Where do the popped ones Go?

They die.

Away.

Somebody good pops, they reset.
Somebody bad pops, they 'go away'.

Nobody dies, it's fiction.

There isn't One True Answer. An author can handle it any way in any given story. Sometimes the author is explicit will say right out that a particular character is dead. Often euphemisms are used. Gone. Missing. Never seen again.

But I think it's pretty safe to assume that popped = dead unless the author give some reason to believe otherwise.

I imagine a brief period of losing it all and everything fading away. However, recently i've wondered if they could just spring a leak and deflate, and even that actually being inflated keeps them alive, and they die because they aren't. Somehow, they become dependent for their survival on being blown up, so if someone let the air out, it would kill them. I also imagine them wanting to pop so that it's all over, but not being able to say anything, or being given a choice of fate by the inflator - be deflated and die, popped with a pin or burst from overinflation. Also, because of the tracksuit thing, i imagine the tracksuit keeping them together until it's unzipped and that makes them pop.

^^^great explination^^^

Those 52 people in my basement are not dead. They are merely resting for an undisclosed amount of time. A repeated knife wound makes people very sleepy you see. Did I say wound? I meant fun holes. That's not blood, it's raspberry jam. You just have to believe it's jam and it's jam. Good on toast. Lots of Iron.
It's not cannibalism, it's merely being an open minded carnivore.

What are you looking at? Quit judging me. You're all ignorant close minded fools! FOOLS! I hate you all!!

Okay, seriously though :P -- I don't think of the popping people so harshly, but I just find the sugar coating part sort of amusing.

Just casting another vote. When I read a story about a girl popping and she doesn't end up back to normal, I pretty much assume that she is dead.

I suppose it also depends on if anything is left behind. Popping stories run the gamut from nothing left behind, to rubbery shreds of skin, to blood and entrails. For me, death is even more apparent in the last two cases, but it is nevertheless assumed in all of them anyway. Maybe some people make the distinction that they are just "gone", but not me.

Boy, dwarf sure hit the nail square on the head. I far as I see, if the artist/author makes no implications about her/nim coming back, then she/he is dead. Regardless of how you try to put it, if the inflatee doesn't survive the popping, they are dead, there is nothing else that they could be. Inflation with the intent of popping, and with the inflatee not surviving, is murder (or suicide for self inflation) any way you look at it.

For the people who seem to try and defend themselves and their fetish for it so vehemently, denile is not just a river in Egypt.

I really do not get how people will suspend all disbelief for a fetish which is not physically possible and then bang their fist on the table and shout 'according to the laws of the universe this must be the case' whenever they come across something outside their fetish.

It has been said many times before that if someone really were inflated in the way we draw it or write it, it would be excruciatingly painful for them, and yet most of us don't really want to think of it as painful.

I find this whole, people telling me that I have a death fetish thing as annoying as if some troll on DA went up to any one of us and argued that we were taking pleasure out of the pain of our imaginary inflatees.

When someone explodes, yes they are definitely gone, but in this world of surreality where we define the laws of physics, gone and dead are not necessarily the same thing.

Here, I think this will put a good period at the end of this argument.

So, let's take a character, they inflate, and they pop. The next question I want to pose is "are the coming back?".

If you answered no, congratulations, the character may not be dead to you, but they are on one hell of a similar plain to it.

PS: Please do not use the "suspension of disbelief" argument unless you know how it works.

My high school literature teacher had this to say about literary interpretation: There is no interpretation that is wrong so long as it does not contradict the text. However, some interpretations are more valid than others to the extent that they conform to the author's stated intent.

So it comes down to what the author says regarding the possibility of life after popping. I can be implied by the characters (e.g., The Challenge) or explicitly laid out in detail (e.g., Racer X), but there has to be something there for the reader to hang his belief on. If the author makes no reference to existence after popping, and if nobody who pops is ever seen again, then there isn't much upon which to base the belief that popping is survivable aside from the reader's own optimism.

Don't get me wrong, the reader is entitled to his optimism. In the absence of any commentary on the effects of popping, you can imagine that the popped person isn't dead just like I can imagine that River, Kaylee and Inara have hot three-way sex when things get slow on Serenity. We can both think whatever we want if it gives us warm fuzzy feelings, but we might have trouble convincing others of the validity of our interpretations.

What does the author say? If you try to convince me that popped = dead in Expanding Horizons, I could point to the text and prove you wrong. If you try to convince me that popped = not dead in Overpump the Volume, I could do the same.

I think the root of the problem is how some people who are put off by popping react to it. Hey, everyone's entitled to an opinion. But far too often it goes from "I don't like this" to "You're a sick freak who gets off on murder," and that's where things go off the rails.

