Dimensions: proper left gauntlet, H. at cuff 5 1/8 in. (13 cm); W. at cuff 5 5/16 in. (13.5 cm); L. 14 9/16 in. (37 cm); Wt. 1 lb. 14 oz. (845 g); proper right gauntlet, H. at cuff 5 1/8 in. (13 cm); W. at cuff 5 5/16 in. (13.5 cm); L. 14 3/16 in. (36 cm); Wt. 1 lb. 15 oz. (883 g)
PLEASE IMAGINE THE FIRST TIME AN ALIEN HAS ONE OF THEIR HUMAN FRIENDS DIE
‘so hey, that was a great funeral, cool outfits, always glad to learn more about your culture and stuff. So, when is she coming back?’
‘She- she’s not coming back’
‘Yeah, not as Megan, but when is her replacement coming back?’
‘We’re- not hiring anyone new for a couple weeks???’
‘no no no, you’re not getting what I’m saying- I want to ask her about that book she lent me- can I keep it for another week or two, or does her new version want it back?’
The humans stare at the alien and just. slowly start to figure out what the alien is saying. The alien shuffles nervously, their six spindly legs making a skritching noise that echoes in the cold chapel. Finally, the kindest of the humans takes the alien aside and-
‘hey. so. Us humans don’t come back when we die. Not like you do.’
‘what? No, but you clearly talk about reincarnation, and-’
‘Those are just stories, Six. When humans die, we’re gone. We don’t come back.’
The alien laughs ‘No, see, cuz that would mean that- that would mean. That Megan- Megan is-’ The alien cuts off the hissing noise that is their equivalent of a sob. ‘I have to go.’
The alien spends a week in their spaceship, the only place they can send communication to their Mother. When they come back, their carapace is a glistening new shade of red, and they’ve ended up as a different gender. When the lab adviser asks them how they are feeling about Megan-
‘Megan? Oh, yes, my previous version was very fond of Megan.’ The alien cocks their head, like a particularly thoughtful bird. ‘I suppose that I regret her loss. She was a valuable member of the team.’
The lab adviser lets this be- they are aliens after all. But later, when lab hours are done, the adviser notices Six double and triple-checking all the lab equipment, especially- well. The accident that took Megan will never happen again.
The book is never returned.
Now imagine the flip side: Sevan finds out his human friend is due to have a baby in six months. Six months! He asks, and finds that no, there’s no way to delay a human birth. In six months, a new version of his friend will emerge. Will they still like space operas? What about visiting that smoothie place in quadrant 6? Will they even still want to be friends?
His friend asks him to be visit the baby, after it’s born. Of course, of course he will. It’s the least he can do. There’s always that vulnerable phase after birth when you haven’t got the hang of the new motor controls, and everyone needs a helping palp for the first few months.
The night he hears that the new baby has been born, he wails quietly and recites the qualities of his friend that he will miss the most.
Three days later, he gathers his resolve and knocks on the hatch of his friend’s place. Strangely, the access panel hasn’t been lowered – rude. He’ll make sure that’s one of the first things changed. His friends partner opens the door and lets him in and there – there is his friend,looking tired but well, a miniature copy of herself held in her arms. Imagine his joy when he finds out that not only will he get to spend longer with his current friend, but there will be another friend to get to know!
Thats the weirdest erotic sentence i’ve read all month
this fucking post singlehandedly ruined my life
You don’t really appreciate how fucking great fan fic is when it comes to writing sex untill you stop to recognise how Serious Literary Stars fail at writing sex.
Forget what his dick is doing, what are her breasts doing? How do a pair of fat sacks attached to a ribcage barrel-roll anywhere? Let alone across a man’s mouth and then his wanger immediately after? Sir, why is your mouth so dong-adjacent? Is your weiner detachable, is that it? Do you have your joystick clutched in your hand so that you can score a sweet schlong-to-titty-roll immediately after a kiss and then proceed to beat your banana all over her body in the world’s most failed attempt at erotic massage??? HOW DO YOU THINK SEX WORKS???
… guys
….. Are the sex scenes in My Immortal better than this? “HE PUT HIS THINGY IN MY YOU-KNOW-WHAT AND WE HAD SEX.”
… I mean. Comparatively…
Like, in My Immortal, it’s at least implied he knows where he’s supposed to put it. It’s very simplistic, Ikea-style sex (insert tab A into slot B) but that’s better than this vague, useless composition of random, nonsensical placement and movement of body parts.
So yes, the sex in My Immortal is, in this sense, better.
OK so I’m sure people are aware of this, but just in case you’re not: there is an annual ‘award’ given every year by the Literary Review for bad sex scenes in fiction. The above entry (sorry) by Morrissey won this illustrious award in 2015 (and yes, he threw a massive tantrum about it, because he’s Morrissey):
The best part of this is that the 2016 nominations were just announced, and OH BOY, there are some absolute crackers this year:
And in case anyone is interested, these are some of the entries that Morrissey beat to the top prize last year:
I agree. We are spoilt by fanfiction.
I literally never want to hear anyone badmouth fanfiction again, I have never in all my years of internetdom read anything as troubling as, “Under that sling, her breasts were like young fawns, sheep frolicking in hyssop – Psalms were about to pour out of me.”
tag urself i’m “Come, sonny boy!”
I kind of see what the fawn thing was going for – imitating Song of Songs – but (a) it does so badly, (b) it then brings up the Psalms INSTEAD OF Song of Songs. If you’re going to do literary allusions at least get them right, my dude
My worst (first) written sex scene is like literary gold compared to what I’ve just writnessed with mine own two eyeballs.
I suck at writing sex scenes and… well. I feel positively gifted, compared.
this is how I melt and blend the crayons! if anyone wants to try it out themselves c: just be careful with the hot glue gun!
