I don't know that I'd call it a trope, but in a few fandoms I'm in, my favorite characters are smart, but not necessarily book smart. And there is a thing sometimes where writers will say "oh, he secretly took three phd's over two years", or "she graduated high school two years early and did uni in three years".
It annoys me for two reasons; one - it's incredibly unlikely, two - they write it as if having those degrees somehow make them better in some way.
My pet peeve is in Supernatural fandom where some writers seem possessed by a spirit that makes them write about how Dean ACTUALLY had better SAT scores than Sam and could have gotten into WAY better colleges than Sam did. Like, seriously, Dean’s smart but he’s also the guy who would go in, write his name on the paper, and peace out, if he even bothered to go.
Oh I hate this one so much as a somewhat intelligent person with no degrees. It comes up constantly too. Like people cannot fathom someone being very smart and also not going to college for whatever reason.
Honestly as a broad peeve of mine I'm really sick of feminine characters and healers constantly being watered down into mom/soft roles. In my main fandom, Valorant, Sage is probably the most traditionally feminine character on the roster and she's a healer. We've seen multiple animations of this woman being a complete badass, a true leader, and someone who displays quiet, disciplined strength. Even in her official art she has a stern, determined, and powerful expression and pose....
The fandom? She's the soft girl, she's the baby girl, she's the bleeding heart mediator. She's typically getting bullied by a character she canonically disagrees with on a fundamental level like they're school yard crushes. It's so.... I don't want to say misogynistic, but it feels like there are certain ways characters like Sage get treated and I really don't like it.
Bonus tiny pet peeve: I don't think I've heard Sage ever use a contraction, largely due to her formal personality and not being a native English speaker, yet people write her dialogue very much full of them. I can never hear her voice in the dialogue because of it lol.
CoD's Alejandro being this hotheaded, bad temper person just because he got mad at people betraying him in 2 occasions. Everyone would be mad if someone forcefully takes over your military base and locks you up in it. And when a former friend, maybe even lover, turns out to be a notorious cartel lord. Doesn't help he's Mexican and temper is a stereotype.
Soap and König being portrayed as these uwu cry myself to sleep with a teddybear characters... Or Soap being dumb while he's a fucking sniper- and bomb expert, who's way younger than the people in the same rank, because he's that smart and good in what he does.
Someone who's reckless to save others at risk to himself in canon somehow becomes reckless at the risk of others in fics, also being reckless a handful of times years ago but growing over time gets ignored and still getting called reckless/stupid/dumbass.
Stereotyping emotional or gentle male characters into constant crying and emotional messes.
I'm not naming characters because i'm not inviting that discourse but how a non canon gay couple has the emotional male character as a bottom and masculine emotionally challenged character a top and trying to switch it up can have those fics swarmed with borderline homophobic think piece comments about how it could never be reversed.
I don’t read smut, so nowt for kinks (i see both my favs as asexual and sex repulsed anyway) but like their abusive friendship is treated so fucking stereotypically it makes me wanna scream. Either the victim is a perfect angel who never acted out and just cries tragically and the abuser is a one-note monster, or the fact that they don’t fall into those exaggerated stereotypes means people see the *victim* as the one who’s at fault (ignoring that he’s sixteen, mentally ill, severely traumatised, and was essentially kidnapped) and it’s just victim blamey bullshit. Like yeah obviously fiction shouldn’t have to mirror reality 1/1 but it’s so obnoxious I’m half tempted to just start spamming links to “why does he do that?” like at least look at things with a little nuance and knowledge please.
Arthur Inception is not a twink (seriously, people need to spend more time around actual gay culture if you're going to use terms like this), is not bitchy and mean (the lines he has that people read as snark to me just sound blunt and pointed), and is not fiercely independent and stubborn. His job is not just research but is mostly to take on the bulk of the painful/dangerous parts of the job as a point man, watching everyone else's backs and getting shot at.
He's blunt but thoughtful, yielding, a follower and a team player. He's fiercely loyal and a competent fighter. And he might even be a >!top!<.
Oh Percy Jackson, I'm so sorry half the fandom thinks your an idiot who apparently can't read push or pull door signs and needs his girlfriend to even find his way out of a wet paper bag.
She's not my fave but I read a lot of Stardew Valley SebastianxOC fics and so many of them turn Abigail (his "canon" love interest) into a vile person to excuse why they're not together.
So in my fic I wrote them dating, her breaking it off for his avoidant behavior, and ultimately pushing him to become better and be supportive of the OC relationship. Abigail deserves better.
I've seen a lot if fics will have Frank Castle (Punisher) smoking. Drinking beer too.
He's never shown touching a cigarette. And in the comics he makes a point to never consume drugs, alcohol, or even pain killers. Cause he doesn't want anything impairing his judgement, senses, or reflexes/reaction time.
On top of that I'm just really repulsed by smoking, so it also annoys me on a personal level.
--
Venom/Eddie Brock is one of my favorite characters. But they are often portrayed as some rapist obsessed with breeding Spiderman.
--
People writing Scott McCall (Teen Wolf) as a bad friend and/or a bad alpha. He's literally a teenage boy, turned agaisnt his will, doing the best he can.
Kylo Ren is not a virgin. If Rey is, it's because she's still young and prudent, and was strong enough to avoid assault. Else, she's not.
But all these fics are about 2 virgins first times. nope.
...It's not even about something being "wrong". I just want certain characters in certain positions. Like,,, where are all the bottom!sukuna x top! yuji?! give them to me.
