"It Feels Rapey" -- Three Horrible Mistakes To Avoid When Writing Romance · 9:53pm Dec 3rd, 2015
Live-reading of this blog, by Imrix. In case you don't feel like reading, now you can listen to it.
I’m not good with romance. I am to romance what a fiberglass handjob is to foreplay. I have been defined as “an emotional wet fart” by at least three different psychologists.
I think kissing is so gross that the last time a girl leaned towards me I spat in her mouth and told her to savor the moment. A woman gently whispered in my ear that she wanted to wake up every morning next to me, and I just farted and went on drinking. My father fists cows for a living, and he’s the suave one in our household.
I’m saying this so you know that, even though vaginas quiver in awe whenever I walk by, I’m not exactly a connoisseur when it comes to the matters of the heart. But I’m making an effort to get better at this – day after day, I force myself to read romance-related fiction with no pause, so I can become an expert on love.
Losing my computer seemed like the perfect opportunity to dedicate even more effort to this. I focused my attention on AO3, a website rumored to have really high-quality stories in it, because it looked like the perfect place to do this.
And after two weeks reading romance fanfiction from there on my mobile phone, I can attest that those rumors are fucking bullshit.
Hi, I’m Aragón. I have never written a good romance, my emotional maturity is measured in pubic hair, and I’m imitating Seanbaby for this blog. Here are three common mistakes when writing romance so egregious even dumb fucks like me can’t understand why people keep making them.
1. WHY THE FUCK ARE THEY IN LOVE.
In real life, people choose their lovers for a bunch of reasons, most of which of the pussy variety, both metaphorically and literally. The emotional blowjob that is love tends to appear because the person in question happens to fit your standards, be it personality-wise or looks-wise or whatever. It’s a beautiful thing.
And it matters fuck-all in writing. If you want me to believe this lovely lady fell in love with the fucking nerd that is your protagonist, then explain me why in terms that make sense to somebody who doesn’t masturbate with pizza crust.
You see, fanfiction is a terrible medium for romance, because more often than not the author is a fan of the relationship they want to portray (hence the term). This means that the important bit for said author is that the two parties are in love, not why they’re in love or how are they going to make it as a couple. The characters end up together no matter what, as if their genitalia had magnetic fields. Shit, if the genitals were magnets, the story would be more realistic, in fact.
I am talking about situations like this: A couple, guy and girl. She is a rich, cultured, beautiful lady with a promising future and tits the size of a penthouse. She’s with the protagonist, a dumb fuck who has absolutely nothing to offer as a person. If you asked this guy to entertain your parents for a minute while you’re in the bathroom, he’d piss his pants and then stare at the walls. This dipshit stutters, sweats all over the place, and his personality has the depth of a layer of Nutella on a stripper’s ass.
And they’re in love. Mad love. She thinks this guy is her soulmate.
That makes as much sense as two clowns having fun without murdering a single child. That guy is the kind of person who knows how much cotton do you need to make a blow-up doll feel like a sheep. The Government wouldn’t let this sad fuck become a eunuch because his dick is legally considered toxic waste.
I don’t give a shit about how you see love in reality. Maybe you think that anybody can fall in love with anybody if the circumstances are perfect enough. But in fiction, that’s a fart in a hurricane – unless you show exactly why both fell in love and why, it doesn’t fucking work. A character can’t fall in love without a reason. Dogs will try to impregnate any pillow in sight without a second thought, and even they bother to smell their mate’s asshole before the courting.
When a character falls in love with some other character, there’s a selecting process going on. They will choose their partner because said partner, in particular, has something to offer that nobody else can give them. This is about unique qualities, and what can the other person bring to the table. If they can’t offer a fucking single thing, they will die alone and everybody will laugh at them.
The EQG movie was a perfect example of a romance that has as much right to exist as elderly sex. It was there, and it was a reality, but it made us all uncomfortable and so we ignore it and silently euthanize whoever brings it up in public. Twilight Sparkle and Flash Sentry had less chemistry than a block of cement, and their dolls were more realistic than their romance.
Why? Because neither Twilight Sparkle nor Flash Sentry had any reason to fall in love with each other. They knew nothing about the other person, and they never bothered to find shit out, either, because fuck that noise. A conversation is not necessarily needed to develop a realistic – or at least believable, which is the lowest fucking standard you have to force on yourself here – relationship in a work of fiction, so I’m not complaining about how they didn’t talk. But again, characters don’t fall in love with a person, they fall in love with a quality.
The definition of “quality” here is not as much “something good” as “something only they can give”. I mentioned uniqueness three paragraphs ago, and for a reason. Twilight is a horse and also a princess horse, and that could be why Flash falls in love with her. She’s weird, she offers something he can’t find anywhere else, and it’ll be both interesting and completely fucked up when she takes off his pants and sees he doesn’t have a monster cock like all the males in her world.
