General fanfiction pet-peeves

foesjoe · Dec 2, 2008

I couldn't find a thread on general pet-peeves, so I created one. We NEED one.

As I found out when I was going through ff.net looking for fics, and I confirmed that 85% of all authors are morons (No surprise, really) or just 15-year olds, though I guess there's no difference between those two. My estimation might be wrong, it could very well be that over 90% of all authors are morons, but I'm an optimist.

There were two things that pissed me off above all else. And I'm not talking about simple things like authors being too lazy to grab a dictionary or a book on grammar to make sure they don't butcher the language they're writing their stories in. I'm not even talking about authors turning the characters of whatever fandom they're writing for into random Joes.

No, what I'm talking about is even worse.

The first is when authors decide they need to "introduce" their stories/chapters, using the characters of the fandom they write in and any crossovers that might be present, and have them act out a little play a la Shakespeare. Only that they're idiots who don't realize that it's not the least bit funny, entertaining, endearing, original, or whatever other positive adjective they can come up with. It gets even worse when the author himself plays a part in this little *play*.

Example:

Stop this. It's stupid, annoying, makes people want to punch you, and reveals you as the moron you are.

The second thing are huge-ass author's notes at the beginning of each chapter, telling us boring and pointless stuff about the author's life that nobody really wants to know or cares about.

Example:

...

I'm not sure if I should rage or cry. And why is it they just HAVE TO post their stupid drivel before the actual chapter? And how come it's these kind of writers who get 2305732059623056 reviews on their stuff? Does this mean there's one person who feels the need to reply as often as he can, or does it mean that there are a lot more idiots out there than I thought possible?

Well, that's all I wanted to mention for now. How about you guys? Is there any stuff like that which just makes you want to rip out some guy's (the author's) eyes and balls, and insert his balls in his eye-sockets and his eyes in his ass so he can see your boot coming?

Godogma · Dec 2, 2008

The questions you ask man will never know the answer to. The simplest way to address your peeves is merely to scroll past the inane babble at the beginning of the chapter.
Our main problem on sites like FF.net is indeed that most of the authors are 15 year old children who are whiny bitches or morons. I recommend Google and looking for alternate fanfiction repositories.

My biggest peeve is an author starting out with a grand story and then through either fanwankery (playing up to the wants of the fans of the story instead of following a real plot and writing intelligently {See Harry Potter books 5-7}) or attempting to draw out a plot they destroy it or send it into utter stupidity.

bluepencil · Dec 3, 2008

My peeve is an inexperienced writer taking an awesome story or setting (let's say... Dune) and combining it with another awesome story or setting (how about... Fist of the North Star) and ending up with only gratuitous amounts of FAIL and SUCK ASS!

Or more like leaping before one learns to walk. Specially enraging if the author refers to his or her story as epic and with something really great planned; just have patience and read it, review please kthnx (and then defending the story from actual criticism by saying I HAVE PLANS!!1)... when the story is around say ten chapters long and still barely having ten thousand words! Almost guarantees that story's just going to end up another deadfic clogging up the Net.

*what, you don't believe a crossover of Dune and Fist of the North Star can be anything but awesome? IT CAN HAPPEN!

::sobs and curls up into a fetal position::

It shouldn't be... but someone out there can so totally mess it up, turning all the possibilities into a slurry of literary poo.

just_here2 · Dec 3, 2008

bluepencil said:

QFT. It's most annoying when it's something you never would have thought of yourself but can see the potential in.

My personal peeve is the author's note stuck in the middle of the chapter. Seriously people, an author's note is there to provide infomation, usually extra infomation, about the story that would be awkward to place in the story or wouldn't fit in at all. Note the bold. Sticking it in the middle breaks the flow of the story and jars the reader from his suspension of disbelief. That's why you see an author's note at the beginning or end of any published story.

Legendary Legacy · Dec 3, 2008

just_here2 said:

That. That right there will kill a story no matter how awesome it might otherwise have been.

Also, any author who writes "I suck at summaries" in their summary. Why, oh why would anyone come right out and say that they have no ability to write less than a paragraph of text, and then expect anyone to want to read more from them? The only thing that I like about this peeve is that it saves me a few minutes of trying to read the story whenever I see it. Still annoying, though.

Secondly: Bashing. I don't care what series it's happening in or which character it is that's getting bashed. I don't even care if it's a character that I myself hate. I just absolutely can't stand reading it. It would be much simpler and easier to read if said character was just completely exempt from the story rather than having an immature author expressing their irrational rage for a character THROUGH other characters, making those characters OoC and pretty much unreadable in the process.

