Tired and kind of braindead at the moment but thank you. Hugs are good things as is things said. Also Japanese grammar is absolutely fantastic though my favorite bit of that language is the orthography.
I see "Always Coming Home" has already been recommended. I also think you should read the Ash books by Mary Gentle (I started to warn for sexual assault, but then I remembered who I was talking to lol) and Flight from Neveryon (and all the Neveryon stuff) by Samuel Delany (also needs warnings, shit you can just warn for Mary Gentle and Samuel Delany). It's not that I won't read things with rape in them, although I prefer not to, it's that you have to write 5000x better and make it worth the discomfort. Also be comforted, I am not a Tolkien fan because I don't like the books about hobbits. The Silmarillion is the only thing I ever read by Tolkien that I really liked, although I had the usual ragefit over the dissension = damnation bits.
Well I mean if the assault happens in a dental office THEN MAYBE but yeah. Also if you liked The Silmarillion you might be interested in some of the History of Middle-Earth Books. Specifically things like The Lost Road and Other Stories, The Lays of Beleriand, and The Shaping of Middle-Earth. Additionally Unfinished Tales might be of interest to you. Thank you for more suggestions though!
Thank you. At least I know I have that problem now at least? Makes it so I could prepare for that sort of stress when I got more dental work done recently. Instead of throttling my nurse because I just don't know what is even up with my panic.
(A bit late, but on the subject of fic that's in-universe academic papers: I am intensely unqualified to write it, but I would love that style of fic for Radiant Historia, with historians trying to figure out the absolute mess left of the timeline at the end of the story. Two divergent timelines running for most of a year, with major geopolitical events and the entire course of a war differing between them, and the ending shows impacts from both of them. I want frustrated historians several hundred years later trying to figure out if this city got razed once or twice, and if this other one got invaded or not, and whether this superweapon thing existed or not and what it might have been, and whether this one group was massacred or rebelled or both. Discussing and debunking assorted wild conspiracy theories, particularly about the royal family. And probably concluding that Stocke is some sort of folkloric plot device that people wrote into stories for some reason, because there are some incontrovertible historical records of his existence, but many references are clearly falsified because the chronology doesn't match up, and if they were all true he'd have to be in several places at once.)
(Not to mention it's canon that there are almost no written records of the actual words of a massively influential religious figure. There would be so many classicists trying to wrangle out exactly what he preached from accounts of people who were known to have lied about it, propaganda against him, laws of the country he founded (which might have been "we have always been at war with Eastasia"ed), fragments mentioned in passing in letters and journals, and precisely one detailed primary account by someone who knew him well... 50 years after he started preaching. Give me all the frustrated historians for this game no one else has played, dammit.)
...from the sounds of it, it'd be almost exactly like historians trying to deal with Jesus-as-a-historical-person. There's basically nothing about him written down and preserved that was contemporary! Because one dude leading a rebellion against Rome? Meh, who cares, there's been ten this year already and this guy doesn't even have his own army. (Yes - one of the dudes who is recorded as having existed at the same time actually managed to round up his own army.) The most reliable stuff is a brief aside about how the latest dude to try it is the brother of one of the Jewish high priests (and in the earliest bits of the new testament, the stuff that's supposed to have been written by people who did know him, he is stated to have had a brother by the same name in the aside, although I can't remember the name right now).
Pretty much, though Jesus was executed at 33 and this guy successfully led a rebellion and founded a country and kept preaching into his eighties. So there's going to be more info even if nobody bothered to write down his speeches because he's just going to give another one next week.
The Jesus situation is particularly weird because there's one first century Roman text saying Christians were following some guy named "Chrestus" who was still alive and living in Rome. I'm assuming they got confused by the resurrection thing.
is plagiarism a fanfiction gripe? because every time i've been plagiarized it's been funny as hell. like one time someone stole most of the sex scene out of this one john/dave fic i'd written, but it was a daddy kink scene that made no sense in the context of the entire rest of their weepy blushy anime-style of rendition of the two of them. they were just sort of your basic pair of coy tsundere motherfuckers for like five hundred words up to the stolen scene, then snapped into my characterization and general fuckwittery, then went right back to being some clueless young sex-shy teenage girl's completely embarrassing rendition of two college age gay men. it was posted on deviant art. someone recognized it, came and got me, and we both politely requested that the fic be taken down and rewritten to not include my stuff. the 'author' maintained that any resemblance to my work was entirely coincidental, because they didn't know me, and anyway i didn't own john and dave, and anyway there were only so many ways words could be combined, so maybe all sex scenes were similar to each other in a way. me and a couple friends then did straight up word-for-word comparisons between my fic and theirs and they backed down, which was a little anticlimactic, but it made for an interesting afternoon.
I wrote an gen issuefic one time and someone used the basic idea for a pairing fic, which is fine, but they basically copied my note at the beginning point by point, albeit with different wording, and used the same joke I'd used halfway through, without mentioning me. Not exactly plagiarism, but annoying.
"maybe it just looks like a thing you wrote because all sex scenes are basically the same, amirite". that's. omf, seriously? that is precious and twee, and i sorta wanna be you when i grow up, because "no, child, this is definitely the thing i wrote, note how it is exactly the fucking same and how it makes no sense in context with the rest of your fic" is just. I mean, yes, you don't own john and dave, and yes, there is only so many ways words can be combined that make sense. but uh - that still doesn't mean that stealing is not what happened there.
I once saw someone post terrible madoka fic where one chunk was entirely a bad summary of another fanfic. Not word for word plagiarism, but everything being described was from that one fanfic. That was on deviantart too.
Not so much a fanfic thing as a fanart thing, but I don't like it when people draw Alphys with a bearded dragon head. Not because it doesn't suit her, but because bearded dragons have tiny brains and a very flat head as a result, and when people draw an Alphys based off of a bearded dragon, they give her a really flat head without room for a sapient brain, even if it were a bird-style hyperefficient compact brain.
Overly blunt titles. People who remember the PPC may know of my riffing of a fic entitled "Shadow Rapes Matthias". The best thing anyone said about it was it delivered what it promised. A friend of mine at the time made a comment about how they imagined this person would call other works "'Hobbit Lobs Ring Into Volcano', 'Darth Vader Blows Stuff Up And Is Luke's Dad' and 'Bruce Willis Is A Ghost'".
