(Untitled)

[peacewish]

"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 NaturalistsThings 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

Comments

[tsarist_secret]

Pretty much sounds like this girl was trying to sound smart, when really...her theories are severely lacking

[ianam1983]

Try speaking dolphin. (Bearing in mind that most of their vocalizations are above our range of hearing, made with a completely different structure than our voicebox, and that they can speak with two different sound-producing mechanisms or "voices" at once.) Cybertronian is about ten times harder. It's not even organically produced. Yeah, the speaking-Cybertronian thing bugs the hell out of me too.

And that's not even mentioning the translations. Those would be rough as hell.

[kookaburra1701]

Just once, I'd like a fic where a human invents a machine or a musical instrument that could produce comparable sounds, and they use it to speak a pidgin-Cybertronian.

Then again Cybertronians writing in glyphs instead of barcode or those little databoxes also annoys me. XD But sadly it's canon.

[ianam1983]

Working on that in a fic myself. ;) Makes infinitely more sense, no?

[mdperera]

I'm glad you found this. It's easy to critique the flaws in stories with lousy spelling, nonexistent grammar, raging Sue-itis, etc. but the problems in this one are a bit more subtle. At least until the threesome starts.

1. "She tried to take people as they were, without prejudgment, because she liked to be taken that way as well."

This sentence? Not only does it come off as the author patting the OFC on the back, it's telling rather than showing. Want to make me believe that someone is kind or tolerant? Don't just say that they are; show me that quality in action. Trust the reader to draw the correct conclusions from the character's behavior.

2. "Alicia found that she had a soft place in her heart for the sullen Mirage... She understood their pride..."I think I need sunglasses. Her halo is blinding me. And I'm not keen on her attitude towards certain races or ethnic groups - the author seems, again, to be congratulating her character on being so understanding and open-minded. Even towards mean ol' Mirage

[konora]

I read the entire 3 chapters just hours ago. It only got worse from there.

It was a... well, not a good concept, but at least a semi-interesting one. I like the whole "sockets" idea, as strange as it seems. The problem is in the author's execution

[vejiraziel]

Because she's Latina, she says "madre de dios!" during sex, and thinks Mexican food is the best thing ever.

Hello, Michael Bay, I didn't see you there. Anyone else notice the similarities to Fig's character to make emphasis on the character's etnic backgrounds?

[dinogrrrl]

I know! She's like her own walking Latina stereotype. If the patronizing sermons about How White America Sucks were removed, I'd be offended by the cheesy stereotyping perpetrated by the Latina character! She's obviously not self aware enough to realize that she's walking right into that stereotype trap of her own volition.

[anon_decepticon]

It is, as you said, better executed than the typical trainwreck normally spotlighted here, but it definitely has some major flaws - euphemism abuse, paper thin plot, questionable character motivation, and of course the crown jewel, an OFC speshul-snowflake Sue paired with not one, but two canon characters.

Like yourself and the other commenters, I was irritated by our charming OFC's preachy, hypocritical attitude, but what I found most annoying about her was her apparent telepathy. The author is clearly going for a tone of, ooooh, look at the alien robots, they're so very alien and mysterious! Except they're not, really - our intrepid Sue has no trouble at all understanding exactly what Hound and Mirage are thinking and feeling, even before they notice her and start communicating with her in English.

Let's examine that for a moment: Not only are these alien robots, they're alien robots she's never met before, yet she readily picks up on their emotions - Hound looks amused, Mirage looks angry - and then correctly interprets the

[kookaburra1701]

Does...does Diego Garcia even HAVE a swamp?

[a_scattered_me]

I got curious and researched Diego Garcia's flora and fauna a bit - and lo and behold it doesn't have swamps haha
It does have freshwater marshes however, since it's a tropical island.
On the other hand, there are uber strict rules to preserve its environment (particularly by the British there), like a soldier getting fined for pissing on a coconut tree or how it's illegal to even pick up a dead crab of a certain species.

So when surveys are made, it's done properly and professionally and certainly not by a lone woman going around, nature-basking or whatever.

[dragoness_e]

I was stationed there for fourteen months back in the mid-80s. If it has freshwater marshes, they are temporary rain puddles back in the restricted zone somewhere, because D.G. has no surface freshwater, just an underground "lens" of freshwater floating on top of the seawater under the sand that wells can access. It's a coral atoll, horseshoe shaped, about 9 miles across the width of the shoe, and not more than a mile wide at any point

[a_scattered_me]

Ah so Diego Garcia DOES have a form of swamp land. Thanks for clearing that up, at some point I got kinda confused when I tried researching about it. Google was being unusually obscure about it - couldn't find crap when sifting through the web pages. I think I caught something about swamps along the lagoons but it was from one source only, from an academic journal you had to pay to read the rest. There were more hits on the eviction controversy than the actual flora and fauna of the place.

(also, somewhere along the line I started having mental images of the British having seizures each time a big, heavy robot goes around stomping on the wildlife, smashing a crab or two in the meantime. Kinda like that 'swear detector' in Demolition Man haha)

But in all honesty, I would expect an author who bases a story on a specific place they most likely have no personal knowledge of to have at least read a lousy wiki entry on it. The lack of research authors put with their Harry Potter fics, for example, is painfully obvious