Entry tags:

ao3, comics, fanfic, reviews

(You can pry my parens from my cold dead fingers)
FelicityGS is very attached to her parentheses. She recently posted "There's Nothing There" a Loki/Steve Rogers fic, to AO3. The earliest reviewers seem to enjoy it. And then a fiend known only as "J" has the unmitigated gall to post this scathing, atrocious, narrow-minded comment:

Almost all of the parenthesis and several commas were unnecessary. If a sentence goes on for more than two lines, it should probably be broken up into two or more sentences. You might want to get a beta who is really good with grammar/punctuation. Otherwise, great story. Very cute and well thought out. (:

FelicityGS's enraged response spans four comment blocks. In the course of the novella she compares herself to Nabokov and goes to great length to justify how her style should trump. I will not inflict the entirety of it on this poor post, but it ends with the following:

Do you have to like it?

No.

But do me a fucking favour:

don't fucking tell me I need a fucking goddamn beta who knows grammar really fucking well and that I could get rid of all those fucking parens and had too many fucking commas because I did not use any of those fucking lightly and you are a fucking douche.

Because if the above didn't give it away?

I know fucking grammar. I know style. I am comfortable in my style, I have given thought to my style, and I know the difference between grammar and style. I write fanfiction as a labour of love and to share stories, to hone my craft and to practice what I have been doing since I could hold a pen.

Fuck.

You.

<3

It's the little heart that just classies it up. The other commenters come in for mixtures of lol and wtf, as well as wondering why she equates Nabokov with her Avengers slashfic. This she also can explain.

I reached for the first book I had at hand. I apologize it wasn't low brow enough for you.

One bold anon tries to stand up for her.

But you're probably also someone who tells their granny the Christmas socks scratch and the cookies are dusty instead of doing the right thing. What a miserable bunch of hypocrites and nasty bitches claimed Yuletide this year!

Which would have made sense if the fic was actually. Y'know. For Yuletide. Another anon explains the fail.

Gift exchange? Yuletide? Also, the author was the one reacting with hostility to a helpful comment-- vile, abusive hostility. WITH AN EPIC NOVEL OF OVERLY DEFENSIVE BABBLE. I don't even-- what is with your comment? Are you trying to paint me as some sort of hands-rubbing, world-domination-wanting Grinch? Where are you going with this absurd reading into things that aren't there at all?

But AO3 isn't big enough to contain the rage of FelicityGS, so the rage goes to tumblr

every time I get a review complaining about parens

My hackles immediately go up.Parentheses are a much loved stylistic device of mine. I am sure many of you realize this by now. And I do understand the complaint about them on occasion.

This doesn’t apply to everyone. Some people give me many words, and they tell me a whole arc of thoughts—what they enjoyed, things that didn’t click. These people almost always can explain why they didn’t care for the parens in coherent ways, and I respect their opinions and look I’m even writing an entire story for those people without a single set of parens in it.

(it may be killing me on the inside)

But if you fucking drop me a review that is only ‘lol i liked this i guess but too many ()s’ I will immediately disregard your opinion. It is worthless. I don’t know why you didn’t like them. I don’t know if you didn’t understand, if you found them unclear, if you just hate parens (you monster), if you simply glazed over them because you decided they weren’t worth reading, if you think that I put them in for NO FUCKING REASON.

But I don’t fucking like you. I am not changing.

I.

Love.

Parentheses.

And you can pry them away from me and my style over my cold, dead body.

(fuck you)

(no seriously)

(but not you guys that actually explain why you don’t like parens, you guys are cool)

As usual, fail-fandomanon gets in on the action, including reposting an allegedly deleted comment. The claim is supported by these two posts by FelicityGS, who continues to believe this is a rational response to anything.

that moment when you take a step back, examine the forest, and then grin like a maniacal loon as you take fire and axe to the rotten tree that soured your mood.

Uh huh. But she's doing much better now.

I actually feel delightfully, refreshingly vindicated and good for breaking down that comment and addressing it in that manner, because I can look at it and see that, no, no, I’m not fucking crazy.

Maybe you can, but the rest of us...less so.

