I have said this. It bears repeating.

Quit using titles to refer to the characters in your fic. Please. Please, for the love of god, please. If you've set it up right, I can guess the person's relationship - and I'd rather be told by extrapolation and the story itself than by exposition. Fucking hell. It jerks me out of a story (any story) so fast it's not even funny.

Perhaps this is because for a long, long time I used to refer to people as "my best friend X" or "my sister Y" or whatever, before I realised that was basically fucking annoying and if people had questions, they could ask.

However! I have a use for these titles! Let's box them up wherever they may be found and send them off to the French cinema industry! I am so serious! This is like airlifting vowels to Wales and consonants to Hawaii!

I saw Tell No One last night (yeah, I know the story was written by an American) and it was pretty good. Partly, of course, this is because on a scale of 1 to French, with 2 being Manon of the Spring and French being Cachet*, it was about a six. But because it was a French movie, these random beautiful women would show up and you wouldn't realise practically until they were murdered that they were the best friend, NOT the sister or the sister's lover, or whatever. It's like, Hi, France, I know you know what women who look different are, please put some of those into your movies because I am just an American, and the one time I tried to speak French to a French person I believe I asked if I was the Gare du Nord, but I cannot keep track of all these women who look basically the same and who aren't given an introduction at all (and seriously, telling some other totally random character to hold the duck floaty like he's jerking off is not introduction) because - and here's the key point - they all look basically the same okay! And when a bunch of the characters don't even get names? That's a problem. Particularly since I did not realise until ten minutes before the end of the movie that the woman I'd pegged as "bisexual restauranteur dating main character" was actually "lesbian living with main character's sister" and I don't think the sister ever even got a fucking name, for chrissakes, despite the fact that she was kind of key to the plot.

In other words, stop it, French Cinema Industry. Just stop it.

Also, please stop subtitling in white. Seriously. One-colour subtitling is of the devil. And there were LOTS of sentences that I couldn't get all of given that, you know, the white titling was on the facade of a white house. Or a white piece of paper. Or a very pale blue shirt. NOT HELPFUL. You might as well hire a French person to punch me in the face every time the plot starts to become clear.

*12 of course is the French movie about the gay man at the end of his life that I wound up walking out of because I was so very tired of the ineffable French-movie-ness of it all that I wanted to stab everyone.