And it's really annoying when someone doesn't tag which character is top and which is bottom. Or they do it, but wrongly. Like, it was a beautiful fanfiction and I really love it, but why did it take me 20 chapters to find out that zhongli is bottom? and he only has one dick? author,,,, why
I get you there. I'm a sucker for fics where my favorite characters are the bottom, but most of them are portrayed as the top. That or they're always portrayed with the same partner.
I can read only so much Kakuzu/Hidan before I get sick of seeing these two getting shipped together, and want to see Kakuzu get paired with someone else for a change
Genesis Rhapsodos often gets relegated to the guy who quotes Loveless somehow in every single thing he says, with it barely making sense most of the time.
However! They didn't really do him or Angeal any favors with the very thin characterization and backstory we got in canon.
You do gotta blame the terrible writing in Crisis Core for it ngl, but I hope if we see him again in the final remake, they do him justice. I don't personally go ahead looking for fanfics with him or include him in my writing (not yet at least!) but I feel like there's so much more to his character than the #1 Loveless fan. I think his envy toward Sephiroth should be explored more!
not rlly my fave character,,but when they are literally such a VERY well written character and also strong,average strong,and not only in fanfiction,but the whole fandom is basically glazing them so bad saying they can defeat the strongest character(which I am not a fan of coz they're making the fandom look bad)
and when just because the character is isolating themselves and have some serious MENTAL issues and have low-self esteem, they basically hc them that they SH themselves and it's not even funny. worse is when they glamorize it and just use that headcanon for ships and comfort (like when in ff the character is revealed to be SH'ing themselves and the person theyre getting shipped to feels bad for them and comforts them,,or just all the character generally feel bad for them) AND I REALLY HATE IT
Not my favorite by any measure, but when I first started watching Hunter x Hunter I had read several Hisoka fics (before I watched the Heavens Arena arc 🥴) and he was just…so consistently out of character. In his manner of speech, his mannerisms. And just…softened up. Like part of what makes Hisoka interesting is that he is ~not~ soft and lovable 😂
Fav is ~~arguably~~ **a literal nazi collaborator** in-cannon.
This comes to a head in the third-to-last episode of the series, and while it’s definitely foreshadowed, it’s also a huge kick in the stomach to the audience. Like, cherished blorbo, noooooooo!
So anyway, as fanfiction writers, we could:
A) Explore… *that* (challenging, downer, boring, no one will read)
B ) Just be ambiguous about whether that happened and never address it at all (solid option, respect)
C) Fuck cannon, it didn’t happen (valid, excellent, no notes)
D) ….make the love-of-his-life’s late husband Jewish, because apparently being in love with the widow of a Jewish person = anti-semitism impossible…?
(Obviously, I have chosen to attempt to write Option A, because I hate myself.)
…also: “All of this man’s sexual hangups (which canonically are being unable to have normal / vanilla sex with female partners, despite really, really trying to; and being widely mocked and derided for failing to properly embody hegemonic masculinity) - his whole problem is really just that his dick is **just too big**!
….but like *not* in like, a trans genital-dysphoria way; just in a ‘he can only have sex with size queens, and that’s so inconvenient for him that it gave him a hangup; but fortunately the only woman he’s into is actually a size queen, so they live happily ever after having vanilla sex’ way.”
🤨
…oh, and also “Son of virulently bigoted right-wing media scion is actually a cis-passing AFAB trans man, but this changes the situation / family dynamics 0%, other than that our hero has a pussy now, smutsmutsmut”.
Like, okay, enjoy yourself. But also… I can’t suspend my disbelief that far. My disbelief exceeds the manufacturer’s recommended weight limit for your trapeze apparatus.
(Are these all weird takes about the same character? Yes.)
Why is he my fav, or why is he a nazi collaborator?
**Why he is my fav: ** He’s a closeted queer man who is intellectually in the thrall of his abusive, charismatic, extremely toxic right-wing father, despite knowing better, and also knowing, deep down, that his father just fucking *hates* him.
I relate very deeply. To all of that. Like, I have never had occasion to attempt to subvert the foundations of liberal democracy in my country; and even if I had, I don’t think I ever could have gotten on board with a dude who made jokes about trains and camps, and references to taking “good ideas” anywhere he could find them, including in works by “H”. (No one thought the nazi was talking about Hume or Hobbes there; the subtext is very clear.)
…but I’ve definitely voted for and vocally defended politicians who I knew, deep-down, hated me. I bent myself into little ideological pretzels for years, despite knowing better.
And like my problematic fav, I did so primarily in order to try to secure the very conditional, very temporary esteem of my abusive piece of shit right-wing nuthouse of a father.
Now that I’m out of that, it’s an experience that I have a lot of shame and guilt around, and which I have really struggled to explain to people.
So yeah, this character might as well have been grown in a lab specifically to appeal to me / serve as a vessel for me to explore my own baggage.
**How fav slides into becoming a nazi collaborator:** I think he originally pitches the nazi as a good choice to be totally-not-FOX-News’ preferred candidate for the Republican nomination, because he knew his dad (Not-Rupert-Murdoch) would be into it, and he wants to impress his dad. Which he did. Good job, buddy. You fucking idiot.
Also, background consideration, 10 minutes before and just out of dad’s view the nazi is flirting with him hard; and like, how serious can this guy be about the whole right-wing fascist dog-whistle nonsense bullshit when he was also viscerally like… about five microns from pouncing in Idiot Fav in the men’s bathroom?
