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8. Squicks - What are some things that squick you in fandom - not necessarily "icky", though it can be. From anything involving blood, to bad grammar.
I'm squicked in general by gory/graphically violent/icky of the kind that squicks a lot of people.
Specific to fanfic, which I think is where the question was heading, and taking squick to mean "strong aversion without a moral component"--so not quite my own more limited definition of squick, and also not meaning serious bad stuff like if the fic is racist--I think my biggest squick is the dread Out of Character. I'm very there for interpretation of character, but when the changes are so extreme that I can't see how the author got there from canon, I'm not interested in reading it. (I read fic because I like, or am interested in, the characters, so why bother with what are essentially different characters using the same names?)
Similarly, I tend to be perhaps irrationally irritated by most AUs. When someone's circumstances are completely different, you're unlikely to get the same kind of person. In OFMD, just to pick an example completely at random, Ed has been shaped by a lifetime of piracy. If he'd spent the last 35 years being a baker, he wouldn't be Ed! Not all AUs are implausible, of course, but a lot of them are. And to be blunt, I don't understand the impulse to take the characters out of an interesting world and put them in a mundane one. A pirate ship is a lot more interesting than a bakery! (Of course a good writer can make a bakery interesting. But (a) I'd rather in that case that it was a story set in a bakery from the start, and (b) I'd still rather read about pirates.) I can understand the urge in the opposite direction, taking characters from a mundane setting and giving them superpowers or putting them on a generation ship headed for the next galaxy. But the fandoms I interact with tend to be genre shows and the AUs go away from sff instead of towards it.
I sometimes have fandom-specific squicks, which are usually bits of fanon I particularly dislike. For instance, I will back out of OFMD fics where Ed uses lots of endearments for Stede (or even if Stede uses them for Ed, if it's a lot). And it's a popular thing because people think it's sweet, even though canonically Ed never says that kind of thing and Stede uses an endearment exactly once that I recall, when he calls his wife "darling" at the moment of their incredibly awkward, pained reunion.
Other squicks, for this loose definition of squicks that's more like pet peeves: the trope overriding the character, too many fannish or pop culture in-jokes*, not bothering to do even a little research, and, yes, bad grammar. I know people say that the ability to write correct grammar and the ability to tell a good story don't necessarily correlate, but in my experience, they do. (Perhaps because good writers who know they have trouble with grammar get their stories beta read. Writers who put them up unbeta-ed aren't bothering about other details either.)
*I understand the temptation of in-jokes. I put a few (I like to think of them as Easter eggs) into Also Known as Blackbeard, because I spent a huge amount of time working on that story in a very disciplined way and I had to indulge myself somehow. I have no idea if anybody's noticed any of them.
Full list of questions ( under the cut )
I'm squicked in general by gory/graphically violent/icky of the kind that squicks a lot of people.
Specific to fanfic, which I think is where the question was heading, and taking squick to mean "strong aversion without a moral component"--so not quite my own more limited definition of squick, and also not meaning serious bad stuff like if the fic is racist--I think my biggest squick is the dread Out of Character. I'm very there for interpretation of character, but when the changes are so extreme that I can't see how the author got there from canon, I'm not interested in reading it. (I read fic because I like, or am interested in, the characters, so why bother with what are essentially different characters using the same names?)
Similarly, I tend to be perhaps irrationally irritated by most AUs. When someone's circumstances are completely different, you're unlikely to get the same kind of person. In OFMD, just to pick an example completely at random, Ed has been shaped by a lifetime of piracy. If he'd spent the last 35 years being a baker, he wouldn't be Ed! Not all AUs are implausible, of course, but a lot of them are. And to be blunt, I don't understand the impulse to take the characters out of an interesting world and put them in a mundane one. A pirate ship is a lot more interesting than a bakery! (Of course a good writer can make a bakery interesting. But (a) I'd rather in that case that it was a story set in a bakery from the start, and (b) I'd still rather read about pirates.) I can understand the urge in the opposite direction, taking characters from a mundane setting and giving them superpowers or putting them on a generation ship headed for the next galaxy. But the fandoms I interact with tend to be genre shows and the AUs go away from sff instead of towards it.
I sometimes have fandom-specific squicks, which are usually bits of fanon I particularly dislike. For instance, I will back out of OFMD fics where Ed uses lots of endearments for Stede (or even if Stede uses them for Ed, if it's a lot). And it's a popular thing because people think it's sweet, even though canonically Ed never says that kind of thing and Stede uses an endearment exactly once that I recall, when he calls his wife "darling" at the moment of their incredibly awkward, pained reunion.
Other squicks, for this loose definition of squicks that's more like pet peeves: the trope overriding the character, too many fannish or pop culture in-jokes*, not bothering to do even a little research, and, yes, bad grammar. I know people say that the ability to write correct grammar and the ability to tell a good story don't necessarily correlate, but in my experience, they do. (Perhaps because good writers who know they have trouble with grammar get their stories beta read. Writers who put them up unbeta-ed aren't bothering about other details either.)
*I understand the temptation of in-jokes. I put a few (I like to think of them as Easter eggs) into Also Known as Blackbeard, because I spent a huge amount of time working on that story in a very disciplined way and I had to indulge myself somehow. I have no idea if anybody's noticed any of them.
Full list of questions ( under the cut )
