Hello my beautiful watchers. Storytime: in June 2020 some guy called Chuck Tingle
responded to me on Twitter and suddenly all of my followers were really happy and excited for me.
To alleviate my confusion I googled this gentleman and… Well, that was an interesting afternoon.
Yes it turns out I was living in ignorance of one of the most beloved figures in LBGTQ
erotica circles. Just in case you have been too, let me tell you a bit about the guy.
Chuck Tingle is a self-published author who’s gained widespread renown
for his absolutely bizarre and hilarious titles and covers. Known works include:
Space Raptor Butt Invasion My Billionaire Triceratops Craves Gay Ass
Oppressed In The Butt By My Inclusive Holiday Coffee Cups
Quietly Pounded In The Butt By ASMR Double Featured By The Sentient
Bisexual Movie Theaters I Went On A Hunt For The
Easter Bigfoot And Now He's Eating My Ass Helicopter Man Pounds Dinosaur Billionaire Ass
The Butt Pounder Of The Opera Pounded By The Handsome Living
Song That Has Been Stuck In My Head This Bisexual Snowman's Carrot
Wiener Is In My Butthole And Pounded By The Pound:
Turned Gay By The Socioeconomic Implications Of Britain Leaving The European Union
Tingle often refers to these stories as “tinglers” and has
affectionately dubbed his fans buckaroos. Nicknames for followers are fun and good.
I’m going to be referring to his work as books though that’s a bit of a generous designation.
The average tingler is about the length of a single chapter of a regular novel.
They exist almost exclusively in ebook form, though you can buy compilations in paperback.
As I discovered when I delved into the world of Covid 19 themed romance,
this sort of thing isn’t at all uncommon in erotica. There’s a thriving literary economy
based around cranking out 30 self-published short stories a year. As a YouTuber,
I feel a certain kinship with this business model.
Despite common belief, Tingle didn’t invent most of the fetishes he writes about though
he did set himself apart from other authors in the genre,
partly with his insane titles and partly by being incredibly inclusive of minority races,
sexualities, gender identities and body types. My friend Rantasmo has gone into
this a little more in depth so be sure to check out his video for more information.
Very little personal information is known for certain about this guy as
he maintains an extremely high level of anonymity and his own personal
accounts of his life are often fantastical, contradictory or just plain disprovable.
For example, he claims to hold a PhD in “holistic massage” and often refers to himself as Dr Tingle,
but the university he stated he attended offers no such degree.
Some of his more believable claims include: his first name actually being Chuck,
almost being a Tae Kwon Do blackbelt, being on the autism spectrum, and his son being
his editor. The editor of his comedic fetish erotica. I must confess that’s not a father-son
business venture I would have envisioned before now but more power to them I guess.
Tingle has quite a substantial following beyond fans of his book due to his vocal
support of the LGBTQ community and his hard stance against hate groups.
In 2016 a subsection of the alt-right attempted to troll the Hugo awards by
organising a voting campaign that drove one of his weird titles to the finals,
Tingle vehemently condemned this group and promised that if he won, he would ask Zoë
Quinn, one of the victims of the gamergate bullshittery, to accept his award for him.
He turned this and a subsequent Hugo loss into subjects for his books because..of course he did.
When JK Rowling revealed that she was more into the turf than the surf
Tingle responded with a full-length parody of Harry Potter starring a trans hero.
He also opposed the tangerine menace during his farcical presidency, mocking him constantly with
parody fact-checking websites and making him a key player in several of his satirical fetish erotica.
So throughout this Tingle enlightenment I experienced, a question kept occurring to me
over and over that no one seemed to be addressing. Chuck Tingle is a pretty cool guy, Chuck Tingle
is great at titles and covers, but are his books actually any good, is Chuck Tingle a good writer?
