General fanfiction pet-peeves

PCHeintz72

The Sentient Fanfic Search Engine mk II
#51
Hypothesis said:
Croaker said:
Edit: And the dreaded high school AU doesn't count as good here. :|
I don't think those even count as AU's so much as they are original fiction that questionably attach canon names to people. Where on earth is the justification for that kind of fic? If its Harry Potter, there's no magic. If its Avatar, there's no bending. Just some strange half baked plot that shoves whoever the Die-For-My-Ship author wants together. WHAT IS THE FUCKING POINT!?
My pet peeves of the ones I've seen are of those series where it does not even apply.

For example, InuYasha and Sesshomeru in current times, not demons, and fighting each other over Kagome... Um... where is InuYasha in that.
 

grant

Well-Known Member
#52
And Inuyasha and Sesshomaru are either A. both gang leaders or B. the delinquent brother and the CEO. Add in Naraku as the head of a gang or criminal group with a name involving spiders and you probably just defined 40% of all Inuyasha fiction.
 
#53
Lets see...
-Fics where the protagonist isn't the focus of the story (the only exception being Xander-centric fics in BtVS)
-Big blocks of text with no spacing whatsoever
-The protagonist being a spineless idiot (canon Shinji, Harry as he is portrayed in most slash fics, etc)
-Misspelling Nerima into Nermia specifically, although misspelling other canon names does annoy me, Nermia just seems to draw out the Kill it with fire! in me.
-Mid story author notes
-Misspelling through, thorough and throughout, especially if it's through and the author put threw or thru.
-And some other stuff, can't really think of it right now, maybe I'll edit it later and add some more.

Edit: Ah, yes, HP fics where magic does not exist at all, like say, High school fics, the same could be said for removing the main premise(?) of a fandom, the ninja and chakra out of Naruto, the demons and monsters out of Inuyasha, Alchemy out of FMA, Evas and Angels out of NGE, etc.
 

goldenarms

Well-Known Member
#54
:invokes Art of the Necro:

I was going to invoke my own thread on this, but hey, why clog up the board... anymore than it is? :\

Pet peeves:

1) Stories that start off with swearing. Seriously, if they're not caught up in the middle of some hypercrazed gun fight that's gone to hell in a mostly-empty tanker truck against them, you do not need to be dropping F-bombs and the like. Especially when it'd be completely out of the character's nature to say such a thing. Case in point:

Chapter #1: The Beginning of a New Journey

Sarutobi, the night before retired Third Hokage, found himself reading his student's last will before he was taken by the Death God to seal the Kyuubi into the child now sleeping in a crib in front of him.

He sighed, ôI'm too old for this shit.ö He looked at his student's son and sighed again. ôWhy did Yoko have to die at a time like this.ö
2) Impossible pairings. This is not a diss towards yaoi -- I already have indiviualized disses premade for that. What I'm talking about is pairing stories that have been made impossible by the fic itself. Off the top of my head, Mizukage. It's like making OOCs out of the canon characters, then OOCing your own OOC characters just the get "these wacky, mixed-up kids" together.

2.5) Left-field pairing. This tags along with the above, in which there will be a cool summary talking about Naruto getting elite training from the most elite of ninja and becoming the badass ninja most want to see, then has a KibaNaru tag.

What the hell?

Mostly, I see it with yaoi stories, but oftentimes, harem fics or the really outside pairings get in on the act. Especially the NaruHanabi pairings, in which she won't be in the fic for a good while anyway. Possibly because she wasn't BORN yet. <_<

3) Canon replacements. Quite possibly the example in my head is "The Lazy Uchiha," replacing Kakashi with Itachi. Here, Itachi's very lazy due to being dropped on his head (literally) as a baby, and thus, everything follows almost exactly like canon. What broke the camel for me was the moment that he and Team Seven was fighting Zabuza. Itachi gets all badass, having let a shadow clone be imprisoned, while watching to see how his students were doing, and is about to kill him. Zabuza gets needled by the masked hunter-nin, who takes the body and run. Itachi later says he KNEW the hunter-nin was fraud, but didn't feel like doing anything about it at the time, thus, setting up for round 2.

4) Gratuitous Japanese. Life would have been so much simpler if people stopped trying look cool and just use English translations. What really grated me on this was reading Miraibulma's Dragonball Super Zed story, where I almost had to go find a community college that taught Japanese, just so I could read the fic without stopping every six words to break out the online translator. "Chikuso! Minna, matte yo!" "Hai!"

