There's this short fiction thing called Deathworlders that I was linked a few days ago. Basically humans are scary as fuck because everyone else in the universe evolved on pansy ass garden worlds. Cool premise and all that, seriously. Too bad the author/s are complete and utter hacks who wrote it into the ground and then some by, oh, the tenth chapter or so.
Don't think I've ever actually dropped a story because it went to shit like this, the premise hooks you in but the moment you take a step back you realise that it's little more than writing 101 mistakes coupled with stuff taken from other fiction and butchered to push whatever sociopolitical stance the author felt like doing that day.
Oh boy, time for some self-flagellation, I love bad fiction!
its not that bad especially since it was started off a hole on bad sci-fi, and the author does starting turning down the political stuff later on when he realizes how he sounds.
I'm late but I'm kinda surprised other people here followed this. I quit a couple months ago when it devolved into blatant fanservice. Dunno if it's still like that but it was more than I was willing to deal with. It had problems before, but until then the setting at least was interesting enough for me to keep trying with it.
Oh dear, does it? The one black bisexual woman space pilot (henceforth BBWSP in the pending review) so overtly telling the Rocket Raccoon knockoffs that she'd bang them if she could was one warning sign, the author's peculiar way of describing that species of spun-glass sphess elves by saying that you'd fatally injure one if you had sex with them was another.
But anyways, yes, it's shit, for a number of reasons.
SJW soapboxingThe most overt of this is in the single-digit chapters, but it's laced throughout. It can be described most succinctly as informed diversity (i.e. tokenism), where the author goes out of their way to make sure that the audience is aware of every single victim point possessed by every character even when there's no reason to be so obvious in the narrative. When a character is introduced, it doesn't feel like meeting another member of the cast, it feels like we're being given a window through which to watch the author tick another box on their diversity checklist. This is reinforced by two main factors, both of which boil down to lazy tokenism.
First, most of these characters get perhaps two or three paragraphs in a single scene and then are abruptly discarded-their only purpose was to demonstrate how socially aware and accepting the author is. The remainder are one-dimensional lazy stereotypes. Take BBWSP, she's one of the major human characters. The acronym I just used describes 100% of her character. Her very first scene, in an ironically appropriate way, has her worrying about people just seeing her as a token minority rather than a competent individual. The author then proceeds to never depict her in any role except that of a token minority and an insert for the xenos fetish. She gets perhaps two paragraphs in the entire story about her piloting the ship, which overlaps with another problem I'll discuss later. But basically she's got a super-fucking-cool role, she's the pilot of humanity's first FTL spaceship, and she's being sent on diplomatic missions to meet strange new life
and fantasize about fucking it, but the author manages to avoid giving her any personality beyond "bisexual who's really pansexual oh and BTW I'm a black woman if you haven't noticed already".
The same thing crops up with other characters. You've got the British-born Pakistani-descended guy whose sole personality trait is "gambling/drinking is haram". When he initially gets abducted (and oh boy are the abduction snippets another problem to talk about), he spends as much time worrying about whether the guy he bumped into being an angry drunk who'll attack him for looking Arabic as he does boggling at how TIME HAS FUCKING FROZEN AND THE ALIENS ARE HERE TO GET HIM. And then there's the Irish woman whose personality is "I have red hair, I'm comfortable being naked around strangers now, and also I occasionally have a single word written in a vague accent to remind you that I'm supposed to be Irish". She's a self-described space babe/pirate queen/colonial governor who somehow managed to bootstrap from being abducted to running first a pirate ship and then a
planet, had her palace bombed out from under her, and hiked for four months to get back to the ruin, but we get the last ten minutes of hiking and then the lazy bullshit. Oh, and she also gets four lines of banter with a SBS operator because "Oh yeah the Irish and English don't have good history" is all the lazy asshole author could remember apart from "red hair" and "funny accent".
So let's continue the detour into
The Author Is A Lazy Fuck Who Doesn't Do Any ResearchInstead of figuring out how to write an Irish accent or tossing in a few words of gaelic Firefly-style, they write "fucking" as "feeking" when she says it. They wants a Muslim character but doesn't care to find out anything about Islam and instead make the guy say "haram" and not want to drink or gamble. They want to describe a new space race but are too lazy to identify all the likely players so instead they just turn NASA multinational, name a bunch of random companies and the Japanese space agency (weeb alert?), and kick Russia and China out of the picture. A lot of stuff overlaps with this heading, so we'll leave it for now.
Tolerant Globalist Author Is A Nationalist Anglocentric AssEarly rants about American nationalism in the text, and then-Russia! The Russian ambassador is a nameless lecher (in a story where everyone and their dog is a named character) who exists solely to offend BBWSP and lazily foreshadow the RUSSIANS ARE EBUL HURR plot. Russia arbitrarily breaks with the international agreement to work as a united front and starts their own negotiations with another alien party. When the Glorious Western Powers throw up an orbital weapons network the Russians protest and the Chinese meekly complain about not being involved. When they put together a specops team to go to another planet, they pick people from
anglophone countries. Not individual anglophone operators, but literally just Americans, Brits, and Commonwealth types. The actual fuck.
That One HFY ThingWhere the aliens all instantly adopt human expressions, idioms, and cultural references, because thousands of years of their own history haven't produced any pithy sayings, clever maxims, or resilient memes, and GLORIOUS HUMAN CULTURE is transparently superior even to people with radically different psychology and history.
That Other One HFY ThingWhere the monstrous space monsters who suck compared to us aren't evil enough until you tell the audience that they like to make slaves out of little girls with vague implications of rape.
That Third One HFY/Greentext Story/Lazy Fanfic ThingWhere it's less a story and more a highlight reel because the author doesn't want to work through all of the "boring bits" even after they leave a space-limited medium.
That's just for starters. The soapboxing isn't as egregious as other authors I could name *cough*DAVID FUCKING WEBER*cough*, but the way it's constantly present and the rest of the writing is also pretty shit makes the whole much worse.
e: Oh yeah,
The Fucked TimelineWhen you need a proper reading order list for a single story's chapters,
you fucked up. The timeline jumps all over and constantly flashbacks with no internal indication. I could be verbose here, but it's honestly just shit and isn't worth the effort.
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14863077 times)