That fic sounds glorious. I’m somehow not related to any traumatized Vietnam vets. I think my dad had to register for the draft but ended up being lucky. Maybe that generation in my family was mostly slightly too young. I do know a lot of young traumatized veterans. I’ve never seen one lose their shit at a loud bang. They lose their shit privately, when we’re alone, because I understand enough about mental illness and brain injury that I can listen. I get what it’s like to not be able to tell or communicate about something being wrong, specifically when it’s going wrong. I know what it’s like when your loved ones are baffled about why you can do this thing but not that other thing, and they’re angry even though they’re trying not to be because they don’t understand, and honestly neither do you. But I’m removed enough that I’m not gonna get triggered by their trauma because I’ve never been to war. They would never let themselves become that vulnerable and off balance if they didn’t feel relatively physically safe. (Unless they were very drunk or something.) I knew one Vietnam veteran, a teacher, who had one obvious dramatic flashback in class that I know of, prompted by nothing the students seemed to be aware of. I could be completely wrong but it seems like people are more likely to go hyperalert and maybe dissociate with an external trigger than make dramatic emotional gestures or big, ill-considered movements, because they’re trying not to die. Freezing while you assess the situation usually happens before fight or flight.
I want to do a fusion fic but I feel I have to change the ending of the story the fic is based on. The ending the original has doesn't really quite fit with the characters I want to use, and using it in perfect lockstep feels like a violation of the Unspoken Plan Guarantee.
without knowing any specifics, i don't see why that would be a problem? fanfic is where you can do things like that.
I assume Chel means it feels wrong as a writer to do it that way. That's happened to me before, where there's an obvious, easy way to make it go but I don't want to use it because it feels like I'm taking an easy way out instead of figuring out what ought to happen, and if I try to use it anyway it makes the whole thing feel unsatisfying and off.
oh yeah, i know that trouble. what i generally do is write it anyway, but when i get to the easy ending i usually get a "oh but what if???" moment that lets me veer off. i think putting in effort avoiding the Obvious Thing makes it take up too much headspace or something.
What I mean is, it feels weird from the writer's perspective to do it, and also I now have to actually come up with the different ending, which is tricky.
The specifics are I'm doing Drop-Out-stuck. Sugar and Lola reminded me strongly of Karkat and Gamzee, but they're obviously not identical and I've got differences in the setup and backstory, and also I don't want to spoil the ending of the original Drop-Out for unfamiliar readers.
I mean just do what feels right for the characters Like having read drop out, its a talky soul searchy car trip story, with the overlooming thing of death etc Like maybe it'll take some getting familiar with your version of Karkat and Gamzee, to like feel out what the ending shall be
I used to be able to turn off the Writer Critic part of my brain pretty easily but now I end up catching myself focusing in on small errors or differences in style that I didn't notice before and let me tell you, when you normally dig into mediocre fic with glee, it's hell to have Writer Critic going "BUT--" in the back of your head.
as someone who has never not been able to not notice mediocre writing (well, after i got past about sixteen or so) all I can really say is: welcome to hell, welcome to hell
INCONSISTENT. LINE BREAKS. I can handle no line breaks, though I'm :/ about it. I can handle doubled or quadrupled line breaks, because sometimes formatting fucks up like that. I can't handle it when a fic wants to be like, "Character A talks." "Then character B." "Now character C is down here!" "Back to character A." "Character C is responding! Oh boy!" "WHY IS CHARACTER B TALKING DOWN HERE NOW WHAT THE HELL HAVE YOU DONE TO THE FORMATTING." If it were intentional? If it were indicating some kind of time shift, or tension in the scene or, or, whatever? Sure, fine, I hate it, but fine. But these are three people sitting around a table talking. Not even about anything important. Dialogue isn't the only area that the line breaks are all screwy. Why. Why is this.
It weirds me out when the viewpoint jumps around I dont really like it when we're getting character A's viewpoint and internal monologue and then suddenly we have insight about what character B thinks about A, within the same scene woth nothing to indicate the narrator changed
sometimes you can tell it's just a reformatted RP, and like... thing one, credit your co-writer, and thing two, if you don't care enough to do a rewrite and fix the POVs, just post it as an RP. there's nothing wrong with that.
There is a difference between voter registration and actual voting. Going to the polls is voting, not registering. To be fair, the author was from somewhere around Australia. Maybe things are different there?
This is half a gripe and half a cry of victory. When you see a fic and the tags are exactly up your alley but it’s in Spanish or Chinese or Russian and it’s not a translation of an English-language fic. Sad because awwww I wanted to read. Victory because if I want to find books in other languages at the library, I have a choice between all two of our Spanish novels (only a slight exaggeration) or I have to visit the Harold Washington where I may get a couple shelves of everything in or about a language, fiction and nonfiction, on like floor seven. If I wanted to learn Spanish and read some stories for practice, I’d probably do better on AO3 than at the library.
