On behalf of my nation of fic writers, I apologise

[burntcopper]

Seriously. Torchwood attracts fic writers like flies to honey, because it's pretty and there's text and aliens and explosions and leaves bunnies littered *everywhere*.

It's just... :scrubs face: I've got reconciled to that thing that weirded me out in first season, of american fans liking a british show. Normally, British fandoms are tiny and only attract british writers for the most part. We got too big and we were too shiny to stay an island fandom.

However. I've since learnt something I didn't know in the American fandoms, and couldn't tell because I was coming at it from outsider pov.

You can tell fic that's been written by a person not from that nation a mile off.

Sometimes it's just little things. The wrong turn of phrase. Sentence structure that never, ever gets used in the native country. The occasional wrong word, like 'pants'. (most US writers being quite good at this, because they've been warned and we set up the big neon signs up before they set foot in it that we will laugh hysterically if they use it to mean 'trousers'. many of them are even learning that a vest is a sleeveless t-shirt, not the third part of a three-piece suit that looks terribly natty if you also wear it with a pocket watch.)

But then you have the huge, *giant* facepalms. The stuff you can't buy here, and have most of the natives going 'er, I think I heard the word in a Buffy fic or a CSI ep once but I have no idea what the hell it means or looks like'. Constant use of the word 'cookie'. Or 'cellphone'. Cultural stuff that you really, really probably wouldn't see anything wrong with unless you'd lived there. Like the time I read a character getting seen quickly in A&E with a non-life threatening injury. Someone being described as drinking too much when they'd only had a few. Behaviour being commented on as odd, or needing help because they were clearly emotionally stifled. (No, really. See BtVS/Angel and Wesley commentaries which had the Brits all going 'er, but why *would* he have reacted?')

Like I said. Sorry. Didn't even know I was doing it.

Comments

[derryderrydown.livejournal.com]

Oh, god, yes. I'm exactly the same.

And it even shows in things like interpretation of the characters. I mean, I linked to that post somebody made a while back, discussing the fact that Jack is an American in a WWII uniform and how that reads as trustworthy to Americans and untrustworthy to Brits, Aussies, Kiwis, etc.

I wonder if my love of John Winchester is another of those things? Because I expect fathers to be emotionally distant and demanding.

[randomeliza.livejournal.com]

I think you mean most of the time. *cough* Some Americans, after all, know their Briticisms as well as any Brit.

Conversely, with American fandoms (particularly Supernatural) I can usually tell a British writer within the first paragraph, and sometimes it's so jarring that a fic that gets recced from here to Cleveland makes me cringe to the point I can't read it.

[burntcopper.livejournal.com]

oh yeah, but it's the majority of them. Even some of the ones I love and adore who do so much effort to get the Briticisms right, there's normally just that one turn of phrase that makes you go ...So not native. hence why I'm now worrying about how bad my american fandom stuff is. on the other hand, I do normally write the British characters in them.

[petronelle.livejournal.com]

This is why I love and venerate the people who will read something over for me and make sure it doesn't make British readers have fits.

I'll do the same for them in reverse, of course, and American-check what I can. For some reason the use of perfect tenses -- had done, rather than did -- gets me as much as "lift" for "elevator." I suspect this means I am a linguistic canary.

[derryderrydown.livejournal.com]

And I will always be grateful to you for the amount of American-checking you did for my DCU stories. *g*

[delle.livejournal.com]

I know that cookie = biscuit, right? but what do you Brits call your cellphones?

(it IS amazing that we speak the same language and yet we don't speak the same language. at. all.)

[derryderrydown.livejournal.com]

Mobile phones.

[burntcopper.livejournal.com]

yep. 'cookie' is a very specific term used for the biscuits with chocolate chips in them.

Cellphones = mobiles.

[grondfic.livejournal.com]

It's worse when films get made out of Brit books with no care whatsoever for the background; and the child-hero gets transformed into an American too. (Yup, I'm talking The Dark is Rising here). You're supposed to PAY MONEY to see it, too (no WAY!)

[lasayla.livejournal.com]

Some of my favourite transatlantic fanfic misfires...

American writer in British fandom having heard that Brits don't say 'period' talks about a girl getting her first 'full stop'.

British reader somehow gets the impression that 'bangs' is the American term for bollocks rather than a fringe. Comes across a fic where somebody brushes a guy's bangs out of his eyes. Frightening mental imagery ensues.

An American writer in Harry Potter fandom goes to great lengths to research the Scottish countryside and includes a scene where Hermione is bitten by midges. Unfortunately, they'd not quite got to grips with the new vocabulary. The fic had Hermione being attacked by minges, which don't fly and only rarely bite...