Okay so the plotbunny has I think been fenced in to stay out of "screaming jibblies" territory, but now I've realized it's going to get fairly long and I'm going to have to, like, put in extended effort, and writing is hard.
writing stuff around your own squicks can be so uncomfortable and fun good luck on ur squicky longfic >:3c
opening lines that are like labyrinthine mazes of epithets and redundancies bother me and i keep seeing them like it doesn't have to be perfect but could it at least make sense. there's a time and place for complicated words that make you slow down and think and tease out the meaning but. but this isn't it. this is just bad writing. this is just straightforward imagery that could be much more easily communicated with plain language.
How to start a fic: drop the reader right into the action. "Action" being anything from a conversation to the character thinking about the problem they're having to an actual fight. You'll have time to build up and pace exposition later, get the reader hooked with something first.
That's a good example of when it's (arguably) appropriate to do that! It sets a scene and a tone that isn't just action obscured by complicated phrasing.
you know what i'm so sick of??? female characters being reduced to background shippers to help get a ship together it's REAL ANNOYING especially when that's ALL THAT SHOWS UP FOR THIS CHARACTER
Dispatch from the land of Yuri On Ice badfic: Famous Authors AU where Yuuri's penname is... *drumroll*... KY. Yes. (Fic also featured people who are allegedly not teenage Tumblr-dwellers saying, "Nobody even knows KY's preferred pronouns," which is not a way people talk, but. KY.)
I asked, and apparently he's living in Detroit because Badfic Reasons and writing in English. Which honestly gives them even less excuse for making his pseudonym a brand of lube.
....i mean. 'yuuri katsuki takes up writing short porn ebooks to make some extra cash during figure skating training, and all his leading men are coincidentally beautiful white-haired russians with the grace and cheekbones of an elf prince' would be a great fanfic, probably, if done right. but uh.
look, even I, a Literal Child, know what KY Jelly is?? I have never actually seen a bottle of lube in my life, but cultural osmosis, I guess??? same reason why I know Trojans are a brand of condoms, despite also never having seen a condom in my life??? that author has no excuse???? edit: that's a lie, actually. I have seen condoms, just not in person. but I still haven't seen hide nor hair of lube.
Just to be contrary: while I do know that Trojans is a brand of condoms, I didn't know that KY was a brand of lube til now. (I have had no sexual experience with other people, to be clear.) And I've read a fair amount of smut fic, too... but usually in smut they just say "lube." (If they use lube...) So I wouldn't say the author has no excuse not to know about KY jelly... but the other things, like living in Detroit and "what pronouns KY prefers" and using a penname of his English initials are all still silly :P
and the pronouns thing is so easy to fix, too. "Nobody even knows what gender KY is." boom, problem solved, way more organic and saying essentially the same thing. still doesn't exclude NB people and NB pronouns! and it's a thing people say!
It's not necessarily that I think it's the author's fault for not knowing so much as living in Detroit and writing in English implies that his publisher's entire marketing department did not recognize this little issue. :::PPP That was pretty much exactly my response.
...Then again, if it's smut fiction he's writing, maybe the publishers accepted it as like, a jokey smut penname?
It is not. He is a ~famous bestselling author~ and so is Victor who also apparently publishes in English because reasons and they both have favorite books picked at random off the AP English Lit recommended reading list.
