About

History of Metabods 

FAQ

Thanks for visiting Metabods! Here are a few frequently asked questions. If you have a question here that's not answered here, please drop me a line.

Site history

Who runs this site, and since when?
Brian Ramirez Kyle is the chief cook and bottle-washer. He founded the site in 1997.
Where can I find out more about the history of the site?
Check out the History of Metabods.
Has BRK ever talked about the site in other media?
Actually, yes.
  • To read a 2023 interview with There She Grows about BRK and the Metabods site, click here.
  • To hear an old radio interview with BRK about Metabods, click here (MP3 file, 16.7MB).

Following, contacting, and submitting

How do I get updates on new stories and site-related announcements?
New latest stories are posted every Saturday; to see the latest visit the news page. You can follow Metabods on Instagram, Facebook, or Patreon or via email or RSS for update notifications.
What are some of the ways I can send feedback, suggestions, and submissions?
All the best ways to contact me are on the contact page, plus a form you can use for both feeback and story submissions.
What other web presences does the site moderator, BRK, have?
That's on the contact page too.

Questions about recent changes

Whoa! What happened to the site in April 2016? Why did everything change?
(Posted 2 April 2016): So here’s the thing. For quite a while now, I’ve been getting very polite notes and hints from friends and visitors to the site that Metabods was not, when it came right down to it, tablet- and mobile-friendly. The frequency and directness of these nudges stepped up a notch after I did the site redesign in 2015. It’s been somewhat frustrating for me as I haven’t been able to get a really solid handle on the nature of the problem, since the site loaded acceptably enough on my own iPhone in Safari.
  Nonetheless I’ve grown increasingly uncomfortable with the fact that my website has had a black mark against it among those viewing on tablet and mobile platforms. In this day and age that’s tantamount to saying you have a broken website.
  One of the things that made migration daunting was that I was certain it was a bad idea to try to maul and manhandle the existing site, which is built on very complicated wiki code that I extensively modified over six years, into some brute semblance of mobile friendliness. The complexity of the site and code guaranteed that such half measures would fail, because something would be included somewhere along the way that would trip up cross-platform users. Even using the existing database and accessing the raw content via SQL was a dubious prospect, because the raw content was laced with wiki code and additional additives and by-products that could taint the process.
  What was necessary, therefore, was to recreate and rebuild the site on a widely used cross-platform framework, and set up the new site so that it was absolutely as simple and clean as possible in order to allow access by as many different users and platforms as possible.
  My plan was to work on setting up the new framework, which turned out to be the Bootstrap software recommended by one of our regulars, while still keeping a version of the old wiki/SQL site available in parallel until the migration was complete. Unfortunately, something I did in moving directories and files around in order to set up the new site somehow fatally crippled the wiki. I spent all of Friday trying to get it accessible again, so that the content would still be publically available during the transition, but persistent troubleshooting and reinstalling, accompanied by even more persistent swearing, was of no avail.
  Which brings us to where we’re at: I’m migrating the content to the new framework steadily but not fast enough to magically have the site fully up and running this weekend, which had been the original idea. I intend to keep at it, and have the full site up as soon as I can, but we’re at just shy of a thousand stories, and while I’ve set up a lot of automation to help me it’s still not instantaneous. (Also, it may suprise you to know I have a real life, though I plan on taking some time away from it to complete this project with the maximum possible alacrity, especially as this is, to quote Aragorn, a cleft stick of my own cutting.)
  All this is by way of apology that there’s a huge, echoing void where all the content is supposed to be. I still have it, it’s all packed away on my laptop, and I’m getting it up, if you’ll pardon the expression, as fast as I can. Please be patient, and watch the News page for regular updates on the migration. —BRK
  (9 Dec 2016) One further migration shifted the stories to a new database, changing the look a little bit one more time and opening up new possibilities for content and features.
Why were the image galleries removed? (Fall 2013)
Originally I never really had any trouble over the image galleries, but they were also never as important to me as the stories. In the fall of 2012 someone who was the subject of a photograph that was later morphed (to show a larger bulge under his clothes) contacted me seeking information about the artist who created the morph. I could not tell him anything, as the photomanip was at least 15 years old and had, to the best of my recollection, come into my possession as part of a batch of submissions from a third party.
  Then a year later he contacted me again, threatening to sue me and the site to recover the name of the artist. I again told him I did not know, and he claims to have halted any actions against me, but the encounter revealed a potentially massive risk exposure to my financial soundness and ordinary life. Having the galleries up simply was not worth that risk, especially as they were always ancillary to the site's focus on erotic stories. I'm not so naïve as to be unaware it's still dangerous curating a story archive devoted to peculiar gay fantasy erotica, but that's one category of risk the less, anyway.

