What are your fan fiction gripes?

does anyone understand what this recent wave of "[their] eyes were so wide, [they] could see the white all the way around" is

like. we are not an animal like cats or dogs or horses - our iris does not cover all of the normal visible part of our eyes. you can always see the white of our eyes

unrelatedly, there's this weird wave in a/b/o fic where "omegas can't get pregnant during their [modifier] heat" - generally like their first heat? or their first heat with their Twue Mate, or something

 

For the first one, for most people eyelids usually cover a little bit of the top and/or bottom of the iris, so the white is visible to the left and right of the iris but not all the way around unless the eyelids are opened very wide. It seems like a pretty good bit of visual detail, if it were described well. (And if you hadn't seen it in the last twenty fics you read.)

For the second... I've heard of men, trying to convince women to have sex, making the bullshit claim that you can't get pregnant your first time so that the sex would seem less risky. It sounds like that got translated into a/b/o, I hope as a bullshit line that alphas try on omegas, but knowing the internet it's probably supposed to be an accurate description of how things work in that setting, which, ugh.

 

... man though, it would be really funny if all those myths translated over, as myths-- if it was an urban legend in a/b/o fic that an omega can't get pregnant the first time/standing up/if the omega is on top/etc.

 

It's a general urban legend, not just a Creepy Dude thing, but yeah. Wouldn't be the first or the last time omegaverse took a real-world myth about sex and made it factually true in-world.

EDIT:

YOI Badfic Friend has also talked about writing fic where "omegas can't be on suppressants too long because it's bad for them and stops working" is an in-universe urban legend, because the IRL birth control version is their personal pet peeve.

 

unfortunately, it's presence seems to be... writers who want to write hot a/b/o smut, without involving birth control, and not wanting to deal with the pregnancy risk - it's most common, i've found, in underage a/b/o fics where the characters are in high school (or, weirdly, in incest fics - "incest is okay so long as no one gets pregnant" i guess?). it's something that may or may not come up in the body of fic, but what i was commenting on was including a line like

in the author's notes - this is an actual quote from an actual bnha fic that's in the top 20 when sorting by kudos&explicit

i would actually enjoy it being an in-world myth, because personally why i love a/b/o is that it allows me to explore things like misogyny and romance and rape and weird hot sex without brushing up against dysphoria from both "not a woman, don't want to read about a woman being the only person facing this" and "dear lord i don't want to deal with transphobia in this too" - so if this was part of the mythic urban legend worldbuilding, i would have actually posted about this in fanfic delights

idk. i get why people are squicked by pregnancy/pregnancy risk, but i'd prefer if they just ignored it instead of having to make up dumb justifications that break my willing suspension of disbelief

 

part of it's drama, part of it's like - when i woke up from getting my wisdom teeth removed, i mumbled "why do you have three eyes" at my mother and then was... basically fine, alert, and coherent. i had a bit of trouble walking? but within about three hours, the only thing that made it obvious i'd had dental surgery was that i still had those little cotton balls stuffed in my mouth

to be fair, tho, i'm weirdly coherent when drugged

(although, now that i think about it, i took one round of ibuprofen four hours after leaving the surgeon, and then took zero (0) pain meds of any kind after that because i didn't want to touch the oxycodone i was given (bc i wasn't in pain and this would have been right after my grandma managed to get herself addicted to opiods) and ibuprofen does basically nothing for me - so that does probably account for some of my "i was entirely coherent and not drugged at all after my wisdom tooth surgery")

 

.... y'all get opioids for wisdom tooth surgery? what in the hell? I just ("""just""" Nsaids have a reason after mouth surgery afaik, to minimize chance of inflammation) got some prescription strength ibuprofen which i took after consulting with my doctor (bc I'm on a different class of nsaids on an as-necessary basis, ibu is only barely coming back to being sort of vaguely effective and still gives me massive stomach pains but it was the only option the dental surgeon had available)

 

hence, the opioid addiction crisis

(i'm being flippant but yes overprescription of opioids is a massive problem, driven by drug manufacturers and helped along by an administration that is anti-regulation or oversight in general.)

 

time to set fire to capitalism once again.....

