A Discussion About Epithets
That’s totally okay! The choice of whether or not to use epithets while you write is obviously a personal decision. In the past, I didn’t even register the fact that I used epithets at all; they seemed like a natural way to handle stories with so many male pronouns all over the place. (‘He’, ‘he’, and ‘he’ feels as though it can get confusing after a while, and finding alternatives is practically an instinctive response to that problem.) I thought that they made my writing flow better, or made the wording seem less stark and clinical in some way; I assumed that using the characters’ names so many times would be jarring and clunky to read. I barely even registered that I was using them!
However, I had some really lovely people take me aside and explain to me why they felt that epithets were problematic and distracting, and they definitely swayed me over. Now it’s at the the point where I don’t enjoy reading them, I try my damndest to avoid using them, and I’ve even tried to edit them out of my older works if I can.
Here are the three main reasons that I’ve heard discussed about why people don’t enjoy coming across epithets in writing:
1. They can be reductionist.
2. They can be confusing.
3. Some people find them unpleasant to read.
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1. They can be reductionist. When you describe someone as ‘the taller boy’, ‘the curly-haired boy’, ‘the countertenor’, ‘the top’, or ‘the Latina’, you are inherently reducing their entire character down to one single feature about them. This is a problem, especially with racial epithets; those have a whole additional layer of uncomfortable layered in as well.
A person’s name is meant to sum up a hundred things about them; if you try to sum someone up using one single quality, it’s basically reducing their personality to that one trait. It’s saying that the defining trait about that person is their height, or their hair colour, or their race, or their preferred sexual position. (Unfortunately the English language is already reductionist with how it reduces everything to gender — ‘he’ and ‘she’ — but that’s an almost impossible complication of the structure of the language more than anything else.)
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2. They can be confusing. For everyone in Glee fandom, let your mind wander back to when Blaine was supposed to be older than Kurt before his age was retconned. Now, think of all of the fics that used to describe Blaine as ‘the older boy’, and how jarring that would be to read now! This is an extreme example, of course, but other situations apply as well. “The slender boy”; which one of them is skinnier? “The curly-haired boy”; what if his hair is gelled down? Using someone’s name eliminates any confusion at all.
Even though it can feel repetitive to write someone’s name over and over again, most people absolutely don’t find them repetitive to read. We’re conditioned to read so that characters’ names settle into the backs of our minds; people tend not to notice them at all. People often even create a little ‘placeholder’ in their mind when they see someone’s name on a page so that they don’t even say the name out loud in their head; they just know who it is by the placeholder. Using epithets confuses that instinct, and can make things more muddled than they need to be.
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3. A lot of people simply find them unpleasant to read. And honestly? In my eyes, that’s the most important thing of all; that’s the real issue. Just like Americanisms in British fandoms or mixing up to/too, epithets have the potential to wrench some people completely out of the story that they’re reading. Some people just really, really don’t like them! It’s awful when you’ve written a perfectly enjoyable story and a tiny technical detail can pull your readers right out of it, and more than anything that’s why I personally try to avoid them.
Epithets are a stylistic decision, it’s true; but they’re a tool that has a strong potential to frustrate people, and if you want to use them you should do so complete with the knowledge that some people are going to find them irritating. In my fandom at least, epithets have practically become viewed as a signature element of ‘bad fic’ — and some people have a kneejerk reaction to hit the back button and stop reading as soon as they come across one. That in itself is enough of a reason for me personally to avoid using them; I prefer for people to be immersed in my fic as much as possible, not getting dragged out of the mood because of a technical decision.
Of course, there are people who completely disagree with me about this. And that’s entirely okay! Some of my favourite authors in my fandom use the occasional epithet, and all I can do is try my best to tone them out and still enjoy the things that they write despite them. The decision to use them or not use them is just a personal preference.
I’m absolutely not trying to spark a debate, or wank, or outrage on behalf of people who enjoy using epithets; that’s not my intention at all. But since there seemed to be some confusion over why some people don’t enjoy encountering them in fic, I thought I would take the time to explain my own personal reasoning.
I hope that helped clear things up for you, anon!
