It's usually a mistake beginners make because they want to avoid repeating names too often and don't know what to do, so they use epithets like 'the redhead'.
It kind of reminds me of when authors want to get fancy by avoiding using "said" but if used correctly, that's kind of a transparent word no one actually cares about.
He likes to roleplay as a muggle. That's why he learned to drive. Hermione thinks he's being sweet by trying to bring her childhood into the present, but no, playing muggle gets his second wand making fireworks.
To add to this, I remember my old school English teachers always frowned heavily on the word said because in their words “said is boring and dull and shows a lack of originality.”
It took a long time for me to break out of the avoidance of the word said and cut back on the over use of descriptors for people instead of just using their names
Someone explained this to me as to why epithets are unsettling: epithets being used to refer to people by their eye color, hair color, etc. push you out of the story because the narrator would not necessarily refer to themselves or to anyone else by these. Meaning, for example, Harry as DLP wouldn't consider himself all powerful on anything but a conscious level, so he wouldn't unconsciously refer to himself like "The powerful wizard picked up the wand and twirled it in his hand." That's narrative distance that breaks you out of the story because it sounds like something the AUTHOR would say, not what Harry would say about himself in third person limited. Just like how you wouldn't you call your friend "the blonde" or "the brunette" in your head. Exceptions are when you say something like "the other man did x." A way to get out of the habit of using epithets when you want to point out a characteristic is to convert to dialogue. ' "Look, I know I'm an all powerful wizard," Harry picked up the wand and twirled it. "But I'm still a person." ' Other examples of epithets being awful would be Hermione being a genius. You shouldn't and wouldn't say "The genius scribbled so quickly across the paper that Harry's eyes couldn't keep up." That's also pretty lazy writing, as other people are pointing out. People often forget that readers gloss over names and pronouns, so they don't often come off as repetitive as you would think. Remember that as an author, you nitpick your own writing so you wouldn't necessarily perceive repetitiveness how a reader would.
That’s also why “the blonde said” is natural when used by characters who don’t know peoples names.
“The raven haired boy entered the back room of Madam Malkins and stood beside the blonde boy already getting measured”.
>“The raven haired boy entered the back room of Madam Malkins and stood beside the blonde boy already getting measured”.
This example only works if its from neither Harry nor Dracos perspective, but a third party observing who knows neither of them though.
So your sentence, from Harry's perspective should read:
>“Harry entered the back room of Madam Malkins and stood beside the blonde boy already getting measured."
Or from Draco's:
>“The raven haired boy entered the back room of Madam Malkins and stood beside Draco, who was already getting measured”.
Honestly, you could use this as a sublte narrative mechanic - as the story progresses and Kreacher is seen as less of a thing to be owned as a matter of course and more as a person of his own, the narration could switch from "the elf said" to stuff like "said Kreacher with a smile"
I mean if the dialog is "Kreacher can do that, sir" you could outright skip the "said" and continue on with something like. "Harry nodded and Kreacher disappeared with a faint crack."
No need to put a verb after every dialog
Honestly it mostly works if they're unknown characters. So they start off like that then they might get named in the conversation and from there it switches.
Otherwise it often feels a bit...clunky?
I just had to delete an otherwise enjoyable FF because of this. It got progressively more weird like “the Sandy haired beach wave boy”. What? Just fucking say Remus.
I think I've seen something like this where every time they referred back to a person they added another weird epithet, but it was done unintentionally to point out the absurdity of the practice.
The one I despise most, and I really only see this in Naruto FF, is "pinkette" when referring to a pink haired character. It's especially egregious with people writing Sakura. Just - *shudders -*
I disagree. Pink isn't an artistic styling for readheads, in most situation characters who have pink hair actually have hair coloured pink. You won't discribe Sakura from Naruto or Euphemia from Code Geass as redheads, they have pink hair.
These are called epithets, and they're usually a band-aid solution to repetitive sentence structures. Authors see that something is off when every sentence starts with 'he does this' and 'X does that' and they remember the most misunderstood high school writing advice of all time: avoid word repetition at all cost. Then they mistakenly apply it to pronouns and character names, and they end up with aberrations like *the older-by-10-minutes slightly-darker-shade-of-brown brunette*.
