Ten Years Of PG-13 (Part I)

It's strange to think that it was ten years ago that I launched a project that, for better or for worse, has been the axis of my life ever since. Whether you were there from the beginning or found the archived site too late for any updates, it's still connected with me. It was never lucrative, never brought me fame, never even necessarily made me a better person or provided a valuable lesson; that's OK. From the start it was about one thing-- making friends and sharing something special that we didn't get to celebrate anywhere else. That's why I'm still proud to say I was the PG-13 guy.

I was twenty years old in 2000. I was dating a woman the same age, and same limited level of competence, and we both agreed that having kids wasn't an option at the moment (although she occasionally accused me of wanting her to get pregnant anyway). Still, she was open to my ideas; I would draw pregnant characters and she'd be amused, I'd draw her pregnant and she'd be even more amused, we'd roleplay as our own characters over the phone and there'd always be something relevant to my interests. Apart from a few early spots of confusion about what I was attracted to (the belly, dammit, not the actual fetus), it didn't take her long to realize that this wasn't just a prank or a kink to keep to the bedroom, it was a part of my personality that needed to be expressed.

In 2000 there were four major websites to visit regarding this fetish. Cheviot's Place was of course the name brand, and the only one that's still around; I still think of it as top of the heap to this day, though sites that exceed it in activity have come and gone. Then there was Wren-Spot, now long gone, a central location for expansion fetishes of all kinds, which had lots and lots and lots of breast expansion and one precious page of pregnancy-themed stories and art. Third was the long-lamented Stuffed! (later Stuffed Online), which was described at Wren-Spot as "not really weight gain, more of a binge-eating site". Although not technically pregnancy, it was certainly a shared subfetish for many if not most of us, and in fact most of my early audience was drawn from there. The fourth was, like Stuffed, not specifically pregnancy themed, but possibly the most beloved of the four to our core audience: Alumineko's Balloon-Bomb, the Engrish-rich Japanese site whose adorable mascot Miss China got more pregnant, or maybe more inflated (we couldn't tell), with every 100,000 hits.

(Soon there was also PGN, later known as Manga Bellies and a few other names. More on that later.)

I'd already had a website. It's long gone now, fallen to the same process of people going their own way as every other website does-- no website lasts forever, unless it either has paid content, or a webmaster with a pathological drive to update that I sadly don't possess. (See date of last Relevant Content post.) What's relevant about that website is that my friends and I would write stories about our shared universe of characters, and illustrate them, and write poems and song parodies, and basically do everything except comics, which were beyond our ability at high school age. My friends were young and naive, just like me, but they weren't blind-- they saw how often a certain recurring theme crept into my work. Sometimes lovingly detailed, sometimes intentionally tossed in as quick author appeal, but it was hard to ignore the fact that I kept making references to characters getting or wanting to be pregnant. They were polite about it, but my self-consciousness grew until I felt that I needed to start getting this stuff out of my head elsewhere, or else it would infect everything I do and ruin it.

I would have begun right there and then-- if there had been a place to do so! Cheviot's Place had always been more of a site for compulsive collectors, men who forage the internet constantly and hoard vast multiterabyte hard drives of thousands and thousands of pictures of pregnant pornography, some featuring women photographed carrying children who might at this very moment be seeing a doctor about their triglycerides. Wren-Spot was a little better, but pregnancy was such a low priority on its list that it seemed like anything written for it would take forever to appear, if it ever did. At the time Stuffed! was my favorite site, updated frequently with a lot of content from a lot of different points of view, but it felt selfish to try to cram in a fetish that the site wasn't about. (Many others didn't share my view, the site eventually evaporated due to furry drama over the inclusion of male subjects.) And of course Alumineko's site would be impossible to share anything with; I once spent a few futile hours trying to translate one of his stories with Babelfish, and all I learned was that "Japanese Parsley" was apparently slang for the pudenda.

Cheviot's was too pornographic, Wren's content was too irrelevant, Stuffed was too furry, and Al-Cat was too foreign. The only thing to do was start my own.

So I started a website, on paper; I laid out the thumbnails for how I wanted it to look, deciding on a three-column format to keep things simple. In the days of Geocities, one only needed to know simple tags like 'table' and 'blink' to make a professional-looking website, or at least professional-looking when you're just out of high school. I took all the pregnancy-themed stories I'd been tossing back and forth with my girlfriend, my favorite cartoon characters that I most wanted to see pregnant, and started drawing. At the time they were the best drawings I'd ever made. (Some would say I never really progressed past that milestone, either.) After much planning, debate, and discussion, my all new website was ready.

This website was called, of course, Pregnant Princess.

More about that next time.

(Reposted from Relevant Content)