Unpopular Fandom Opinions

[kennahijja]

(gacked from ella_bane)

Yup, unlike the fanfic heresy a while back, these are contentious (and not surprising, if you know me). But I still love you, all right! You don't have to agree, and are welcome to hit me with dead carps too!

1. It almost physically hurts me when fics are taken down just because the author falls out of love with them or decides to leave fandom.

2. I hate it when people try to tell others what they shouldn't write/draw because it's immoral/harmful/whatnot. But watching people self-censor their imagination is even more painful.

3. Compared to the utter wrongness of dragging RL – employers, lawyers, police, spouses – into fandom disputes, plagiarism is *nothing*. Because hell, it's supposed to be us against the mundanes – running to RL authorities is, well, treason to the Cause!

4. Once your work's out there, it's fair game for just about everything except posting under somebody else's name – especially for reccing, reviewing, downloading, sharing and writing spin-off fic for. Deal!

5. Ron haters make me msad [... except for Ron-haters with a pureblood pedigree, a riding crop and a nice line in acerbic banter]. (yeah, that's pretty much plagiarised from ella_bane, but she's dead right! And amended after intercession by fee_absinthe, who, as always, has the priorities right)

6. The 'say good things or say nothing' attitude to feedback that seems to dominate fandom annoys me to no end. But bitching about concrit makes me *really* mad.

7. 'Anymore' bugs me even more than 'cum'. Though not quite as much as 'orbs'.

8. LJ name changes... meh! Fandom name changes suck in general, unless it's for good RL reasons. It's hell on those of us with brains full of holes.

9. Taking your OTP(s) seriously is seriously silly.

10. As long as there's slash and gen, we could almost do without het, couldn't we? *ducks*

ETA: One of those is a joke - just in case it's not obvious.

Comments

[gunderpants.livejournal.com]

... and do people say "anymore"? We got that flogged out of us in year two.

[masterofmercury.livejournal.com]

*raise hand* Me

Can I ask why not? I'm not a native speaker, so...

[kennahijja.livejournal.com]

I'm neither, but we got hit over the head pretty severely about that in English class... though I think there are some cases in US usage where it's acceptable, bascially because... it's two words? :)

[masterofmercury.livejournal.com]

*grunt* when I was pointed that out, I remember some of my teachers said something about it too. (I have mixed nationalities and English dialect teachers. :))

I thought at first that there's something wrong with the usage of the word, I didn't notice the spelling. XD

[snorkackcatcher]

I'm not sure why it would be considered that bad -- I'd even say it's common usage in something like 'X doesn't live here anymore'. After all, we have 'anywhere' and 'anyone' as perfectly valid words.

The way these things usually seem to go in English (when the compound proves useful and common) is to start as two separate words, then become one hyphenated word, then lose the hyphen and become one standard word.

(Mind you, I suspect something similiar would happen in any language -- convenience usually wins out over purism as far as usage goes. Doesn't German have a tendency to jam multiple words together into one long one, and then knock out the middle to make a brand new word? :D)

[kennahijja.livejournal.com]

I think it may be just that tendency of German (and it gets *really* nice and long if you leave the middle in!) that makes German teachers of English grammar harp on the compounds in particular - over-avoidance ;). But once you have things drilled into you... though it's really only 'anymore' for me - I still do it with noun compounds, like 'fireplace' or 'tabletop' (although I work for a Scot, and he writes a lot of compound nouns too, so it might be dialect-related? Or German-influenced? I'm all for natural evolution of language, really, but 'anymore'... throws me out of a fic like a trout on the fishing rod ;).

[kennahijja.livejournal.com]

Well, year five, but then it was my second language...