Healthy relationship? Fuck no, they’re not even the same species. Try to fuck a chicken and you tell me how your first date went. But at least it’s a start. In the fictional example I put above, the girl was an amazing person and the guy was the human equivalent of puking during a motorboating session. It didn’t make sense, because we saw that one character had a lot of qualities and uniqueness and the other was just a fucking dipshit. EQG is the same – we know that Twilight has unique qualities, but Flash doesn’t.
And even if he had, Twilight never really sees any of them. Sure, he saves her when she’s talking with Luna, but by then she’s already got a crush on that dude. Fucking why? And mind you, the exact same thing happens with Flash, because we know that Twilight has qualities as a person, but he fucking doesn’t, so the entire thing is just a total clusterfuck of absurdity.
Neither Twilight nor Flash have any idea what the other stands for. The scriptwriter didn’t give a single shit for their relationship, and it shows, because what matters is that they are together, not why. Ironically enough, if you care too much, or just enough but in the wrong way, you’ll make the exact same mistake, as I explained earlier.
Seriously, the only way for that movie’s romantic angle to work is to picture that, in-universe, Flash is really damn hot. He’s such a hunk that whenever more than three women look at him at the same time the air gets instantly moisturized and smells like fish. Likewise, for Flash to want Twilight so badly and give a shit about Luna screaming at her, Twilight has to be a knock-out; the kind of girl that makes guys pump their muscles, blush, faint, and then cry in the bathroom for sixteen hours.
So change “love” for “desire to bang each other”, and bam. Now both have a reason to be in love, and their actions are obviously justified – they want to enjoy that quality, the hotness. Fucking Pride and Prejudice right there, and the worst thing is, it’s still better than what we actually got.
You see, a romantic story isn’t selling the characters to each other. A romantic story is selling the relationship to the audience. The EQG romance is shitty because the viewer has to headcanon what the fuck is going on to get invested in anything at all, or at least to avoid being alienated. None of the characters show qualities to each other, so they’re all out of everybody’s league. What a goddamn masterpiece.
So when writing a romantic story, the author should always show both characters as equals, in the sense that both have a reason to fall in love. If one of them is perfect and the other is a piece of shit, then your story makes no sense. Sure, one can be slightly better than the other, adoration can be the basis of a sex agreement, after all. But it still has to feel justified.
The reader needs to feel like the characters are better now that they’re together. No matter the exact angle – can be emotional, physical, intellectual, philosophical, or whatever floats your fucking boat.
And for the record, “being nice” is not a fucking quality; it’s the lack of a flaw. It’s like fucking your postman because he didn’t beat up your senile grandfather this morning. Nobody ever got a blowjob for holding a door open, and if “he’s/she’s/I’m not an asshole” is the justification the characters use to explain why they are or should be in a relationship then at least one of them is a rapist.
You want your dick sucked, you work for charity, or play the guitar, or beat up monkeys with your kung-fu skills. You do something that’s real and measurable. If the story’s relationship is based on thoughts like “at least he doesn’t try to choke me while I sleep”, then you’re not reading a love story – you’re reading a manual on how to make sure your future children stab hobos when they grow up.
2. THAT IS NOT HOW HUMANS WORK, YOU CUNTWEASEL.
Of all the godawful mistakes rookie authors make when writing a love story, “learning how an actual human actually operates” is basic enough to just know that everybody will fuck it up. This is a thing that’s justified if you’re thirteen and think that a passionate relationship is crying because you don’t sit next to each other during Arts and Crafts, but if you’re an adult, this shit is inexcusable.
Here I’m not talking about a general thing, by the way. That would be way too logical. A basic misunderstanding on psychology is normal when you’re writing for the first time; there’s a reason why we pay a lot of money to people who can write realistic characters. No, I’m talking about something so fucking specific that the mere fact it just keeps happening and nobody says a word about it is a slap in the face of God.
This point is about this particular scene, or minor variations of it: a character is thinking about something normal and boring. All of a sudden, they think of the romantic interest in affectionate terms. And then they say “WOAH, WHERE DID THAT COME FROM?!”
You know the scene. Showing surprise because suddenly they realize they’ve been in love this whole time, guys. Being baffled because they seem to have developed hyoo-man ee-mo-tzions. It’s been done a thousand fucking times.
”I mean, you don’t like anybody after all, do you?” asked Kickmyballs-chan in a way that was kawaii as fuck or whatever. “You don’t care for this stuff.”
“No, I…” Gilipo-kun shook his head in a cool yet mysterious way. “I don’t...” He blinked, still cool and mysterious, like my homeroom teacher when she refuses to look me in the eyes while she fucks me with a strap-on. It was hard for him to say the words, for some reason. That was weird, right? After all, he couldn’t think of a single person he liked—
Like a flash, Twat-kun’s face came to mind.
Gilipo-kun jumped in surprise. “Woah!” he exclaimed cooly. “Where did that come from?!”
This shit.
I have read this shit so many times in just two weeks.
Who the fuck thinks like this? Who wrote this bullshit first and how it got so popular everybody is trying to copy it? Even when it doesn’t appear like this, you can see traces of this line of thinking here and there. Characters suddenly going “Wait, I’m gay?! Where did that come from?!” or having to ponder if they like someone or not.
