Reserve-list-pictures - Free Infodump Today

postal systems and railways are so good. a postal system is like a computer made of people. you hand someone a box, and can be assured that, somehow, after a week, a completely unrelated person will hand it to your friend. they look at the adress you wrote and figure out where it needs to go, then they never see it again. a hundred people pass it between one another, building up order and structure out of our world. technology is amazing. a train is made by people living in the same mud as a million years ago, we just slowly learned and passed on more knowledge about that mud. we found a way, over time, without changing any of the rules of the world around us, to hammer tracks into the ground, to make networks of steel and signalboxes, and we could do it again if we had to. we somehow figured out the rules that existence itself follows and we applied those back on itself. it's all so amazing when you stop and think about it!!

When you say "This part of fandom is extremely weird about first person", could you elaborate on that? Either about the history, or just about the contemporary things that are usually associated with first-person... Whether they're true correlations or just stereotypes.

Is first-person considered pretentious, for example? I sort of assumed for a long time that it would be.

Are there particular types of fandom that tend to have a lot of first-person writing? As in, some genre or whatever, not just "the original book was in first-person".

And it's not even particularly thought of as a self-insert thing, is it? (Rather, as JUST a self-insert thing.)

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First person is a less common but just kind of banal choice in original writing. Many fanfic fans respond to it as such. It's overwhelmingly more common when canon is like that. Most of the rest of the first person fics I see are imitating a specific style that's normally in first—think ridiculous hardboiled private eye fics like the famous Who Knackered Aragorn's Catamite?

But in recent years, I've seen some people finding first to be a Big Deal™. It's still not common in most fandoms, as far as I can see, but people flailing about it have become more common. When this has come up before, it has become clear that there's a strain of fandom coming out of knockoffs of knockoffs of YA Boom titles, the kinds of things that are in first person present tense but don't know what to do with it.

IDK about the untagged first person fic, but the tagged stuff shows no particular pattern. There's a bunch of it in enormous fandoms that have a lot of works and that tag a lot.

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I do find first to be a more challenging choice for your average TV fandom because those actually do have POV, but not one most viewers can easily articulate and not one that's similar to written first person that stays with one character. Bringing in this wildly different stylistic element can end up sounding like you're writing the aforementioned hardboiled detective AU even when that wasn't the intent.

Omniscient and limited third with POV switches are both pretty similar to your average TV POV, though film and written POV don't work the same way, so there isn't a one-to-one match.

If someone said the usual "I want fic that's similar to canon... or I want you to be very, very good at your craft", I would not find that remarkable. But the actual way people talk makes it sound like every baby writer in 2024 cares about Divergent. In my experience, they do not.

I guess most "discourse" (more like "wank" imo) can be boiled down to "God forbid a woman does anything. EVER."

Woman likes dick? Bad.

Woman does NOT like dick? Bad.

You literally cannot win, and that's FUCKING ANNOYING!

But interestingly, men existing in any way, shape or form is ALSO bad, SOMEHOW.

But Nonbinary identities are ALSO bad.

Puritans' obsession with suffering and making EVERYONE ELSE suffer too, even if they don't actually subscribe to their bullshit sure is something else.

The catholics are at least aware that "sin" (whatever that fucking even MEANS) is a rather unavoidable part of living as a human, but that's still something between you and god (and maybe the priest of your trust).

(Or well, maybe only my catholic lessons were more "modern" and "free" in the sense of it being a traditional cultural background in my country, and important to its history and how it functioned, but yeah. I do wish a lot of people would just take a fucking chill pill...)

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