A genuinely bad-assed, interesting, heroic female character who had extensive interaction and decent chemistry with the male protagonist? Whyever would we do anything with her except reduce her to an annoying cockblock to the important relationship- which is deeply romantic and meaningful and ordained by fate, obvi, despite Spoiler the character turning out to probably have died before the movie started and the male protag never actually interacting with the non-doppelgänger version and even as an antagonist having treated the male protag mostly as an annoyance, more of interest because of what he caused than as a person? NOPE THE PRETTIEST BOYS MUST KISS GET THAT ANNOYING BITCH OUT OF THE WAY. ... Not that I have any objection to seeing the pretty boys kiss. It's just, goddamn it. There might be no shortage of het in mainstream fiction, but there is a shortage of het that isn't fucking stupid, nah mean? And there sure as hell is a shortage of interesting, heroic female characters that don't end up getting stepped on and overshadowed by the More Important Mens. To see that dynamic recreated in fanfic when it wasn't there in the source material is beyond infuriating. Goddamn, Homestuck fandom spoiled the hell out of me.
And I mean, to the fandom's (semi) credit they've mostly been dealing with it by being like "Porpentina who?" rather than explicitly throwing her under a bus, which is still fuckng annoying, especially seeing as Spoiler later sources refer to her as Porpentina Scamander and that's not really a relationship you can just "oh whatever" away. It's probably at least partly my fault for spending more time scanning the E section than the Ts and Gs, but. Dammit, she had genuinely interesting interactions with multiple characters, and nobody seems to give a shit. Not to mention that I've only seen one fic for what seems to me the obvious M/M pairing, but nope, can't do that, one of em's fat, gross!
Additionally: You can either require a character lose their virginity for evil-unicorn-related reasons, OR you can have an entirely un-coerced, perfectly ideal, leisurely and intensely personalized emotional virginity-losing experience. PICK ONE. And frankly, if we're going to be dropping our V-card for emergency animal-wrangling purposes, I'd absolutely prefer a brusque, businesslike interaction to what you're showing me here, which is your idealized virginity-taker repeatedly reassuring Newt that he doesn't have to do anything he doesn't want to, while at the same time emphasizing that the only other options are to kill the animal or risk someone else getting skewered OH BUT NO PRESSURE RIGHT ISN'T THIS ROMANTIC? Also, way to go you for not asking the virgin if he has a preference in partners. Wouldn't wanna risk in-character het happening, after all. (This is the same fic that's later treating Tina like an annoying cockblock. I'm also not seeing any evidence of author self-awareness at how fucking skeevy all this is.)
... That said, I would actually be interested in a fic that explored the parameters and mechanisms of unicorn virgin-detection. Like, "Oh, they say it's virginity, but actually they'll react that way to any perceived female who hasn't copulated in the past 72 hours. Otherwise they'll get shirty and start casting about for the rival male, and in that case you better get scarce if you like your guts where they are. ... What? Of course it only works with the males. Well, for a given value of 'works,' anyway. It's not as if it's particularly safe for the lady, either. For your money, actually, it's probably best just to avoid unicorns entirely during the mating season, unless you know what you're doing."
Oh! Yes, and having that be one of the reasons why it's considered a really bad idea to go out into the Forbidden Forest, because there's a whole herd of unicorns there and I bet they aren't particularly safe to be around during foaling season either.
Yes! ... Which means the centaurs there must have a whole rigamarole they have to go through each year during the unicorn rut and foaling seasons. Implying the best people to call when dealing with problem unicorns would be Hogwarts Forest centaurs. ... I bet anyone who has to deal with unicorns on the regular finds their pop-cultural status as symbols of sexual purity laughable, given that the males will try to get a leg over anything that smells like girl between the months of January and March, and the females will run you through if they think you've so much as looked at a foal cockeyed... and given unicorns' legendary powers of species identification this probably becomes an issue to parents of small children living in unicorn country. Best advice if you see your child playing with a unicorn, leave them alone until such time as the unicorn decides she has something better to do. Or, if you're feeling lucky, convince the child to come to you, and maybe she'll conclude you're the dam and nobody needs to die today.