Today's writers aren't much better. Just be yourself, and write "Yes!"

4.5) Gratuitous Japanese-English conversions. It's one thing to use Japanese for certain things, like Moko Takabisha. That's acceptable. Writing "Moko Takabisha (Pride of the Fierce Tiger)" though... If you have to explain it, just write the explanation and save the cool data to impress girls with later.

5) Lemons within the serious work. This is about stories that have developed most wonderfully. Characters are sharp, story is fast-paced, everything is perfect.

...and then there's a need to go into the deep end. "We need some fucking in this story!"

Take it from me, you do not. Trust me, you absolutely do not want to get into a lemon at this point. It kills the quality by an order of magnitude. If there absolutely must be some kind of sexing going on, which a lot of stories don't need anyway, just mention it like this.

She smiled softly. "Well, big boy, looks like today is your birthday," she breathed, dropping the towel she had been holding around her body.

He blinked, then grinned. "Happy birthday to me..."

---

The old perv suddenly stopped in place. His companion paused, looking back at him. "What's the matter?"

"I think my pupil's becoming a man," he responded with a wide grin. "Just let me go check up on--"

He didn't see the hammer descend upon his noggin, only the darkness it left him with afterwards.

---

"So, how was it," the old perv asked, nudging the beaming young man the next morning.
Imagination sells better than IKEA.
 
#55
Yes, rampant cussing is a peeve, but what's about as bad [or worse, depending] is going out of your way to make the dialogue "clean" when working in a series that does not fit that approach.
For example, take Bleach. Take, specifically, its character Nnoitra Jiruga. He is a chauvinistic, loud, domineering, sonofabitch egotistical.............okay, yeah, you get the idea. He also cusses. A lot. It's part of his manner of speech.
Now, take a quick few lines of dialogue.


"Nnoitra, look at you! You're covered in blood!"
"Fuck, woman, I know that! Get the hell away from me so I can get back to the fight. Shit, you're gonna make me lose!"
"Y-You're going back? But you'll be--"
"I'll be the winner, babe... or I'll go down fighting. Either way it'll be fuckin' awesome. Now, get the hell outa my way!"

Okay. Dialogue that's basically convinving. [NnoiNel or NnoiHali in case you wondered. Probably if it was part of a fanfic, NnoiNel. But I digress.] That's probably what he would say, how he would respond, etc.

Let's go back and redo it, shall we?


"Nnoitra, look at you! You're covered in blood!"
"@$%&, woman, I know that! Get the heck away from me so I can get back to the fight. &$*^, you're gonna make me lose!"
"Y-You're going back? But you'll be--"
"I'll be the winner, babe... or I'll go down fighting. Either way it'll be @^%!^*$ awesome. Now, get the heck outa my way!"


The main problem with this is not that I'm a huge fan of profanity. But what is important to remember is that, just like everything else used to flavor literature, it does have its place rather than no place at all. Especially when you're writing for a series where it's canon.
 
#56
I have a few peeves that vex me on a regular basis. Some have already been mentioned. Some I haven't seen mentioned here yet.

1 - A fic that claims it is AU and then promptly throws out everything that makes that setting identifiable. To use the Buffy the Vampire Slayer fandom for an example, something proclaiming "AU - Everybody's human! Popular cheerleader Buffy Summers finds herself torn between her boyfriend Xander and the newly arrived British Bad-boy Spike..." or "AU set in the old West..." umm. no. If you remove the reality of vampires, remove the magic, and remove the Slayer-ness, you no longer have the BtVS setting. Period. Write about some other group of high school students. An acceptable sort of AU would be that Buffy wasn't the Slayer, Cordelia was, or Harmony, or Dawn... that rather than Angel being the vampire semi-courting Buffy, it was Darla or Drusilla. That Buffy dies at the end of S2 instead of Kendra. Something that still remains in the same framework of the universe. Likewise a "Harry Potter" fic with no magic, they're attending a school for music, or dance, or... just No. OR a Marvel Comics fic where there are no mutants.

