Pinkocracy.

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( TWILIGHT: 54 Animated 'New Moon' Icons! )

Alright. Here we go.

I am sick to death of all the overdone token eating disorder fics that seem to leap out from behind every fandom lamp-post. I mean, I get it - eating disorders are srs business, you know this, you suffer from one or have a friend who suffers from one, so you want to show the world what horrors lie in wait for those who starve themselves, etc. I'm not personally a fan of the whole ED genre because I very seldom find it done well, but if you feel absolutely compelled to turn your favourite character into an obsessive calorie counter or b/p-er, please bear in mind:

1. It's not always about being thin. Not everybody who has an eating disorder looks in the mirror and sees a grotesquely fat individual staring back at them. For some people it's about control, an escape from an uncontrollable world through something that's solid and definite. For others, it's self-punishment. Denying yourself food is brutally destructive and painful. A lot of eating-disordered girls have been sexually assaulted, and it can become their defense mechanism - making themselves as skeletal and sexually unattractive as possible keeps them safe from further attack. Some people are hurting and just want their bodies to reflect how fragile they feel. It can be all of these reasons, or none. There are all kinds of motivations for eating-disordered behaviour. It doesn't have to be about looking like the cover-girl of a Vogue magazine.

Also, I would like to draw fandom's attention to the fact that said Vogue aesthetic is a cultural thing. 'Skinny' has only very recently become synonymous with 'attractive' in the eyes of pop culture. People far removed from this culture are unlikely to be convinced that weighing 45 kilos will make them beautiful. Hermione Granger probably isn't overly fussed about having a supermodel's body. Legolas probably doesn't look at his reflection in puddles and go 'oh man, I wish I looked more like Mary-Kate Olsen.' Lucy Pevensie isn't going to adopt 'bones are beautiful' as her motto for life.

2. Anorexia is not the only way. The 'perfect anorexic' doesn't really exist. Real anorexics don't live off air and water - their daily intake is insufficient and highly regimented, but they still eat. Also, they fluctuate. They fuck up, they decide to 'get better' and then relapse, and sometimes they'll eat a lot more or less than other times. Bulimic behaviour is even less predictable - they are usually (and I'm generalizing) much less regimented in pretty much everything. They're likely to be more openly out of control. Also, middle ground is possible. Not everyone has to be The Most Extreme Anorexic Evar. Ever heard of ED-NOS? Binge-Eating Disorder? There are plenty of ways to have messed-up attitudes to food without subsisting on two cornflakes a day.

3. Cuddles and tearful catharses do not fix eating disorders. The End.

If you're going to answer your own prompt on an anonymous kink meme, you might want to wait more than two minutes between making the prompt and putting up a response. Just so it's not blaringly obvious that you're just putting up your own fic under cover of meme.

For bonus points, make sure you haven't posted the response somewhere else a few weeks before you actually put up the prompt on the kink meme.

All right, guy. When I post to the discussion forum asking for advice on what to do with my current project, I do not expect you to camp in my thread and ignore all my attempts to make conversation in lieu of pimping your own terrible fics. This is made even more frustrating by the fact that you tack generic advice like 'introduce the characters first' to somehow balance out the fact that you spend two block paragraphs chattering about how you've written a crossover in which the heroine of the series hooks up with Captain Marvel, and that makes you a revolutionary.

People writing College!AUs or, for that matter, anything with roommates.

( It's not as simple as you seem to think it is... )

This probably goes without saying, but I hope all of you will keep your reviews and comments on "Half Blood Prince" as general and spoiler-free as possible over at least the next two or three weeks.  Please give everyone a chance to see and enjoy the movie before getting into too many specifics.  I'm sure at some point, many of us will want to debate certain aspects of the series, and this sixth film in particular.  But let's try to control ourselves. 

I have noticed a great deal of restraint in other fandoms on this issue...Star Treck, Transformers, etc., have all been very good about this.  I hope the Harry Potter fandom will be equally thoughtful.

Preaching to the choir is now complete for today.

Guys. May I point out something?

Loath is not the same as loathe. Loath (or loth) means unwilling. To loathe means to hate. You're confusing two utterly different parts of speech - when you say I was loathe to do that, it's the same as saying I took a ride on my hoarse.

For a long while I thought I was just confused, or that it was an American vs. English difference, like humor and humour, but I'm getting pretty convinced that people just don't understand that the two words are different.

So now you know. Loath =/= loathe. Thank you for your time.

