davidinbrooklyn

[pegasusrightsforall]

Birthright Corrin/Kaze is an achingly beautiful love story if you just free yourself from the thought that it’s cringe to enjoy Birthright’s story.

[valamerys]

I really enjoy your blog so is it okay if I ask you top 10 pet peeves in novels? It can be tropes or even a niche moment in a particular book. I like writing myself and would appreciate the help.

hmmMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM sure, I can come up with some things! bear in mind I read almost exclusively fantasy, and mostly “low” ie not game of thrones fantasy at that, including a loooot of YA, so my items will reflect that.

Top (YA, Fantasy) Fiction Pet Peeves:

1) Unnecessary post-apocalyptic setting  WHY THE FUCK. DO PEOPLE KEEP DOING THIS. WHAT DOES THIS GAIN ANYONE. WHAT IS THE POINT. Red Queen, The Selection, The Queen of the Tearling, and that weird TV show The Shanarananaharahahananaaa Chronicles all do this. It’s, frankly, a cheap-ass bid for Dark and Gritty points, and also an excuse to set things in America But Fantasy, and it’s always bad and awkward. This isn’t planet of the apes, just make your damn fantasy world; you don’t have to try to make it more ~realistic~ by putting the ruins of the statue of liberty in the background. That’s stupid and you’re stupid.

2) One-note characters  Mostly present via The Bitch or The Bully stereotype, but also seen in The Bratty Brother, The Sweet Sister, The Spacey DGAF Parent, and the Eccentric Wise Elder. I get that there’s not time to flesh out every single person your protagonist comes into contact with, but certain archetypes are so fucking boring and done to death that I tune out immediately. It’s not 2004 anymore. The game has evolved. We can do better. We can be more interesting.

Related to the sweet sister trope, I’d like to bring up this text post from my other blog:

3) When the protagonists’ actions/ choices do not affect the plot  Alright, this one isn’t even a pet peeve, it’s basic narrative construction. Your story is supposed to be about your protagonist (or your two or three protagonists, in a multi-pov story, but for simplicity’s sake we’ll talk about one) and their arc, how they change and grow. a) If their actions never have consequences, how the fuck do they, like, learn things? and b) if their actions have no bearing on the climax of the story, how the fuck does the story demonstrate that they’ve changed, or come to a meaningful conclusion that’s related to that? Sure there’s weird literary exceptions, and certainly some fantasy in particular is more plot than character driven, but if your character is honestly never proactive, particularly through the ending of the book, uh, i have a major problem and so should you.

4) The Mandatory Feminism Stuff  we should all know these by now. “Not Like Other Girls” is bad. Hating on corsets and other femme paraphernalia is bad (and moreover i personally resent it because I love corsets). A book with a female protagonist and no other important female characters (or only evil female characters) is bad. A high fantasy series that builds its worldbuilding on a raging patriarchy for the purpose of elevating a few specific women into positions of power for superficial RAH RAH FEMINISM points while not addressing systematic oppression is really, really bad. Defining female empowerment as only one thing (IE picking up a sword and Proving Yourself just as badass as all those scoffing men!!!) is bad. I’m very tired and I want to read about women-- different kinds of women, with different moral alignments and interests and abilities and ethnic backgrounds and ages and sexualities and beliefs-- helping each other and being forces in the world and in each others’ lives. That’s it. That’s all I want. I have no clue why that’s so elusive.

5) Characters being flippant to the point of stupidity because........ that’s cool, i guess?  Homygod, I am so sick to my teeth of characters who would get their asses kicked IRL for being obnoxious and overly glib be appraised with “wow, you’ve really got some nerve! I like you, kid!” or some variation therof. Mouthing off to superiors/ royalty? Charging into a fight on a stray heroic impulse despite everyone with a brain and their mom telling you you’re going to die because you just picked up swordfighting on tuesday? flagrantly and thoughtlessly disregarding engrained cultural things because they don’t align with your conveniently 2017 sense of social justice despite you living in an analogue-medieval world? Not cute. It will get you fucking killed. If your character doesn’t seem to grasp that, I’m going to think they’re a dumbshit, and if the book rewards rather than punishes that, I’m not going to take it very seriously. (obviously there are exceptions to this, particularly if your world doesn’t take itself very seriously, but if you expect to instill a real sense of danger in day-to-day life, your protagonist doesn’t get to be exempt from that because they’re hot and witty.)

