Someone pls save me from the badfic

I had a whole post but it turned into a ranty thing.

The short short version is: Dear Fic Writers: Alcoholism does not work like that.
You cannot throw out all the drink and hug someone better and have that be the whole story. Just... no.
It is not even a happy fantasy, because of all it implies about all the people who try the hug thing and fail.

Other short version of other complains: I know what slash writers do to our favourite characters. I know we have our best shiny toys and I know they tend to somehow turn out to be the white boys. But somewhere beyond that into really uncomfortable territory there's what happens when you set things up as Clint&Phil the woobie good guys vs horrible haters Fury and Maria Hill. I in no way think the writers consciously put all the white boys in the happy box and wrote the rest as manipulative backstabbing violent harpies, but it's really ugly when it happens.

SHIELD is not made up of a bunch of cold haters made of incompetence and spite, plus Clint, Phil and Natasha. SHIELD is made up of people kind of like Clint, Phil and Natasha. And Nick Fury. We have no reason to believe Phil Coulson is any less a manipulative bastard than Fury is.
Treating assets as people? Not his unique talent. He has shit to get done, and he'll do what it takes to get it done. Keeping assets on side and useful is part of that. As is putting his own life on the line. And that is by no means unique, that's the job.
Plus, we're talking about their friends and trusted allies. They trust Coulson, he trusts them. One way loyalty says no good things about a guy.

Plus I don't get it on a characterisation level why anyone wants to write them this way. If they like Clint and Coulson well enough to spend a few thousand words with them, why not use what we've actually seen of the guy? There's a difference between looking under the cool to what he cares about and simply getting rid of the cool and replacing it with cuddles.

Team made of assassins is problematic. Doesn't mean they're secretly the nice and fluffy people only surrounded by cold bastards.


okay, that got long again and I still haven't slept.

If I could sleep more I'd read much less bad fic.

even more of the bad fic

am reading more of the fic that I hate
... no I don't know why, sleep went away, I just read what I find, tis annoying, I hope someone writes something long and plotty soon.

They're doing that thing again where Rhodey and Pepper aren't good enough for Tony until he finds his True Love (tm), and the new guy points out how Rhodey is a horrible friend who is all mean to Tony, and Pepper never saw how awesome Tony is (and also by implication they never just tried hugging him and throwing his booze away, which seriously, still is not how humans work, I hate that part)

So this is the same fic where Fury and Hill are also haters who do not value their co-workers and say all mean things about them until corrected by the Sainted Phil.

And it's looking like a pattern.

Character bash the black guys and the women, replace them with pretty white boys who understand Tony's awesome woobie manpain excuses all things.

It's making me look sideways at, well, all the fic, really. In an OMG I really hope we don't do that kind of way.

Canon gave us kick arse black men and awesome women. Fanfic... does not spend much time with them. And I was thinking it's a side effect of which pairings I read, but it's still giving me the creeps right now.

I think if a genre is more sexist and racist than summer action blockbusters it has a problem.

So I'm really hoping I'm just seeing too much rubbish in a row.