What is it with perfectly fine, especially really original, stories going sour from one chapter to another? They either suddenly have a chapter that's so confusing that I simply can't get through it or go so far beyond anything believable (to me at least) that I can just shake my head and close the window! I hate it when that happens to stories that I actually enjoyed reading until that moment, stories that held me captive and made me sit on the edge of my chair, hoping that there is just one more chapter available already.

It's not as if they all use the same plot device either - sometimes it's things that just seem too much to be possible (e.g. trunks in the Harry Potter fandom that contain so many rooms that it might as well be an entire house as if magic didn't have a limit) or flashback after flashback that make me wonder how they fit into the story or the n-th setback/drama in a row just as the previous was about to calm down and about to be resolved. It's not just bound to one fandom either.

I guess the point at which you just can't read on is YMMV, but it's not so much about what makes me stop reading... it just frustrates me that a fic I loved is going into a direction I just can't follow coupled with annoyance about the recent frequency with which that happens. I can't really bring myself to enjoy reading fic if nearly every fic I read is either abandoned (or it's been ages since the last update) or just reaches a point that just makes me go WTF.

Super Smash Brothers fandom:

I-a know-a he-a has-a an-a Italian-a accent-a, but-a when-a you-a make-a Mario-a talk-a like-a this-a, it-a gets-a fucking-a annoying-a.


It hurt my brain to type just that sentence.

No love,
Me.

If your pimp post for your latest fic is so full of formatting changes and randomness that I can't even tell where the link to the fic is, I'm probably not going to take the time to look for it and click it, no matter how awesome you claim it to be. Then again, maybe I was as distracted by the typos as I was by the font and color changes...

To FFXII writer -

Writing down a journal passage word for word from the game does not constitute a chapter. Not even for the prologue of your story. Everyone knows what was said in that passage so you do not need to re-write it.

oh yea i still have an LJ.

This is my first rant so, um, when you bust out the snarkiness of snark snark, give me time to put on a helmet and armor first, please?

( Oi! You! Whose Line fandom! )

ETA: Edited to make more sense. Gah.

Oh lord. I know I'm being nitpicky, especially since plenty of published authors seem to ignore this, but it's starting to bother me.

All right. A lot of popular fandoms (for instance, Harry Potter springs to mind) follow a group of characters from the time they're tweens to when they're young adults. And lots of people in these fandoms write lots of ship!fic and lots of lemons. Okay. That's fine so far.

But I do wish that people would remember-- especially when they're writing a fic that has a multitude of pairings-- that people don't all hit puberty at once. And the younger everybody is when you set your fic? The less likely it is that everybody is sexually mature. Sure, plenty of them will be. But plenty won't. I feel like I'm being YMMV, but you really ought to consider that before writing that everybody is having sex with everybody else and their mom little sister. --To me, it comes across fake in the same sort of way as the fics where everyone is gay.

Consider the following: Adolescence? Covers a fairly long stretch of time. I had a lot of friends who got their periods in grade school. Personally, I didn't get mine until I was sixteen. I didn't start being more than very vaguely interested in sex until years after my best friend lost her virginity.

Or tl;dr: Harry and Draco's balls most likely didn't drop at the exact same moment. And certainly not at the same moment as Ron's, Seamus', Neville's, Crabbe and Goyle's, and everybody else I'm forgetting's.

Dear fanthing,

It does not matter how funny you think it is. Light Yagami's last name is not and never will be 'Imagay'.

Care to explain why you used that to refer to him in your otherwise-serious fic?

...If both characters in a sex scene are young men with black hair, I really don't think "the black-haired boy" is the best epithet to use. I'm assuming she meant the younger of the two, but the situation was written in such an ambiguous way that I'm still not sure who it was.

1) Can we please stop with the Sues that call Hitsugaya 'Shirou-chan'? IIRC, only one person in canon calls him that, and he doesn't exactly show much appreciation for it. (YMMV as to whether or not his protests are real or just for show.)

2) Also, can some of you please sort your romanisation out? It's Toushirou or Toshiro. Not Toushiro or Toshirou. And whichever one you choose, can you please stick with it, not only for Hitsugaya, but for all the other characters who have the same issue with their names.

3) Yama-jii is a similarly reserved nickname. Not everyone can get away with walking up to Yamamoto and calling him that. Kyouraku gets away with it because Yamamoto lets him. Ichigo call him 'jii-san' because he's Ichigo and therefore doesn't use the correct honorific unless he wants to.

4) Speaking of Ichigo, the way he refers to people is not the way that your supposedly rank-and-file Sue should. If I see one more Sue wandering around Seireitei calling Byakuya and Kenpachi, or anyone else who outranks her and isn't a close friend, by their given names, I will scream.

