Govinda's Guide to Grammar, Punctuation and Other Stuff

[Govinda]

I absolutely agree with you. I think I mentioned it earlier, when one of the crap pieces of fan-fiction I found identified a speaker by hair colour. There's a lot of it on the internet and it annoys me to no end. When was the last time you heard an actual person refer to someone by citing their eye colour?

I'd put money on someone being able, right now, to head on over to the fan-fiction Pit and return with an example of this wtfery in about three seconds, depending on connection speed. It's prolific.

To be honest, I think it just stems from laziness. A lack of willingness (or perhaps ability) to create full characters, ones that can be recognised without needing to mention their body type or hairstyle.

I think the best way to avoid it is to work on the voices of your characters; that way, whole parts of conversations can be left he/she/it/them-free and thus completely devoid of references to 'the raven-haired girl' and 'the violet-eyed boy' and other such examples of laziness. (Speaking of which, someone really needs to sort out the way internet-people write about eyes. I remember once reading the sentence, 'her chocolate orbs sparkling in the light' and think that there was no hope for humanity. Orbs? Chocolate orbs? Srsly.)

So no, I don't think you're being picky, and yes, I do see it as a problem; laziness, probably. People who are so keen to get their next bit of work finished that they resort to having to identify people not by their actual personalities but by their magical 'chocolate orbs' and 'effeminate' manner.

If you ever get the time, I'd recommend reading an extract of conversation from Coupland's Girlfriend in a Coma. He shows everyone that there's no need to either overuse he/she/it/them or start getting awkwardly creative with descriptions of eyes. He's clearly on our side too. I'd like to do a section in this thread about this problem, it'd be fun, just for the trips to the Pit. I should have time next week.

[Andromeda]

I couldn't remember if you had mentioned in here or not before. I had read your posts so long ago and skimming through quickly at two in the morning apparently missed it. Sorry about that.

Laziness...that is a curious way to look at it. I think I can see where you're coming from with it. I hadn't thought about it being seen as laziness since they are making the effort to change things up. The ultimate in laziness would be just endlessly using their name and never saying anything else.

I end up reading fiction rather than fan fiction, so I don't know how terrible things get in the fan fiction. I think it might be a little better in fiction, but it is definitely a problem that people identify visually and not by personality. A part of that could be society itself as well since so many people read another based on their appearance rather than their words or personality.

I actually had someone review one of my stories suggesting that I start using visual descriptors for my characters rather than their name. It just flattened me to hear someone actually going around suggesting that style of writing. Because I agree with you that characters should be able to hold on their personalities just as well as their appearances. In a good conversation one should never be confused who is speaking because their speech or the things they're saying should make it pretty clear who the speaker is.

Chocolate orbs sounds like they're getting desperate. You can at least give them credit for being creative if nothing else.