RatCreature's Journal

I thought I had seen the most ill-suited posting venue for fanfic when I encountered fans posting stories to deviantArt, but that has now been surpassed by far: Why on earth would anyone put a ficlet in the tag field in Tumblr?!? And not a five word story or the like either, but something that's abut 350 words accompanying a GIF? I mean, you can post text with a picture, why not do that? Is there a reason to make it a tag? It's actually not a bad Erik/Charles ficlet or gif, but omg the formatting...

And connected to this another Tumblr question: the post I linked above to illustrate is a reblog of the story in the erikandcharles Tumblr, because the original post you get to when clicking that reblog has apparently been deleted. So if others reblog your posts/pictures on Tumblr the reblog posts remain, and you can't delete your content? What about edits, i.e. say I posted a sketch to Tumblr, it gets reblogged by someone, then I notice that the hand of the character has the thumb on the wrong side or a similar error (don't laugh, that has happened to me with pictures) and edit my post with an upload of a corrected version. Will the correction propagate through the reblogs? Obviously there are pros/cons either way, i.e. if it does affect the reblogs you can do effective corrections, however because the nature of Tumblrs it would also open an easy way to abuse/spam or rickrolling, in that someone could post something attractive and pretty, wait a bit, then edit to shock image or the like. So would you have to live with wrongly thumbed hands forever when posting to Tumblr?

I have finally found an animal-sex inspired fanfic that is weirder than the marsupial mpreg series in SGA: Ballistic Penises and Corkscrew Vaginas by longsufferingly. It's J2, but not even my RPF squick could stop my curiosity after I watched the linked videos of duck penises that were the inspiration.

I have just seen a Kirk/Spock/McCoy fic tagged as "Mckick". Granted, on the story itself rather than the journal's tags it was written out, so don't know whether this was just for tag brevity or is really used as pairing name proper somewhere, but even with knowing the pairing it took me a bit to decipher what this tag on the post meant. Smooshes just get the more confusing the more people are involved.

I know I have ranted about the usage of "Spock Prime" in the narrative and dialog just a few days ago, but since then I've come across this far more often. Like every day I see stories doing this. More than one. It occurs even in stories that I found on rec lists, not through random, at-your-own-risk browsing. (In case you're wondering, musesfool recced this offender.) Just, WTF? This is getting out of hand if you can't even trust recs to protect you.

Please tell me that some fan somewhere has written a Greasemonkey script or something to do word replacements on the fly in your browser to fix epithets, and I can adapt this to replace every "Spock Prime" with "Ambassador Spock".

ETA: Thanks to the awesome gnatkip I have now indeed found a script that will do this word replacement for me. Greasemonkey to the rescue.

Sometimes fanfic is really weird. See, I've been reading an X-Files story, which started normal enough. It was a Profiler!Mulder story with an X-Files twist in that Mulder forms some sort of psychic connection with the killers and victims, and so on, cue to Mulderangst. Which was the kind of story I wanted to read. Only then suddenly out of nowhere some green, winged horse shows up and brings Mulder to a blue anthropomorphic cat shapeshifter alien who starts talking about fighting interdimensional demons. What? Just, what? I have no idea how this continued, because the story rather lost me at that point.

What irks me most is was that I read over half of this long novel, which I thought was one thing, and then without warning it turned into something completely different. It had a summary and warnings for all kinds of things which indicated that this was a serial killer story with child molestation, but nothing mentioned mystical furry aliens fighting evil on psychic planes. Gah. What a waste of time.

Okay, I dread boring exposition dumps as much as the next reader, but while I'm not actually opposed to AUs that randomly cast canonically purely human characters as something with claws, merely encountering a sentence like "His extended claws clicked on the metal." will throw me out of a story. I mean, some kind of noticeable setup for this would have really helped, as I tend to assume (not unreasonably I think) the character's basic anatomy to be like what I'm familiar with, especially if the source media doesn't have any humanoid clawed creatures at all. So I'd like some hint what the character is supposed to be now that he suddenly isn't human anymore. Were-creature? Shapeshifter? Animal-hybrid? Mutant?

ETA: Why did I read on? Right, I was curious, only did I still not get an explanation for the claws, but instead there's now added a similarly unexplained "double row of extra-mammary nipples" -- albeit on another formerly human character, who btw is male in canon. Seriously...what?!? I don't think finding out why there are claws is worth more of this.

brown_betty discussed a story that somehow featured Clark identifying with Kermit the frog, and I read that post (not the story though) and chatted a bit with thete1 about DC/Muppets fusion possibilities in the comments, and as a result I had the image of Superman!Kermit and Lois!Piggy stuck in my head. Worse I now actually have committed both to paper in cracktastic doodles. All that's missing now is Jimmy!Fozzie and Nightwing!Gonzo. Both of which I might actually draw next. *headdesk*

Fandom is not good for my sanity.

ETA: While looking for Gonzo pictures to draw him, I saw that he was cast as Darth Vader Nadir in the Muppet SW parody. Why didn't I know about this before?

I just saw a Harry/Tonks story labeled "Honks" (unfortunate enough, some pairings really shouldn't be given smushed names), but all I could think for a moment was "penguins!". Clearly I have read too much SGA crack!fic...

I have just read the first sentences of a bad het sex scene that caused me to imagine really gross things. The worst sentence:
"[...] He heard her scream at the same time her inner muscles gripped him fiercely, and then he burst. [...]"
Since that sex scene was right at the start of the story and the summary didn't give much info I thought at first it might be like a horror story or something, like she's a monster that squishes his penis until he bursts and then bleeds to death, but unfortunately that was apparently meant to describe an orgasm without permanent injuries, even though you wouldn't think so from that gross icky unfortunate description. >.<

It's moments like these that make me reconsider my policy to randomly browse archives rather than rely solely on recs and "safe" authors. OTOH I find fun and entertaining stuff too, so it all balances out in the end...

So, still being bored and listless I, as notorious AU junkie, found myself looking for Harry Potter AUs tonight. And clearly it's a shame that in all those sorting hat quizzes I'm never sorted into Gryffindor, for I am (apparently) fearless and lacking in common sense, and thus browsing ff.net without guidance. And there I found this summary:

Unicorn Child by Felinity
AU What if Voldemort had killed Lily and James Potter but only attacked Harry 3 years later? At the age of 4, after defeating Voldemort, Harry is alone and scared and runs away. He is taken in by a herd of unicorns. Will he ever return to "his kind" again?


which improved my mood greatly (and I hope the neighbors don't mind loud laughter in the middle of the night too much). I haven't tried the story, since unicorns really aren't my thing, so for all I know it's a great story if you dig unicorns. I mean, it got nearly a thousand comments for its seven chapters, so apparently it works for its readership, and I have enough peculiar kinks myself to get that-- and yet. Taken in by unicorns. *giggle*