2 - The story is set in the recognizable world, but it is "Alternate Universe" in that a few things were switched - perhaps the Slayer is Willow, not Buffy, or the vampire is Xander, not Angel. Yet somehow, everything except the physical descriptions remains identical - instead of a pretty, confident popular blond ex-cheerleader who complains about the horrible destiny of being the Slayer (canon s1 Buffy) to her red-haired shy friend with awesome computer skills and a rather eccentric and concealing wardrobe(canon s1 Willow), they give us the confident, popular Willow who is miserable because being the Slayer means she can't remain on the cheer-leading squad, and she keeps ruining her good clothing with demon slime, as she often complains to her shy hacker friend Buffy, who is hiding her longtime crush on her best friend Xander... If the whole point of your story is "What would happen if character #4 was given the trials, responsibilities and abilities of #8 then for the love of good writing, keep characters 4 and 8 identifiable as themselves! Otherwise you've failed the point before you began.


3 - Pointless bashing - the sort that goes I the author do not like these things that character 3 did in season 5, so I will write a story set in s2 where I destroy them slowly. And their little dog too.
3b this is not the same as writing a story where in character 3 gets called on something that they did that was rather mean or stupid or just proved to be a disaster. One can point out mistakes without pointlessly bashing. But generally, when you hit ground level, that's enough - you don't need to break out the shovel.


4 - Diverging from canon is a great thing, it can be a fabulous thing (hasn't everyone had something that they didn't like happen? 2 and 8 getting together, 5 dying (and they were your favorite character too!) a romance starting/ending that you disagreed with?) and it can head off later unpleasantries, but... please, please, please remember that if you change this you also need to either remember that b, c, d, and e therefore wouldn't have happened, or give the readers alternate explanations for why all or part of those events still happened. If Reed Richards didn't have an experimental space ship, why would Ben Grimm end up a big guy made out of rocks? If Buffy and Angel never had sex, how did he ditch the soul and become Angelus? If Thomas and Martha Wayne weren't killed in the alley, why would Bruce Wayne become Batman? And ".... because!" is not a valid answer.


5 - Suprise sudden slash. For example, in 5 (okay, maybe 7) seasons, Xander Harris was consistently hetrosexual. He had a couple relationships an more crushes, all of them involving females. So why, oh why does your story open with him and Spike naked and shouting Oh God! Harder, Yes! Or we see things going on as was canon for this season, only... exactly why is Lex Luthor snuggling up to Pete and nibbling on his neck, calling him snookums? If there is a canon same-sex relationship, it's one thing to show them together (please rate accordingly though!), but... if you are using a non-canon relationship, please show us how this started. If the relationship is not only non-canon but a completely different orientation for the character when compared to their canon behavior, then our first reaction as readers is likely to be WTF?!? Some people want warnings for that even if it does build gradually.
5b On a related note, please do not prepare your story with the Magic Mushrooms of Gayness (phrase coined by someone on another site I frequent). You can tell these stories because the characters are - each and every one - in a relationship with someone of the same anatomical gender as themselves. Giles is dating Ethan. Buffy and Faith are doing more than patrolling together. Cordelia and Harmony don't just shake their pom-poms together. Willow and Amy are doing more than casting spells together. Xander and Jesse weren't just friends. Devon and Oz have some really special bonding times after their performances. ... ummm. No. One person being gay - could be canon. One person discovering they might be gay (or bisexual) - plausible. A whole town turning up gay all of a sudden? no.


6 - Everyone Must Have A Partner. No. This is fanfiction, not Noah's Ark. It is acceptable for the story to end without everyone being in a relationship with someone.


7 - The already mentioned 'crossover' where all the author does is substitute this character for that one, yet they still do the same things, fight the same foes, date the same people, and... nothing's really different except their main character's name.


8 - Character Baddo BadGuy has insulted, fought with, and done everything in his power to make Shy-oh-my miserable, yet all of a sudden, he can't live without her, wants to have her as his wife, and... after a lame apology (maybe) and a fangirly description of how hawt Baddo really is, Shy-oh-my is okay with this, and goes off with Baddo to live ever after? WTF? Sometimes I hate you just means... I hate you, and there's nothing redeemable to Baddo. (of whatever fandom you may be familiar with.) Sometimes the jerky guy... is just a jerk. There's no deeper meaning, he's not a good guy deep down - he's just a jerk. Or evil.


9 ... likewise, all the pretty people are not always good guys. Nor is someone automatically the evil fiend because they don't like the main character of the story. It's called giving them depth and dimension. Likewise, to prove just how evil Baddy McVillain is, you don't have to have him going around with a goatee kicking puppies and cheating senior citizens out of their retirement funds.


