Homestuck. Partially involved with some of the later ones as well.
Pet Peeves in Fanfiction
- Thread starter LostHourglass
- Start date
As Ser_serendipity says, he is behind a curtain when he is stabbed.
And frame is incorrect because it usage in media, to my knowledge, stems from how we describe camera/pictures. But play's aren't viewed through a camera(well, recordings of plays can be viewed that way, but that's not the method of viewing they are designed for). Frame thus has a bunch of implications that do not and largely cannot apply to theater, which is fine. They're different media.
Homestuck.
Oh, you can already see aspects of that. Like, the whole 'what is a lemon' debate.
Hell, how many people in this forum right now understand what I mean by 'But I want to kill the Lampreys'?
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The Narrator
Disembodied Voice
- Location
- Somewhere Offscreen
Shakespeare's plays were intended for commoners as well. They were called "groundlings" because they could only afford cheap, standing room space at ground level, rather than actual seats. That's why Shakespeare plays are full of dirty jokes. The modern audience just doesn't get them because the slang is different. Hamlet has a line that, if updated to the modern parlance, is basically, "Did you think I was trying to get all up in that vag?" Macbeth has a bit by a minor character about how he loves drinking but can't get it up when he's drunk. Titus Andronicus is basically a weird, ultraviolent Tarantino film of a play.
- Location
- United States
Speaking of death scenes in Hamlet and bad fanfiction: In the Second Quarto version, Hamlet's last words are "The rest is silence." In the First Folio, he follows that with "Oh, oh, oh, oh!" Somebody (possibly a ham actor ad-libbing) seems to have had an interesting idea of what "silence" means.
This is important to keep in mind because most people aren't really familiar with stage plays anymore. Especially ones with large audiences and no real technological aids, not even opera glasses. Much less modern things like microphones.
The actors and their dialogue needed to be a lot more exaggerated and explicit (in the non-sexual sense) in many ways than some show on a TV or movie screen since the majority of the audience were far away, with a limited ability to see or hear what was going on. People watching the original Shakespearean plays had to rely on the un-amplified voices of the actors and just their naked eyes to see and hear what was going on.
- Location
- oregon, usa
- Pronouns
- He/Him
We are talking FR, in which the mechanics of the game set a full musket as having a max range of 120 feet, and a longbow has an accurate rang of 150 feet (and a maximum rang of 600 feet. Mechanically D&D is not particularly nice to guns. They do good damage, but their range sucks.
Also, class features are typically given as just working regardless of the speed of the attack. Monks can catch projectile attacks and throw them back against the attacker without caring how fast the projectile was going, for example. A Monk can only do this once per turn, the musket can only fire once (the "loading" property limits rate of fire, and is shared by crossbows and guns) per turn (where a turn is 6 seconds, so enjoy your utterly ludicrous 10 shots a minute musket), but a longbow can fire as many shots as the wielder has actions (two attacks per turn is not uncommon among martial classes) and ammunition.
Let me drop a little thought I have to explain why guns have such little rang or accuracy. The tech in FR is in its infancy. Put yourself in the mind of a regional leader and ask if you would rather invest in these fiddly firearm things that reqire relatively expensive and severely limited in capacity manufacturing, or invest into a similarly expensive school of magic.
From the first few guns in the real world to the point of fielding full armies equipped with muskets there is a span of centuries. With access to wizards and their spells and without any certainty that guns will get all that much better, guns are of interest only to a rare few inventors. For now. Leaders with spare coin might look instead toward establishing a school of wizardry to feed their forces a steady supply of casters, or to sponsoring to mystic education of promising candidates who can come back to their home later with practical skills and abilities.
I hope some of the context here is helpful.
- Location
- Elsewhere
Honestly I'm less concerned with whether a setting has guns or not, and more annoyed when they're all mixed together.
Usually this comes up with game settings, where you have one person fighting with their bare hands, one person fighting with a machine gun, and a killer robot with laser swords all in the same room.
It doesn't even matter who the author says "wins," the question is why they decided to do it?