I wouldn't want someone else to pop, but i want to pop myself, probably because it symbolises orgasm, i.e. the "little death". There is then the question of agency in the inflation. There could be someone doing it to someone else, someone doing it to themselves or it could be accidental. For me, this translates into sex between two people for the first and masturbation for the last two. Popping is orgasm.

I don't expect everyone to condone my fetish, I just don't like people deciding that they know better than I do what's going on in my head.

You say it yourself here... 'MY thinking' exactly it's your thinking, not mine. I think differently to you and don't appreciate being told that your thinking is some kind of universal truth and mine is invalid.

If you are put off because when you see popping you think death then that's fine just don't assume that everyone thinks the same way.

I don't deny that in my stories popping=gone... none of my popped characters come back, reform and I never talk about any sensation they may have after the pop. But gone and dead aren't identical, they don't have identical dictionary definitions.

In real life it is impossible to make someone 'go' without presuming that they must be 'dead' but just because this is the case in real life, it doesn't have to apply to fictional characters. Cartoon characters 'go' all the time but a lot of the time there is no death as such, it just becomes as though they never existed.

Fictional characters were never 'alive' to begin with they are malleable and their disappearance could be akin to the 'petit mort' that has been mentioned before, or if you like, they went into another dimension or something.

Ah but my point is it's not where MY problem is. If you can't avoid thinking about death then that is in your head, not mine. When you read a story you make your own interpretation of it, but that isn't necessarily the same interpretation as the writer.

In inflation erotica, the inflated belly/body is a substitute for normal sexual arousal, and for me, the popping/bursting is the subsitute for the orgasm. To me, popping=orgasm, not death. Inflation without popping/busting is like sex without a climax.

Not really something that keeps me awake at night. Given that we're talking aobuit imaginary people turned into balloon and spheres filled with various substances, I'd say a pop/burst is something that would be realistically within the laws of probability.

For a given value of "realistically."

Well well, stop the bickering children as a popper I suppose I should put in my two cents, although I'll refrain from the milk crate stand. I don't think your looking at it how we do Witty, well those of us who go with gone. It's not always that we have a death fetish, it's one we want a conclusion, a finish, we're done with the character, keeping them around begs the question, so then what, or makes folks go well NEXT STORY NEXT! A bang that ends in gone lets the pop be the main attraction the explosion be centerstage the main thing to think about, the after just gets in the way, added clutter to some. Sure I rarely share my craft but I'm not there for the extra just the small tale, do I get any jollies that the character is gone...no. I'm already to cocnerened about the next story and just don't care to fill out things that take time and effort to an after I don't wish to continue or come back to pop and walk away. Leads for a clean cut off.

Course then those that know me also know I'm known for having a twist pop that creates whole new life, or different life, does that mean death obsesses my mind because OH SHITZ I dared to not bring back the one who made this whole new life I care to concentrate on? If so would not anything dealing with death be a death fetish? Oh shitz I luvz guns must have death fetish. Oh dear lord I love plants making new plants even if the old one is gone I must LUV DEATH! You see I think what's being missed is some of us just don't care for the fate of our balloons, that's your concern not mine, give me a reason to care, she was words and I already have new words to look after.....

Took me forever to find my "Guide to stories" book

AHEM *blows infinite amounts of dust off book*
"When a fictional character dies and no where in the story does it specify what happens afterward to that character, if they indeed go to a place when they die, or nothing happens, then the fictional person(s) go to The End, Which is the end of the story. The End is where all fictional characters eventually end up, but characters who die are transferred there faster then the rest."

God I love this book.

I never WANT the popped character to be dead but I assume that they are. I DO support the popping is orgasm analogy; the concept of release is a natural fit.

I have read the gory popping stories and they're not for me. But I also find the stories that have popping then "suddenly she was back to normal" as convoluted. I agree that you do need to suspend disbelief at the door, but without some rules and structure, without accepting some stuff as "true," you can't tell anybody anything. If you keep changing the rules of the universe, suddenly nobody wants to play.

I wrote The Corset specifically so the pop at the end could be read however the reader wanted to take it -- was it the girl or the garment? And over on DA I had someone say "I wish she hadn't popped at the end." I said, "Did she?" They said "Well, yeah, you said there was an explosion." Like, he couldn't read it any other way. But it just as easily could have been the rubber corset finally exploding; clearly, that guy picked up on the bits of body inflation and his mind automatically ended the tale the way he subconsciously wanted it to end.

I probably shouldn't say it, but in my mind, the corset blows instead of Amanda, and it's clearly a release point for the orgasm analogy. But I wanted to give the pop fans something that would make them happy, too -- if you want the girl to pop, then the girl pops, and I do not invalidate either interpretation.