Me, like a fool, in a large, public Discord server: I love my OTP so much, I can't get enough of it, I'm always looking for more content! Monkey's paw: *curls a finger in* Person in same server, in front of god and everybody: Oh, here is a fic I wrote with your OTP featuring really terribly written, poorly understood kink, and one the worst descriptions of physical sex acts you've ever read! Me, now eating my hubris: Great. Thanks. That's.... that's lovely.
You can DM me but I'm not going to post it publicly. The writer really is proud of it and I don't want to deflate their sails but. It really is just. Bad. Bad porn.
YOI Badfic Friend found a Rurouni Kenshin fic where Kenshin's use of a weird, archaic Japanese speech style was rendered by... literally substituting sessha for the word "I," with third-person verb conjugations. The general effect is probably best summed up "We've secretly replaced Kenshin with Dobby! Let's see if Kaoru notices!"
have i already complained in this thread about adult characters who, in canon, have their shit together emotionally, being written like neurotic teenagers who've never dated? because it's my enduring hate and i still keep seeing it. latest culprit: leverage fic where eliot and hardison keep interpreting each other's ooc awkward avoidance behaviors as "he can't even stand to be near me" and the whole team is getting distracted by this in the middle of a case. to make it worse, the author spends five times as many words on this neurotic waffling as they do on the rest of the fic. each chapter is like, half an hour of time passes, there's one page of actual happenings, and the whole rest is these thirtysomething men, who are internationally wanted criminals and the best in their field, brooding and sulking and fussing through an internal monologue that i wouldn't have let myself get away with when i was 15. i really wanted to find out what happened re the case, but i finally just couldn't wade through any more of it and gave up. so i still don't know why the mossad agent had eliot kidnapped or who was in the photos they left with him in the basement. and i will never know. upside, it was probably dumb because the author clearly didn't care about that, only about ~e~mo~tions~ that these characters should've outgrown ten years ago. such as crippling uncertainty whether someone making out with you means they want to make out with you some more later.
On the one hand, it definitely wouldn't be the first time the team's gotten distracted during a heist. On the other hand, Eliot and Hardison aren't the ones who are most likely to be pulling those kinds of shenanigans unless it's part of the actual caper.
Conclusion to my previous gripe, I checked the Wayback Machine and alas, the fic was not archived, and I felt way too awkward to message the author and ask them to reupload something they weren't happy with for my personal amusement. However! It turns out that 'biweekly updates' in this case means 'twice a week' instead of 'every other week' so it's already on chapter five and I'll just Deal With It™.
And if they did, it wouldn't be shy teenage avoidance, it would be belligerent macho posturing to mask the annoyance/embarrassment of experiencing A Feeling about that guy.
i think eliot expresses feelings through food, and hardison expresses them through clowning and weird gifts. i would absolutely read 100k words of slow burn where eliot keeps cooking gourmet versions of junk food for hardison and hardison keeps buying eliot increasingly hard-to-find kitchen supplies and ingredients, and they somehow delude themselves that this is some kind of competition or prank war, while the whole rest of the team is perfectly aware it's a courtship. that would work for me. although i'd still nope out if there was more internal monologue than story. that gets old so very fast.
I don't even go here but I want to see this resulting in like...an entire hydroponic system to grow saffron
you can't grow saffron hydroponically, it needs a cold hibernation period in dry soil, you'd have to have a freezer with a one month timer and then -- hardison, are you listening? *hardison typing notes excitedly* yeah, go on, then what?
the next morning workmen arrive to install a walk-in freezer in the brewpub with a conveyor belt system and grow lights, and burpee's overnights a gross of crocus bulbs. eliot's making his Furious Disbelief face. he already has a source for premium kashmiri saffron. somebody owed him a favor. even if he bought it at full markup there's no way it'd be as expensive as this. what is hardison even thinking?? parker: "nobody tell him. this is great."
Spoiler: not really nsfw but just to be safe Bad author! no! You were doing so well up to this point, but staccato has no place in makeout noises!
