I am staring down a day full of family obligations, so I am kind of cranky, which I guess makes it time for another round of "I won't read your fic if..."
- If you have great eyesight, I am happy for you. Really I am. But I do not. So if you hard code your fic to be in 6pt font, even when I use style=mine or format=light, I am not going to bother to change my browser settings to accommodate you. I am going to click out without reading.
I will never understand why some people don't get this, or why their aesthetics are more important to them than having a wider reading audience, but apparently they are, because they hard code things beyond bold and italics into their text, things like 6pt fonts, that make it harder for readers to read their stories. This seems counterproductive to me.
- I get that you want your pairing to be the most specialest pairing ever, and that the sex they have with each other is so far beyond anything they've ever experienced before yada yada, but if your story includes some line about how Character X had never been touched by a man before, but it was so much better than being touched by women, even the woman he'd loved and wanted to marry/did marry/etc. or how he'd only thought he'd been in love with (currently dead) woman Z but now that he'd touched some other guy's dick, he knew what REAL LOVE was, or any similar generalized moronic construction, I'm going to click out of your story disgruntled and basically wanting to punch you in the face.
YOU DO NOT HAVE TO DEVALUE PAST RELATIONSHIPS TO MAKE THE CURRENT ONE SPECIAL.
You also do not have to devalue women IN OUR ENTIRETY to make the point that your boy likes the gay sex.1
And yet.
There are ways to get across your point that won't leave me growling in irritation, but so few writers - and I include pro writers in this, because it's rampant in romance novels, which well, this is one of many things I wish fanfic would shed from its genre romance parentage - bother to make the effort.
1 If you are actually writing a story where your boy is discovering his sexuality and has had some bad/weird/unfulfilling experiences with women and now he's trying out the home team and hey, wow, now he gets what the big deal is about sex, that's different. That is not the kind of thing I'm talking about. However, that is so rarely what people are actually doing.
Whew. That felt good.
Maybe now I am ready to face two different sides of the family at two vastly different events.
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