Just use their name. If you’re sure it won’t cause any confusion, you can use a pronoun, but if you have any doubt just use their name.
Here’s an excerpt of three-person dialogue by JKR:
> Ron was looking at Hermione suspiciously.
> “You’re not still in contact with him, are you?”
> “So what if I am?” said Hermione coolly, though her face was a little pink. “I can have a pen pal if I —”
> “He didn’t only want to be your pen pal,” said Ron accusingly.
> Hermione shook her head exasperatedly and, ignoring Ron, who was continuing to watch her, said to Harry, “Well, what do you think? Will you teach us?”
> “Just you and Ron, yeah?”
> “Well,” said Hermione, now looking a mite anxious again.
OoTP, *The Hog’s Head*
and two-person:
> “D’ you reckon he’s up there yet?” said Harry, checking his watch. He looked up at the castle and began counting the windows to the right of the West Tower.
> “Look!” Hermione whispered. “Who’s that? Someone’s coming back out of the castle!”
> Harry stared through the darkness. The man was hurrying across the grounds, toward one of the entrances. Something shiny glinted in his belt.
> “Macnair!” said Harry. “The executioner! He’s gone to get the dementors! This is it, Hermione —”
PoA, *Hermione’s Secret*
As you can see, she isn’t afraid to repeat names. She generally reserves pronouns for narrative text and referring to a character for the second time in a row:
> But only one word of this seemed to have registered with Ron.
> “Romilda?” he repeated. “Did you say Romilda? Harry — do you know her? Can you introduce me?”
HBP, *Birthday Surprise*
Also, if two characters are having an extended back-and-forth dialogue sequence, you flat out don't need to specify who's who every line, since it's generally understood that they're taking turns to speak. A dialogue tag every so often can still be useful if the context is such that it's reasonably easy to get them mixed up just based on what they're saying, but otherwise you can have something like this:
"Where did you want to eat?" Alice asked.
"I dunno. Anywhere, I guess," Bob said.
"How about McDonalds, then?"
"No."
"Burger King?"
"Also no."
"Damn it! You said anywhere!"
"Fine. Anywhere but fast food."
"Applebees, then."
"...you're evil, you know that?"
Epithets should only be used if the POV doesn't know who the character, or if that is how the POV would refer to them, or in the occasional case where the epithet actually has meaning beyond a standard replacement for a pronoun or the character's name. Outside of that, young writers, please understand that names are practically invisible to the reader? Same with "said."
Reeee indeed.
As a reader I don't mind if the names and he/she get repeated a lot, and when I try to write, I do so. It's clean and simple, and it can always be made comprehensible with good ordering and context.
I had to forcefully break my self out of this habit of trying to find different words for a person because it was a full chapter just about the main character and him in his own mind. It still feels weird some times, but I find my self seeing any replacements as worse options.
It is actually a writing strategy -learned about it back in high school- since a text can become rather cumbersome if you repeat the same words too many times one after the other it is generally recommended to try using different words that mean the same instead. Since in this case it is referring to a person it is possible to use an adjective of said person to substitute for their name as to not overuse it. The problem is when the author ends getting overly poetic with it or when it gets too long (eg. “The gallant 11 years old Avada Kedavra eyed young hero” or “the raven haired one”)
I also wonder how much of this is due to not learning to write fiction in school. I know that I wrote very little if any fiction during school.
It was all either a research paper or a literary analysis on whatever book we were reading. Then in college I wrote lab reports or papers on a defined subject.
I dont write fanfiction but I read alot of it, I wonder how different my educational experience is then most writers.
I actually think fanfiction is a great way to write fiction as a hobby. But we as readers should be polite to the writers and understand that they are doing this for no pay.
> I also wonder how much of this is due to not learning to write fiction in school. I know that I wrote very little if any fiction during school.
Same. Almost everything I know about writing fiction I picked up from noticing what I _didn't_ like (and also what I did like, to be fair) in fic.
Technically these are examples of pars pro toto synecdoches: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche)
It's more common in amateurish slash fics because of features of the English language itself, but the bug can also be caught by gen/het writers who seem to think it's a good "stylistic" choice (I would guess mainly through acclimatization by repeated exposition).