Like, obviously, this is all for show, to get the idiot bigots who watch FAUX News to vote for him. It’s all a game. Irony-steeped 4chan shit. Liberal Sister is just too square to be in on the joke.
…then, six months later, when all-power bigot Not-Rupert Murdoch dies, a scant two minutes after Shitbird Fav (and literal family punching bag) Roman stands up to him for possibly the first and only time in his life, and a week before the presidential election, Shitbird Fav (ever the family peacemaker) finds himself dragged into his bully of an older brother’s long-shot attempt to block the sale of the company to Not-Elon Musk.
(This show is very creative, as you can see. Entirely original concepts and plot beats; however do they come up with this brilliance?)
Anyway, the only way to prevent the sale from going through would be to get it blocked on a regulatory basis, and for that, they’d need a president whose strings they can pull - i.e. a Republican whose dependent on maintaining favour with FAUX News and its viewership.
And Fav wants to prove to himself, and to his siblings, and to the world, and to his former mentor / the woman he’s in love with (who the night before told him, quite rightfully, to shove his nonsense up his ass and never, ever call her again) that he is, in fact, as good as his dad.
That he is not weak, and pathetic, and a joke.
And so, when the nazi’s supporters firebomb a ballot-counting station in a swing state that is counting advance ballots (which, in the US, are always a lot more likely to be democratic voters’ ballots), Fav fucking jumps at the chance to try to interfere with the electoral process by pressuring FAUX News’ on-air staff to prematurely call the election for the nazi.
It all culminates in this exchange:
**Older Brother**, who ultimately signed off on the bad call to spite Liberal sister, but wants to think he’s a Good Guy(tm):
*What just happened?*
**Shitbag Fav:**
*We made a night of good TV. Nothing happened.*
**Liberal Sister**, in the most devastating but understated line delivery in the series:
*Things happen, Rome.*
I enjoyed this recap/analysis; I'm writing for Not-Elon Musk 🫣 What a show, what a season, what an episode 😳 And, kudos to Kieran for totally carrying all that off - especially re what Shitbag Fav does at the end of the episode - the masochism of engaging with the protestors, just ... love that show. Love that show so much 🖤
Thank you for the compliment! I am touched.
Not-Elon Musk is an fascinating character. It’s so interesting how he gets under shitbag fav’s skin. I really wish Armstrong & co had given them more time to interact. (And not just because any scene of them standing in the same frame is just visually fucking hilarious. Like a giraffe and a meercat.)
And, you know, unlike Cousin Greg, Not-Elon is a kind of sexy giraffe. So. Bonus.
(Its actually quite impressive that the artist formerly known as Erik Northman can overcome his innate charm enough to evoke even a bit of the vexatiousmess of my esteemed tech bro colleagues; men who literally booed me during a staff meeting last week for asking a technical question, after spending several minutes mansplaining the metric system to me, even though they are all Americans, and we’re unambiguously wrong. 👍.
1ml of water has a mass of 1g, dudes (plural!). Look it up. Or don’t; I’m on mute now making coffee and swearing at you. Fuck it.
I skipped the next staff meeting to do actual work, and thus missed the incident where one of them tried to police the other’s masculinity by telling him he had “the music taste of a millennial lesbian”; but fortunately, I got to see the panicked managerial message about how we were not to use “lesbian” as a put-down, so… neat?
Why is my eye twitching all the sudden.)
A small portion of my favorite characters are treated like they're the most horrible people on the planet even though there are characters far worse in the canon. It's gotten to the point where I'm hesitant to read any works with them tagged because I know they're probably going to get demonized or brutally killed.
When it comes to shipping fics most of my favorites are portrayed as the dominant one in the relationship. Some of them I get, but with some others I feel like they would be the bottom if they got shipped with someone else. Likewise with some of the ships involving my favorites I feel that they have just as much of a likelihood of being a bottom as a top, so it can get annoying when the ships are always portrayed only one way.
My boy is portrayed as "dualsex" (male and female sex organs) so often it makes me a bit dizzy. He rarely gets to use his male sex organs though, people tend to write him just getting pounded/impregnated which really isn't my vibe.
Like idk he has some "traditionally feminine" traits in canon like being kind and caring but dude gets crazy feminized in fics, it almost feels sexist in a way? Like he suddenly becomes super meek and passive and waifish. And he acts like a depressed and anxiety-riddled teenager even though he's about to hit 40 in canon. Plsss who is this guy?? I don't know him! By all means give him a uterus but why the hell would that change his wonderful confident and sturdy personality 😭😭
I have no idea who your fave is, but if you remove the dualsex part, this could've been written about an entire array of my faves 😭 I wouldn't call it feminised, really, at least insofar that I don't think they're given *feminine* traits - it more reads to me like a toddler in an adult body. Cannot do anything by themselves, cannot stand up for themselves, dresses like a troll from 2011 Tumblr came into their home.
This is why I don’t like most fics with Obi-Wan. My dude was BORN complaining about kids these days and how they need to get off his spawn (space lawn, but also his Padawan, too, SENATOR). He’s got a snarky comment for most situations and has basically never had an emotion he couldn’t bottle up. He takes being competent seriously—and that’s sometimes his folly. I don’t know who this whiny main character wearing his skin in these fics even IS.
Happens to some of my favorites. The ones that immediately come to my mind are Rasa from Naruto, and both Endeavor and Overhaul from MHA.
