Fanfic rant no. 963

[graculus]

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.

Comments

[innocent-lex.livejournal.com]

"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,"

And it just gets better when people try to sound Ezra-smart, and thus use long words just because they're long words, and not because the meaning of said long words even remotely resembles the thing they were trying to say. Oh, and said long words are in "accent", too.

But yes, when I have to ask on LJ for possible translations of words that have simply been invented in an attempt to depict an accent, it's not good. Not good at all.

[graculus.livejournal.com]

Yes, a thousand times, yes.

Ezra uses words very precisely, not just because they're long - personally I enjoy writing Ezra dialogue but then he doesn't have the accent too much in my mind (which is probably good since it bears no resemblance whatsoever to any particular regional accent, apparently)...

But as bad as the depiction of Ezra and Vin's accents are, they pale into insignificance against the horror that is dialect-RayK. *shudders*

[innocent-lex.livejournal.com]

I've never read any Due South fic. I watched quite a bit of the show, but found it odd when they changed Ray for a new Ray and gave up. It was hard getting to watch anything at all at the time, so I stopped watching most things with the slightest excuse.

And yeah, why do people write Vin with this broad Texas accent? He doesn't speak like that in the show, and he says very little anyway. All this "cain't" business drives me potty - it's one of the first things I search and replace on before I read a fic.

Yes, I'm one of those evil people who edit quite a bit of fic before I read it. Yes, I'm bad. No, I'm not sorry.