Discussion Fan Fic Pet Peeves?

There's Sonic fanfics? I guess I shouldn't be so surprised.

Anyway. Unfinished fanfics annoy the hell out of me. There's acually been a few times when I've wanted to contact a few authors and ask 'can I finish that for you?' but of course they haven't logged on since 2003. Yeah, I could finish them in my head or even write them out for myself, but it isn't the same. Half the fun in writing is sharing. And they always seem to drop off at the best parts.

They bug me so much that I've actually never left a fic unfinished, even if I had no readers. I don't start posting a fic until I have a fair idea of how it's going to end. There was one fic that I started posting, then lost all interest in it, so the last chapter was one of the characters reflecting on the past 8 months then I wrote a quick ending. It actually worked fairly decent for the story and if I ever have to, I'll do it again. I wish others would take that hour or two to do that for their stories they,re never going to complete.

 

These are my pet peeves for fanfic in general:

• Mary Sues and self inserts.
• Out of character behaviour (unless it makes sense, like if the story is an AU).
• Hurt/comfort simply for the sake of hurt/comfort.
• Authors who use some of the respective fandom's invented language(s) and doesn't give the reader a translation.
• Poorly written AUs and crossovers.
• Fics that have "Suck at summaries" and/or "Better than it sounds" notes at the end of the summary.
• Great stories that are abandoned.
• When an author constantly misspells the name of a character, place etc.
• Authors who do not do any research at all about what they are writing.

 

I've seen some great Sonic fanfics. And some pretty bad ones. And a lot of weird ones. Think preteen girls starting flamewars because THEIR character is the REAL girlfriend of insert-official-character-here (usually Tails) and they are going to get MARRIED goshdarnit, so stop implying that said character is cheating on them. XD I used to moderate a Sonic fanfiction archive, and it was... really interesting.

I find self inserts too much fun to be annoyed with them, at least when we're talking about the "pure" insert not the Mary Sue. A lot of young writers seem to think a self insert is just an excuse to be mouthy and have a bad attitude without any repercussions from the people around them. Because apparently characters like Darth Vader wouldn't give them the kind of retaliation their parents would?

I promise if I ever write a fanfic that uses a conlang, I will write a script that displays the translation to phrases when you mouse-over them. It's hard to have to scroll to the bottom of the page every three sentences to see what a character just said. I see some stories that have tons of "foreign" text and put all the translations in the footnotes, so you end up scrolling back and forth 20-30 times just in the course of one chapter. That kind of solution works well in real books, where chapters are split into multiple pages. Not so much online, where a full chapter might be anywhere from 5-20 pages long.

 

My pet peeves: the ever popular 'I suck at summaries' You're just not even trying! and those that write off oc's just because they're automatically not good enough, without giving a story a shot. Makes me sad; I always feel there's so much that can be gained from a fresh perspective.

 

The less popular but no less annoying: I know my characters are out of character, but read it anyway.

 

Any author notes that excuse a story's shortcomings with a cop-out should be condemned, really.

 

I think the 'I suck at summaries' is the one that gets me the most. If you can't do a 6th grade 3 sentence summary about your own story, then you oviously have no idea what you are doing.

I hate it when authors don't do their research. Profic authors are known for this as well though. I write too many medical drama type stories and I do too much research, but I learn some interesting things. Yes, in science fiction you can get around small details by using new technology or something. But I think when you base or have a condion or illness in your fic that is based off of, or is simmilar to something in the real world, it should have common origins and common symptoms. I once read a HP fic where Draco 'developed' Cerebral Palsy when he was a teen. I calmly pointed out that CP is caused by brain damage before, durring or shortly after birth... and the author told me I was wrong -.-

 

That author is a nitwit, then.

But, yes, when authors don't do their research, that bugs me. Particularly if it's something that could very easily be looked up on Wikipedia.

As for Draco "developing" cerebral palsy... that sounds like hurt/comfort for the sake of hurt/comfort. If there was comforting going on.

 

fanfics that don't use the format (you know, title, characters, etc) at the beg. of a fanfic or don't even give you an idea of when the story takes place...just a title and that's it. If they are newbies, I'll give them a break.....but seriously.....putting character names in the title, even just two or three, helps you get readers!

 

Yeah, there was comforting going on.

I'm probably guilty of hurt/comfort for the sake of hurt/comfort, but I'd like to think (most of) my plots go deeper than the hurt/comfort aspect. But I also understand that it's not for everyone.

I'm kinda OCD about knowing the timeframe of a fic, especially Star Wars. If someone doesn't have the typical Title, Author, Character, Timeframe form at the top of the fic, I generally don't read it.

I may have mentioned it before, but spacing really matters. If there isn't a space between paragraphs, I can't and won't read it. Most of the time it's newbies though, so I'll politely tell them.

 

Yeah, walls of text really annoy me. Particularly when there are no paragraphs separating dialogue and speakers, and everything is haphazardly thrown into one giant blockade of text. I've seen this many a time and informed one author about breaking it up, and he acknowledged that he knows that he should. But, he didn't want to do it. Want to know why?

He claimed that it made his fic too long.

 

Better a long chapter with readers than a short one minus readers.

 

Yeah, those blank lines really add to the length.

 

And we all know that a long fic is a bad thing.

 

Oh, god, NOOOOO. The horror of a long fanfic!

 

It makes me check under my bed every night. And my bed is on the floor. You never know where those long fanfics could be hiding.