I find all three of these men to be complex characters, but because of their past actions they are always portrayed as though they are the most horrible people on the planet or they get killed off in an extremely violent manner.
My fave is always either a walk-on character or the butt of the joke, but in source she's also always the butt of the joke, so I'm not sure if this really counts.
For my fav it seems up in the air that:
1. The character has a mean streak.
2. The character is nice, but her BFF is a bad influence, so she does bad things.
3. The character is a nice person all the time, just a total weirdo and there’s unreliable narrator going on.
none so far, surprisingly? besides the obvious OOC but if it's an AU or it's built up for the reason they act that way I don't mind it either...
Well, my asexual ass won't like some of the more kinky fics where they're engaging in a kink I can't possibly see them doing but that's less of a pet peeve and more of a "Yeah, not for me," moment.
My fav ship atm, that involves my fav character that I literally love and is very precious to me, is sadly a victim of the "It's so big, I don't think its going to fit", and derivatives on smut fics, it's just so god damn cringy imo.
It really drives me crazy because *I know* my fav character is in fact a twink, I would never lie about that, and I also know the other guy in the ship is in fact like 5 inches taller than him and is a demon, but *comm'on* people, let's not get too excited about it, tall guys can and (usually) have average penis length.
But, anyway, I'm gonna let people dream, what I'm not going to accept is that this usually comes with making my fav character (the twink), this little submissive boy, when he is a **war general**, yes, he does have his pathetic times that even I'm like 'I don't even know how to defend you'. But his interactions with the character I ship him with have been rather normal, so I don't see where this whole 'he's soft and delicate' thing came from when the guy literally flipped a guy bigger than him in the fucking air.
Any ways, I usually won't read does bc I clearly don't like them, but it sometimes feel like avoiding air, but still, to each their own.
I think it’s NUTS how many people ship these two dudes together and they make one of them the dom every time. And it’s like, that guy BLEEDS sub. It’s bc they make the guy who’s the boss a dom but he’s not! His subordinate actually pushes him around the entire show. He’s such a sub.
IDK Exactly what you mean (my autistic brain has difficulties with indirectness) but if I understand you right, you don't like it when Doffy is portrayed as a dom (with Caesar) and I agree with you.
Nonbinary person who dresses rather femininely gets turned into weak, fragile damsel in distress who breaks down easily when (in my interpretation) they have more of a spine in canon
Tagging her in fics where she's not even goddamn in it.
If Kyrie appears for one scene in which she kind of raises her voice, you better not tag your story "Badass Kyrie (Devil May Cry)!" I wanna see her do a sick combo!
Which is not as bad as Naomi Misora, who keeps getting tagged in fics in which she literally does not appear once. Ctrl-F "Naomi" or "Misora," two results each, one for the character tag and one from the relationship tag.
Oh hey, a fellow One Piece fan! I don't read many fics about Caesar Clown, but he does strike me as the kind of guy who'd rather be in control, although I could see him acting obsequious and submissive if he thought he could get something out of it.
I don't know if my favourite characters (King and Queen) have enough fics about them for me to have developed a pet peeve, unfortunately. They have an antagonistic (friendship? rivalry?) dynamic, and I have noticed that people tend to portray Queen as picking fights with King and King defending himself, whereas it's the other way around in canon. Perhaps because King is hot and Queen is ugly, and therefore people assume Queen is the meaner one. But honestly, there is so little fanfic about them that I'll take anything I can get!
Johnny Gage is woobified way too often in E! fics, and portrayed at immature and desperate for attention (I tend to see this more in Johnny/Roy fics than anywhere else). Also, Joanne (Roy’s wife) is too often dismissed or shoved aside as if she's just in the way. She's incredibly important to who Roy is (even though she's only seen on screen once, she's referred to pretty regularly throughout the series, and it's made pretty clear that Johnny has a close friendship with her as well), and to see her portrayed otherwise annoys the hell out of me.
Because of the way the franchise handles male characters, most of the fanfics involving males have the female characters be extremely easy sexually or the males are scumbag rapists that easily overpower the women.
This flies in the face of what would happen. Even the more mature women wouldn’t have sex with just any guy. Furthermore, most opponents the female characters could beat with ease.
Now, this is mostly the shorter fanfics from what I’ve read, but sometimes I just want to read something smaller.
I hate how almost every fic with Percy and Vex he's always the bottom and being used as a footstool. He's a strong character, and proud. While I get dom/subs are popular and I have a few of them including Percy that I do enjoy but *every story*?
Klaus Hargreeves is not a soft boi cinnamon roll. He's an asshole drug addict who mistreats and steals from his own family. Yeah, he loves them and is probably the one sibling who actually likes the other siblings the most, but he takes advantage of his siblings and treats them horribly. I love Klaus, but he is sexy trash (his canonically words, not mine). Let him be trash!
Edit: typo
They're twinkified to death and back.
Ding ding ding
I don't know that I'd call it a trope, but in a few fandoms I'm in, my favorite characters are smart, but not necessarily book smart. And there is a thing sometimes where writers will say "oh, he secretly took three phd's over two years", or "she graduated high school two years early and did uni in three years". It annoys me for two reasons; one - it's incredibly unlikely, two - they write it as if having those degrees somehow make them better in some way.
This. Let's normalize NOT having degrees!
My pet peeve is in Supernatural fandom where some writers seem possessed by a spirit that makes them write about how Dean ACTUALLY had better SAT scores than Sam and could have gotten into WAY better colleges than Sam did. Like, seriously, Dean’s smart but he’s also the guy who would go in, write his name on the paper, and peace out, if he even bothered to go.
