![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Was going to post something deep about the way I relate to canon boys in eyeliner, but after catching up on an HL fic community, this came out instead.
Five little things in fanfiction which annoy me all out of proportion:
Five little things in fanfiction which annoy me all out of proportion:
- 1. Swearing by "the gods". I can see this being in-character in only one case: when the character using it is a neopagan trying to make a point. However, for anyone who is supposed to be an *unreconstructed* pagan-- somebody who is part of a living polytheistic faith -- it grates. Not that I'm any expert, but from the impression I've gotten from historical stuff, and actual ancient texts, and for that matter modern pagans of my acquaintance-- people wouldn't have sworn by 'the gods' collectively that way-- most people have *a* god or gods who are their particular gods, and they would swear either by referring specifically to those gods, or by just 'god' lower-case. "Gods" wouldn't have carried enough emotional charge for general-purpose swearing. This is one that has not quite reached the automatically-click-away stage, but it's been getting worse rapidly and will probably soon reach that stage.
- 2. Gay men calling each other "Husband." This has *always* bothered me. At first I just thought it was my dubiousness about slash-wedding-fic in general, but it goes beyond that. I think a discussion in
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
amanuensis1's lj was what made me realize my real problem here: To me, a husband is somebody married to a woman. A wife is somebody married to a man. I have nowhere near the same 'ugh' reaction if the guys refer to each other as 'wife'. It's as much a grammatical issue to me as a social one; these words are about the relationship rather than the individual-- 'married to a man', not 'man who is married'. If you just want to say that the character is married rather than who they're married to, you have the perfectly serviceable word 'spouse'.
I realize that I will never convince anybody to agree with me on this. My dictionary defines 'husband' as 'a married man; a woman's partner in marriage.' I'm not sure why I so prefer the second definition to the first. But if a fic uses the words that way before it's well hooked me, I quit. To me, marriage is mostly a symbol anyway, gay marriage doubly so, most slash pairings wouldn't *care* about the symbolism enough to bother in the first place, and if your interpretation of the characters *and* the symbols of marriage are so far off of mine, why would I want to read a fic you've written about those very things? - 3. Guys peeing while erect. Actually, I feel like I have no right complaining about this, because I have no direct experience whatsoever with the plumbing apparatus of the adult male. However, long before I fell down that long, rose-tinted slide into smut fic, I learned everything I ever didn't want to know about sex at E2.* Including this node, where four different males discuss the logistical and anatomical difficulties involved in pissing with a hard-on. They have different strategies for dealing with it, but they all agree that it is a *problem*. The strategies described all require either unlikely gymnastic contortions, deflating one's organ, or pissing in something other than the toilet. It made me once again glad to be a girl.
However, the number of fics I've read where guys stop in the middle of foreplay, or wake up hard, take a casual pee break, and then come back apparently still erect, is without number. And these are stories where bathroom breaks are mentioned-- they're not stories that gloss over the more inconveniently realistic aspects of sex. And *none* of them *ever* mention the logistical problems involved. I know for a fact that many of the writers who've done this have, unlike me, been in long-term sexual relationships with men. So I'm forced to conclude that either 1) this writer is getting the male sexual organs confused with female ones again; 2) the men at e2 were all lying; 3) Men do pause foreplay in order to piss, and they've been peeing in these women's showers, or all over their walls, for years without ever mentioning it; or 4) Men do pause foreplay for bathroom breaks, but what they're doing in there is not urinating, despite what they tell their girlfriends.
All of these possibilities generally just make me want to go read about angry all-men-are-jerks lesbians instead. - 4. This one is purely grammatical. While I do take great joy in grammar, I'm generally forgiving enough to give an author a chance. However, if I notice in the first screen of a story that they don't put commas between the name of a person being directly addressed and the rest of the sentence, I don't bother scrolling down to the next screen.
I *know* comma rules are confusing; comma usage is what editors most often complain about in my own writing. What I don't get is why *that* rule is the one that's most often broken, because it's the *easiest* of them all. If you're talking to a person directly, their name gets set off by commas. You don't have to understand appositives or verb phrases or subjects and objects or classify clauses or anything. If you're talking to someone and call them by name, put commas around their name! It's not that *@#$@ hard! - 5. On a similar note, if someone can't be bothered to learn that it's an Internet convention to put an extra line break between paragraphs, I can't be bothered to read their story.
*E2 is a user-compiled knowledge database which attempts to mimic the way knowledge is networked in the human memory through "softlinks", a nework of pathways between articles which become stronger the more often people travel them. It apparently mimics the human brain very well, because you can never follow the softlinks for very long before you end up reading about sex. Once I tried to test this by trying to find a pathway between two totally non-sexual, unrelated subjects-- some bit of computer trivia and 'bluebird', I think. I only managed it by way of an anecdote about parakeets masturbating.
no subject
Well, those all seem wildly unnecessary.
5. On a similar note, if someone can't be bothered to learn that it's an Internet convention to put an extra line break between paragraphs, I can't be bothered to read their story.
It is? Oh.
And: Eee! 8BT icon again!
no subject
Huh? I don't know what you mean by this.
no subject
Oh, and it is possible to urinate with an erection, it's just clumsy, awkward, and 9 times out of 10 very messy.
no subject
Not like this. q-:
Because it looks very crappy and it's hard to read when you just try to indent. Even if you manage to get indenting working.
I always lurk around a new place long enough to pick up at least simple things like that. It annoys me when people don't. Plus it annoys me to read things without clear paragraph breaks, too. So I don't.
no subject
no subject
I did mention that these things annoy me completely out of proportion to how important they are, right?x
no subject
no subject
(oooh... a pagan using "god" as a epithet!)
That's my deal breaker. But the lack of a simple carriage return? Yeah, I tend to go running away when I see that, too.
And as for the whole "husband" thing? Yeah, I feel rather the same way about it. For some reason, when I see two men calling eachother and/or thinking of each other as "husbands," it makes me make that "Oh! The milk's starting to go bad!" face. I think it also has to do with it sounding forced, too.
=-)
no subject
A warning though; they're addictive! There was a time when I just followed 8BT. Now there's no less than 15 in my bookmarks, and I got their update schedules memorized by heart.