(no subject)
"I feel like writing a human/bot threesome mixed with the state of cultural tolerance in southwestern America."
Well, someone must have said that out loud, because we got The Naturalists
Things have become a little quiet around here lately, and I wonder if we got tired of picking on the easy, wildly horrible fics. So I'm aiming for something a little more highbrow here, a story that did actually manage coherent grammar and (mostly) spelling. It's the philosophy behind the writing at which I take aim. Ordinarily this is the kind of story I'd just avoid completely, but it rained today and I can't go campaign, so to Diego Garcia we go!
We begin with our standard gorgeous scientist/soldier OC, newly stationed on Diego Garcia. In this case, it is one naturalist Alicia Rodriguez. Naturally she's a wild card, preferring to camp out when all the other scientists retreat back to base for air conditioning at nights. She's Hard Core, that Alicia. While slopping around in the swamp to collect samples (because Optimus ordered an environmental impact study of all things... while Decepticons are busy blowing up tankers and aircraft carriers, he's worried about the mosquito larvae?), she runs into Hound and Mirage. Mirage is stuck in a swamp, so naturally he is completely decked out in his I Hate Nature stereotype.
"I'm Hound. Mister Grumpy there is Mirage," he teased his companion and ended up on the receiving end of that death-glare and several clicks. It didn't seem to phase Hound in the least.
Faze, people. The word is faze, not phase. One homonym does not stand in for another, unless you one that won race last weak even though you were feeling a little week.
Hound and Alicia engage in a few lines of friendly dialog, mainly introductions, throughout which Mirage utters not a word in English and mainly ignores her as well, only clicking at Hound now and then in irritation. Is our OC annoyed by this? Of course not!
Alicia was not at all put off by the seeming sulkiness of the smaller mech. Having grown up in as culturally rich a state as New Mexico, she had learned early on to leave her preconceptions about appropriate behavior at the cultural door where they belonged. She tried to take people as they were, without prejudgment, because she liked to be taken that way as well. American culture had so many ingrained attitudes toward Latinas that did not at all match the culture she had grown up in, in a small mostly Spanish-speaking town in the New Mexico mountains that had been around since before Plymouth Rock.
I just... don't have the words to cope with this one. It manages to be sanctimonious, hypocritical, hateful, and astoundingly incongruous all at once. There is nothing wrong with being even mildly offended when someone is pointedly ignoring you, but the writer manages to imply that anyone who is must be a hick redneck. Her character might insist she doesn't make judgments, but in fact so far throughout the fic she's done nothing but scrutinize and analyze the nature of both mechs' personalities, drawing multiple conclusions about their personalities and attitudes toward each other. Not that there's anything wrong with that, it's what I'd expect of a scientist character, but it doesn't exactly fit with this little diatribe. And that last sentence felt like a slap to the face. American culture is racist and backward? Leaving aside whether that's what the writer meant or not, it has absolutely no bearing on this particular scene. It's like the writer felt the need to rant a bit on Latino discrimination and just decided to slap it down right here.
Hound enthusiastically offers his assistance, which naturally spurs Mirage into more glaring and native-speak clicking. Rather than making Alicia sad, or in the least defensive of her career, she...
Alicia found that she had a soft place in her heart for the sullen Mirage. He reminded her of the abuelitas back home...the ones who were so very proud of their heritage and would not stoop to speaking English even if they perfectly well understood the language. She understood their pride, coming from such a long heritage around gringos who assumed they had walked across the border just days before and couldn't understand why they refused to speak English.
This writer has hatred in her heart. I wonder what she would think of a gringo who moved to Mexico and refused to learn to speak Spanish. I am not, incidentally, even in favor of formalizing English as our country's language. The Constitution does not grant the power to declare an official language to our federal government. Legally, only a state can declare an official language, and New Mexico has indeed declared both Spanish and English. My problem here is the hypocrisy, again.
Hound and Alicia discuss the 'upgrade' Ratchet is offering humans on the base, which, among many other incredibly unrealistic effects, will give her the ability to speak and understand Cybertronian.
She was thoughtful for a moment. "I honestly think the most interesting thing you bring up is your language, though from the little I've heard from the two of you, I can't imagine my tongue being designed to make those kind of sounds. It would be a like someone trying to speak Spanish who couldn't roll her 'r's, only about a million times worse. But to be able to understand? That would be amazing. I've always felt that you never really can know how people think without knowing their native language."
Truer words were never spoken, as far as I'm concerned. But I guess Mirage and the 'abuelitas' she holds so dear in her heart are exempt. It's okay if you're refusing to learn someone else's language out of pride, understand. It's got nothing to do with elitism or racism at all.
The conversation naturally progresses to their names and what the true Cybertronian nuances are within them. Always an interesting subject, yes, and I'm happy to read about it. But not when it's boiled down to something nonsensical as this:
"Our designations are many-layered in Cybertronian. It does mean 'hound' on a real level, but also denotes that I am a wilderness tracker and scout, my working-class origins and my holographic generator."