(Post a new comment)

	redcoast 2012-12-30 07:20 pm UTC (link)
	Double wank all the way! (Reply to this)(Thread)

	seiberwing 2012-12-30 08:33 pm UTC (link)
	Double the batshit. Double the overreaction. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	seiberwing 2012-12-30 08:37 pm UTC (link)
	Also, are you getting comment notifs to your email? I am not. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	seiberwing 2012-12-30 08:47 pm UTC (link)
	Never mind, they apparently went for a walk into my spam filter. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	iczer6 2012-12-30 11:13 pm UTC (link)
	The best part is girl_friday's Fry icon glaring at seiberwing's icon. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	singe 2012-12-31 01:53 am UTC (link)
	I had to go back and look. BWA! (Reply to this)(Parent)

	eljuno 2012-12-31 02:29 am UTC (link)
	I honestly didn't notice that until you said something, but now I have to say that it's kind of awesome. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	paladin 2012-12-31 08:53 pm UTC (link)
	Fry is ticked that Seiberwing is objecting to girl_friday's report and submitting her own as evidence. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	risha 2012-12-30 08:46 pm UTC (link)
	I, too, love parentheses, and overuse them as a stylistic choice. The difference being that I have no pretensions to being a good writer or that choice's grammatical correctness. (This comment needs more parentheses, but I was having trouble coming up with a good excuse to work them in.) (Reply to this)(Thread)

	risha 2012-12-30 08:48 pm UTC (link)
	(And I totally missed the post below this.) (That explains to the "double" comments!) (Reply to this)(Parent)

	kumquat_of_doom 2012-12-31 02:42 am UTC (link)
	My own punctuation addiction is the semi-colon. I love those things far too much; I use them WAY more than I can possibly justify but I just love them! Trying to break my addiction to them is a work in progress, but it's trickier than you'd think. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	rosehiptea 2012-12-31 03:16 am UTC (link)
	I used to have this thing for ellipses. It still comes out in personal blog posts and comments but I usually only have one per fic, if that. (I love semi-colons but I'm never 100% sure I'm using them correctly.) (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	seiberwing 2012-12-31 03:34 am UTC (link)
	I'm bad with hyphens--they're like indecisive sentence breakers. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	cygnia 2012-12-31 04:55 pm UTC (link)
	Ellipses and hyphens both. I'm trying to wean myself off them, but.... ;) (Reply to this)(Parent)

	puipui 2012-12-31 07:23 am UTC (link)
	My own punctuation addiction is the semi-colon. OMG ME TOO. I'm so happy; I thought I was the only one!* * This isn't entirely true; I just said it as an excuse to use a semi-colon, because yes. I also like footnotes. (And also parentheses.) (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	kumquat_of_doom 2012-12-31 04:24 pm UTC (link)
	Nope, definitely not the only one: I know of plenty of people who struggle with semi-colon over-usage. I had to train myself out of using multiple semi-colons per paragraph. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	dreamworld 2012-12-31 06:26 pm UTC (link)
	I love emdashes--I refuse to give them up. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	subluxate 2012-12-30 09:07 pm UTC (link)
	Her beta compared her to e.e. cummings. That's nearly as delightful as the "Nabakov" comment. (Reply to this)(Thread)

	risha 2012-12-30 09:19 pm UTC (link)
	(Aggh, autoplay! This sort of thing is why I continue to avoid tumblr.) (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	subluxate 2012-12-30 09:20 pm UTC (link)
	Oops, should have warned about that. (I despise autoplay and wish I had a way to turn it off entirely.) (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	risha 2012-12-30 09:24 pm UTC (link)
	It's like GeoCities circa 2000 out there. (I realized too late that it sounded like I was complaining to you instead of the Universe itself.) (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	subluxate 2012-12-30 09:26 pm UTC (link)
	It is. People go, "Oh, I can use this feature (that no one over the age of twenty-two likes because they remember GeoCities)!" (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	mcity 2013-01-03 07:59 pm UTC (link)
	That explains a lot. (Reply to this)(Parent)

Except the text isn't 18pt blue comic sans on a cyan background.

mcity
2013-01-03 07:58 pm UTC (link)

In fact, it has precisely the opposite problem; the text is often too small. You'd think in an age where browsing is increasingly mobile, people would try to make sure their page was actually readable without squinting. If your font size is smaller than a cooked grain of rice sideways, go back and fix it. Do these people ever try to actually use their own designs?

/amateur web designer rant

(Reply to this)(Parent)

	lied_ohne_worte 2012-12-30 10:33 pm UTC (link)
	Noscript in Firefox does a pretty good job on it - I didn't hear anything. On the other hand, what's it with the text that's so light you can barely make it out? Am I the only one who has to squint to even see it? (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	lied_ohne_worte 2012-12-30 10:34 pm UTC (link)
	Looking down to seiberwing's comment, it seems I'm not, which makes me feel better. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	seiberwing 2012-12-30 09:40 pm UTC (link)
	Lord, my eyes. Why is light grey on white a good idea? (Reply to this)(Parent)

	singe 2012-12-31 01:56 am UTC (link)
	I don't think I've ever used parenthesiseseses in fic. (Weird.) (Reply to this)(Thread)

ekaterinv
2012-12-31 05:20 am UTC (link)

I don't think I have either. Parentheses are for things like citations and asides that for some reason you can't fit into the main argument of the paragraph. And as was pointed out to me by a professor, if you cannot fit it into the main argument of a paragraph, why is it even in your paper?

