Fanfic rant no. 963

I'm a bit of a packrat where fic is concerned, so if I stumble across fic that looks interesting, or in a fandom I don't regularly read, I tend to stash it away for later. Makes life much easier when it comes to updating my recs page, that's for sure, even if it has been somewhat overwhelmed with Snapely goodness in recent months.

Anyway, one of the fandoms I don't read all that often is Due South, but occasionally I like a little Fraser/Ray K. What I don't get in that fandom is the tendency of writers to write Ray K like he's a knuckle-dragging semi-illiterate twang monster with the accent from hell. I've seen the show, his accent is strong but it's not that heavy. Pack it in, fcol!

Writing dialect is really hard to do well. Ask anyone who's read some of the worst Magnificent 7 fic for a description of how poor Ezra's mock-southern accent gets mangled, or the people who have no idea how to write dialogue in Harry Potter because middle class English is something alien to them (thus Hermione ends up sounding like a refugee from a Merchant Ivory film).

The pedants among your readers (and lo, they are many!) would like you to stop it right now, thank you kindly.