burntcopper (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
burntcopper) wrote2008-02-15 12:39 am
burntcopper) wrote2008-02-15 12:39 am
On behalf of my nation of fic writers, I apologise
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.
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.
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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.
no subject