I thought “feelings” was the scientific name of that itchy shit you get on your dick after skinny dipping in a polluted lake until last year, and even I know that this is not how this fucking thing works. Guys, if you feel the thirst for balls in your mouth, trust me when I say you at least suspect it already. Ladies, if you think eating pussy is exactly like making out with an alien, I don’t expect you to go “WAIT A FUCKING SECOND” and start a lesbian rampage.
But then again, shit, at least the gay thing has an excuse. Maybe the character is in denial, or honestly never stopped to ponder about it. Being more than mildly surprised is a total exaggeration, unless you’re a rampaging homophobe, but I can see straight people writing this and not feel like they’re fucking stupid, because playing out of field is always rough.
The fucking “wait I was in love” line of thinking, though? Unless you’re a robot, that’s just not how it goes. You fucking know when you have a crush, you don’t need to be all startled about it. Trying to surprise the reader by having “X is in love with Y” as a twist is pretty damn stupid on its own, but trust me, you can do it without surprising the character as well.
The characters either fall in love slowly or all at once. Depends on the story and how the author wants to portray the relationship. But love is not a fucking ninja that sneaks up behind you and slashes your throat with a knife shaped like an erect nipple – the moment it happens, you fucking know.
I can’t stress this enough. I talked about falling in love with qualities before, and this is actually a continuation of that.
Some people mistake this for the well-known trope of “jealously equals love”. The idea that a person might discover he or she is in love when their Valentine starts hitting on a stranger or whatever. It’s similar, yes, but it’s not the same because here at least we have a justification for the thought. If somebody wants to take something that you think of as yours, then you get possessive. This might work as an epiphany for love.
Although it really is not. That’s not love, that’s manipulation. It’s the mental equivalent of throwing a microwave to a girl’s face and then feeling up her boobs. You’re forcing the character to make a choice in a rush – choose him now, or you’ll lose him forever. This is what salespeople do to force you to buy shitty cars.
But even then, the reader sees why it’s going on. There’s an emotion there, a quality, and a reason why it arises. The jealously, the possessiveness, and the fear of losing a future opportunity get mistaken for actual affection. Even then it shouldn’t be surprised, because if you’re possessive about a person you fucking know it, hence you being possessive in the first place. Sure, you can justify it by saying that “they’re in denial”, but being in denial implies they fucking know.
Not even having this jealous shit, though? Inexcusable. Characters who go all “OH WOW HOLY DICKS I LOVE HER SO MUCH” for no reason are the kind of people who grow up to be the kind of man who rubs himself against little boys in the subway.
3. CAN SOMEONE EXPLAIN ME WHY THEY’RE ACTING LIKE LITTLE CHILDREN.
I’ll admit right away that this is petty as hell, but if two people have been fucking married for, like, seven years, and the guy blushes every time she expresses any affection whatsoever, she has all the right to stab that guy’s temples until his brain finally activates. My instinctive answer to a hug is a suplex, and even I know this is bullshit.
If two characters are in a relationship, showing affection is the goddamn standard. It’s not a rarity, it’s not a surprise, it’s not a twilight velvet; it’s the definition of their daily routine. That’s what “being in a relationship” means. I accept that doing this kind of shit in public might be uncomfortable for some people, and maybe the character feels that way, which is fine.
But I’ve seen this kind of scene happening all the time, no matter if the characters are alone or not.
There are thousands of stories out there in which the characters are flustered twenty-four-goddamn-seven, because the author finds it cute. So the characters will be doing whatever the hell they do for a living, and then he will kiss her, and then she will blush and almost faint, because even though they have been going on for over five years this is a new thing for her.
Look, humans get used to everything with time. We come to this world screaming, covered in shit, and causing indescribable pain to our mother. A kiss is not going to blow anybody’s mind after that. This is just stupid, especially if the characters are supposed to be emotionally developed.
The reason for this kind of scene, I think, is of a meta-story level. And that’s bad, because it breaks immersion. You see, this is not how the characters would react. It’s how the fans would like them to react. Maybe even what the author would do in such a situation. And sure, everybody includes bits of their own personality in their stories– it’s why all my characters have seven-foot schlongs – but that doesn’t make it any less stupid.
It’s the first time we see the characters kissing. Some readers might get flustered when reading that, and maybe the author does, too. But the characters don’t. In-universe this makes no sense whatsoever, so having this stuff, especially when it doesn’t fit the characters’ personalities, is not a good idea. The signal here is less “they’re so in love and cute together” and more “she’s holding his family hostage”. It’s not cute, it’s uncomfortable.
If the characters are alone, and have been together for a long-ass fucking time, then showing affection shouldn’t render them completely useless. Having sex with a person like that must be like rubbing your erect nipples against a bag full of dead cats and one dwarf – there’ll be a reaction, yes, but unless you’re into kinky shit it won’t be what you’re expecting.
There’s not a lot to say here, because this isn’t as generally wrong as the other two things. I already said this is petty as fuck. Maybe if the character is really really shy this can be justified, but even then – you’re showing that the character cringes whenever their lover tries to show affection.
