Discussion Fan Fic Pet Peeves?

I blame my family for that. My grandparents were heavily-Pennsylvania Dutch, and they misused "lie/lay" all the time. Thankfully, in dialogue, you can get away with a lot of stuff because no one speaks with proper grammar.

A peeve of mine is bland prose with short, declarative sentences and equally-short declarative paragraphs. Seeing many small paragraphs makes the story look like a grocery list, while the sentences make the prose just as bland.

 

There is also that some people are more used to reading english then actually speaking it so they don’t really know the difference in pronunciation

 

Is that you saying you may be taking FF too seriously? Because it doesn't make sense for somebody to tell you fanfiction is serious business and then in the same breath say you are taking things too seriously.

Personally, I don't believe fanfiction is taken seriously enough. If a person was writing crappy original stories we would applaud them for trying to become a better writer and take them much more seriously than the best fanfiction writer. Fanfiction for some reason carries the stigma associated with people who enjoy going to comic con. We are all crazy Trekies, SW nerds or Browncoats. We are looked down upon for our fandom...but it is perfectly acceptable to paint your face and body with the colors of your favorite football team or wear a wedge of foam cheese on your head. That is a healthy fandom.

 

I can see both sides of it. There are points for both views.

 

This is a little more shocking than a pet peeve. But I have been lurking on a fic on ff.net and the writer said that they won't update until they get some reviews. Since they needed some advice I left a review talking about using commas and the spell/grammar check to help with words that were spelled right but the wrong word. Another person left a review which began with a rather nasty paragraph about the grammar and that they were wondering if they needed to send the writer a dictionary. The second and last paragraph in the review was very nice with the reviewer saying they liked the basis of the fic and everything. I am pretty sure I have seen other reviews like this. I like to think of them as bipolar reviews since they went from tearing the fic apart and insulting the author/plot to singing praises to about the author/plot.

 

Holding a fic hostage and tearing apart a work or attacking the author...both upset me. There is such a thing as tact and polite honesty.

 

I've never held a fic hostage myself.

Not to say I'm not above begging for reviews mind you, but I can't stand when an author holds a fic hostage...you should write because its fun, not just to get people to pat you on the back and say 'good fic'.

 

I'm going to chuckle about this for days...my in-laws are Wisconsinites...complete with foam cheese.

Is it just me, or are the authors asking for reviews the same ones who write overly angst-y stuff?

 

Depends on what you mean by "overly angsty."

 

Perception is so subjective. What one considers 'overly angsty' another may consider genuine drama. You can't really blame people for desiring feedback and it isn't that all all of us want is a pat on the back. Yet, courtesy does seem to be diminishing on both sides which is sad.

 

I don't like it when they hold a fic hostage for reviews, but I could understand a writer getting frustrated with no reviews. In that case I think I would be tempted to ask if anybody was reading and if the fic is worth continuing.

 

That makes sense. Yet it can also be annoying when a fic is put up piecemeal and then abandoned. I prefer it to be finished before I start reading.

 

It was an 'overheard' convo, a putdown by a longstanding TFN-er for a writer who was not me. It was maybe sarcasm, though; for sure, it was the most obnoxious 2 comments I'd heard on these boards, but maybe I don't hang out in rougher threads, I don't know. Anyway, to me writing is writing, and enjoyable, whether it's advertising jingles *By MENnen!* or fanfiction or profiction. I write to make part of my living, and fanfiction is a welcoming place because it's noncompetitive.

I am proud to say I tied yellow and blue ribbons in my hair for Youngest's team last Saturday!!

 

So I like to read some non-canon ships for other series' and it almost always seems that the other person in the canon ship is always the bad guy if you will. Do they really have to do that? Sometimes it works but sometimes I just want to see everyone get along. Is that too much to ask?

 

I see mortal enemies shipped quite often, which just baffles me. They're taking "opposites attract" a bit too far.

I may have mentioned this before and others may have mentioned it, but when writers don't do the research, particularly in a subject that I know very well, it drives me up the freakin' wall. Now, I've stretched some rules and used artistic license here and there for the sake of storytelling and drama, but I generally make sure that I have at least enough of an understanding of the subject before I bend it to my whim. In some fics, though, and even profics, I'll find mistakes in very basic aspects of a certain subject, regardless of artistic license, and be shaking my head and saying "that would never happen."

 

For me, it's just when something comes to mind after reading other peeves.

 

When something that tends to annoy has come up again, I tend to post here. Or when I feel I need to say somehting about the other peeves.

 

If I see it again and again.

 

Fairly soon after reading a peeve - and I try not to repeat myself in the thread

 

That might be difficult to do. If it's repeated, we definitely know that it's a peeve!

 

Pet peeves? Just a couple I can think of:

Overly-dramatic/weepy. Read a Twilight Fanfic recently where they went on and on (and on) in the first person in an overly emotional/dramatic fashion. I hate it when it gets laid on too thick; makes me want to scrap reading it.

Grammatical errors/not bothering to run a spell check. It's made so easy these days, I don't see why someone couldn't do it.

Over-use of a phrase. I read a fanfic once that took something from a published novel and started out every sentence with that four word phrase. For about 50 sentences. It wasn't profound or brilliant, it sucked the creativity right out of it.

And...I've only seen this in Twilight fanfiction (both with the Fifty Shades author and with a private poster), the "inner harpy/Goddess" talking and acting up. Such as, "My inner Goddess responded to him by sticking out her tongue and blowing raspberries, mouthing, 'ho'....." I can't even articulate how annoying reading that was; it wasn't as much humorous as it was an exercise in seeing a main character's schizophrenia. I actually stopped reading that fic, and it was good otherwise.

 

My inner Goddess just threw up reading about that fanfiction inner Goddess.

 

I've basically returned to reading a lot of fanfiction after losing interest in it a while back, and only just started to remember some of the common errors in the prose. My new old peeve of the day has to be the inability of writers to understand what apostrophes are for. They follow an "s" when the possessive is being used, you don't just slap them onto a plural noun! Even otherwise decently-written fics seem to make this mistake repeatedly, and I'm baffled as to why.

 

I confess to having committed the apostrophe sin with using "it's" for the possessive form. Don't know why -- I would just put in the apostrophe without thinking about it when it was not "it is". I think I've strangled that impulse for now, but I have to keep watching for it.

I have never read any form of Twilight.