this is so bad on multiple levels but my first thought was that don't people still have gum (and suckers?). also uh. you chew gum. which. when thought about as a metaphor for oral sex is kind of D8
In some ways the most terrifying thing about Marked is that it was written by a mother-daughter pair. Can you imagine collaborating with your mom to write whole paragraphs of random plot-irrelevant slut-shaming?
Mom thanks her kid for "making sure the teens sound like teens". Sounds more to me like the daughter half of that pair very carefully pruned the narrative to be as shamey and puritan as she could, in order to make sure mom wasn't looking at her funny. (Remember, blowjobs are only something bitches do. And that is definitely something that can be used as a moral standard, and the blowjob giver will deserve ever awful thing that ever happens to her, while the blowjob reciever will be... hot and cool and the main love interest?)
Now I'm thinking about that and mostly just kind of going eh. Those aren't the best texture for chewing. Too big too. But now I want to. Even though I know that it would be worse than sticking gobs of octopus in my mouth.
the slut shaming makes more sense actually, with the mother daughter pair thing. it being there, not the slut shaming itself. eta: another funny/????! thing is that that bit alone has at least four different euphemisms for oral sex imagine brainstorming that with your mother oh my god
Yeah, it's funny because as absolutely godawful as this series is, the weird incongruities with things like swearing and sexual expression make way more sense if you view it through the lens of "something-teen has to tell her mom about what teens (like her) do all day in school" being published. It's the awful Twilight coattails of 'oh mom I don't even know what marry-joona is, teens would NEVER do A Drug', where regardless of whether or not you actually do The Drug you have to make up this absurd version of teenagers that can't comprehend of A Drug or A Sex because otherwise you're admitting to thinking about either of those things. Which is its own layer of fucked up, tbh, but I wouldn't be surprised if part of why this was published in the first place was the Paolini effect.
The blowjob receiver gets slut-shamed in the narrative too. Also if I remember right the giver mind-controlled him, but the narrative constantly acts like a) it was consensual and b) the idea of giving a blowjob is a bigger deal than the mind-control. (Reminds me of an on-topic fanfic gripe: weird skewed estimations of the severity of transgressions, where everyone is acting like [character] dumping their boyfriend is worse than all the murders they did in canon.)
i just googled the series and the book covers literally look like they could be kink adverts so the really conservative view on sex is kinda ??? also derail, oops (also yay! another series romanticizing abusive relationships! /sarcasm eta: the tv series could improve it though, because often the book creators have actually very little influence over what ends up happening, like the show bones doesnt have a lot of similarity to the books it was inspired by)
i thought i hadn't heard of house of night, but then i googled it and immediately recognized it as a series of books i've seen in the YA section in bookstores for the past like eight years. glad i avoided that one! looks at Homestuck fandom
Marked and assorted other past-tense verbs, yes. Your one-stop shop for immense amounts of slut-shaming, casual prejudice of all kinds, and creepy "I put a gay stereotype in my Mary Sue MC's personalityless entourage, I'm so progressive" attempts at 'diversity.'
I can kinda understand it as the product of a particularly dark and cynical mood. That doesn't make it quality, just sorta understandable. Now that is an interesting idea. Or where the whole affair is a deliberate attempt by a villain to make the character think they're deluded. I suppose it's vaguely acceptable if done as an indication of character's weird skewed estimations of the severity of transgressions. There are people who might act like someone dumping their boyfriend is worse than murder (especially if they're the boyfriend/boyfriend's friends.)
fandom specific, again, but god damn it can people stop erasing jade's femininity?! i know the wooby, weepy, useless jade is the more common fanon, but i'm so tired of fics trying to fix that and swinging too hard the other way. she wears pretty frilly dresses and kicks ass! grumble grumble >>
This is half fanfiction gripe and half "thing I love about fanfic in all of its disorganized folk-art-like glory" but when you have foreign-language (for me, usually anime and manga) fandoms where no one can agree on how to spell or render the names of anything. Like, if the series or arc was never officially translated, or if the fandom developed pre-translation, and the character's name isn't a real word or a word that's normally a name, you will see a dozen different spellings, at least. This makes finding fic heck and also some of the transliterations are...interesting. Or wrong. (I've seen Hiro from Fruits Basket called "Jiro;" I thought the author had added an OC for a while.) And then there's an official translation and half the fandom switches but the other half is just like "the official spelling looks weird now." (Related to this, I also love just...reading stuff from, like, 2005 and being like "remember when that trope was a thing because the word Horcrux had never even been published." Just...watching fandom try to respond to canon in real time is fun, and looking back on it is fun.)
Oh yeah, I feel you on the 'canon looks weird now' thing. (Sieglinde Jeremiah is a MUCH better name than Sieglinde Eremia, thankyouverymuch. Also for some time her name was translated as JACQUELINE.)
[Remembers FMA fandom and all the permutations of Zolf(f)/Solf J. Kimblee/Kimbley/Kimberley/Kamblee/...] It doesn't help when there's typos in the source material so unless an official correction is put out everyone can argue their spelling of choice is Totally The Right One Guys.
speaking of FMA, Hohenheim/Hoenhaim and Liesenburg/Resembool. Or as TVTropes put it: Spell my name with an "S"
Hetalia fandom is tricky because most of the characters only have their country names, which is fine until you want to do either human AU or fics about them interacting closely with humans. It's not the fandom's fault, but I've ended up using inconsistent names between fics and sometimes one has to pause to work out who the author means.
the fairly oddparents section of fanfiction.net's official character selector thing is convinced that vicky's name is actually spelt "vicki," even though the show had an actual song spelling her name out. it has been like that for years, even though most of the fandom knows that's not the actual spelling and the character list has not been static the whole time.
I fucking loved house of night because I had this massive need for vampires and also because it was against "the church" and babby Wes was complicated. In retrospect though it was awful. I need these vampire lit recommendations I need more vampires in my life
