December Talking Meme: Fiction Pet Peeves (Dec 1)

[dhampyresa]

rogueslayer452 : What are your biggest pet peeves in fanfiction? What are your biggest pet peeves about published fiction?

My biggest fanfiction pet peeve is easy: overtagging. No, you don't need to tag a character that has three lines in you 60k+ fic. Really. I swear, it's fine.

The worst case of this I ever encountered was a -- I can't remember the pairing, but it was a slash ship -- fic that was tagged with "Zatanna Zatara" (because I'm a big fan of her) among a variety of characters. It was pretty long fic, at least 30k, so I thought that even though there were a lot of characters tagged, Zatanna would have a role, however small. I was wrong.

She was mentionned in one line.

Not "she had one line". She was mentionned in one line. As in, "Zatanna was sitting on the couch when [the slash couple] came out to the Justice League". That was it. That was the only time Zatanna's name appeared in the fic, even though I'd read the whole thing for her. I was so pissed. SO PISSED.

Don't do that, okay? DON'T DO THAT.

As far as i'm concerned, the rule for tagging is "if anyone specifically looking for the content of this tag (and only this tag) reads this fic, will they be disappointed?" and if the answer is "no"? YOU DON'T FUCKING TAG IT. It's not rocket science, ffs, and that goes for characters, ships, fandoms, additional tags, whatever.


I think my biggest peeve in published fiction doesn't actually count, by virtue of being a peeve about not published fiction. That is to say, it's when characters are identified as queer outside of the text itself. How nice that you revealed in an interveiew that the heroine's male love interest was bisexual. Is that likely to show up in text any time soon? I thought not.

I don't know, something about the way it's clearly trying to have the cake and eat it too and yet, somehow, you the reader is supposed to also had over your piece of the cake (... that metapor got away from me), that really pisses me off. It's talking the talk, but not walking the walk.

At some point you have to walk the walk or shut the fuck up.


Another thing that really pisses me off in published fiction, even though I very rarely encounter it these days, is the rape-as-love thing, when it's presented as totally normal and romantic and not fucked up at all. That's a sure fire way to make me not finish the book and never read anything by that author again.


Wow, the more angry a thing makes me, the less I talk about it, apparently. Use your feeling words, dhampyresa. (And I've gotten better* at avoiding published books that push my HULK SMASH buttons, so there is that, I suppose.)

*I do a lot of reading based on people's reccomendations and y'all have good taste. Also the whole "not picking up books by authors who've burned me once" thing. Except for Jodorowski, for some reason; his work is utterly vile and yet I can't look away.

There are still open days for my December talking meme.

Comments

[alexseanchai]

That published-fiction thing is actually one of the reasons I love Seanan McGuire. Her queer characters are on-the-page QUEER.

(Which, okay, if you haven't read a particular Toby Daye short story published on McGuire's website, you won't know that about Toby's boyfriend, because it's not in the books in so many words. But it's still unambiguously textual canon, and also there's several people who are in-the-books-queer.)

[umadoshi]

*nodsnods* Seanan has several characters I can think of who I know are queer because she's mentioned it on Twitter or Tumblr or something, but that feels very different to me from the Dumbledore Effect since she does have so many on-page queer characters that she's clearly not hiding or obscuring the ones whose sexuality isn't spelled out. (I may have mentioned this example before, but: one of my favorite Newsflesh characters is bi, frex, and I only know because someone referred to him on Twitter as "straight and married [to a woman]", and Seanan was kind of like "...married, yes. Not so much with the straight." So that tends to be the sort of way it comes up.)

[dhampyresa]

Which make s me think of something: I tend to assume that everyone in fandom is non-male and non-straight and (as far as I as know) you're married to scruloose (who is male), while you're female: is my assumption wrong, in this case? (Not that you have to answer if you don't want to.)

Btw, does McGuire has any main and/or PoV queer characters in any of her books?

[umadoshi]

I don't mind being asked. ^^ I am indeed female, and scruloose and I are both cisgender and straight, and in a monogamous marriage. (I tend to have similar default assumptions when interacting in fandom, FWIW.)

None of Seanan's POV characters are queer, no. (Which is on a technicality untrue, but for what you're asking I don't think it qualifies--the Newsflesh character I mentioned in my reply to alexseanchai narrates one of the novellas in first-person, but as I said, his bisexuality never comes up in the actual material, just in an offhand comment Seanan made once on Twitter.)

I second alexseanchai's opinion about May being a main character in the Toby books.

Two fairly important characters in Newsflesh are IDed as bisexual (two women who dated but broke up prior to the series); for the record, I'd hesitate to call anyone but Georgia and Shaun the "main characters" in Newsflesh, but both women have very significant roles in the books.

Oh, and there's a married gay couple in the first Newsflesh novella, one of whom comes as close as anyone to being a main character in that particular novella (it's very...decentralized, I guess I'd say?), and there's a poly triad in another novella, and IIRC one member of the triad is a central character in that story. But I suspect the novellas may not count for what you're asking?

No main characters are coming to mind in InCryptid or Indexing (although it's been a year since I read Indexing, and I forget whether some of the characters' orientations were specified).

[dhampyresa]

I've a question about Toby's boyfriend: is he queer in the books? Because if not, that would fall into "queer in extra material" territory for me, simply by virtue of not being in the books (how many people reading the books will read said short story, for example?). It's different if there are other queer-in-the-books characters, though.

Are any of the main characters? Or PoV characters?

[alexseanchai]

There's only one PoV character in the books themselves, Toby, and she's straight. But define 'main characters'. Tybalt (the aforementioned boyfriend) absolutely is a main character, but I take your point about not-in-the-books. The Luidaeg absolutely is a main character, and her queerness is explicit on-page in another of those short stories, but in the books it's not mentioned in so many words--there's a conversation between her and a minor female character that, once you've read that short story, you go "ohhh they're exes, that explains that".

May...debatable whether she's a main character? She isn't even in the first two books, which is frankly the main argument that she's not a main character. But she is absolutely unmistakably on-the-page in-the-books queer.