Questions about updates and content

Hello! I just wanted to ask why metabods functions the way it does right now. Why is it that stories only update on a certain time schedule? Why can't the authors update their stories whenever they want? Thank you!
The update schedule is when I post my own stories, because the main purpose of the site from my perspective is as a place to post the stuff I write. When I post my stuff, I also post other stories that have been submitted to me. There’s some work involved in editing these stories and posting them, and so my practice has been to set aside time to do that alongside the writing and editing I do on my own stories every week. I don’t let anyone else work on the site, because supervising the editing work of others feels like it would be the same amount of work, and I like being the guy that does Metabods as well as the writer BRK.
  Up until the end of 2015 the site updated very randomly because I posted my stories very randomly. So, again from my perspective, the biweekly updates (and weekly updates beginning at the start of 2021) were an improvement.

General questions about the site

What is Metabods?
It's a place that celebrates, um, metabods. You know.
No, I don't know. So what are metabods?
Metabods can be anything you want. Metabods are expressions of the desire to transform and improve the human (male) form. These improvements can take a variety of forms, but usually they involve the enhancement of whatever you find alluring about the male body.
The male body? Aren't there fantasies about women too?
Theoretically, yes. That is, there's material about female metabods out there, including things like multibreast fantasies, Amazon growth, etc. But, it's all guys here.
All guys, huh? So this is stuff is all gay, right?
No, not all of it. Many or most of our stories involve erotic encounters between male metabods, but not all.
Still, on the whole, it's pretty much gay?
Well, yeah.
Cool. So give me an example. What do you guys dream about?
It's all very individual. Muscle growth, in moderation or extreme, is one popular category. There's also replication (cloning, the growth of a second body, or "twinning", the splitting of a body into two exact forms), cock growth (increasing size a few inches or a few feet), macro (growth in size beyond the range possible for regular humans), micro (shrinking, which can be down to a few feet or a few inches or even smaller), body swapping (placing your mind in another body), centaur forms, and various kinds of extras (extra limbs, digits, cocks, even heads; twinning, which is basically extra bodies, falls into this too).
Are the stories all about the transformation into the fantasy form?
Some guys find the transformation process itself most engaging. Others are interested in envisioning people, or even societies, of guys who have metabods their whole lives.
What's multilimb? And what's a boytaur?
Multilimb describes guys with either extra arms, extra legs, or both. A boytaur describes a particular kind of multilimb: generally, a hot, muscular, randy young guy with four legs and at least two sets of genitals. The boytaur developed around the turn of the century as an outgrowth of centaur fantasy stories originally written by Josh Dugan. It turned out in these stories that, given how cumbersome a horse's body can be, it would be really cool to try human legs in place of the horse's legs, with a short or long human back in place of the horse's body. This became the humantaur. The boytaur is a sexed-up version of the humantaur, inspired in part by the teen musclegod drawings of Matt/HSMuscleBoy. Boytaurs had their own excellent web site, boytaur.net (defunct as of 2012, sadly), run by my friend and fellow author Spike. All the stories from that site are posted here at Metabods.
So how did Metabods start, anyway?