I don't understand how parentheses can work in fictional prose. A humorous work, quite likely. But this kind of story?

His eyes were blue (specifically, azure (azure like the sea)) and sparkling (but like a sapphire, not the sea (a princess-cut expensive sapphire)).

I wanted to fuck him (but in a deeply spiritual way (but also in a hot sexy way)) so much (both frequently and extremely (and in extreme ways)).

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	ashes 2012-12-31 05:52 am UTC (link)
	I like them for asides, sort of like when the POV character is disagreeing/lying to themselves? IDK, I know I've used them and I even think they worked, but I clearly don't have the ego to defend it. :D (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	seiberwing 2012-12-31 02:58 pm UTC (link)
	I've used them for small tangents, like the smaller of Terry Pratchett's footnotes. But not parens in parens unless you are clearly mocking yourself. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	ashes 2013-01-01 03:39 am UTC (link)
	Yeah; I think for stuff like that, they can be really effective when used well. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	singe 2012-12-31 03:03 pm UTC (link)
	I use them in informal journaling all the fwiggin' time. I'll have to practice with them. And also practice my screeching when someone questions them. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	mcity 2013-01-03 08:01 pm UTC (link)
	This reminds me of the bit in one of the E. Nesbit books that ends up with quadruple-nested parentheses. The last one is the narrator noting how many parentheses she's used, and that she should probably stop. (Reply to this)(Parent)

maverickz3r0
2013-01-04 04:09 am UTC (link)

I use them for...I'm not sure how to describe it? I'm writing a 'start of darkness' type thing right now that the readers know going into it will make the character a villain by the end, and I put things in parentheses at the end of each bit lightly sketching out the consequences of whatever happened in that piece, or detailing what he could've done differently to make things all right.

I've also done the 'character is lying to themselves' version, although the character was also an unmedicated schizophrenic so it was also supposed to partially represent disjointed thought patterns.

There are ways to use them. I don't know if you'd see them in published fiction, but they work fine in fanfic and anything where you can be a little more stylistic.

(Reply to this)(Parent)

	gerorin 2012-12-31 06:42 am UTC (link)
	JKR uses them, so I've seen quite a handful of HP fics that tried to emulate that, but success vary. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	singe 2012-12-31 02:56 pm UTC (link)
	I never noticed. I'll have to look at my HP books again and see how she does it. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	anthologia 2012-12-31 09:01 pm UTC (link)
	I wouldn't exactly call JKR a good example of how to do little things like parentheses right, judging from the way she uses and abuses ellipses. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	singe 2013-01-01 01:39 am UTC (link)
	Now I DEFINITELY do that in my fic! Call it a weakness... (Reply to this)(Parent)

	demonbean 2012-12-31 04:46 am UTC (link)
	Well, I know that when I read a comment response that is 1/5 expletives and contains several grammatical errors, I feel much more confident about the level of emotional maturity and grammatical competency of the author. (But that's just me.) Because: I may not have these spacing and paren(these)s things down yet. Am I doing it right? <3 (Reply to this)

	ashes 2012-12-31 05:57 am UTC (link)
	So, this seems reasonable and not at all an over reaction. I'm certainly assured of the author's grasp of effective language use. All the F-bombs and defensive rants really clinch it. (Reply to this)(Thread)

	mcity 2013-01-03 08:03 pm UTC (link)
	Well, she uses tumblr, so that's pretty much standard debating techniques for her. I wish I was joking. (Reply to this)(Parent)

anthologia
2012-12-31 09:18 pm UTC (link)

"I understand that not every sentence should go on at length, but if you read anything I write, you'll note that, actually, no. They don't. Not without a reason. Not unlike Nabakov, sentences that I choose to make run at length are doing so for a purpose. A stylistic choice, if you will."

I get so much glee out of grammatical errors in rants about HDU MY WRITING IS PERFECT!!! Now I'm trying to imagine Nabokov-shaped sentences running around a track, all confused and lost.

(Reply to this)

	mochibuni 2012-12-31 11:57 pm UTC (link)
	Oh. My. (Reply to this)(Thread)

	tofuknight 2013-01-04 02:09 am UTC (link)
	Oh, yes! :eyebrow waggles: (Reply to this)(Parent)

	kittenmommy 2013-01-05 04:04 am UTC (link)
	Oh dear. I've read and enjoyed lots of her other fics. I'm at a loss to explain this behavior, because wow. I don't even know. (Reply to this)