Third: Crossovers that take one character from one series, has him/her replace someone from another series, but doesn't ever have any huge impact on the timeline. The story will almost always proceed exactly like the canon version of the series that the new character finds himself in, the only differences is how the crossed over character handles the problems and who s/he falls in love with, but no matter how either of those things turn out, it probably won't diverge the timeline in any real significant way.

Example: Instead of meeting Tsukune on the way to the Monster Academy, Moka runs into Uzumaki Naruto, who is now attending the school for reason's varied or unexplained. Even though Naruto is clearly a different type of person than Tsukune is, he and Moka still end up fighting all the same monsters in the same order, meet the same people in the same scenarios, and all the girls still fall in love with Naruto.

There's others, but that's enough for now. Don't want to piss myself off by listing them all at once.

Legacy|iB · Dec 3, 2008

Pet peeves? I'm a little out of it right now, but I'll add some of mine.

For starters - bash fics.

Oh, I could go on forever about how much I despise bash fics and their authors, but we already know everything that's wrong with bash fics. They're dumb, unimaginative, and they're little more than the author ranting about something. To be fair, I don't even consider them to be legitimate attempts at fanfiction writing. I class them in a category lower than the spam fics.

The thing that absolutely annoys me the most, however, is that these 'stories' actually have fans. I mean, seriously - a certain writer of Love Hina bash fics, which I will not name, could write a painfully stupid and linear bash fic with just a few chapters, but it will receive nothing but glowing praise and an inordinate number of reviews for something that short and that outrageously stupid. The stories are built on such a flimsy platform of everybody being completely out-of-character just so the author can prove get some sort of revenge on whichever character he completely loathes and wishes to see get punished.

No, contrary to your legions of illiterate fans - your story sucks, it isn't even a story, and it's a waste of words and bandwidth.

I'm sorry, but I really hate bash fics. I mean, really. There was a week when I was so fed up with having to see just a small collection of them just recently added and constantly being updated by their authors that I damn near removed all my fics and wanted to write 'I FUCKING GIVE UP' on my profile page. It took a fic with a Gary Stuish self-insert to stop me from going any further.

...that's all I have for now. I might elaborate some more when I...get...free...?

...yeah, something like that... :huh.:

Godogma · Dec 3, 2008

I'm not sure precisely who you are or what fandom you write fics for, but a gathering of stupid people aren't a good reason to delete your own fiction. Write to enjoy yourself, write to give others pleasure, write for whatever reason you like - but remember you don't have to read what others are writing, especially if you absolutely hate it. Its best to just ignore it and move on.

Fanfiction.net is most inhabited by 15 year olds, who write to please a similar audience. Another peeve I've come up with after getting some sleep. Authors who can't tell the difference between:

There and Their
Defiantly and Definitely
Too and Two

I'm sure there are others, although the Defiantly and Definitely one is the most peeving of them.

Frank Cadena · Dec 3, 2008

One of my personal peeves are elementary mistakes that can be caught if the author bothers to read through the chapter two or three times. Things like simple sentence structure, spelling and capitalisations. If it's few and far between, it can be shrugged off with some advice. Too much will just ruin the flow of the story for me and pisses me off. Especially if I know that the story has potential.

Another peeve is mixed usage of language without warrant. For example needless use of Japanese in an English fic that can be replaced just fine with English words. Nouns or honorifics are the only exceptions.

Lastly, author notes explaining something in the middle of the fic or the author butting in to say something inane. Nothing would make me drop a story faster than this.

Godogma · Dec 3, 2008

Quite, the authors note in the middle of the fic is a deal killer for me as well. On the Japanese in an English language fic I'm of two minds... Many things just don't sound worth a damn in English or flat out don't translate at all.

For examples, see the attacks from Ranma or Streetfighter or Naruto - try saying the supposed English translations after you read them; thats a deal breaker also. I can't stand reading the shitty Anglicisms of the various attacks or worse even names of characters.

Dartz_IRL · Dec 3, 2008

Shippers who don't know how to take to lifeboats when their ship is sunk by canonfire.

Edit: typo

Arkhe · Dec 3, 2008

-Nermia. Or just any consistent misspellings of names and places in any series. Once or twice is fine, but every damn time makes for a dyslexic fic. Seriously, is it so hard to use 'find and replace'?

How can authors expect readers to care for their writing if they themselves don't?

