#it's taken 500000 years for me to get my act together have a post

[askvictini]

What's your name?

Frankly: Well then if you are to stay here, you should have one! I will think of a suitable nameVictini: …..well.. alright.. Frankly: Hm! I have it! We will call you Anikitos! That seems fitting.Victini: ……ani..anicos.. ??Bella: …Yeah that’s a bit hard to say, the Professor is like that sometimes. We’ll call you Nick for short ok?Victini: ….that’s.. a nickname??Bella: ..yeah??Vicitini: ……yes. that’s good.

[llawlietofficial]

What type of characterisation do u like for fics? I do find that fic from back in the day is mostly 1 dimensional but I was curious what ur issues w it where?

I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to answer this but I’m gonna be real my opinions on stuff like this have led to me being labeled toxic to the point where people have literally implied they want me and people who share similar opinions with me to leave the fandom, so I’ve been kind of hesitant to answer something like this bashing some recent characterization again. So if you’re one of those people I’m sorry and you should probably stop reading now.

opinions under the cut with some lawlight characterization stuff I don’t like + some stuff I do like:

Honestly? I try and read at least the first chapter or so of every new lawlight fic in the tag and recently it’s been impossible for me to enjoy a lot of it because when I read it it just doesn’t feel like L and Light to me at all? Like it feels like someone at some point wrote a big fic with strong characterization and interesting characters, except they weren’t much like L and Light and they acted in ways L and Light wouldn’t act. And a lot of fics now are based off that same characterization, which in turn inspires fics with that characterization, rinse and repeat. And that’s just not enjoyable to me when I’m looking to read lawlight fanfiction.

Obviously old lawlight fanfiction wasn’t all 100% perfect and there were a lot of doozies in that mix too but it felt like there were more really solid multichapter fics that might have been messy and toxic in ways but they made sense with the canon characters. And fics that did have a happy ending and some fluff thrown in were still written using circumstances that could be believable, even if it took a long time or a slow burn to get there.

To answer your question more specifically, here’s some common tropes that feel out of character to me (and I’m not calling out any specific author or saying fics that do any of these things are poorly written because they’re not and we have a lot of talented and dedicated people here):

Either one of them changing their principles and switching sides within the first 20k words and without a LOT of persuading. IMO “we’re two sides of the same coin and not that different despite both being hugely stubborn” is shit I love, “actually I’ve sided with you secretly the whole time/your magical dick has cured me of disagreeing with you/I’m willing to sacrifice the principles I literally died for in canon easily because I want to be with you” is shit I don’t love.

“We suddenly agree and work super well together as partners now that we’re in an AU and there’s no death note” doesn’t feel authentic to me because death note or no death note their entire outlook on the world is different. Light would think L’s methods are disgusting. L would think Light’s initial idealism is naive. Light believes mankind is inherently good and once you get rid of the bad that can shine, L…doesn’t seem to share that. That’s not to say they can never work together but the good shit is when it’s a long journey into understanding each other and where they’re coming from and slowly making compromises and falling in love.

L being a naive uwu tries his best baby who’s being taken advantage of by Light. Light being a misguided uwu baby who tries his best and is being taken advantage of the whole time by L. They’re more complex than that and they’re both bad people but they also both have good sides so any sort of simplification of the characters into one being a villain and one being a victim is uninteresting to me. 

They shouldn’t work but somehow despite everything they do, because they’re alone and because despite disagreeing and being enemies by circumstance and by beliefs, they know without the other they’d never really be challenged or fulfilled. That’s neat. I like that. It’s messy. They’re drawn to each other even as they’re disgusted with each other.

It’s more interesting when they are their own conflict rather than the conflict solely coming from outside sources.

The 500000 fics where Light is a rebellious and progressive omega who actually secretly wants to be protected by L and feels grateful that they’ve found each other? don’t love that. I dislike omega fics in general even if there’s a couple I’ve thought were pretty alright so that doesn’t help either. It is kind of interesting that despite their differences this could be an in-universe reason to force them together. It just seems like omegafic is the lawlight default right now. Like even fics where the plot doesn’t revolve around omegaverse stuff is sometimes omegaverse and that’s ? hard for me to wrap my brain around? that’s not just a lawlight problem though that seems to be happening in a lot of fandoms

Similarly to point one, either of them being okay with losing like lol what. 

yotsuba can be difficult to tackle because there’s so much going on there with the characters, but there’s so many interesting layers to explore and dive into that sometimes get ignored in favor of fluffy hijinks and that’s boring to me. from Light’s perspective L took everything from him and has made his life pretty miserable because of this whole Kira thing and catching the real Kira is the only real thing that could totally clear Light’s name and L just sort of….gives up, for a lot of it. mopes about and acts unmotivated and uninterested because Light isn’t Kira. that’s probably very frustrating for light! and fun wacky fluff or hijinks can happen, but I love when it happens in the “we got so distracted being the smartest people in the room we forgot we’re supposed to be enemies” way because that’s juicy to me

sometimes it’s the little things, too, that bother me. stuff that’ll happen and it’ll completely pull me out of the story. like L Lawliet made Naomi Misora destroy her whole damn computer after he slid into her DMs and you really think there’s any way in hell he’d have any sort of google home or siri or alexa? or casual social media, even under fake names? facebook knows everything. or light saying something or making a joke that i could never in a million years see him saying in canon because the author thought it would be funny or cute. 

anytime Light is suddenly some kind of beacon of goodness champion of justice just because he didn’t find the death note. the death note didn’t make him a completely different person, he’s bitter and jaded and thinks some people would be better off dead even before getting the death note. self righteous yeah totally but actually righteous? nah man

or Light just being a fucking awful person who kidnaps and r*pes L because he lusts after him but it’s okay because somehow in the end they end up together ? i’ve seen that trope a few times and i know it existed in 2007 too i just avoided it like the plague then also. 

I see a lot of AUs that are less “what would L and Light legitimately do if this was the situation or universe they were placed in” and more “i want to write this situation happening like this and i want to make it lawlight because that’s my main ship” 

like, the characters that are being written are fine but if you want to write OCs right OCs. I know all of this seems really harsh which is why I put a warning about it at the beginning, and of course I know some of these problems were also prevalent between 2013-2017 and there’s tropes here that have been happening like this since the dawn of lawlight fanfiction, but since it’s happening now and now is when i’m frustrated by it now is what i’m complaining about, it could be the reason i go back to older fanfiction so much is because i had lower standards back then and it was easier for me to wade through the ones i hated to get to ones i liked and now it’s easy for me to find those again. who knows. Also I agree most fanfiction from 2007-2009 were pretty 1 dimensional. 

And like, fuck me I guess but I actually like the canon characters and I joined the fandom to experience more of them and apparently that makes other people feel unsafe.

I’m not saying people aren’t allowed to express opinions that are different than me or that I Know Better Than Everyone Else or that I don’t like people posting their own headcanons or ideas or things they wish were different about the series, it’s just not my cup of tea and it’s a little frustrating that fanon is mostly all I get in fics now and that people are allowed to express opinions but only if those opinions are “people who stick too close to canon are elitist and should die and are sticks in the mud and need to leave the fandom to stop ruining things for everyone else” because like, we’re people too?

Anyway sorry this veered in a bit of a different direction and I hope I don’t lose followers over this because it’s sad to see people go but I’ve been blogging here for over 5 years and I’m not going to stop anytime soon. I also wrote most of this while having bad anxiety at like 3am last night so it’s all over the place and i’m probably going to think of like eight things in the shower later I forgot to mention because i’ve been thinking over this ask for like two weeks now.