Adult Content Creators’ Corner — Emily Blake Gets Animated

(This interview was originally published on August 31, 2021.)

UPDATE: The project is reached its goal, but is now focused on stretch goals. You can continue to donate until the deadline, September 9th, at 9:00 AM.)

(Author note: Since the Kickstarter mentioned here ends September 9th, I’m breaking away from my usual Friday release schedule. And, full disclosure, I pledged money to the Kickstarter.)

Kink is coming out of the shadows. But like with a lot of subcultures, as it goes mainstream, there are always people who don’t know all the ins and outs. Gatekeeping is bullshit. Full stop. New kinksters should be welcomed with open arms. But if you join the Trekkie community and don’t know the registry number of the original Enterprise, there’s really no damage done. If you’re choking your partner, not knowing what you’re doing can turn your adventures in erotic asphyxiation into a dangerous, even deadly, situation. Educating people about kink is essential. People should be able to enjoy exploring their sexuality without harming themselves . . . any more than they intend to.

Emily Blake wants to destigmatize kink and help people learn about how to practice it safely. That’s why she started working on Welcome to Kinkyville. Welcome to Kinkyville is an animated series for people who are new to kink. Or at least it will be if Blake can get the project off the ground. She and her cohort are trying to fund the project through Kickstarter. As of this writing, August 30th, the Kickstarter has raised $43,213 of the $54,000 needed. This is an all-or-nothing project. If they don’t achieve their goal by September 9th, at 9:00 AM Pacific, then it’s back to the drawing board. Reaching that goal would be great. Exceeding it would be better. Every extra $5,000 means they can do another minute of animation.

While filming has its costs, animation is expensive and might seem like a strange choice for a show about sex and kink education. Blake had originally planned to do this as a live-action series, but then the pandemic changed that. As the delta-variant cases rise, it’s safer for their actors’ health. It’s also safer for another reason.

I’m really glad we did animation because, after I started working on it, I realized animation was a better choice because you can show nudity — you can show sexual situations, and you don’t have to make actors uncomfortable.

Blake also believes the animation would be less intimidating. “If you are just trying to get into kink, it’s a bit overwhelming and a bit scary. Animation allows us to be less scary and a little bit more friendly.” A cartoon also allows for more humor in situations like the scene in the trailer where a nurse admonishes a man for deciding an astronaut toy was suitable for anal play.

Blake initially envisioned her project being called How to Be Kinky, but that name was already taken. Since she wanted it to be welcoming, having welcome in the title seemed like a good start. As for the origins of Kinkyville:

We went with a 50s aesthetic. I like the idea of us setting the show in with this visual aesthetic of such a sexually repressed time. We called it Kinkyville because, in the fifties, it became very popular to add -ville to the end of words.

Think of Kinkyville like Pleasantville, but instead of Betty Parker discovering masturbation, she discovers BDSM.

When the project is funded, and they’ve finished shooting the pilot, they’ll pitch it to some of the major streaming networks. (Have no fear. The team has access to the types of meetings they need, so that hurdle has already been cleared.) And while the money is essential, the number of people donating is also a vital data point. Even if a bunch of people only donate $1, not only does every dollar help, but those people are counted as a potential audience for Welcome to Kinkyville if a network picks up the show. “The higher the numbers are, the better it looks when we take it into a network and say, look at all these people actually gave us money to make this. This is how many people were interested in seeing this.”

For Blake, the road to Kinkyville hasn’t been a straight one. And why would it be? She’s a kinky bisexual woman. Her project is motivated by her desire to make it so people don’t have to go through the same disappointment and shame she did for being into improper things. “I was married to the person I was supposed to marry. I was doing the things I was supposed to be doing, and I was never fully happy.” She was denying part of herself. “I had fantasies about things when I was married, and before that, but I just sort of dismissed them as wrong or not an actual thing people do — that it wasn’t something I was allowed to feel.” Blake eventually divorced her husband, and her parents weren’t supportive. In fact, they were the opposite. “They didn’t think I should have left. Their behavior over it was pretty much unforgivable, and they’ve never thought to ask for forgiveness.” That’s when things started to change for her. Minus one husband and two parents, Blake didn’t have anyone telling her what to do. That allowed her to realize the thoughts and feelings she’d been doing her best to suppress and ignore weren’t something she needed to be ashamed of.

I started to explore who I really wanted to be, and I discovered that I wanted to be kinky. That was something I hadn’t allowed myself to be because it was not proper. It wasn’t right. There was a lot of shame. There were all these fantasies I had thought were just fantasies. That they didn’t mean anything. Realizing that I’ve spent so much of my life denying it all means this is very important to me. We need to remove the shame from these things. For people who are getting into kink in the future, I want to try to normalize it as much as possible. I want them to feel that it’s safe for them to like these things.

But that didn’t mean she instantly knew she wanted Welcome to Kinkyville to become a thing. There were still plenty of twists and turns before she’d arrive there. In fact, the project started out as a fake idea. After finding her place in the sex-positive, kink community, she was writing a screenplay about polyamory. After about 30 pages, she started to realize it wasn’t working, so she attempted to salvage it by having two of the characters make a YouTube series about kink. “The more I started working on what this little fake YouTube show was, the more I wanted that to be a real thing.” She eventually binned the screenplay and continued to develop the idea that grew into Welcome to Kinkyville. She’d already been educating people about kink.

I’m in a lot of kink groups, and you start to see the same questions asked over and over again. A lot of the time, it’s from subs who have abusive Doms. “My Dom said, I have to do this thing. I don’t like it. But he said I have to do it because I’m his sub.” And I found myself responding to that comment so many times, with the same information, and sort of wishing that there was an easy, entertaining way for people to get this information so that they don’t find themselves in abusive situations.

The project grew from there until eventually, people she talked about it with said, “Hey, you know this could actually be a thing.”

Three years later, with the help of friends and colleagues, Blake’s long, winding journey is nearing an end. Welcome to Kinkyville has a director and producer, Gabriel Figueroa. Blake’s cohost is sex-educator Javay da BAE. With help from their voice cast and Lucy Animation Studios, Blake’s vision is almost a reality. All she needs is more donors to turn the originally fake YouTube series into an actual tool for educating people about sex and kink.

You can find more of her work on her real YouTube channel, PewPewPew Productions, where you can find things like A Buffy Quarantine Musical and benchmark videos for their fundraiser — like her demonstrating caning on Figueroa when they reached $15,000. When they get to their next benchmark, $45,000, Blake will use Figueroa to demonstrate wax play.