood, blood, blood. And bits of sick."

 

[IWroteThis]

Darkness and the rules of Literotica are not exactly the same thing, unless you define darkness as anything prohibited by Literotica's rules.

I write stuff that I can't post here, but I wouldn't call it dark. I mean, I wouldn't consider a story to be dark just because it utilizes Romeo and Juliet laws, but it still can't be posted here.

 

[Stanfield2025]

My series is dark and examines multiple facets of a trauma-bonded relationship. Tbh, sometimes I struggle with the morality of having written such a story. It made some readers uncomfortable, but I don't mind that. Some of the things that happen in the story ought to make readers at least a little bit uncomfortable. Darkness wasn't the point of the story, but it was needed to put those ideas out there. Anyway, it's one of my best stories. The protagonists are among the most interesting characters I've ever written, and they've changed how I write characters in general.

There were fleeting moments in which I wondered how close I skirted to guidelines, but I wasn't interested in pushing those kinds of boundaries.

 

[EmilyMiller]

1) Have you ever had the urge to push your writing and see exactly how much darkness you are capable of realistically presenting? The kind of stuff that dances very close to the limits allowed on sites such as this? Not because you enjoy the topic, but rather like a long-distance runner trying to finish one more mile after they are exhausted.

No. Any darkness I have in my stories is related to prior trauma. It’s something to attempt to heal, not to be celebrated.

A lot of my work is about celebrating the redemptive / restorative powers of sex, or simply about people expressing their sexuality with joy.

I have no interest in the euphemistically named ‘darker’ themes - life can be awful, I’d rather write people trying to help each other, or at least enjoy each other.

2) If so, have you also worried that—should you complete the thing, and both you and your work avoid getting banned—presenting this work with your name attached to it will poleaxe your popularity with readers?

Not applicable.

View attachment 2646617In the past, retelling the story of Apollo and Daphne from Apollo's POV, with all the self-justification that horror story requires. [Apollo attempts
to rape Daphne, and she permanently turns into a tree while trying to escape.]

In the present, a man full of self-loathing is surrounded by people who agree that he deserves everything they do to him.

I’ve written quasi-Greek tragedies in a supernatural setting, but only as a set-up for the later punishing of guilty parties.

 

[usable001]

No. Any darkness I have in my stories is related to prior trauma. It’s something to attempt to heal, not to be celebrated.

I don't know if celebrated is the right word when talking about horror.

What got me thinking about this was how things could escalate before they got better, if I were to write a continuation of Sex With Clones.

 

[KittyOfSteele]

1) Have you ever had the urge to push your writing and see exactly how much darkness you are capable of realistically presenting? The kind of stuff that dances very close to the limits allowed on sites such as this? Not because you enjoy the topic, but rather like a long-distance runner trying to finish one more mile after they are exhausted.

"If the brush-strokes I have used to portray crime disturb and distress you, then your redemption is nigh and I shall have accomplished what I set out to achieve. But if you find the truth they depict offensive, if they provoke you to curse their author... then, wretched reader, you have recognized your own self and you will never change your ways." — Marquis de Sade

I've done political cartoons that weren't subtle at all with the message I tried to convey. Even the layer of humor didn't exactly hide my statement. I should rather say it made it even more explicit.

In my journal I've written about things that I went through that go from as recent as two near death experiences before a year, all the way back to every bit of trauma I've experienced in my teenage years, and is still affecting me to this day.

I've put much of what I lived in my works of fiction, both before writing erotica and after getting into erotica.

How much darkness am I capable of realistically presenting, you ask? My answer would be not enough, because whatever threshold everyone has, I went past those over ten years ago, and I'm tired of pretending to be polite. Is not even my limits that concern me, but rather how the zeitgeist is not even ready to know stories that are worse than mine, because there are other people with much darker stories. I'm just the guardian of the gate in comparison.

There's no morality in fiction. Only fear of your own abyss, let alone survive it. Every. Fucking. Day.

I said it before, and I'll say it again: the purpose for Literotica's guidelines is so that the platform has something to protect itself. It never was, and it never is, meant to be a morality code for anyone. The same counts for every platform that exists, both online and IRL.

2) If so, have you also worried that—should you complete the thing, and both you and your work avoid getting banned—presenting this work with your name attached to it will poleaxe your popularity with readers?

