Things I will eyeroll if you put it in your fic

[transemacabre]

1. Fishing-for-compliments. "Omigod, this fanfic is so bad, I'm sorry, I shouldn't even be posting this!" If you say something like that about your own work, you know what? I'm gonna believe you. Yeah, your fanfic probably sucks and you should probably have kept it to yourself.

2. M/M sex scenes where one half of the slash pairing thinks to himself how, at last, he can be as rough as he wants to be because his sex partner is a big tough man and not some fragile woman. Um, have you ever had sex with a woman? Women are not china dolls. If you fuck a woman vigorously, her leg will not pop off or something. And a penis isn't a battering ram, for fuck's sake.

3. "Blown pupils". Has any turn of phrase ever metatastized across fandom so quickly and so widely?

Comments

[redcandle17.livejournal.com]

"Blown pupils"

What does that even mean?!

[transemacabre.livejournal.com]

Its supposed to mean that your pupils become wide and make your eye almost black; it's based on (real anthropological) studies that show that when we look at someone we find attractive, our pupils dilate. So it's sort of textual shorthand to get across one character's attraction to another.

It'd be fine if it was just something that cropped up now and then, but it's FUCKING EVERYWHERE. Every fandom I'm in, from Marvel to Les Miz, blown pupils are popping everywhere.

[redcandle17.livejournal.com]

But how did they start using "blown pupils" to mean "dilated pupils"? It seems like such an odd word choice to me.

[transemacabre.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure. Blown pupils is a thing, but not a sexy thing -- it usually refers to the way pupils look after someone suffers head trauma. I did a google search for "blown pupils fanfic" and got over 8,000 hits.