Even a mime would think that’s rapey.
To be continued.
This blog was written in a much meaner voice than my usual one, and it was actually exhausting on a mental level. Fun, but exhausting.
Also, I actually like EQG, but if you try to defend that fucking romance then you are wrong from an objective point of view, god dammit.
How exactly is this different from when you beat up a panda with your kung-fu skills?
s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/32/79/8c/32798c6320419ea9f7efe38be565aa9f.jpg
My only question is, which two ponies do you want me to ship?
The largest archive of romance on the Internet is ASSTR.Org (Alt.Sex.Stories Text Repository). You can try doing research there.
3590138
Isn't there one story where it turns out Flash just has a huge pony fetish...
A-hah!
There it is.
Oh right, the reason why Twilight was interested in Flash (Aah aaahhhh; saviour of the universe!) ...
*shrug*
So I'm guessing you'll have the solution to all these problems? Because I agree with all you say but I have never found a way to bypass it. (Hey, I'm just an amateur writer, I'm still learning). I also can't think of any stories that have done it right, so I got really nothing to go on. But I would like to see what your solution is.
This is only the second time today I've wanted to beat my intestines with a meat tenderizer. Aside from that, you make good points. I don't really know if you're right, but you make good points.
I can't wait until your next blog post.
Now where did I leave my brain bleach?
3590297
Really?
I'm going to explore this later, I suppose, in another blog post -- so far, the mistakes I pointed out aren't too hard to by pass, though. Present the characters as equals, and don't include those two kind of scenes I said I hate. It really isn't that hard, it's just about avoiding scenes or situations that are purposedly pre-designed to be perceived as "good" when, in reality, are just artificial. If only one story did that stuff I wouldn't mind, it's the repetition that bothers me.
Show the characters kissing and being happy about it, but without being extremely flustered, for example. And have the character realize he or she is in love as it happens (tends to be a gradual thing, but if you wanna go sudden, less surprise and more acknowledgement and introspection should be the way to go -- you can play that as a comedy without trouble).
I actually think that a romance should almost never be used as a main plot. A romance is the perfect B-plot (hence its overuse in pop culture), because you manage to develop chemistry between the characters by focusing on something different than the relationship itself. This makes it both more realistic and easier for the reader to perceive.
As per good examples of romance, from this website: Yours Truly is a god-damn masterpiece, Mercy, Mercy, Mercy manages to pull off OctaScratch and make it believable, and Eyes on You had such a refreshing confession scene for its lack of stupid cliches that I actually stepped in and became a proofreader for the last chapters.
There are many more, but really, the mistakes I pointed at are by nature easy to avoid. Nobody needs to show the characters flustered when kissing, there's no reason why you would write a stupid-ass "revelation" scene if a character develops feelings for another one, and having proactive, not-piece-of-shit characters is a must for any story.
But again -- more on this later. As the ending of the blog says, I'll talk about more things in following posts.
Funny, I already assumed that that relationship was founded on mutual lust. I mean, come on, they're teenagers. Even if Twilight's mind isn't, her brain is, along with her endocrine system. You can see the rational part of Purplesmart get drowned in a tide of hormones every time she crashes into Flash. As for him, he's a teenage male. A nice one, yes, but I well remember that time of my life.
(Also, my pet theory is that Flash has a serious case of horse face. He did date Sunset before, and even if she were just using him as another rung on the social ladder, she probably didn't mind that he was easy on Equestrian eyes.)
In any case, a fine work on what to avoid in romantic fiction presented with your usual wit and voice. I look forward to further installments.
Actually AFAIK if a baby is born covered in shit it means something went wrong, and it's kinda bad. (Not "the baby's gonna die" bad, but "we have to keep an eye out for possible complications" bad.)
3590331 I wasn't referring to this site as I do not read ship fics. I was referring to general media. The best romantic relationships I see on TV or movies often come from relationships that have been established before the show's beginning.
3590421
Picture a romantic attraction as a form of respect. What do these characters do that shows and earns respect from each other in a way that the other characters don't, won't or can't?
My personal rule, or at least pet peeve: don't write mind control that turns into romance unless you really know what you are doing.
Heh. As someone who has shipped The Purple One as well as The Pink One (and just closed the last chapter on Princess Purplesmart's wedding), I have to say I agree with a certain percentage of what you said, *except* the belief that love always has to express itself as a rational relationship between two people with obvious reasons for said hookup to exist and persist. Sometimes love just comes out of left field and clocks you over the head like a baseball bat. From the inside, it makes sense, but all of your friends (and hers too) are baffled by the relationship. If it wasn't so, sites like match.com would have a lot better win/loss ratio.
With that in mind, I'm pretty proud of my little nerdy nook. :)
Most shipfics seem to drop the ball on one of 3 points: Time, similarities, and events. Summer Camp romances exist, but they're far weaker at the core.
