It's time for another peeve post

[estepheia]

If this will make me unpopular, so be it. I have to vent. Please do not feel insulted. It's nothing personal. Whatever floats your boat, etc.

Hunging season is open. Here's a list of words and expressions that I'd rather shoot myself than use (although I may have used them in my younger days...)

* chocolate orbs traveling the angular planes of his face
* cerulean orbs
* velvety orbs

What is it with those orbs? The only orbs I like are real objects. And the chocolate. Chocolate eyes? a) read it so often that it makes me gag, b) has a horrible eating vibe which doesn't go well with eyeballs. Eeew.
'Cerulean' is a nice word, very pretty. So is 'blue.' But we do know that Spike's eyes are blue, so maybe just maybe we don't need to be told every second sentence. Same with the hair-color. Which means that constant use of 'the blonde' is just as out.

* Spike's soft hair - Oh please. After twenty years of bleaching? You wish.
(There is a brilliant story by Zero that deals with the fact that even Spike has his imperfections and is on some level just a guy)

* childe - noooooo please. As a real parent I find the vibe off-putting. Makes me think of small kids, not of sexy vampires. The whole concept of vicious killers turning into cuddly poppa-bears for their adored childe makes me cringe. (However I *do* see different emotional ties when the vamps are souled)

* sable hair - Ask me what Nicholas Brendan's haircolor is and I sure as hell won't say sable. *snort*

* beautiful - a word to be used with care. How about 'handsome', 'good-looking' and 'attractive'?

* pulsing - in conjunction with certain parts of the male anatomy I think 'throbbing' is the nicer image. Just saying.

* baited breath - shouldn't that be 'bated'?

*sucking - a lovely word used to describe what mouths do. Not so great for other orifices. Anataomically impossible too.

I used to love the badfic thread at TwoP. *Sigh* I never got into the habit of visiting its new home. Sometimes I wonder if mikelesq shouldn't resurrect it here. Sometimes I even wonder if I shouldn't quote a few paragraphs of truly horrible writing, but I don't really feel like offending someone.

Oooh, maybe I can do it behind cut tags. Do not read if m/m smut offends you. Do not read if you think pointing out bad writing is mean. But if you do read it please tell me, is it just me or does this really suck? Is this so-called purple prose?



"Slowly, Spike raised his body until only the bulbous head of Angel's cock remained inside him. Watching those velvety brown eyes flare with gold as Spike slid down again joining them together again was nearly Spike's undoing. Angel's eyes were held mesmerized as he watched the place where his body joined Spike's. He stared as Spike rose again; seeing his hardness bathed in his
Childe's blood disappear into that hidden reasure once again."

later:
"Over and over, Angel slid his way home into the only place he felt truly alive. Inside his beautiful childe."
Wickedly Delicious by Amy.

Comments

[mpoetess.livejournal.com]

You're assuming that everybody's main intention is to specifically change the behavior of badficcers. (Or potentially good writers who just need that push towards getting a beta, etc.) It may well be so for some, but for some, it's just a rant to blow off steam. For some, it's a discussion topic that they'd welcome opposing arguments to, because they enjoy the back and forth of trying to convince people that they're right. Even if it's the same back-and-forth, from the same types of people.

Hence my pointing out that the back button and the scroll wheel exist for folks who are tired of such discussions, just like they exist for those of us who are tired of badfic. The difference here is that those of us who are tired of badfic are at least talking about something specific -- bad *things* in fic, bad trends, opinions on pet peeves. Something that could possibly be contstructive. We're not -- most of us anyway -- tearing down specific fics and telling those authors that they shouldn't be wasting their time posting. While there's a couple of y'all -- who seem a bit like you popped up here with an agenda -- who are essentially telling Estepheia that she's wasting her time posting, and specifically annoying you. So I don't think my comment about your delete key is hypocritical in this case.

In answer to your actual point -- do I think targetting individual writers with suggestions for improvement would be more constructive than posting occasional public lists of things that annoy me? (Not that I usually do the second; I'm just defending Stef's reasons for doing so.) No, I don't think so. I think they're about equally constructive, for different reasons. Sending feedback to specific authors -- which a lot of us do anyway -- is helpful for those specific authors, but it doesn't let the general public know what annoys some readers. So under your model, there would always be more specific authors to say it to -- and time wasted on small, ridiculous stuff that we could be using to say "I loved your storyline and language, but I thought the Angel characterization was a bit wonky here..."

There's a reason, for instance, that when someone sends an OT post to the fic-only list I co-mod, we always send a mod/warning both to the individual, and to the list. A personal one for the individual, and a note to let the list know that such posts aren't acceptable -- otherwise the one person won't do it again, but everybody else on the list wouldn't know that yeah, we're serious about the fic-only rules. I'm not implying anything ridiculous like "I or Estepheia think we're good taste fic-mods for the world" -- I'm just drawing a parallel in the reasoning.

[(Anonymous)]

You said:

You're assuming that everybody's main intention is to specifically change the behavior of badficcers.
_________________

Nope. I'm addressing the reason Estepheia specifically gave me.

As for the rest? You win. You sucked all the life out of me. I have lost the will to argue. Good job.

- Birdie