#this wound up being a lot more about vibes than specific tropes oops

[snickerdoodlles]

ellebeesknees replied to your post "choose violence ask game except its just me complaining about fic tropes..."

☕☕☕.

ooooh three bitchy opinions 👀 okay so, not really a trope but:

authors who are snide towards canon

this one is kinda hard for me to describe, but you know those fics that have a line that Makes A Statement about something in canon and the tone of it is just bitchy? or just any sort of vibe where the author clearly thinks they're Much Better than the actual show writer? sighs.

we've all had that phase in fandom where we hate read/watch something and then bitch about it online but my god am i glad to be over that bullshit. if you don't like it here, you don't have to be here! there's nothing making you stay! I've noticed the trend that if the author's a snide cunt about canon, they're inevitably going to be a snide cunt about some canon thing i do like, and i don't need that in my life. you can disagree with/change canon choices in a way that doesn't automatically put down anyone who does like what canon did, and you can't do that if you're going to be smug and superior about what you do or what you don't like. canon is a sandbox and if you're not here to have fun, please go to a different sandbox where you will have fun, it'll be much nicer for everyone.

spite fic

similarly: i have negative patience for spite fic. what's the fucking point of spite fic? if you only participate in spaces you don't like, you're never going to find the stuff you like or convince anyone in those spaces to change their minds, you're just going to piss everyone off as you trample on their toes. i'm a little steamed thinking about this because of the debacle of people trying to start fights in tags, but overall its just so childish and exhausting. again: why are you here if you aren't having fun!!

like i said above, there's a way to...hmm, dance? with stuff you don't like that still comes from a place of love. like, personally! i do not like Macau & Chay friendship! which is a different post, but fandom largely likes to smash the two of them together for some reason and i Don't Get It. so i avoid that tag, but i wrote interior design with the sort of playfully-antagonistic dynamic i would love to see more of between them. but like, my point was "hey, has anyone considered how funny this would be" and never at any point "the other way people write them is WRONG." because it isn't wrong, it's just not my cup of tea. i'm rambling, but tl;dr- anything tagged with "spite fic" or is spite fic in vibes has me rolling my eyes and scrolling by, no thanks.

fix-it fic

okay so like. i don't automatically click out of anything with this tag, but i'm very leery towards it. my joy in fandom is exploring all the "what-ifs" of canon and canon-divergence is such a fun playground, but i've gotten...really, really frustrated with the fix-it fic tag over the past few years. a lot of fix-its revolve around "what if x choice never happened" scenarios and very often the answer to that is "this significantly more boring y result happened instead" and meh. generally, i find it more interesting to work with things that happened in canon than to just banish them, so anything starting with the premise of just erasing something is a hard sell for me.

for example! after kinnporsche ep4 dropped and the spurt of ~fix-it~ fic that dropped so that either kp didnt fuck or it was fully consensual or whatever. it just...missed the entire point of why it was narratively important, or stripped Porsche of the agency he did have during that scene, or missed the point of how Kinn can't ignore the power imbalance between them. i'm not going to ramble more on the meta about it here, but it felt like a bunch of people clutching their pearls and more anxious about making some fictional guys ~unproblematic~ instead of digging into the story the writers were trying to tell. plus, KinnPorsche as a ship minus the power imbalance or the tension of their circumstances is a much more boring story to me, so my inclination is to just scroll by anything wanting to avoid it.

another example of fix-it fic i hated was after good omens s2 came out, a bunch of people rushed to write ~fix-it fic~ where Aziraphale didn't go to heaven or it turned out ~he was drugged all along~ or anything that didn't have Aziraphale and Crowley splitting at the end. even a lot of the literal story metas dropping at the time were theories on how Aziraphale wasn't actually leaving Crowley or he was literally being brainwashed/drugged into it somehow, and it was just like. hmm. the s2 end was the natural build-up of the story (all???? of s2 was them miscommunicating or trying to find their new purposes in the world???) (also: in all trilogies, the 2nd story ends on a cliffhanger, that's How You Write Trilogies) and like. blah, idk, i get how the natural instinct is to want some comfort food after the bombshell, but the good omens tag (on AO3 and even tumblr in many ways) was impossible for me post s2 because i was really excited about their divorce and all the ways to dig into that split, but everywhere i turned was about turning the wheel back to erase it. bleh.

anyways, overall, nothing wrong with fix-it fic, but it's usually easier to just assume anything with that tag is not a story i'm interested in reading.

...reading back and the tl;dr of this post is that i find it more fulfilling to play in a sandbox i like and take all canon choices in good faith to work with lol

[ send a ☕, get a bitchy* fic opinion ]

*personal opinion, I'm not going to be mean

#this wound up being a lot more about vibes than specific tropes oops #but yeah #canon can absolutely make dumbass decisions but i still think you find more interesting stories if you consider the implications or ways to #work with it versus outright banishing it #i care more about the story canon's trying to tell than the story fandom wants it to tell #.........okay now im officially veering into salt territory lol SHUSHING NOW 😂 #i still dont know how to tag these uhh #tea asks #???