askerian | (no subject)

jesus fucking dick.

you ever read an author who’s pretty awesome, but for one GLARING FAULT -- and you only notice it the first time because it’s egregious, but then you reread your old favorite and the scent of that same thing is hanging in the air? and then you read new fic and surely they have learned another way to plothook since the last horriblest example of nooooo not that idiot ball plot plz...

... and the fic is awesome!

for seven out of ten chapters!

bam.

i love vathata’s plots and the way she does crossovers and merges universes, and her love of little details and meta and research is so geekily fun but like

every single fic

there is a darling, and they have fun and badass stuff happens and the fic is fun, and then there is someone who gets handled the idiot-jerk ball and gets their characterization flattened down to the worst aspects and loses their ability to use any self assessment and break all their hypocrisy alarms that should be BLARING, and CALLOUSLY BETRAY the darling, so that the darling can be BETRAYED AND HURT and give them a lesson but ultimately grandly forgive them. after they have crawled some and been Very Sorry.

why does she always do this.

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The worst for me is when it's a childhood/teenhood favorite, and then I go back after decades and it turns out to be unreadable. :( James Nicoll refers to this as "having been hit by the Suck Fairy".

yeah, that's bad too.

but goddamn, vathara has been told so many times about how frustrating and illogical and bad this kind of plot is, but it seems she has a goddamn kink for it and it's so frustrating because apart from that she's borderline epic. at some point i would have put her on laylah or roachpatrol levels of good writing. and she writes about monstruous transformations and inhuman mindsets and packbonding telepathy and other storytelling kinks of mine that i really really love that i can hardly find anywhere!!!!!

so. frustrating.

I have noticed this too, and it's why these days I prefer Vathara's fic in fandoms I don't know at all or only know glancingly through internet osmosis. The insulation of not having strong opinions about a canon and its characters means my reaction to the OOC fairy's visit is more of a dispassionate, "Oh, so Person X is the designated fall guy in this story and Person Y can do no (lasting) wrong," instead of an anguished, "But Person X isn't like that, dammit!!! (And neither is Person Y, seriously, let them be a jerk and/or make a mistake now and then)."

i thought i was safe because i don't know much about the mcu canon as i haven't seen all the movies.

then bruce banner stole a sample illegally off someone not quite human and emailed it to his girlfriend to be all like LOOK LOOK :D because he doesn't care about ethics because the not-biologically-human *person* who he stole the sample off of is FRIENDS with a FIFTEEN YEAR OLD dude who doesn't appreciate his niceish father and bruce had a shitty father and apparently never encountered anyone else to be bitterly jealous of, and it's only when his girlfriend answers all excited OMG YOU FOUND A VOLUNTEER that he remembers that maybe there are ethics concerns.

bruce. banner. the dude who's been chased all over creation by people who want to sample his body and toy without his consentment with it because he doesn't count as a human being to them. the dude who's dating a government-employed, very moral lady. the dude who's at least in his thirties?????

Yeah, that was just seriously WTF, especially since turning Bruce into a xenophobic amoral jerkass was in no way necessary for the plot! Having him be somewhat envious of Artemis for having an intact family and healing powers, and also being the voice of suspicion on the team, would make sense. Bruce has been chased around the world for years; if anybody has a right to be paranoid, he does. But he's also a kind man -- consciously so, as something of a reaction against his own father -- and as you say, he's very aware of medical ethics, depersonalization, and the consequences of experiments, because hello, he's THE HULK, so the taking illegal samples was completely OOC and upsetting.

I think Vathara was also kind of bashing Artemis's parents (but I can't say for sure, since I only ever read the first book of that series, and that was about... ten years ago, holy shit, where does the time go), but in that case the negative character emphasis did serve a plot function so it was a liiiiiitle less in-your-face about the Suddenly A Massive Jerk thing than what she did to Bruce. I can enjoy the story with the Fowl Family Trauma Congo, but I have to sort of mentally edit Bruce's medical ethics!fail out. And that's sad and frustrating, because she is a really good writer and should be better than that.

