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I hung out at the 3-Sentence Ficathon for a bit a while back, and ended up liking a couple of my fills enough to post the lot to AO3, so:
30 Sentences, feat. various micro fills for Hikaru no Go, Anne of Green Gables, Gunnerkrigg Court, Code Name Verity, Calvin & Hobbes, Harry Potter, Adventure Time, Homestuck and due South.
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Here is my latest fannish pet peeve. It's bothering me enough that I've started slipping passive-aggressive references to it into pinboard notes and conversations with non-fannish friends, so perhaps it bears saying so that I can, you know, stop:
I am so over AUs in which European characters are inexplicably American.
Obviously this all ties into the weird set of expectations and assumptions that we all have about what are acceptable changes to make to a character in an AU setting. Turn a rockstar into a librarian but don't change their surname. Turn a bunch of canonically adult characters into teenagers in high school, but don't change their ages relative to each other. Turn a human character into a vampire but don't change their freaking nationality.
I know that those are subjective lines, and that there are plenty of people who are bothered by none of those things, or completely different things that don't trip me at all. So I guess what I'm actually complaining about is the mindset that makes what is starting to feel like far too many people not tag or in any way signal the nationality change in the headers.
If you're writing One Direction, you can't just call it a bookshop AU and leave people to work out two thousand words in that the reason it's so badly britpicked is that it's a bookshop in freaking New York. If you're writing Les Mis, you can't just call it a Modern AU and expect people to understand by that that the reason none of the street names sound very French is because everyone is supposed to be Californian. I am not going to assume that Enjolras is American just because he's in a modern AU. That isn't a natural assumption to make! Paris is also a place that exists in the 21st century! And has university students and social justice clubs and cafes!
(All that said, I will freely admit that it hasn't actually bothered me much in the past when American or Canadian characters in historical AUs were inexplicably English. Hypocrisy, it's a beautiful thing? ... I think that it would bother me to read it now, though.)
Just ... tag it. Mention New York in the summary. Do something to warn me that if I want to read this fic, I'm going to have to read all of Louis Tomlinson's dialogue with a New York accent and nobody's going to drink any tea.
ETA: Just to clarify, as with all rants, the "you" here consists probably entirely of people who will definitely never read this.
30 Sentences, feat. various micro fills for Hikaru no Go, Anne of Green Gables, Gunnerkrigg Court, Code Name Verity, Calvin & Hobbes, Harry Potter, Adventure Time, Homestuck and due South.
____
Here is my latest fannish pet peeve. It's bothering me enough that I've started slipping passive-aggressive references to it into pinboard notes and conversations with non-fannish friends, so perhaps it bears saying so that I can, you know, stop:
I am so over AUs in which European characters are inexplicably American.
Obviously this all ties into the weird set of expectations and assumptions that we all have about what are acceptable changes to make to a character in an AU setting. Turn a rockstar into a librarian but don't change their surname. Turn a bunch of canonically adult characters into teenagers in high school, but don't change their ages relative to each other. Turn a human character into a vampire but don't change their freaking nationality.
I know that those are subjective lines, and that there are plenty of people who are bothered by none of those things, or completely different things that don't trip me at all. So I guess what I'm actually complaining about is the mindset that makes what is starting to feel like far too many people not tag or in any way signal the nationality change in the headers.
If you're writing One Direction, you can't just call it a bookshop AU and leave people to work out two thousand words in that the reason it's so badly britpicked is that it's a bookshop in freaking New York. If you're writing Les Mis, you can't just call it a Modern AU and expect people to understand by that that the reason none of the street names sound very French is because everyone is supposed to be Californian. I am not going to assume that Enjolras is American just because he's in a modern AU. That isn't a natural assumption to make! Paris is also a place that exists in the 21st century! And has university students and social justice clubs and cafes!
(All that said, I will freely admit that it hasn't actually bothered me much in the past when American or Canadian characters in historical AUs were inexplicably English. Hypocrisy, it's a beautiful thing? ... I think that it would bother me to read it now, though.)
Just ... tag it. Mention New York in the summary. Do something to warn me that if I want to read this fic, I'm going to have to read all of Louis Tomlinson's dialogue with a New York accent and nobody's going to drink any tea.
ETA: Just to clarify, as with all rants, the "you" here consists probably entirely of people who will definitely never read this.
