Discussion Fan Fic Pet Peeves?

I figured I'd start this as a place both to vent, and let newer writers see what people think about various things, so they know what do avoid. So, what are your pet peeves?

#1: 2nd person storytelling. I got no clue why, but it just makes it look like the author was too lazy to develop another character, and is therefore injecting you into it to cover his/her own laziness.
#2: Hybridized/barely-modified names. Yoda Skywalker? Chevacca? I stumble onto this in a lot of fics on FanFiction.Net, and it annoys the crap out of me. Grow some innovation!

 

Itsy bitsy cutsie wootsie romance where the characters fall endlessly in love after some traumatic event that brings them together. Talk about been there, done that.

 

Mary Sues

 

If the author didn't take the time to run spell check and proofread for blatant grammer errors, then I quit reading. I figure it's safe to assume they didn't take a lot of time perfecting plot and characterization either (especially since those are much more difficult than the difference between to, too, and two).

 

hey, i wrote a second-person short story once. maybe you've just never seen it done right. just cuz it's second person doesn't mean the 'you' in the story can't be an original character.
on the other hand, it was only a page long, and i've never written another...

 

1. I think Mary Sues are pretty much a given.

2. Plagiarism - Makes. Me. SICK. Though often times it's purely unintentional, which I can respect, since there are a lot of similar ideas flying around in the fan fic world; but when it is intentional, well, it just irks me that someone would be that lazy (as a replacement for some other undesireable words ). Fortunately, this has yet to happen to me yet, but I know it's happened to others.

3. Excessive vulgarity. I dunno, sometimes a person can go too far, especially in Star Wars fan fiction. I doubt some of the words I've seen even exist in the GFFA.

Well, that's all from the peanut gallery.

 

"If the author didn't take the time to run spell check and proofread for blatant grammer errors..."



in the context of this sentence the word 'grammer' is very funny.

 

i agree

 

It's amazing how many people hate poor spelling and grammer. I used to, too, until the humour was pointed out to me one too many times and I finally caught on.

What do I hate? Many things. One of my biggest peeves is in presentation - lack of paragraphs. There's nothing worse that trying to make out one big blob of text.

Lack of capitalization. This one is probably because I find people who do not know enough (or care enough) to capitalize also do not know (or care) enough to use basic grammar. Nor do they utilize that lovely invention called the "spellcheck". (It's almost worse when they *do* use the spellcheck, but end up correcting their mistakes incorrectly.)

Over-used plots. This one does not happen so much in the Star Wars fandom (or at least, I don't *see* it as much in the Star Wars fandom). But some other fandoms I am involved in . . . *shudder* You have three basic plots and three thousand stories from these plots.

I have some other pet peeves - many, actually - but I can't think of them, and I'm sure you're all getting quite sick of me by now.

 

Some writers don't seem to understand what Jedi are. I see them getting angry, feeling despair and breaking into tears. Not that they don't feel anything or that any of this has no place, but some of the excesses this is taken to is unrealistic. If a Jedi was unable to fight the sorrow within that they were breaking down into tears every ten minutes, they'd soon find themeselves on the dark side.

It's just a small peeve. I don't really care if they misspell things, I do it all the time. I also hate the one giant paragraph thing and lack of capitalization.

 

Technobabble. SW fans are NOT stupid, so don't explain how your Meson Taloscope analyzes, refresherizes, and femfriendizes your blood samples (just as an example). I really hate those made up words like refresher station, felinx, femfriend, etc. Just call the thing what it is. Imagine the story of Star Wars is an ancient history, and we have a storyteller giving it to us now (George Lucas, of course). He has to explain things that happened way back then and way back there in terms that make sense to us. In the novelization of Star Wars, he uses words like dog, robot, etc. because that's stuff we understand. Technobabble and stupid made-up words are the most incredible insult to that idea of "our own terms."

Along that line of storytelling, "bloopers" can be excused as "word-of-mouth mistakes" (Imagine playing a game of "Telephone." You rarely get the same message at the end that you had at the beginning. Same idea goes here.)

