i dropped rothfuss's wise man's fear for a long time because of this. the second half of the book is completely derailed by pointless sex of casual sexing and doesnt answer any of the fucking questions the story introduces in the first half and it was ugh, almost a betrayal.
Ahaha, yeah that book is sort of a running joke in my friend group because of how egregious it is. There are a lot of things in it that are even better than the first, and within the dumb as shit sex faerie bit is the Cthay (sp?), which is the best bit of the book. But god damn Rothfuss, the Aidem went on wayyyy too long and was completely stupid from an anthropological perspective.
i'm still baffled that an editor gave rothfuss an okay go ahead on that part??? it slows the book, it doesn't make sense, it just drags on for eeeeeeeeeeever and eats pages that COULD have been used on more interesting stuff.
My personal favorites are always the longfics with complex plots AND character exploration AND dealing with trauma AND hella porn, so... I guess I'm a bit hard to please :P To each their own! I do remember it being quite good kinky sex, and the writing was pretty good too. It's one of the better known fics in the fandom for a reason! Just personally frustrating to me -_-
Aka, the reason why I started sorting fic by "word length" instead of anything else, because I'm a picky awful snob who wants 50k tender sexual characterization on an epic backdrop of plot, and by god I will wade through twelve chapters of nonsense to get it.
i like longfic because i haven't had the spoons to wade through actual published material looking for something i'll care about these days, so when i want to get my Actualish Reading fix i just go for longfic. better probability of finding stuff i care about when i already care about the characters
*tries to tap "next chapter" while on mobile* *accidentally leaves kudos on a meh-level fic that just made the "prostrate" mistake* ... GODDAMNIT.
The prostrate gland is a special piece of anatomy possessed by certain porn characters which produces hormones that aid in the process of lying down.
If only there was a way to unkudos something! I have made similar mistakes, though in my case it was generally fics that started out strong but then did something that hit a squick, or suddenly! demonized! character!
Heh. I'm a completionist, unfortunately. If I start a fic, no matter how mediocre it is, if I don't finish it it Just Feels Wrong. ... At least maybe I just encouraged some budding young author's delicate butterfly soul to keep writing... boring schlock riddled with greengrocer's apostrophies? (Okay maybe it's not that bad... except for the part where it is... dammit how do you make superhero porn boring, that's actually kind of an achievement...) ... though if I'm gonna take the "encouraging developing writers" angle maybe I should go ahead and point out the "prostrate" issue.
I wonder if it'd be worth it to figure out a polite way to steer a writer away from using epithets it's definitely not the only thing wrong with the fic in question, but it'd help a lot I don't know if they'd take concrit gracefully though edit: epithets, not epitaph. wtf brain
probably one of the oldest gripes in the book, but the PoV meandering in and out of different characters heads. If you're going to write from one character's perspective, great! Stick with them. If you're going for third person omniscient, cool, stay with that. But you can't have third person limited and then randomly switch who's perspective is whenever you feel like that person's opinions on what is going is more important. It's one thing to switch PoV halfway through the chapter with a marker in between, even multiple times! But at least show that you did it intentionally! and please for the love of god pick a tense and stick with it.
It's true. I was thinking about saying something myself but then I realized I can't spell it either. No worries though brosis, that's what betas are for.
I am also a completionist, but much less of one than in the past, since my "completionism" has on occasion made me continue to read things I probably should not have been reading because I was not the intended audience. (By which I mean badly written torture porn. Or well written torture porn for that matter. Or heavily dystopic doom filled dark fic where I want to burn the world for the sake of the poor hapless characters who are not going to get a happy ending because angst.)
Awesomely complex character dynamics reduced to whiny sexual jealousy. (Sexual jealousy in general, tbh, but that's more purely a personal peeve than something that's necessarily bad...)
Okay, dropped the author a line re: prostrate, ended on what I hope was a neutral-friendly note. Helping!
This reminds me of a very fandom-specific issue I have, which is Aradia and Feferi being portrayed as hating each other solely because they're both into Sollux. Like, I could get them not liking each other for various reasons--it could really go either way, IMO--but the more, well, interesting reasons never seem to be brought up. It's always just "two girls like the same guy and fight about it," which does everyone involved a disservice.