5) Ken-chan is a nickname to be used only by Yachiru. I wouldn't like to imagine the retribution that would be forthcoming if anyone else used that name. The same goes for any other nickname given by Yachiru, for that matter. Seeing a Sue walking around using names like 'Feathers', 'Pachinko Head', 'Byakushi' etc makes my brain hurt. YMMV, but I don't think anyone but Yachiru would get away with those names anyway.

If it's an ALL BOYS SCHOOL, no matter if you are the Headmaster's daughter, you sure as hell aren't going to be going to that school** or sleeping around with/sleeping in the bed with boys you or your father don't know well. Not only that, if the characters are canonically in love*, they aren't going to auto fall for you because you have "beautiful, bouncy golden curls" and you "smell like cherry blossoms".


Also, as a side rant, am I the only one who fumes with self inserts who are "long lost sibling/lover/friend" that is just out of the blue? No matter how good it's written, I tend to avoid those.

*These inserts were stemming from the anime, not the game.
**I have since been proven wrong with some interesting facts. :P

This is a little mini-rant that I already posted in my personal journal a while ago, but I thought would be appropriate to post it here. The subject is something that a lot of fanfic writers do, so I don't want it to sound like an attack. It is far from the worst thing an author could do and some otherwise great stories contain it.

I am talking about epithets, when, in an attempt to avoid repetitive use of a character's name or character confusion in pronouns, authors will refer to characters with phrases like, "the older boy," or "the blond." It took me a long time to get over my fear of using characters' names multiple times, and if anyone reads my older stories there a epithets all over the place. So really, I am in no place to admonish those who use them.

But I am very happy I have outgrown using them in my fanfiction. When reading fanfiction, or any fiction really, I find epithets much more awkward, tedious even, than reading the character's name more than once. Also, it has sunk into my head that the POV character isn't likely going to think of somebody that they know as "the blond" or "the older boy."

Zeroing in on a specific fandom, one thing I frequently see in Hetalia fanfiction is the character's nationality used as an epithet. When I see this in AU fics, it's just like any other epithet, tedious, but not a deal-breaker. When I see it fics that are not AU, however, it kind of makes me go "Huh?" If it isn't an AU, Sweden is the Kingdom of Sweden, not one of its citizens. Does that make sense? Seeing him referred to as "the Swede" in a non-AU fic makes him sound like one guy from Sweden, not the whole nation, its culture, its history, and its government.

As a footnote I have to add that I do not think I am just such a great fanfic writer and don't make mistakes or word things awkwardly. I am merely describing one problem that I am grateful to have largely overcome. Every little lesson learned I hope makes me a better fanfic writer.

I understand it's very easy to get this wrong (I did, myself, for quite a long while), as it's only shown once, in Turn Eight of R2, and previous to that people probably got used to whatever their chosen fansubs used, but... Euphemia li Britannia's nickname is spelled E-U-P-H-Y. Not "Euphie" or "Yuffie" --- "Euphy".

/small, nitpicky, kind of YMMV issue that nevertheless bugs me.

[edit because for some reason livejournal didn't let my chosen icon work at first...]

Dear Sailor Moon xover authors...

Please stop bashing Mamoru just so you can hook Usagi up with other characters from the crossed-over fandom. Mamoru, for all his faults, isn't an abusive jerk-off who beats women for fun.

My dear beta,

I don't know where you learned English, but I think most of my teachers would have your head. I can't. Write a fic like this. Those are called sentence fragments.

I know I have the tendency toward long, multi-clause sentences in my writing. Perhaps you thought I was overindulging. However, then you should tell me. You should not just randomly replace my commas and semicolons with periods. When you do that, it's crappy grammar and doesn't make sense.

(Really, if you think that's good, why are you a beta?)

This was a couple months ago, but I'm still annoyed and hoping you're not betaing for anyone whose grasp of English grammar is worse than mine.

No love,
Your writer

Unless you're writing dialogue for someone from an area like parts of the South West of England, where the past tense of every verb is constructed with "ed" and they think Lynne Truss is a village in Dorset, then the past tense of "grind" is "ground". Not "grinded".

Also, if you're talking about a single member of the X-Men, then he'd be "an X-Man" [1], not "an X-Men".


[1] Even if it's Jean Grey, presumably, although that doesn't apply in this case anyway.


Edited to fix my HTML fail

Dear ficwriters, good and bad alike,

Just because two characters have the same hair colour doesn't mean they look like sisters.  Nor that one of them'll look at the other and think she's looking at a mirror.

No, not even if that colour is red.

kthxbye

(This wasn't a case of Identical Grandson, these characters are, blood-wise, completely unrelated.)

