Ameripicking + fannish witch hunts

[transemacabre]

While 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. These fics included "Sympathy Crime", a Persona 4 fic in which a 16-year-old gets involved in an abusive relationship with an older person; another fic, "Crossing", has the rape of a teenager by another teenager. 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?

Comments

[dragonbat2006.livejournal.com]

And where do Canadians figure?

[transemacabre.livejournal.com]

Not sure. To be honest, I can rarely pick out a Canadian in real life based on accent/speech patterns -- excepting French Canadians, many of whom have thick accents. A lot of pro wrestlers are Canadian and many of them gave noticeable Canadian accents (Bret Hart comes to mind). I don't know if they play it up purposefully or if a lot of the Canadians I meet in real life deliberately play down their accents.

[curtana.livejournal.com]

I think part of the Canadian accent thing is that what people tend to think of as a Canadian accent (Bob and Doug McKenzie hoser-speak, eh?) is really an accent from a pretty limited region (rural Central Ontario) - like if the 'typical' American person were assumed to have a Boston accent or a Texas accent or something. Other Canadian accents sound a lot like the parts of the US that they're adjacent to - the Maritimes sound a lot like Maine, southern Ontario and into the prairies sounds a lot like the Midwest, Minnesota, and so on. Newfoundland is its own wacky thing.

Hearing/recognizing a Canadian accent that isn't really strong/distinctive (like Quebecois, Newfie, hoser, etc.) seems to depend on how attuned one is to the little things like vowel sounds and certain vocabulary choices. Working in the US, once in a while I'll get a patron who immediately knows I'm Canadian, and it almost always turns out that they have Canadian relatives, used to vacation in Canada every summer, or something like that. Most people are surprised to find out that I'm not American.

[opera142.livejournal.com]

Bitch, am I writing the fucking fanfic about you?

Legit lol'd there. The line I hear the most often is "I prefer British spellings." Whatever, extra U's are free. Go nuts with your colours and cheques.