i like it in fandoms that are predominantly white/"unstated" - i guess the best example would be harry potter, for where this is useful to me, since the majority of the characters are considered to be white.... which i don't like, esp for characters like hermoine, so getting the "character of color" or "characters of color" or "[race]![character]" tags lets me know it's a fanfic i'll be more interested in trying it was also pretty useful in homestuck for a while, before nonwhite headcanons got way more popular for the beta kids, but it sorta has looped back around to uselessness and self-congratulatory nonsense (i realize races are like, deliberately never said, and everyone's headcanons are fine, yadda yadda, but i always thought hermoine was black, and learning that the series was "supposed to be" about race tensions just made me very sure that she was, and i just.... really don't like fics where she's white. so the tag is useful for me there)
I assume, depending on the tags associated, that it's for fandom-blind people too. I sometimes pick a freeform tag and read anything that catches my eye in it, and I'd imagine at least some people do that with the "character of color" tag. If nothing else, at least it gives them new media to check out when they realize that hey, Hardison's a great character and the rest of the cast is a delight, hopefully?
I could also see it being used similarly to the “LGBTQ themes” tag, if race is a big theme in the fic?
that's what i originally thought it was, but none of the fics i've read that had it used race as a major theme. i keep seeing it in fandoms where the protagonist or one of the most important characters is black, so that a fic in that fandom without that character is difficult or impossible. like the example i gave of leverage -- a leverage fic without hardison is hard to do. and i was searching the ot3's tag. so like. a parker/eliot/hardison fic is going to have a character of color in it every single time, guys, why do you need to tag that. one of my guesses would be that nonwhite readers might avoid the 'character of color' tag because it indicates white writers trying too hard and that's exhausting, the same way i tend to avoid the 'trans male character' tag and, on some days when i'm Just Real Tired Of Stuff, the 'disabled character' tag even in fandoms where the disability is canon. because it so often means an abled writer trying to Be Sensitive about bucky barnes's fucking arm.
witnessed. emma watson is a brilliant actress and a fine person, but in my mind hermione looks more like tessa thompson.
Huh, that's in interesting perspective. The canons I most often end up rolling around in don't have canonical disabilities (explore or otherwise) so for me, the Disabled Character tag is actually pretty useful--I often find fics written by other spoonies that way, and I tagged my own self-indulgent character-with-EDS fic that way. (Then again, I'm also routinely in fandoms several orders of magnitude smaller than the MCU, so that probably affects things too.)
A comment from Dreamwidth which put into words things about difficulties adjusting to origfic (specifically about the many chapters in 50 Shades in which nothing actually happens, applicable to other contexts):
i think it's just important for writers to recognize it's a different medium. just like i wish some 'literary' writers would realize that fiction isn't prose poetry and shouldn't try to be. :P
I mean, not to pick on romance in particular, but there doesn’t seem to be any call to stop glutting the market with really specific romance tropes in professional fiction any more than fanfic. You could also say that there’s no call to stop putting overly detailed technical passages in scifi, and I’d cheer because I love that. I think bad pacing is bad pacing no matter who’s doing it, and if professional fiction didn’t enjoy beating a horse of questionable liveliness just as much as anyone, we could probably lay off the Tolkien and Norse mythology by now. But we will not.
yeah i feel that 'bad writerly habits' here depends entirely on..what you're writing... like, writing a specific kink? is genuinely a thing that people make money off published fic off. writing for a specific audience is not a 'bad writerly habit', it's knowing your audience and catering to them. That's like complaining that a chocolatier has 'bad cooking habits' for only working with chocolate. like no, that's their job that they earn their actual money with.
Yeah, unless the chef attempts to treat other types of dishes as if they’re chocolate without entirely realizing that they’re doing it, that’s not a habit at all. It’s just a technique.
