Yeah, this instance wasn't that creative - it was Futurama, where robots definitely aren't meat creatures, and went into detail about organs that a robot would have no reason to have even mechanical analogues for.
I know in a realistic situation Bart Simpson would be dead many times over, but using Homer to make Sideshow Bob look better strikes me as fairly ludicrous.
Oh! Genos from opm has tons of cyborg medical whump! I can't say I'd be able to find any fics since I read them ages ago but iirc, the potential is definitely there and people have explored it
I feel like I need to do a Fall of Equestria spitefic about how ridiculous it is for creatures from a frozen tundra to stand a chance against a god-tier-powerful being who controls the sun.
BNHA has a million characters, and it can be a major challenge to remember all their names. It gets extra complicated because official material reverses the Japanese name order (to GivenName FamilyName) in the English translations and takes liberties with how characters address each other to avoid being stilted as all hell. And none of it, or fan materials including wikis or even AO3 tags, actually explicitly tell you what name order they’ve decided to use. (AO3 uses FamilyName GivenName unless the author tags it differently. The English language fan wikis I’ve seen use the reversed order.) The saving grace I’ve had is that I can read hiragana. So far I have yet to find anyone who reverses name order in Japanese. Small favors. I prefer Japanese name order, especially for something I first encountered as anime, where the subtitles introducing me to people in the opposite order of the voice track is a lot of extra mental work. I’m bad enough with names when people introduce themselves to me in just one order. I often have to skip back and replay introduction scenes when they’re like that, because I couldn’t process the name at all when given to me simultaneously in two conflicting ways. But whatever, I make do. With familiar characters I can kinda just mentally autocorrect the name order when I know it’s going to be reversed. Which brings me to the gripe. There is an unholy amount of fanfic that isn’t consistent about name order, even if you only count members of the fic’s main cast who are also major characters in canon. My brain autocorrect just wipes the fuck out if Izuku Midoriya (reversed) is having a conversation with Bakugou Katsuki (Japanese). I’m barely even surprised anymore if Uraraka Ochaco (Japanese) appears in the same damn paragraph as Ochaco Uraraka (reversed), and man does it do weird things to my head every time. But nothing is quite as bad as Todoroki Enji and his son Shouto Todoroki. The Todoroki family has so many problems already. They don’t need this one too. I can get why it’s hard, but blease. Have pity on my poor brain.
i think what confuses some writers (and has confused me too!) is having to decide: if you’re writing limited 3rd person POV, and you’re referring to everyone else by family name (Japanese order), do you use the POV character’s first name in narration (because it’s from their perspective and they would likely think of themself using their personal name) or do you use the POV character’s family name to keep it consistent? and if said character becomes close enough with another character to be on first-name basis, do you also use that character’s first name in the narration to reflect that, or keep it consistent to reduce confusion? i’ve def had this conundrum (though my main applicable fandom is Danganronpa rather than BNHA.) that said, whatever the writer chooses should have some kind of internal logic wrt name choices, and it sounds like the fics you’ve been reading often don’t :(
See, this is why My Hero Academia characters should be referred to exclusively by their Hero names, regardless of context or continuity. If the character doesn't have a hero name, they can't appear in the story unless you also write a spinoff where they become a Hero.
That makes sense to me! It’s not whether I think the writing is using the most appropriate part of a name that’s tripping me up. I’m pretty flexible about that as a reader, even if I might have made a different decision myself. As long as it’s not so confusing I can’t follow it, I’m not that fussed. I’m talking about when a writer uses characters’ full names, and sometimes it’s FamilyName GivenName, and other times it’s GivenName FamilyName, in the same piece, sometimes in the same paragraph, and even with the same character.
The more I think about it, the fucking weirder it seems. I’ve been in anime fandoms since I’ve been in fandoms, and I don’t remember ever seeing this particular problem on any noteworthy scale before. It’s like a fucking epidemic.
Minor gripe; multiple fics which don't realise closed-casket funerals are the norm in England. I've actually never been to a funeral (I don't do well with even happy crowds) but I know that we don't embalm or show off the body and most people I know would consider that creepy. It probably wouldn't occur to an American writer to question that, but it jars.
Long-abandoned fics which started with worldbuilding and minor characters and never got far enough to actually reach the premise described in the summary.
