The fic I'm reading right now is doing that slash fic thing where a dude compares touching ladies to touching dudes, and it just. Chicks' bones and muscles give under this dude's hands "like putty," apparently.
The one thing about orphaned fics is that if I love it, I can't search for more by the same author. But even though it's a little sad, I offer thanks that they didn't choose to delete it. I feel panic when I look at someone's bookmarks and there's a ton of deleted works messages.
Big Gripe Energy about the “category: multi” tag on AO3. Why is there so much m/f in the multi tag? Not m/f and also something else, or m/f with poly. Just straight up nothing but one or more m/f pairings. What gives? Look, I just am not in the mood for het. I’d like to exclude it without also excluding, say, bi escapades, or poly, or all slash that also happens to have a featured m/f couple. I would like to give people the benefit of the doubt, but I don’t have time to read a bunch of extremely monogamous-het-looking stories just in case they aren’t actually mislabeled. Am I misunderstanding something here?
Hm. Maybe people are thinking something like, “Het Is Dumb And Boring So I Better Pretend I’m Not Writing It, what do you mean that defeats the purpose of the tagging system? Of course no one would choose to read het, what are you even talking about? Anyway it doesn’t count as het because I haven’t clearly indicated which character is the handmaiden and which one is the feudal lord. I’m progressive!” *edit* Slightly more charitable hypothesis, maybe they’re misunderstanding the meaning of the “multi” tag? Like, rather than indicating that there are multiple people in a single relationship, they’re thinking, “Well, I have a gay couple in there too, better let everyone know there’s multiple kinds of relationship in there!”
I think it’s the second one, sometimes with the misunderstanding if “well there’s multiple m/f pairings...” or “well there’s a gay character who MIGHT end up in a relationship...” thrown in as well. Which doesn’t actually make it less aggravating, actually, because goddamn just tag your M/F and be done with it so I can move on past. *STARE THE DRAGON AGE INQUISITION TAG DEAD IN THE EYES*
That could really do with being split into a poly category and a multiple ship category - they’re kind of different
Ah yeah, that makes sense. (Also I hope most people writing m/f aren’t thinking het is boring. That’s sad. It’s not my favorite, but there’s nothing wrong with it, and obviously lots of people love it because there’s no shortage.) It occurs to me that that probably wasn’t supposed to be a poly category exactly. I think it was probably supposed to be “stuff that falls into more than one category among slash, femslash, het, and other.” A clearer description might be nice though.
I think it was probably meant to have some connection to polya stuff--the description certainly describes that, and M/F/M, F/F/M, etc. variations on threesomes certainly aren't new to fandom; people who are looking for M/F or M/M exclusively might not be okay with another partner of a certain gender thrown in, depending on how it's handled, so that's helpful. And the use for it with multiple ships of differing gender configurations is useful too (though I stand by the fact that if all your main couples are M/F or M/M or F/F, use those fucking tags.) But this is probably one of those instances where they were balancing "too many options" with "not enough options", trying to weigh against authors getting form fatigue when trying to post works, and trying to weigh against readers having choice paralysis when it comes to refining their searches. Which sucks, because I know exactly why the two are rolled into one--if someone is fine with both M/M and F/M in their shipping, they're more likely to be fine with M/F/M. But it does lead to frustration when some people use the option as an overbroad net ("look! the gay BFF flirts with someone in chapt 37 for three lines, that's M/M right there!") and it's often not indicative of which pairing is the primary one--but if there are pairings with significant spotlight on them that run in a different category than the first, it's useful to have, so... Like always, it's mostly a problem of "well if I happen to reference a gay character or gay ship down the line, I want to have the fic pre-categorized for that", just like tagging background ships that never show up; I doubt it's malice or self-hatred that drives it, so much as authors erring on the side of caution that someone in the M/F tag might have a heart attack over Gays Existing (or, more cynically, erring on the side of opportunity with the idea that "people love background gays, if I tag like the background gays have more than a line attached to them, I can rope people in and they'll be hooked on the story as it is!") I tend to assume the second, cynical interpretation, because my greatest amount of experience with that is in the Dragon Age fandom where that's an honest-to-god bit of tagging advice for authors writing M/F. But either way, I doubt it has much to do with "I think my choice in writing het is boring".
Because of the type of person I am (and apparently this is pretty common with my learning disability too), unless I have a reason to be terse I will tend to want to infodump all remotely relevant information. I also sometimes try to answer the question I think a person might be/should be asking rather than the one they did ask. (If I’m right, it’s kinda spooky. If I’m wrong it’s just confusing. I’m not trying to be either, it’s just the way I think.) I could definitely imagine a younger me picking “multi” unless given clear instructions about the intent of the category, because technically...
(Oh, actually, tertiary, most charitable possibility I've just considered: the fics themselves are only tagged with the main M/F ship, but feature M/M or F/F ships with a fair amount of frequency within them, but the authors are putting it in 'multi' because those ships feature without attaching the ship tags themselves out of concern for dominating those other ship tags. Without reading the fics in question, I can't actually say if that's the case, but that's a very good reason to have the Multi tag without any other ships in the tags too.)
... are there fandoms where people are considerate about not flooding tags with irrelevant fics? Wouldn't that be nice. Over here in BnHA, no two Koda Koji fans have ever met, due to the infinite forest of chatfics that tag the whole cast but give Koji an average of .3 words of dialogue each. We are lost and alone. Send help.
Not strictly fanfiction, but probably relevant to the interests of many people here because it's about lousy porn: this year's Bad Sex in Fiction Award nominees are up, and there are some doozies. (NSFW/B, obviously.)
I'm not sure if I'm more concerned about the guy putting his bits in a pepper mill, the woman dissociating so hard that she apparently doesn't notice the sex she's having, or the man who appears to be boinking an alien with a rubber extendo-neck.
The one that I'm most worried about is the one that reads like it was dictated to a speech-to-text program in the middle of a handy, tbh.