How, exactly, can a name mean 'hound' on a real level, when it's from a planet millions of light-years from the species we call 'hound'? Unless it's just an abstract reference to anything that hunts, in which case one would think the 'wilderness tracker' covers that nicely. Unless he meant 'hound' in the verb sense, in which case wilderness tracker covers that pretty well too. But all that pales next to:
"While the obvious thing it says is that he can turn invisible..."
Well, no, it's not obvious. A mirage has nothing to do with invisibility of any sort, in fact it's pretty much the direct opposite. Invisibility means something is there but you can't see it. A mirage is something you see that isn't there. Logically, Mirage's name makes no sense. And that's something for the writers of the G1 cartoon to take the blame, but my point here is that there is no 'obvious' about it.
Hound and Mirage (who, reluctantly, finally starts to participate in the English conversation) take Alicia back to her swampside camp. And they proceed to get it on right in front of her, because, well, why not? And she watches, naturally gets turned on, and so naturally Hound turns to her and says "Want some help with that?" And of course she says "yes", not at all shy or flustered, because who among us hasn't been asked to have a threesome with robotic aliens roughly ten minutes after the first meeting? Really, it's either that or go get a frappuccino.
At this point I had to stop reading, lest my eyes burst into flames, but I skimmed enough to know that after Hound uses some tiny tentacles on her, she delves into both their circuitry with both hands and mouth. And all I could wonder was, how does she not get electrocuted doing all that?
And that's it... for chapter one. Do not feel masochistically inclined enough to tackle the rest of the fic. I am going to conclude with this: My point here is not incite a flame war about language and Spanish vs English. I'm from Texas, I love Spanish and margarita contests and the fact that my whole city celebrates Cinco de Mayo. And like I said earlier, it's legally up to the states to declare language. If they want to designate Swahili, then that's their deal and it's cool.
My point is that the writer didn't take the time to look back over what she'd written, at what was obviously a dear principle to her heart, and realize that it made no kind of consistent sense. You can't have a character smilingly indulge another character's refusal to speak her language, then emphatically declare in the next breath that we should all learn one another's languages because it helps us understand one another. Either one would have been an acceptable character trait, but you can't do both.
That she can blithely write that bit about how Mirage's name is so 'obvious' says to me that she wasn't putting a whole lot of thought into the writing, though. Writing fanfiction is about more than just regurgitating the fandom tropes we all know by heart. Take a little time to think about what you're saying. Maybe also take the time to wonder if you might be offending everyone who lives outside "culturally rich New Mexico", but I suppose that's grasping at straws.
Well, someone must have said that out loud, because we got The Naturalists
Things have become a little quiet around here lately, and I wonder if we got tired of picking on the easy, wildly horrible fics. So I'm aiming for something a little more highbrow here, a story that did actually manage coherent grammar and (mostly) spelling. It's the philosophy behind the writing at which I take aim. Ordinarily this is the kind of story I'd just avoid completely, but it rained today and I can't go campaign, so to Diego Garcia we go!
We begin with our standard gorgeous scientist/soldier OC, newly stationed on Diego Garcia. In this case, it is one naturalist Alicia Rodriguez. Naturally she's a wild card, preferring to camp out when all the other scientists retreat back to base for air conditioning at nights. She's Hard Core, that Alicia. While slopping around in the swamp to collect samples (because Optimus ordered an environmental impact study of all things... while Decepticons are busy blowing up tankers and aircraft carriers, he's worried about the mosquito larvae?), she runs into Hound and Mirage. Mirage is stuck in a swamp, so naturally he is completely decked out in his I Hate Nature stereotype.
"I'm Hound. Mister Grumpy there is Mirage," he teased his companion and ended up on the receiving end of that death-glare and several clicks. It didn't seem to phase Hound in the least.
Faze, people. The word is faze, not phase. One homonym does not stand in for another, unless you one that won race last weak even though you were feeling a little week.
Hound and Alicia engage in a few lines of friendly dialog, mainly introductions, throughout which Mirage utters not a word in English and mainly ignores her as well, only clicking at Hound now and then in irritation. Is our OC annoyed by this? Of course not!
Alicia was not at all put off by the seeming sulkiness of the smaller mech. Having grown up in as culturally rich a state as New Mexico, she had learned early on to leave her preconceptions about appropriate behavior at the cultural door where they belonged. She tried to take people as they were, without prejudgment, because she liked to be taken that way as well. American culture had so many ingrained attitudes toward Latinas that did not at all match the culture she had grown up in, in a small mostly Spanish-speaking town in the New Mexico mountains that had been around since before Plymouth Rock.
