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

[rogueslayer452.livejournal.com]

Overtagging is the worst, imho, especially from those who forget that other sites like AO3 aren't Tumblr where they can literally go off into conversational thoughts in the tags. Like, seeing every single character and pairing tagged is annoying enough, there really is no need for tagging nonsensical sentences when you could have just written that in your summary or the additional notes on the fic itself.

Anything that is tagged a pairing but they aren't actually the main pairing of the fic, or there is a NOTP featured, is something else that annoys me as well. Either don't tag or place a warning. Another thing is when people don't tag for character deaths. I read this one fic where it happened to one of my OTPs and nowhere in the tags or description was there any warning for it. Like, if I want to read angst I'd specifically look for it but to have it sneak up on me like that was just, no.

IA with you about published fiction. I know that with some authors their publishers might pressure them to not include queer characters or keep it on the "down low" or something to that effect, but I wish authors would stand their ground on keeping characters who are meant to be queer in the story. It's not really that hard. To say that it's "not relevant to the story" is kind of ridiculous, because what about all the heterosexual romances in stories that aren't about romance? Are those also not relevant to what the plot is about? Like please, get real.

And yeah, the rape-as-love thing is gross. See: 50SOG and how romanticized it is, when it really is just rape and domestic abuse. And the fact that it's supposedly so popular baffles and scares me, tbh. SMH.

[dhampyresa.livejournal.com]

I don't mind the tumblr-esque tags, because they tell me upfront that the fic is very very unlikely to be one I want to read. (It must be a nightmare for the tag wranglers, though, and they have my sympathies.)

I'm pretty sure "Major Character Death" is an Ao3 warning and you can report them to abuse for not using it (unless they use "Choose Not To Warn", obvs). But, yeah, that tends to be the kind of thing I want to know about up front.

I realise some authors might be trying to make the best out of a bad situation and most historical works are given a pass (mostly for reasons of authors having not as much control over thei work as they do now), but it is so so so annoying. Lol, "not relevant to the story", LOL.

It is spectacularly gross when it's not acknowledged as fucked up. I haven't read 50SoG, so I can't comment.