*checks what we're actually talking about* Fifty Shades being full of pointless filler has nothing to do with fanfiction encouraging bad habits, it's a potential failure state of any quickly-serialized storytelling medium. E.L. James is a marketer, and she sold Masters of the Universe to the fandom by releasing new chapters like clockwork so it was always at the top of the recent search results. But she's not a particularly good writer and was seat-of-the-pantsing the plot, so a lot of the time the update was just random events she dashed out to have an update, because ever slipping would reduce her fic's permanent visibility. It's the same reason you get Shonen Jump manga with 900-page fight scenes: Tite Kubo needed to hand over another chapter of Bleach every week, didn't have any good ideas and didn't have any time to come up with good ideas, so he drew 14 pages with no backgrounds in which two blows are exchanged and the characters monologue about whose dick spiritual power was bigger and then went off to cry into the pile of fashion magazines he'd rather be drawing fanart of. E.L. James then also happened to be a controlling egomaniac who didn't want editors or film adaptation crews touching the incoherent series of events she threw together in a row to keep her fic up high in the leaderboards.
yeah i was just gonna say... fanfic doesn't encourage filler chapters, serial media encourages filler chapters. i exclusively write short form fanfic (and fiction in general... i just don't have the focus for anything longform), short stories that have a beginning middle and end and which i only post after probably way too many editing passes. no need for filler.
I cannot for the life of me read Charles Dickens. Part of that is his stories are pretty depressing, but a big point is how much you can tell the man was paid by the word.
such advice would remove tom bombadil and i will stand by him being one of the best parts of that fucking book
It honestly reminds me of realizing that people who don’t spend every waking hour listening to electronic music may not realize that the repetition in techno isn’t a mistake or a lack of creativity, it’s the basis of the entire structure of a song. The song often evolves slowly over the course of the repetition. You can’t do the big exciting thing until you’ve given the listener enough material for a really solid memory, because the excitement is probably going to depend heavily on how the new thing contrasts and aligns with what people are hearing in their heads. Elements that would be extraneous or even an annoying lazy detriment to the work in one genre may be load bearing elements in another.
It's why if you take my repetitious dunad shit and apply it outright to the paragraph structure of a novel you'll probably end up grating on someone. You can use dunad structure just fine on a wider scale in a novel though and in fact it does tend to happen quite a bit. Bookending is very common. Poems, prose poems, and shorter works of fiction can get away with tighter and smaller circles than some other mediums can though. And even with poems if you're going for a longer work you ideally need to be stringing your dunads together in such a way as to not fatigue the reader. It's why the Lay of Leithien reads poorly. It's a lovely story, yes, and some of the language is nice, yes, but the rhyming couplets begin to grate after like a good twenty or thirty pages. It really depends on what you're working in and to what effect. Take the dunad out of the rosc poems though and you're left with boring empty shells full of meaningless phrases that are guided by nothing. Their power is in how circular they are. The circles guide the content and enclose it. They offer it purpose and meaning and help the listener piece together the mandala the poet has painted. Granted, you can also be an obtuse ass of a writer and that's fine too. It might not to be everyone's tastes but Finnegan's Wake isn't highly regarded for nothing. But many also think it's trash. So I think there is a degree of subjectivity in regards to 'what is proper for a medium or genre'.
*dingdingdingdingding!* we have a winner! not being sarcastic. that was really well said. i assumed what was meant about Too Many Words was the thing where writers will do "she went to the fridge. she opened the fridge. she perused the contents, considering the orange juice before selecting an egg. she closed the fridge and went to the table. she sat in the chair --" and so on for a thousand words before the doorbell rings and more plot happens. imo that's not a fanfic thing specifically, it's a first draft thing. it's just that fanfic is a medium where people usually post their first draft with minimal editing. and a beta reader isn't an editor; they're catching typos and maybe continuity errors, but they're generally not trying to improve your writing as a whole. they're not going to call out a long boring passage and say "cut this entire thing and skip to the doorbell" unless they've been your best friend for six years and held your hair while you threw up. edit: that wasn't intended as a dig at whoever it was that feels strongly about beta reader and editor being the same. can't remember who that was but i'm not trying to step on your toes. i'm focused on the lack of Full Service Editing rather than on the terminology.
There is definitely some of that going on too. I suppose I think that unless you are a professional level editor, it may not always be as obvious as it sounds which cuts are good and which might actually destroy the tension and mood of the story. Uuuuusually not the fridge scene I’d imagine, but I guess you never know?
I'm the prickly bitch in question and it honestly might be because if I am sharing my work with people beforehand it's not to get like typo corrections and shit alone. I want actual editing. That is the reason I send things to people early. Editing. It's also how I tend to respond to things that I am given to look at early. I'm not just going to correct typos unless you tell me you just want a human spellcheck.
