fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2596 ]

[ SECRET POST #2596 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2596 ⌋

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

01.

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02.

[Star Trek: The Next Generation]

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03.

[The Croods]

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04.

[Elementary]

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05.

[Final Fantasy XIII]

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06.

[SCP Foundation]

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07.

[Philip Seymour Hoffman]

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08.

[Twin Peaks]

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09.

[Richard Armitage]

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10.

[Reign]

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11.

[The Hobbit]

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12.

[Hunger Games]

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13.

[Don't Hug Me I'm Scared]

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14.

[Teen Wolf]

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15.

[Panic! at The Disco/Dallon Weekes]

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 063 secrets from Secret Submission Post #371.
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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Writers , do you ever fear that something you intended to portray or insinuate in your work will be misconstrued by readers to either be seen is bad writing or "problematic" somehow? Feel free to talk about your worries here, and maybe someone else can give you suggestions on how to avoid it or just show you that you're not alone.

I've definitely worried about it, particularly with one story where the main character had some damaged views about sex and intimacy. I worried and worried that someone wouldn't pick up that the character's thought process was supposed to be off, but ultimately just had to hope.

"I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody."

- Bill Cosby

this is incredible. I needed to read that. Thank you!

EVERY TIME I WRITE SOMETHING OR DRAW A COMIC
every time
every single time
I have to sit there and worry about-- will this joke offend someone? Will someone be looking for a reason to be offended? Will someone read only this far, get offended, and not read on to learn how it plays out??

Because it has happened to me multiple times-- I create a character that is *supposed* to be a prude, who learns not to be a judgmental ass; a few pages in, someone decides that I must be a slut-shaming bitch and drags me for it. I make a joke comic about a character who is implied in canon to be a cross-dresser secretly trying on his female friend's dress, I'm a bigot.

Never try to be funny, that's the rule.

Actually, I've been worrying about this exact thing just recently...(highlight below to read, trigger warnings for incest and possibly insensitivity about disability)

Write it but don't make it trite. I almost always find that if you're serious enough about something most people will "get" it.

Also I would be blown away if someone actually presented a fan theory in that context. That's putting a lot of god damn thought and analysis into something.

As far as I know, disability as a result of one-off incest is actually quite rare. It's only common when there's generations of close intermarrying (eg European royal families in the past, or other royal dynasties where brothers married sisters for hundreds of years, eg in ancient Egypt).

I'm disabled and wouldn't find your idea terrible, as long as

a) The disability wasn't presented as a kind of punishment or divine retribution from God (and that characters who say anything of the sort in your story were clearly presented as nutcakes). This is a common comment that disabled people get all the time, even from people who seem quite rational and intelligent. Honestly, you wouldn't believe it. It's so staggeringly offensive.

b) It was clearly stated that incest-based disability is actually quite rare, and so it was just a very rare combination of bad luck that it happened.

Re: Inspired by secret #12

mimi-sardinia.livejournal.com - 2014-02-11 08:43 (UTC) - Expand

I wrote a fic once where... uh, long story short, but it was a slash fic, and one of the guys smacked the other across the face hard, in front of other people, to shut him up. And the guy doing the smacking has metal plated hands, so it wasn't just like a slap...

I kept thinking "well okay that makes him a total dick, doesn't it?" and... yeah, it does, and in real life I would not advocate anyone staying with someone who did that, but this is a pairing I've written for years and years, and I have NEVER insinuated that theirs is a HEALTHY relationship. It's messy and complicated and full of deception and insecurities and codependencies and fear and resentment, even if the core is strong. That's WHY I've been writing it for years.

Just, you know, no way to say in mid-story "By the way, this guy is not a role model. Don't act like he does, yo."

I know what you mean. One of my favorite relationships I've written goes from friends to sex partners to messy feelings and finally back to friends, and in the last half of it she tends to hit him a lot, hard. I worry about perception of that one, because in the end I do support their friendship, even though it's messed up. Given the setting and other circumstances, they're pretty messed up people.

Re: Inspired by secret #12

pantswarrior - 2014-02-11 01:25 (UTC) - Expand

I feel like plastering a disclaimer 'these guys are not role models!' on top of every story I ever write.

I sometimes even write them, but then decide it's too insulting to the reader and take them off.

Not really.

No, but I fear the day of publication when approximately half of any potential fanbase decides to jump all over my dick for daring to write a female character that a) has sex b) is a soldier/spy c) is either too feminine or not feminine enough, no matter how she is written.

That's a weird fear.

Re: Inspired by secret #12

herpymcderp - 2014-02-11 03:42 (UTC) - Expand

To be honest: not so much.

I often fear that I suck as a writer when I feel low, but for specific stories, if people tell me they like them, I believe them.

As for problematic writing. Well, GOOD. A lot of my original stories have people dying in unpleasant ways, and shitty people getting away with shitty things, because life is not a fairy tale.

As for fanfic, I'm pretty much fond of morally dubious characters, so I'm basically just going to assume that some people take offense at my stories.

I have a female character who I personally think is pretty cool,a kinda badass battle medic girl, who also happens to be protective of her older brother who has dated a few girls who mistreated him. She isn't stiflingly over protective but has no problems privately calling out a girlfriend who doesn't treat him well. This is far from being her only trait she is also interested in psychology and help some of their relatives in their big screwed up family by giving them advice and letting them vent.

