Where Do You See Yourself In 5 Years?

The second I saw your post requesting people to rant about shitty books one came to my mind first. The last dragon slayer. Now, when I had to read this in high school I was actually excited because for once I got to read a book with an interesting premise. Oh how wrong I was. The pacing in this book was so god awful that it was genuinely hard to keep track of what was going on. As cool was the world was, any information about it or magic was delivered in a way that’s reminiscent of dry textbooks. Never has a book disappointed me quite like that one did (and there’s even 3 more after it). Thank you for allowing me to rant about that hot garbage, I hope you have a great day :)

Your description of this book is similar to how I'm currently feeling as I slog my way through Fourth Wing. Especially with how the worldbuilding is delivered. Just dumps it onto you with large blocks of text unrelated to the current scene.

Dragons are too cool to have such bad books written about them.

Reblog if you say "Y'all"

All of the above.

I also want to add that it is extremely unnecessary to tag your main character as being in a relationship with every other character if it's not a massive poly situation.

For example: if your fic is Tav/Astarion, you don't need to also tag it as Tav/Shadowheart Tav/Gale Tav/Wyll Tav/Karlach etc etc. If you want to indicate that those characters will be in the fic, you can tag with just their names or with Tav & [character].

There is an issue in this community with misstagged fics on AO3, specifically in the FxF tags. I don't know if it's going to reach the actual people or not but I'm still going to put this here:

A lot of MxM and FxM are tagging FxF ships in the main relationship category despite the ship itself only being written in the background.

Which is a problem because when you go into your ship tag to find fics of your ship, a ridiculous amount of them are off topic. And while yes you can lower that amount significantly by filtering and tag exclusion, AO3 has a built in feature that is made to avoid this.

I am going to use the Shadowzel tag for that because it's the most popular FxF ship on there and it's also one of the most misstagged rn. As of right now, there is 607 fics in the Shadowzel tag without filter. If you restrict the search to only include FxF, you are down to 397 fics. That is more than a third gone!

And it gets rid of some shadowzel content as well, so it's either you filter that out or you have to scroll through a tag where 1 out of 3 fics are about Astarion, Gale, Halsin, etc instead of the ship you looked up.

If your fic, let's take for example a Tav x Astarion, has either consistent mention of Shadowheart x Lae'zel, the most popular wlw ship, or has them in the background as support characters, or even just mentions them as a funny little wink and you want to make sure your readers know they are in here, you do not use the relationship tag! You go down to the additional tags and add "Minor Lae'zel/Shadowheart (Baldur's Gate)".

Unless the pairing you are tagging is the main focus or have a significant role and spotlight on them, you should not use the relationship tag! It clogs the feed for no reason, AO3 is not a website where you have to advertise your posts to the most tags possible.

Adding a visual for clarity:

R*wling shows throughout the series that she believes that bad things are only bad when they're done by the Bad Guys. However, if one of the designated Good Guys does the same thing it's not bad.

For example, use of the Unforgivable Curses. When the Bad Guys use them it's horrific, evil, one of the Worst Things Ever. But when Harry uses them, with alarming frequency, it's fine. He's not a Bad Guy, so the things he does can't be bad.

Then there's Snape. He's awful. Just awful. He's an incel creep. He's racist. He bullies young children just because he can, and is outright abusive to them if he didn't like their parents (even when said parents died when the kid was an infant). And oh yeah, he's an incel creep who became obsessed with a girl who did not return his feelings, called her slurs, and was a-okay with her husband and infant son being murdered. You cannot tell me that he wasn't hoping to swoop in and try to manipulate her into a relationship when she was vulnerable due to extreme grief. But, because she for some bizarre reason unwilling to stand aside quietly during the murder of her family, he started working for the Good Guys, which totally means that he's a Good Guy and none of the horrible things he did actually matter.

And then there's Dumbledore! Oh boy, I could write at least an Order of the Phoenix sized book about all the terrible things he did. But I'll keep it short here. He knowingly left a particularly vulnerable child in an abusive situation, and didn't even bother to actually check in on him now and again to make sure that he wasn't being, you know, abused or anything like that. He also left the baby in a basket, outside, for hours, because that was for some reason better than knocking at the door? He then manipulated a young child into basically becoming his private soldier against an evil wizard so powerful that the entire magical world pissed themselves at the mention of his name. But all this gets glossed over and is forgiven as easily as if he had just lost a pen someone had lent him. Because, after all, he's the ultimate Good Guy. And a Good Guy can't do bad things. Therefore, none of the things he did were actually bad.

This got a lot longer than I intended it to be. The views on morality in this series really bother me.

Sometimes I just sit around and think about ways to improve the Harry Potter books. Not even in a fix-it fic way. Just like...there are some seriously dropped threads in Deathly Hallows especially.

Do y'all ever think about the thing with Griphook? Harry choosing to deceive him about the sword of Gryffindor? Well, I do. It bothers me that there are no negative consequences for this. Because oop- Griphook double-crossed them too! So we never have to think about Harry making that choice. And the characterization of Griphook is squicky, man. He relishes the idea of weak creatures suffering, he's obnoxious. We can't even REALLY examine wizard/goblin relations because Griphook is such an uncomplicated little asshole. Did Gryffindor steal the sword from the goblin king??? Harry is uncomfy about it for like two seconds and then oop--guess we never need to think about it again. It's a bad writing choice and when I think about a book like Terry Pratchett's Feet of Clay--a book that complexly and carefully and humanely examines racism--i feel super disappointed in the way the Harry Potter series just like...lets some things go.

This is, I think, one example of a handful of moments when Harry does a Bad Thing: lies, uses unforgivable curses etc. But there's no real examination of it. She nods at it a little like "harry was becoming as reckless a godfather and Sirius was to him" but then it just gets...dropped. There isn't even a "this is war; there is no moral high ground" moment. R*wling just seems to have no plan at all to examine any moral complexity in that final book. It makes me nuts.

Bisexuals in media: "I don't really like labels, you know. I just date who I want. We don't have to call it anything."

Bisexuals in real life: "Hey, I'm bi! Have I mentioned that I'm bi? You have to understand, I am bisexual. Bi. I am bi. I love being bi. Did you know that I'm bi? Check out my bi pride shirt/poster/pin/shoes/tattoo. Isn't it awesome that I'm bi?"

All I can think about is Fenris and Solas glaring at me, arms crossed, demanding that I explain exactly who this "Astarion" is that they've heard so much about

Come join me on twitch for some more Left Behind!

It's a terrible book and watching me suffer is fun!

Earthlings by sayaka murata; the fmc was annoying, it was always this weird bragging mixed with "poor lil me" also, it dragged sooooooooooo bad, it felt like half the book was only 15 minutes of plot, and it was the most boring 15 minutes u could imagine, nothing happened and it keep dragging and dragging and i couldn't finish it

I haven't heard of this one, but I accept your offering and will hate this book on your behalf

Another thing pissing me off this morning is fucking allistics thinking they need to teach me "manners"

So fucking what if I said hey instead of good morning. Don't fucking lecture me over it!