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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3079 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 15, 2025

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A few things which irritate me about the LitRPG genre and web fiction in general. You may picture me as comic book guy for purposes of this rant.

  1. Switching tense within sentences. This is rampant and incredibly-obnoxious once one notices. "Hefting his mace, he swung at her as hard as he could." I don't know how this got to be such an entrenched institution but to me it occurs as about on par with having "Like" at the start of every sentence. Is the book still readable? Yes. Does my eye twitch a little every single time? Also yes.
  2. "Whelp I don't immediately understand what's going on so let's just not talk about it at all; let's not even try to figure it out until later in the plot." No use thinking about it now!
  3. Reflexive denigration of 'religion' even in contexts where this is obviously and absurdly inappropriate. "Oh are there literal gods walking the world, enacting their wills and communicating with humans? Well I want nothing to do with that because religion is dumb and stupid and icky and only for low-status people."
  4. "No don't bow to me or call me 'sir'; I don't go in for things like that." This one is everywhere and I find it especially puerile. Hierarchy is crucial in human organizations and we developed the systems we did for a reason. Particularly outside the modern context, public displays of respect and deference are both necessary and for the good of all. People need structure and boundaries to function. Refusing to take on the mantle and respect of authority, if that is your calling, does not serve anyone. It just confuses and scares them.
  5. Related to the above, modern progressive attitudes everywhere. Of course men and women are exactly the same. Of course everyone is having casual, consequence-free sex. Of course anyone who finds meaning in faith is secretly cynically corrupt or else a psycho child molester.

I could go on but I feel better getting at least this much off my chest.

Hefting his mace, he swung at her as hard as he could

Is that changing tenses? Consider the sentence 'While running, he saw Steve'. 'While running' modifies the verb 'saw', but it's not present tense on its own. It could also be written as 'He saw Steve while running' which makes it more obvious.

It's not 1:1 with your example, because he's not swinging while he is hefting it. He would heft it first, then swing. So it would be more similar to "going for a run, he showered off the sweat and went to sleep".

"Going for a run, he showers off the sweat" is no more correct, so it's not really about the tense here. "Going for a run, he listens to music" is only very slightly better. The issue isn't actually that the latter action has to take place during the former; it's that "going for a run" is actually a description of a static event, describing the start of the run.

So I'd say that "going for a run, he stepped out the door" is actually more correct than either of the other two, and also more in-line with the original example. It's an odd case where the sentence structure only works if the latter action is somewhat taken while the start of the former action is happening.

"Starting his run, he stepped out the door" is best of all. Or "Following the man, he stepped through the door behind him." In both cases the former action sort of describes and informs the latter but is also an action in its own right. I'd argue this is precisely what's happening in the sentence you described too. "Hefting" isn't actually separate from swinging the mace; it's a description that informs the swinging of the mace, similar to "Using all his strength, he swung the mace."

There's nothing ungrammatical about it, it's just bad writing.

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