Today in decent fics that would have been better without epithets, one character is repeatedly referred to as "the brunette" and "the teen" in a scene where half the characters are brunette, and all of them are teenagers. That got confusing.
Oh man, I'm pretty sure I loved that story to pieces. If it's the one I'm thinking of, even the minor OC characters made me happy.
My general response to a comment like: "!!!!" would be: "????" I have occasionally gotten responses that were actual words.
Okay so I have a minor beef with certain kinds of dark fic because of a thing that is seldom addressed. Spoiler: discussion of suicide The victim in the fic almost never takes what would be the most logical step in a horrific situation they're not going to escape from: suicide. They also almost never make a conscious decision NOT to commit suicide. Nor do they really have suicidal ideation from what I've seen. This is annoying to me. Also annoying is the abuser not even taking steps to make suicide difficult. It just doesn't make sense to me, and I know it's supposed to be "whump" or whatever, but really, if you're going to go dark, go dark, man.
There is a particular fic I am peeved about. Spoiler: eunuchs It's actually an Allura fic, but has Keith having been raised Galra. For some inexplicable reason, he's been castrated because he's not pure Galra. Only I'm not sure the writer knows how castration works because while he's functionally a eunuch, it wasn't his testes that were cut off, it was his "knot." I'm not sure if I'm more annoyed at Keith being a eunuch or that the writer doesn't know what to cut off. (I would be less annoyed about Keith being a eunuch if I thought the writer had any knowledge of the historical position of eunuchs in societies that had them.)
Okay, this is dumb and super petty and probably sour grapes to at least some degree, but...when most of the fanfic recs you see for your main fandom on TVTropes and Tumblr and such are genuinely not that great. And meanwhile, your fic is Apparently Pretty Damn Good but has yet to be publicly recced anywhere. Like, I know this is me being dumb and bitter, but if a fanfic where Steven is somehow both part-Quartz and part-Diamond is heavily recommended over mine, I'm gonna be fucking bitter. #doesn't help that i used to be friends with the author and she's a bitch #and her characterization was never very good in the homestuck fandom so i don't trust her su characterization either
And another fic I'm peeved about: Okay so it's a situation where Shiro is given to Keith to be his body guard. To ensure Shiro's loyalty a spell is cast so Shiro feels anxious and protective of Keith. Shiro does not actually get a chance to be a bodyguard and is not given weapons to be a bodyguard because apparently "bodyguard" is a euphemism for "anyone can walk up to Shiro and get handsy and there's nothing he can do about it, like say, the job he was allegedly assigned." This is exasperating. Then it turns out Shiro was actually given to Keith so Keith could be his handler, because Zarkon wants Shiro to pilot the red Lion and so on. I am not sure why Zarkon didn't indicate this from the beginning.
I feel like I can say this because I've been recced on TV Tropes and take stupid joy in it, but TV Tropes recs are mostly reflective of the tastes of the people who actually bother to post fic recs, especially now. For some fandoms, you can find good recs, but a lot of them seem to be older fandoms that predate the major forum dramas that chased a bunch of people off. And even then, only some of them are good. I've seen recs on there for awesome fic but also, I'm pretty sure at least some of those recs were people reccing their friends' fics. Good fic recs are hard to find for some fandoms and it's frustrating.
It's so damn hard to find truly good SU fic recs. I mostly function by just browsing the AO3 tags and clicking things that look maybe good, because a lot of the fic recs lists aren't that good overall. (I will admit to reccing my bestie's Gravity Falls fic on TVTropes, but I did that because it was genuinely really fucking good.) Another pet peeve: when some of the most popular fics in a fandom, like the ones EVERYONE talks about, are just...not actually very good? Even in fandoms with a lot of really excellent fics? I'm looking at you, Homestuck fandom. >:/ ...Not that there aren't some really good AND really popular Homestuck fics, but a lot of the uber-popular longfics were not great. (And before you ask, yes, I have a specific fic in mind when I'm saying this.) Edit: For those of you who might be going "shit, is she talking about me?" because brain goblins, I can reassure you that the fic wasn't written by anyone here.
i STILL haven't found decent Young Justice fic, it's all pretty mediocre. mostly meh quality shipfic, WAY too many that try and fail to fuse it with the larger DC conglomeracanon.
Aw man, I know that fucking feel. The "hey everybody loves it but it ain't all that great" feel. I guess some times fandoms just really want specific tropes and are willing to consume whatever comes round that features them. I'm thinking of a couple fics that had interesting little tidbits of worldbuilding and characterization that ended up being hampered by unfocused writing and a trend of not thinking about how all these cool desperate elements would actually work together, where I can see entirely why they're so popular despite what I'd consider deal breaking flaws. one of them involved immortal witches who were death's chosen people who can only die when Death personally deigns to take them, and the implications of that were so fucking interesting and entirely unconsidered by the author. Also in that fic; a ban on shapeshifters that involved actually hunting down and killing them with the excuse that motherfucking shapeshifters are the kind of dangerous that'd prompt a war between norms and unnorms, like fucking hell that's such utter bullshit and also what happened to witches not being able to die unless Death wills it????
Yeah. I dunno, I just...I had this period where I got really into X-Men, and not, like, just the new movies, I went for comics fics too and ended up on old fansites that were just curated single character specific reclists, with descriptions and ratings for all 30+ fics. I wanted one like that for all my favorite characters. If it's not too off topic, honestly, there's a gripe--I would love to see character-specific reclists more, because I go on binges related to single characters a lot. None of this OTP nonsense, I just want to read fic about that one specific character, regardless of who they're kissing, or preferably kissing no one at all (still like gen best). Slightly more relevant if minor gripe--I've been reading a fic for some time now, and it's rated pretty high, presumably for gore/body horror, but quite frankly I've read worse. I keep wondering if this is gonna suddenly turn into something actually terrible, or if the person just really thinks that what they've got so far deserves the rating. I really wish sometimes that authors would be more consistent about saying in the notes whether they're warning for a current chapter or something in the future. Helps me know if I'm gonna want to nope out at some point.
Seconded! Especially in fandoms with oodles and oodles of characters like Homestuck and Transformers - I'm sure there must be at least some character-specific rec lists out there, but none seem to pop up in the fandom places I frequent. Searching by character and hit count on AO3 is the closest I get but again - just because a fic has a ton of hits doesn't necessarily mean it's GOOD
...I would happily make those for some of my fave characters tbh, although a lot of my favorite Pearl fics are pretty Dead Dove...