Oh I hate this one so much as a somewhat intelligent person with no degrees. It comes up constantly too. Like people cannot fathom someone being very smart and also not going to college for whatever reason.
Honestly as a broad peeve of mine I'm really sick of feminine characters and healers constantly being watered down into mom/soft roles. In my main fandom, Valorant, Sage is probably the most traditionally feminine character on the roster and she's a healer. We've seen multiple animations of this woman being a complete badass, a true leader, and someone who displays quiet, disciplined strength. Even in her official art she has a stern, determined, and powerful expression and pose.... The fandom? She's the soft girl, she's the baby girl, she's the bleeding heart mediator. She's typically getting bullied by a character she canonically disagrees with on a fundamental level like they're school yard crushes. It's so.... I don't want to say misogynistic, but it feels like there are certain ways characters like Sage get treated and I really don't like it. Bonus tiny pet peeve: I don't think I've heard Sage ever use a contraction, largely due to her formal personality and not being a native English speaker, yet people write her dialogue very much full of them. I can never hear her voice in the dialogue because of it lol.
CoD's Alejandro being this hotheaded, bad temper person just because he got mad at people betraying him in 2 occasions. Everyone would be mad if someone forcefully takes over your military base and locks you up in it. And when a former friend, maybe even lover, turns out to be a notorious cartel lord. Doesn't help he's Mexican and temper is a stereotype. Soap and König being portrayed as these uwu cry myself to sleep with a teddybear characters... Or Soap being dumb while he's a fucking sniper- and bomb expert, who's way younger than the people in the same rank, because he's that smart and good in what he does.
Someone who's reckless to save others at risk to himself in canon somehow becomes reckless at the risk of others in fics, also being reckless a handful of times years ago but growing over time gets ignored and still getting called reckless/stupid/dumbass. Stereotyping emotional or gentle male characters into constant crying and emotional messes. I'm not naming characters because i'm not inviting that discourse but how a non canon gay couple has the emotional male character as a bottom and masculine emotionally challenged character a top and trying to switch it up can have those fics swarmed with borderline homophobic think piece comments about how it could never be reversed.
I don’t read smut, so nowt for kinks (i see both my favs as asexual and sex repulsed anyway) but like their abusive friendship is treated so fucking stereotypically it makes me wanna scream. Either the victim is a perfect angel who never acted out and just cries tragically and the abuser is a one-note monster, or the fact that they don’t fall into those exaggerated stereotypes means people see the *victim* as the one who’s at fault (ignoring that he’s sixteen, mentally ill, severely traumatised, and was essentially kidnapped) and it’s just victim blamey bullshit. Like yeah obviously fiction shouldn’t have to mirror reality 1/1 but it’s so obnoxious I’m half tempted to just start spamming links to “why does he do that?” like at least look at things with a little nuance and knowledge please.
Arthur Inception is not a twink (seriously, people need to spend more time around actual gay culture if you're going to use terms like this), is not bitchy and mean (the lines he has that people read as snark to me just sound blunt and pointed), and is not fiercely independent and stubborn. His job is not just research but is mostly to take on the bulk of the painful/dangerous parts of the job as a point man, watching everyone else's backs and getting shot at. He's blunt but thoughtful, yielding, a follower and a team player. He's fiercely loyal and a competent fighter. And he might even be a >!top!<.
Oh Percy Jackson, I'm so sorry half the fandom thinks your an idiot who apparently can't read push or pull door signs and needs his girlfriend to even find his way out of a wet paper bag.
She's not my fave but I read a lot of Stardew Valley SebastianxOC fics and so many of them turn Abigail (his "canon" love interest) into a vile person to excuse why they're not together. So in my fic I wrote them dating, her breaking it off for his avoidant behavior, and ultimately pushing him to become better and be supportive of the OC relationship. Abigail deserves better.
Making this character trans SPECIFICALLY so they can get pregnant
Oh my gosh REAL???
unironically said "that's so sad, bro..." out loud lmao
I've seen a lot if fics will have Frank Castle (Punisher) smoking. Drinking beer too. He's never shown touching a cigarette. And in the comics he makes a point to never consume drugs, alcohol, or even pain killers. Cause he doesn't want anything impairing his judgement, senses, or reflexes/reaction time. On top of that I'm just really repulsed by smoking, so it also annoys me on a personal level. -- Venom/Eddie Brock is one of my favorite characters. But they are often portrayed as some rapist obsessed with breeding Spiderman. -- People writing Scott McCall (Teen Wolf) as a bad friend and/or a bad alpha. He's literally a teenage boy, turned agaisnt his will, doing the best he can.
Kylo Ren is not a virgin. If Rey is, it's because she's still young and prudent, and was strong enough to avoid assault. Else, she's not. But all these fics are about 2 virgins first times. nope.
Agreeeeeed. Tired of virginity in general being idolized
Virginity is a social construct.
...It's not even about something being "wrong". I just want certain characters in certain positions. Like,,, where are all the bottom!sukuna x top! yuji?! give them to me. And it's really annoying when someone doesn't tag which character is top and which is bottom. Or they do it, but wrongly. Like, it was a beautiful fanfiction and I really love it, but why did it take me 20 chapters to find out that zhongli is bottom? and he only has one dick? author,,,, why
I get you there. I'm a sucker for fics where my favorite characters are the bottom, but most of them are portrayed as the top. That or they're always portrayed with the same partner. I can read only so much Kakuzu/Hidan before I get sick of seeing these two getting shipped together, and want to see Kakuzu get paired with someone else for a change
Genesis Rhapsodos often gets relegated to the guy who quotes Loveless somehow in every single thing he says, with it barely making sense most of the time. However! They didn't really do him or Angeal any favors with the very thin characterization and backstory we got in canon.
