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.

---

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.

---

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?

---

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.

---

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.

---

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?)

---

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

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

i love your kissing rant...my personal pet peeve in addition to that...sucking on tongues. no, you're not giving the tongue a blowjob and vacuum may not be a pleasant thing :D

[apetslife.livejournal.com]

That was a fantastic kissing rant. Excellent, excellent, take a bow and a great big round of applause! Thank you!

[reginagiraffe]

Um, I like having my tongue sucked. And I like sucking someone else's tongue. YMMV.

[sophia-helix.livejournal.com]

Unquestioning applause to the kissing rant, except that the phrase "deepened the kiss" *is* a useful, quick way to say "A opened his mouth too and pushed his tongue into B's cavernous, accidentally open mouth and wrestled with B's tongue a little, then did something which (hee!) resembled fucking while playing lacrosse with B's searing tonsils" without, you know, actually having to say all that. *g*

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Personally, in those circumstances, I'm fond of the word "lick."

In fact, "licked into his mouth," though it's equally trite and overused, gets me in the gut every time. No accounting for it.

[sophia-helix.livejournal.com]

Mmm, lick is a nice substitute. And "deepen" is a pretty generalized, non-descriptive way of saying the above. But I do prefer it to the blow-by-blow.... heh. *g*

[norah.livejournal.com]

Tongue-sucking - I always figured that was one of those things where there were them as did and them as didn't. I'm a didn't. :)

[park-hye-in.livejournal.com]

I agree with everyone else, the kissing one is spot-on, but I'm quite partial to the frog rant. :D And thanks for doing mine!

Re: Kissing

[raine-wynd.livejournal.com]

Some folks kiss like they would give a blowjob:
- no going deep into the other person's mouth
- touching everywhere but not actually taking or using any tongue
- going entirely too far into the other person's mouth as if they intend to swallow the other's tongue and possibly mouth
and there are a million other varieties of this. You can tell a lot about a person's level of comfort with certain types of intimacy by how they kiss. I've known folks who like to mimic what they would do if they ever got a chance to touch you below the waistline by how enthused they were in their kissing, whether they sucked tongue or not, whether they allowed you to French kiss, whether their kisses were wet or dry. And yeah, I've gotten completely and utterly turned on by a very long series of kisses, but I understand it's very much a YMMV sort of thing, and it honestly doesn't happen nearly as often as some fic writers would like us to think. :-)

[randomblade.livejournal.com]

In reality, I have found kissing to be -much like many dessert foods on menus- a wobbly disappointment.

In literature, however, I am going to agree wholeheartedly with you on licking kisses, and the use of mouth in kissing, rather than tongues and teeth and lips. Y kissing x on the mouth is somehow much sexier than y kissing x on the lips.

[pauraque]

We spent so much time together in the seventies! You'd think I'd remember him better than I do!

The 70s were kind of like that.

[raucousraven.livejournal.com]

why is it always hockey? Why not lacrosse?

Because there are obviously not enough Canadians writing slash. Or maybe it's because hockey is that much more *insert violent stick/puck/hipcheck/mullet metaphor here*

In related news, rants on bad erotica from resonant? Make my entire week a happy, happy place. So if you've been, er, aching to let fly, do. *waits hopefully with the frogs and the lacrossistas*

[raucousraven.livejournal.com]

Er. resonant8, even. *edges off embarassedly*

[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.

[mzcalypso.livejournal.com]

Tongue curling? (Canadian, again).

Tongue tennis?

Tongue wrestling, either professional or Olympic Greek-style...?

The mind boggles.

[halimede.livejournal.com]

I prefer deepen to lick, possibly because I can't connect licking into someone's mouth with anything I like to do. Whereas deepen does describe the stages of kissing thing quite well. That, or I have a penetration fetish. *g*

I'm lost when it comes to commas. I think I use enough, but probably in the wrong places. :(

[thete1.livejournal.com]

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.

YES! YES! That! I hate that SO MUCH. It happens in every fandom I've *been* in, just about, to varying degrees. And it fills me with RAGE. Because it *is* just another way to say "why yes, this character sucks. He'd be MUCH better if he were like THIS."

To which I say "fuck the fuck OFF!" and take my Xander Ron and go home.

[thereallyle.livejournal.com]

Well, your commas in that particular post were all in the right place. :)

Re: Kissing

[thereallyle.livejournal.com]

Uhm. Seen this twice now, no clue what it is. What does YMMV mean?

[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.

[thereallyle.livejournal.com]

I LOVE your frog rant! Buah!

[halimede.livejournal.com]

w00t! Good to know, thank you! :)

[painless-j.livejournal.com]

I died of laughter reading the kissing part.

I suppose it depends on personal preferences to a point, but my pet-peeve in kissing scenes is when character A bites character B's lip and draws blood. And they both enjoy it. If somebody bit my lip this way, I'd kick him in the balls.

Re: YMMV

[raine-wynd.livejournal.com]

"YMMV" = "your mileage may vary". In other words - you may have a different opinion/perspective/experience.

[axiom_of_stripe]

tongue curling!

there must be tongue curling fiction out there!

please!

*dead*