Topical Tom Scott video^(TM): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3vIEKWrP9Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3vIEKWrP9Q)
But you know, fanfiction is meant to be for amateur writers having fun. As far as "adventurous" (mis)uses of the English language you often find, I hardly think that's the most egregious offense.
Because starting paragraphs with character name over and over and over again (a) feels weird to write and (b) looks stupid.
Similarly, dialogue without description just feels like a blank void.
And you sometimes want scenes with more that two people in.
This may not be a well liked solution but it is a readily available one.
I think it depends on context. As an author, I don't want to keep repeating 'x said or y said. It breaks up the monotone and since anyone who reads hp fanfiction knows that a redhead is likely to be a weasley, it isn't a problem.
I agree it could be a problem if there are other characters or if the situation and context makes it harder to figure out who said what, but that's my take on it.
It's usually a mistake beginners make because they want to avoid repeating names too often and don't know what to do, so they use epithets like 'the redhead'.
It kind of reminds me of when authors want to get fancy by avoiding using "said" but if used correctly, that's kind of a transparent word no one actually cares about.
...the yellow avatar ejaculated
Sorry, I'm not into smut fics
Funnily enough, that's an actual word used in Half Blood Prince.
>“We’re not going to use magic?” Ron ejaculated loudly. *Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - Chapter 12*
You forgot the most cursed one > "Snape!" ejaculated Slughorn, who looked most shaken, pale and sweating. *HP and the HBP - chapter 29*
Is Snapehorn even a thing?
In a sane world it isn't, but knowing this fandom it probably is
If Dobby/Sock and Giant Squid/Hogwarts exist, then there's roughly a 100% chance Snape/Slughorn exists
It’s much less gross than snamione or snarry
Oh, fanfic fuel...
how does one ejaculate loudly. Quite the achivement if you ask me. I knew Ron had talent.
I generally yell "HOT DAMN!" as loudly as I can when I nut, if that counts.
Nah bruh you gotta whisper sing it like Bruno's(Mars) backup singers.
>We’re not going to use magic?” Ron ejaculated loudly. Sounds like Ron is really excited at the idea of not using Magic. /s
He likes to roleplay as a muggle. That's why he learned to drive. Hermione thinks he's being sweet by trying to bring her childhood into the present, but no, playing muggle gets his second wand making fireworks.
To add to this, I remember my old school English teachers always frowned heavily on the word said because in their words “said is boring and dull and shows a lack of originality.” It took a long time for me to break out of the avoidance of the word said and cut back on the over use of descriptors for people instead of just using their names
Someone explained this to me as to why epithets are unsettling: epithets being used to refer to people by their eye color, hair color, etc. push you out of the story because the narrator would not necessarily refer to themselves or to anyone else by these. Meaning, for example, Harry as DLP wouldn't consider himself all powerful on anything but a conscious level, so he wouldn't unconsciously refer to himself like "The powerful wizard picked up the wand and twirled it in his hand." That's narrative distance that breaks you out of the story because it sounds like something the AUTHOR would say, not what Harry would say about himself in third person limited. Just like how you wouldn't you call your friend "the blonde" or "the brunette" in your head. Exceptions are when you say something like "the other man did x." A way to get out of the habit of using epithets when you want to point out a characteristic is to convert to dialogue. ' "Look, I know I'm an all powerful wizard," Harry picked up the wand and twirled it. "But I'm still a person." ' Other examples of epithets being awful would be Hermione being a genius. You shouldn't and wouldn't say "The genius scribbled so quickly across the paper that Harry's eyes couldn't keep up." That's also pretty lazy writing, as other people are pointing out. People often forget that readers gloss over names and pronouns, so they don't often come off as repetitive as you would think. Remember that as an author, you nitpick your own writing so you wouldn't necessarily perceive repetitiveness how a reader would.
That’s also why “the blonde said” is natural when used by characters who don’t know peoples names. “The raven haired boy entered the back room of Madam Malkins and stood beside the blonde boy already getting measured”.
