laleia

1. So there's this thing people do when the pairing they want to ship is in their fanfic, but is not in canon. Where they devote roughly five minutes of the fic talking about why the canon pairing is actually a recipe for disaster and would not work and ended in tears all around. They have to ruin the existing relationship in order to set up their OTP.

And sometimes, it's done well and subtly, and sometimes it's not, and sometimes I buy it, and sometimes I don't. I see this most often in breaking up Spock/Uhura for Kirk/Spock slash (though sometimes they break up Spock/Uhura for Uhura/someone else) and in breaking up Simon/Kaylee, most often for Mal/Kaylee (which grosses me out beyond belief; he is like her father). And I recently read it in a Steve/Danno fic detracting Danno/Rachel.

The thing is, I am so ridiculously picky and capricious about fanfic, and so I hate this whole canon-pairing-ruining thing (except for the one or two times it's done in a manner I am okay with -- I do not judge it based on whether or not it was done ~well~ or ~realistically~ but on whether it was in done in a way that was acceptable to my plot preferences). Part of this is because I tend to ship canon-pairings in a non-fanatic way, which is to say I'll read non-canon pairings as well, pairings that contradict my non-fanatic ships. If you start your fic off by insulting my non-fanatic ship, however, even if I'm not fanatic about my shipping, I'll be Seriously Annoyed.

But the thing is, even when it's a pairing I ship, I'm starting to get annoyed. Like, I ship Shikamaru/Temari pretty rabidly, but when they spend half the fic explaining why Shikamaru/Ino doesn't work, I'm over it. You don't have to bash Ino for me to ship Shikamaru with Temari.

2. Okay, but even if people don't address existing canon relationships when they set up their OTP, that annoys me too. Like I said, I'm weird. A perfect example of this is: I ship Viktor/Hermione. HP canon has the Ron/Hermione endgame.

Fanfics annoy me when they:

a.) Paint Ron as an abusive asshole (he's not)
b.) Paint Ron as an idiot (he kind of is, but not to the extent that fanfics will demonize him)
c.) Have Hermione cheating on Ron (I don't do infidelity)
d.) Handwave the whole thing like Hermione and Ron never got together (they did! it's canon!)
e.) Have them just randomly break up.

Which means that I don't read Viktor/Hermione fic anymore, because it is like my mind is a giant Catch-22 and I can no longer find fics that satisfy my Viktor/Hermione fic requirements.

3. I read this very well-written AU fanfic that I didn't at all enjoy because even though it was a very detailed Pirate AU with lots of wonderful stuff, BUT. ALL THE WOMEN CHARACTERS WERE PROSTITUTES. Seriously? All your men (but one) are fun-loving pirates who roam the seas and all your women are prostitutes? I do not approve.

3a. I consider getting someone high on Pirate-era-version-drugs so you can convince them to join in an orgy ... nonconsensual. So I approved even less after that.

4. Sometimes I get really tired of all the slash and slash goggles that I feel like are EVERYWHERE and slash up ALL MY CANONS, but obviously this is because I choose to lurk/stalk/hang out in a very slash-prevalent corner of the Internet/fandom, and if I ever really ventured out, I would find myself overwhelmed by het. But I never do venture out because the fic out there is of variable quality whereas the fic I have here is all of superb quality.

And every time I think that, I also think, God, it would really suck to be LGBT and have ALL THIS STUFF EVERYWHERE be about heterosexual romances and have all the people up hetting up your slash and be so tired of it all and even when people do write slash it's all weird and not-right because they exoticize it and stuff which is part of the reason every time I start plotting long epic original fics that never get written, I always think, why does my heroine (because it's always a female character and never a male one because secretly every one of my original fics that never get written are giant self-inserts: what would I do if magic happened in my life and I were actually awesome and could deal with it instead of gibbering in terror which is what I would do in real life?) have to have a male love interest? Why can't I have a female love interest? If not for her, then for someone else in my story?

And that's why my blatant self insert main character in my NaNo 2010 fic has a male and female love interest, even though I was iffy about sharing it with anyone because even though I enjoyed writing the love triangle, I thought that people might look at my blatant self-insert character being bisexual and assume that I was, and then I was like, well, why do I care if people think that? And I'm only probably heterosexual (I think I would have to go on a date or some other normal human social activity to be certain of this) (Who knows, my friends could be right and I could be asexual) (But I feel that if this were true I wouldn't be secretly reading so much pr0n on the Internet) (But real sex does sound so messy and not worth it so maybe I'll skip it for the entirety of my life) (Wow, I really hope nobody has made it this far and is actually reading all of my insecurities out on display).