Gay fanfiction problem
Is Jack smiling or gay John problem Even more interestingly though, this puts us onto looking at how other languages solve the gay fanfiction problem. I recently came across a YouTube video about something humorously called “The Gay Fanfiction Problem,” – more commonly known as ambiguous pronouns – and I wanted to talk about it.
Another issue is that the sentence has a comma. This is because Jack is the subject of the first clause, and the subject precedes the pronoun, which would suggest that the pronoun is referring to the subject — Jack. While the ambiguity might appear to be because of the pronoun, this is not entirely the case.
The Gay FanFiction Problem refers to the issue of ambiguity when more than one person is referred to by the same pronoun. Here on Writer In A HatI love talking about my journey to becoming an author and about the technical parts of writing. The Gay FanFiction Problem refers to the issue of ambiguity when more than one person is referred to by the same pronoun.
The problem is so big, in fact, that it garnered attention from actual linguists, including social media’s resident linguistic expert human “Have you heard of the gay fanfiction problem. Gretchen: One thing that happens with third-person pronouns is what I have called in a blog post The Gay Fanfiction Problem.
Two antecedents. This is actually very easy. You can watch it below or by clicking this link. For example, in French,* third singular possessive pronouns don’t make any distinctions for the gender of the person they refer to (i.e.
The question is: Who is smiling? If you want John to be smiling, the easiest way is to write this as two sentences:. Therefore the pronoun should be referring to John, because he is the nearest antecedent. To make the pronoun refer to Jacksimply remove the comma.
If people are more than happy to write yaoi or male on male fics for people who aren't gay in cannon then I don't see the problem with writing a character straight in a story. Or phrase the sentence differently to make it clearer. “her book” and “his book” is both “son livre”).
In other words, if read aloud and ignoring the comma, the sentence has a different meaning to what it does as written. A lot of us aspiring authors want to be great storytellers, so we seek out writing advice about character development, plot structure, themes, and motifs.
Lauren: That very serious linguistic problem. The comma separates the statements, which are called clauses, and this separation influences how each clause is interpreted. To make the sentence clearer and more concise, remove the pronoun entirely, thus getting rid of the ambiguity once and for all:.
Gay fanfiction is one life’s simple joys — but it does pose one major problem for writers. Less of us are interested in fanfiction to use a comma or what a semi-colon is really for. Again, make sure the pronoun is closest to the person it is referring to.
This is why punctuation matters. I really want to touch on one of the examples this YouTuber gives because there is a lot more to consider than pronouns. Generally, to avoid an ambiguous pronoun, the pronoun should refer to a single, nearby antecedent.
The video I watched was posted by human and has a brief but interesting segment about pronouns in other languages, including pronouns that indicate social status. But here, we have two names preceding the pronoun.