Naked Run

Occasionally in this wiki, you will come across me referring to something as a "naked run." So what is a naked run?

This is a phrase I dreamed up myself after watching the execrable Batman and Robin. This movie is a naked run movie. Joel Schumacher had made one okay-but-not-great Batman movie that made buckets of money. So when he made this movie, he apparently felt he could put anything he wanted in it: Bat-nipples, Bat-asses, barely-veiled-at-all gay innuendo, insanely silly villains, stupid dialogue, oiled semi-nude boytoys and scenes like girl auctions and.... EVERYTHING about Mr. Freeze.

In a nutshell,﻿ "naked run" means that the author/director/whatever has become so famous and egotistical that they feel they can vomit all their personal fantasies and fetishes onto the page/camera without actually thinking or caring about the people who will actually watch/read/listen to it. It's the artistic equivalent of taking off your clothes, painting yourself bright purple, and running naked through the streets. No restraint at all. You are an artiste, so everything you vomit out is wonderful!

So what are some other examples? Well, there's Stephenie Meyer. More specifically, there is the epic explosion of WTFery that I really don't have to introduce.

Granted there's always been some naked-runniness about the Twilight series (like the author's weird fetish for marble), but Breaking Dawn is where it goes nuclear. Stephenie Meyer sticks to her previous style through the wedding, but then suddenly it becomes a celebration of mutant murderous fetii, her not-so-subtle hatred of pregnancy/motherhood, a guy finding troo luv with a five-minute-old baby still smeared with birth snot, rapey rough sex, blatant Sueiness instead of concealed Sueiness, and Bella's Magic Sue Shield. This is what Stephenie Meyers wants to write! This is her vomiting up all her fetishes and fantasies into the book with NO RESTRAINTS.

Who else is a naked run author? Well, look at the last several years of Stephenie Meyer's long-lost sister-in-Sue-ness, Laurell K. Hamilton.

In retrospect, LKH has always had a touch of the naked run about her. But it was pretty much kept in check for MOST of the first part of her series. Then... she divorced her first husband, allegedly because she was already hooking up with an adoring fanboy who was happy to center his entire life around her. She also had reached a level of fame that meant she got the "no-edit" clause which is pretty much death for any author who gets it. I can't think of ONE author who got the no-edit clause and didn't immediately have their quality go down.

And with LKH, she managed to totally jump the shark in a single three-book cycle. Suddenly the entire series went from a dark gritty series with lots of blood and murder and mayhem.... into being a catalog of LKH's fetishes and personal obsessions. Oh yes, her entire Anita Blake series has now become one long naked run.

Among them: rainbow-colored hair, from butt-length to ankle-length, circus-freak penises, leather, talking a lot about BSDM without including anything more than the super-mild stuff, underage teenage boys, gay sex, sexually-abused child-men, bashing her ex-husband/ex-boyfriends, her own "mounds of creamy goodness", "rain-making", working out and protein shakes. She has even notoriously told the world that she writes "90% gold" in her FIRST DRAFT.

As if that naked run wasn't brain-exploding enough, Hamilton then started ANOTHER series, in which she did mostly the same naked-run stuff as before, plus her preaching about Wicca.

...

Okay, I'll shut up.

I think you all get the idea behind the "naked run" now. It's when things like character development, plot and the potential enjoyability of the movie/music/book get shoved aside, so the author can just unleash all their fetishes, neuroses and fantasies on an unsuspecting audience. And yes, it usually starts at the same time when an author/director/musician suddenly develops a bloated grotesque ego and becomes more than a little bit crazy.

So remember, everyone: if an author, director or musician's work is suddenly consumed by incredibly weird issues, fetishes and personal fantasies... it's probably a naked run. If that happens, suit up and prepare to snark!