 

If your plot goes deeper than the hurt/comfort then I don’t consider it “h/c for the sake of h/c”. I define “h/c for the sake of h/c” as stories whose aim is seemingly restricted to showing a private fantasy of comfort. In such stories, the comfort scene is the object, not plot and/or characterization; the “plot” consists of the event(s) of hurting and the (often unlikely) circumstances surrounding it, and is merely an excuse for portraying the comfort scene. Characterization, likewise, is limited to the necessity of arriving at the comfort scene, and therefore usually doesn’t have anything to do with how specific characters might realistically react to such situations.

Actually, I see the comfort scene in h/c as being very similar to the Mary Sue phenomena (and “sex for the sake of sex”); they are the products of a private fantasy and therefore have more to do with the author’s desire than things like plot, characterization, or canon. It’s the comfort scene or the Mary Sue (or the sex scene) which exclusively determines the narratives of the stories, and they therefore either completely lacks a plot or only have enough of a plot to ensure that the desired scene or character come about. Such stories stand apart from stories which have coherent narratives that are driven by plot or characterization.

I don't mind h/c when it helps drive the narrative (for instance, when it's used as a tool to develop and/or explore one or more characters, or help develop the theme in a story), but I dislike h/c when it is the exclusive driving force of the narrative.

 

I don't mind a straight h/c story as defined above if a vignette, which is just a slice of life moment anyway. Mind you, the one's I'm referring to have something that happened, comfort following, and one at least of the characters learning something about himself.

 

The h/c-kind of fics I'm talking about (the ones where the h/c exclusively drives the narrative) don't have any of that.

 

Often the type of h/c fics you're talking about include unlikely scenarios that cause unlikely injuries that require unlikely recovery time and for some unlikely reason, the injured party cannot be taken to a hospital, so the comforter gains unlikely skills to care for this individual in a very unlikely manner. The injuries are usually not researched, so the inflicted bodily areas are affected in an unlikely manner by an unlikely affliction that is very unlikely. I am noticing a trend here...

On that note of unlikely scenarios, this scenario that occurred in a profic is very, VERY unlikely. No remote possibility of such a thing happening, EVER. Sorry to tell you, authors, but your appendix will not detach itself from the junction of the small and large intestine, in order to travel into the chest (there's a diaphragm blocking its path, for starters) and then grow larger when it has no blood supply. No. Uh-uh. That won't ever, ever happen. And that, my friends, is where the suspension of disbelief will be shattered.

If you want to inflict pain and torture on your characters, it helps to research it. No matter the species.

 

If it was a non-human, you could make up an organ to get inflamed, but the appendix? What's wrong with Appendicitis?

EDIT: I mean, obviously, there's a lot wrong if you have appendicitis, but as a storytelling device, it would work fine.

 

Okay, I didn't even take biology in high school, but even I know that senario is pretty much impossible for human bodies.

In that case, I don't think I'm guilty. I always do a fair amount of research, and there's typically much more to the story.

 

• Most What If's, with the exception of a few good ones, such as http://www.fanfiction.net/s/7031369/1/The-Road-Less-Traveled-By -the Road less traveled by, and some of Onimiman's fiction because LOTF was that atrocious.

 

Oh, I'm not condemning using appendicitis as a storytelling device. I was condemning that weird implausible scenario, in which the appendix somehow ended up in the chest cavity. Goodwood cited that it was an example to show how alien even Humans can be, but the scene was shot down by my brother, who was in nursing for several years. Simply put: the scenario in Death Star in which a patient's appendix "travels" into the chest cavity would not happen.

Earlier, though, I decided to think of ways that it could happen. Perhaps that person had a deformity in which their intestines were inverted, as in the transverse colon was in the lower abdomen and the cecum was in the upper-right quadrant. Exceedingly rare, but it's plausible enough for fiction. I can swallow that. Now, that pesky appendix somehow herniates into the chest cavity, where entrapment causes it to become inflamed and require removal. That's possible. However, the only way for it to herniate into the chest cavity would be for that appendix to find its way to the opening in the diaphragm where the gullet comes through and scooch up in there. That's plausible, because small intestines will sometimes herniate into the chest cavity that way.

The problem: Let's say that somehow the appendix worms its way into the chest cavity because somehow, the guts (despite being held relatively in place within the abdominal cavity) moved enough for it to do so. So now that appendix is sharing space with the gullet. Possibly part of the cecum is wedged in there. That would become fatal, as entrapment causes the pressure to build, the guts to rupture, and nasty bacteria to flood both the chest and abdominal cavity, if they get through that opening in the diaphragm. Big-league infection sets in very quickly and that character is in BIG trouble.

Other than the scenario above, there's really no way that an appendix can "travel" into the chest cavity. There is a diaphragm blocking its path. Also, it's rather attached to the large intestine. Organs don't necessarily "travel" unless the tissue that more or less holds them in place is rather weak or nonexistent or tears. Even then, they usually don't get very far. If your appendix did decided to go unleashed, it would sooner hide somewhere in the abdomen, rather than somehow find its way into the chest. That diaphragm makes a pretty damn good blockade.

 

TrakNar Good grief! That's awful! I'm laughing hysterically at that.

You are right, that there are malformations that allow that to happen, but they are exceedingly rare, and the character will know about it from birth, or they will learn about it most likely very early, not just randomly.
I would say maybe 2 people ever have had a "travelling colon" (Chilaiditi syndrome) or the diaphragmatic hernia (hole in the diaphragm), had the caecum manage to enter the chest cavity, and then on top of it get appendicitis.

That's just really bad luck.

Oh how awful it is to have an interest in medicine, and then read some of these crazy made up medical happenings. It hurts my heart.