What are your fan fiction gripes?

Discussion in 'Fan Town' started by OtherCat, Aug 27, 2016.

  1. latitans

    latitans zounds, scoob

    I think it would be fair to say that the Harry Potter books (and JKR, if her twitter is anything to go by) have no cohesive theory of structural oppression

    See: the nonsensical reasons for secrecy; Ron being somehow More Oppressed than Hermione in the 6th book; the goblins; and of course the house elves
     
    • Agree x 10
  2. BaseDeltaZero

    BaseDeltaZero Shitposting all night.

    I mean, I kinda disagree with their thesis, you can pull it off if they're not too crazy powerful, and the circumstances are right. A large group of armed people can easily abuse someone who is physically superior to them. That said, it is not something that can be directly mapped to real world oppression. It is a different type of thing. A potentially interesting type of thing to write about, but like... Marvel's 'Mutants are a metaphor for LGBT people' kinda breaks down when you consider there are individual mutants who are an existential threat to humanity as a whole. In reality, there are no individual humans who are an existential threat to humanity by themselves, LGBT or otherwise.
     
    • Agree x 8
  3. ChelG

    ChelG Well-Known Member

    Oh, I could see it being done, yeah. It just requires a lot of thinking about to produce an answer to the question. For example, on Alternia, the people who can shoot fireballs from (in this case) their eyes aren't the only ones who have powers, and they're a lot more susceptible to being controlled by the powers that the higher castes have.
     
    Last edited: Jan 13, 2021
    • Agree x 7
  4. swirlingflight

    swirlingflight inane analysis and story spinning is my passion

    The fics I've read that I liked went with the premise, it's hard to effectively hurt the people who can shoot fireballs from their eyeballs and whatnot themselves - but it's very easy to hurt their friends who can't shoot fireballs, or their children who haven't yet learned to shoot fireballs. It's hard to keep up 24/7 protection.

    From there it's easy to imagine that, over generations, the fireball shooters might be less and less willing to befriend or care about anyone but their own. More and more willing to isolate themselves and generalize the outside world, to praise their own strengths and insult the outsiders' weaknesses.
     
    • Agree x 3
  5. bornofthesea670

    bornofthesea670 Well-Known Member

    it is obnoxiously hard to find fix-it fic for GoT where Jon is not shipped with Dany. Just let the poor man be a Stark like he always wanted to be, and figure something else out for their love interests.
     
    • Witnessed x 8
    • Agree x 2
  6. bornofthesea670

    bornofthesea670 Well-Known Member

    in other news one of the fics has Drogon as male, Visyrion (i cannot spell valyrian names to save my life, fight me) as female and Rhaegal using they/them pronouns. the author explains it as dragons not really having defined genders, Dany just go by what she feels, which...ok sure. maybe because drogon is bigger and stronger and vis is characterized as more affectionate, and Dany's going by Gender roles. Rhaegal's gender so far seems to be Chaos and Stubborn, at least when they are younger. remind me of a draconic Arya.

    anyway, someone in the comments was like "lol what, did Rhaegal go to ~college~ or something?"

    the wording was different but that was the vibe i got lol. leave our enby dragons alone bro
     
    Last edited: Jan 14, 2021
    • Witnessed x 9
  7. BaseDeltaZero

    BaseDeltaZero Shitposting all night.

    Yeah, that's... definitely something you can do, and it's a reasonable and justified way the Seperation could have occured. I would have actual sympathy for the wizards!

    Another thing you could do in the general 'oppressed mages' category is mages as, I dunno, Kulaks. They were part of the ruling class or at least priveliged*, then conditions changed, a revolution occurred, and now they're resented/persecuted...

    *How do you spell this, anyways.
     
    • Agree x 3
  8. LadyNighteyes

    LadyNighteyes Wicked Witch of the Radiant Historia Fandom

    "privileged."
     
    • Informative x 2
    • Agree x 1
  9. Alexand

    Alexand Rhymes with &

    fanfic where everything is in lowercase for Stylistic Reasons: fine
    fanfic where names get capitalized but everything else is in lowercase: a little weird but fine, i guess
    fanfic where everything is in lowercase but sometimes names get capitalized, and sometimes they don't: WHAT IS GOING ON...................
     
    • Witnessed x 12
    • Agree x 2
  10. TheSeer

    TheSeer 37 Bright Visionary Crushes The Doubtful

    Even that first one... Like, it's not an automatic deal-breaker, but you'd better be really stylistic. I'm sure the next e. e. yiffings is out there somewhere doing an amazing job with this, but if I ever get the impression you just don't want to bother with the shift key, I'm hitting the back button.
     