Spoiler: bit derail-y about drugs and stuff

I mean in some ways our system is a bit extreme in the other direction i suppose? bc like. when people argue that chronic pain patients who are suffering massively under the strain that other pain killers often put on the body don't actually need opioids and are just drug seeking, then i feel that's also a problem. Massive disclaimer that I'm ~still on nsaids, no big bad brain drugs for me until i actually can't walk anymore without it~ but yeah, salt and such the medical industry is massively fucked, water is wet, more news at eleven

 

i got a 10 day supply of oxycodone, a 4 day supply of something else -codone, and was told to take OTC ibuprofen at double dose

i didn't touch the opiods because my grandma had gotten addicted prescription opiods (she had knee surgery, and didn't follow doctor's instructions, and took like 3x what she was supposed to at every dose interval) and OTC ibuprofen hasn't done anything for me since freshman year of high school, so i didn't actually take anything

the anesthesia they gave me just gave me double vision upon waking up (hence "why do you have three eyes?"), but it didn't make me loopy and i guess they didn't give me anything else, because i felt pretty normal otherwise - honestly, the whole experience wasn't all that much different than wearing drunk goggles for PE in high school

edit:

Spoiler: lmao

i got a 10 day supply of oxycodone for my wisdom teeth, but asking for migraine medication for my agonizing migraines got me labelled drug seeking l m a fucking o

 

i think when i got put under for the gastroscopy mostly i was just weirdly floaty and giggly afterwards? the worst part was how dry my mouth was, that made me really unhappy but i got water and a cookie and once it was clear i was coherent and sensible enough for it, coffee, so it could've been a lot worse

 

I remember when I got my wisdom teeth out I woke up from general anesthesia and was like "wow I'm actually not loopy at all" and then they handed me a penguin shaped ice pack which I stared at because "I have been given a penguin :O" XD

I was prescribed Vicodin I think? I think I only used one and it genuinely didn't make me loopy or anything.

Edit: stared not started

 

i once had a moment of actually crying over "why would you drown goldfish?? that's so mean!!! D:"

but that's also. just me. i wasn't drugged in any way - we were on a roadtrip or something and my sister made a joke about drowning goldfish and it just. went totally over my head XD

 

I dunno what the internal experience is like, but Moony's always come up from anesthesia coherent and grumpy as hell instead of Loopy And Hilarious. Which, I mean, the other way is great too--he's so mad that he gets woken up from the first good sleep he's gotten in [insert amount of time here] and he maintains that Maximum Pissed Off expression for like the next two hours.

Can confirm that dramatic waking up scenes in hospitals need to feature more ice chips though, because my god. Also more lingering after effects like nausea or shakes, tbh.

 

I'm always very very cold after coming out of general anaesthesia, and extremely tired, but I don't think I've ever been incoherent. Mostly just like "gimme another one of those heated hospital blankets" in a croaky voice

 

I partially blame this on many authors having no hospital experience and just kinda forgetting to ask.

Spoiler: Completely unnecessary medical history

I was born in a hospital and then didn't enter one again until my twenties for "Yggi's Mystery Disease" (we don't know what was wrong but it went away) and literally the only interesting thing that happened in there was an MRI scan that showed that my sinuses were congested. I coulda told em that. Oh and I took a T3 one night because I didn't realize it was codeine, I thought it was just stronger Tylenol. It was the most boring five days of my life.

My wisdom tooth was removed with jaw freezing and my prescription after was just, like, "take an extra ibuprofen if your face hurts, go home".

Anyway this was a long rambling way to explain that I, a grown adult, have no hospital experience and I'm sure there are others who have also not been.

 

I though this was about me for a second, and my MGLN/40k crossover. Not that 40k has many characters, but people sure were ragging on me, which... well, I don't hate 40k, but it's kind of ridiculous, and no, I don't feel the need to portray the canonically incompetent space nazis as anything other than villains. And yes, 40k has some pretty awesome stuff (sometimes), but like... no, a Barrier Jacket is going to be able to stop a few lasgun shots. Calm down. (I could write paragraphs and paragraphs about the 40k fandom, but... not fanfic, and ugh).

Which brings me to another thing: 'which would win in a fight' is not the same as 'which is more interesting'. Looking at you Star Wars/Trek. (And also 40k, but that goes without saying).

Hmm. Bringing up a random connection... do you know the term 'fantasy heartbreaker?' its a home-grown RPG built by some group of people to 'fix' problems in D&D, which of course will never succeed because D&D is the Juggernaut that Consumes All, but... a common trait a lot of these have is reinventing the wheel. They're trying to do 'new' things, but these are all things that have been done before - in different systems the authors don't know about. Because all they know is D&D.

Perhaps a similar phenomenon is at work - Dumbledore Heartbreakers emerge from relatively inexperienced authors who want to address their problems with Dumbledore, but aren't familiar with the reams of work that have already been done in the field.

I mean, the dude has seven lives, it's not even that difficult to justify.