About That Big New Movie
Big promo tour for that big summer movie. RPS fodder appears to be a part of the actors contracts. Very wink wink, nudge nudge. Alas, the group of actors seem to have all gotten different scripts
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I don't know why epithets annoy me so much, but oh, how they do annoy me.
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I find that they just really through me out of a fic, and more than something like a typo would.
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I think my current personal most infuriating variation on it is when a member of the out-group from the writer's perspective, in first or close third, refers to another member of their out-group from the writer's perspective. Garrus is not going to think of that soldier as "the turian woman," he's going to think of her as "the petty officer" and note that Shepard is the human woman.
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I think epithets bother me less when the viewpoint is third-person omnipotent, but if it's third-person limited? Backspace ahoy!
And I totally agree about writers giving more thought to names. I read a fic recently where the POV character was a slave. Throughout most of the fic he refers to the other main character only as "his master", but towards the end, after he's freed, he changes to using the other character's name. It was simply done, but it worked for me in terms of showing the changing dynamic between the two characters.
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I tend to write in very tight third, so I spend a lot of time thinking about names.* Therefore, it really stands out to me when it's clear a writer HASN'T put a lot of thought into it, and it tends to throw me out of the story very quickly.
*As an extreme example, I once spent at least two day trying to figure out A) What Emily Thorne/Amanda Clarke calls herself in her head and B) How Nolan thinks about it. False identities are HARD.
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Epithets don't bother me. They can be a useful tool in writing and have been used to good effect in literature. It's only when they're overused or used in jarring contexts that they become bad writing, but the same can be said of any literary device.
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I don't dislike epithets as a rule, but I think you should use them when you actually have a good reason for (subtly) attracting attention to this particular characteristic of the character, instead of just wanting to avoid names.
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"It's going to blow! Run, go, NOW!" the blond screamed.
...makes me wonder what the hell being blond has to do with the action. On the other hand...
"Let me help you with that," the taller woman said, pulling the luggage down from the overhead rack.
...would be fine.
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It's like, okay, I get it. You don't want to wear out the character's name by using it too much. But the second sentence?
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