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I want a targeting system that says "ROCK ON!" when I acquire a target...

Incest couples are creepy. You can pretend that they aren't related until the moon pulls away from Earth's orbit, but that's never gonna change.

I was looking for this story yesterday that I absolutely loved when I first read it. It took me half an hour of going through archives but I finally found it... and discovered that what I had thought was a one-shot was actually the first of many chapters. I was pretty stoked, since it was the most in-character thing I had read in a long time.

It turns out that I hate all of the chapters apart from the first one. emo What I had liked about it was that it showed the pilots as friends (although towards the end there was some light 3x4) and that it showed the hard and realistic bits of the fighting and the recovering; it had all the parts that never made it into the series. The rest of the chapters seemed like something tagged onto the end (which is annoying in and of itself) and delt, in my opinion, way too much with trying to hook up Heero and Duo and then keep them together and not nearly enough with the actual fighting and plot of what was going on. It didn't help that it also turned out to be a "Solo raped Duo when they were kids and now he's getting flashbacks and nightmares about it and Heero has to restrain his sexual passions and comfort him in this dark and difficult time" fic. Those really annoy me, if only because they are overdone. Every chapter seemed to come up with some new way to torture (sometimes literally) Duo. It just got very frustrating.

I think it mostly bothered me because I loved (and, you know what, still do love) the first chapter so much. It was one of the most realistic and most heart-pounding things I'd ever read. It didn't rely on any of the fanon steriotypes and while there was a safe house with the other three pilots in it, it was only used for maybe half a page. It was just really disappointing to find out that the rest of the chapters weren't like that. sad

I don't think Woofie was exactly sexist to Mei Lan; it's just that, in his eyes, she was following a stupid and childish belief, and he was trying to prove that she was wrong to do so. If anything, Master O was worse, telling her that a woman couldn't handle the Tallgeese/Proto-Leo.

On the other hand, one could argue that there are deeply-ingrained cultural biases and social mores on that colony, given that it's populated by members of a very strict, traditionalist Chinese clan which was forcibly emigrated by the Chinese government. However, I don't want to sound like I'm being racist, so I'll avoid that thread. If someone else wants to look at it, though, go right ahead.

Either way, personally, I believe that Wu Fei has some sort of instinctive aversion to fighting women not because he's sexist, but because he fears inflicting the same pain that he's felt upon other people; after all, those women he's fighting are daughters, sisters, wives, mothers, etc., and that means there's somebody to feel the pain of their loss. He doesn't consider this the other way (IE every man he kills is a father, brother, husband, etc) because he figures they knew the risks of battle when they signed up with OZ. Does it make him hypocritical? Sure, but I don't think it means he's sexist.

Recently, another couple of things that bother me have come to mind...

-Angstfics. You know, the ones where characters get put through hell with only a slim possibility of a happy ending. Unfortunately, my GF sort of likes this kind of thing...personally, I feel that the characters should have to earn their "happily ever after", but that doesn't mean I'm going to have Heero lose his friends, a limb or two, and think Relena is dead for a couple of years beforehand.

-Rapefics. Not fics that depict the act, but ones that use it as a plot device. I'm actually guilty of this one myself...anyway, what I mean are fics where a character is raped, or is nearly raped, and it's the inciting incident for something important. Very often it's used to start a relationship between two characters, or to bring them closer together. I feel really strongly about this, because rape is one of those things that should never be taken lightly. I hardly think a woman's response to being abused is to jump into the arms of a man, even if it's a good friend; she'd need some time to recover.

Something I wanted to point out in my last post, but forgot...

A lot of people seem to assume that Wu Fei is sexist because he refers to Noin as "woman" once. As was pointed out, though, he didn't know her name at the time, and it was the only real way he could address her. This is pretty unfair; if I referred to a woman I just met as "Ma'am" or "Miss", would I suddenly be some kind of woman-hater? That's pretty much what Woofie did. Personally, I think a lot of people jumped onto it because "onna", though the standard Japanese word for "woman", has a rather resonant quality and stands out easily among all that other dialogue, as do the other words fan-losers glom onto, like "baka" and "kawaii".

My only pet preeve is really when they crossover GW with either Sailor Moon or Harry Potter(seeing an increase of these ones) Also yaoi and when they bash the women characters!

Crossovers CAN work...but for them to work requires a certain level of careful planning and organization. The problem is that, as Aona said, 95% of crossovers are something like "Hermione invents a time/space travel spell and accidentally summons the Wing Team, hijinx ensue". This type of "lazy crossover" is best suited to comedyfics and the like, but if you want to do something serious, you really have to plan it out. I mean, if Sailor Moon's cast somehow existed in After Colony, they wouldn't be EXACTLY the same way they were in the BSSM anime; there would be changes dictated by the nature of GW's universe. For the two series to come together, exactly as depicted in their respective shows, is just unreasonable.

And trust me, I speak from experience...long, long ago, I used to write Ranma 1/2 crossover fics, but I always did my best to make sure that the crossing over was done in a somewhat reasonable fashion.

I knew about Kuwabara... but the Death Note writers are bashing Misa?!? ARGH! SMASH WITH FIERY DEATH!

On topic, both of Skye's points are pretty much perfectly in line with me, so yay. People are really pretty immature if they don't even have a basic understanding of Relena's character, and the usage of Japanese sprinkled in the English is a problem for most anime fanfics. Some writers are just... ugh...