[FyreCracka]

.....So....we are all in agreement. There is no right (or wrong) way to present a fighter's stats. 

[catfightlover40]

.....So....we are all in agreement. There is no right (or wrong) way to present a fighter's stats. 

It needs to make sense in the story, but that's true for everything that's written. The description of good writing is kind of like the old description of porn, you know it when you see it.

That's a tricky one since that would start with "porn is a film genre that attracted such stars as Helen Mirren, Donald Sutherland and Malcolm McDowell but once private cable and with it, pay per view came around, it got reduced to a plotless fuckfest you can watch while drunk or high".

[EllenShaw]

This is an interesting discussion. It looks to me like the majority are saying 'go easy on the stats and let us imagine the characters' and I sort of get that.

In most of my stories the fights take place in a ring (not spontaneous cat fights) and the ref reads the 'tale of the tape' before the fight.

One reason I do this is because my characters are all based on real people I've known. I imagine those people as I write and I want the reader to imagine something similar to what I do. So it's relevant to know one girl is taller than another or has smaller tits or whatever.

That said, readers of my stories will know my personal stats haven't changed much in the ten years my stories cover. And ladies of a certain age will know you don't go from your mid-forties to your mid-fifties and stay the same size and shape ?

[Tiberius J.C.]

Here's an even funnier example from an otherwise excellent story by a German writer whom I won't name because we all write twaddle sometimes (some of us all the time):
Now, Marka, that's her name, is by no means unattractive. In fact, for her 37 years, she is really very beautiful. She's around 1.75 m tall. She has very fair, shoulder-length hair that she normally plaits into a pigtail and a delicate face with even features: big blue eyes, a thin, elegant nose and a small mouth with slim, delicate lips. She has long, gracefully slender, legs, a wasp-waist (no kids yet) and what (relative to the rest of her figure) are fairly large breasts. Once, at a village fete, there were some scales lying around and for a laugh we all weighed ourselves. That's how I know her exact weight: 49 kg.
 

[Super Deadly Ham Attack]

I've gotten feedback before that in my stories I should be putting the exact height and weight down because it's too hard to picture otherwise, so I guess I'm a little surprised to see how unpopular that is in this thread. The approach I've adopted is trying to think about what makes sense for the story. As noted up above, if it's a pro match with a weigh-in, it makes sense for everyone to know the fighter's height and went down to the inch and pound. If not, I'll usually have someone take a guess at the various heights, because anybody can do that; when it comes to the weight, though, since this is much tougher to eyeball, I'll make it much looser, or just leave it out entirely and describe the body shape.

All that being said, I do think in general I prefer to err on the side of too much description. There are some stories on here where the fighters aren't described at all, and I know it's a crime I've been guilty of before where I can see the fighters so clearly while I'm writing that I forget everyone else is only going based on what I say about them.

[Swedish Cats]

I've gotten feedback before that in my stories I should be putting the exact height and weight down because it's too hard to picture otherwise, so I guess I'm a little surprised to see how unpopular that is in this thread. The approach I've adopted is trying to think about what makes sense for the story. As noted up above, if it's a pro match with a weigh-in, it makes sense for everyone to know the fighter's height and went down to the inch and pound. If not, I'll usually have someone take a guess at the various heights, because anybody can do that; when it comes to the weight, though, since this is much tougher to eyeball, I'll make it much looser, or just leave it out entirely and describe the body shape.

All that being said, I do think in general I prefer to err on the side of too much description. There are some stories on here where the fighters aren't described at all, and I know it's a crime I've been guilty of before where I can see the fighters so clearly while I'm writing that I forget everyone else is only going based on what I say about them.

I think there's a large discrepancy between the commentators in this thread and the readers in the story forums.

[Phoenix_Falcone]

I think there's a large discrepancy between the commentators in this thread and the readers in the story forums.

I would say there are a few different types of readers. There are those of us who like writers like Jon Grey and rin573, both of whom have created fantastic story series that took a minimalist approach to describing the competitors. Then there are those who like stories like those written by DottiD, where every competitor has their height, weight, bra size, and description of what their breasts look like described in extreme detail.

I think it may be more nuanced than that.  By and large everyone in this thread is or has been a writer in some form, a very creative process.  Having also experienced that creative process, I know personally I'm after a little more than "here's two women of x description, they're now fighting" (in the main of course, some simpler stuff is nice on occasion).  Really it doesn't matter too much to me who the women in question are or what they look like, I can conjure that up myself.  What I enjoy is the creative reasons built up around the combat, and I think a fair number in this thread share this thought process.  This is not to say measurements are bad necessarily, it's just that they are not vital to the story, and if the story is written in a way where it is jarring to read measurements, then it's less enjoyable.

However, a lot of readers I imagine, are looking specifically for the fight/sexuality, and may not have a lot of time or want to consider who x character is, or why they are doing what they are doing.  They just want two characters doing the thing, and with as much physical detail as possible so they dont have to think about anything.  These people, I would think generally, would not write anything of their own, so rely on us writers to provide for them.  Keep in mind, while porn can potentially have a good story attached, people dont necessarily go out of their way to read/watch it for that story.  There are obviously many other ways to consume a good story without delving into a fetish.

Neither side of the coin is wrong, we are free to indulge in what we like.  I can only write what I think I would like to read, and if there's a market for that here, then I'll be happy.  If not, then so be it.

[Golden Goddess]

I think someone just dropping the stats of a woman into their first paragraph is the sign of a bad writer, personally, especially if it doesn't make any sense in context.

[papillon]

Some men think a woman's sex appeal is directly proportional to the size of her tits. To others, it's the size of her biceps and thighs. Blaise Pascale famously speculated that if Cleopatra's nose had been shorter, the whole face of the world would have been changed. This type of gigantism is a fetish, and there's nothing wrong with it, but men who feel this way are in a very small (if noisy) minority. Most of us spend our entire lives trying to understand why we find some women irresistible and others less so without ever arriving at an answer. It's a whole complex of things that defies analysis. Neither of the historians who described Cleopatra during her lifetime even mentioned her nose, and a third, Appian, states specifically that the two most powerful men of Rome, Julius Caesar and Marc Antony, both fell in love with her “wit as well as her good looks”.
She was also rich. Exceedingly rich. That can't have hurt.