Markup /zellig/138373

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>>138214
Late response. It's an accessible fic but picrel made me chuckle against the preceding momentum of ||Vera not catching up to perform because she forgot to scan a QR code at a flyer||

'Them' as gender neutral would have worked because this fic is clearly queercoded but this was too funny. Overall though the fic is too emotionally transparent and accessible with the occasional politics.odt here and there. It doesn't really feel like a midlife crisis fic as much as it is about a very mildly inconvenienced woman, a fic about a forty-six year old woman who decided to do something that didn't go her way because she felt t. Nostalgia from le nineties. Except she doesn’t sound forty-six either but a teenager’s conception of one. Either terminally online zoomers or millennials call their cognition their ‘Mind Motel.’ It’s so bland, but it’s not something I should get mad over. I’ve already spent enough energy giving this fic a chance.
>Shut up ‘’shut up shut up!’’
That is her interiority in Chapter 4 after ||she got thrown a curveball by her inability to read past the rest of a flyer|| Adults are not that hard to write. Yet she's generically underpaid, generically listens to Nirvana, while the Pilot references like the Jip en Janneke act as plot crutches that ought to be texture. It's fidelity to the Pilot that the gag she drinks nonalcoholic bubbelsap is consistent with her character; it's also the reason why this fanfic is as generic as it is, because it uses fidelity to the Pilot as its emotional ceiling. The A.D.D. callback gave me secondhand embarrassment because it, as the philosopher Peter Griffin once stated, ‘insists upon itself.’ maybe_unless was also insistent on using ‘crwth’ as a word twice in xer fic to cement xe knows about this instrument ofzo.
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It doesn’t excavate further beyond the labels that were plastered on Vera (Nirvana, Jip en Janneke, history teacher, Holland) and even then two of those labels are ==wrong.== The text doesn’t specify if Vera is a first- or second-rate history teacher, stating that she got a ‘promotion’ even though that doesn’t happen in the education sector (first and second rate are qualifications; the ‘promotions’ maybe_unless was supposed to be reaching for was salary grade increase in whatever rate of teaching Vera is in xer fic; ~~my mother is an educational administrator, I know how this shit works~~) let alone could the text be bothered where in ‘Holland’ she is. And, as far as I’m concerned since I asked my Dutch friend this, they hate it when you call the Netherlands just ‘Holland.’ 
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It's not really derivative as much as it is just “Here's Vera Persijn in fanfic register. Don’t you get that she’s old and struggling to cope with the signs of the times!” I’m not really disappointed in it, but it’s like bathing in a kiddie pool and you’re 22. It reads as too overtly cautious to actually make you genuinely sympathise with Vera, you only get the understanding that she’s bothered without really getting into her head. The misophonia may be relatable to those who have it, but as a conditional for the medical condition itself, not Vera as a person, who sounds a lot like Maya’s peer and not the adult in the room. It’s heavy handed in forcing you to feel, not letting the text speak for itself. You have no input to make as you read, you just receive. And frankly, reading is not just reception as it is also active interpretation of whatever the author meant, except the author is so crystal clear in what they want you to feel that when I, as reader, wanted to read a Vera fic where I feel for her—I instead read a Vera fic where she feels and I read how she feels. It’s something worth reading for someone exploring the adult character in a teen-adjacent register, but for someone like me extremely curated to Vera Persijn as enthusiast and author of a fan work dedicated to her, reading Letters is me drinking Kool-Aid after being a chronic Gossips Cabernet Sauvignon drinker.