yukie | Entries tagged with write like a grownup

…I’m really tired of these bingbongs just sticking one toe-tip in the pool and then crowing that they are totally Olympic swimmers.

vidya gaem broskis are especially bad about this and usually so are their stans. they throw around all of this rhetoric that’s supposed to be snappy and witty and make them look all grown up—but really guys I need to tell you that I saw the exact same behaviour back in high school from Liefeld, McFarlane and Moore fanboys. grasping for your youth in the form of trying to relive/revive the heyday of the so-called dark age of comics all over again isn’t gonna make you look like anything but old farts trying to be hip and with-it.

you’re not saying anything new. you’re not saying anything worthwhile. you’re flinging around buzzwords and just BARELY superficially scratching the surface of all these DEEP AND TROUBLING REAL LIFE ISSUES that you’re claiming to address. you’re making shallow wangst-pr0n; you are not creating anything that is actually “adult” or “mature” or “gritty” or “realistic”. you’re splicing together a fuckload of action scenes and random shockjockery from whatever source you can get your grubby little hands on and proclaiming it Oscar material.

you get the picture, right?

you are not doing anything that matters. you are not producing material that matters or has meaning. you wave around the HOLY SHIT GRYMMDARQUE banner in the vain hope that we’ll be distracted by it and not see that the product ultimately has no substance, or has been halfassed and rushed to death, or is a complete fucking mess.

and maybe right now you have the accolades of your stans and yes-men but they are fickle as fuck.

tl;dr if you’re going to bring GRIPPING REAL LIFE ISSUES OMGZORS into your work, spine up and address them properly. do not just randomly pitch heavy stuff like addiction and bigotry and discrimination into your work to make it GRITTY AND GRIM AND EDGY but not fucking bother to address these issues or resolve them.

if you’re gonna be a coward about heavy stuff, don’t bother trying to handle it. you fail. either spine up and follow through, or sit down and shut your face.

(standard disclaimer: this isn't about anybody here. :3)

(I wrote these last night on tumblr in a fit of blargh and am reproducing 'em here because why not XD Also I am kind of ridiculously proud of the Plotty Illidan Smiley that appears within the rant, to wit-- }:D)

( teal deer )

Dear fanfic authors,

If you've acknowledged that XYZ Fantasy Race is coded in a way that is just Orientalist as balls, but you STILL opt to characterize them in fanfic as just this side of Ming the Merciless/Dragon Lady/Discount Jafar, you have only done half the blasted homework and need to go back to the editing desk right now before I bite you a lot.

Smooch smooch,

Someone who's really tired of people depicting WoW elves in ways that are at the root just racist (yes, it still counts if 'Elves' = 'Generic Pop-culture Stereotype Asian/Middle Eastern lololololol'), gross and issue-laden as fuck.

I mean--writing a compelling love-to-hate antagonist who's well thought out and whose portrayal is NOT steeped in grody old bigotry? Awesome. Feel free to have Fandral be as big a douche as you like, it gives your heroes a reason to fight. But there is 'douche' and then there's 'oh for fuck's sakes why did you do that'. If your villain up and starts sprouting all these Fu Manchu/Dragon Lady/Evil Vizier-esque traits that are indicated fuck-nowhere in canon, there's something going on that needs addressing. That is not interpretation anymore, that is Issues.

Srsly don't do that shit it's hacky and makes my ass twitch. :D

Okay, just to clarify...

If an author pulls any of the following shit over and over and fucking over again, I am highly unlikely to like them or any of their work.

1) Gross dumbass gender bullshit--be it taming-the-ice-queen or lady-is-a-prize or vomitworthy essentialist crud or fucky double standards or punishing someone for ~not knowing their place~ etc.
2) Normalization of abusive behaviour/victim blaming--be it that 'boys will be boys' fuckery that basically insults everybody male ever, that 'oh but they're just STRESSED' backhand crap, passing off emotional manipulation as normal etc.
3) Dunderfuck anti-LGBTQ etc. bullshit, no matter what the fuck it is.
4) More-equal-than-others shit where it's okay for the hero to be a dickyacht just because s/he's the hero and therefore any sketchy shit s/he pulls is handwaved or excused.
5) Unexamined clueless shitbrained attempted parallels to real-life situations, without any examination of the hangups that can make this go horrifically wrong and/or make this get ragingly offensive.
6) Stereotypical fuckery relating to ethnicity and culture. This encompasses the 'this one person represents their entire culture teeheez' shit, model-minority issues, and often crosses over with the humans-are-white crap that is so very very tiresome.
7) Ableist shit. This encompasses just about anything you can think of lol--the PWD naturally being evil, evil albinos amg zamg, the idea that illness or disability is a just punishment for something (see also: the idea of ~generational curses~) or that a disability is an outward manifestation of inner badness, and the usual cackhanded treatment of mental illness and of issues relating to addiction.

No, I cannot ~*just look past this*~. The older I get, the more and more it leaps out at me. And? I was taught to hunt this kind of thing down in my own work (my advertising prof was very big on not repeating past grossness) and burninate it with vigour--repeatedly if necessary. I can't help but see it now. And to see it so often in the work of quote-unquote professionals, and see it go unexamined, and see it perpetuated by people...well, that gives me rabies XD

And now you know why I skim most WoW novels and refuse to use certain authors' characters and make up my own instead, and why a lot of mainstream popular media makes me want to bite things. ;p Whee!

And! Yes! I know everyone has ingrained issues and such, because Society Is Deeply Hosey And Issueladen and we all pick up nonsense without realizing it much like socks picking up lint. The key here is whether or not you're onto yourself and examining why you did XYZ Thing. I screw up a lot, I am no paragon, but I do take the time to consider what the heck I am doing and why. The authors I get annoyed with very obviously skip this step and think everything is just hunky-dory wall-to-wall and it's ~just~ a book or a comic or something.

