[ SECRET POST #6722 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #6722 ⌋

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


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[Severance]



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[Cinderella's Castle (musical)]



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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 35 secrets from Secret Submission Post #961..
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

[fscom]

03. https://i.imgur.com/VbTi5Jr.jpeg

[iff_and_xor]

And not just Southern US accents. There’s a clear tendency to over-use “unusual language markers” in fic. I see it for all kinds of accents, dialects, and linguistic idiosyncrasies (especially goddamn pet names).

Is there a term for this phenomenon? I guess it’s the same general thing that happens when a character eats something in canon and then subsists off only that thing in fanfic.

[(Anonymous)]

I wonder if there's a term for it, too - something more specific than a literary device crutch or similar.

I once beta'ed a fic where I had to (REPEATEDLY!!!) tell the author that the custom of afternoon tea in the UK didn't start until like... the late 1800s? So no, people in medieval England didn't sit down in the afternoon with a plate of scones, clotted cream and jam, cucumber sandwiches and pastry with a big ol' pot of tea because THEY DIDN'T DO THAT BACK THEN. British people today don't sit down and have scones and tea every single day, who's got the time for that? We're both Americans, but she had it in her head that British people = afternoon tea every day, and it's like her brain refused to compute that this wasn't necessarily the case. I think she was just reaching for a "hmmmm, how to show readers that the characters are British????" query and that's all she could come up with.

[(Anonymous)]

Maybe it's an offshoot of what TVTropes calls "Flanderization"?

(https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Flanderization for those who aren't familiar)

[(Anonymous)]

Heh, sort of Flanderization of a culture, I guess? I've seen "British people drinking tea all the time" as a complaint of American-written fanfics in Sherlock fandom as well as Harry Potter, so it tracks.

[(Anonymous)]

The only people over here that can do afternoon tea on not just llthe weekends are retired pensioners, otherwise the rest of us are too busy working or they have kids to look after lol.

[(Anonymous)]

Absolute worst case I can think of: Scotty and Chekov in fanfic.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, people can overuse dialect in writing. A little goes a long way, and in most cases, I'd say that authors should just leave it alone. By all means, if someone is speaking with a French accent, then say that and write their dialogue normally. The reader can imagine how that sounds in their head, no need to torture them by trying to write it out phonetically.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah. And I think it's much more effective for people to explore sentence structure than to add dialect markers. Different people use different words and arrange them in different ways to express the same meaning, and if you pay attention to that, then you can convey a character's "voice" perfectly well without having to literally write out their accent.

[(Anonymous)]

Agreed. But that's probably harder for most writers, which is why they go for the silly accent.

[volkameria]

I tend to be more forgiving of this in fandom than in original canonical material for accents and dialects. I remember being a younger writer not sure how to make a character sound like themselves so would use the language marker as a crutch - especially if they only had one or two lines.

However, there's an officially published book I'm reading now where most of the characters are Scottish, and half the chapters their dialogue is written like "Ye' kin go a'er th'way, I cannae'" and the other half it's written like "You can go over that way, I cannot." and that is egregious.