This is also of major concern to me with the more jokey joke portrayals of Reaper wherein he uses Spanish and lots of it. This is questionable for a variety of reasons but I think the worst is people who do not get how Mexican Spanglish works.
One of the anime fandoms I write for has a wiki with character pages that include honorifics/nicknames--like, there are little charts with tabs so you can reference what each character calls the characters they interact with most, and what those characters call them. I miss that level of detail every time I go to write for another fandom. Also, an unresolvable gripe: one of my favorite linguistic things in another anime fandom is a main character's shift in personal pronouns, from ore to boku to watashi, and there's absolutely no way to express the full implications of that in English-language fic.
I'm coming to the realization that miscommunication/lack of communication in fic, as a precursor to angst, is just a really hard no for me. The problem is, it's not always tagged for, and when it is tagged for, it's never a clarification on the genre, so... You know, FF.N had a lot of problems, but I do miss the drop-down that let you pick a genre. Sometimes I want to be able to tell if something is angst at a glance, without relying on the author thinking to tag it without prompting.
oh man, a wiki with all the honorifics and nicknames is the perfect solution for this. i often feel like i'm missing a lot of important contexts when translators don't include honorifics (and fanfic writers, but if i know which honorifics the characters use in canon i don't mind them being left out of fic), or at least a gloss of them, but it also can break up the flow of prose. a table/wiki somewhere would be perfect! come on every anime fandom, get on this. hard sympathy with the personal pronouns problem! in Les Miserables, whether a character refers to another with tu or vous is hugely significant, but it's really hard to capture in English. some materials (both official translations and fanfics) use thee and you respectively to translate the French versions. which... i mean, as a historical linguistics nerd i appreciate the nod to the fact that English used to have formal and informal personal pronouns, but also to modern readers "thee" doesn't read as familiar or informal, it reads as old-timey.
Man, the US must be so weird for people coming from an area where there are pronouns/suffixes/etc that change depending on your relationship to another person, because (looking at vous here for derivations) we use the Formal grammar for everyone, but simultaneously throw around first-name-basis like nobody's business. Maybe the first-name-basis thing is bc historically Americans used to have really huge families?
Fic: tagged as "ship: character A/character B", appears to be A/B in the first chapter, then reveals that it was a bait-and-switch in chapter two, and the person that both the audience and Character A assumed to be Character B, was in fact Character C (no warning, no tags to indicate the mistaken identity, "A/C" not originally part of the fic's tags) Me: Hm. Don't like that. (Fortunately not a problem I've run into a lot, but once was once too many.) Edit: On the subject of pronouns/suffixes though!! It can be tricky to pull off in English, but when done well I really like it. The Goblin Emperor did it with "thee" vs "you", as well as "I" vs "royal 'we,'" and it was great, the way it indicated level of formality or familiarity, especially when two characters' ideas of what that level should be didn't match.
The element of surprise can suffer with the tagging system. I used to be a little iffy about that, then I realized that actually I don’t really miss relying on serendipity to deliver me the kind of story I’m looking to read. If they don’t want to tag a surprise relationship, they could just not tag relationships? I honestly can’t think of a solution more likely to get the wrong target audience than the arrangement they’ve got.
Or use custom tags since Ao3 let's you do that. Something like "a/b (sort of)" "a/undisclosed" "(not tagging for spoilers)" And then you get an idea that it's not going to go how one might expect without spoilers.
When people remove Mineta from their BNHA fics by having him come in last in Aizawa’s quirk assessment test and get expelled because of that. It’s not Mineta’s character they’re fucking with there, it’s Aizawa’s! His logical ruses are important, and so is the fact that he specifically didn’t kick anyone out for coming in last in a basic physical test on their first day. If they would just say that he noticed Mineta creeping on some girls during the test and kicked him out for that, that would be just fine. But Aizawa of all people isn’t the type to say someone has zero potential just because they don’t have a quirk that enhances their physical ability. It’s an absolute disservice to his character and really jarring, especially when the authors in question characterize him just fine the rest of the time. And anyway, it’s inaccurate. Mineta is shown using his quirk to help him on the test. If anyone came in last, it should have been Hagakure, who as far as we know didn’t spend the ten months leading up to the exam doing brutal physical training.
