I would love Davekat with kids. I want Rosemary with Kids. I want Terezi to be the crazy aunt, even to her own kids. Babies 5ever! (Ironically, I have no intention of ever becoming a parent.)
kidfic is like. 95% cringey saccharine garbage but when someone manages to write it well, it's glorious. because kids are great! they're hilarious little jerks with zero self-awareness, and yeah they can be cute but like..... when people write these angelic plot devices that exist only to say precious things and/or play matchmaker for their Conveniently Single (Foster/Adopted/Step)Dad, or Super Advanced Genius Kids who talk like they swallowed a thesauras (which would be fine and hilarious if the writer weren't obviously intending for the reader to take them seriously), i have to wonder if the writer has ever actually interacted with a child?? but oh man when kidfic is good, it's magical
TW for spoilered bits: this is a continuation (and actually I hope an ending) to an old series of posts about rapey stuff in fics. I would agree that that's the way it is now, but people get upset whether they're supposed to or not, which is why I still think we really do need better and more specific warnings and tags than just "rape". Sorry to resurrect this now, but I had to take a break from the thread, and I wanted to thank you for posting a reply.
Bad kidfic is the worst. So bad, I had to emerge from the lurking cave. While I'm up here, I've obessed with the Raven Cycle for a couple months now, and I've read a lot of saucy Adam/Ronan fanfic, and almost none of the post-Raven King stuff has any idea what to do with Spoiler: spoilers for The Raven King re: Orphan Girl Opal. There's always a throwaway line about her being with the physics or Declan, almost always phrased the exact same way, before they get to the sex. Or Ronan visits Adam and leaves her at the Barns, which bothers me more, especially when he spends the night and leaves her all alone. I think that's OOC. Really, I guess my gripe is that so many fics go through the same contortion to not have Opal under the same roof as sex. Wait... :O I literally just realized that maybe this is an extension of the 'children cannot be exposed to sex in any way' thing. My childhood bedroom was next to my parent's, maybe that's why I find it so weird. The Barns is huge, and probably has good soundproofing, they really don't need to worry. Plus, yaknow, Opal's not really a kid, she's a half-goat dream construct that's lived in Ronan's head since he was a child, I'm pretty sure some muffled sex noises won't mentally scar her any more than the night horrors. My biggest Raven Cycle gripe is also kinda related! *deep breath* Why are so many people writing Matthew as a child. Sometimes literally as a child, sometimes just having him act like a kid and not specifically mentioning how old he is. It drives me up the wall. Yes, Mathew is the youngest and his brothers are very protective of him. But he is in high school, and he is popular. No matter how sweet and cherubic, I think saying a high schooler who acted like he was seven would not be popular is an understatement. Spoiler: spoilers for Blue Lily, Lily Blue re: Matthew Plus, if they're keeping Ronan's dream abilities, which the fic that broke me does, like, does Ronan remember dreaming Matthew now? That's a pretty big difference, that I think would change their relationship. Did he not dream Matthew and they just decided to change this one detail for some reason? Why
kind of obscure, but i am extremely cranky to have read two calvin and hobbes fics in a row that diagnose calvin with adhd (same hat!) but then go on to act like a ritalin prescription is a bad thing. i'm super fucking tired of the narrative that ritalin exists specifically to hobble creative geniuses down to the level of normies. like, oh, your parents can't HANDLE how WILD and UNIMAGINATIVE you are so you're getting ZOMBIE PILLS to slow you down and force you to act normal. in one fic he stops taking the pills as soon as he leaves his parents and goes to college, because now he's free to be himself authentically, hooray! but like. yeah, a bad medication can suck. but a good medication helps you realize your potential because it gets your brain to stop sabotaging itself. if calvin was put on adhd meds that worked, he wouldn't stop being such a weird and funny and brilliant kid, he'd just stop finding school so incredibly painful to sit through. because the calvin and hobbes comic makes that completely clear: school is unbearably difficult for him. he constantly loses focus while the teacher's talking, so he gets yelled at and does badly on tests, and he's really resentful about it. and his social skills are also crap, because he can't connect with most kids, because he can't pay attention to anything anyone's doing long enough to understand or care. if i were his parent, i'd absolutely get him medicated. if i were him— and frankly i kind of am— i'd get medicated. and it would be a good thing.