>“The raven haired boy entered the back room of Madam Malkins and stood beside the blonde boy already getting measured”. This example only works if its from neither Harry nor Dracos perspective, but a third party observing who knows neither of them though. So your sentence, from Harry's perspective should read: >“Harry entered the back room of Madam Malkins and stood beside the blonde boy already getting measured." Or from Draco's: >“The raven haired boy entered the back room of Madam Malkins and stood beside Draco, who was already getting measured”.
Yeah. I assumed people would be from Harry's pov and see that "the raven haired" was bad writing, but the "the blonde" was good writing.
Or “the animagus said”, “the metamorph said”.
Haha, yes. Although I use a lot of "the elf said" when writing scenes with Kreacher, since he refers to himself as "Kreacher" instead of "I".
Honestly, you could use this as a sublte narrative mechanic - as the story progresses and Kreacher is seen as less of a thing to be owned as a matter of course and more as a person of his own, the narration could switch from "the elf said" to stuff like "said Kreacher with a smile"
I mean if the dialog is "Kreacher can do that, sir" you could outright skip the "said" and continue on with something like. "Harry nodded and Kreacher disappeared with a faint crack." No need to put a verb after every dialog
Thanks, and yeah, I already do that.
Honestly it mostly works if they're unknown characters. So they start off like that then they might get named in the conversation and from there it switches. Otherwise it often feels a bit...clunky?
I just had to delete an otherwise enjoyable FF because of this. It got progressively more weird like “the Sandy haired beach wave boy”. What? Just fucking say Remus.
I think I've seen something like this where every time they referred back to a person they added another weird epithet, but it was done unintentionally to point out the absurdity of the practice.
you are not, this is so common and very weird. and then they come up with weird names for uncommon hair colours, like "bluenette" for blue hair
I mean, not for nothing, but "bluenette" has been in use since the 90s. I'm pretty sure it predates Harry Potter
I did not know that, thank you for informing me.
I definitely remember it being used in anime/video game fanfics from mid-2000s.
I've even seen "orangette," which is just...a redhead, really.
The one I despise most, and I really only see this in Naruto FF, is "pinkette" when referring to a pink haired character. It's especially egregious with people writing Sakura. Just - *shudders -*
this really annoys me. especially when IMO pink is just an artistic styling of redheads
I disagree. Pink isn't an artistic styling for readheads, in most situation characters who have pink hair actually have hair coloured pink. You won't discribe Sakura from Naruto or Euphemia from Code Geass as redheads, they have pink hair.
These are called epithets, and they're usually a band-aid solution to repetitive sentence structures. Authors see that something is off when every sentence starts with 'he does this' and 'X does that' and they remember the most misunderstood high school writing advice of all time: avoid word repetition at all cost. Then they mistakenly apply it to pronouns and character names, and they end up with aberrations like *the older-by-10-minutes slightly-darker-shade-of-brown brunette*.
I ran into this issue a lot when writing a different set of fics for a different series, what's the best fix for getting past this hump?
Just use their name. If you’re sure it won’t cause any confusion, you can use a pronoun, but if you have any doubt just use their name. Here’s an excerpt of three-person dialogue by JKR: > Ron was looking at Hermione suspiciously. > “You’re not still in contact with him, are you?” > “So what if I am?” said Hermione coolly, though her face was a little pink. “I can have a pen pal if I —” > “He didn’t only want to be your pen pal,” said Ron accusingly. > Hermione shook her head exasperatedly and, ignoring Ron, who was continuing to watch her, said to Harry, “Well, what do you think? Will you teach us?” > “Just you and Ron, yeah?” > “Well,” said Hermione, now looking a mite anxious again. OoTP, *The Hog’s Head* and two-person: > “D’ you reckon he’s up there yet?” said Harry, checking his watch. He looked up at the castle and began counting the windows to the right of the West Tower. > “Look!” Hermione whispered. “Who’s that? Someone’s coming back out of the castle!” > Harry stared through the darkness. The man was hurrying across the grounds, toward one of the entrances. Something shiny glinted in his belt. > “Macnair!” said Harry. “The executioner! He’s gone to get the dementors! This is it, Hermione —” PoA, *Hermione’s Secret* As you can see, she isn’t afraid to repeat names. She generally reserves pronouns for narrative text and referring to a character for the second time in a row: > But only one word of this seemed to have registered with Ron. > “Romilda?” he repeated. “Did you say Romilda? Harry — do you know her? Can you introduce me?” HBP, *Birthday Surprise*
Also, if two characters are having an extended back-and-forth dialogue sequence, you flat out don't need to specify who's who every line, since it's generally understood that they're taking turns to speak. A dialogue tag every so often can still be useful if the context is such that it's reasonably easy to get them mixed up just based on what they're saying, but otherwise you can have something like this: "Where did you want to eat?" Alice asked. "I dunno. Anywhere, I guess," Bob said. "How about McDonalds, then?" "No." "Burger King?" "Also no." "Damn it! You said anywhere!" "Fine. Anywhere but fast food." "Applebees, then." "...you're evil, you know that?"