10 - please don't hold your updates hostage for X number of reviews.

11 - and don't put your author's notes in the middle of the story! Put them at the beginning, or at the end.


Now for the flip side.

Reviews are nice, reviews can make an author's day. But there are a few things that are annoying in reviews...

ths Sux! <- that is not a review. If you do not like a story, tell the author why - is it because the action is wooden? Are misspellings thick on the ground? Are the characters not behaving true to themselves?


You should split up 3/5 and make it 3/7! <- No. I am the author, so I am the one who decides who the characters are paired with (well, me and canon.) Should I ever want reader input about a pairing (and I have never asked for that thus far) I would say so in an authors note (at the top or bottom of the story) and request reader suggestions. Not reader orders.


UPdate soon! <- You mean I should abandon my responsibilities to job/house/children/homework/sleep and update this particular story
right now just because you demanded it? No. Particularly not when that's the entirety of the comment. I like to know if readers enjoyed, and I like to know that they would enjoy more, but I have a life beyond the keyboard.


eeeeeewwwww! How could you write 6/2 together! <- Many authors put predominant pairings in the headers of their stories (some archives demand this, other archives are character or pairing specific). It's often easy to identify - sometimes from the summary - who the main pairing of a story will be. If you see a summary stating that Harry wants to propose to his true love Ginny and it's identified as a Harry/Ginny story, then.... why are you shocked and appalled that the story is a Harry/Ginny fic?


sorry, I think I ranted a little.
 

Pale Wolf

Well-Known Member
#57
1 - A fic that claims it is AU and then promptly throws out everything that makes that setting identifiable. To use the Buffy the Vampire Slayer fandom for an example, something proclaiming "AU - Everybody's human! Popular cheerleader Buffy Summers finds herself torn between her boyfriend Xander and the newly arrived British Bad-boy Spike..." or "AU set in the old West..." umm. no. If you remove the reality of vampires, remove the magic, and remove the Slayer-ness, you no longer have the BtVS setting. Period. Write about some other group of high school students. An acceptable sort of AU would be that Buffy wasn't the Slayer, Cordelia was, or Harmony, or Dawn... that rather than Angel being the vampire semi-courting Buffy, it was Darla or Drusilla. That Buffy dies at the end of S2 instead of Kendra. Something that still remains in the same framework of the universe.
You could also have none of the known characters as a Slayer, and just see how screwed/not-screwed they are while the supernatural is still going down and involving them :p

If the whole point of your story is "What would happen if character #4 was given the trials, responsibilities and abilities of #8 then for the love of good writing, keep characters 4 and 8 identifiable as themselves! Otherwise you've failed the point before you began.
Yeah, that example seems more like 'what would happen if Character #8 was given the name of Character #4?'

A whole town turning up gay all of a sudden? no.
Unless the plot actually is about some supernatural force (the magic mushrooms of gayness) causing it...

Sometimes I hate you just means... I hate you, and there's nothing redeemable to Baddo. (of whatever fandom you may be familiar with.) Sometimes the jerky guy... is just a jerk. There's no deeper meaning, he's not a good guy deep down - he's just a jerk. Or evil.
And sometimes there is a deeper meaning, and nobody gives a fuck.



Me, I'm going to be ambitious and sum up all my peeves in one.

When people don't respect their stories. When they don't care enough to put in the effort to make everything make sense - it doesn't require a special talent, all you need to do is take some time and track down what event affects what. Or take maybe ten minutes on Wikipedia to find out a couple of the details of whatever you're using (say, a criminal justice system).

Care shows. A well-researched, well-thought out fic is really all we need. Even the most elegant writing is still a pain without the research and thinking time put in. And writing improves - how much effort you're willing to put in is something you decide.
 

grant

Well-Known Member
#58
You could also have none of the known characters as a Slayer, and just see how screwed/not-screwed they are while the supernatural is still going down and involving them
I actually would like to see that written.

Of course it is shown what happens if Sunnydale doesn't have a Slayer in an early episode, to put it mildly nothing good.

BDSM and homosexuality. It is understandable that Hamilton managed to convince you into believing that every homosexual and bisexual man in existence is secretly either a masochist, a sadist, or both. However, it is essential for all of those impressionable 13-year old girls out there to understand that very, very few people actually do enjoy BDSM relative to the entire population of homosexuals and/or bisexuals.
 