Edited for a missing letter.

Okay, so different scanlations can romanise Japanese names differently (eg: Ohtori Kyouya/Ootori Kyoya, etc), so I can understand if different ficcers write names differently.

RANT 1:

Stick to one romanisation in your fic. I'm going cross-eyed reading Kyouya, Kyoya, Hani, Hunny, Honey everywhere in the same fic.

RANT 2:

If the mangaka presents the romanisation of the name in the manga itself (letter jacket, etc) or otherwise in an illustration that would appear in the published volume, I don't expect to see alternative spellings, especially if the manga in question ended its run over ten years ago. Raaargh.

(Minor note: no Ouran characters were, to my knowledge, victims of this. They very kindly volunteered to be examples.)

Dear American fictwits,
In England, we do not have cream in our coffee. We have milk... or tea!
So please stop telling me that quintessential British characters are having coffee with cream, because I won't believe you.


ETA: I'm an idiot and I don't make sense.
I meant tea as an alternative to coffee, not that people are putting cream in their tea.
Sorry!

01] Please comment!
02] Credit mrbnatural or iconzicons if taking!
03] No hotlinking or altering, please!
04] The more you resist them... the greater the damage will be.


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Dear author,

Before we begin, I'd like to say that I liked your previous fics a lot. In fact, I liked the whole first half of this fic, the part before the lemon. It was hilarious and sweet in parts, and I eagerly looked forward to the next half.

When I finished, it took me a while to figure out why I disliked the second half so much. I just figured it out now.

( Cut for sex talk. )

In summary: the no in 'no, I don't want you to go that fast, do that specific action, be in that position' means the exact same thing as the no in 'no, I don't want to sleep with you'. Unfortunately, it's rarely given similar weight.

Dear Gaiafen,

Peyo, Ruby's son, was a toddler as recently as spring of this year. Even after the art shift, he's definitely still a young child. Young enough that he can't count to three-digit numbers yet.

For the love of baby ducks, if you are going to write smut intensely-romantic fanfiction involving him, please account for this in some way. Getting surprised with shota/toddlercon was not on my list of things to do today.

Mild irritation,

Yui

PS: There ARE canon precedents for fast-forward aging, if that's what you need!

That's cool, I mean, you're writing it with the addition of hermaphrodite mpreg, but that's cool, whatever floats your boat.

But when one guy refers to another guy as "ess-ay", it's not some hip, pop culture term, or new school slang spelled "S.A.". It's Spanish, and it's spelled Ese. It's in the script, and if you're using canon dialogue then you should try looking at it.

Angry Spanish-as-a-second-language student is angry.

Dear Firefly fandom:

Shepherd is a title.

Shepard and Sheppard are names.

It would be best not to confuse them.

Even if you haven't seen Book described as a "shepherd" in writing -- which I don't think he ever actually is -- all the talk about "the shepherd" and "I wasn't always a shepherd" should probably be a clue.

(Of course, if the POV character is from out-of-universe and perhaps misunderstanding the title, then that makes sense and all is forgiven.)

(edit: adding a small example)

We all know what tags are, right? Those lovely little one or two word phrases that help you keep track of what you've put where in your LiveJournal and that help those of us looking for what you've done figure out where to go.

They're remarkable little inventions, really, and they're yours - they're all yours - and far be it from me to ever insist that you use them in a certain way or even insist that you use them at all. But could you please just do me this one small favor?

If your tag cloud looks like this - spn fan fiction, spn fanfic, spn fanfiction, spn fic, spnfic, supernatral fanfic, suprnatral fic, supernatural fan fiction, supernatural fanfic, supernatural fanfiction, supernatural fic - and if all of those tags hold different pieces and parts of different stories (but none of them hold all of your stories, or even one complete story):

Could you please, please, please pick a stinking tag already?!

Thank you.

Death Note fandom: Please stop making L and Light suicidal over their Twu Wuv/loss of their Twu Wuv/fear that their Twu Wuv will never work out/breakfast bacon being overcooked. I have seen this something like five times in the last two weeks and if I see it again I think my brain is going to explode out my ear and run away screaming.

L and Light are not Romeo and Juliet. Really. I promise.

ETA: Yep, there it goes. Goodbye, brain, it was nice knowing you.

Did another painting today. Yay watercolors! I think this took me maybe around 3 hours total.

As per usual, click for larger view, photo doesn't do it justice, etc.

