#bc like there are SUCH good characters and ideas and worldbuilding concepts! it just brushes over it all so lightly

[aroaessidhe]

2023 reads // twitter thread      

The Name Bearer

Queer Latinx YA fantasy

a girl destined to bring the newborn king’s name from the flowers of prophecy to them, is instead told she must wait 10 years to find the new true king, and is taken to train in hiding with a group of warrior women

found family, start of series

[mixelation]

there's a certain genre of fic (largely in fandoms with pre-teen to teen protagonists) where the premise is basically "so-and-so gets a mentor who painstakingly explains every possible detail of A Thing They Have To Learn to them." for example, in the naruto fandom, an example is an AU where Kakashi "stresses the basics" and explains super in-depth chakra theory to his team, usually involving a training montage of chakra manipulation. this is when the writer will whip out worldbuilding on yin/yang chakra, "chakra coils," tenketsu, etc, and then often make digs at other characters or canon itself for skipping "fundamentals." the pay-off is usually the students being better prepared than other characters with different mentors later on, or a canon challenge being much easier

now! i get why these fics are comforting to some readers. i read them too. when i'm learning something, i like getting a bunch of details up front, and i understand this fantasy of a mentor who caters to this (and the adjacent fantasy of being highly motivated and making linear progress under the mentor). i'm not against this as a fic premise. however! often i'll see people in the comments or on reddit going, "why didn't they just do this in canon?" or behaving like this is the only good mentoring technique.

and as someone who has both worked with children and trained young adults to work in a research lab..... no, most people get completely overwhelmed with too much information at once and it makes learning harder, even when it's ""intellectual"" challenges like finicky lab work. over-explaining isn't a good teaching strategy in most cases, and it almost never is in a group setting where your students all have different learning needs. a lot of your early education was probably intentionally skipping details so you could get core concepts.* please let fictional fantasies stay fiction and don't think this is a good idea for real children.**

*Depending on your quality of education, a lot of it was probably also skipping details bc of either teacher exhaustion or teacher apathy. If you asked specific questions and your teacher brushed you off, that was probably a bad move on their part. I'm not arguing all your education was secretly high quality, just that not giving you every conceivable detail on a topic isn't automatically a bad teaching strategy.

**obligatory disclaimer that every child has different needs and some DO benefit from lengthy explanations, but that's relatively rare and almost certainly doesn't apply to 98% of the fictional children these fics feature.