The Angels of Samaria, actually! Though it's nice to know that there's at least a couple out people playing with that mix of fantasy and scifi.
By Sharon Shinn? Hell, I think I've read that, too! Young me definitely had a thing for the weird science-magic :P Claidi had heaps of poorly explained magical genealogy and tech bullshit that I still love. I'm pretty sure Pearl of the Soul of the World actually took place in a medieval-ish culture on the Moon far in the future after being terraformed by forgotten technologies. It also subverted the soulmate element in that (spoilers) the main girl traded hearts with the love interest dude in the first book to save his life and this bound them together in stereotypical fashion... But by the end of the series it's revealed that this is stifling the guy's actual feelings for someone else and artificially keeping the two in love, so she has to swap their hearts again and go alone on her own path to restore the world
Yyyyeaaah, like so many people here I tend to find Soulmate AU's deeply creepy unless they're subversions/deconstructions/etc. (I get that they're catnip for other people, so YKINMKATO!) (Although... the Valdemar series by Mercedes Lackey, for all its flaws, has a soulmate mechanic that I admittedly can't hate. Most people in the world don't have a soulmate, and the first example of soulmates that I saw in the series was a lesbian triune. Which was also my introduction to "lesbians exist" and "poly exists" although the latter went over tiny!me's head at the time. So I'm giving it a pass.) I don't actually hate A/B/O AUs, because I find the concept hilarious (it's like Vulcan werewolves! Plus bullshit categorization system! This is the most quintessentially fandom thing ever), and I've seen a handful of good writers do interesting things with them.
Others have beaten me to the A/B/O and Soulmate AU complaints (I'm ace and both concepts tend to leave me feeling vaguely offended), so I'll second those and add that I really wish AO3 let me filter OUT tags, like maybe with a second checkbox? Because if I could exclude all the, let's say, Teen Wolf crossovers I'd be a happy Yggi. (Sorry TW fans, I just don't care about the series at all) Minor peeves: there are, like, a LOT of Avengers fics with Shield and Soldier misspelled. Also where is the Nick Fury tag where he's neither a minor character nor demonized? He's doing his best you guys. I will say this though, while I've definitely read some stuff that came across as 'look at how ~progressive~ I am' , I do prefer the trend I've seen of 'traumatized characters get professional help' instead of 'traumatized characters get healing sex' ... To be fair I don't know how much it varies by fandom, maybe I was just reading all the wrong fics in 2005.
You actually can! I use this feature constantly. When you have the list of works, go to the filter box and find the "search within results" field. Anything you want to filter out just put a - before, with quotation marks around multi word terms. So to filter out teen wolf, it'd be -"teen wolf" or filtering out soulmate would be -soulmate . Works for anything - so you can filter out your NOTP, a kink you don't like that's common, a big fandom that's taken over a tag you like that you don't care about (like if I'm looking for piercing kink fic I just don't really care about Sherlock, y'know?), etc. It will filter out anything that's in summaries as well as tag clouds, though, and it doesn't work consistently for crossovers, because a lot of people don't tag their crossovers using that particular word. But otherwise it helps me filter out stuff I have zero interest in.
Speaking of healing sex...I wish that there was some understanding of the nuance about this sort of thing. Because sex can in fact be very, very, VERY fucking helpful in getting people out of shit moods. It can be used to solve disputes without it being sexual abuse. It can be used to help someone get out of a sobbing fit. It can be used to help get someone over their horrible, horrible trauma. It won't be an instantaneous thing and it might just help deal with it, but the fact is that sex can be a sort of healing thing. The problem is that most fic that does that sort of thing it's just an instant one and done wow so that's all I needed sort of thing which just...Doesn't really happen. I dislike the NO SEX IS NEVER GOOD FOR CONFLICT RESOLUTION AND DOESN'T HELP TRAUMATIZED PEOPLE trend though. A lot.
There are concepts I find interesting in solumate AU territory too, but they're all deconstruction and people being furious at the status quo (people deciding to stay together despite not being soulmates, having to struggle through not really knowing or loving your soulmate and where to go from there--like Elfquest, which had Recognition, which was just two elves seeing each other and being struck with the unstoppable need to make a baby, which was sometimes awesome and led to relationships and sometimes just a one-off and sometimes TORTUROUS because they didn't actually like each other. They just needed to make an elf baby. Awkward in wartime. Anyway.) You can write cool stories in soulmate AUs, I just find myself uninterested in that horrifying romantic dictatorship being presented as GOOD. Excuse me pardon I've not gotten into Valdemar (except I read a short story in verse collection once by chance) which novel do I need to read Do you know how rarely I see relationships like my f/f/f poly triad happen like, outside of literally the room I'm in right now And yeah again a lot of people like soulmate and I really don't care, have fun kids, I just.... scroll really fast by it because I do not want, really do not want.