Bob Brown's pages go into incredible detail on this (look in the "essays" section, and read away).

 

Really stupid cross-overs irritate me and I won't even bother to begin reading.

IE: Vampires in the GFFA, yeah... sure.

 

1. 1st and foremost is bad formatting, it screw ups my thought process
2. Bad spelling and grammar <---(that's how it is spelled)
3. Bad dialogue. "You know I've always loved you..."
4. No desrciption: He walked over. He sat down. He was shot. (I could read the phone book for this kind of riveting action)
5. Cliché characters: the hansome guy with brown hair and great pecks.
6. People who put twins in there story just to have twins. (at least make it triplets or something... there are enough twins)
7. This one's a little wierd, but people who don't put the accent on the names of the Handmaidens. It's not that big of a deal, but I'm a freak and it bugs me. (for future notice Alt + 0233 = é)

~~Aanix

 

Oh boy, here we go! My biggest pet peeves.

Flawless characters. Otherwise known as the Mary Sue/Gary Stu character. Or characters that everybody loves even though they're jerks (usually a male character). At least have them wade through some crap before earning any respect of their peers for being a total jerk!

Grammar and spelling errors. Especially poor spelling. I especially get peeved when I see the same words spelled wrong all the time. Some of the main ones I've seen have been the variations of "your" and "its", but also the word "lose". Surprising, isn't it? It's a common mistake. For anybody that makes this error, the word "lose" and "losing" refer to when you have something and then it goes away, or when you're defeated in a game. The word "loose" or "loosing" (which isn't even a word, I don't think) refers to when a tooth is about to fall out and wiggles around. Ok, rant over. I'm just the grammar police. If anybody needs a beta, I'm here.

Paragraphs also annoy me, when they're not easy to see. I don't mind weird sentence format if I can read it and it's done on purpose. Some authors stray from convention when they get better at their craft. Usually you can tell a good author straying from convention from a newer writer. Like somebody else said, more eloquent description clues you in.

The twins thing also peeves me. Just because there are two sets of Skywalker twins doesn't mean their descendants need to be twins. I would even stand for identical twins as opposed to fraternal twins. But single births are better.

Jae Angel

 

#2: Hybridized/barely-modified names. Yoda Skywalker? Chevacca? I stumble onto this in a lot of fics on FanFiction.Net, and it annoys the crap out of me. Grow some innovation!

That puts me off a 'fic straight off and unless the writing is truly excellent otherwise I won't bother.

 

Out of all the pet peeves that people have put up so far. The only ones that actually annoy me personally are the badly done characters and occasionally the grammar spelling.

Badly done characters annoy me. People have faults, therefore characters should have them. This works two ways, to me a badly done character is one who is always having emotional breakdowns and hurts. The other are the ones who seem to have no feelings, no emotions at all. They are badly done drones... This extends to Jedi too. Jedi might be stoic, solid and dependable, but even they would have moments of insecurity and heartbreak. It doesn't mean that characters should always be crying or getting angry, that goes against the Jedi code and training. However, they will have moments of doubt and insecurity. They will question themselves (if they are young enough). Being a Jedi doesn't necessarily have to wipe out all the humanity and emotions from a person.

However, my boyfriend disagrees. He says that Masters should be boring to write and read because they should be at peace. It is the padawans and young knights who are still struggling to find the exact right path. I just thought I should put his point in because we just had a five minute debate on it.

Also in the badly done characters are (to me) ones who seem to have been dealt the worst set of cards that life could give them. They are constantly oppressed and go from one bad moment to another. By the way I know I'm guilty of this too

As for the grammar and spelling, this is a lesser misdemeanor. I hate obvious ones that an author should have picked up just by a quick read over. However, for many people on this board english isn't their first language. For other people, (like me) english is a struggle for many reasons. So unless the mistakes are loud and obvious it doesn't generally bother me.

Kithera

 

I did an award thread for pet peeves a while back- the Bad Fanfic Award Thread. It'shere if anyone's interested, and the final results are here.

 

Yeah, the crossover thing is out of hand.

