[ SECRET POST #5189 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5189 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 50 secrets from Secret Submission Post #743.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I will take 2nd Person POV over 1st any day of the week. It's trickier to pull off but most people who can't pull it off don't do it. Everyone thinks they can write 1st person and uh...no. They can't.

[(Anonymous)]

see and I can't 2nd person because "you" is supposed to be "me" and most of the details in the story are not in any way reflective of me as a person so it instantly takes me out of the story. "Your breasts heave with every breath" yo I do not have breasts get out. 1st person at least is someone telling their story from their perspective. I don't have to like their perspective, but I can at least grasp that they're telling me a story. It isn't as meta as 2nd person.

[(Anonymous)]

Exactly. Even though I know it isn't literally me (unless it's a Character/Reader fic, which I just can't read at all), it still feels jarring at first. It can work in short experimental fiction but only there.

(Or if it turns out that it's in second person for a cool twisty reason like in Harrow the Ninth).

[(Anonymous)]

DA - Another vote for 2nd person being the worst.

The only context where 2nd person sometimes works for me is in poetry. Richard Siken uses it a fair bit, for example, and for me it works because the things he is describing are raw and devastating, and also, often, deeply personal, so you implicitly understand that the narrator has to dissociate from what they're saying in order to tell the plain truth about it. 2nd person, to me, is basically the trauma POV.

But I think that's about the only medium where I don't hate it.

[(Anonymous)]

I've used 2nd-person successfully (going by the feedback I was getting), but it is *definitely* a risky choice. Mostly I use it when there's a specific emotional effect I'm going for.

But... I've never tried to embody the reader? It can give a really intense character-specific POV, and sometimes I want that.

[(Anonymous)]

"you is supposed to be me" is a really bad take on the form. It's obvious that I'm not actually a pirate receiving letters from a dead lover, a mech pilot, the memory of a child, an estranged husband, a daughter preparing to eat her father in an elaborate mortuary ritual, or an immortal undead necromancer, or any other case where the "you" OBVIOUSLY refers another character with an intense and intimate relationship with the narrator (or even the narrator experiencing intense disassociation).

[(Anonymous)]

or any other case where the "you" OBVIOUSLY refers another character with an intense and intimate relationship with the narrator

See, I think this is a bad take. I don't think this is what's usually being implied by second person at all.

[(Anonymous)]

The times I'm directly addressed as a reader is limited to cookbooks, discussion posts, and political screeds. Never published fiction.

[(Anonymous)]

I recognized one of those references!

I think you're right, but I also think you and AYRT are coming at AYRTRT's comment from opposite sides and missing each other in the middle: some people can pull off 2nd person really well and it's awesome when they do, but those that can't pull it off rarely touch it (and the ones that can't pull it off are generally what AYRT replies, especially in fandom) versus 1st person is something that everyone thinks they can do, so they all do it and the same percentage does it badly.

TL;DR it's easier to seek and find good 2nd person if you're looking for it, but there's less of it, and harder to find good 1st person because there's more of it.

[(Anonymous)]

The secret didn't say anything about fanfic, and it takes a particular form of egoism to use one's taste in fanfic to be a shit about perfectly good (sometimes great) published work.

I find lots of good 1st- and 2nd-person work, maybe because I follow reviews, follow good authors, and don't pick my reads from the Amazon algorithms.

[(Anonymous)]

DA - Aren't you special and just oh-so-more-refined than the rest of us? Of all things to do some kind of weird hipster flex over...

[(Anonymous)]

DA

As someone who enjoys 2nd POV (character x reader) type of fics, i get this, but at the same time, i never actually see the "you" as me. I always see the "you" as some sort of character or avatar, that if generic enough you can project yourself onto, but I really just take it as a bit more immersed 3rd person pov story.

Because I know "you" may decide it's a great idea to prove "yourself" to the MC by joining them in battle after they told you to hide, but ME (I) would listen and GTFO since I have no skills and will likely endanger everyone else lol. So i always see it as a more immersive version of an OC x MC story than a "self insert". I'm also the type of person who yells at characters as I'm reading or watching something, so I'm always smh at "you" and all their poor decisions.

I've only ever read one or two 2nd pov published fiction books and it wasn't bad, one was scifi and choose your own adventure style so it was interesting, and despite being a used book, i still felt played out of a dollar.

[(Anonymous)]

Personally, I hate 2nd person, but I also hate reader-insert fics. They're the antithesis of what I want from fanfic.

I can totally understand how, if one is into reader-insert, then 2nd person has a very distinct purpose and function, and is basically necessary.

I feel like the venn diagram of People Who Hate 2nd Person and People Who Like Self-Insert Fics is basically two separate circles.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

Yeah, in most cases, 2nd POV is a necessary function for Reader insert fics -- I like 3rd POV OC fics -- that again, the way I tend to read reader inserts and OC/MC fics is the same, they're both essentially the same to me (perspective being the only difference and the character having fucking name! I can't stand the blank spaces or F/N -- a lot of writers I've been reading lately can't stand it either and have gotten creative about the name situation).

I can definitely see if you dislike 2nd POV, reader inserts are just gonna fly/will be avoided like the plague lol

[(Anonymous)]

Sure, but since reader-insert fanfic rarely makes its way into published fiction, it's not really relevant to the secret, is it?

There are some really great uses of second person these days beyond the self-insert: parodies of "help" text and support, confessions where the narrator is trying to explain their actions to another, in-world storytelling, epistolary stories. I've seen stories where second person is used as a way to flag the existence of significant identity disassociation and gender dysphoria because the POV character struggles with thinking of themselves as a real person. I read a really creepy medical horror story that combined lobotomies with zombie horror, and the "you, the medical subject" was extremely effective.

But I never get the impression that the "you" in those stories is a middle-aged person reading a story on a Kobo.

[(Anonymous)]

We're talking about second person, which isn't, in itself, particularly relevant to the secret, is it? Who cares?

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, second person is hard, but because it is hard, it's self-selecting. Usually people have to have *some* skill if they're even attempting it. First person is what I defaulted to when I started writing in grade school, before I was even aware that different POV styles existed.