Regarding epithets, I think the way to use them best is a) pick a really defining trait, and b) use a variety of description types. You can use physical appearance (“the angry blonde”), actions (“the laughing girl”), social status (“the class president”) and relationships to narrator and other characters (“the unknown man turned to his companion”) to illustrate interactions that would seem confusing or clunky just using names and/or pronouns — you’ve just got to make it obvious which epithet refers to which character. And you can have some real fun playing with them, depending on pov and authorial voice! I am sad that I don’t see more fun epithet usage. :C Regarding first person, I always come into those stories expecting personality - like, I want to feel like there’s an actual person there retelling the story to me, and in the case of fanfic, it’s a person whose thoughts and mannerisms I want to recognise. If I don’t get that, it kinda feels viscerally wrong, like I’m talking to a robot or an impostor. On the other hand, I’ve written 100k words of an oc-narrator fic in first person and found it a really useful tool for developing character on a lot more levels than most of my third-person fic. No idea if my fic would weigh up to my standards if I wasn’t the one writing it, but hey, it’s been fuuuuuun. XDD
@tinyhydra Other writers have expected me to believe a character too innocent to masturbate is instantly an expert at sex first time out the gate. I feel your pain.
I get thrown badly enough when third-person limited fic suddenly loses the limits, and it's sooo much worse when it's first-person. I have this issue a LOT when reading first-person origfic. If I don't get a really strong sense of the narrator's voice, the first-person feels really artificial. Back when I first finished the Dresden Files and went looking for similar urban fantasy, I abandoned several copycats over that.
since we’re on the subject of epithets, here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of terrible epithets i’ve read in fanfic (some of which was very badfic) -the pinkette -the ambiguously tanned man -the silverette -the skinny -the greenhead -the MPD (yes, that’s an author deciding that the best way to refer to a character who canonically has disassociative identity disorder* is “the MPD.” *though the canon in question still calls it multiple personality disorder) honorable mention goes to “the redhead” used in a fic with 3 different redheads, all of whom were referred to as “the redhead” multiple times, including in scenes where more than one of the redheads were present.
The MPD thing reminds me of this: ... So, is her name Rose/Ross with an alter unrelatedly named Ross? Also, that's not how DID works.
I'm pretty sure this fic was going for less that and more "incorruptible pure pureness, untouched by even her own hand!!!" I wouldn't know, I noped out when it had her express disappointment that her beau asked for permission before ravaging her, and also remember fondly the days when he kidnapped her. Yunno, taking what he wants, like how a real man do. It's pretty obviously a kink thing and not an unsavory notions about women thing, I'm just cross that I read it with my human eyeballs, not that it exists at all.
Like, kinktomato and all, but of all the characters to use for puritykink, why the one who dumpster-dives battlefield wreckage for a living?
While we're on the subject of how Rey is canonically a desert dwelling garbage sifter, an awful lot of fandom stuff decides that, nah, that's not an aspect of her character we're interested in exploring. She's off Jakku now, and that means she no longer sizes machines up based on how much their parts would bring her, and she doesn't worry about how she's gonna acquire food and clean water or nothing, stuff like that doesn't linger. The fact that she's never had to deal with any sort of galactic currency and has lived her whole life working within this weird incredibly onesided barter system wherein one man owns all the food on the planet and just gets to decide how much everything is worth on a whim is also unimportant, it has definitely not colored how she views the world around her, nope. There's a lot of fun shit you can do with Rey I rarely see explored.
The worst epithet I’ve ever seen was “blondette”. I’m still not sure if the author meant it to be a joke.
Ambiguously tanned sounds like ny family genetics. We dont tan, we just keep getting more and more freckles until they are close enough together we appear one and a half a shade less white. Either that or a blotchy fake tan.
I seem to be running into contradictory descriptions lately. I've seen a woman having a "mound of cleavage" and things being described as, I kid you not, "small but large".
My guess re: "ambiguously tanned" is that they might mean "I can't tell if this person is a pale person with a tan or if they'd be non-pale even if they hadn't been out in the sun." That or like the TVtropes term "Ambiguously Brown," for characters who have tan skin but no clues about ethnicity beyond that are given, so they could potentially be from/have heritage from practically anywhere on the planet.