I'm already banned before even finishing those drafts. It's a badge of honor for me, really. After all, banning me doesn't erase my past. If anything, it only proves me right.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

Presenting darkness realistically? I had a go at a story involving human trafficking, and a NC/R that was realistic in being actual coerced consent and the instigator being in denial - 'I had to do it', and afterwards, 'it doesn't matter'. I figured it wouldn't be too popular with readers in the category because it presents a sexual encounter that isn't consensual but male readers might be wanking along with, and then essentially pours cold water and the cold light of day on them - not just to ensure the story fit Lit criteria on such issues, but seeing as I had to start down that path, I ran with it.

Poleaxing my popularity with readers? My followers aren't that many (500+), because I post in a wide range of categories and the next story won't necessarily be something someone is willing to read (at one point I wrote a I/T story, gained 75 followers, who almost all ran away when I posted my next few stories, various types of kinky and queer filth - took two years to get my numbers back to where they'd been).

I was pleasantly surprised when the first dozen votes (presumably including my intrepid followers) were remarkably positive, along with positive comments ('Dark... oof...' is positive given the content!). Even had a red H for about five minutes. Then the scores went down, though not one comment criticised the story - three asked for more, in fact.

Anyway, the scores are continuing to fall, silently. So I can confirm yes, it is possible to write a story that's not in LW, that's literate yet unpopular enough to score 3.5. But I can also make an educated guess that the downvoters were never my followers!

I don't care - as a piece of writing, I think it works OK and makes a decent stab at honouring 'David' and his hard-working colleagues. Obviously 'Ray' would be fired immediately if such a story were true and discovered... but it's plausible. It might be happening all around you.

 

[StillStunned]

On Love at First Sight:

 

[ChuckWolf]

Had an idea where at the end of the story, the female protagonist gets human-trafficked.

In an epilogue, years later, two of the other characters in the story are visiting an Arab sheikh for a business deal and they see the MC has been made into a harem slave.

The male character is horrified, but the female character (who was a work rival of the MC) is delighted to see what has happened to her.

Haven't done the story (which is a sequel to another tale), but have always thought that that ending was too dark and mean-spirited and might not even be publishable by Literotica's standards.

 

[BobbyBrandt]

Underage characters being intimate, non-consensual sex, politics, torture, religion - I've included them all in one or more of my stories here. The limits have never been limiting for me.

I know there are those who might think that I push the limits with some of my story content here, but it is respect for the limits that has allowed all that I have written to pass muster with the site in every instance.

Creatively saying it without actually saying it, and presenting the questionable content in a context that keeps it safely between the lines isn't all that challenging IMO.

 

[NotWise]

Mom, Sex, Guns, and Rock-n-Roll, as I originally conceived it, is too dark for Lit. It doesn't push Lit's rules, it's just dark. I wrote a WIWAW essay about it, largely as a way of warning people who wouldn't take it well. I re-conceived the dark ending of the story before I gave it to Laurel, but sometimes I think my itch to write the story won't really be satisfied without the original ending. Most of the time, I'm sure I'd have regretted publishing it with the original ending.

 

[Voboy]

Yup. I've often been curious how low I can go. It turns out... not very. When I try to be dark, I usually just end up with a lot of pathos and a grudging submission to the ROMANCE category.

Twice I've written stories too dark to be published here. One of them I like a lot; I could pretty easily modify it to pass muster here, but I don't wanna. I like it too much as-is.

The other ended up so damn bleak I finished the story, read it back over, and decided it never needed to see the light of day. I don't even think it made it into my permanent folder, since I can no longer seem to find it.

The thing is that with me, writing interconnected stories the way I do? Even though those stories are unpublished and in some cases unfinished, the events in them still "happened."

 

[SimonDoom]

I have a few very dark stories. One results in the takeover of the planet by aliens and wiping out of most humans. Another is about ritual murder.

I don't celebrate darkness, exactly, but I think it's an essential and inescapable part of human nature and it's an interesting thing to explore in art.

I never worried about what it would do to my readership or to the ratings of my other stories. As far as I can tell, they had no impact.

 

[StillStunned]

I don't celebrate darkness, exactly, but I think it's an essential and inescapable part of human nature and it's an interesting thing to explore in art.

One thing I enjoy about writing smut is that it lets you embrace a whole new part of the human experience that mainstream writing glosses over. Going dark is the same.

