If somebody pulled that on me, I would write more cheesy AU just to spite them. Like, "Thanks, you finally gave me incentive to write something more about an AU where the setting is Star Wars."
This is going to sound petty but: Making a character who is not, canonically, implied to be a CSA survivor a CSA survivor (often with added graphic for the angst descriptions) because often times it seems to be saying that it's not "enough" for them to have been "just" emotionally/verbally abused? Idk. I'm very protective of the specific type of abuser the Dursleys are because that's very familiar to me and it feels like people are telling me that my abuse isn't valid when they do that.
Heck, even outside of fiction it sometimes gets annoying. Tildes are odd in general - I think people like to overuse them because who doesn't like a pretty, swoopy line? But in fics especially extraneous ~s just make me sigh On the other hand, I've made ~~~ a part of a typing quirk for the Breeze/Trickster!John before, so I'm not one to talk
Do people do the weeb thing with tildes much anymore? Using them in dialog appended to a word to indicate a sing-song delivery? Also, I hate the thing of adding extra vowels in a word to indicate the delivery, because they break English pronunciation rules. Doubled vowels in English indicate a changed vowel sound with very few exceptions (e.g. "Coordinate") and most of those are compounds or foreign loanwords. "Hello" is not equivalent to "heeeelloooo". My brain really doesn't like it.
Writing out accents makes me close a fic immediately. Especially when we can't even apply it to everyone. If you aren't going to take the time to transcribe the accent trademarks of Pharah's Musri accent then I damn sure better not be seeing Mercy saying ZE every five seconds. I shouldn't be seeing it at all actually.
Also on the subject of second person writing, I am hoping that Homestuck and works inspired by it helps popularize the usage of it in prose writing on a wider scale. Because I am tired of poor lovely second person going unloved and unmentioned in textbooks and such as an option.
oh god, typing out accents. baby-harvey's first fandom was CATS the musical, and everyone had different ways of typing out two cats' cockney accents. and no one could agree which method was the best; there were like. actual fights over who phoneticized cockney accents the best. i think like....one person, ever, suggested not typing them out in the time i was in the fandom
I've still seen tildes used to indicate sing-song, occasionally. That usually makes me nope out. I'm desensitized to phoneticized accents though, because of TF2 fic.
This is tangential to the thread, but what makes ME happy about it is that Lackey supplies a sensible mechanism about it: Spoiler: spoiler In one of the later trilogies, a character comments, re: the Talia-Dirk lifebond, that they're pretty much always between a Person A with strong, potentially unstable Gifts and a Person B who provides stability for A's powers and/or emotional state. (And I recall feeling like an exchange in "Brightly Burning" implies that this isn't something preordained, either, it's A's Gift fixing upon an ideal candidate, but it's been a long while since I read that one.) More directly on-topic: I really can't deal with a/b/o and can only groan at how popular it's gotten, but my biggest pet peeve is AUs that bear no sensible relation to the canon. Like, if the cast is a bunch of teens/young adults, a high school or college AU exploring how they'd fit in an age-typical environment makes sense (though I won't read it myself), but a bouncer AU? Or anything else that feels really random. Especially if it's a canon where the setting/circumstances themselves have a lot to do with the characters' development and the author doesn't come up with any parallels in the AU, so Joe Trauma in canon is Joe Cheerful in the AU and the author could literally change the names and have an original gay romance novel instead. I mean, kudos for acknowledging the setting would change them, and I'm sure sometimes that's the goal, but it's not what I'm there for. (I mean, more power to those who enjoy that, but I just can't read it.)
This is the reason why the modern!mundane!AU of my favorite video game where the main characters are all in a DnD group still has somebody get thrown out of the house by his abusive father with nothing but the clothes he was wearing as soon as he turned 18 and his little sister thinking he was dead for years.
Undertale specific, but: fics that make Sans way more violent than canon. I know, I know, he's a pretty ambiguous character, people have the right to interpret things however they want, so I just take a deep breath and move on without getting into anything, but... It just feels so damn out of character to me. Like, all those headcanons about how he might have killed one of the previous fallen humans, things like that. It just doesn't fit with the way he acts to me, you know? I know it's a petty difference of interpretation, but it bugs me so much.
Ok, with the accents thing, I've been writing a specific fic (and a specific type of accent) so long I didn't even think about foreign accents. I like to see people writing regional and vernacular English; a lot of times they use their own accents or ones they're pretty familiar with so it's less likely to be a trainwreck. I mean, sometimes it still gets stereotype-y or hard to read but it can also be cool, especially if it's not a common accent or one I know a lot about. I very rarely see written-out non-English accents (as in, accents belonging to people who originally spoke languages other than English) that are not at least somewhat patterned, after older, vaguely racist media. They often don't even reflect how an actual speaker sounds. They're usually really hard to take seriously, too, and sometimes hard to read.
"Zees eez zhe Spy, 'ow dare you questeeon my reetin accent. Sacre bleu." Christ that hurt to type out.
My least favorite sorts are the Russian ones. Mostly because I spent years of my life living with Russians. I am more than aware of the ways in which English speakers whose first language is Russian tend to talk. There's weird little ways they use the word "is" and "shit" and "sheet" are often pronounced exactly the same (which has led to some like my russian professor refusing to use the word sheet for anything ever). There's a lot of little shit that doesn't get portrayed and the phoneticized accents just come off as like racist bullshit from the Cold War. I sadly can't think of how to really...explain the pecularities of Russian-speaker English. Not off the top of my head. I can say that Axiom Verge did a very good job of presenting how it works grammatically though. The Rusalki all speak with Russian accents which, while not presented phonetically, are very apparent grammatically if you're familiar with Russian-speaker English.
That's really cool. Honestly, when I do see accents, I like to see them like that. Because if you give me the grammar and structure weirdnesses I expect from an English-language learner with that background my brain will fill in the pronunciation stuff itself.
Epithets have annoyed me forever, and mostly because of pro fic rather than fan fiction. A LOT of books Do The Thing. Also, the thing where some word other than "said" is being used, AND IT'S THE WRONG DAMN WORD. There are no sibilants, how did s/he hiss? "muttering" implies resentment, what is she so pissy about? "mumbled" means you missed most of what they said, and they're out of it in some sense, or maybe pissy/resentful. In context, he's not any of those things. You can only use "ejaculated" instead of "said" if you actually wrote the damn thing in the thirties/forties. MAYBE fifties/sixties but I feel you'd be pushing it.
