Just for once I would love to find a chatfic that doesn't end up being the bastard child of all those scriptfics you used to find on FFnet back in the day and tumblr social justice wank, particularly when the characters involved are all well out of high school/college.
this fanfic I'm reading keeps referring to these characters by their hair styles instead of their actual fucking names long after the point where hair styles were even necessary or relevant to the scene, and it is the most annoying thing to read because I'm just like "AAUGH THEY HAVE ACTUAL NAMES USE THEM ALREADYYYY" (and it's so weird because it's usually hair color this happens with but it's hair styles for some reason? I've literally never seen that done before. which makes it stick out even more really) good thing I have the fanfic saved to my computer and am reading it through my document program so I can just replace every instance of this garbage writing technique with the character's names and make things read so much better!!!!!
I kind of wanna write a really bitter spitefic about some canon stuff I didn't like but it wouldn't actually be very enjoyable to do so and focusing on stuff I hate isn't good for me.
I don't know how to handle characters I hate. In an AU they could have had circumstances which didn't lead to them becoming what I hate about them, but then are they the same character at all?
don’t write them? if focusing on things you hate isn’t helpful or enjoyable to you, you’re not obligated to write about characters you dislike. as to “are they really the same character” i think it depends. what personality traits do you consider core to that character’s identity? i do...a LOT of aus, honestly, and a lot of them have different circumstances that create differing personalities—what makes them recognizable is the core nugget of personality. so, say, if you don’t like karkat because he’s angry, making him no-longer-angry probably wouldn’t work, because that’s pretty central to his core character. but if you don’t like, say...the way he chilled out late game, you could create an au where circumstances don’t cause him to chill out, and he’d still read as karkat because that’s not central to who he is as a character.
It's my problem with feeling bad leaving anyone out. The character I'm having problems with is Vriska; I think she deserves better than she had as a kid, but the way she interacts with the others is awful.
okay, so, if i’m parsing you right, you don’t want to leave characters out, but you don’t want to write characters you dislike, and you don’t want to change them so that you like them... i don’t know what suggestions you’d want or find helpful, sorry, that sounds like a real catch-22 to be stuck in. maybe give vriska a minor background role? then she’s involved, and you don’t have to do much with her.
or come up with something to incapacitate vriska or make her leave so she exists but she's not participating in the plot, maybe? like, it's not a vriskaless world but she doesn't matter to the plot. (and lol, that's literally what vriska would hate the most, i think, which i love, tbh. that the ultimate punishment for vriska is making her Miss Not Participating In This Plot.) (i don't hate vriska but it is hilarious to me.)
you can't include every character in everything so i think you're just gonna need to deal with leaving people out (though i probably have a vested interest in saying that because "never-met-vriska" AUs are my favourite AUs)
This is a matter of good writing. If you don't have a role for the character, the character doesn't belong in the plot. It's that simple. This was honestly part of the failing of Homestuck. Too many characters, too many irrelevant stories for them to juggle, one big sprawling mess that had to be retconned to make work. Learn the lesson from Hussie: don't just stuff the character because of aught to's or supposed to be's, figure out what if anything they bring to the table and if that's an element you need/want in your story. If not? Cut it out. Editing room floor for that beach.
This is what I was going to suggest, yeah. A brief one-paragraph mention that amounts to "yep, Vriska exists in this universe but she's off doing something else and not participating in the plot of this story". Maybe she's on a cruise. Maybe she's competing in a card game tournament somewhere that's nowhere near where the protagonists will go. Maybe she's taken a look at herself and her actions and gone "hey, I'm kind of fucked up" and decided to put herself into intensive therapy until she's in a place where it's safe for her and Tavros to be in the same room without her being awful to him! The world is your oyster, do what you want.
I don't think the author of this fanfic I'm reading knows how to construct sentences in any way other than with dangling modifiers. there are far too many of these things in here
Reading a sugar daddy fic. Character A says “I’m old enough to be your father.” Character A is 10 years older than character B. Closes sugar daddy fic.
vampire fic that includes one instance of feeding but like it's super short and i am not sure why we included it the fic is porn even and they included one of the porniest things about vampires and you're telling me i get like two two sentence long paragraphs that are sparse as fuck on details and make no mention at all of the animalistic hungering lust of vampires D: D: D:
