Counts, Part 3: Why Are We Meant To Like You, Again?

These are for whenever characters act like awful people and we’re expected to like them anyway. Comes in a few variations, including those listed in the All The Isms post.

While I’m familiar with the terms “Mary Sue” and “Marty/Gary Stu”, I will avoid using them, because they’re very subjective and rather loaded, plus they don’t give a good idea of what the problem with the character actually is. Instead, I’m going to get specific.

ABUSE AS LOVE / RAPE AS LOVE / STALKING AS LOVE – self-explanatory. When a character treats the object of their affection abominably, and we’re supposed to think this means they love them more.

EAT THE RICH – in almost everything I’ve read, a character who displays excessive consumerism and pointlessly destroys or wastes expensive things would be a villain. This is for when this behaviour is portrayed as good and desirable; connected to classism. I understand the appeal behind a fantasy of wealth and power, but there’s a point at which I just want to paste anticapitalist bumper stickers all over the writer’s monitor screen.

GET AWAY WITH MURDER – when the character acts like a brat, a criminal, or an outright monster, this is acknowledged in-story, and yet they never receive any punishment or consequences for it.

GOD MODING – when the character solves plot problems with powers they really shouldn’t reasonably have, up to and including literally punching out God (yes, I have seen this, long story).

SIN THINE ASS OFF – from Das Sporking’s Twilight dissection: “Bella will tell the whole world how bad and wrong and stupid and idiotic her actions are. For some reason, in this world, that means you can keep doing what you’re doing with impunity. So long as you acknowledge it’s bad? It’s okay!” Related to my own count “Oops, I Did It Again”.

SOAPBOXING – when the story halts so a character can deliver a long lecture on the author’s personal opinions, or worse still, when the character appears to only exist for the purpose of getting across the author’s personal opinions with no thought put into telling an actual story.

TOO STUPID TO LIVE – particularly endemic in horror, this is when a character walks right into a dangerous situation that they really, really should have seen coming. Walking down a dark alley alone when they know a serial killer is on the loose. Blackmailing a murderer without making backup copies of the evidence. Pressing the big red button. You’ll know it when you see it.

Counts, Part 2: Department of Redundancy Department

Redundancy: (noun) the state of being no longer needed or useful.

This issue can manifest in multiple ways, which can all be fixed with good editing. It’s natural for this to happen in first drafts, but if you want your work to be as good as it can be, it’s a good idea to check for these.

From the Turkey City Lexicon:

AS YOU KNOW, BOB – “A pernicious form of info-dump through dialogue, in which characters tell each other things they already know, for the sake of getting the reader up-to-speed. This very common technique is also known as “Rod and Don dialogue” (attr. Damon Knight) or “maid and butler dialogue” (attr Algis Budrys).”

COUNTERSINKING – “A form of expositional redundancy in which the action clearly implied in dialogue is made explicit. “‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said, urging her to leave.””

From How Not To Write A Novel:

THE CLONE ENTOURAGE – “If the protagonist is going to have more than one friend, they should serve more than one purpose and have more than one personality. Most crucially, they must be distinguishable by more than the names that have been assigned to them. Generally, if they can be collectively referred to as ‘the guys’, ‘the gals’, or ‘the gang’ with no harm to the plot, there doesn’t need to be more than one of them.”

THE SECOND ARGUMENT IN THE LAUNDROMAT – “NEVER use two scenes to establish the same thing. We do not, under any circumstances, want a series of scenes in which the character goes to job interviews but fails to get the job, or has a string of unsuccessful dates to illustrate bad luck in love.”

THE REDUNDANT TAUTOLOGY – “If you have made a point in one way, resist the temptation to reinforce it by making it again. Do not reexpress it in more flowery terms, and do not have the character reaffirm it in dialogue[…] This point is worth repeating: don’t reiterate.”

THE SKIPPING RECORD – “Give us the thought once. We will assume that the character’s opinion remains the same until you tell us otherwise.”

And one of my own:

OOPS, I DID IT AGAIN – the character suffers negative consequences from a choice, demonstrates that they know they should have learned a lesson from this, possibly explains in detail how they should change their behaviour after it, and proceeds to do the exact same thing again. Overlaps with “Too Stupid To Live”, which I’ll discuss in a later post.

Counts, Part 1: All The Isms

For my reviews, I’ll be using “counts”, as Das Sporking and Anagnorisis Awakening reviews do, albeit formatted slightly differently. Here, I’m going to set up a universal counts list, for things which happen in a lot of books, as well as any specific to each individual one. Every time a thing happens in a book I review, I’ll add a point to its counts, and the final scores of the books will be compared.

The first set of counts will be for demonstrations of offensive/prejudiced views. This will not be counted when it’s portrayed as wrong, from the point of view of a character we’re not supposed to agree with; villains obviously have views the reader isn’t supposed to like. However, a lot of books have unfortunate implications the author didn’t quite think through, or have characters express offensive views which are never called out. That’s what these counts are for.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of prejudices, and I know I won’t catch every case, but this is a rough list of which ones are most likely to be found.

ABLEISM – prejudice against the physically or mentally disabled, or people with mental health problems.