I worry that people will see the fact that she defends her brother as sexist or problematic when I personally just thought it would be cool to have an inverse of the 'protective older brother" trope in which the younger sister defends her older brother. Or see the brother as problematic because "how dare you show a guy getting mistreated by women in a relationship".

Also it would kind of annoy me if readers construed the brother as a "manchild who can't take care of himself" when he actually has a logical reason for his dating problem, he was raised in a household with a mentally ill smothering mother , an alcoholic abusive father and a highly manipulative emotionally abusive aunt.

Also I worry that the protagonists' protective streak will be seen as sexist when it comes to trying to protect his friends (one is female) from his kind who has powers they don't.

Those are a few of my worries.

The "protective older sister" is a trope I don't think I've ever seen before. It would certainly be interesting to read!

I just really like it when writers take tropes that are gender-exclusive, and swap them. I think it would be really interesting to have more variety with female villains, and have some that are truly frightening and intimidating and have incomprehensible morals & motives.

Re: Inspired by secret #12

jaybie_jarrett - 2014-02-11 01:40 (UTC) - Expand

I don't know if this helps you at all, but I can tell you from a RL perspective that there's probably a reason this isn't common in fiction: IRL I tried very hard to be a protective older sis, but it backfired when, the second my back was turned, whoever was giving him trouble would pile on extra hard because "you need your sister to take care of you, huh?". Which, yes, is usually the case with most bully situations where somebody tries to step in, but what breaks my heart TO THIS DAY is that he still resents me not only for the fallout, but for trying in the first place.

Not to say that my experience is universal or any such thing, but just ... yeah, it's very problematic and writing about that won't just be a challenge from imagining reader reactions but also to write realistic CHARACTER reactions.

I guess sometimes I worry that I may portray characters who aren't like me as stereotypes. So I try to avoid that and do research on what those particular people go through.

As an example, I'm currently writing a story with a disabled character as the protagonist. It takes place in a fictional culture that has a hierarchical structure built around eugenics, so the disability is important.

But I also want to avoid either portraying the character as an "inspirational cripple", or a "bitter cripple". It's sort of a balancing act between focusing on them solely as a character, and also being aware of their disability, and how it might influence their life experiences & the kind of person they become.

Tricky stuff. I just know that what I write can never be perfect, but I can at least try to make it... truthful to who people are, and respectful.

Still, it's been interesting doing worldbuilding, and figuring out how this character will physically get around and interact with their environment.

I started writing an Azog/Kili fic for The Hobbit. I made it a "modern" Middle-Earth AU, so goblins and orcs live alongside the other races and they're considered rough, untrustworthy types, but that was about as far as racial friction went. And then I wrote about Dwarf royalty!Kili sneaking out to the other side of town where his criminal overlord lover Azog lived, and there was lots of size kink and Kili liking it when his brutish orc boyfriend treated him like a toy and fucked him in front of all his orc friends, and then I reread it and it just sounded like thinly disguised white princess/black thug porn and I was incredibly disturbed and never went back and finished it. I've thought about ways to downplay that, but I guess I've lost the drive to write that one now.

I also got trapped in worries about a story.

I started writing a love triangle set in the future where one of the characters was in the police/military. I spent a long time describing him in his riot gear, in far too much detail for it to be anything other than a personal kink.

I was fine with that part. Only then I decided that I hadn't worked out future-Earth's approach to same-sex relationships properly, and that my whole story was gaycist (is that a word?) Which I would fix it by changing the military character to a woman. Okay, so that would be even better because I'd have the whole women-in-the-military problems to play with and the triangle would become f/m, m/m.

But that just screwed up the balance of the whole story. And a woman solider just didn't do it for me in the same way.

But the main reason I abandoned it was because I'd become convinced my whole concept was offensive to RL gays.

Even though it was the most disfunctional relationship of the two, my story went for the m/m in the end. The idea that I was being offensive to gay people still plagues me - for a story that never got beyond 10 chapters and which I never published anywhere.

Why can't I just write non-straight relationships without all these worries? I really can't.

It's good that in the end I thought about these issues, but to be honest, I'd rather I was just able to post whatever rubbish. It's the most tropey, id-pleasing writing that's often the most fun to read.

Yep. That sounds about right to me. Kind of just replaced Big Black Cocks with Big Orc Cocks.

Re: Inspired by secret #12

(Anonymous) - 2014-02-11 03:13 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Inspired by secret #12

herpymcderp - 2014-02-11 03:27 (UTC) - Expand

Your Azog/Kili fic sounds kind of interesting. Isn't fantasy and SF famous for transposing real world frictions onto mythical races as a way to explore them - even if it's unconscious on the part of the writer?

Having said that, I don't understand the white princess thing because in my country the thugs are white. This could be hugely offensive and I'd have no idea.

I've already gotten this, several times.

Probably one of the most disturbing was a fic in which I wrote a very dark and unhealthy relationship, and I got some comments about how romantic it was. Like - WHAT?! It was one person coercing another into being his sex slave, where did you get romance? D:

All the freaking time. In fact, I'm wibbling about some of my ideas for the fic I'm working on because it's.. highly sensitive material.

Then I remember that I put a disclaimer at the top of my problematic fics now, inspired by seeing similar on TV shows and the like. Basically that the views expressed in the fic may or may not be shared by the author. That way if people complain, I can point them to the disclaimer.

May not staunch the tide completely, but it makes me feel better.

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