#59
My pet peeves tend to be more personalized matters rather than just evidence of poor writing; anybody can correct a consistent and pointless flaw in their story if they're willing to put time, thought, and effort into it, but some things that others love and do on purpose just irritate the hell out of me. That said, everything that follows is strictly IMO.

1) Time-travel. I really just hate it. And the more of it there is, the more I hate it. Characters walk through a plot with sub-divine knowledge of what's going to happen, and then make themselves out to be either impossibly intelligent and capable or mysteriously prescient. It takes a lot out of the story for me to know that a character's reaction is as much trial and error as it is personality. I hate most other kinds of time-travel plots too, except, of course, those that use time travel to mock the idea of time travel. I really like those.

2) "Fixing up" characters. This includes things like making Ranma Saotome cautious, humble, and polite, making Shinji an assertive badass, or making Usagi competent and intelligent. Nobody's perfect, and nobody should be. At best, a character overcoming a major personality flaw should at least involve an entire episode's worth of thinking, working, soul-searching, and whatnot, rather than a sudden (and usually obvious) epiphany, but it's a lot more fun to watch characters struggle with their flaws rather than impressing others with how they barely have any.

3) Law and honor. I realize that these are really important in some plots and series, but GOD DAMN! It just doesn't excite me to read a multi-page dissertation on how "dishonorable" someone is or the problems with someone's family honor, or whatever. And legal issues are much worse in many cases. Nobody in Nerima solves their problems through the legal system. EVER. NOT EVEN NABIKI. There's only one good reason for this, and it is as follows: it's much more entertaining to solve one's problems with violence and/or humiliation.

4) Fanfiction genres too far from the genre of the base material. I personally don't think that romantic comedies or humor series make good darkfics. I have never wondered what would happen if my favorite characters had their spirits crushed under waves of angst and committed suicide in front of their so-called loved ones. That's just me.

5) Puppetmasters. It really annoys me when a story cuts away to reveal that the whole plot is really all the product of nigh-omnipotent beings toying with the threads of reality, or whatever, and it's even worse when those beings interfere so that the author doesn't have to think up a more sensible plot device. That's probably my individualism speaking, but the material universe is for mortals to screw up, not gods or god-like aliens.

6) Hopelessly overpowered characters. Nobody needs to have the power of a Dragonball Z char unless they're part of the Dragonball Z universe (that way I'll know ahead of time not to bother with it). Ideally, a main character should actually be LESS powerful than the primary antagonist, and have to defeat their opponent through cunning, teamwork, or dumb luck. Of course, this only applies if one of the main themes of the story is combat; overpowered characters work just fine if forced into situations where being able to blow up moons or knock around tanks isn't helpful (or even detrimental!).
 
#60
Reviving this thread because I've just got to type somewhere about my hate of typing characters/places names wrong.

For example, while browsing the ASoIaF ideas thread on SB several just jumped right out at me.

Rob
Robbert
Tiwin
Tryion
Tasha
 

AzaggThoth

Well-Known Member
#61
I wish High school AUs had their own genre listing on FF.net so I could exclude them from my searches. Oh that would make searching for something to read much nicer and less likely to make me want to vomit.
 

PCHeintz72

The Sentient Fanfic Search Engine mk II
#62
Grrr... forum toasted the post again... 2nd try

AzaggThoth said:
I wish High school AUs had their own genre listing on FF.net so I could exclude them from my searches. Oh that would make searching for something to read much nicer and less likely to make me want to vomit.
Heh... You should see the following thread on high school AU's and lack of quality with them


Does all High School AU fanfiction have to suck?
- http://thefanfictionforum.net/showthread.php?tid=20504
 

AzaggThoth

Well-Known Member
#63
I was actually aware of that thread but that doesn't stop this whole AU sub genre from turning my stomach. What pushed me to post about it as a peeve was seeing a half dozen new ones pop up between the last time I searched for some Naruto fics and now. I want goofy ninja wizards not lame teen wangst... granted I usually have to filter out bucket loads of grimderp, neglect wank, mob chases and near death beatings to find anything passable on a good day but its the principal of the thing.
 

PCHeintz72

The Sentient Fanfic Search Engine mk II
#64
Sadly, I do not think there is a computer search engine in existence that can consistently and reliably remove all bad fics from the list. No matter the series.
 
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