I just... don't have the words to cope with this one. It manages to be sanctimonious, hypocritical, hateful, and astoundingly incongruous all at once. There is nothing wrong with being even mildly offended when someone is pointedly ignoring you, but the writer manages to imply that anyone who is must be a hick redneck. Her character might insist she doesn't make judgments, but in fact so far throughout the fic she's done nothing but scrutinize and analyze the nature of both mechs' personalities, drawing multiple conclusions about their personalities and attitudes toward each other. Not that there's anything wrong with that, it's what I'd expect of a scientist character, but it doesn't exactly fit with this little diatribe. And that last sentence felt like a slap to the face. American culture is racist and backward? Leaving aside whether that's what the writer meant or not, it has absolutely no bearing on this particular scene. It's like the writer felt the need to rant a bit on Latino discrimination and just decided to slap it down right here.
Hound enthusiastically offers his assistance, which naturally spurs Mirage into more glaring and native-speak clicking. Rather than making Alicia sad, or in the least defensive of her career, she...
Alicia found that she had a soft place in her heart for the sullen Mirage. He reminded her of the abuelitas back home...the ones who were so very proud of their heritage and would not stoop to speaking English even if they perfectly well understood the language. She understood their pride, coming from such a long heritage around gringos who assumed they had walked across the border just days before and couldn't understand why they refused to speak English.
This writer has hatred in her heart. I wonder what she would think of a gringo who moved to Mexico and refused to learn to speak Spanish. I am not, incidentally, even in favor of formalizing English as our country's language. The Constitution does not grant the power to declare an official language to our federal government. Legally, only a state can declare an official language, and New Mexico has indeed declared both Spanish and English. My problem here is the hypocrisy, again.
Hound and Alicia discuss the 'upgrade' Ratchet is offering humans on the base, which, among many other incredibly unrealistic effects, will give her the ability to speak and understand Cybertronian.
She was thoughtful for a moment. "I honestly think the most interesting thing you bring up is your language, though from the little I've heard from the two of you, I can't imagine my tongue being designed to make those kind of sounds. It would be a like someone trying to speak Spanish who couldn't roll her 'r's, only about a million times worse. But to be able to understand? That would be amazing. I've always felt that you never really can know how people think without knowing their native language."
Truer words were never spoken, as far as I'm concerned. But I guess Mirage and the 'abuelitas' she holds so dear in her heart are exempt. It's okay if you're refusing to learn someone else's language out of pride, understand. It's got nothing to do with elitism or racism at all.
The conversation naturally progresses to their names and what the true Cybertronian nuances are within them. Always an interesting subject, yes, and I'm happy to read about it. But not when it's boiled down to something nonsensical as this:
"Our designations are many-layered in Cybertronian. It does mean 'hound' on a real level, but also denotes that I am a wilderness tracker and scout, my working-class origins and my holographic generator."
How, exactly, can a name mean 'hound' on a real level, when it's from a planet millions of light-years from the species we call 'hound'? Unless it's just an abstract reference to anything that hunts, in which case one would think the 'wilderness tracker' covers that nicely. Unless he meant 'hound' in the verb sense, in which case wilderness tracker covers that pretty well too. But all that pales next to:
"While the obvious thing it says is that he can turn invisible..."
Well, no, it's not obvious. A mirage has nothing to do with invisibility of any sort, in fact it's pretty much the direct opposite. Invisibility means something is there but you can't see it. A mirage is something you see that isn't there. Logically, Mirage's name makes no sense. And that's something for the writers of the G1 cartoon to take the blame, but my point here is that there is no 'obvious' about it.
Hound and Mirage (who, reluctantly, finally starts to participate in the English conversation) take Alicia back to her swampside camp. And they proceed to get it on right in front of her, because, well, why not? And she watches, naturally gets turned on, and so naturally Hound turns to her and says "Want some help with that?" And of course she says "yes", not at all shy or flustered, because who among us hasn't been asked to have a threesome with robotic aliens roughly ten minutes after the first meeting? Really, it's either that or go get a frappuccino.
At this point I had to stop reading, lest my eyes burst into flames, but I skimmed enough to know that after Hound uses some tiny tentacles on her, she delves into both their circuitry with both hands and mouth. And all I could wonder was, how does she not get electrocuted doing all that?
And that's it... for chapter one. Do not feel masochistically inclined enough to tackle the rest of the fic. I am going to conclude with this: My point here is not incite a flame war about language and Spanish vs English. I'm from Texas, I love Spanish and margarita contests and the fact that my whole city celebrates Cinco de Mayo. And like I said earlier, it's legally up to the states to declare language. If they want to designate Swahili, then that's their deal and it's cool.
My point is that the writer didn't take the time to look back over what she'd written, at what was obviously a dear principle to her heart, and realize that it made no kind of consistent sense. You can't have a character smilingly indulge another character's refusal to speak her language, then emphatically declare in the next breath that we should all learn one another's languages because it helps us understand one another. Either one would have been an acceptable character trait, but you can't do both.
That she can blithely write that bit about how Mirage's name is so 'obvious' says to me that she wasn't putting a whole lot of thought into the writing, though. Writing fanfiction is about more than just regurgitating the fandom tropes we all know by heart. Take a little time to think about what you're saying. Maybe also take the time to wonder if you might be offending everyone who lives outside "culturally rich New Mexico", but I suppose that's grasping at straws.