My Top Ten Pet (Fanfic/Writing in General) Peeves

[bjewelled]

I'm supposed to be working. We've got big changes tonight. Oooooh~

Actually, I am working. Mostly. I just have to wait a few minutes for the servers to do their thing. So in the meantime, let me educate you all.

Comments

[last_archangel]

11. Babyfic. STOP, PEOPLE, PLEASE!

(This especially implies to the Bones fandom, which predominantly seems to think that Temperance Brennan, a sexually healthy woman with an extremely high IQ, has no idea how to use contraception. This has not only made most of the fanfic stupid and tired, but has inspired more rants than most Southern Baptist preachers can produce.)

[smirnoffmule]

And what's more, a sexually healthy woman who has explicitly stated she does not wish to have children. Grrrr. (And y'know, there's fairly strong canonical evidence to suggest Booth knows how babies are made too, couldn't he take some responsibility on board?) (Assuming this is an B/B baby and Brennan didn't accidentally boink Sweets or something).

[last_archangel]

Booth is usually a father in the stories, and he already has one kid that was, presumptively, not planned, and he's not the kind of idiot that doesn't learn from that (although people like that do exist, I know some of them *eye twitches*).

[nicocoer]

As a crack fan, I saw the words baby fic, and automatically went ". . . but people as babies in crack is hilarious!"

Then I read the rest, and totally agree. If it's OOC for your character to not know how it works and doesn't *want* kids, then WTF?

I knew there was a reason I avoid most Bones fic, even though I love the show. I KNEW it.

[jedishadowolf]

Howdy, another of copperbadge's brood. Am printing this list off and using it as a reminder of the things I NEVER wanna do...except that fluff one...I love fluff when it gives us a break in the angst or horror - kind of a balm against the pain we know is coming.

And some how, someway I'm using his cd, her cd player I just don't know how yet. :)

[fmanalyst]

Mine: loose=/=lose

[beathen]

This just opens up the can of worms that is the English language. Other misused words like these also annoy me and will often jar me out of reading a fic:

their=/=they're=/=there
your=/=you're
our=/=are
its=/=it's
hear=/=here

[adina_atl]

Complement/compliment

His shoes complimented his red shirt: "Ooh, shirt, that is such a lovely color," the shoes said. Talk about flattering footwear!

[beathen]

Stationary=/=stationery

The beautiful cream stationery remained stationary on the desk no matter how hard he tried to move it with his mind.

[ginalin]

I used to do some of those things when I was a baby writer, but thankfully, my ears were properly boxed.

No more fangirl Japanese, epithets or author's insertions. There are writers in certain fandoms who claim those epithets like "The brunette" or "the blond" are expected and continue to use them.

What? We pretty much know what color hair the characters have, what eye color and what the hell does that have to do with the story anyway?

[wellowned]

i have a feeling that the epithets are mainly used to differentiate between characters, especially in slash. case in point--harry potter fandom, particularly harry/draco shippers. no one wants to write he, he, he, him, him, his, his... the whole way through. it drags and it's also a little confusing.

however, i figure that a person who is very clever will find a way around that without resorting to epithets every other sentence.

[ginalin]

There are definitely more clever ways to get the reader to understand who you're referring to.

Just takes a bit of thought.

[adina_atl]

Names are your friends, and your readers' friends even more so. "Draco spread his hands on Harry's chest as Harry laid his head back on Draco's pillow." Yes, you really are allowed to repeat words even in the same sentence, especially when they're names.

The problem with epithets, other than their sheer silliness, is that they're usually from the wrong point of view. If the story is from Draco's POV, for instance, who thinks of himself as "the blond"? If the story was Draco/Hermione, it might be appropriate for Draco to think of Hermione as "the Mudblood" if it was hate sex or otherwise part of your characterization of his relationship to her, but Hermione would never think of him as "the Pureblood" because it's not important to her view of him. (Yes, I realize that het doesn't have the same pronoun problem as slash.) Hair color and nationality are, I hope, seldom important characteristics of the person you're fucking, especially as you're fucking them.

[irytgud]

authors of series tie-in novels seem to see the need to fill the character's backstory the moment they're introduced onto the page. It's lazy. It's forgetting that the people who are reading this already know it.

In official tie-ins, repeating canon backstory is (sometimes) editorial policy based on the idea that the book might be a person's first encounter with the franchise. Similarly, for a while, every comic issue was treated as potentially someone's first, which is why, e.g, Superboy would mention he had tactile telekinesis once an issue, Psylocke always had time to mention her psi-knife was the sum totality of all her power every time she used it, and everybody always addressed everybody else by name.

So it's not necessarily lazy, just incredibly irritating. XD