Now I feel the need to immediately qualify this: I’m aware that it doesn’t MATTER. His books make
people happy (even if they’ve not read them which is quite an achievement), his inclusivity means a
lot to people and his general behaviour, be it the amusingly bizarre or the unashamedly progressive
matters more in this crazy world we’re living in than if he can rock a good three-act structure.
It’s cheesy to say but Tingle has somewhat transcended simply being an author to
being an icon so the question of whether or not
he’s actually good at writing is fairly inconsequential...
But fuck it I don’t have anything going on tonight so let’s address it anyway.
In search of an answer I read… More individual books than I’ve ever read
for a single project before. Tingle has over 350 to his name and as I said,
they’re all really short so you have to read a decent amount of them to get a
feel for his writing style. Here’s a quick rundown of my top picks.
Pounded In The Butt By My Own Butt
Some years ago a scientist invented a way to clone a mindless worker drone
replication of himself and started some sort of isolated island nation.
His research is obviously highly controversial and mostly secret but Kirk and a small group of
scientists are attempting to replicate his work by combining tissue samples
from various parts of their bodies with animal DNA and cooking up insta-clones.
Their first success comes when they combine Kirk’s brain, butt, and an eagle,
resulting in a flying sapient pair of buttocks with all of his memories and intelligence.
To welcome him to life Kirk takes him out to dinner, and in what appears to be an extreme
act of narcissism, they immediately fall for each other and return to his apartment to have sex.
The next morning Kirk briefly believes that his clone butt has loved him and left him as that
is his own MO, but it turns out it decided to remain with him and give a relationship a try.
I have to admit I was surprised by the amount of world-building that Tingle squeezed into
this tiny ass story. He managed to work in a whole backstory around the creation of
clones and the ethical debates that sprang up from it before getting to the anal sex.
My Librarian Is A Beautiful Lesbian Ice Cream Cone And She Tastes Amazing
A young woman named Sally is annoyed that her
local library has cranked the AC to an uncomfortably low temperature but
immediately regrets complaining when she finds out it’s to accommodate a
very attractive female living ice cream cone called Drenda who’s just started working there.
They hit it off and Sally discovers that the cold actually results in her being significantly more
efficient in her work, but alas Drenda is fired after too many people bitch about it.
Sally tracks her down and offers to try to help her get her job back,
then things get SUPER META. Drenda reveals that she is aware that they are characters in a book
and is in possession of a copy of said book, referencing Chuck Tingle by name.
She decides that getting her job back is secondary to getting this book into a library someday,
either in the real world or their one, so their best option is to have really
amazing sex and hope that helps the book sell well, so they do.
I don’t personally care for meta storytelling or humour BUT I did
look up the cold efficiency thing which was mentioned as a real phenomenon,
I suspect that was Chuck's real intention, so he wins this round.
Moby Butt
As the name implies this is a parody of Moby Dick, but with the delightful twist
that the whale is a giant aquatic butt, and Captain Amber i.e. Ahab is her lesbian lover.
7 years prior to the start of the tale they had begun a sexy game of cat and mouse
that got way out of hand as the butt wouldn’t let herself get caught and
the captain has become too obsessed with winning and justifying the whole terrible ordeal
to use the pre-agreed upon safeword that would’ve ended it immediately.
After some teasing from the butt and a lot of frantic chasing,
the crew of Amber’s ship is on the verge of mutiny and a massive storm is raging overhead.
The ship is badly damaged and her last-ditch attempt to capture the
butt fails. In an act of madness, Captain Amber dives overboard to swim after her.
Seconds from drowning, she realises how silly she’s being and calls out the safe word, so
the butt turns around to rescue her and her ship.
Amber passed out and comes to on a deserted island and has sex with her massive sea butt.
There were enough references and quotes in this for there to be a distinct possibility that
Chuck Tingle actually read all of Moby Dick so he could make this one chapter long erotic parody.
Even though he went about it in a very silly way and hammered it home with a shred of subtlety,
there was a pretty good moral in this about not letting embarrassment or
any other reason stop you from using a safe word if you want out of something with your partner.