If some rando villager who learned to fight in bar brawls can fight off an army with guns, then why does anyone use guns?
If some mook can pick up a gun from a box in the slums and use it to kill the dragon, why are people still trying to fight in melee?
The reason is so the game can have variety, and it doesn't really bother me when playing, but when the fanfics start up and try to justify it...
Usually this comes up with game settings, where you have one person fighting with their bare hands, one person fighting with a machine gun, and a killer robot with laser swords all in the same room.
It doesn't even matter who the author says "wins," the question is why they decided to do it?
If some rando villager who learned to fight in bar brawls can fight off an army with guns, then why does anyone use guns?
If some mook can pick up a gun from a box in the slums and use it to kill the dragon, why are people still trying to fight in melee?
The reason is so the game can have variety, and it doesn't really bother me when playing, but when the fanfics start up and try to justify it...
Night
Widow Null
- Location
- Hoff
Which, of course, is obviously not true. That's just the range at which the game has decided you can successfully hit. The bullet isn't going to magically stop or even necessarily be slowed enough to be not dangerous at that range.
D&D doesn't really have effective rules for massed fire as you'd expect on a battlefield, in which you'd expect even bows to not be firing at individuals, but blocks of bows firing together at mostly other blocks of infantry. That's fine. It's an individually focused system and setting. But that also means you have to take stats like this with a hefty grain of salt, because they describe how to use certain weapons, like spears, or bows, or guns, to their worst advantage. The reality of this is it describes how the pegasus rider would fight but not their targets whether armed with bows or guns; they would be massed together, firing a hundred shots in a coordinated volley, achieving with volume what would not be possible with individual accuracy at that range.
(The rock paper scissors answer to massed infantry blocks is of course wizards, who substitute for artillery in this analogy. But then the answer there is another wizard, so you end up with infantry blocks fighting anyways while the wizards duel.)
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Pethrai Darkos
Murder Ensued
The bullet doesn't need to magically stop. Gravity and bullet drop dictates an absolute maximum range which is less than that of a bow, and significantly less if you're talking Ottoman matchlocks instead of the Napoleonic era flintlocks that came centuries of kingdoms investing in making a better gun later. A quick search puts a musket's absolute maximum range as less than (some) bows maximum effective range and that's before taking into account magical weapons or supernatural ability.
It does have rules for that. It's called having your block of twenty make twenty attacks at the opposing block of twenty.
The Narrator
Disembodied Voice
- Location
- Somewhere Offscreen
It was more than 120 feet, however. An arquebus would be pretty inefficient past 30 meters, but it had a max range of about 100 meters. You wouldn't have control over what you hit at the range, but you wouldn't have much control over what you hit firing an arrow at a 45 degree angle for maximum range, either. That's why both had groups of soldiers firing volleys.
I guess technically that's true, but it's certainly not an "effective" rule for handling volley fire or massed combat of any sort. "Have 19 guys take the Aid Another action to help the 20th guy shoot" would at least be less time consuming.
Pethrai Darkos
Murder Ensued
No an archer won't be accurate at 1800 meters firing at a 45 degree angle, but they are accurate enough to target shoot at 250 meters. No reason why they couldn't float at 150 meters and rain hell.
Thread Tax: when authors start off a rewrite by deleting the previous version. Like yeah it's your stuff and you can do what you want with it but it's still annoying, especially in fandoms that are mostly barren in the first place.
Axslashel
I am a pessimist not a realist.
- Location
- Land of the Midnight Sun
Everyone has their own style of fighting that works for them. The weapon represents their values and personality rather than a simple tool. What is natural for one might be incomprehensible to another. That is how I see works operating on the Fighting Games interpretation of weapon diversity. Works just as well in written works in my opinion if that is how it wants to portray things.
- Pronouns
- Male
The two times I rewrote a story, I had different approaches. The first rewrite, I deleted each chapter as I replaced it. This was only a spelling/grammar/ paragraph clean up so no plot actually changed. I was just horribly embarrassed by my first stories terrible grammar.
