While I’m being a horrible pedant (see my recent Grammatical PSA for a prior example of this), I’m going to try to clear up another usage problem that I see a lot in fic, including very well-written fic. Here’s the general principle:
When a line of dialogue is embedded in a sentence of narration, close it with a comma, not a period (though question and exclamation marks are OK) and don’t capitalize the first word of the rest of the sentence if it isn’t a proper name.
Here are some examples of the mistake I see people making and the correct punctuation.
Incorrect: “I have to go.” He said. Correct: “I have to go,” he said.
Incorrect: “It’s pretty late.” Said Bob. Correct: “It’s pretty late,” said Bob.
Incorrect: “I’m hungry.” Sam remarked. Correct: “I’m hungry,” Sam remarked.
Incorrect: “What a cute puppy!” The touch-starved grad student exclaimed. Correct: “What a cute puppy!” the touch-starved grad student exclaimed.
I do sometimes see people making a mistake in the opposite direction and closing a quotation with a comma even when followed by a sentence in which it is not embedded.
Incorrect: “I have to go,” he glanced anxiously at the clock. Correct: “I have to go.” He glanced anxiously at the clock.
“You’re not going anywhere, brother.” “Indeed I am not.”
I’m a big fan of Gods Squabbling Like Children In Inappropriate Fighting Environments – I love them a lot. Also, this is the result of me trying out more angles/poses/colouring styles again!
That storyline cuts pretty close to the id, you know? And it’s just one of a large number of similarly… charged storylines (soul bonds, every fuck-or-die scenario ever written…) that you see very very often in fanfic, and from time to time in profic as well.
And the profic? Almost uniformly sucks.
Because pro writers either have some shame, and relegate the purest, most cracklicious iterations of those stories to drawerfic that their workshop buddies will never see, or else they’re shameless. But they usually have to be shameless alone– and so their versions are written so solitarily that they don’t have any voice of restraint, to pull them back from the Event Horizon of the Id Vortex when it starts warping their story mechanics.
But in fandom, we’ve all got this agreement to just suspend shame. I mean, a lot of what we write is masturbation material– not all of it, and not for everyone, but. A lot of it is, and we all know it, and so we can’t really pretend that we’re only trying to write for our readers’ most rarefied sensibilities, you know? We all know right where the Id Vortex is, and we have this agreement to approach it with caution, but without any shame at all. (At least in matters of content. Grammar has displaced sex as a locus of shame. Discuss.)
And so we’ve got all these shameless fantasies being thrown out into the fannish ether, being read and discussed, and the next thing you know, we’ve got genres. We’ve got narrative traditions. We have enough volume and history for these things to develop a whole critical vocabulary.
We have a toolbox for writing this sort of thing really, really well, for making these 3 A.M. fantasies work as story and work as literature without having to draw back from the Id Vortex to do it.
a friend was asking, in light of me promoting@iddyiddybangbang about the use of the word “id”. This post really helped fandom define the term for itself.
I used to be such an uptight miserable jackass that I *hated* this concept for a while (even while I was writing werewolf porn, idk). NOT ANY MORE.
If we’re going to update the pantheon of regrettable artists, can we add “white male writer who was legitimately progressive twenty years ago, but hasn’t learned or grown as an artist in any way whatsoever since then, and now exists in a state of grumpy bewilderment at the fact that he’s being critcised for doing exactly the same stuff that used to win him praise”?
That’s a long winded way of saying Joss Whedon
When we say “regrettable artist,” do we mean that his entire existence is regrettable? That we’re not allowed to still like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, or The Cabin in the Woods? Should we wish those things had never existed? Must we now condemn everything he writes as worthless in order to prove our social justice bona fides? I’m strongly suspecting the answer is “yes,” since I see a lot of very flimsy criticism of his characterization in recent films: because his feminism is imperfect, his writing must also be terrible in every way. No one who has any moral failings can have any virtues, even non-moral ones. The most ironic example of this I’ve seen lately is a juxtaposition of a gif from The Avengers of Captain America saying “Son of a gun” – claimed to be an example of Whedon’s inept characterization of Brooklyn-born army vet Steve Rogers as a euphemism-using prude – with a gif of Cap saying “Son of a bitch,” which is said to be more authentic. The irony, of course, is that the second gif is from Avengers: Age of Ultron, also written by Joss Whedon. In their haste to condemn every aspect of his writing, Tumblrites happily misattribute quotes.
I’m willing to concede that Whedon has not followed the zeitgeist on representation of women in action films. His approach is still to show the way women are sexualized, victimized, and underestimated on account of their gender (which, I can attest, is still accurate to the experience of women in male-dominated fields), while the favored strategy in progressive circles is now to depict a situation in which women are accepted and respected without question and gender is a non-issue. (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. does pretty well on that, as well as on racial diversity among women as well as men, but Joss Whedon’s involvement may be minimal at this point.)
But I still think that Whedon is a better writer of dialogue and, yes, character than most of the other staff hacks writing in the MCU. People also have a tendency to reduce his style to pop culture jokes, and yes, there are a lot of those. But there’s also “I remember a shadow”; “It’s a terrible privilege”; “Big man in a suit of armor. Take that off, what are you?” / “Genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist” / [Natasha shrugs]; “I’ve got red in my ledger, I’d like to wipe it out”; “Loki, he’s a full-tilt diva”; “Seeing as it’s a stupid-ass decision, I’ve elected to ignore it”; “Satisfaction’s not in my nature” / “Surrender’s not in mine” (yes, he wrote the Dark World bro-boat scene); “Actually, he’s the boss, I just pay for everything”; “That up there, that’s the endgame”; “If you step out that door, you’re an Avenger.” Those aren’t just punchy quotable quotes; they’re moments that tell you a lot about a character. Our conceptions of characters in the MCU are profoundly shaped by some of those moments, and people are happy to gif them and quote them in tribute to the characters, giving no credit to the person who wrote them, then turn around and unconditionally demonize the writer. And I’m really tired of it.
I wasn’t in Tumblr fandom in the mythical days I hear of when criticizing Joss Whedon was an unpardonable sin; all I’ve seen is the excessive backlash. I ask for nuance; I ask for credit where it’s due. And I’d really like people to stop implying that I’m a bad feminist (which, to the rigorist Tumblr Left, makes me an irredeemably wicked contributor to Oppression) for continuing to like Joss Whedon’s writing (or George R. R. Martin’s, for that matter). As a historian of philosophy, I’m used to dealing with people like Kant and Nietzsche whose attitudes were often Problematic, sometimes even regressive relative to their day. I’ve also learned how not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Loki is the Philosopher King 