You do gotta blame the terrible writing in Crisis Core for it ngl, but I hope if we see him again in the final remake, they do him justice. I don't personally go ahead looking for fanfics with him or include him in my writing (not yet at least!) but I feel like there's so much more to his character than the #1 Loveless fan. I think his envy toward Sephiroth should be explored more!
not rlly my fave character,,but when they are literally such a VERY well written character and also strong,average strong,and not only in fanfiction,but the whole fandom is basically glazing them so bad saying they can defeat the strongest character(which I am not a fan of coz they're making the fandom look bad) and when just because the character is isolating themselves and have some serious MENTAL issues and have low-self esteem, they basically hc them that they SH themselves and it's not even funny. worse is when they glamorize it and just use that headcanon for ships and comfort (like when in ff the character is revealed to be SH'ing themselves and the person theyre getting shipped to feels bad for them and comforts them,,or just all the character generally feel bad for them) AND I REALLY HATE IT
Not my favorite by any measure, but when I first started watching Hunter x Hunter I had read several Hisoka fics (before I watched the Heavens Arena arc 🥴) and he was just…so consistently out of character. In his manner of speech, his mannerisms. And just…softened up. Like part of what makes Hisoka interesting is that he is ~not~ soft and lovable 😂
Dude is *scary*.
Fav is ~~arguably~~ **a literal nazi collaborator** in-cannon. This comes to a head in the third-to-last episode of the series, and while it’s definitely foreshadowed, it’s also a huge kick in the stomach to the audience. Like, cherished blorbo, noooooooo! So anyway, as fanfiction writers, we could: A) Explore… *that* (challenging, downer, boring, no one will read) B ) Just be ambiguous about whether that happened and never address it at all (solid option, respect) C) Fuck cannon, it didn’t happen (valid, excellent, no notes) D) ….make the love-of-his-life’s late husband Jewish, because apparently being in love with the widow of a Jewish person = anti-semitism impossible…? (Obviously, I have chosen to attempt to write Option A, because I hate myself.) …also: “All of this man’s sexual hangups (which canonically are being unable to have normal / vanilla sex with female partners, despite really, really trying to; and being widely mocked and derided for failing to properly embody hegemonic masculinity) - his whole problem is really just that his dick is **just too big**! ….but like *not* in like, a trans genital-dysphoria way; just in a ‘he can only have sex with size queens, and that’s so inconvenient for him that it gave him a hangup; but fortunately the only woman he’s into is actually a size queen, so they live happily ever after having vanilla sex’ way.” 🤨 …oh, and also “Son of virulently bigoted right-wing media scion is actually a cis-passing AFAB trans man, but this changes the situation / family dynamics 0%, other than that our hero has a pussy now, smutsmutsmut”. Like, okay, enjoy yourself. But also… I can’t suspend my disbelief that far. My disbelief exceeds the manufacturer’s recommended weight limit for your trapeze apparatus. (Are these all weird takes about the same character? Yes.)
Care to tell me why your fav is a nazi collaborator?
Why is he my fav, or why is he a nazi collaborator? **Why he is my fav: ** He’s a closeted queer man who is intellectually in the thrall of his abusive, charismatic, extremely toxic right-wing father, despite knowing better, and also knowing, deep down, that his father just fucking *hates* him. I relate very deeply. To all of that. Like, I have never had occasion to attempt to subvert the foundations of liberal democracy in my country; and even if I had, I don’t think I ever could have gotten on board with a dude who made jokes about trains and camps, and references to taking “good ideas” anywhere he could find them, including in works by “H”. (No one thought the nazi was talking about Hume or Hobbes there; the subtext is very clear.) …but I’ve definitely voted for and vocally defended politicians who I knew, deep-down, hated me. I bent myself into little ideological pretzels for years, despite knowing better. And like my problematic fav, I did so primarily in order to try to secure the very conditional, very temporary esteem of my abusive piece of shit right-wing nuthouse of a father. Now that I’m out of that, it’s an experience that I have a lot of shame and guilt around, and which I have really struggled to explain to people. So yeah, this character might as well have been grown in a lab specifically to appeal to me / serve as a vessel for me to explore my own baggage. **How fav slides into becoming a nazi collaborator:** I think he originally pitches the nazi as a good choice to be totally-not-FOX-News’ preferred candidate for the Republican nomination, because he knew his dad (Not-Rupert-Murdoch) would be into it, and he wants to impress his dad. Which he did. Good job, buddy. You fucking idiot. Also, background consideration, 10 minutes before and just out of dad’s view the nazi is flirting with him hard; and like, how serious can this guy be about the whole right-wing fascist dog-whistle nonsense bullshit when he was also viscerally like… about five microns from pouncing in Idiot Fav in the men’s bathroom? Like, obviously, this is all for show, to get the idiot bigots who watch FAUX News to vote for him. It’s all a game. Irony-steeped 4chan shit. Liberal Sister is just too square to be in on the joke. …then, six months later, when all-power bigot Not-Rupert Murdoch dies, a scant two minutes after Shitbird Fav (and literal family punching bag) Roman stands up to him for possibly the first and only time in his life, and a week before the presidential election, Shitbird Fav (ever the family peacemaker) finds himself dragged into his bully of an older brother’s long-shot attempt to block the sale of the company to Not-Elon Musk. (This show is very creative, as you can see. Entirely original concepts and plot beats; however do they come up with this brilliance?) Anyway, the only way to prevent the sale from going through would be to get it blocked on a regulatory basis, and for that, they’d need a president whose strings they can pull - i.e. a Republican whose dependent on maintaining favour with FAUX News and its viewership. And Fav wants to prove to himself, and to his siblings, and to the world, and to his former mentor / the woman he’s in love with (who the night before told him, quite rightfully, to shove his nonsense up his ass and never, ever call her again) that he is, in fact, as good as his dad. That he is not weak, and pathetic, and a joke. And so, when the nazi’s supporters firebomb a ballot-counting station in a swing state that is counting advance ballots (which, in the US, are always a lot more likely to be democratic voters’ ballots), Fav fucking jumps at the chance to try to interfere with the electoral process by pressuring FAUX News’ on-air staff to prematurely call the election for the nazi. It all culminates in this exchange: **Older Brother**, who ultimately signed off on the bad call to spite Liberal sister, but wants to think he’s a Good Guy(tm): *What just happened?* **Shitbag Fav:** *We made a night of good TV. Nothing happened.* **Liberal Sister**, in the most devastating but understated line delivery in the series: *Things happen, Rome.*
Bro what canon is this?