    • Agree x 8
    • Winner x 2
  11. littlepinkbeast

    littlepinkbeast Imperator Fluttershy

    maybe they're cockroaches who have to hurl themselves from the monitor to strike the keys with enough force to press them, so they can't hold shift and hit a letter at the same time, and it's never occurred to them that computer keyboards don't take any extra force to work the caps lock so they could just turn it on, hit the letter, and turn it off.
     
    • Winner x 6
    • Agree x 1
    • Informative x 1
  12. Meagen Image

    Meagen Image Well-Known Member

    This fic was tagged as some fluffy m/f porn that's very much in line with my tastes, and it's one of the FGO guys I don't mind reading porn about.

    However.

    ....yeah.
     
    • Witnessed x 17
  13. swirlingflight

    swirlingflight inane analysis and story spinning is my passion

    I feel it.
     
    • Agree x 5
    • Informative x 2
  14. Nobody's Home

    Nobody's Home I'm a Greg Coded Tom Girl

    I won't accept modern day au Geralt is a CEO premise
     
    • Agree x 13
    • Witnessed x 3
  15. LadyNighteyes

    LadyNighteyes Wicked Witch of the Radiant Historia Fandom

    I don't even go here but like. Isn't the entire point of the Witcher franchise that monster-hunting is a shitty job that everyone wants done but nobody wants to pay for, so Geralt has to spend nearly as much time trying to get the people who hired him to give him his damn money as he does actually doing his job.
     
    • Agree x 15
  16. BaseDeltaZero

    BaseDeltaZero Shitposting all night.

    I mean, CEO-in-title of a small firm, that could make sense, but that's not something that most people think of when they hear 'CEO'.
     
    • Agree x 3
  17. Everett

    Everett local rats so small, so tiny

    :(

    Eta: this isn't a fic ive read, was just browsing a tag and saw that in the summary
     
    Last edited: Jan 27, 2021
    • Witnessed x 16
  18. swirlingflight

    swirlingflight inane analysis and story spinning is my passion

    There's some AO3 Drama thanks to people doing some bassackwards demonstration of their opinion of AO3's moderation methods, by posting entire stories within the tags of fics. Thanks to this, I've seen a reference guide going around for how to hide excess tags!

    One simple / rough option is, under Set My Preferences, click the "hide additional tags" option. This keeps the relationship tags and character tags in place, but hides the various commentary tags. Doesn't do a lot for the massive crossover fic compilations, but does help with the more Tumblr-style commentary.
    bitterwind demonstration 3.png

    Since this story has only so many excessive fandom and relationship tags in use, and most of the spam is in the additional tags options, this works pretty well here! But other fics have very long summaries, or use far more shipping tags, and those might want other solutions.


    So, another more structured option is adjusting the site skin with a little CSS that limits the length of the tag box, leaving the remaining tags within it to be scrolled through (or not). Post on two styles of doing so here, depending on whether you're making your own site skin, or using one of the offered ones.

    Either way, you'd be pasting in some CSS along the lines of:
    The h5.fandoms part simplifies the Fandom section to 4 lines (including the title / author line), the ul.tags part limits the lines of tags that show, and the summary part limits the lines of summary that appear. With this example, a fic with deeply excessive tags would instead be:
    bitterwind demonstration 1.png

    This is shorter than I want the display to be, as I read a lot of fics with conversational tags and I haven't yet checked how all this looks on mobile devices, so I'm going to increase the numbers on everything to:
    resulting in:
    bitterwind demonstration 2.png

    (You can see now that the person involved here has decided to post multiple full-length stories within the additional tags field.)

    With a little tweaking, hopefully there's a sweet spot where stories with more tags than you prefer have them tidily tucked out of site for easier browsing.
     
    • Informative x 4
    • Useful x 4
  19. Aondeug

    Aondeug Cringe Annoying Ass Female Lobster

    thank you.
     
    • Agree x 2
  20. HonestlyVan

    HonestlyVan a very funny person who never tells jokes

    Wait, so, this is just about purity wank again? I thought it was trolling to get better posting/tagging guidelines b/c single fics with tags like that are a constant problem in my fandoms where a few prolific writers don't know how to use collections and instead add to an ever-lengthening single story that has all their disconnected ficlets in one place.
     
    • Agree x 3
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