fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #5298 ]

[ SECRET POST #5298 ]

⌈ Secret Post #5298 ⌋

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

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[Ferris Bueller's Day Off]

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 06 secrets from Secret Submission Post #756.
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.

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05. https://i.imgur.com/TK3EThU.jpg

I get you.

I understand it. I only hate it when grown men are written like teen girls. Yeah, I know this sounds reductive, but 99% of male lead characters don't talk about their feelings for ten pages.

Totally agree OP, it is deeply tedious. Perhaps it's a result of getting older myself, or getting into a fandom where the main characters are older men, but I don't remember finding myself so bothered by bad characterization in the past-- but now, I basically can't read any fic in my fandom because my favorite character is the preferred target of this infantilizing. I think a lot of writers struggle to understand that there is a difference between a character being portrayed as "less intelligent" and a character acting and speaking like a child.

I also get so weary of the "talking about our feelings for 10 pages" trend. I really think this is a response from a newer fandom mindset of "give all the characters therapy/everything would be resolved if they just talked" that might be satisfying for some, but creates the opposite of an engaging story for me. Sure, there are some problems that could be avoided by talking openly, but that doesn't mean all characters would do that in all situations-- just because it "would be best" for them doesn't mean it's believable that they would.

That's not new. Old school slash was full of that.

Hence why I said maybe it's a result of my own getting older, or my fandom changing to one with older characters-- not saying it never existed, I was just musing that maybe I wasn't in the right fandoms to see it or I was too young to realize how teenage a lot of melodramatic writing sounds.

Imo some people just like reading characters having in depth conversations about emotions

And I think that is historically a huge mainstay of fanfiction as a medium

Agreed with your last paragraph so much. There's this one fic in my fandom where the characters work are working through their issues in a believable, in-character manner while still having an external plot and it's incomplete. Which is really annoying because I feel like I will never see that again.

Yeah this has been an issue in most of my recent fandoms, the ones with any size to them at any rate, where people will take grown-ass, often very flawed men, and then turn them into weepy little babies who can't tie their shoelaces without breaking down? If I ever see the 'anxiety' tag I turn the other way, it's an instant recipe for the worst most horrible OOC tripe ever.

I genuinely hate it and can't understand how anyone finds it fun. I like my faves getting affection and care, but I cannot take the constant crying and babying like they aren't the competent or even ruthless people they are.

And even with male characters that do express their emotions more openly, there's still a way to do that that doesn't turn that into the sole defining feature of who they are. Some of the shows I watch do have men who will cry openly sometimes, and who are more open to expressing and discussing how they feel about things, and so on and so forth. Which is great! That's part of what I like about them as characters.

But even then, they don't act that way EVERY time they're under some kind of stress, or in a dangerous situation, or whatever. And they won't act that way around every single person they encounter, either. There's naturally going to be some people they feel more comfortable being vulnerable and emotional in front of than others, and there's still going to be some things they'll be reserved about even around people they trust and are close to, for a whole host of reasons. There is a balance there, and yeah, it does seem a lot of fic writers either have a hard time finding that balance, or just don't bother trying to explore and find it at all.

Absolutely. There's still ways to do it well and I feel most of the time fandom's just... don't? They want excessive whump, which alright, but I cannot say I'm interested what a lot of a given fandom will put-out in that regard. It's not 'emotional' or difficult, it's just melodramatic dogshite that's worse than your average soap opera.

If the characters actually were 13 I'd probably still hate it, lmao.

AYRT

It's not 'emotional' or difficult, it's just melodramatic dogshite that's worse than your average soap opera.

Mmhm. I especially find those kinds of stories amusing when the characters already have more than enough trauma in canon and the fic writers just want to keep piling more on top of all of that, instead of, y'know, just exploring their struggles that already exist. But no, apparently, in some fic writers' eyes, those characters haven't suffered nearly enough.

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(Anonymous) - 2021-07-09 15:30 (UTC) - Expand

I get you. I recently got into this pairing where one half has some particularly heavy emotional baggage and GASP cried in canon. So now a few artists/writers tend to turn him into a uguu super emotional flower boy which is seriously annoying. Yeah, he's traumatised but he's not a baby ffs
Kind related but this week I found out that age regression doesn't mean characters physically turning into kids for cute interactions, but mentally. Imagine my shock when I read the part where the character above wet the bed and started acting like a baby oh my god it killed something in me.