Perceived similarities and an example: Suppose Flash was a great lyracist, but weak in math, while Twilight was frantic for song lyrics and a math genius. Math test coming up. Big song to beat the sirens coming up. Mutual study session strikes sparks. Romance blooms. From that bloom, the romance can go on... except that Twilight has to go home. Summer camp romance over. Or is it? Perhaps the portal is closed, and Twilight has to science it back open, using Flash's guitar amp as a harmonizing whatchamcallit. Or Flash happens to have a relative who does harmony experiments.
My new favorite quote
I really wouldn't call the last two inherent mistakes, if they were they wouldn't be as popular as they are. More that they're overused cliches. They still shouldn't be done, but they aren't like the first one in that no one would ever enjoy a story more for it.
3590730
I feel like I agree with both of you. No, love doesn't make rational sense -- make all the checklists you want, Twilight, but they won't change how you really feel. But as you admit, it does make emotional sense to the people (or ponies [or griffon and breezy in a star-crossed love forged high in the clouds, constantly trying to overcome their different scales]) involved. The crucial phrase from that bit I quoted is "From the inside, it makes sense". The story is supposed to take us inside!
Some trouble arises because people subscribe to different emotional logic. I think that's why certain ships make perfect sense to some folks and are inherently disgusting to others -- TwiDash (for example) might work for someone who doesn't identify with, and isn't similar to, either of them, because that reader's sense of how love works still fits their personalities. But there is still some potential to communicate that. Bad Horse has a great post about the logic behind Mauxie presented in FouDubulbe's strips, and "Spring is Dumb" kind of made RariDash "click" for me even though the one overt passage about what it made me realize is actually very brief, and has a lot of other stuff going on. (Although according to my shelf I started following Salvation first. Maybe they got flipped by the bookshelf update?)
Writing a good shipfic is involves both making the emotional logic that makes sense to you real, in the form of a narrative, but also communicating the logic itself. Slack on the latter and you can appeal to a ship's fandom while making everyone else raise a quizzical eyebrow; handle it well, and, like "Spring is Dumb" for me, you're more of an ambassador, making new people "get" the stuff that already appeals to you about the ship. In that sense, it's a special case of one thing writing is for, namely communicating the abstract, personal, or internal (there's probably a better way to describe this, but, well, I'm not a writer).
There's a certain limit to how far you can go with this -- you'll probably never make a truly committed homophobe buy a gay ship, or make a pony-hater care about horse love, or get an unrepentant rake to feel for a committed, devoted marriage. But I think Aragón is right that the width of the net you cast is an aspect of your story's quality, at least as far as anyone who doesn't already "get" your ship or your style or whatever is concerned. And people who do certainly aren't gonna change their minds because of him.
(I'm sure you already get all this on some level, Georg -- it's a prerequisite to writing, as you have, the best-loved OC romance on the site. But hopefully me braindumping about it can trace the path from your perspective to Aragón's.)
tl;dr (boy howdy is it): Love doesn't make sense, but a love story should make it feel like it does.
3590735
Aragon tasked me of working out something so awful, someone hadn't fetishized it.
This line was the result. It's not easy when we live in a world where "sounding" is common enough to have its own name.
What? Oh, no, this comment isn't to take credit for the line. I'm just writing this hoping that Aragon reads it and asks me what "sounding" is.
3590873 I've actually been working off and on (mostly off) on a story called "Twilight Sounds Discord's Urethra With Fire Ants for like a year now. Should probably continue working on it.
3590838 Hm. Also very good point. I loved 'Spring is Dumb' and the ship that went with it even though I'm not a fan of that ship. Now that I'm on a computer with a mouse (wonderful invention), let me split philosophical hairs a bit more. I fell in love in August, 1981. I didn't realize it at the time (neither did my now-wife). I was doing things that had no logical explanation. For some reason, crawling around on the dorm lawn on my knees and collecting about ten pounds of dandylions to stuff my now-wife's mailbox full seemed like a great idea. I didn't know why. She liked it. She didn't know why either. We still do stuff like that. Our friends still think we're crazy. So do our kids. I understand now (a little), even though I didn't then. It's the reason they call it falling in love. Sometimes it slips across the threshold and whispers into your ear, sometimes it flings you into a brick wall hard enough to leave an imprint.
The summer we were apart, she wrote me a milk-carton full of little short love notes. I still have it. (in more ways than one)
Why do your blogs always have me laughing my ass off?
I shall report back to you next week, but I suspect it will go fowl.
I am not sorry.
I am/was reading a story on fimfiction and it actually has all three problems you've described. I knew it wasn't good, I just didn't understand how not good it was. I couldn't bring to mind what was wrong with it, but your article brought the spotlight on those glaring flaws.
So now I am in a predicament. Do I (a) continue with the rest of the story and trudge through the aggravating romance plot, or (b) toss it and find something better.
3590873
Joke's on you, buddy -- I already knew what that was. I read Cracked, remember?
I have an issue with stories that focus on romance, but in the background you have an epic adventure type quest. It rarely works, and it is always jaring whenever you swap focus between the two plots, because it just doesn't work. That's if the main plot is romance, mind you. Especially if it is Harry Potter fanfiction. I have yet to see any good Harry Potter stories with romance as the focus.
