Ameripicking + fannish witch hunts
Jul. 16th, 2014 04:02 pmWhile everybody was lolzing at Dashcon's stunning display of incompetence, the Welcome to Night Vale fandom was running a ficcer out of town in a vicious and grudgy witch hunt.
sodomquake, a ficcer and official WTNV contributor, was subject to a witch hunt based on her having written some non-con fic that featured (sometimes, not always) underage characters. ( Deets on her fic ) She was doxxed and forced to delete her fic and tumblr out of fear of losing her RL job as an educator (of college students, not little kids, before anyone starts clutching their pearls).
This kind of shit is why I'm so cagey about what I do when I meet fannish people IRL. Several times at meet-ups people have asked me where I work and I give them an uneasy smile and change the subject. Ain't no way I'm trusting any of y'all not to be bitchy grudgewankers the first time we have a disagreement about your thoughts on yaoi or what-the-fuck-ever. The first time I heard about doxxing was like 12 years ago in X-Men fandom -- we just didn't call it that then -- it's been going on that long.
Anyway,
theladyscribe and I had an interesting talk about what in their writing gives it away that a ficcer is British, American, or Australian. There's been a big influx of British/Australian writers into Captain America fandom and oh boy is it obvious. It's not just vocabulary that's a giveway like calling an apartment a "flat" or saying that Steve and Bucky grew up on a "council estate", there's also grammatical structures, especially in dialogue, that clue me in that the author is British. For example: dialogue like "Oh, so you'd like to join me for dinner, then?" There's a tendency to British ficcers in particular not to write blunt, direct sentences. They like to front-and-back-load dialogue with fillers like 'then', 'so', 'perhaps', 'quite', etc. It sticks out especially when the characters in canon don't structure their dialogue anything like this.
Americans also have a tendency when speaking in a slang manner to drop some constructions like simple present tenses. "Where we going?" as opposed to "Where are we going?" British/Australians seem to do this less.
And every time I write a post about ameripicking, there's always some blithe soul who pipes up with "I'm American and I use those Britishicisms in daily life!" Bitch, am I writing the fucking fanfic about you?
sodomquake, a ficcer and official WTNV contributor, was subject to a witch hunt based on her having written some non-con fic that featured (sometimes, not always) underage characters. ( Deets on her fic ) She was doxxed and forced to delete her fic and tumblr out of fear of losing her RL job as an educator (of college students, not little kids, before anyone starts clutching their pearls).
This kind of shit is why I'm so cagey about what I do when I meet fannish people IRL. Several times at meet-ups people have asked me where I work and I give them an uneasy smile and change the subject. Ain't no way I'm trusting any of y'all not to be bitchy grudgewankers the first time we have a disagreement about your thoughts on yaoi or what-the-fuck-ever. The first time I heard about doxxing was like 12 years ago in X-Men fandom -- we just didn't call it that then -- it's been going on that long.
Anyway,
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Americans also have a tendency when speaking in a slang manner to drop some constructions like simple present tenses. "Where we going?" as opposed to "Where are we going?" British/Australians seem to do this less.
And every time I write a post about ameripicking, there's always some blithe soul who pipes up with "I'm American and I use those Britishicisms in daily life!" Bitch, am I writing the fucking fanfic about you?