@Aondeug i think you bring up an amazing point and state it very well. It's definitely important to see the nuance. Sex (and kink!) in good relationships and all that stuff can be really healing. So yes, there's definitely something special that makes "magic healing cock" such a cringey trope, and it's not the fact that sex is happening
Crossover fanfics that exist solely to have someone's favorite characters from fandom A talk about how great and mature and cool everything in fandom B is, especially compared to fandom A, usually completely ignoring the themes and characterization of everything from A and making one wonder why this author who clearly hates fandom A is even watching it in the first place.
Or the inverse of this: characters from fandom A imported into the world of fandom B to constantly one-up characters from fandom B and snidely comment about everything the author dislikes in fandom B and overall act like superior dicks. UGH.
...I was honestly thinking about a specific fic and that happens as much as what I was saying. When it's not OCs or the narration saying it. (It's been nearly four years. I still hate that fucking fic. It's the worst thing I've ever read. Not even funny-bad. Just miserable bad. People who read PPC probably know what I mean.)
Can I ask what fic this is? I love reading about terrible and rude fanfiction and people getting rightfully mad about it.
Ngh. Again, it's not even funny bad, it's miserable and a slog and just exhausting. Like. I could go on about what is terrible in the fic. There's so much stupid and bad in it. But probably the worst thing that I can think of - among things like characters who are perfectly kind and warm in canon becoming torturers, characters breaking the closest things to sacred vows, all of that- The heroes of the fic bomb a planet's capital city. And aim for the busiest parts. This is never slightly referred to as being even morally dubious. I reread parts of my sporking of the fic and felt unclean.
Ok another fanfic thing that i hate: interrupting high-tension situations for Fucking. If you're running against the clock to stop a high-profile assassination attempt, wasting five minutes in a quickie is just irresponsible, no matter how supposedly sexy the character looks in formalwear. my one exception is sad sex fics set at the end of mass effect, especially in that last opportunity you have to talk to your companions in destroyed london in 3. but that's just because i want to write a shenko songfic set to some deconstructed Ke$ha song in that exact situation
can I read your sporking? in any case, i'm agreeing with the "ugh a/b/o whyyyyyyyy" group it's just no. not only does it squick me out, it's all rapey and ooc and while generally I don't have problems with "rapey" in fic, ooc??? and esp ooc rapey are v bad. i think that might be my biggest problem, really. naking random characters rapists and it just makes no canonical sense.
that thing where a slash writer makes their favorite lady aro ace so that they can be permanently on call to tend to one of the dudes' love life. I see it with D.va sometimes, and it's like. Fuckin, ace ain't the wingman orientation. Ace people got lives, I assume.
When people mess up medication, especially psychiatric medication. I read a fic once that claimed Klonopin was an antipsychotic. This was a major plot point because it's how they figured out the person they were investigating was suffering from a psychotic episode. They also gave the character a mood stabilizer that's like... Third or fourth line treatment at best for people with psychosis that have mood issues, if it's used at all.
Hahaha no, I use it as an excuse to stay the hell OUT of other people's drama. If I cared about romance I'd go ahead and have one.
The book was Arrows of the Queen, IIRC, but important disclaimer: the triad were NOT the MCs, and Spoiler it's got dead lesbians syndrome. They also weren't even actually in a triad yet relationship; it was just that their soulmates thing was a lesbian triad. IIRC, A and B were together when B died, and then A and C realized they ALSO had the soulmates thing while grieving afterwards. >_< . It's been... literally decades since I read it, so I honestly cannot say if the book itself is any good or not.
For some reason I forgot to second this hard. If you're writing grown ass adults, unless you have a good canon reason why (raised in a cult, literal chobit, incredibly broken brain, GET CREATIVE) they should know the basics about sex and what they feel attracted to. I guess if you're writing a coming out of the closet fic they would deny it for a while but I personally went through that process and it's still pretty obvious what your feelings for sexy member of your own gender are, you're just usually ignoring them. And if you're writing not grown ass teenagers they should still, in general, know what sex is and that they will be attracted to things, in general, even if they don't know what their pattern is yet. If you're writing a super sheltered teen or a late bloomer or someone who thought they were asexual (stepping on a landmine there)...... okay, I guess. I GUESS. Like. I don't know why that appeals but... have a reason. Just. Have a reason why anyone who has already gone through puberty and lived around human beings (feral child, I guess that would be another reason, but then I would inevitably be judging your depiction of feral humans) would not know either what sex is or what lust feels like. I get that many people go some years into their adulthood without having sex. I did. I get that some people were super religious or sheltered and didn't figure out the facts or face their own sexuality until they were in their mid-teens or later. I was, I did. You can figure out just through freaking cultural clues what lust feels like, you practically have to do that as a survival tactic even if you are asexual and rarely if ever feel it yourself, JESUS CHRIST I HAVE A LOT OF EMOTIONS ABOUT THIS ...but in unpacking them I've sort of realized that there are a lot of reasons someone would try to write 'person of age who doesn't understand sex or their own sexuality to an unusual degree' but that almost none of them are applicable to the situations I actually find this trope in. Grown ass adults who should have a freaking clue. Like. The Freaking. Avengers. The Avengers know what sex is. aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.