@vuatson they’re actually accurate about Mineta’s placement, canonically speaking — he comes in second to last in canon, with Izuku being last, so in a canon-divergent story where Izuku can do better than he does in canon, Mineta would be last (assuming that no aspect of the canon divergence affects anyone’s score other than Izuku, which is common for AUs where Izuku has a quirk that isn’t One For All (or in addition to OFA.)) now, does that actually make sense? no — as you mentioned, Hagakure should logically come in after Mineta because at least Mineta’s quirk can help with a few of the tests, unlike Hagakure. But Mineta does canonically rank 19th out of 20 students (Hagakure is right above him, at 18th.) but you’re absolutely right about Aizawa’s character here.
Spoiler: screenshots from bnha is the thing about him expelling a whole class of first years ever contradicted? im not entirely caught up yet but idk if id see it as SO ooc, ive always seen the later leniency as a side effect of growing fond of them
the way i think of it is that aizawa will not hesitate to expel students whose potential is zero. if izuku had not impressed him in the quirk assessment, aizawa would likely have expelled him. (specifically, when aizawa erases izuku’s quirk to prevent him from breaking his whole fucking arm again, he expects that izuku will either wimp out and just do a normal throw, or try to break his arm doing an overpowered throw again, either of which aizawa would not have approved of. it’s izuku’s unexpected solution that makes aizawa decide his potential isn’t zero.) but the thing that makes mineta unsuited to be a hero (in the eyes of the fandom) isn’t his quirk or his physical capabilities. his quirk has potential. even if he placed last in the quirk assessment test, if you’re only looking at what he can do with his quirk, he has potential. it’s his personality that sucks/shitty behavior. i personally prefer when the latter is what gets him expelled in fanfics instead of just “he came in last,” tho tbh i’m used to it at this point. (afaik the “expelled a whole class of first years” is never contradicted, but idk if we ever learned when he expelled them — beginning of the year? middle? end? it’s a kinda big difference if he expelled them all 1-2 weeks in as opposed to at the end of the school year or something)
I'm pretty sure there was more going on there than Aizawa revealed even to All Might. Midoriya shouldn't have been last even without his quirk, let alone with that superhuman throw added in, and it's an odd test for Aizawa to give in the first place, considering he'd have flunked it himself unless he managed to sabotage every other competitor. It takes some twisty headcanoning to make that arc make sense. I'm not sure I blame a fic author for missing things in their interpretation. Besides, coming up with a reason for Mineta's absence at all is more than most authors do. Most people just declare him gone in the tags and don't bother to explain.
why are you specifying that the characters are “of age” when they are adults in canon??? Like I’m only gonna assume they’re underage if you start talking about them being in high school, otherwise I’m probably gonna figure they’re around canon age.
I'm starting to think some writers must have an allergy to using dashes (properly if at all) and it may or may not be contagious
luckily all you need to do is plug 'how to use dashes' or similar into a search engine and you'll get multiple resources telling you how to use them which makes this apparent trend of dash misuse or absence I keep seeing in fanfic all the more glaring
The dash and hyphen seem to be dying out in general, honestly. Like overall usage of both is dying in many cases, regardless of medium.
I think it's just fanfic writers not using them properly (which likely stems from bad education--I've heard horror stories of american english education for instance--and then for whatever reason they don't look up grammar resources later on, which these days is pretty >:/ since we have instant search engines at our fingertips and all) and then other fanfic writers see that and copy it unawares, and nobody ever bothers to correct anyone because these days most people have hair-trigger tempers and block you for daring to imply anything negative about their precious creations, so dashes and hyphens never get used properly and more people go on to misuse them. one of those vicious cycles sorts of things, basically. at least that's my theory on it. eta: fixed a couple of words