I get that not everyone wants to go there, particularly not on a site for sex stories. But as a writer I like having being able to draw on a full range of emotions and experiences.

 

[EmilyMiller]

Dark is a very flexible adjective.

I have a supernatural story here in which the FMC is coerced into having sex with her father in order to save her kidnapped mother. It doesn’t go so well. Her mother becomes crazed and absconds when she learns what happened. Her father commits suicide. It’s intentionally all very dime store Sophocles.

The story is basically the FMC peeling back layers of dissociation about events, exacerbated by her uncle’s - well-intentioned - forgetfulness spell, and coming to a realization about what has happened to her.

None of this is titillating, and the sex is not described in any detail. The whole thing is a set up for @Djmac1031 writing a denouement in which the person responsible for the above is taken down.

Is this dark? I’d say yes.

Then you get other meanings of dark. It’s often used as a euphemism for women being violently degraded for the masturbatory pleasure of the reader. I think we need a more accurate adjective than dark to describe this type of story.

 

[Rob_Royale]

Definitely. I've dabbled in horror and non-con which I never thought I would. But both stories were recieved well with no torches, pitchforks or vitriolic comments.

I thought both might push the Lit boundaries because of the way I used fear and in the case of the erotic horror, death.

My advice is for writers to not set boundaries about what they won't write. Because when the right idea is in your head, you can find a way to mold the story into something you will write, which is very exciting.

 

[THBGato]

My short (2.6k words) non-erotic piece The Parting Glass is very dark, perhaps all the more so by being (IMO) entirely plausible.

Often, it's the stories that are entirely believable that are the most horrifying. Those that take place in fantasy worlds can be scary and suspenseful, perhaps gross and disgusting, but we know as we're reading that it's only make-believe. True horror lies in the real world, I think; thus (and this is a common trope in both lesbian and romance) those stories featuring women recovering from the trauma sexual assault often begin in darkness.

 

[Areala-chan]

I'm uninterested in pushing boundaries for the sake of doing so. I am interested in exploring darker story elements within a smaller scale, and sometimes the darker sides of characters win out in the end, but such a thing is never the point of the story itself. If I kill a character, it isn't because I want the reader to gasp in surprise when it happens. Sometimes life just turns out that way.

 

[Djmac1031]

Im a horror fan so yeah I've tried my hand at the genre.

My darkest is probably Riders On The Storm, a story about a rapist / serial killer who picks up what he thinks is another helpess victim.

I won't spoil the twist but it gets pretty gruesome and dark.

Writing it was interesting because I had to put myself in the guy's headspace. But it's not like I needed to "feel" his feelings or whatever. And I knew how things would turn out before I wrote a word.

 

[Djmac1031]

Then you get other meanings of dark. It’s often used as a euphemism for women being violently degraded for the masturbatory pleasure of the reader. I think we need a more accurate adjective than dark to describe this type of story.

I think you and I have both explored turning some of those darker tropes on their heads.

Example: The Devils Sting features two female characters hypnotized into doing the male characters sexual bidding... or so he believes.

And I already mentioned Riders On The Storm above, where I flip the script on the helpless kidnapped rape victim trope.

I have nothing against a good horror story but we both agree we're not fans of stories that feature the abuse of women to sexually gratify the reader.

 

[sirhugs]

Perhaps I went dark "early":

Cliffhanger, in First Time, 2006 - did he or didn't he die as he experienced his first climax?
Elysium Island Adventure in Taboo/incest, also 2006 - which twin's blood is that on the machete?

just in case anybody thought I went all cheery :

His Last Time? in Mature - 2020, the year I started writing again after my own near death experience- his death is not clealy implied, just left as a faint hint...maybe?

Since then, I've shifted more to experimenting with story forms, lengths and perverting categories as a release for my wickness. They stay within the rules, not even tripping along the edge, but hopefully sometimes challenge readers . Mom's New Cock (2025, T/I) is an example. Pushing reader's boundaries, not Lit's.

Some might consider how The Black Cloud (in EC in 2025 ) frankly grows out of my depression as "dark", I suppose, though not in the way you mean- it doesn't really push the rules.

Locked in the Closet (2026) in Fetish isn't exactly Rainbows, Unicorns and Puppy's Tails, but is dark in tone, not pushing boundaries of the rules.