Who let the jackals out on fanficrants?

[matrixrefugee]

WARNING: Major ranting here....

Second time in a week. I go on fanficrants to vent about the sheer number of fics that push or at least poke my squick buttons in a particular fandom, and I get jumped on for it. I admitted to not being comfortable with "A Knight's Tale" slash and people come back with stuff like this and this and This or especially This. The other time it was people jumping on me for being uncomfortable with incest fics in the "Supernatural" fandom, but I took that rant down because I felt like a fight was breaking out and I didn't feel like ending up on Fandom_Wank *again*. I thought this was a community where you could air out your fanfic griefs and get a certain amount of support, not get stomped on for not being "OH KEWL!!!!!1111" over certain fics/types of fics/pairings. I go through periods when I'm not comfortable with slash, or I just don't like seeing it in a certain fandom. I don't know why I get this way, but it happens. I'm not asking people to agree with me, I just want to find a safe, non-judgemental place to vent and have my fannish feelings respected. I just feel like, God forbid anyone should want gen or -- quelle horreur!!! -- het fics. [/sarcasm] They're just shy of acting like those wankers who get all "U R TEH H0M0PH0BE!!111111" if you're not comfortable with certain slash pairings. Unfortunately, it's people like this who only cause my discomfort with slash to get worse, and then I start getting uncomfortable with explicit het fics and sometimes with romance at all. Does every fic have to involve romance (all right, I admit to writing romance fics myself, but I try to make it more about the characters and their relationship with each other and less about the hormones)? Does every character have to be paired off? Is it at all possible that some characters might be straight or even asexual?!

Comments

[beckyh2112.livejournal.com]

*snuggles* I generally find that complaining about pairings on FFRants isn't worth the time to type up the post. There's always someone who will take "I dislike or am uncomfortable with" x pairing as an excuse to rant about just way that pairing is good and wonderful and that you're just EV0L!!!!1! for not loving it and you must be taught the error of your ways!

Someday, I shall take up the issue with them of twincest - there are limited places where I can handle it (Transformers), but other places where it's just SQUICK (Harry Potter).

[matrixrefugee.livejournal.com]

I just don't do incest at all: it reminds me too much of some horrible things that happened in my extended family. ::Returns the snuggle in gratitude::

[beckyh2112.livejournal.com]

*snuggles* I accept incest in Transformers, because they are giant alien robots. I honestly get confused when people are squicked by TF incest, because for the most part, it doesn't register to me as incest.

[matrixrefugee.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I can see it working like that: who's to say that AIs of various makes might not have completely different standards of conduct than humans do?

[beckyh2112.livejournal.com]

I have been known to say that one certain construction TF doesn't sex up his creations, but that's a) completely fanon, and b) probably in the societal context means he's a little nuts. Not that incest is normal, or anything, but just that he'd rule out a small subset of the population because he had built them.

But yeah, different standards of conduct. I'm inclined to say they don't register that sort of thing as wrong or as even worth noticing. (Though, I don't know, certain subsets, like military teams built together, might be encouraged to feel that way about each other.)

[crowdog66.livejournal.com]

You're right, not every character has to be paired off, much less homosexual. ;-)

Sorry the folks over at fanficrants are being such shitheads.

[matrixrefugee.livejournal.com]

Laurie, sometimes I think you're the voice of reason among slashwriters, and I mean that as a compliment! :8^D

And man, I'm running out of place to vent about my fanfic woes. First GAFF, now FFRants... Got any suggestions where I can vent, or should I keep posting my rants in the relative safety of my personal LJ?

[--flood.livejournal.com]

Every time you write a fiction with Flood doing sexual actions, a baby subroutine dies.

*sneer*

I get your drift though. Earlier I saw your comments on A Knight's Tale; I can't say I am way into the fandom of that film -- it was certainly entertaining...

But the pairing off of Geoffrey Chaucer with made-up film characters is rather lame. I wonder if the fangirl writers are even aware of The Canterbury Tales.

[matrixrefugee.livejournal.com]

::Hides the drafts of several fics she *was* working on, only to lose all taste for them. Maybe the slash-discomfort debacle is good for something after all...::

In MxO canon, Flood at least has a significant other; one of his communiques during one of the missions I ran a while back had this funny line: "Make haste and I shall have time for a quickie -- er, quick bite. Yes... that's it." I read him as a "metrosexual", one of those straight guys who are fussy about their looks. And considering how good-looking he is, I bet the ladies are all over him... at least until his employer shows up.

Hm! I like your point about people pairing Chaucer off with made-up film characters. I guess that makes them RPS (real person slash) and any fics involving real persons are forbidden on ff.n. ::Evil plot begins to form...::

[--flood.livejournal.com]

Heh. Yes. I'm in a debacle myself over Star Wars fan fiction.

I'll shift OOC for good here, I'm rather lazy and half asleep.

Fan fiction is like this for me -- I'll write some. Then I find covens of sickos and proceed to feel bile come up... The Internet is full of weirdos. Many of us (everyone posting on your journal, I AM SURE ;-) ) write FF, RP, just for fun. It's all fine and good. Some people publish, some don't. Some have characters as headspace dwellers. I daydream a lot, myself.

It's an ESCAPE! But some...ehh, they cross a line of some sort and here I go again, wanting to find a bag. =/

[matrixrefugee.livejournal.com]

Remind me to tell you the story of the Three-Month-Long Smith Fanbrat Debacle... it's quite a horror story, but it's laughable looking back on it. What makes it even funnier is that the offending writer only half-understood how Agent Smith's 'mind' (what *DO* you call the information-processing aspect of an AI's essence? Their processor?) really worked, and when those of us who were well-steeped in the film trilogy-canon would point out where she'd come up horribly short, she'd go into conniptions over how good a writer she really was, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[he-dreams-awake.livejournal.com]

http://www.livejournal.com/community/fanficrants/1671942.html?thread=49587206#t49751302

[matrixrefugee.livejournal.com]

Heh! Thanks for taking them on for me, cher Un...

I guess I'm more like the Merv than I realize: I'm not too good at defending myself, but I manage to surround myself with people who are. ::Insert photo of the Merv surrounded by his well-armed guards... not that I look anything like Lambert Wilson, or even a female version thereof, except maybe the hairline...::

[he-dreams-awake.livejournal.com]

See my other comment to you -- Lord, I'm scatterbrained. But I'd go to bat for you anytime. That same person's been pissing off a lot of other posters, so far as I can see.

[matrixrefugee.livejournal.com]

Heh... that makes me feel a lot better... and at least I'm not being singled out by that one twerp...

[he-dreams-awake.livejournal.com]

Nah. But I still think they unnecessarily harshed you.


If you scroll through fanficrants, you'll find a rant on incest... and the OP had to edit it to address that same person.

[matrixrefugee.livejournal.com]

Nah. But I still think they unnecessarily harshed you.

Agreed. Too bad I deleted the post on "Supernatural" incest fics and all the comment emails for it (I deliberately disabled comment emails on one of my more recent FFrant posts, and changed the setting on the rant that gor slammed with "critic roasts", because I got sick of seeing "Get over yourself because you don't lile AKsT slash" comments jamming my inbox), because part of me is inclined to think the same troll pested me on that one.