3590355
Those are all very good and believable points, except that, well...you're the one who came up with them. :-\
As Aragon notes in his post, if the reader has to make up headcanon to justify the ship, the ship isn't especially good.
The aim is to sell the relationship directly, instead of waiting for someone on their way to the fridge to go "oh, wait, I guess it does make sense if you look at it this way"
3591604
Storytelling that needs the audience to cover its rear is bad storytelling, especially when that audience could completely miss the point. Just look at how fans scrambled to explain how Han Solo could make the Kessel Run in any number of parsecs, a unit of distance, when the original intention was to show that he was a rather dim blowhard.
Still, those ambiguities and justifications are the footholds of fan fiction. If everything were perfectly explained, we would have a lot less to work with.
Spanish! \o/
Fanfiction is not the only guilty party in this. Ever seen an Adam Sandler movie? Any Adam Sandler movie?
3590925
Not realizing you're in love rings true to me. Having it be a way to shoehorn in a poorly-justified romance, or having a character suddenly "realizing" how they supposedly already felt obviously change how they feel and act, can still be pretty awful writing. I think when it goes wrong, it's usually a consequence of writing to the trope or cliché rather than any honest emotional insight. Still, I imagine something like that will always ring less true for Aragón than for you, because you've just got different personalities or perspectives.
Also, your relationship with your wife sounds really cute and sweet. D'aww.
3592095 Every Adam Sandler movie, you mean
3593056 As always, reality does not translate well into fiction and vice versa. (Try some of the things you've seen in movies to attract a prospective mate and you would wind up in jail for several years) If you go for really trying to *define* stages of love, you wind up with a matrix (and I can't do matrix math worth a hoot)
If A=B you have rough stages of:
1) Cluelessness - "Yeah, he/she seems nice. And we've spent time together. So?"
2) Familiarity - "Yeah, we're friends. That's all there is to it."
3) Really Familiar - "We're not really seeing each other. We just go to the same events, and it's easier than going alone."
4) Serious (many degrees) - "Oh, lipstick? It's... um... Complicated.
5) Really Serious - (yeah, the whole chart breaks down when you get to this point, like a marching band and a field full of fire ants)
If A != B you have prospective conflict and sparks fly. For example:
a 1/4 cross "How could you go out with him?! I thought you liked me!"
a 2/5+ cross "He tried to give me a ring last night! Right there in the restaurant! What was he thinking? You have to go talk to him for me, please? I don't know if I can look him in the face again. You would have thought I hit him or something. No, don't answer that! He's probably calling for me! Say I'm not here!"
AO3 has some good fics, some very good fics even, but yes, it's mostly trash.
This is common with a lot of fanfiction sites. It's even arguably true here.
I didn't read through the whole comment stream, so someone else may well have said this already.
I think there's a sweet spot where certain stories can sit pretty low on the "prove they're in love" scale. For most romance fanfiction, the whole point of the story is to get the two together. It ends on them finally kissing, or getting married, or weathering some relationship turmoil. Basically, the romance is the story, so if you don't justify your own premise, your story will suffer for it. But there's another type of story, where you're showing the couple long after they became one, and the relationship isn't necessarily the focus of the story. Tossing in a couple of reminiscences of events where the two did things to endear themselves to each other certainly helps paint a picture, but you don't have to lay the groundwork from the beginning. Depending on how important the relationship itself is to the plot, it may be enough just to show them doing the little things that couples do, which gets at your "treat each other like equals" point. It's kind of the difference between "it's in the future, and these things happen, and, oh, AJ and Dash are a couple" and "it's in the future, and these things happen because AJ and Dash are a couple."
3590331
Look, I thought "Yours Truly" was a well-written story. But it has its own point that it violates that's a common source of ridiculousness in fanfiction romance. And that's the way that within a small group of friends, they all manage to pair up. The odds against this are staggering. We get Twijack, Flutterdash, and Sparity all in the same story. Only Pinkie gets left out in the cold. Whenever this happens in a story, I just have to roll my eyes.
Just read the comments, and names for the ships mentioned, in my mind;
Flashlight
Need Help (TwiJack)
Remix (OctaScratch)
Bookworm (TwiDash)
Pinkie Keen (Twinkie)
Moxie (Eh, I got nothing)
20% Cooler (RariDash)
Iron Pony (Appledash)
Cloudfall (Flutterdash)
Gem Hunt (Sparity)
Oh man, if I could make this a site blog without getting fired I would.
3594229 ARguably. we've had Futa fanfics on the front.
Arguably left town ago a few seconds after this site was created.
3600656
No, no, the arguable part is whether or not the site is mostly trash , not whether or not there's trash here.
No computer for five days, hence me commenting so late. Phone replies are horrid.
3590187
Rather obviously, Octavia and Vinyl Scratch. You know you want to.