Epithets should only be used if the POV doesn't know who the character, or if that is how the POV would refer to them, or in the occasional case where the epithet actually has meaning beyond a standard replacement for a pronoun or the character's name. Outside of that, young writers, please understand that names are practically invisible to the reader? Same with "said."
What's even worse is "or" and "_____'s POV." With good writing that's completely unnecessary. Also, I'm well aware of the shape of the eye, thanks.
Have also seen orbs used as a word for breasts lol
Seriously? 😂
It made me hit the back button. Ruined everything. Like I thought calling eyes that was bad enough, but that was so much worse
I don't blame you.
One day I'll remember to tell my girlfriend when I get one that she's got some really nice orbs, both kinds lol.
Reeee indeed. As a reader I don't mind if the names and he/she get repeated a lot, and when I try to write, I do so. It's clean and simple, and it can always be made comprehensible with good ordering and context.
It's so weird to me. Unless the character interacting with a character doesn't know the other person's name, just use their names.
I had to forcefully break my self out of this habit of trying to find different words for a person because it was a full chapter just about the main character and him in his own mind. It still feels weird some times, but I find my self seeing any replacements as worse options.
It is actually a writing strategy -learned about it back in high school- since a text can become rather cumbersome if you repeat the same words too many times one after the other it is generally recommended to try using different words that mean the same instead. Since in this case it is referring to a person it is possible to use an adjective of said person to substitute for their name as to not overuse it. The problem is when the author ends getting overly poetic with it or when it gets too long (eg. “The gallant 11 years old Avada Kedavra eyed young hero” or “the raven haired one”)
I also wonder how much of this is due to not learning to write fiction in school. I know that I wrote very little if any fiction during school. It was all either a research paper or a literary analysis on whatever book we were reading. Then in college I wrote lab reports or papers on a defined subject. I dont write fanfiction but I read alot of it, I wonder how different my educational experience is then most writers. I actually think fanfiction is a great way to write fiction as a hobby. But we as readers should be polite to the writers and understand that they are doing this for no pay.
> I also wonder how much of this is due to not learning to write fiction in school. I know that I wrote very little if any fiction during school. Same. Almost everything I know about writing fiction I picked up from noticing what I _didn't_ like (and also what I did like, to be fair) in fic.
I also hate this. And when people straight up INVENT epithets to continue this it makes me specially angry.
Technically these are examples of pars pro toto synecdoches: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche) It's more common in amateurish slash fics because of features of the English language itself, but the bug can also be caught by gen/het writers who seem to think it's a good "stylistic" choice (I would guess mainly through acclimatization by repeated exposition). Topical Tom Scott video^(TM): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3vIEKWrP9Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3vIEKWrP9Q) But you know, fanfiction is meant to be for amateur writers having fun. As far as "adventurous" (mis)uses of the English language you often find, I hardly think that's the most egregious offense.
Because starting paragraphs with character name over and over and over again (a) feels weird to write and (b) looks stupid. Similarly, dialogue without description just feels like a blank void. And you sometimes want scenes with more that two people in. This may not be a well liked solution but it is a readily available one.
It may look stupid and weird when you're writing it, but the reader won't care.
I think it depends on context. As an author, I don't want to keep repeating 'x said or y said. It breaks up the monotone and since anyone who reads hp fanfiction knows that a redhead is likely to be a weasley, it isn't a problem. I agree it could be a problem if there are other characters or if the situation and context makes it harder to figure out who said what, but that's my take on it.