my pet peeve of the day

[ratcreature]

It drives me absolutely crazy when in ST:AOS fic the older, time-traveling Spock is called "Spock Prime" within the story text, assuming the story is told from a POV character withing the fictional universe rather than some jokey outside parody narrator or omniscient meta fiction narrator. It's fine for a pairing label, but please, please find some other way to distinguish the character from the younger Spock in the text. I am usually not that picky about narrative voice, but this just throws me out of the story in a way from which I can't recover. It's one of the few things that will just make me stop reading immediately in this fandom.

Comments

[jacquez.livejournal.com]

Wow, I'm glad I haven't run across that one yet!

[ratcreature]

Unfortunately I have been thrown out of stories in this unpleasant way several times now. It's not so bad if it happens early in a story, then I take it as an indicator that I probably won't like the rest and move on. But I've had it happen in stories in which the older Spock only appeared later on, and I was already invested in a longer story. Granted, those weren't masterpieces, but still decent enough, and I was like several thousand words into the events and wanted to know what happened, and then the other Spock appeared and I ran into this brick wall.

[ratcreature]

BTW, surpassing the awfulness of "Spock Prime" in narrative text is seeing it in actual character *dialog*, but iirc I've seen that only once so far, and that was pretty much badfic in other respects too.

[sholio]

Oh god, people actually do that? HEAD, meet DESK.

I must admit that one of the hardest things about writing multiple versions of a character is clearly identifying who's talking, and I've read some pretty clunky examples in SGA fandom. But I don't think I've ever seen anything THAT clunky.

[ratcreature]

Oh god, people actually do that? HEAD, meet DESK.


Yes, they really do. I haven't seen it *that* often, but it wasn't just a single occurrence either.