What are your fan fiction gripes?

I've reached a point where if I see a weird kink it's fine but when I see a weird thing that isn't noticeably eroticized at I get suspicious. Like if I read a lovingly detailed screed about a lady turning into a giantess, sure, whatever floats your boat chum. Then I read a ninja story with an in depth medically accurate autopsy and all I can think is 'what's your angle? Which is the secretly sexy part?? Is it the formaldehyde???'

 

This is kind of hilarious to me because I get excited at a good medical scene or feat of macroengineering in a very similar way to, say, a lengthy smut scene involving my OTP. :D

 

Is that what you call the giantess fetish in the Transformers fandom

 

I didn't even think of that, omg. I was just talking about massive feats of engineering, like megatall skyscrapers or space elevators or whatever, but honestly your idea is 10x better lmfao

also spock are you talking about valve spelunking, because this fandom is the reason I'm never going to be able to see that word without my mind screaming "THAT'S NOT SAFE FOR WORK!!!" at me

 

Oh God, I think we both read the same fic yesterday. Was it the one that was, like... seven full chapters of loving detail, just to find out that the answer was 'yep, she had a heart attack from stress and also there was some drug smuggling, told you so'?

 

Yes! That one! To be fair to the author, I did end up enjoying it, but it was still super weird.

 

This isn't a fanfic, but it's a thing fanfics do and it's awful/hilarious. I found this person quoting from a romance novel:

 

Someone need to cure them of their love of alliteration, it sounds so forced

 

It honestly reads like Amanda McKittrick Ros, doesn't it?

 

I'm going to have to look her work up some. It seems like her poetry might even give dear old William Topaz McGonagall some competition.

 

holy shit

all i can think is that they get paid by the word. ive seen a lot of job postings for romance novels that pay by the word ($0.01 per word usually, and 40% of that gets eaten by taxes and fees in the usa)
but i dont know what happens with the products of those postings, if they get edited or are noticably different from non-job-site books or what

 

Considering I've seen similar things happen in fanfic, where no payment is happening, I don't think that's it. I think some people just think that it's better to use unusual phrasings and odd metaphors for everything because they think just saying what happened would be boring.

 

(For whatever it's worth, the only authors I've read who I know were paid by the word were Dumas and Dickens, and while two famous authors who are accepted members of the Western Literary Canon(TM) is not a representative sample, what they did to pad their word count was load the story up with a ton of little details and tangential digressions. Which makes sense to me- it seems like it'd probably be a lot easier to use more words talking about more things than to try to squeeze as many words as possible out of describing the same thing.)

 

Like, comparison:

"While I was climbing the stairs, a couple of them collapsed." - 11 words.

"Less than twenty-four hours prior, I'd clamored down the corridor, every stair intact. Since then, two members of the timbered community had commited suicide, their splintered remains resting in the grassy knoll below." - 35 words

"As I climbed the stairs, I suddenly heard a warning creaky from the aged plank below my feet. Then, with a sharp crack, it gave way, and only my grip on the wobbly old railing saved me from falling through the hole and being sliced by spikes of broken wood. My knee hit the stair above as I fell, leaving a pink scrape down my bare shin, and I heard another thump as the remains of the stair hit the grass below. I pulled myself carefully to my feet, mindful of the instability of my splintery handhold and wondering how long it had been since these stairs had last seen maintenance. To think I'd gone down them just yesterday- to think B. used them every time they came or went from their home. It was a wonder no one had been hurt. I stepped over the gap, testing the next stair experimentally before putting my foot down. It held. More cautiously now, I resumed climbing, wary for another groan from the gray wood at my feet. This time, when it came, I managed to rock my weight back onto the previous stair before the rusted nails pulled free and this step, too, dropped to the ground below." - 208 words, didn't have to come up with the phrase "members of the timbered community."

 

Alternatively they honestly have a fondness for such things and haven't gotten a hand on how to do it gracefully. People can like odd metaphors and alliteration who ever could have guessed.

it's almost like unskilled writers and different aesthetic tastes exist

 

Oh yeah, I'm sure a lot of people writing weird purple prose are trying to imitate prose they really liked and maybe not quite hitting the mark. Like how The Eye of Argon is pretty obviously someone who read a ton of Robert E. Howard, but didn't have a great handle on language because it was their first story and way overshot the mark.

(I personally suck at writing with metaphor. It's a problem.)

 

i sometimes veer close to or into it when writing characters that talk like that, to try and get at their voice.

 

Metaphors are a fucking bitch to manage, but they're honestly one of my favorite things in writing. Especially in comedy writing. Epithets are another of my favorite often fucked up thing. Sadly those make it into very few well written things that aren't like fantasy novels.

at least i'll always have you tolkien

Hodgell does nice epithets too. That-Which-Destroys just sounds rad.

 

bring back kennings