fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #6454 ]

⌈ Secret Post #6454 ⌋

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

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02. [WARNING for discussion of ableism]

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03. [WARNING for discussion of violence/gore/RL death]

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04. [WARNING for discussion of transphobia]

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05. [WARNING for discussion of transphobia]

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06. [WARNING for discussion of transphobia]

[Dr. Becky/YouTube]

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07. [WARNING for discussion of incest]

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #922.
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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Inspired by the GRRM incest secret.

When a repeated trope is beating up or torturing women in all of their books.

Killing off women for manpain. Looking at you, Alan Garner, literary giant.

When they clearly think their writing is better than everyone else and spend a bunch of time talking badly about other authors.

When everything is overly dark and gritty and bloody just for the sake of it. Especially when they clearly think that is more realistic.

When I find out they filed serial numbers off of their shitty fanfic. sorrynotsorry

It’d be one thing if those stories were good… but they’re not.

DA - I feel this. Whenever I find out some shitty book I've been struggling with was originally fic all I think is "yeah that makes sense."

Weirdly, I'd forgive it if they just admitted it was fic/borrowed. But I guess that gets messy if the original author/creator is still alive.

When male authors write male protagonists who are irresistble to all women.

The usual, really. Bigoted characters that the narrative doesn't treat as bigoted or proves out to be "correct," casually sexist heroes, characters that exist to be author mouthpieces and self-inserts, anything that isn't a white cis het man with conservative values being treated as Political in theme, etc.

The same things I dislike in a meta sense are the same ones that make me side-eye authors because they're the ones writing them.

Repeated tropes of violence against women or children. Or repeated trope of children in sexual situations (I’m looking at you, Steven King).

When authors write fucked up romances but glorify it or tend to intentionally write it as something good. There's nothing wrong with writing the dark erotica of your dreams, but most of those romances tend to play it straight with how fucked up it actually is/or make it so it's an obvious fantasy. Authors who don't ever acknowledge it or handwave it off always makes me side eye pretty hard.

Male writer doing a story with a male main character where the central narrative arc of the character's story is him trying to atone for and mature from past romantic misbehavior, with lots of writing about how bad and shitty the guy has been and how guilty he feels about it.

I think from now on, this is gonna be a straight-out red flag to me.

Is this about Rurouni Kenshin?

Ha, no, I never watched it.

The immediate top-of-mind example was Gaiman but I definitely don't think that he's the only example.

I feel like this applies to Shadow in American Gods (the book, never seen the show) but I can't think of any other Gaiman examples of this sort of thing?

Sandman

That's literally the plot of Sandman

Re: What makes you kind of side eye an author

(Anonymous) - 2024-09-07 07:01 (UTC) - Expand

(Anonymous) - 2024-09-07 08:12 (UTC) - Expand

how on earth does that apply to kenshin?

The author of Rurouni Kenshin was found in possession of CSAM.

(Anonymous) - 2024-09-07 15:09 (UTC) - Expand

When they write all their female characters very similarly, either in terms of physical characteristics where it's clear the author has a type and they're only interested in writing about women who fit that type. Or share very similar personality/role traits, like only writing women who are saintly mothers, hot girlfriends or hot potential hook-ups, killjoy wives who are there to harsh the hero's buzz, etc.

Bonus points for authors who write about underage young women and talk about how sexy they are.

this!

When a male author has diverse ensemble casts in most of his books, but the LGBTQ diversity always only extends to there being a pair of WLW who become a couple, and meanwhile all the male characters are explicitly into girls and only girls as far as we know.

I'm thinking of one specific author. I've never found a gender reversal of this (women who write M/M aren't the same thing, because the M/M is usually the main plot and it's not a repeated pattern of female characters who are just as important as MCs but all of them are straight) and if I did I honestly don't think I'd side-eye it. I make no claims of rationality.

I ended up quitting a Kirsty Logan book about 2 pages in for fat-shaming a child and just lost all motivation to end bother continuing.

Honestly, I kind of wish nothing made me side-eye an author, because I feel like the amount of reasons that people pressure each other to disapprove have gotten completely out of control. But, putting that aside, I read for me, and life is short.

So, I find myself disliking and quitting authors when:
-I find their stories boring
-the characters the book follows around are colorless, average, and everyman-ish
-(or conversely, when the author thinks telling us how to judge the action is as good as showing it and letting readers draw their own conclusions)
-they're overtly Christian
-they waste a lot of page-space on rewarding the good and punishing the "bad"
-the plot is paying lip service to some ideal in an entirely hypocritical (and often self-interested) way

Same. I skip anything overly religious because I feel it's a strong signal that the religious message will be prioritized over storytelling and everything else that matters to me.