Did someone order a rant on boring rants?

[resonant]

Evidently nobody wants me to rant about bad erotica, which is my specialty, but behind the cut tag I gamely attempt to rant about inadequate punctuation for twistedchick, frogs for qe2, nonsmokers (of whom I am one) for park_hye_in, kissing for apetslife and randomblade, MTV for shoorihoshi, Ron-bashing for skuf, and Hawkeye for janecarnall.



Inadequate punctuation! What, is there a comma shortage that nobody told me about?

Especially grating on my system are people who leave out the comma before the name of the person to whom a sentence is addressed to. Commas like these:

"May I speak with you, Professor?"

"Get on with it, Potter. I haven't got all day, boy."

"Why do you always have to be so obnoxious, you shriveled old bat?"

"Your failure to control yourself has just cost Gryffindor ten points, you little fool."

"So it's all right for you to insult me but off-limits for me to insult you, you hypocrite?"

"That's twenty. Care to make it thirty, Mister Potter?"

Actually I have to admit that missing commas are not without value; they function fairly well as an early warning system. If someone leaves out a lot of commas, it's a good (though not infallible) sign that the story will also have more profound flaws. So if someone's story announcement says, "Lost and alone Harry turns to an unlikely source of comfort. Beta'd by MissSparkleKitty -- thanks hon you're the greatest!" then it just saves me the trouble of clicking on it.

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Frogs! Sometimes in the springtime they just will not shut up, and I really don't appreciate their suggestion that their love life is that much more exciting than mine.

Plus if you pick them up, sometimes they pee on you, which is just bad manners.

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Nonsmokers! Smokers are already absorbing less than their fair share of oxygen, not to mention yielding valuable jobs and real estate by dying younger; how much more must they sacrifice?

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Kissing! French kissing! I've really never found these to be the sources of searing, overwhelming pleasure that I was led to expect by early consumption of Gypsy Lady and similar serious reading matter. To tell the truth, I find kissing kind of boring.

This probably means I'm not very good at it. If I were single, I'd ask certain select members of my friends list to help me out with this problem.

I have dated two really fabulous kissers. Both of them ended up being extremely unkind and dishonest human beings, but I'm sure this was only a coincidence.

Kissing in slash stories, however, I feel that I can properly rant about. Here are the cardinal kiss sins committed by slash writers:

- Comparing the mouth to a geological feature such as a cavern or a cave.

- Using violent metaphors for tongue behavior, such as "dueling" or "wrestling."

- Or hockey. Tongue hockey, tonsil hockey -- why is it always hockey? Why not lacrosse?

- Equating depth with pleasure. Especially if you mention throats or tonsils. (This one always makes me wonder: Do other people actually find this pleasurable, and I'm just a weirdo? Is this one of those things that's sexy to read about but not so much to do? Or are these stories being written by people who have never kissed anyone?)

- Using painful adjectives, such as "fiery," "burning," or, god forbid, "searing."

- Getting cute about how kissing involves pushing one body part into another, and thus is a lot like fucking, see? Isn't that clever?

- That thing where Character A kisses Character B unexpectedly, and B sort of accidentally opens his mouth, for reasons that have nothing to do with being kissed (like breathing or protesting), and A takes this as permission to "deepen the kiss." Because, seriously, when someone else's mouth is pressed up against mine, I am very aware of what my mouth is doing, and I am quite able to keep my lips pressed together unless I want to invite a tongue in.

- The phrase "deepen the kiss."

- Describing the first kiss in exhaustive detail for three or four paragraphs, then compressing all the remaining sex into one sentence which ends with a violent mutual orgasm, after which the entire remainder of the story is devoted to exchanging increasingly unlikely endearments.

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MTV! The reason why women are no longer allowed to be musicians unless they look like supermodels!

I mean, lord knows there's always been a double standard in the music industry -- I'd like to see a woman who looked like Mick Jagger or Tom Petty become a star -- but MTV made it worse. Y'know, Janis Joplin, Ella Fitzgerald, Chrissy Hynde, and Carly Simon were all in their own ways attractive women, but they're lucky to have been born when they were, because if MTV couldn't have packed them into skintight leather, it would have gotten some actress to lipsync for them.

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Ron-bashing! I keep hearing about this, but I don't believe I've read more than one or two stories in which Ron's character was wildly distorted so that he could Stand In The Way Of True Love. Lucky me.

You know what I see a lot of, though? Not characters who are warped all out of true so that they can be villains, but characters all warped out of true so that they can be romantic heroes.

I mean, it's Ron-bashing if you make Ron a vicious mouth-breathing clone of Rick Santorum, but it's also Ron-bashing if you make Ron a smooth Cary Grant type with unusual emotional sensitivity who always knows the right thing to say.

(Actually, I see a lot more of this with Snape than with Ron. Big surprise, huh?)

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Hawkeye! We spent so much time together in the seventies! You'd think I'd remember him better than I do! I don't even remember enough to rant about him.

Comments

[mzcalypso.livejournal.com]

Hey, if you want to rant about bad erotica, consider this a request. there's so much of it out there!

I don't mind "deepening" a kiss. One of those things that lets the reader fill in the blanks without supplying too much detail. Tongue-sucking ... depends on the parties involved; someone who acts like a Hoover gone berserk, no fun at all - but it might make for a funny scene rather than a hot one.

Inadequate punctuation does save time. There seems to be a national difference -- I've read a couple of good UK/Aussie writers who don't use commas as often as I'd like to see 'em... but the results can be delightful: "Please try to eat a little Horatio," is still my favorite. If "Eats Shoots and Leaves" is any indicator, though, it's bad Brit punctuation rather than ideal.

[thereallyle.livejournal.com]

Oooh, I love that book! You'd never expect to find an enjoyable book on punctuation, but that one was great. Informative and hillarious.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Yes! There was a British DS writer I avoided for quite a long time because she always left out those crucial commas-before-the-name-of-the-person-addressed, and I assumed she was an ignoramus, and was very embarrassed when I finally read one of her stories all the way through and found that she was just an excellent writer with a punctuation blind spot.

[mzcalypso.livejournal.com]

Charlotte MacLeod is like that. Wonderful tongue-in-cheek mysteries, but she can't for the life of her put a semicolon between independent clauses. I use an extra-fine point felt-tip...