3590588
Mind control is one of those things that, if done well, can lead to a masterful story, be it romantic or not. And if it's romantic, you can play it artsy and angsty and whatnot, or completely off-the-rails and for laughs. Any way you go, though, it's mandatory that you know exactly what you're doing and the implications of everything you say or do with the story, because that's some touchy fucking subject if I've ever seen one.
And with touchy I mean "rapey". I'm serious when I say half the fucking mistakes when writing romance lead to situations or entire relationships feeling like there's a lot of rape going on in the background. One would think that's the last goddamn feeling you want to evoke, and yet.
3590730
In real life, anything goes. I have a really personal and weird view on love because, quite frankly, I'm rather dumb -- so when I say that a reason has to exist, I'm only talking about fiction. The only way one can actually play a "love at first sight for no reason" card without it looking like it's only about how damn handsome both characters are is if you approach the whole thing with a really fairytale-y perspective. Destiny, fate, red string, yaddah yaddah. Otherwise, having two characters who fall in love without perceiving something unique or quantificable in the other just comes off as lust.
Which, hey, can be good if that's what you're going for.
Mind you, you pretty much agree with me:
In the context of this blog, that counts as a reason for falling in love. A quality. Similarities and events, especially -- Twi falls in love because Flash can play the guitar. Swallow, yes, but that can work as an opening for her knowing him better, discovering htey have shit in common, yaddah yaddah. It doesn't come out of nowhere, which is what the blog is pointing at as stupid.
3590792
The problem with the last two, though, is that they are inherently wrong in the fact that nobody acts like that in real life. They're popular scenes, and extremely overused -- that makes them trite and tiring. But even if they weren't overused, they would still be wrong because that's not a healthy or a realistic relationship. It breaks immersion to make something "cute". It quite obviously comes from sources like manga or anime, and that's a problem when the relationship you're portraying is based on western tradition and storytelling.
And in manga and anime, those scenes are still pretty fucking stupid, by the way. People don't act like that, ever. And last time I checked, Japanese people were still people.
3593056
Yeah, I got nothing. You and Georg pretty much said anything I could say. So... Neat that we agree? Anyway, good chain of comments right there, I liked your arguments a lot, man.
3591588
One of the things to talk about in a later blog, yes. Romance is a great B-plot, but you have to be really damn good to make a neat A-plot with it. It can still be done, though.
As per HP fanfiction -- not my cup of tea. Naked Quidditch, Methods of Rationality, and that's kind of it for me. I've heard there are some awesome ones I might be missing, though.
3592095
Point taken. However, it'd be hard to find something Adam Sandler didn't fuck up in his movies. The relationships he portrays are fucking horrid for a bunch of reasons, a big one being the very first point in this blog, tho, so you're totally right.
3596099
Yeah, that's a way to avoid the pitfall that is the "how they fell in love" plot, but even then, one has to make sure the characters are seen as equal. There's nothing in your comment that I disagree with, but note that I talk about this in the blog proper: if you show two characters that have been together for a while, make sure one is not seen as perfect while the other is a total slob.
This particualr issue shines a lot in Gravity Falls fanfiction, when tackling a certain relationship (Dipper/Pacifica, for the ones who wanna know for trivia or whatever), and I think it has to do with wish fulfillment. The author wants to be with the girl, so they write themselves as the guy -- but while doing so, they turn the guy into a totally useless piece of shit and the girl into some kind of mix between Optimus Prime and Superman.
When portraying two characters as falling in love, show why by pointing out the qualities. When they are already in a relationship, show why they would want to be in that relationship in the first place, by writing them as equals. The little things a couple does, for example, are a good way to do it. It's just about making sure it doesn't feel like someone is being dragged down by being an item.
3597054
Man, wouldn't that be awesome, though? Just to see everybody's reaction? Say it was a social experiment and then blame someone else, it always works for me.
(In all seriousness, while this is a horrible example, a series of site blog posts on general writing advice when it comes to particular genres would be a pretty cool thing. You could get chums like Bookplayer or Bad Horse to do so, if that's overwhelming for just the mods. I would offer my help too, but I don't think I'm smart enough. Yet.)
3602872 Sadly, I already did those
Seems like people have already forgotten them... BUT! I'm organizing a big single-blog thing that I am pretty sure I can publish site-wide including writing guides (mine and several other people's). So if you have suggestions, let me know!
3602872
My first comment is so fucking long I think it covers about 20% of anything anyone could say, right or wrong, just through infinite monkeying.
D'aww, I love you too, shmoopy-doo.
My whole 500+ word logorrheic essay should probably have been boiled down to:
I was gonna ask you if there were any romantic ponyfics that pulled this off, because it seemed so impossible to me. Then I remembered I already knew one: it comes up in this chapter of Cheerilee's Thousand.[1] But that example is a) deliberately kinda silly, b) creepy on purpose, and c) has a pretty light touch, compared to other forms of mind control. So I still wanna know if you're thinking of anything specific, especially for "artsy and angsty and whatnot".
[1]The spoiler doesn't really work with hyperlinks, but at least I tried.