ACEPHOBIA – prejudice against asexuals. Prejudice against celibate allosexuals is also covered here, though the two states are not the same; implications that one’s life is incomplete without a romantic partner or there is something wrong with people who don’t want to have sex at every opportunity, or even just at this specific opportunity, apply to both.

AGEISM – prejudice against people due to their age, in this context usually against older people.

ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM – prejudice against intelligence, learning, and facts. Surprisingly common in books, which strikes me as slightly ironic. Better explained here, but can be succintly summed up as “anything I don’t understand is dumb”.

BIPHOBIA – prejudice against bisexuals, from either a heterosexual or homosexual standpoint.

CLASSISM – prejudice against people for their monetary status or lack of perceived noble ancestry.

FATPHOBIA – prejudice against people for their weight. Common subcategory of lookism.

HOMOPHOBIA – prejudice against gay people (or bisexuals in same-sex relationships).

LOOKISM – prejudice against people for their appearance. Usually applies to contempt of people deemed unattractive, but also applies to cases when attractive people are treated differently based on looks, either better or worse; for example, the “dumb blonde” stereotype, or the assumption connected to sex-shaming that a woman wearing lots of makeup must be promiscuous.

RACISM – prejudice against people of different ethnicities or nationalities. Technically the latter is nationalism, a separate thing, but it overlaps so commonly with racism that for count purposes I’ll use them as one.

RELIGIOUS DISCRIMINATION – prejudice against people for either their religion or their lack of one.

SEX-SHAMING – prejudice against people for having sex in what the prejudiced person deems either too high a frequency, with too many people, or some otherwise “wrong” way. Surprisingly often overlaps with acephobia or celibacy/modesty-shaming, as demonstrated in Rosalarian’s comic on the subject.

SEXISM – prejudice against people due to their gender. Usually manifesting in casual prejudice against women, can sometimes instead consist of actively malicious misogyny. Negative implications against men as a group will also come under this heading; just because it’s less damaging as a whole doesn’t mean it’s good.

TRANSPHOBIA – prejudice against transgender people. When applied to people of nonbinary/third gender specifically, the term is enbyphobia or exorsexism, but acknowledgement that nonbinary people exist is rare enough that it probably doesn’t need a separate count; transphobia will usually be assumed to cover all non-cis statuses here.

VICTIM-BLAMING – blaming people who have suffered some misfortune, usually abuse or assault, for said misfortune.

And one which doesn’t apply to real life:

FANTASTICAL XENOPHOBIA – in real life, xenophobia means prejudice against any group which is different from one’s own. I’m going to use it to mean offensive, creepy, or unfortunate-implication-filled portrayals of fictional groups such as aliens or elves. Usually this overlaps with one or more of the above points, when a fictional group is too similar, or similar in the wrong way, to a real group. See this excellent article for discussion on how this can go wrong.

I will make another post listing other potential counts, and am likely to add to that post in the future too when I notice certain themes crop up a lot.

Sporking (noun)

Sporking: A line by line critical analysis of fanfiction, typically of the Utterly Horrible or occasionally So Bad It’s Good variety. Derived from the term “Sporking one’s eyes out”, implying that the fic is so bad that most people would prefer to attack their own eyes with sporks rather than read it. Also the verb for performing such an analysis.

-Urban Dictionary

“Sporking” as I’ve seen the word used can also apply to metaphorically tearing the story apart, as one would do literally with a useful combination utensil.

Anyway, I shan’t be “sporking” things line by line here, because what I’ll be reviewing here are published works and that’s not allowed. Instead, I’ll describe/recap the pertinent points and pick out especially egregious lines. A la popular comm Das Sporking, I’ll also use “counts” for recurring tropes. “Sporking” also generally refers only to works which are objectively bad, and the works I bring here won’t be that, just bizarre from the point of view of an outsider like me.

Greetings, and the whys and wherefores

Hello! For the purposes of this blog, call me Ace. Regarding pertinent points about me, I’m almost 30 as of this writing, voraciously literate, autistic, genderqueer/neutrois, and asexual, and this blog sprang out of the latter four points.

This started when I encountered an article on Cracked, 5 Secrets I Know About Women (From Writing Their Weird Porn). Having been writing fanfic since before I knew it was called that and writing porn for a few years at the time, I immediately thought “wow, a job I can do!” Unfortunately, my explorations of the Kindle market felt wrong in some way, even though the content was technically far less disturbing than things I’d written myself before, and attempts to write to fit the erotica and romance markets put me in a headspace which left me extraordinarily unhappy without really understanding why.

I don’t like not understanding things, and I do like over-analysing things, hence why I figured I could play with this blog.

Here, I will read smutty or sweet fiction and pick it apart, not with cruelty but with curiosity. I want to be able to demonstrate how and why various parts do and don’t work from the point of view of someone who simply cannot step into the shoes of the target audience. I don’t pass any moral judgement; as I said, I have written worse and weirder. Please tell me if I am getting too mean-spirited so I can adjust. I’ll keep a running tally of tropes I find and explain how they work from both the point of view of an outsider and that of the insider audience. Hopefully I’ll be funny in the process.

With thanks for inspiration to Straight Guy Reviews of Bad Romance Novels!