The second time, I just spoiler tagged the old chapter and replaced the posts with the new version as I updated them. This time I did make plot changes and felt new readers deserved the same level of information as the older readers.
I don't like rewwrites that don't actually address the original fics problem. Usually the rewrite dies for the exact same reason as the original, it just looks better getting to the end now. Did the story get blotted with characters? Cut some of them in the rewrite. Did the plot get convoluted? Drop some threads that just make the story messy.
TBH this is especially awful because a good 99.9% of fanfic rewrites never get off the ground; it's "man my old writing sucks, let's try again from the start" on a fic that hasn't updated in years in the first place, gets 3 chapters into the rewrite, then dies again forever. So now you've got some short-handed remake and no original to go back to, and it's just terrible all around.
Vyslanté
The self is a prison
- Location
- European Union
Writing three lines about what happens isn't hard. Making it so these lines make you want to read the story is.
People using "logic" to change or add elements to a story and then using the stuff they "deduced" to prove that characters are stupider or eviler than the source material clearly meant to depict them as and in contrast to the source's tone and themes is a pretty classic peeve.
Like, if someone wants to say that a story is bad due to its plot holes/inconsistencies/ambiguities, then go ahead, but if this important character was actually super evil or that character could have easily become super OP if they just used common knowledge and did something super simple, then something that important to the plot and characters and such would have at least been mentioned in canon by now, and canon was clearly written as if that wasn't the case.
Like, if someone wants to say that a story is bad due to its plot holes/inconsistencies/ambiguities, then go ahead, but if this important character was actually super evil or that character could have easily become super OP if they just used common knowledge and did something super simple, then something that important to the plot and characters and such would have at least been mentioned in canon by now, and canon was clearly written as if that wasn't the case.
Sometimes a character has a distinctive name. Sometimes a fanfic writer will have a future version of that character have a kid
Neither of these things are bad, but what is bad is when the fanfic writer decides to be clever and have the name of the kid be a riff on the parent character's name, and the kid always seems to have that name regardless of which fanfic author is writing that specific plot.
And the name isn't even that clever, it's usually the first thing you'd think of when you try to come up with a name for the child of the character with a distinctive name, but it's everywhere and it's infuriating in how uncreatively "clever" it is.
This is a roundabout way of saying that I see Yang from RWBY with a kid named Yin one more time, I'm going to fucking scream
Neither of these things are bad, but what is bad is when the fanfic writer decides to be clever and have the name of the kid be a riff on the parent character's name, and the kid always seems to have that name regardless of which fanfic author is writing that specific plot.
And the name isn't even that clever, it's usually the first thing you'd think of when you try to come up with a name for the child of the character with a distinctive name, but it's everywhere and it's infuriating in how uncreatively "clever" it is.
This is a roundabout way of saying that I see Yang from RWBY with a kid named Yin one more time, I'm going to fucking scream
Hykal94
Orange Estus Kitteh
- Location
- Firelink Shrine
You can say Boruto, we all know.
The Narrator
Disembodied Voice
- Location
- Somewhere Offscreen
I was gonna say Trunks and Chibi-Usa.
- Location
- Home
Eh, in Trunks' case, all of their names are puns.
WhiteNights
Notorious Phoneposter
- Pronouns
- She/Her
That's what came to my mind as well.
But after factchecking (because nobody wants to be wrong on the internet), apparently it's a riff on Neji's name, rather than Naruto's.
Article: "Boruto" (ボルト) is the Japanese pronunciation of the English word "bolt". His name is a reference to his first cousin, once removed; Neji, whose name means "screw" (捻子). Masashi Kishimoto initially intended to name Naruto's son "Menma" (メンマ) or "Shinachiku" (シナチク), both being names for seasoned bamboo shoots
Name still sucks.
You just reminded me of Star Wars. Revan's son is named VANER of all things. They weren't even trying to be clever, they just used a fucking ANAGRAM.
Well at least it's in good company with all the professional fiction that has Alucards who are descendents of Dracula.