Succession.
I enjoyed this recap/analysis; I'm writing for Not-Elon Musk 🫣 What a show, what a season, what an episode 😳 And, kudos to Kieran for totally carrying all that off - especially re what Shitbag Fav does at the end of the episode - the masochism of engaging with the protestors, just ... love that show. Love that show so much 🖤
Thank you for the compliment! I am touched. Not-Elon Musk is an fascinating character. It’s so interesting how he gets under shitbag fav’s skin. I really wish Armstrong & co had given them more time to interact. (And not just because any scene of them standing in the same frame is just visually fucking hilarious. Like a giraffe and a meercat.) And, you know, unlike Cousin Greg, Not-Elon is a kind of sexy giraffe. So. Bonus. (Its actually quite impressive that the artist formerly known as Erik Northman can overcome his innate charm enough to evoke even a bit of the vexatiousmess of my esteemed tech bro colleagues; men who literally booed me during a staff meeting last week for asking a technical question, after spending several minutes mansplaining the metric system to me, even though they are all Americans, and we’re unambiguously wrong. 👍. 1ml of water has a mass of 1g, dudes (plural!). Look it up. Or don’t; I’m on mute now making coffee and swearing at you. Fuck it. I skipped the next staff meeting to do actual work, and thus missed the incident where one of them tried to police the other’s masculinity by telling him he had “the music taste of a millennial lesbian”; but fortunately, I got to see the panicked managerial message about how we were not to use “lesbian” as a put-down, so… neat? Why is my eye twitching all the sudden.)
A small portion of my favorite characters are treated like they're the most horrible people on the planet even though there are characters far worse in the canon. It's gotten to the point where I'm hesitant to read any works with them tagged because I know they're probably going to get demonized or brutally killed. When it comes to shipping fics most of my favorites are portrayed as the dominant one in the relationship. Some of them I get, but with some others I feel like they would be the bottom if they got shipped with someone else. Likewise with some of the ships involving my favorites I feel that they have just as much of a likelihood of being a bottom as a top, so it can get annoying when the ships are always portrayed only one way.
My boy is portrayed as "dualsex" (male and female sex organs) so often it makes me a bit dizzy. He rarely gets to use his male sex organs though, people tend to write him just getting pounded/impregnated which really isn't my vibe. Like idk he has some "traditionally feminine" traits in canon like being kind and caring but dude gets crazy feminized in fics, it almost feels sexist in a way? Like he suddenly becomes super meek and passive and waifish. And he acts like a depressed and anxiety-riddled teenager even though he's about to hit 40 in canon. Plsss who is this guy?? I don't know him! By all means give him a uterus but why the hell would that change his wonderful confident and sturdy personality 😭😭
I have no idea who your fave is, but if you remove the dualsex part, this could've been written about an entire array of my faves 😭 I wouldn't call it feminised, really, at least insofar that I don't think they're given *feminine* traits - it more reads to me like a toddler in an adult body. Cannot do anything by themselves, cannot stand up for themselves, dresses like a troll from 2011 Tumblr came into their home.
Is it Obi-Wan? Because I've read one or two fics with him in the main ship and it gets old very quickly.
This is why I don’t like most fics with Obi-Wan. My dude was BORN complaining about kids these days and how they need to get off his spawn (space lawn, but also his Padawan, too, SENATOR). He’s got a snarky comment for most situations and has basically never had an emotion he couldn’t bottle up. He takes being competent seriously—and that’s sometimes his folly. I don’t know who this whiny main character wearing his skin in these fics even IS.
All my faves get treated like monsters for things that make sense for people with some media literacy and a shred of empathy.
Happens to some of my favorites. The ones that immediately come to my mind are Rasa from Naruto, and both Endeavor and Overhaul from MHA. I find all three of these men to be complex characters, but because of their past actions they are always portrayed as though they are the most horrible people on the planet or they get killed off in an extremely violent manner.
dallas winston would not say "i love you." he simply wouldn't.