Funny story. Somewhere around 1996 I discovered Josh Dugan's multilimb stories on the net at Nifty, the comprehensive erotic story archive. I was entranced. It was like coming out all over again: I had always thought that I must be the only one who had fantasized about guys with extra arms (among other things). And here were these stories on the net for all the world to see! If there was another guy there had to be more. I was immediately inspired to write my first two multilimb stories ("Body Shop" and "Army Experiment"—still two of my personal favorites, as your firstborn often are <g>), which I submitted to Nifty. The Nifty Archivist duly posted my stories, but then sent me a note that suggested that perhaps one prolific author in this vein might be enough for his site. At first I was angry at being discouraged so soon after my revelation, but later I realized he was right in a way: The proportion of one writer to all the writers on Nifty is probably not dissimilar to the proportion of gay guys interested in multilimb stories in relation to the gay population. So, being a web developer, I started my own web site, sometime in 1997. Since then it's had several incarnations. But at root it's always been a story archive for "specialized" fantasies that are hard to find in generalist sites like Nifty. Originally there were very few such sites (and none featuring multilimbs); recently more have developed, as well as Yahoo groups and other forums.
Where did the word "metabods" come from?
My first site was on a UNIX server and I needed a site account name that was eight characters or less.
Brian Ramirez Kyle is a funny name. Is it real?
Um, the name is real, it exists in reality...
I guess I mean, is it your real name?
Well, no. It's my pen name. Trying to keep a scrap of anonymity here, you know, in case I run for President someday.
How do you feel about people that laugh at you because your fetish is so bizarre?
“Lalalala, not listening...”
But does it bother you that people think you're a freak?
I wear the name freak with pride. Normal people are boring, conformist, and stupid.
Some stories I've seen elsewhere with similar content involve violence, humiliation, BDSM, etc. There's not much of that here. What gives?
Well, when it comes down to it my interest is not in making this site an exhaustive survey of the entire breadth of the gay fantasy literature, as useful and as fascinating as that might be. Metabods is still the outgrowth of the kind of fantasy writing I'm interested in to varying degrees, and I'm just not quite as interested in reading about enlarging a guy's muscles and then beating the shit out of him (for example) as I am in other things. There are lots of subgenres that are underrepresented here, partly because I haven't spent a lot of time on them and partly because I'm not as interested. For example, a significant subsubgenre of the macro/micro (growth/shrinking) category involves vore (eating people that are a lot smaller than you are). Some shrinking stories intrigue me, but not ones involving vore. No judgments, it's just not me, and at the end of the day this is still just a overgrown personal site.
What about furry?
No, not a lot of furry (anthropomorphic animal/human transformations) here either. Out of habit I've left that genre alone, though I may start adding some at some point. But there are lots of furry resources on the web, so I don't think I'm doing the furry community a disservice by not including it here yet.
Do you advocate promiscuous, unprotected sex?
No. There's this thing called AIDS, you know, not to mention all the rest of it.
But some of these stories feature wild sex without condoms.
Some of these stories also feature eight-foot-tall guys with 80-inch chests and 30-inch waists. I proceed on the assumption, which I'm convinced is valid, that our readers know that this is fantasy, and that they're not stupid enough to think that sex in a fantasy story has anything to do with sex in real life. Guys who read Superman comic books don't generally follow them up by jumping off buildings, and guys who read fantasy porn know that they can't do what our supermen do, either. But here's a reminder, guys: Only idiots practice unsafe sex. And if you're dating an idiot, it's your job to remember not to be stupid.
I want to submit a story.
Awesome. Please do. Check out the submissions page for more information.
I want to tell you what I think of your site.
Awesome. Please do. Check out the feedback page for more information.
I want you to turn me into this (or this, or this).
Great. Sit back and close your eyes. You should feel something tingly in a few minutes. If not, go get a Gatorade and try it again. It won't work if your electrolytes are low.
 

For more on BRK commissions click here or go to commissions.metabods.com  (Credit: Aaron Amat)

 

Commenting and star-upvoting helps others find the good stuff  (Credit: Paul Atkinson)