What are your fan fiction gripes?

If the work revolves around a particular kink or relationship and there’s no especially compelling reason it needs to be surprising for the plot to be effective, I’d consider that information to be more premise than plot. Never in my life have I met a category of media that expects people to decide whether to consume it without knowing the premise. Occasionally there are works where enjoyment might be maximized for a fair portion of people by knowing as little as possible ahead of time, including the premise, but those tend to be relatively rare and generally require some sort of trusted intermediary to introduce them to potential audience members.

 

listen. listen. I understand the fandom is small.
but holy fuck. there's more than 60 character/reader fics, only outstripped by the count for the fandom's major ship
and that's not even taking into account all of the "crossover" fic that's actually "xyz characters from different fandom set in this universe!!" and anthology/mixed bag type fic............

 

Dear bit of me that feels bad when we're interested in self indulgent porn fic,

Please shut the fuck up.

Sincerely,

A woman (man?) trying to enjoy his porn

 

Two more:
"What secret is lurking behind those eyes?": Sex
"Why can't X get them out of their head?": Sex

 

i'm a horrid sucker for that latter one

 

@jacktrash I know exactly what scene you mean. I adore that story. I also think it’s a perfect example of why absolute rules with no nuance don’t work, because that’s definitely a place where the bare tags probably would in fact be catastrophically misleading about what’s actually in the fic. If the notes are actually giving me a different understanding than the tags do/could, that’s useful stuff that will help me make a much more informed decision about whether to read, not an attempt to ensure that I know you’re really serious by reiterating something you already said but with more value judgment.

 

In short, I don’t know if it’s definitely necessary or not in that particular case. That’s probably different from person to person. But it’s in service to providing an accurate depiction of what kind of experience a reader can expect, and dubcon or noncon within the focal relationship is a really different kind of story than if it’s not part of the focal relationship, and attempted dubcon/noncon is a different kind of story than if it were successful.

And yeah, I’m probably not one of the readers who would mind or even notice that I wasn’t warned about that particular scenario. But I don’t remember having any particular feelings about being warned either, so I can only assume that I believed the warning was not out of proportion with the importance of the event in the relevant section, and that I didn’t feel like it spoiled anything overly much. It was a pretty damn important part of that section of the story, so that probably helps. I vividly remember the scene, not the warning. That wouldn’t be true of a warning I felt set expectations out of proportion to the event.

I can definitely imagine the presence (or absence) of a warning being very important for people who do not want to read coercion at all. If I had to choose me or them as the audience to keep in mind while deciding what to warn about and how, I’d pick them. There’s no contest.

The whole discussion increasingly makes me think of Lindsay Ellis and Folding Ideas talking about how the visual components such as framing in a film will always trump every other element, such as the script, so if there is disagreement between what they’re saying, the visual element will win. (I think Lindsay covered this in her video about how Megan Fox was framed in the Bay Transformers movies, and Folding Ideas covered it most thoroughly in his video about Rent, though I believe Megan Fox also came up in his ludonarrative dissonance video as an example of something one could call cinemanarrative dissonance.) I don’t think this is a case of warnings in author’s notes or summaries at the top of a page being bad. I think it’s far more about the traditional use of that space, to set the scene, impart some vital information about the setting, and hook the audience, and maybe to speak to specific people the author wants to thank regarding their contributions to the story, or to speak to the audience to create a sense of personal engagement. This is what the author has to say about the story to readers directly before they read. I don’t know that it overpowers the story, but if it’s at odds with the story, that’s a very powerful point of dissonance. This is where you get to frame how people approach the story.

“This is extremely naughty, teehee!” doesn’t tend to be at odds with the story. “Heads up, a thing is about to happen,” followed by a major event fitting that description is not at odds with the story unless maybe the story was relying on surprise to create the effect it wanted. The ones that tend to grind my gears are more like, “This story contains a lot of heavy, disturbing topics including [a list of things that resembles a mixed bag of kinks and plot points from a CW tv show as described by someone who is possibly clutching pearls and thinking of the children, or believes the audience is], please read with caution and take care of yourself first!” and then it’s a porny melodrama. The intro is framing it in a way that is very much not conducive to porn or melodrama.