PCHeintz72 · Dec 3, 2008

Bad grammar/formatting. If I have trouble reading it, I'm not going to care if it is the best story ever, I'm likely to stop. Paragraphs should change at each change or speaker or point of view. scene breaks ect... The entire story should not be bold, underlined, or centered, nor have outragious hard to read color schemes or fonts. I do allow some give if the author does not have English as a first language. Also, I do not care on the quality of their comment posts, as I do not check spelling/grammar on most of mine, but story postings should always be checked.

Finally on formatting, I if at all possible, prefer to read my stories in TXT format. Thus, things like bold, underline, and italics to do word highlighing don't work well, authors that go the extra step to use methods that work even in text view are preferred. Sites I don't mind readin in HTML include Anime Addventure, Ranmafics, and Lost Library of Florestica.

Stories that 'Jump Shark', where the plot and dialog are pointing a certain way, and then in the space of a chapter or so, things do a 180.

Stories where the author goes to the trouble to break a couple up, perhaps even as far as to get the readers to hate that character, yet still have them together in the end.

Unless done really well, or not part of main plotline, Guy/Guy. I'm not against it per se, though I do not seek it out, just it is done crappy in what I've read.

On the endless anime vs. manga canon debate...

My view is anime is just as canon as manga, just that they should generally be considered different continuities of each other.

Canon to me is anything within the series source material. For a anime, OAV, or movie, within series airtime. For manga, within the story pages, and not before or after them.

Anything stated by an author after series, or during interviews is not part of series, and this not admissible in my eyes as canon. If a series is ever extended, then that becomes part of canon.

One Lucky Unicorn · Dec 3, 2008

Arkhe said:

THANK YOU. Misspelling a canon character's name repeatedly is just lazy. ThereÆs a ton of resources out there like fan sites or Wikis that you can turn to, or you could even just simply ask someone else, "Hey, how do you spell [insert character] name?" The same goes for getting a character's physical description all wrong without any real reason behind it. I saw one fic where this happened and told the author that her description was incorrect, but she ended up getting all huffy at me.

Previous posters have already nailed many pet peeves of mine's (especially bashing), but IÆd like to add fics that are just big text blocks and fics that are just the authors' own personal soapboxes. I don't care which politician you hate or why I need to become a vegan, I just wanna read about a cartoon or whatever else that I like. Ooo, and fics where foreign characters are heavily stereotyped, and fics that have a jingoistic tone to them. Honestly, I myself like it when not every single character is American, and I think it's pretty insulting to read a story where the author say stuff like, "Thankfully, so-and-so had finally lost his/her accent", or something else in that vein. :no:

kilich · Dec 4, 2008

I don't like when the author says in the very beginning that character A will be paired with character B. It removes a portion of my interest in this fic and outright kills it if the only purpose of the fic is to pair them up.

Also, I can't stand self-insert fics, no matter how good they are. For some reason I feel that way only towards stories written in English.

PCHeintz72 · Dec 4, 2008

kilich said:

Some like knowing the pairing, or at least who won't be paired, before starting a long story.

Frank Cadena · Dec 4, 2008

Personally, knowing the pair wouldn't put me off unless I get vibes off the fic itself that says the author is incapable of pulling off something new or refreshing. Also on the Canon vs Anime argument.

My personal opinion is not to mix them if you want to make it simple. Manga is manga, anime is anime. Mixing can be done if done properly. My personal rule is to assign tiers of canon. Which ever comes first, be it a game, novel, manga or anime, that is the primary tier. Which comes next is the secondary tier, so on and so forth.

Lets have an example. Mai-hime. The anime came first so that is the first tier, the manga second. If someone writes a fic for the anime, then puts in a fact from the manga and it contradicts something in the anime then I would point it out. If it doesn't then I would just leave it be.

PCHeintz72 · Dec 4, 2008

Frank Cadena said:

Hmmm... some series have common fanfiction conventions that IMHO successfully mix differing canon continuities.

A good example is Tenchi Muyo. Tenchi Muyo has more canon continuities than nearly any other series I've heard of, and more than any series I've personally seen or read.

A common Tenchi Muyo fanfiction setup though, is to have a story take place in OAV canon continuity, but include Kiyone as Mihoshi's partner. Kiyone as Mihoshi's partner though, is 'TV Universe', 'Tenchi in Tokyo', and movie continuities, not OAV. The Kiyone in Oav's is Tenchi's mother, which is almost never used in fan fiction.

Shiakou · Dec 8, 2008

The Don't Like, Don't Read mentality. The link explains it well.

Also, this.

naughtybit · Dec 9, 2008

Arkhe said:

Often followed by by the introduction of the Saotome matriarch: Nadoka

I love that. It's even lovelier seeing it show up in Konaha sometimes.