I have for you... two whines. One about my fic being read and one about other people's fic, both mildly nsfw. Spoiler: my fic Some people here know I have a WAUGH PANIC reaction to receiving private messages, which is 1) dumb, and 2) my problem, not other people's problem. I'm also awful with strangers. And Discord is also a platform perfectly constructed to send my anxiety through the roof. So I just got out of the movies, was in a happy post-movie haze, and got jarred out of all that by a private discord message from a complete stranger telling me I'd done something Wrong. Ugh, this needs backstory. Transformers porn takes many shapes, and only one (valveplug/sticky/whatever) involves genitals. There's also wireplay, which is physical but distributed, sex-as-data-transfer, and spark merging. Mix and match at your pleasure. Those last three are sometimes-but-not-always tagged as nsfw. Valveplug is probably the most commom flavor these days, because it's straightforward to draw and write, and is a flavor where it's easy to apply your existing non-robot porn skills. I write lots of valveplug. I tag it as explicit and nsfw. Now, the commenter was unhappy, because my fic was tagged with 'plug and play'... and not tagged with 'sticky' (it's both) (is there even a canonical ao3 tag for that? I guess there might be, but also, i hate that as an adjective to describe sex). They use the tags to decide whether to read stories, weren't expecting sex-sex, and were badly shocked. Now, I felt REAL bad, because my fic was tagged explicit, but some authors do call pnp explicit too, do that's not as clear as it could be, plus I tagged that fix when I was half asleep, PLUS on my last fic I initially forgot to tag self-harm, so fuuuuuck, I fucked up again-- No. I didn't. Because after a few back and forths I went to check my fic. And I'd tagged it with 'explicit sexual content' and 'facesitting.' And one miiiiiiight be able to argue that explicit sexual content COULD include plug and play, but I'm not sure how facesitting would work with plug and play unless you're connecting your mouth to someone else's crotch. And after I mentioned those tags were there and my standard system IS 'explicit sexual content' + one or two main sex acts', which is a system I can keep consistent across fandoms, they dropped the subject. So I'm pretty sure that even though they 'use tags to decide whether to read' they only read the plug and play tag and missed the rest. Except now I still feel rattled and guilty, even though I know I don't NEED to, and I'm sympathetic they ran into upsetting content by accident, but annoyed, but sympathetic, but FRUSTRATED. Also secondhand embarrassment. And I got jolted out of my happy movie haze for nothing, ughhh. Spoiler: someone else's fic Bleh, all of this comes down to one person's writing preferences, so I feel bad complaining about it, BUT. If you want to, like... make something distasteful. Whether it's a person or it's a sex act or whatever. I've seen this author use a delicate touch in other ways, so it's really uncomfortable getting it mashed in my face that look, this character is an asshole! Look at him being terrible for no reason! Look at him being gratuitously awful without pause in all sorts of unnecessary ways. And some of this is flavored by later canon developments. If 'my beloved ratchet' is now canon, it's just... uncomfortable reading that 'ratchet was only any good bent over a table and forced to acknowledge me as the superior doctor'. It was LESS uncomfortable before "my beloved ratchet", but it was still so... gratuitous even before that, taking the jump from an unpleasant and nasty character into a cartoony caricature. But it's not just later developments making things awkward, because they work backwards from canon too, in ways that just... it's unnecessary little digs that leave me like yes okay thanks yes yes I'VE GOT IT THANKS. We learn that this one perfectly nice guy from, the past grew up to be a sadistic asshole? Cool, I'm on board, love that before and after contrast. I'm NOT on board with the next chapter in a wip about this guy having the pov character (unaware of the connection) making an internal aside about 'yeah, remember my friend? he sure used to smell weird'. I've been trying to avoid using this word, because fictional characters aren't real people, and arguing that authors have to treat them as such has gotten real old. But it feels like bullying. It feels like setting up a person in a believable low point and then just... continuing to take cheap shots at them at every possible opportunity. And not in-universe either, it's all about the audience reading the fic. It doesn't advance story and it rarely does much new for character, it just feels like a point and laugh moment that the author is trying to share with me. It's frustrating, because a lot of times I'm on board with the author's ideas and stories, but then there are consistently those little moments where I get more and more uneasy until I'm want to tell them to let it BE already. Wow, that was a tangent. My original whine, the one that spurred me into this thread, was about oral sex. Nobody is under any obligation to be maximum sex-positive all the time always, in or out of character, but again, it eventually starts to get real uncomfortable when characters consistently obsess over how DEGRADING oral is, and how yes, you want to subjugate this person and put them in their place, or nooo, you could never ask your darling partner to do THAT for you! I'm so INCREDIBLY on board with exploring all the flavors of power dynamics I can get my grubby little paws on, and oral is fun and exciting territory for those explorations. But it gets weird when different characters receiving oral consistently start obsessing over what a dirty unclean act it is, and look at the humiliating way this person is SERVING them, and like... it's. It's just oral, guys. /whine
So like. Are you supposd to keep your lube in th fridge and nobody told me? Because in fanfic they’re always talking about how cold it is and I haven’t had this experience.