PS Scratchtavia a shit LyraBon 5ever 1v1 me irl
3602872
It's my belief that that is entirely irrelevant. If people come away from a story happier/sadder/whatever the story is supposed to make you feel, realism doesn't matter. Often realism does make people happier/sadder/whatever, but not always. Those scenes would not be popular if they made every story with them inherently worse.
3602872 Oh yeah, that's exactly my problem with it and why I brought it up, the nearly inescapable rapey-ness.
This is actually something my opinions have crystallized on fairly recently, last few years or so. Probably on account of all the shipping fanfic I've read in that time, pretty much all I read pre-pony was traditionally published fiction that didn't include a lot of stuff that was specifically intended to be romantic. Well, that and fanfic is by definition usually amateur, so maybe stuff gets through that hopefully a professional editor would look askew at? I'm dunno.
3601978 Oh sorry I'll say that again
Yes this site is mostly trash.
3602872
If you're going to bother reading HP fiction at all, you should try Seventh Horcrux by Emerald Ashes over on fanfiction.net. Make sure you have the right author, their might be a couple stories with that title.
It's an amusing comedy that involves horrible people, which seems like the kind of thing you could get behind.
This is the single greatest thing I've ever read
To be fair, the whole "wait omg am I in love?" is exactly how teenage girls experience their first crush. This is because we do not have anything nearly as reliable as a dick to tell us, "Whoa, that thing's gotten all stiffened up, I guess that must mean I think that person's hot!" We have no feedback mechanism. Vaginas get wet at random for no reason whatsoever (literally no reason, you were thinking of your math homework and no, you are not turned on by math), nipples do not in fact harden in the presence in one who you would wish to schtup (they are much more likely to harden because goddamn it's cold outside and I forgot my sweater), so you basically have to learn what that giddy feeling of you want to spend every minute with that person and you want to giggle hysterically when they are looking at you and if you fear they might have seen your zit OMG YOU WANT TO DIE, and how these sensations are different from the very, very similar situations of wanting a girl to be your best friend in 2nd grade.
So if the character is a teenage girl experiencing her first crush, then actually this is normal. Also, if someone was a friend before you became attracted to them, it really does kind of sneak up on you. Dunno about guys, but for girls and young women, it does work like that. Guess who wrote 98% of the fiction on AO3?
However, if the character is a more-than-1000-year-old world leader... then no, it is not going to work like that. For MLP characters this might be vaguely believable for most of the Mane 6, but not Rarity, not Celestia or Luna, and certainly not fucking Discord (Discord thinks having a friend is a new experience, but if he's capable of getting a boner, then he's had them before and knows what they mean. if he's not capable of getting a boner, then experiencing Fluttershy's friendship for the first time isn't going to magically give him the capability.)
it's funny because the main romance I'm writing now is based on rapey feels. Rather, it's actually a relationship started by them molesting each other in a smut fic.
The Japanese are their own breed altogether. (Bigoted asshole-ism aside, I could at some point believe their culture leads them on different paths.)
As far as being seen as equals, that's for the characters and not the reader. Maybe the reader does think one of them is a total shitbag but their partner sees them as a vital complement. Maybe he's a fantastical dreamer and she's a negative, unsupportive bitch but at the end of the day, she keeps him from sinking their life-funds into a half-cocked ambition and subsequently falling into a deep depression. At least, that's how he perceives it. Making them too equally matched empirically feels kind of meta to me.
I came to see which of these heinous crimes I've committed, but I'm far too blinded by proximity to my writing to parse out these flaws.
Just about died laughing, though when I read the header for the 3rd note, I thought was going to be about characters being mean to each other to show affection, or avoid each other when they want attention.
Wow. your "emotionally retarded' comment resonates with me.
I think a crush CAN sneak up on you, depending on how romantic you are or have been conditioned to be. When I was in 3rd and 5th grade i thought girls were cute, but I never had an intellectual, emotional reason to like them. It was all physical.
Hell thanks to reading too much fiction and hentai, I'm left to wonder if orgasm equals ejacualtion. So many go on about "Mind blowing" or some other vague definitions and i've never had any of that. Makes me wonder if I'm a sociopath...
So I for one will never write a romance.
3872602 Shit, I already did......Eh it was an April Fool joke meant to highlight some of these issues, so....satire?
Now I feel even more terrible.
Wow. That was blunt
You'd be surprised, actually
Falling in love is largely pheromones, which transmit a fair portion of antibody information. Apparently, in terms of pheromones, people are largely attracted to people whose immune systems complements their own, ensuring a strong next generation. So yeah. Obvious qualities are not a factor in that initial raw animal attraction at all. It could be a deadbeat who just happens to have a really good immune system
Of course, this is just initial attraction. Might get someone infatuated, and, if they get lucky, laid, but it's not even close to even pursuing an actual relationship.
Too true. Most authors seem to forget the very basic fact that characters are people first, and story content second. Make them act the way they would and should act in some given situations, and they might not give a damn about any story you may have planned. And of course, if you try to force that issue, you just get out of character behaviour.
Well. That doesn't mean it's not a plausible scenario. Life is rarely fair about when to dump hard choices on someone