Reminds me of how I want to know if anyone's written a sex pollen fic where the characters know it's there but have to send people into the affected area anyway, and the entire fic is the group awkwardly trying to figure out which two people are going to have to take one for the team. :::PPP
P sure I've found variations of that in Marvel fics on AO3. (I am assured by multiple fics that there's an in-case-of-fuck-or-die form when you sign up for SHIELD. Don't put down Kermit the Frog as a joke. They will find him and have him flown in.) ... anyway, as if it's at all in-character for Newt Scamander to be more preoccupied with virginity-shedding than manticorn-wrangling when there's a manticorn that needs wrangled. If anything, the fact that you know the animal's going to be hostile specifically to you just means there's a usable element of predictability to its behavior! Like goddamn, use yourself as bait! How hard was that!?!
Author, you just spelled the word correctly. Why did you then use the same misspelling twice later on in the same paragraph?
... shoulda been all like, "Oh, guess this manticorn agrees with Leta in regards to what does and does not constitute a loss of virginity," and got on with the wrangling. ... TO HIMSELF. He doesn't know who-all has interacted with that manticorn, and this is the f'ing 1930s1920s whoops. Like don't just tell people they've been hanging around a bona-fide virgin detector all day, you could destroy someone's reputation, young women used to actually get fired and evicted over this sort of thing! ... Actually I think I am starting to like my story better. (Is this becoming a derail?)
So I went onto the SU fanfic recs page on TVTropes, and...there's one that was pretty clearly added by that fic's author, because it's. Uh...well, I think the summary speaks for itself. Just. I went to look for good fanfiction. Why this.
Sometimes I get such a craving for bad fanfic to hate-read and then I read it and I remember why it's bad to do that.
dark steven sounds like dark danny/dan phantom from danny phantom, just with a bit of steven universe added in and dark steven's name should, logically, be the name of a gem if they're a steven-jasper fusion (smoky quartz is not called grey steven, after all) and their pronouns should probably be they/them/theirs, not he/him/his and what the hell is a fusion spirit? just... wow
The bad fanfic tropes that get me really pissy are when loyal wonderful friends or badass ladies get turned into shrill, bigoted, jealous harpies in fic for the *~*~angst~*~* and to drive the main character away from the people that love them and into the other half of the pairing's arms. Like, hey, man, I don't like Ginny/Harry as a couple either, but that doesn't mean Ginny Weasley is a bad person? There are so many ways to adjust the canon pairing to allow for a different ship (it didn't work out, but they're friends, they're getting an amiable divorce, the chemistry fizzled, or even like hey the relationship went bad for these realistic reasons and they're NOT friends but it's in character and makes sense), and yet somehow so many people seem to go "Wow, gotta get rid of the canon partner, I guess they're now a slutty cheater/raging homophobe/abusive bitchfuck." This happens in a lot of fandoms, but I see a ton of it in Harry Potter, especially when I'm just looking for good well-characterized Drarry (it's so rare, guys. please. save me. also, the ever-present dearth of good femslash.) Also, you can NOT tell me that after being the most loyal friend of all time that Ron would ditch Harry for being bi. Fuck off with that. Another big pet peeve for me is when characters are genderbent for whatever reason and they give them different names or turn them into completely ooc people with the same hair color. Like, yes, I too would love to read fic of these characters except lesbians. But not like this. Dear god, not like this. (Or when they just change the gender of one person and it's suddenly het. It just feels SO weird and random. Like, why do this. If you're doing one why not do everyone. Porque.)
@unknownanonymous Yeah, that sounds basically exactly like a SU version of Dan Phantom. Even the description of evil!Steven sounds basically just like a description of Dan Phantom + gem. If I had to guess, the "fusion spirit" part is because of the whole DP connection. But uh. Yeah. That pretty much looks like a bad DP rip-off. Really goes to show why fanfic authors shouldn't add their own fics to TVTropes rec lists...