Agreed. If Tony Stark is screaming at other characters like a teenager in a tantrum, I’m hitting the backbutton so fast. (That’s just the first example that comes to mind.) I hate it when fics have characters “screaming” at other characters. Use “shouted”, use “yelled”, use…anything else. Unless your character is screaming in pain or fear, having a canon adult character “scream” at another character just makes them sound like a hysterical teen.

When a grown man is upset enough to really scream at people everyone around them is like 😳. So it really throws me off too when people use that word because nobody writes the other characters doing that.

Good Omens fandom is rife with this. When the characters are 6000 years old, you're not even infantilizing adults, you're infantilizing immortals. WHO CAN LITERALLY SNAP THEIR FINGERS AND CHANGE ALMOST ANYTHING AROUND THEM.

I miss the old omens fandom. There was a minuscule amount of fic but there wasn't much of the cartoon writing that i now have to wade through.

Yupppp, so much Crowley woobifying. Which like, Crowley undoubtedly has trauma in his past, let's explore that. But he's also an immortal demon and he probably doesn't need to box breathe to fend off panic attacks.

A lot of it is definitely writers working through their own shit via comfort characters, which is fine. The back button is easy to find.

I can enjoy some woobification and I'm completely fine with owning that, but there is definitely a point where it becomes way too much, or just a way for it to be done that makes me nope out immediately, and yeah, it has a lot to do with whether the character comes across like an adult or not.

Whump them, make them an angsty mess, make them flounder emotionally, I will eat it up like candy. But the way they behave outwardly has to be believable to me, and having them behave like a literal child (or melodramatic teenager) is not believable to me, even for the most emotionally stunted adult characters.

When it comes to adult fic writers who write adult characters behaving like children, I kind of assume it's one of those Id-y things where deep-down the author would love to be able to sob out all their insecurities and get tucked into bed and coddled and taken care of, but they can't, so they have a character do it for them. I assume both the people who really love this trope and the people who really hate it are comprised largely of people who never felt able to express themselves emotionally and be taken care of as children/teens. That said, I have no idea why some people fall in one direction while others fall in the other.

I assume both the people who really love this trope and the people who really hate it are comprised largely of people who never felt able to express themselves emotionally and be taken care of as children/teens

Oh my god it's shitty writing, not some sign that those of us that hate it have ~childhood trauma. Christ.

Um, ayrt didn't say anything about childhood trauma. A less than perfect childhood does not automatically equal childhood trauma calm down. Interesting that you jump immediately overt defensiveness though. God forbid we ever dare to theorize about why we feel what we feel. *eyeroll*

nayrt

If you feel like you were never taken care of as a kid/teen, it's not unreasonable to suggest there was likely neglect, abuse or absence on the part of the parent, which I'm pretty sure qualifies as trauma.

why on earth are you trying to pathologize why some people hate dogshit writing?

We all have reasons why we like and dislike the things we do. Calling the act of speculating about why we like and dislike what we do "pathologizing" is pretty OTT, IMO.

The secret is already speculating about why people who like this trope like it. I guess that's fine with you as long as nobody turns the lens around? As someone who very much dislikes this trope myself, I find that baffling.

If someone hates something trivial, IMO there is almost always a reason for it, beyond just "thing is qualitatively poor." We dislike things that we find bad; hate, though, is a lot of emotion to summon up for something completely impersonal, inconsequential, and easily avoided.

The good news, anon is that it is entirely your prerogative to disagree with me. In fact, you will find that everything I said I prefaced with "I think" or "I assume."

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i have a love/hate relationship with woobification because i mostly agree with you but ill still read fic like that just so i can mentally go wtf?

OMG, yes. In my current fandom, a large proportion of writers absolutely love woobifying, infantilizing and (with cis men characters) feminizing them beyond all recognition. I would really love to read more stories about the characters acting and interacting how they actually would. The canon is right there to use as a guide! Ugh.

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