6) Also, characters being stubborn. This goes with my last point, because it’s another trait people seem to think is like cool, or something? That stubborn people are stubborn because they’re Strong? that it’s a flaw but it’s actually a Cool Flaw, like in job interviews when they ask your weakness and you say “i’m just TOO hard of a worker, ha ha ha”? U see this a lot in female characters written by people who are uncomfortable writing female characters, i think because, again, it mistakenly reads as Strength on some really superficial level, and because the banter and petty conflict that arises from it temporarily distracts from weak overall characterization. If you’re going to write a character being stubborn, that’s great! But understand that a) it’s a real flaw that can genuinely blind them to good ideas and cause unnecessary friction that shouldn’t be treated as endearing, b) it’s not a replacement for other elements of characterization!! and c) it’s the flipside of being assertive, which is a good thing: no trait is only a flaw or a strength, and so any trait a character possess in abundance should both help and hinder them at different times, with maturity level tempering the bad, to a degree. stubbornness is no different.

7) Sexual assault (or the threat of it) all over the fucking place. Do i have to explain this one? Of course ownvoices books about sexual assault survivors are good and necessary but we are all sick to death of "fun” fantasy worlds where the female characters exist under the constant and unending threat of rape, where sexual assault is common as window dressing and the love interests are Super Special Feminist Snowflakes for being so revolutionary as to take consent into account. fuck that. that should be the bare fucking minimum. i am so tired.

8) The Six-Pack Sex Appeal Golem  Honestly, I am not here to hate on love triangles, because I am ALL ABOUT the romance and the more the merrier. But what i do really, really loathe is the incredibly narrow parameters that have come to exist for male love interests, to the point where they all tend to feel like the same guy in need of anger management: a little broody, smart, serious, jealous and protective to a fault, if we get his POV we get real creepy sexual thoughts out of nowhere while he acts vaguely standoffish and probably a little patronizing to a woman whose Attitude gives him a boner. This man does not experience emotions that can’t be interpreted as darkly sexual, or possibly A Little Bit Vulnerable, just for that one scene of mandatory backstory reveal. I recently reviewed a real bad romance novel and described the hero as “a barely-consistent golem of toxic masculine ideals” and that’s what I’m talking about here. MAKE YOUR LOVE INTERESTS WELL-ROUNDED AND UNIQUE CHARACTERS LIKE ALL YOUR OTHER CHARACTERS. Forget what’s “sexy,” I wanna see the male love interests be Soft and Weird and cry in an unattractive way. For further reading/ a great case study of the Masculine Golem, please just read this article about how abysmal the romance in ROAR is. (For what it’s worth, I actually think SJM manages to avoid this in the ACOTAR series. Rhys and Tamlin suck but they are still mostly consistent characters, not just shells inhabited by the spirit of heterosexuality. your mileage may vary, though.)

9) Secret Superpower/ She Was The Missing Princess/ Queen All Along  I think this is a trend that’s slowly but surely passing from YA, but for a while you couldn’t throw a rock in a bookstore without hitting a trilogy where a long-lost missing princess was established in chapter 1 and you spent the whole fucking first book knowing the orphaned heroine with a murky past was gonna turn out to be the princess and you were always right. Queens are also a huge fucking thing right now, although they don’t tend to follow that exact formula. See also the character’s discovery of a superpower catapulting them into a new exciting life-- basically any discovery of a Cool Sexy birthright as a catalyst for a plot is kind of played out and boring, at this point in time? This ties into my earlier point about wanting characters’ choices to shape the plot; it’s so much easier to have them reacting to external forces, especially dramatic, aesthetic ones, i get that, but you’ll get a more original and interesting story the more you resist that urge. And everyone is fucking tired of secret princesses and can spot them a mile away, y’all.

10) OMG magic is outlawed!!! BUT WAIT THE PROTAGONIST HAS SECRET MAGIC! CAN SHE RISE ABOVE PERSECUTION AND HER PROBABLE ROMANCE WITH THE PRINCE OF THIS POORLY-THOUGHT-OUT TOTALITARIAN REGIME TO LEAD ALL MAGIC-HAVERS TO FREEDOM AND ACCEPTANCE???? If you do this i’m going to come to your house and pour a cup of soda on your head. This is dumb and I can’t believe I’ve seen it multiple times. I’m not even explaining this it should be obvious.

Honorable mentions go to: Excessive mentions/ descriptions of eye color, really tired ways of describing kissing, elemental magic is super fucking overdone, instalove, and Training Montages