I suddenly remembered this kid’s book I was strangely fascinated with when I was like ten years old… I kept checking it out from the library, even though it wasn’t normally the sort of thing I’d read… The book was called Help! I’m Trapped In My Gym Teacher’s Body! and yeah it was exactly that it sounded like.
The gym teacher is described as this amazingly muscular, but incredibly stupid, guy. Then the main character accidentally swaps bodies with him, and he ends up not only super muscular and hot, but he also starts getting really stupid too.
Anyway I was wondering if there were any books or TV shows that you were really into as a kid, for reasons you didn’t understand at the time, and then you look back at them now and you go “okay that was obvious in retrospect.”
Also, just to be clear, this is how the book describes the gym teacher that the main character ends up swapping into:
His arms and chest bulged through his dark blue polo shirt, stretching the material tight. His neck was like a tree trunk and you could see the ripples in his stomach through the shirt. …
Mr. Braun caught a glimpse of his own reflection in the cafeteria window. He flexed his right arm, making the muscle bulge even more. I was certain his shirt sleeve was going to rip, but it didn’t. …
The gym teacher stepped up to our table and crossed his massive arms. He had a deep, husky voice and a square face with short black hair. It was only 11:30 in the morning, but his jaw was already darkened with stubble. …
I feel like I could literally plop some of these descriptions into a Spiral story and they would not feel out of place.
That literally sounds like a Spiral story… I adore it. That’s nuts. I can’t particularly think of a book that involved anything interesting, but there was, of course, that scene from the Jungle Book. (I originally typed Lion King here and didn’t notice until a while later.) I watched it maybe 100 times, just on loop.
Also - not a book, just an anecdote - when I was a kid, my friend and I took this huge cardboard box and drew all over it with markers. It was our “spaceship.” I remember drawing a big red button and said if you pressed it, you could mind control the other person. I’d press it all the time and use it on her, but as soon as she tried pressing it, I threw a fit and said she wasn’t allowed to use it on me, just me on her. In retrospect, I was a real brat of a kid, but that’s pretty much how I turned out anyway.
I can’t recall any books that really got me thinking along those lines myself. I mean, yes, I read (and saw) The Jungle Book, but at the time I read it, I didn’t have any inkling that it was anything “special”. The first time I recall anything Spiral-y where I actually took any kind of interest at all was an episode of The Bionic Woman where they had some kind of hypnotic shampoo. I don’t think it was at the point of being arousing, but I think it says something that I can remember that episode and no others. (Although, even there, apparently my memory isn’t as good as I’d like to think. I’d always thought it was an episode of Charlie’s Angels, but I looked it up a while back and found out I’d misremembered. Watched them both avidly as a kid/teen, so it was an easy mistake to make.)
Oh God, I got off on that gym teacher story SO. MANY. TIMES. I’m pretty certain it caused my transformation fetish. Because of it, I read other books in the series, but none of them did quite the same thing.
I always really liked a scene in “Bewitched” (season 1, episode 33) in which Samantha and Endora use magic to change Darrin’s face while he sleeps, changing his hair and nose and giving him a moustache.
Can’t remember all the details, but somewhere in the Deltora books a monster starts to hypnotize the hero to take a magic belt off, and I think the wording was something like “take off that thing under your clothes,” and to this day I remember reading that and feeling so charged up all the sudden but not understanding (or even really questioning) why. I probably jerked off thinking about that line dozens of times.
Im pretty sure i read this book as well. Didn’t he start eating junk food and ruining the body while the gym teacher worked out in his body and got it in shape?
For all the wrong reasons, the whipping of Kunta Kinte into accepting his slave name ‘Toby’ in ‘Roots’ had a profound effect on me as a child - I was about 8 when I saw that for the first time. Similarly, the scene in the second Indiana Jones movie ‘Temple of Doom’ when the bad guys are turning him into a worshipper of Kali. Harrison Ford’s face becomes so evil at one point and I remember hoping that he would join the bad guys. I must have been an awful child because I was quite disappointed when he didn’t. As for childhood reading, I was brought up on the ‘Noddy’ books by Enid Blyton and I always identified with the ‘naughty’ golliwogs, who used to go around stealing and being generally bad-ass. The gollies were removed from the books years ago because they are racist stereotypes. Similarly, my old copy of ‘Lord of the Rings’ which dates from the 1950s, has a section where the evil orcs are described as being originally ‘black men from the south’ before Sauron twisted and changed them. This made me feel rather sympathetic towards them as a teenager. Recently, I bought a more modern copy for my nephew and noticed that this entire passage has been taken out. Despite this, the book still has to be one of the most ‘racist’ stories ever written; no one is as good as those High Elves.
I was into Molly Moon’s book of hypnotism. I remember getting off on fantasies from that book before even really understanding anything about what sex was… I was just doing something that felt good.
There was also a scene in some movie, like, Baby Geniuses or something, where the baby’s hypnotized a man or something? I don’t really remember.
The “feeling sharing,” from E.T. also got me a little excited, strangely.
Ohmg, and there’s a scene in John Tucker Must Die, where they drug John with like estrogen or something like that, and it makes him act “feminine,” and he also ends up running around in his underwear… I realize how problematic that sounds, and I probably wouldn’t like it if I were to watch it again… But at the time, the actor was just overwhelmingly hot to teenage me, and imagining the things he might want to do while feeling “feminine” really sent my mind places…
I realize you asked about books…
Oh I actually do have good story here. When I was in high school, I was assigned to read Billy Budd by Herman Melville for an extracurricular group activity. I’d been reading erotica for some time by then… Anyway, Billy Budd was just SO homoerotic, and I didn’t know how to process it for schoolwork. I was like, how do I write something when all that stands out in this novella is homoeroticism, and I’m a mostly closeted queer teen in a conservative state… Like, there’s literally a scene where Billy Budd spills soup on a ship, and the protagonist spends paragraphs talking about his ass, and how he was a man’s man and stuff. Idk I can’t remember it all that much… I think the captain has Billy killed cause he’s jealous or something? Or the captain dies during a mutiny? Anyway, it was like the most bizaare and surreal high school English experience…
The Chronicles of Narnia, Book 6 The Silver Chair. There is an enchantress that has kidnapped a Prince and robbed him of his memories but they come back while he is stuck in a silver chair. he is almost rescued by a trio when the enchantress comes in and uses a smoky fire and gentle music and a soothing voice to convince all of them that she didn’t kidnap anyone, they are all four from her realm and should stay with her. They start buying into it and she ALMOST gets them all and SHIT that whole scene got me excited even before I realized WHY. Someone on EMCSA made a short M/F fic heavily referencing the scene with a more MC ending and… I was appreciative.