I think it's cool if people wanna make a story readable to people who aren't up for porn, but I feel like there are some important considerations that tend to get overlooked. Making the porn optional really limits how much it can contribute to the plot, character and relationship development, and especially how or even if it can fit into the structure and flow of the story. It doesn't have to hamstring the impact of those scenes or do violence to the overall pacing, but I rarely see stories with more than one or maybe two skippable scenes in a longer work where both of those problems aren't happening. If the explicit parts aren't important enough to be necessary, they're gonna start feeling like a drag if they keep happening. It makes me feel almost catfished if the rating and tags don't reflect the parts of the story that actually matter and can affect other things. It's like if someone told me a show was psychological horror, but it turned out only the skippable filler episodes actually delved into any psychological horror, and each set was only loosely connected to any other set. No matter how good the psychological horror of the filler episodes is, that's not an accurate description of the show, and I'm gonna feel frustrated about having been excited. I'm sure there are good ways to do this even with a relatively high number of skippable scenes. Maybe I've even read and loved stories that do it well, and just don't remember them in this context because there's no disappointment attached to the memory. There are definitely stories I've read and loved even though I didn't particularly like their approach to this specific thing, because they did other things so well that I didn't fucking care. This is probably true of most of my gripes, I think. The urge to gripe arises from a cumulative background radiation of something that sometimes really gets on my nerves, but I would probably fight all comers behind a diner of their choice to defend the honor of a great many stories that do exactly the things I complained about, because that story? That story is amazing. How could I ever care about some stupid pet peeve in the face of such magnificence, fucking fight me. I guess I just wish that separating out the porn into skippable bits didn't seem to have spread so much with an idea that it's an easy way to make your stories accessible to more people? Not because that isn't a worthwhile thing to do if you want, but because it's not easy. At all. Writing a story intended to read well in two different ways is a significantly greater amount of effort. Success should provoke admiration.
my own feelings are, if the porn is skippable, maybe it should be made into a side story instead, posted as a separate fic. and if it’s not skippable and is important to the story, it probably shouldn’t be treated like it is by the author & the author shouldn’t try to make it skippable. yet i understand that this solution (of posting the porn as a side story if it’s skippable) appeals to me personally, and not necessarily appealing to everyone. i like these things being separate: if i’m in the mood for porn, i’ll read porn, and if i’m not, i’ll read plot; i don’t tend to want both at once (and have wanted less and less porn in recent years). but there’s so much fic out there that if all the explicit longfic writers reversed course and did their best to reintegrate their porn and make it important/unskippable, i would still have a lot of other fic to read. i’m really not the target audience here. i guess the porn-with-plot writers are trying to broaden their audience, at the risk of alienating their core readers. that’s an old story, but it’s still rough. witnessed.
Honestly it feels like it’s more of an issue with newer, less experienced authors who maybe haven’t realized yet that trying to please multiple target audiences with conflicting needs is a lot harder than it might seem at first glance. I usually get the feeling that they’re trying to expand the range of their work to include porn rather than the other way around, but they haven’t really figured out how porn works in a story yet? If so, the problem, if you consider it to be a problem, will probably fix itself with a bit of time. I also appreciate a good story with porn as a separated extra. Then it usually feels more like a bonus scene than a filler episode. The problem for me is that the porn is not nearly as interesting if it isn’t heavily integrated into the plot and character arcs. It’s like how a romance doesn’t work as a romance if that’s not a key integrated component of the tension and stakes, as well as showing character growth or lack thereof. A pwp basically works for me or doesn’t work depending on whether the author can distill tension that already existed in the canon work into a short scene that says something about it. But that’s me.
Oh hey an issue I have that I hadn't thought about until it was articulated. I like sex, including explicit sex, in my long form books a lot. Like no the various sex scenes in the Baru Cormorant books aren't on the level of explicitness as the porn chapters in an explicit fic but they are sex scenes. Ones which are thematically important and plot crucial. The book's themes literally do not work without Baru fucking and we, as readers, getting to increasingly see that fucking with fewer and fewer dumb filters set up. Because the series is centered around a woman with deep amounts of internalized lesbophobia untangling all that and reaching some form of gay self actualization. Also she's evil but it's fine. This is the sort of integration into the main narrative that I wish porn chapters in longfic had as a baseline. I want it to be something so crucial it literally cannot be removed. Partially because I like well structured narratives with strong thematics but also because. It's hotter if it matters? It can make fairly short and non-explicit sex REAL HOT. Also if I just want porn by itself then I just want porn by itself. I do not want to have to wade through tons of other shit just to see 5000 words worth of fucking. Granted, even then, my preferences for one shot porn err very towards character pieces that happen to be exploring a character by way of explicitly detailed sex. Like yes it is just 5000 words worth of fucking but it is 5000 words worth of fucking that say something about Baru as a person. That explores some aspect of her awful garbage self. Which is more interesting than just "Baru fucks a woman" because I am not interested in Baru fucking other women because she is a woman and can fuck them. I am interested in her fucking other women because I like Baru the character and find her particularities intriguing.
.... I feel like there's a connection to be made with how fandom has gotten increasingly hostile towards smutfic, because I also barely ever see fic that is Just Fucking, For The Sake Of It like I used to, outside of Kinktobers and the like. (I miss Just Fucking, For The Sake Of It. I don't always want my porn to be emotionally challenging or saccharine)
