ACTUALLY, that part especially is a huge component of my grumping XD hold on, I'm going to whine in greater depth in the actual transformers thread (it shockblurr)
Oh my god, and when people do make the shorter one a dom, they fucking bend time and space to make the bigger party somehow itsy. Or like, with Kylux you get stuff like 6'1" Hux is just the tiniest fucking thing next to 6'3" Kylo when he's subbing, and Kylo is a slender emo pretty boy next to Hux who has "real muscle" somehow despite being a hecking general standing next to the guy who does melee combat for a living when Kylo's subbing, and piss the hell off with that. God, I've seen stuff with Finnlo where Kylo is the shorter party cause Finn's supposed to be the dom/top, and fuckkkkk there's an actual six inch height difference there, guy. That's. obnoxious. The only Kylo pairing that doesn't pull shit like that based on who's domming/topping is Reylo, I think. No matter how hard she doms him, Rey never gets to be a hulking woman mountain with a slender prettyboy Kylo swooning into her arms, and I'm kinda mad about that too, actually. It'd be ridiculous, but fuck it, right, everyone else gets to be bigger than Kylo.
Hops in because oh my god same hat with Erwin/Levi from SNK Spoiler: D/s and sex discussion 18+ Levi is a sub in just about 100% of the fics I've seen and I just ??? because it is incredibly Obvious to me that he loves being in control and he has a strong sadistic steak. Conversely, Erwin kind of hates having as much power as he does, he hates himself and all the mistakes he makes as the commander of the corps. I feel like he would get a lot out of having someone else be in control for a bit, someone who forced him to think about things that weren't awful self-flagellation and he was not allowed to argue with. And levi would get a lot out of it too because here he can channel his sadism into something good and healthy and he can help his partner out while he's at it and he's not uses to helping people and it feel so good to be able to do a single good thing on this Hell world It just makes sense to me that if they were in a trusting relationship they might find a way to explore this shit together. Its so complimentary! It makes sense! But Levi is unusually short and Erwin is unusually tall, and Erwin is in a higher position of authority, so we get Erwin as the Dom and levi as a sassy sub and I'm tired of it
Whatever happened with people with a lot of power and control liking to secretly have an excuse to give that up, and let someone ELSE have control and make the decisions? That's such a classic thing. It can be done the other way around, obviously, but the emotional depth just builds itself right into the scene with you have the powerful, high-ranking decepticon/officer/commander/etc deliberately choosing to give that power to someone less physically imposing than them, or who is under their command in the real world.
See also: dom!Cullen??? What????? I mean from a 'needing control' standpoint maybe, but c'mon, he's perfect for 'controlled loss of control to deal with history of trauma' ITS SUCH A GOOD DYNAMIC C'MON.
Right?? I feel like that dynamic used to be so much more common in fic, but you can hardly find any these days!
When 1 character is clearly more invested in the relationship than the other...I just :/ Also when Character A is obsessed with Character B in a definite spades way, like constantly showing up going "FUCKING FIGHT ME!!!" and Character B is just like. Vaguely pale for them. And just sort of rolls their eyes and tolerates it and cleans up whatever mess A's dumb tantrum made. I LIKE this dynamic...but then people make it boring and fluffy and mutual even though the point is that they both want/need different things out of an actual relationship and that's why it won't work. (See: Flynn and Yuri from Tales of Vesperia. Nero and Cid from Final Fantasy 14.)
Het ships that decide that they're going to be Aggressively Het. So that, like, the dude is The Dude and the chick is The Chick and it's all aggressively gendered to the detriment of the characters' actual characters, yunno? And it's not like this doesn't happen in slash too, when you get authors who are young and shitty and decide that one dude is the Dude and the other is the Chick, and that's all sorts of yucky, so. IDK. It's just obnoxious.
One I brought up in the fanfic gripes thread; when the same ficcer portrays the same character as an entirely different person based only on who they're paired with today, and neither/none of the portrayals bear any resemblance to their canon self.
But, but, but, obviously Harry when he's dating Draco is like weirdly identical to every badly written sub ever Also known as why isn't there any good snape/lupin, it's all weird and terrible when obviously they would be mostly full of rage and exhaustion.
THIS, SO MUCH. Especially if one or both characters in a het ship is canonically gender-nonconforming to any degree and then all the fucking fic wants you to know how much they actually totally do conform to stereotypes. Because it's not het enough if a girl is kinda butch and/or a guy is kinda femme, I guess. >:|
@peripheral Yeah, but you'd think they could at least keep their own portrayals of a specific character consistent rather than using the character as a mask for Generic Seme or Generic Uke depending on who they're stuck together with.
This is why it is my goal (once im An Grown-up) to write angst slash. All the sads. All the i am super lonely and you know my secret this is close enough to romance.
Theres a lot of rhys/ handsome jack fic out there which basically boils down to jack being super evil forever and then takes rhys and makes him 10 times worse, like. No??? Rhys is a pathetic buisness shark fanboy who couldnt outwit his way out of a wet paper bag, hes the biggest poser there ever was only behind vasques in loserville. Yeah he may have whack morals like every other hyperion lackey, but hes not gonna go around killing puppies and children just because he can.
the fact that barb from trollhunters forgiving strickler for what he did to her and her son and getting back together with him is a) the assumed default in EVERY bit of stricklake content i can find, b) always conflated. WHERE IS MY FUCKED UP DYSFUNCTIONAL STRICKLAKE AND WHERE IS MY BARB FORGIVING STRICKLER WITHOUT JUMPING ON HIS DICK c) increasingly the only fucking shippy or non-oc-based content to be found. i'm dying squirtle (don't get me wrong the ocs are good and fun, i just miss when people actually talked or wrote about the canon characters or ships-other-than-stricklake ever 8'C)
This is a beef with the Overwatch lesbian ships. E.g. they make Pharah into The Dude and Mercy into The Chick. I mean, yeah, Pharah's a little less femme but they way exaggerate to the point of caricature.
