Best Known for the Fanservice/Literature


Examples of Best Known for the Fanservice in Literature include:

  • There's a very graphic and deeply disturbing female-on-male rape scene early in the first book of Orcs. It seems that a lot of people stopped reading there.
  • D.H. Lawrence is widely known for Lady Chatterley's Lover, and that book is remembered for one specific scene. It could even be argued that the entire book is this trope; it's hardly the author's best work, but it's still the most recognized Lawrence title. Why? The entire book is about sex. In the UK, it's arguably for the fact that it being about sex resulted in an obscenity trial. The jury found the experience to be rather stimulating.
  • How Not to Write A Novel offers three examples for the 'list of ingredients' method of descriptions gone wrong: the living room, the zoo, and the porn studio. Which one does everyone remember? The porn studio.
  • Stephen King's IT Yeah, that one scene in the sewer, which wasn't in the TV miniseries for obvious reasons.
    • And that other similar scene which also wasn't included in the TV miniseries for even more obvious reasons.
  • Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels tend to avoid or skirt over sex or erotica. However, Thud! has a scene which smacks of genuine contrivance, maybe as a Take That! to fanfic writers who insist on pairing off the most unlikely characters in contrived scenes where they inevitably get off with each other. Sally and Angua end up knee-deep in mud, naked, and squaring off for what could either end up as a cat-fight or something else; Sally subverts either result with a joke about how people might so much want to see this that they'd pay good money for it.
  • In the Sword of Truth, there are a few examples that stand out above all the others, though there's enough material that most of them don't even stand out.
    • The "spirit house" becomes a running gag between Richard and Kahlan.
    • Kahlan, leading the D'Harans against the Order, wearing only bodypaint.
    • Nicci, riding out against an army with her dress pulled down so nobody would notice her face.
    • Nicci, abusing the Maternity spell she cast on Kahlan.
    • Denna. But we wish we could forget.
  • Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade. His writings are fairly quaint for the 21st century, but back in the 18th century his erotic writings were controversial enough that he wound up jailed for blasphemy and pornography. The way he tackled Sadism (there's a reason it's named after him) and pain in love was remarkably ahead of his time, and in many ways reflects more modern thought that Safe, Sane, and Consensual BDSM is cool, but unsafe BDSM is not. In fact, most of his works heavily rely on "the laws of nature" as a moral centerpoint, and while he writes about various forms of fetishism, his viewpoints are not that dissimilar to what a modern person may think about them: some are cool to do if you both agree to them, others are very much not (like pedophilia), and others yet (like coprophilia and necrophilia) are unsanitary and, in the latter case, plain and simply disrespectful of the dead.