Wat.
WHAT THE HECK MAN THIS IS THE BEST HACK IVE EVER SEEN YET ON TUMBLR
This is fucking brilliant, holy shit.
But yeah, watch the temperature of that hot glue gun, especially if your gun is prone to overheating and you have to unplug it for little intervals while you work.
so i just googled the phrase “toeing out of his shoes” to make sure it was an actual thing
and the results were:
it’s all fanfiction
which reminds me that i’ve only ever seen the phrase “carding fingers through his hair” and people describing things like “he’s tall, all lean muscle and long fingers,” like that formula of “they’re ____, all ___ and ____” or whatever in fic
idk i just find it interesting that there are certain phrases that just sort of evolve in fandom and become prevalent in fic bc everyone reads each other’s works and then writes their own and certain phrases stick
i wish i knew more about linguistics so i could actually talk about it in an intelligent manner, but yeah i thought that was kinda cool
Ha! Love it!
One of my fave authors from ages ago used the phrase “a little helplessly” (like “he reached his arms out, a little helplessly”) in EVERY fic she wrote. She never pointed it out—there just came a point where I noticed it like an Easter egg. So I literally *just* wrote it into my in-progress fic this weekend as an homage only I would notice. ❤
To me it’s still the quintessential “two dudes doing each other” phrase.
I think different fic communities develop different phrases too! You can (usually) date a mid 00s lj fic (or someone who came of age in that style) by the way questions are posed and answered in the narration, e.g. “And Patrick? Is not okay with this.” and by the way sex scenes are peppered with “and, yeah.” I remember one Frerard fic that did this so much that it became grating, but overall I loved the lj style because it sounded so much like how real people talk.
Another classic phrase: wondering how far down the _ goes. I’ve seen it mostly with freckles, but also with scars, tattoos, and on one memorable occasion, body glitter at a club. Often paired with the realization during sexy times that “yeah, the __ went all they way down.” I’ve seen this SO much in fic and never anywhere else
whoa, i remember reading lj fics with all of those phrases! i also remember a similar thing in teen wolf fics in particular – they often say “and derek was covered in dirt, which. fantastic.” like using “which” as a sentence-ender or at least like sprinkling it throughout the story in ways published books just don’t.
LINGUISTICS!!!! COMMUNITIES CREATING PHRASES AND SLANG AND SHAPING LANGUAGE IN NEW WAYS!!!!!!!
I love this. Though I don’t think of myself as fantastic writer, by any means, I know the way I write was shaped more by fanfiction and than actual novels.
I think so much of it has to do with how fanfiction is written in a way that feels real. conversations carry in a way that doesn’t feel forced and is like actual interactions. Thoughts stop in the middle of sentences.
The coherency isn’t lost, it just marries itself to the reader in a different way. A way that shapes that reader/writer and I find that so beautiful.
FASCINATING
and it poses an intellectual question of whether the value we assign to fanfic conversational prose would translate at all to someone who reads predominantly contemporary literature. as writers who grew up on the internet find their way into publishing houses, what does this mean for the future of contemporary literature? how much bleed over will there be?
we’ve already seen this phenomenon begin with hot garbage like 50 shades, and the mainstream public took to its shitty overuse of conversational prose like it was a refreshing drink of water. what will this mean for more wide-reaching fiction?
I’m sure someone could start researching this even now, with writers like Rainbow Rowell and Naomi Novik who have roots in fandom. (If anyone does this project please tell me!) It would be interesting to compare, say, a corpus of a writer’s fanfic with their published fiction (and maybe with a body of their nonfiction, such as their tweets or emails), using the types of author-identification techniques that were used to determine that J.K. Rowling was Robert Galbraith.
In an earlier discussion, Is French fanfic more like written or spoken French?, people mentioned that French fanfic is a bit more literary than one might expect (it generally uses the written-only tense called the passé simple, rather than the spoken-only tense called the passé composé). So it’s not clear to what extent the same would hold for English fic as well – is it just a couple phrases, like “toeing out of his shoes”? Are the google results influenced by the fact that most published books aren’t available in full text online? Or is there broader stuff going on? Sounds like a good thesis project for someone!
Our culture has celebrities in place of myths, and we have grief twitter instead of byzantine lore about the journey to the underworld and the proper ways of burial. When celebrities die and we mourn them in a massively public way, this is a safe way to practice mourning for our parents and our partners and our friends, to try to force ourselves to make the unthinkable familiar.
The generational quality of this grief comes from the fact that, as the celebrities with whom we grew up die, it signals that we are at the age where people are dying, and we look ahead to the inevitable disasters, the wave that grows larger on the horizon. If our public grief is a performance, it’s a performance in the way that a disaster drill is a performance.
Our grief at losing an icon who meant a great deal to us is a real grief but a bearable one. But that bearable grief is a test-drive for future unbearable ones. We practice together in the hope that we can be prepared, so that the idea of loss does not seem so alien.
Complaints about the inappropriate nature of grief on social media – that it’s a circle-jerk, a joiner’s club, an obligated performance – are as defining a part of these mournings as the remembrances themselves. But to call this grief a performance is to miss the point – it’s not a performance, it’s a rehearsal. It seems right to me that grief be public, and messy, and inconvenient, that it make everyone in its path uncomfortable.
Small amounts of discomfort, after all, increase our tolerance for large amounts of pain. Mourning celebrities who mattered to us is a way to remind ourselves that no one is spared, not even those who seemed immortal, larger than a human being with petty little organs doing their pedestrian little jobs inside their skin. Speaking things aloud removes their terror, dulls the power of their unfamiliarity. We speak this over and over to try to come to terms with something that cannot possibly be made familiar.
Steel Phoenix Studios 