I kind of wanted to work on more today.. I woke up early (before 9am), was toying with the idea of getting up or working on stuff.. I had various ideas for fairy paintings popping up in my head to make for the art festival. I decided to get up and shower, then try and scribble down some ideas and didn't really get anywhere. I managed to get the above done before Robin recruited me to go with her to go pick up Shawn's mom (Shawn and his dad were here trying to fix the sprinkler system) so she'd be here for bbq and such. I tried calling Brian when we got back since I figured he'd be into the bbq, but his mom said he was at work (I swear he told me he had today off). I ended up just cleaning up my stuff when we got back and hanging around talking. Tried taking the cats outside (not at once, only one harness), and neither of them really wanted anything to do with it.

Anyway, Imma go watch some tv then do that whole sleep thing...

If you're going to write a review correcting my grammar, you might want to make sure of two things first:

1. That the grammar you're correcting was incorrect to begin with (it wasn't)

and

2. That the correction you give me is grammatically correct.

Otherwise you're just going to look kind of stupid in a fairly public forum. And when I write you back thanking you for your review and pointing out (politely, or so I thought) that actually, it was right the way I wrote it--please don't write back to tell me that YOUR WAY IS RIGHT and you know this because you're VERY SMART and in HONORS ENGLISH.

I have a BA in English. I've met a few fanfic-writing college professors. There are plenty of people out there on the net with a lot more education than you have, and all of us make mistakes. Waving your 11th-grade GPA around like it means jackshit (which it doesn't, especially since YOU WERE WRONG to begin with) just makes you look really stupid.

Edited because I hit the 'post' button by accident

ETA 2:

The offending line in my fic:

You still haven't opened your eyes, but you curl in on yourself like a withered leaf, forehead to your knees, arms wrapped around your shins. Your ankles are still bound.

Her review:

Your a good writer but you should learn the difference between you're and your.

FOR EX:

'forehead to YOU'RE knees' etc.

I've encountered people who have trouble with your/you're, but until that review I'd never actually met someone who was willing to argue that point.

It made me cry a little.

ETA 3:

.....okay, I feel a little bad now. I guess she reads ffrants, because she just deleted her comment.

Either that, or she finally got around to looking it up and had an EPIC headdesk moment.

I know most people take more info from the game series before the anime series or the manga series and that’s okay. In some cases, the anime fleshes characters out a tiny bit more and in others it doesn’t answer questions that we’d rather have answered. Still, it’s nice to see how people interpret these characters. Sometimes.

Fandom, Cute guy (called C) wasn’t all blushing and shy and easily embarrassed to my knowledge in the anime or the game. I haven’t read the manga recently but I doubt the characterisation would change that drastically. I only saw two of the episodes in which he was in but in those and the game, C came off as pretty normal to me. As in, not the type of person who gets flushed over a smile from the guy that he likes.

If you were to say it’s because C’s unconfident, I have to counter that too; the guy works in a mine half of the time, digs underground for fossils as a hobby and is darn proud of his skills at both. He’s probably also aware of the fact that he’s quite cute and built as a result of the above hobbies. And a lot of you are doing this. Is there something I’m missing? Or is it that Uke-ification syndrome that I hate so much?

Last question – Where is all the OMG-hot-broody-guy and his best friend slash? I mean come on, some of the things that his best friend says to you sound nothing short of downright suggestive if you have a dirty mind. I'm not asking for much, I’m just looking for something that isn’t crack!

Hey, it's me again. With some rants, too.

Quick note: Some of these, YMMV.

( I'm afraid I'm a bit long winded. )

--Phanny



EDIT: Stupid typos. >.<

I encountered this problem long ago and forgot about it until I entered a new fandom recently, where it's way too common...

Yes, I get that one guy in the pairing is significantly taller than the other guy.  However, I really really don't want to see the phrase "pocket-sized" in a sex scene.  It conjures up images of Pokemon and definitely not sexy.

Okay, fanbrat, I realise you want to write a little hurt/comfort fic, and really, there’s nothing wrong with that.

The problem comes when you give your strapping football player stage three ALL (leukaemia). Not stage one, or even two, no you really want this boy to suffer so you give him stage three. I think we can all agree this boy is pretty sick if he’s got stage three ALL.
( Cut for lots of long winded medical talk )

01] Please comment!
02] Credit mrbnatural or iconzicons if taking!
03] No hotlinking or altering, please!
04] And don't your eyes seek out the things you want?



( SILENCE OF THE LAMBS: 51 icons! )

Dear Younger, Dumber Self,

You are not Douglas Adams. Therefore, footnotes that take up half the page pertaining to a single subject are not funny or clever, they are stupid and annoying.

Love,
Your Older and Slightly Less Dumb Self.