I’m not sure that people necessarily realize that the reading experience has already started when the audience is looking at the summary and intro notes. Or that the intro is capable of creating dissonance. But it is. This is the frame through which you’re asking people to approach the story. “Take care of yourself” warnings are explicitly requesting that people approach the story as a possible mental health threat, even if that’s not what the author actually wanted. I think even a slight change in wording, to use more neutral wording or acknowledge readers who actually enjoy the content under discussion so that you’re not alienating your target audience in favor of people who won’t like your content before the story even starts, can probably make a world of difference.

ETA: I should probably not have started a post this long with “in short” but here we are.

 

a gripe about a specific pairing, but which probably applies to others as well:

WHY do Vimes/Vetinari writers have such a hard time with the canonical existence of Sybil. yes, Vimes is married and loves his wife very much-- but open/poly marriages exist, and they're not any less loving, y'all! why do so many writers seem to think they have to kill off Sybil to write Vimes/Vetinari?? what is so hard about "Sybil knows, and she is super into it"???

i posted this in a different thread a while back, talking about the different ways fic writers handle the canonical happy marriage... lately it seems "Sybil died tragically" is taking over from "secretly our marriage is terrible", but they're both bad options imo.

 

there are still only 40 fics in the "Sybil Ramkin/Havelock Vetinari/Samuel Vimes" tag on ao3, alas, compared to over 250 in "Havelock Vetinari/Samuel Vimes." i wish more people would get on board with the ot3 because that's the ideal solution tbh.

or maybe i'm just saying that because it's my oldest and most favorite ot3... really i don't mind if people want to keep it to V/V, just as long as they stop doing a Sybil a dirty like that.

 

Just because I like to overexplain myself, I probably phrased a lot of things as hard absolutes because they’re new thoughts that I’m considering and haven’t yet had cause to refine or maybe even totally discard. I don’t think anyone should feel bad if their content warnings don’t conform to my personal preferences. I don’t actually read content warnings as a condemnation of me personally. Even if it makes me go ??? I’ll probably get over it pretty quick if the fic is up my alley. I don’t think a lot of stuff on the internet is actually about me. I stand by my thoughts, I just very much don’t need other people to change their creative expression according to what I think.

I’m pretty sure there’s reasons people do like they do, which I intentionally completely ignored because it wasn’t really part of the point I was making at the time. I suspect not every writer is completely 100% comfortable with every topic their writing covers, and totally confident that their audience has the same tastes they do or even good intentions.

I just recently saw with my own eyes someone opine that AO3 needs better moderation because there is explicit content about underage characters in the archive, and thought that choosing not to warn was a bad thing because it didn’t have warnings??? I’m assuming they completely don’t know about strikethrough. If I wrote something that meant something to me but might get that kind of attention and believed I could ward off some of it with a really thorough content warning, I might just go ahead and do it and pray that the true believers would stick with me.

 

That's charitable of you. I've yet to find an idea so bad that no one will want to try it again, and in particular I would expect any modern antis who knew about strikethrough to approve, or at least say "maybe they could have executed it better, but..."

 

Oh, I've absolutely seen them say that. One of the big "LEARN YOUR HISTORY" posts that keeps getting circulated on Tumblr started with some anti posting about how they just found out AO3 was founded to PROTECT PEDOPHILIA!!!

 

so, only tangentially related, but i binge read this yesterday and holy shit???

also the warning was p chill

 

whenever someone's washing blood off in the shower, no matter how old or dried or whatever, everybody writes that the water goes pink

maybe ive just been bleeding into the wrong water but like. unless a wound is gushing blood into a relatively small amount of water im pretty sure blood makes water go like. orangey??? like im not a Bloodologist™ but i have had a lot of nosebleeds in the shower

it's such a little thing but it's everywhere. pink water

 

I originally rated that as agree but had to change it because the wording is so excellent.

 

yeah, red blood cells are red, but blood plasma is yellow, so diluting blood results in an orange colour from the red blood cells no longer entirely masking the yellow pigment of the plasma!

 

Bloodologist is just a v good word I want to say

 

clearly these writers are playing too much Danganronpa

Spoiler: explaining the joke

in DR, all blood is bright pink