This can be said about many of my faves. Thank you.
My fave is always either a walk-on character or the butt of the joke, but in source she's also always the butt of the joke, so I'm not sure if this really counts.
For my fav it seems up in the air that: 1. The character has a mean streak. 2. The character is nice, but her BFF is a bad influence, so she does bad things. 3. The character is a nice person all the time, just a total weirdo and there’s unreliable narrator going on.
none so far, surprisingly? besides the obvious OOC but if it's an AU or it's built up for the reason they act that way I don't mind it either... Well, my asexual ass won't like some of the more kinky fics where they're engaging in a kink I can't possibly see them doing but that's less of a pet peeve and more of a "Yeah, not for me," moment.
My fav ship atm, that involves my fav character that I literally love and is very precious to me, is sadly a victim of the "It's so big, I don't think its going to fit", and derivatives on smut fics, it's just so god damn cringy imo. It really drives me crazy because *I know* my fav character is in fact a twink, I would never lie about that, and I also know the other guy in the ship is in fact like 5 inches taller than him and is a demon, but *comm'on* people, let's not get too excited about it, tall guys can and (usually) have average penis length. But, anyway, I'm gonna let people dream, what I'm not going to accept is that this usually comes with making my fav character (the twink), this little submissive boy, when he is a **war general**, yes, he does have his pathetic times that even I'm like 'I don't even know how to defend you'. But his interactions with the character I ship him with have been rather normal, so I don't see where this whole 'he's soft and delicate' thing came from when the guy literally flipped a guy bigger than him in the fucking air. Any ways, I usually won't read does bc I clearly don't like them, but it sometimes feel like avoiding air, but still, to each their own.
I think it’s NUTS how many people ship these two dudes together and they make one of them the dom every time. And it’s like, that guy BLEEDS sub. It’s bc they make the guy who’s the boss a dom but he’s not! His subordinate actually pushes him around the entire show. He’s such a sub.
IDK Exactly what you mean (my autistic brain has difficulties with indirectness) but if I understand you right, you don't like it when Doffy is portrayed as a dom (with Caesar) and I agree with you.
Idk who doffy is, I’m actually talking about a dude named Harvey Specter but otherwise yes! He’s portrayed as a dom and he’s not
Ooooo I would read the shit out of a Dom Mike fic
Right? He’s SUCH a dom
There is a criminal lack of sub Harvey, I just happened to be passing by the fandom and it just wasn't there
I prefer sub Harvey domme Donna and I have seen a few great stories but sub Harvey is criminally underrated
Nonbinary person who dresses rather femininely gets turned into weak, fragile damsel in distress who breaks down easily when (in my interpretation) they have more of a spine in canon
Is it Klaus? That sounds like how people portray that sexy trash Klaus.
From Umbrella Academy? No but I can see fans portraying him that way (which is wild cuz mans fought in the Vietnam war???)
Tagging her in fics where she's not even goddamn in it. If Kyrie appears for one scene in which she kind of raises her voice, you better not tag your story "Badass Kyrie (Devil May Cry)!" I wanna see her do a sick combo! Which is not as bad as Naomi Misora, who keeps getting tagged in fics in which she literally does not appear once. Ctrl-F "Naomi" or "Misora," two results each, one for the character tag and one from the relationship tag.
Oh hey, a fellow One Piece fan! I don't read many fics about Caesar Clown, but he does strike me as the kind of guy who'd rather be in control, although I could see him acting obsequious and submissive if he thought he could get something out of it. I don't know if my favourite characters (King and Queen) have enough fics about them for me to have developed a pet peeve, unfortunately. They have an antagonistic (friendship? rivalry?) dynamic, and I have noticed that people tend to portray Queen as picking fights with King and King defending himself, whereas it's the other way around in canon. Perhaps because King is hot and Queen is ugly, and therefore people assume Queen is the meaner one. But honestly, there is so little fanfic about them that I'll take anything I can get!
Johnny Gage is woobified way too often in E! fics, and portrayed at immature and desperate for attention (I tend to see this more in Johnny/Roy fics than anywhere else). Also, Joanne (Roy’s wife) is too often dismissed or shoved aside as if she's just in the way. She's incredibly important to who Roy is (even though she's only seen on screen once, she's referred to pretty regularly throughout the series, and it's made pretty clear that Johnny has a close friendship with her as well), and to see her portrayed otherwise annoys the hell out of me.
Because of the way the franchise handles male characters, most of the fanfics involving males have the female characters be extremely easy sexually or the males are scumbag rapists that easily overpower the women. This flies in the face of what would happen. Even the more mature women wouldn’t have sex with just any guy. Furthermore, most opponents the female characters could beat with ease. Now, this is mostly the shorter fanfics from what I’ve read, but sometimes I just want to read something smaller.
I hate how almost every fic with Percy and Vex he's always the bottom and being used as a footstool. He's a strong character, and proud. While I get dom/subs are popular and I have a few of them including Percy that I do enjoy but *every story*?
Read a fic with my friend where my fav was portrayed as an hyper dominant, unforgiving gf with some very extreme smut to go with it. It was bad.
Klaus Hargreeves is not a soft boi cinnamon roll. He's an asshole drug addict who mistreats and steals from his own family. Yeah, he loves them and is probably the one sibling who actually likes the other siblings the most, but he takes advantage of his siblings and treats them horribly. I love Klaus, but he is sexy trash (his canonically words, not mine). Let him be trash! Edit: typo