Sex Brood

Fandom
Name:	Sex Brood
Abbreviation(s):
Creator:	Marie Crosswell
Date(s):	February 2013
Medium:	ebook
Country of Origin:
External Links:
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Sex Brood was a book epublished by Marie Crosswell, who previously blogged at The Thinking Aro. Crosswell was also previously on Tumblr as outlawroad.

Gabriel Kidd, a young private investigator and bounty hunter working the streets of Los Angeles, takes a case revolving around the mysterious disappearance of a porn star. Two time zones away in Chicago, a young police psychologist named John Hughes starts shadowing a pair of homicide detectives as they try to solve the brutal murder of a convenience store clerk who was stabbed to death on the job. While Gabriel recruits a Hollywood Vice detective named Blythe to help her find answers about the actress nicknamed Jill K, John befriends a sex worker in desperate need of his help. As Gabriel and John slide deeper and deeper into the dark world of sex crimes, they head for a dangerous confrontation that may cost multiple lives--including their own.

Sex Brood was notorious mostly for its lack of quality, and fanart, readings of it, and general critique spawned around it. Most of said “fanbase” was removed due to her DMCAing fan creators. Much of the criticism of Sex Brood centered around its representation of asexuality, and the fandom surrounding it can be characterized as a form of antifandom.

In a 2014 Tumblr post, user missvoltairine described their experience receiving a DMCA takedown notice for a parodic fanwork of Sex Brood:

After much, much hype about how her first novel was going to be a game changer in terms of representation for asexual people, she finally released it as an ebook… I wanna say it was about a year ago? Anyway, it was terrible. Like, it was really, really bad. It was called Sex Brood, often referred to by people like me as SEX BROOD because how can you not. It was like… I can’t even describe how bad it was. I think it should actually be taught in literature courses as an object lesson in Everything Not To Do for your first novel (or any novel). I mean, aside from being racist, misogynist, and obviously just a very poorly disguised BBC Sherlock fanfic, it was just… really, really badly written. The plot was thin and didn’t hold together very well, characters were one-dimensional stereotypes, there was a bunch of stuff about drug use that was just obviously not researched at all, did I mention the racism, did I mention the misogyny, I mean, it was BAD.

So naturally because of OLR’s established presence and the way she’d been hyping the book and all of that, it became an almost instant source of mockery. It was a magical time for people who like making fun of self-important assholes on the internet! twittysuch did a dramatic reading series of the book on youtube, I made a blog where I illustrated passages from the book in ridiculously literal ways, my partner thepfa wrote and recorded a SEX BROOD theme song. Lots of people posted reviews with excerpts from the book, and another tumblr user who’s on hiatus rn distributed the book for free from pastebin or some site like that so people wouldn’t have to pay to read it - although tbh a lot of people still did pay to read it just because of all the wank. Probably most of the sales came from people making fun of the book, although obviously I can’t say for sure (I do know that a lot of people told me they bought the book after seeing my illustrations). It was mostly just fun to take the piss out of such a terrible book, idk.

Then OLR threatened tumblr, youtube, and the host for the pastebin or equivalent site with lawsuits and everything got deleted. I mean like everything. All my illustrations got yanked, which tbh was not a huge loss (I did them all in ten minutes or less while drunk), and all of twittysuch’s videos. The one thing that DIDN’T get pulled was the SEX BROOD theme song, because it didn’t contain any actual content from the book. I never heard anything from Marie Crosswell personally, although I said a few times publicly that if she had approached me personally and said “look, I wrote a bad book, it’s my first book, I’m 21, I don’t want my professional life to be forever associated with this disaster” I would have just taken them down myself. I’m a writer and artist, I wouldn’t want to be forever associated with the shit I wrote and drew when I was a teenager. (I still think she should be accountable to how OFFENSIVE it was, though, I mean really.) I only heard from tumblr. I explained to them that everything I did fell completely under fair use, but she must have actually involved a lawyer because I know tumblr is pretty good about parody normally and they were really rigid about this. I can’t speak for twittysuch and I don’t know what youtube’s policies are like, though. I know at the time I was really pissed off because I saw it as an abuse of copyright law, which is something I really value as a writer and artist myself, and I still feel that way but I’m less pissed off about it now. All I did was make some silly drawings, it’s not like she had any great works of art censored.

Fan Reactions

This book is horrid in every way a book can be horrid, and makes it obvious the author has no idea how people, porn, or drugs work. Gabriel Kidd is not so much a character as she is a mouthpiece for the author's (completely repulsive and nonsensical) worldview, while John is what would happen if a Lifetime Movie Hero somehow got his spine replaced with unset Jell-O. As Dorothy Parker once said of "Atlas Shrugged," this is not a book to be lightly cast aside, but rather hurled with great force. Preferably into the nearest woodchipper.

I'm in the minority, apparently, in thinking this had redeeming features. Yes, the reliance on racial/racist cliches was a problem, and yes, the character did come across as repulsed by other women. That made for some highly uncomfortable moments reading this book, but I don't have to love a character to enjoy a book.

I think most of the problems with this could have been resolved with a little more research, and a highly critical beta. One of the problems with self-publishing can be precisely that the lack of an outside perspective makes it impossible to pick up on things like unconscious kneejerk racial stereotypes. It's something the author can avoid in her future work if she just finds critical readers to give preliminary feedback.

Still, at the end of the day it was an attempt to portray a hardboiled asexual female character, and in that respect, it was entertaining to read.