Ugh i remember this one comic where Calvin takes Adderall or something and Hobbes disappears, fuck that shit.
UGH, I'm really happy to have never encountered that D: Especially because right now, I'm busy being crazy stoked because I finally got adhd meds prescribed and hopefully now I'm going to be able to scrape the focus to actually complete the creative projects I get ideas for instead of flying of in ten million directions. I remember how much I used to be able to create before all my focus went to hell, and I would do anything to get that back. You go, Calvin, you get those magic focus drugs.
It'd actually be interesting seeing something that's not anti-medication but still playing around with the concept of Calvin having ADHD. Especially since I can see his parents trying non-medication methods of dealing with it first, like his dad strikes me as the sort of being really wary of medicating a kid when you can just build character grow up a little and try anything but that. And he'd probably get the idea that "ritalin = creativity melting away = Hobbes will die" and actually flip out a bit and resist it at first, like he resists baths or Rosalyn. Or try to hide the pills. And then things begin to improve when he finally keeps at it for a full week and Hobbes is very much alive still. And he actually got a B on a history test to boot! Because he actually was able to sit down and pay attention in class! Actual improvements, possibly with some hiccups here and there thanks to side effects or not entirely effective regiments to start with.
Oh god, yes, something like that would be awesome. And, like - it would make sense to me that his parents would try non-medication methods first? Especially since both of them would be making the argument that Calvin isn't a bad kid (and he isn't), he just has trouble focusing. Considering that Watterson was pretty good (from what I recall) about dealing with serious topics like that, I wonder if we would've seen Calvin's parents having a discussion with the school about getting Calvin tested for ADHD and how they deal with the results.
And, like, as exasperated as Calvin's parents get, they both like who he is. Remember the one where Calvin does that impression of his dad and his mom just falls on the ground laughing? They'd resist anything that felt like trying to change him to make their lives easier (which is how a lot of ads and other messages aimed at parents frame things.) I wonder... what if his parents were trying to talk Calvin out of medication, or at least give them an excuse to say no, and Hobbes was trying to talk him into it?
Allow me to introduce you to lalaietha's The Apocalypse According to C (with Some Help from S and H), "Worked Okay So Far?" and suggestions. All feature ADHD!Calvin, without it being about Calvin having ADHD. Apocalypse is creepy awesome, "Worked Okay So Far" is actually about Bacon, Calvin's hypothetical future child from that one fan comic, and "suggestions" is future fic.
Current gripe: if you write an OC-centric fic and you're on FF.net, put OC as one of your god damn listed characters so that I can filter your fic out. (FF.net has very limited filtering-out; this isn't really a problem on AO3, but this particular fandom is all but dead on AO3.) (It doesn't help that this fandom has lots of OC stuff. I'd be okay with this if I could filter all of it out.)
Another FF.net gripe: the fact that there is no "Entire Work" button. Makes trying to read fanfic on road trips (or when going anywhere without consistent cell service) a lot more irritating, since I can't just load the whole thing before I leave.
Oh thank god. I used to copy/paste entire fanfics to word docs to read when my internet was cut by step-mom, and I've just been converting those to .epubs but this does it so much better.
Also, a pet peeve: Badly done fics about brainweird. A good fic centering around mental illness or autism or what have you is an absolute treasure, but so much of it is just...not. ...I've admittedly gone "AM I HECKING UP WITH PEARL, INTERRUPTED" a few times, since I'm writing Pearl with (implicitly) major depressive disorder, which I don't have. I've had severe depressive episodes because Fun With Bipolar And BPD, and I'm basing her depression-related problems partly off my own depressive episodes, but I keep worrying I'm Doing It Wrong. (Though several people have said it's a startlingly accurate depiction...idk, I still worry. :c) Plus the main plot takes place in group therapy, which I've never been in--I haven't hit that yet in the fic, but I might ask some of y'all who HAVE been in therapy groups to look it over when I do. TL;DR I hate badly-handled brainweird fic and I'm perpetually worried I'm contributing to it. Also, kidfic CAN be good, but... it usually isn't, to the extent that I tend to skip over it by default (unless it's a canonical instance, but that's...very different, IMO).