Gay T-Rex Law Firm: Executive Boner
Donny, a law graduate struggling to find work in the poor job market,
takes a secretarial position in a law firm run by human-sized intelligent T-rexes.
After a disastrous first day, his boss reveals they were
working him extra hard to test his resolve then offers him a contract
to have sex with a room full of senior partners in exchange for 10 million dollars.
He signs it thinking it’s a joke but discovers it was entirely serious,
so decides to follow through and is gangbanged by half a dozen dinosaurs.
This book surprised me a little because I thought that Tingle was known for being
steadfast on themes of positive consent and this played very near to that line because
while Donny ended up enjoying the experience he still didn’t sign the contract fully aware
of its seriousness and insisted that he was heterosexual several times.
Sentient Bisexual Ketchup and Mustard Get Me Off
Lindsey is a young go-getter moving up the corporate ladder at her office job.
Her boss discovers she is a big fan of the baseball team The Lobsters and
gives her a box ticket to an upcoming game.
The other occupant of the box turns out to be a celebrity bottle of ketchup that
Lindsey has been crushing on and what do you know she just happens to have
a big hotdog that's in dire need of what he can give her if you know what I mean….
That’s not a metaphor so yeah you probably do know what I mean.
Celebrity or no, Lindsey's sexual needs are only met when a beutiful
mustard woman joins them for a bixesual conderment threeway.
This one was pretty entertaining. In addition to the treasure trove of food puns the book had
some surprisingly quotable lines like “Lightning rod of sexual conduction”.
General thoughts
Two things surprised me about Chuck’s work, the first is that while his books derive humour
from some of the internet's strangest genuine fetishes they do not appear to be mocking them.
The absurdity of the beings that people have sex with is obviously not
played straight but the characters in the stories are NEVER made the butt of the joke or
judged for feeling sexual attraction to them.
Related, the humour in the sex scenes is intentional but they’re not JUST played for
laughs. Tingle put his all into making sex with a lesbian ice cream cone as arousing as possible.
In the event that absurdist pornography is your jam,
you could probably get your jollies from this.
Every book felt a little rushed. Like I mentioned,
Tingle managed to squeeze a lot of good moments into them but it was undeniably a squeeze.
I understand each concept has limited legs and
there has to be an extremely high turnover to fit the business model but
I don’t know I think they could just be a little bit longer. Just a liiittle bit.
There’s also recurring issues with inconsistency regarding the physical
abilities of the weird sexual partners. Hands or mouths are often either not
mentioned or are confirmed missing but whenever the sex scenes start
things are described that definitely require the use of fingers and tongues.
I don’t know I just think it’s a missed opportunity to get creative
regarding how sex would work without human bodies.
The word “coo” comes up in almost every instalment
and it’s close enough to the word murmur to upset me.
This might be different in some of Tingles many, many other books but I noticed in the
selection I read the POV is always the regular human, I would quite like to see
some stories told from the perspective of an affluent horny gay dinosaur at some point.
There was way more variety to these stories than I would have thought possible,
each brought a little something different to the table before having sex on it.
Pounded in the butt had its world-building, The Librarian Icecream went meta,
Moby Butt was a one for one parody, they all did something unique which is quite impressive.
Tingle could have easily gotten away with coasting by on the clickbait value of his titles and covers
and either put out the same plot over and over again with different creatures copy-pasted into
it, OR written his stories to be bad on purpose like Sharknado or something but he didn’t,
he clearly puts a lot of work and thought into these silly books.
So all in all I think the answer to my question is yeah, Dr Tingle is a pretty
good writer. I think if he chose to he could write something longer or more grounded but
if this is what he enjoys creating and people enjoying reading them then fuck it,
this is a perfectly good use of his talents.
Thank you for joining me, my beautiful watchers. Don’t forget to pound the like
button in the - you know I can’t finish that sentence but please don’t forget
to do all those good youtube channel helping things and take care of yourselves out there.