#my squicks

"Pippin shaded his eyes, squinting until the sight of the man walking up the road resolved itself into the familiar form of his cousin Merry..."

Hobbit. Just say Hobbit. You don't need to gender everything. Or if you must, then "Hobbit-lad" or "Hobbit-lass" how's that? Or person! Being! Individual! Literally any word that isn't an inaccurate use of the word "man" for someone who is not a man!

"Gimli looked up at the taller man and scoffed at the sight of Legolas's pointed ears, now drooping with dismay..."

See this one just sounds silly, doesn't it? Silly and also confusing! Because you've just called Legolas a man, but clearly you're talking about an elf or he wouldn't have pointed ears, now would he? And Gimli's a dwarf! So why did you say "man" at all? There are no men here! (Unless Aragorn is playing Third Wheel in the background I suppose, but that's neither here-nor-there right now.)

"Glorfindel turned upon the edge of the fountain and greeted the other man with a smile like a sunrise..."

No no no stop, they are not men. Neither of them are men. They're elves. That's kind of a big important plot element in fact, that the Firstborn and the Secondborn are distinct and sundered from one another, please don't call elves men it's weird and awkward and often confusing because then I'll think you're talking about "A Man" but no, you mean an elf but you said man and it's just so off-putting...

They're different species, guys! (This drives me nuts in scifi too. Stop with the humanocentricism! You're not the Galactic Empire!) Replace the word "man" with something else and see how silly it sounds. "Elephant," perhaps; or any other species that isn't the one you're actually talking about.

"Gimli looked up at the taller raccoon and scoffed..."

"Glorfindel greeted the other ant-eater with a smile like a sunrise..."

"The sight of the giraffe walking up the road resolved itself into his cousin Merry..."

See? Yeah, that's how inaccurate it feels to me every time I read the word "man" or "woman" when you're talking about somebody who is not a human. It's not something on the level of squick where I'll reverse out of a fic if I see it, no, but it absolutely is jarring enough to throw-off the rhythm and mood of the story, for me.

(And if I see it in the first line or so before I've gotten invested in the story...yeah. That'll get me out of a fic almost as fast as lack of paragraph-breaking.)

Because I'm such a sucker for world building, I suspect, and the fact that these are all different peoples with different cultures and capabilities and outlooks and understanding and history and everything is such an interesting and important aspect of Middle-earth to me...and lumping all these different folks into one thing like that as though gender is the most important and indeed only notable aspect of their identity, and overrides everything else about them is just weird. It doesn't make sense. And I do not like it.

(Exceptions obviously made for when the character's identity is being deliberately obscured or confused, and they are erroneously thought to be a human and then revealed as something else; that sort of thing is on purpose and thus is fine.)

(Also exceptions for folk like Arwen or Elwing or Elladan etc who straddle the line between species.)

Anyway thank you for coming to this session of Tathrin Whines About Little Things To Avoid Doing Productive Writing Today.

*none of these lines are actual examples taken from real fics; I made them up for this post. Please do not attach call-outs to actual fics or authors in the notes. No need to be mean!

🐎

Hmm... good question. NGL, I am pretty vanilla in RL and use art/writing to explore different things, so there are a lot of tropes/kinks I am just not around/aware of.

Hard nos for me include: incest (even fake! mommy/daddy kinks squick me out), infantilization, mind control/hypnotism, anything involving feces or vomit, anything involving underage characters (age differences are cool, as long as the prefrontal cortex has cooked/everyone is of age, and hasn't met previously while anyone was a child), petplay

BUT

THE TWO THINGS

I CANNOT HANDLE

ARE BURNS

AND EYE STUFF.

if i see images of eye injuries or 2nd+ degree burns i immediately want to cry and hide and ive seen this one post of this dude with 2nd degree sunburn on my dash like 3 times this week making fun of his whiteness and thats fine but it’s. SO. GROSS. pls no more

IF YOU ARE A MUTUAL AND YOU LOVE ME PLEASE DONT REBLOG THAT ANYMORE JFC

-Incest -Power differences (D/s, teacher/student, coach/player, a/b/o, etc) -Scat -Humiliation (very different from power differences, embarrassment is fine) -Bestiality -Animal hybrid/human -Rape -Slavery -Gang bang

To clarify--kink is fine. BDSM is fine. Temptation is great. People slipping in and out of roles, even roles with a major power differential or those that would, if they were real, have major consent issues, is okay (fine when done well, but that's not often). But I immediately hit the backbutton if that carries over into the rest of their interactions or if one characters implies by thought, word, or action that they would prefer the other character always be in that headspace or at that level of relative powerlessness. Negotiation is great. One character exerting their will over another (even if it is consensual, sorry) sends me to the back button. And, to that those power differentials institutionalized? To imply that a person is born to submit or dominate (whether a D/s or a/b/o 'verse) and while a character may resist a little, they're ultimately happiest when fulfilling their role? I can't. I end up wanting to re-write the entire fic and yelling at the characters to question the bloody system, to not just accept things how they are.