*headdesk*

I... honestly don't think I've noticed this?

Possibly because my attention is split between the fic and her twitch-inducing horrible Japanese, hahahahaha. I love her writing, but OMG. /o\ /o\ /o\

Wait, no, I think I know what you're talking about in the Bleach fic, at least... Bluh.

she did it with daniel and jack in her SG1/kenshin fics, tho not as noticeable, but daniel was her woobie and jack got to trample all over that and then crawl -- was still vaguely possibly ic i think -- and then she did it to katara and aang in Embers.

the thing is, katara *was* a suspicious aggressive jerk to now-nice!zuko in the series -- AFTER she had been nice and empathetic and he opened up to her and it looked like he might come to their side and then he sided with his sister and Aang almost got killed and she needed sacred water to even start fixing him and he still had chakra damage afterwards. but vathara made it so that scene didn't happen, but katara still acted like an unsympathetic suspicious bitch who no matter how many time was told a thing refused to accept the thing, and she made Aang's one white lie to avoid a silly war into Aang Is A Casual Habitual Liar Who Knows Damn Well He Shouldn't But Feels Like He's Getting One Over On People. and then they got told why it was bad or they were factually wrong, and then they just rejected the Truth in block and kept being all self righteous assholes for another turn or three.

and then there was a HUGE fucking deal made of how katara might need to be killed for accidentally influencing people's emotions like WOW scary dangerous betrayal (her own FATHER brought that up!) -- but zuko accidentally hooking people to fall in loyalty to him? the *dude who just got hooked* is like "nah it's fine" and that's the end of it.

that fic was otherwise awesome but the way she handled katara, aang and even sokka almost soured it all the way to me. what grated even worse was that only the characters who were sympathetic to zuko got to be Morally Right, and the only way katara and aang got to crawl out of the Evil Pit of Evil was to acknowledge that zuko was in fact fucking awesome and noble and self sacrificial and they had been wrong all along -- well no duh, who KEPT them wrong??? aaaaaarhghghg.

Ahhhh, I haven't watched Stargate, so I didn't see that, and I got like a third of the way through Embers before my brain fell out because toooooo many thiiiiiiings, hahahaha. I am not good at the twenty-layers deep political stuff, heh.

IIRC her Yuugiou stuff is pretty good characterisation-wise? A little harder to tell with the Kenshin stuff, because Kenshin Is Always Right is canon, especially the bits of canon she pulls from. Maybe she just likes the shounen hero trope, IDK.

Still, if it's OOC and a canon you're familiar with, damn but that is fucking annoying >(

I hate that too. I used to have a fic author that I really enjoyed... until I realized that not only did they glorify superficial attractiveness to the point where, being a normal, average looking person, I would have a really sucky life in this world, but EVERY SINGLE FIC had the cannon girlfriend be batshit superstalker insane, just so that the characters could be her OTP.

Mercedes Lackey used to be my favorite pro-fic author, but in the last several years she has also developed writing shortcuts that kill my interest. mainly, 98% of the book is just People Doing Things, with only the last few pages devoted to the climax, defeat of the bad guy, and resolution. In one of the worst, the characters went from breaking into the enemy stronghold to sharing the final group chuckle in about 1,500 words. In a 300 page book, that is unacceptable.

As for Vathara.... I love Embers, but I have always kind of skimmed the bits with Katara. Ignore her, and it is amazing! Aang is obnoxious, but I can kind of see, "Kid who typically flies off happily is not super aware that consequences are a thing."

As a teacher, I have seen this MANY TIMES. Kids whose parents are more focused on them staying happy often have only a glancing awareness of Cause and Effect. When effects are introduced to them... they often continue the way they did, each time being shocked and appalled when things are not magically smoothed over for them. Clearly, getting time out for hurting someone or making a huge mess (or defiance) means that you are Being Mean To Them.