me, gettin that yearly morally dubious Hannibal fanfic itch: lets check the Lay Of The Land, boys!! me, immediately inundated with fics tagged like: 'Hannibal Is Nice, Hannibal Is Not A Cannibal, No Serial Killer AU, Fluff, AU: No Cannibalism': then what is the fucking point, boys!! yeah yeah yeah yeah i KNOW, but rly of all the fandoms to write sweet sweet fluffy pure uwu gay romance in, i mean, LIKE, edit: and im exaggerating anyway, most fics are positively rolling in the cannibalism and murder, but I Love To Complain
i misread that as Land of the Lay and i want that to be ao3's new nickname now or adultfanfiction's but barely anyone uses that site anymore
OH MY GOD KILLING STALKING HAD THE SAME THING (when i was reading in it which was admittedly a year ago) and yes most of the fics were wonderfully Problematic but then a lot of them were like "fluffy au where sangwoo is a good person and theyre married" and you do you author but im so confused
Ceescedasticity said something very relevant to this thread on Tumblr: I know I've noticed that a lot, and reviews at Das Sporking work that way too; they will usually start out giving one point at a time for their "counts" of annoying/weird/offensive things that pop up repeatedly in the work, and by the end of it the count grows exponentially for each time it appears.
I think that applies to fics that start out promising but devolve into suckitude, too. I read That One Fic I Hate to the very end, even though I utterly despised it by that point, at least in part because I kept desperately hoping it would get better—because it COULD be better, it started out GOOD! And I kinda realized it sucked when reading it began to feel more like an obligation than something I enjoyed. ...And thinking about it, it ALWAYS had issues. But while I was still enjoying it, I was more likely to overlook them.
i mean, it's normal to give people the benefit of the doubt. (in many areas, not just fanfic.) one weird thing happening might be them making a mistake, or you misunderstanding things. but if a pattern of weird things emerges, then yeah, shit's weird.
YOI Badfic Friend is reading Drarry again, and has stumbled across and started spitereading a fic the highlights of which include: A potion for orphaned pureblood wizards made from donated memories of the orphan's parents, which allows the orphaned wizard to have a sense of what their parents were like and what it would've been like to know them growing up, which REMOVES the memories it was made from from the donors' minds, which was never offered to Harry, and which he is now expected to donate all his memories of Sirius to because Sirius had a secret daughter Magic(TM) won't let you get married if you're not a Technical Virgin Harry doesn't like shampoo because it's too girly Dumbledore is alive and everyone's at Hogwarts in Year 7 and it's not tagged AU Draco shows off his Dark Mark to all the first-years Harry apparently holds roses by grabbing them tightly in a fist to establish dominance (since holding it makes him start bleeding everywhere) Hermione tells Draco he would have trouble dating Harry because the Dursleys are homophobic Pureblooded wizards are Ruined For Life if they have sex with muggleborns because muggleborns have Scary Uncontrolled Magic Lily's sacrifice has nothing to do with Harry's survival, it was just his "innate magical ability" making the spell bounce off Snape has been hoarding Harry's most humiliating memories in a Pensieve from his Occlumency lessons and no one thinks this is creepy The only possible way for Draco and Harry to fit under the invisibility cloak is with Draco's mouth on the back of Harry's neck Magic(TM) tells wizards how to Court(TM) Draco assumes Harry being attracted to him means Harry has an incest kink because they're super-distantly related Literally every single Hufflepuff starts sighing and swooning and "cooing to each other" about romance because they saw Harry get a Magic Courtship Present Hermione knows more about wizard romance culture than Ron does Draco has a spell that tells him things like Harry's most prized possessions, his allies, his enemies, his fears, his strengths, and his weaknesses in convenient list format, and also lets him just point at a list of names and get a random one of Harry's memories related to that name, and somehow no one is using this insanely powerful invasion of privacy tool to rule the world This sentence: "The many bits of acid were escaping their shards and exploding on contact with whatever they happened to touch." A fortuitous typo that claimed someone who came in via Floo Powder "came from the loo." Given the magical worldbuilding introduced so far and its complete lack of any relationship to anything having to do with how things work in Harry Potter, we've pretty much decided at this point that the author is writing a schlocky high fantasy AU with a completely different setting, but somehow hasn't realized it.
They clearly are, but what makes it really remarkable is that as far as either YOIBF (reading the fic) or I (getting highlights quoted at me) can tell, they do not appear to be aware of that.
Since then, YOIBF has also reported: The author set up a convoluted ritual Veritaserum Q&A session and then skipped past it Descriptions of characters' skin colors changed multiple times Draco Malfoy brought a crystal wading pool from home and set it up in the middle of the Great Hall There was a paragraph-long run-on sentence in the middle of a smut scene Draco learned Secret Malfoy Danger Writing Code before he learned to read normal English Harry dreamily talks to Ron and Hermione how romantic it would be to set their Wizard Marriage Vows so they'll both drop dead if one of them is killed "So, the Dark Lord truly did dream of a brighter future for the wizarding world." [9:20 PM] [YOI Badfic Friend]: Harry is now a Parcelmouth. [9:20 PM] [YOI Badfic Friend]: He can speak to boxes. YOIBF friend theorized that Snape's dislike of shampoo was a mental virus spread through Legilimancy and Harry was infected.
Huh, compared to the rest of it, that's practically in-character. For some reason I imagine the pool looks like one of the fountains at Versailles…
No word, but Molly Weasley wrote a Howler that involved a great deal of TMI and speculation about Harry's sex life. Rita Skeeter also speculated about what specific things they were getting up to in a newspaper column, which seems a bit much even for her.
Well, she did basically accuse Hermione of sleeping around with every famous guy who spent more than five seconds talking to her politely, and that was when the Trio was 14. I could believe that Skeeter would get much more openly vicious towards someone who's a nominal adult. But you're right that I doubt she'd be speculating about specific sex acts in her column or in public; it'd be much more in-character for her (and the editors of the Daily Prophet) to go for the pearl-clutching "this journalist hardly dares to imagine what they might be getting up to behind closed doors, dear reader, and she will not subject you to such lurid speculation, which would obviously not be suitable to print in a publication which might be read by children" bit.
"He did [x]. He did [y]. He did [z]. And then he did [abc]. He did [v]. Only at the end of the paragraph did the author decide to vary up the sentence structure, long after the reader has wondered if they opened a transcript of See Spot Run."
am wondering if perhaps i should get myself a text replace extension for the sole purpose of replacing any variation of “i suck at summaries” with like, empty space, or an emoji or something. ...of course, that still wouldn’t help me while browsing ao3 on my phone, like i’m currently doing :p