fanficrants

subluxate posting in

If you refer to a character as "the black agent" when NO ONE ELSE has been referred to by an epithet, I'm going to back the fuck away immediately.

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From:

ruuger

Ugh, yes. That's a huge peeve of mine in The Mentalist fic, where Cho is often referred to as "the Korean/Asian agent" (or, even worse, "the Oriental agent", though that one I've mercifully seen only a few times), when the others are just referred to as "the agent".

From:

subluxate

This was a Criminal Minds fic. I have absolutely zero confidence in the person's ability to write without further prejudice after that. I mean, are they going to refer to Garcia as "the fat computer whiz"?

From:

basedeltazero

Really, using epithets this way annoys me in general. It's one thing to use an epithet when the viewpoint character doesn't know the correct name (or just doesn't care), but what the heck is with people's love of referring to characters by anything but their name? I mean, I've seen the viewpoint character themselves get epitheted, and it's pretty awe inspiring...

From:

musyc

what the heck is with people's love of referring to characters by anything but their name?

Very, very, very bad composition/writing teachers. Using names is repetitive, using pronouns is repetitive, using "said" is repetitive. (Rinse, repeat. >.> ) I see the reasoning behind it, where the students are supposed to be encouraged to be creative and expand their writing beyond the basic sentence but OMG is it often so poorly implemented.

From:

clare_dragonfly

Hear, hear.

From:

ruuger

This is an excellent essay about what's wrong with epithets, namely that they are often OOC for the viewpont character, and that they reduce complex characters into a single descriptors.

(and it says a lot about the writer which descriptor they choose for the character)