Well. I do not agree with that assessment. Intent isn't magical, if you elbow someone by accident it still hurts etc. Summing up--I'm gonna quote my prof here: it's rare that a piece of media is 'just' a piece of media. Everything comes from somewhere.

okay seriously

authors?

if you are trying to depict addiction recovery of any kind, you need to look into what 'dry-drunk syndrome' entails. (no, that is not a pejorative term, and anyone who uses it thus is doin it rong. it's a descriptor. bear with me, i'll splain.)

also you need to not present this kind of behaviour as virtuous/good/ideal/healthy.

it's not.

it's not good for the person in recovery and it's not good for their loved ones.

cessation of the actual substance abuse is only the beginning of things, okay?

the behaviours described as dry-drunk syndrome are a sign that someone is not doing the mental homework necessary to recovery. they've stopped drinking alcohol/taking drugs, but they haven't done anything ELSE, whether out of thinking quitting is enough or out of not knowing WTF to do or something else...either way, they've stalled.

so sometimes they act like sanctimonious judgemental holier-than-thou douches, and sometimes they throw huge pity parties that last ages, and sometimes they're snarly and dickish as hell, and sometimes they get into these THOSE WERE THE DAYS~~~~ nostalgia fits that drive everyone around them up a wall tl;dr it's disordered behaviour, it's not healthy, it's not good, it's not a sign of strength of character--and conversely it's not a sign that they are innate magnum douches who fail at life. it's a sign that somebody in recovery has gotten stuck in a rut and is spinning their wheels and needs a boost.

i've heard people say that someone in recovery basically goes through the stages of grief, and from what i've seen--yeah, they do. someone engaging in the disordered behaviours and thinking that get called dry-drunk syndrome are stuck in a rut in some phase or another preceding acceptance.

again, this kind of behaviour doesn't mean someone is a bad person, or a failbox, it just means they're in a rut and prone to driving people around them nuts lol and in need of support/counseling--and it should absolutely not be upheld as ideal or virtuous or healthy, because that's enabling bullshit and i will elbow drop the BALLS off of anybody who proclaims that this behaviour is good for people. kthxbai.

if you're gonna depict addiction recovery do your homework or i will bite your knees off.

this rant brought to you by stupid sheltered ignorant people's depictions of addiction recovery, esp. dealing with WoW characters of various sorts. :P

Current Mood: annoyed

Dear writers:

Please remember that there is a lot more to passing as a different gender than wearing the right clothes. Like, a LOT more. The idea that all a woman has to do to be seen as a guy is wear a tux and drop her voice a bit? Yeah, sorry son. There's more to it than that, and it's more than a little naive and offensive to assume there isn't.

( on passing, gender roles, clothing, and tropes )

Current Mood: determined

I know I've ranted about this in short form in the past but I've finally got a full post's worth of material about it now!

Hokay, so. MIND TALENTS! They've been around in literature and stuff since way, way before Spock made his debut on the scene. My first encounter with them in fiction that I can remember was - okay. In books, it was Monica Hughes's The Dream Catcher and then again in Madeleine L'Engle's A Wind in the Door. On TV, it was that old 1990s X-Men cartoon (hey shut up, it was fun XD) and Counselor Deanna Troi. It's The Dream Catcher that's really the inspiration for how I write societies of people with mental talents; I wasn't really a Trekkie although I have a tone of friends who are. I don't doubt there's some Vulcan influence in my work too - but I digress.

The point of this post was not navel-gazing, it was how to write or RP mental talents in a way that doesn't annoy the bejesus out of people.

This is all my opinion, of course, and I know my way isn't the only way, but the examples I'm about to give are largely in the category of 'this is how NOT to do it well'. Discussion's more than awesome but pls refrain from talking to me as if I were a mentally defunct jumping bean XD

Of course every universe has its own rules; the examples I've given are from my own games and writing and from stuff I've seen myself. These deal with characters who have control over their gifts for the most part.

ETA: It occurs to me that I totally left out any stuff about n00bs. A n00b psychic is prolly going to get an eyeful of brain by accident OFTEN and end up flailing around because they would rather not have seen that dude thinking about that thing that time. This can ALSO be RPed or written annoyingly (along the "OH TEH MELODRAMAZ AND TEH WANGST AND TEH SORROEZ, and so on" lines of things) but for the most part I've dealt with developed psychics, so it's them I'm rambling about mostly. I'll likely deal with n00b psychics at a later date. This is principally about psychics who can control their stuff.

( words omg~ )

Current Mood: dorky
Current Music: Kikuta Hiroki - High Tension wire

Cut because of somewhat NWS subject matter. XD

.... ffff. and today in 'ur doin feminism stupid, holmes' - dear would-be next great bestselling author lady, if you're trying to present youself as progressive and stuff... ( [discussion of girl anatomy beyond this point!] )

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yukie

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Page Summary

Basically (she said, crosseyed from benadryl)...
WoW: LONG RANT IS LONG and uncapitalized lol
Pro tip:
Blerf
wharrgharbl
Sort of a long and rambling rant
On Telepathy and Empathy and other YAYBRAIN talents in fic and RP
Hahaha what

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Scaramouche, Scaramouche

Will you do the Fandango?

Entries tagged with write like a grownup

Basically (she said, crosseyed from benadryl)...

WoW: LONG RANT IS LONG and uncapitalized lol

Pro tip:

Blerf

wharrgharbl

Sort of a long and rambling rant

On Telepathy and Empathy and other YAYBRAIN talents in fic and RP

Hahaha what