Two other pet-peeves of mind are HUGE BLOCKS OF TEXT and stories written entirely in bold. Nothing says "CLOSE WINDOW" fast than those two.

Lastly, why are some authors so impatient with their stories these days? I can't count the number of "pairing fics" I've read where the non-canonical couple were hooked-up and bumping uglies by the second or third chapter.

Drawde · Dec 9, 2008

PCHeintz72 said:

Unlike PCHeintz72, mixing continuities is one of my biggest peeves. Especially the example from above. That one will throw me out of a story faster than anything. If I keep reading instances from one continuity, I'll keep expecting more of them. Having something from a completely different continuity pop up is like having a brick wall suddenly pop up in front of me.

PCHeintz72 · Dec 9, 2008

Drawde said:

PCHeintz72 said:

Unlike PCHeintz72, mixing continuities is one of my biggest peeves. Especially the example from above. That one will throw me out of a story faster than anything. If I keep reading instances from one continuity, I'll keep expecting more of them. Having something from a completely different continuity pop up is like having a brick wall suddenly pop up in front of me.

Fortunately... in my experience... most Tenchi fan fiction authors will note which continutiy(s) their stories take place in. Not all, but a good amount of them. Others make it clear from events references which occured.

That is better than most fandoms give.

Solarman · Dec 9, 2008

PCHeintz72 said:

Drawde said:

Fortunately... in my experience... most Tenchi fan fiction authors will note which continutiy(s) their stories take place in. Not all, but a good amount of them. Others make it clear from events references which occured.

That is better than most fandoms give.

I'm pretty sure I speak for at least a sizable minority of Tenchific readers when I say that, though we've seen it all at some point or other, often many years ago, we can't remember which continuities are which anyway, or how it all gets strung together, so mixes are a fairly moot point.

edit: when we start reading them, anyway.

Belgarion213 · Dec 9, 2008

Unexplained but Drastic Character Development: What I mean by this is having say Character X doing something WILDLY out of character (usually at the beginning of a fic) but there is no explanation for WHY this happens. Lets take Harry Potter fanfiction for an example (Yes I know some people don't like it but its just an example). In Cannon before Deadly Hollows, Harry Potter LOATHES Severus Snape. Snape has generally been a spiteful prick towards Harry and Harry has not acted much better in return. While Snape might have his reasons, and so does Harry, the expectation is that unless there is a good amount of character development these two characters will continue to dislike each other immensely.

However seemingly every bloody second HP fic has Harry 'forgiving' Snape at the drop of a hat, suddenly deciding Snape is a 'good person' or some other such BS. Alternatively Snape who has shown nothing but contempt for Harry decides to come forward and offer to adopt Harry or becomes extremely friendly or, my favorite, suddenly starts berating every single other adult in the Order of the Phoenix for their mistreatment of Harry. I'm fine with these situations.... provided there is a REASON for it other than 'I think they will help each other! I can't be bothered explaining WHY they tolerate each other now though so lets just skip that part!'

Weird Time Space Anomaly or just somebody not bothering to keep consistent character attitudes?: If I see one more fic where, from chapter to chapter, somebody's talent/enjoyment etc at a task (say Schoolwork) flux's between 'Oh god its school!' in chapter 4, then in chapter five its suddenly "I LIKE this school Hyuk. Look at all the stuff I have learned" and then with no warning its back "Oh god its SCHOOL!" I think I shall hit something.... with a hammer.

Godogma · Dec 9, 2008

You mean kind of like JKR? She can't maintain internal character consistency in relation to the people and places in her story worth a damn. Considering mystically Snape was the "bravest man he ever knew" and numerous other things.

Snape is a mean spirited bully who can't teach, even in my shit school system the simple fact is he'd have been fired...

Half Baked Plot and Dried Horse-shit can't quite change the fact that after book five Hermione mysteriously acquired a lobotomy, Ron suddenly became a master of strategy and Harry got hit with a love potion for his resident stalker.

Books 5-7 aren't models of internal consistency, and JKR simply cannae write intelligent teenagers or many other things.

She covers most of my Pet Peeves really well in books 5-7.

Frank Cadena · Dec 9, 2008

Another pet peeve that just jumped into my face reading a new fic today. An unexplainable, dominating OC that takes away the focus from the main character, known as a Mary Sue. I was reading a House story and suddenly another character just appears that somehow symphatises with House no matter how abrasive house is and suddenly House is actually liking her but trying to push her away, unbelievably I might add, and by that part I stopped reading.

General fanfiction pet-peeves

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