I think the masters can be interesting to write for. I like to give my most clever bits of humor to them, if I think of any that is. True, they don't have all the big flashy stuff that you can make a movie trailor on happening to them, but they're not uninteresting subjects.

 

I don't have too much of a problem with spelling or grammar unless it is really bad and distracts from the reading - come on, everyone is human... well maybe not in the Star Wars world... little spelling mistakes where you can easily see which word it is supposed to be is nothing to get riled up about -- unless there's too much.

My peeve is bland writing... there are no descriptions, no - subtext - shall we say.

I've read many fics like this lately where Gary Stu wakes up, feels happy, goes on a mission, something bad happens, a little angst, some overwhelmingly power is discovered, saves the day!

There really seems to be nothing inbetween these events, it is written just so. No discriptions or anything of the sort. Gets kinda tedious to read.

 

Biggest pet peeve is lousy grammar and spelling. I mean, come on, I can't stand it. Like, a lot of people don't seem to know that the past tense of "spit" is "spat" and can't figure out the difference between "wander" and "wonder." The English teacher in me is writhing in agony here. Honestly, I started a list of mistakes in fan fic that drive me nuts.
As for other pet peeves: I hate "no description." OK I might put a bit too much of it into my writing but it's still better to mess up by trying too hard than to not try at all. I love stories with lots of description that just feed my audio visual physical imagination.

 

Seeing the Lady Ex show up before the Death Star has always managed to bug me, for some odd reason.

 

Well, my particular hardship in writting is AVOIDING Mary Sues. A lot of my characters are giant walking question marks, and so it's not totally bizarre for them to pull some "new" power out in a hard spot. Also, if I'm trying to pull a lame relationship connection, I do my best to put a spin on it. Like Sumina Naberrie in my story. A dark Anakin comes after Padmé at one point, but isn't in total control of his Force senses, and fails to tell the difference between her and one of her look-alike handmaidens. So she's going to be the bastard child of Anakin and someone else. Making her half-sibs to the famous Twins, but by blood, a Skywalker none the less.

 

1)Mary Sues. 'Nuff said. Not to say that I don't like original characters, they work great as bad guys and stuff.
2)The same love triangles, over and over and... Well, you get the idea. If you're going through the trouble to write it, at least try to make it original.
3)Spelling, grammar, formatting. Nothing makes me stop reading faster.
4)Slang. Especially taking culturally specific slang and randomly throwing it in. Call me crazy, but having all the characters celebrate St. Patrick's Day just yanks me right out of the story.
5)Cliches. Especially in a summary or the first paragraph.
6)Inconsistent tenses. If it's done intentionally, and well, then it's fine. But otherwise it just makes the story even harder to follow.

Yes, I'm picky . Doesn't mean that I run screaming from fics that have the above in them, it just makes it less enjoyable for me as a reader. And I have been guilty of all of the above one time or another. Those kind of errors are quite easy to spot and don't take that much time to fix, so the fact that they aren't makes me angry.

Anyone disagree?

 

Spelling isn't really a reason to leave a fic. If you get ticked every time you see a typo , than you're really just nitpicking.

My pet peeve for fanfics has to be these "semi-swear words" that people come up with. Every time I hear a character say "Sith Spit!" or "Emperor's black bones!" I burst out laughing. We've all heard swear words before, if the story calls for swearing don't hold back.

 

RE: <<If a Jedi was unable to fight the sorrow within that they were breaking down into tears every ten minutes, they'd soon find themeselves on the dark side.>>

LOL I absolutely agree! Thank you for putting that so eloquently. If I see one more Obi-Wan cries for an hour fic.... grrr

The other peeves:
1) Jedi falling in love, especially with Mary Sues. Especially Obi-Wan. Please characterize him better. Unfortunately, he's our George's boring hero straight-man, and has learned his lesson NOT to jeopardize his Jedi standing. He might have a fling, however...

2) Bad Yoda-speak.

3) Really AU stories. Yawn. If this is a post Ep-1 story and Qui-Gon is still alive, then it's not Star Wars to me. Just can't suspend disbelief there.

Oh, well. Just my two cents.
JediShampoo