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Pet Peeves in Fanfiction

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Blaflaix said:
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Doing research for a fic can sometimes ruin the will to write a fic, but researching what you don't know really does help. For example, if I were writing a fic that starts off at boot camp, I'd look up a First Day of Boot Camp video on Youtube. If I wanted to learn more about court proceedings, I'd probably re-read Pound the Table.
 
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Plagiarisim is a big word and pretty much requires word for word copying with serial names filed off. Do you mean you've seen several fics copy paste the Full Metal Jacket speech but with different names?

Or do you mean knock off fics (like the B movies that get rushed out at the same time as blockbuster ones) that feel more like a highschooler had to write the whole movie down from memory?

the first is something I also hate and I blacklist those authors. But when it's the later, I can tell it's generally a newer writer and if I like the overall concept/ideas in the story, I should check out the next story they write to see if they improved.
 
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Any scene within a highly ordered structure is going to be similar in many respects. I'm not talking about those. I'm talking straight rip off, nearly word for word, and with corresponding reactions but passed off in-fic as the authors own writing.

The FMJ scene was just one example I've come across multiple times but in general I'll drop a fic for plagiarism if I recognize it. I despise a lack of originality in writing. Its also why I don't like canon rehashes.
 
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On the other hand I very much like setting A as told with setting B's characters. Seeing who the author would pick from say the characters in in Touhou would be the best fit for the sergeant Hartmann role is hilarious (my choice would be Kasen). The entire Full Metal Jacket movie done this way would probably be pretty boring but throwing in a reference to famous scenes from it can be pretty hilarious. Of course the characters you use must behave slightly differently because while similar to the ones from setting A they are not identical.

It tends to work better in a visual format because the parody/reference becomes more obvious that way. And in fanart it works the absolute best. Seeing the album cover of Rainbow's "Difficult to Cure" redrawn with the cast of Madoka Magicka was amazing.
 
Sonifri said:
Any scene within a highly ordered structure is going to be similar in many respects. I'm not talking about those. I'm talking straight rip off, nearly word for word, and with corresponding reactions but passed off in-fic as the authors own writing.

The FMJ scene was just one example I've come across multiple times but in general I'll drop a fic for plagiarism if I recognize it. I despise a lack of originality in writing. Its also why I don't like canon rehashes.
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That is such an iconic scene that it has almost universal recognition. I just can't see someone copying it as anything but for laughs, with tongue in cheek. Like Tanya the Evil did.
 
Chapter/scene transitions that make no sense. Like, for instance, the character is exposed as having done something impossible in a mundane setting, surrounded by witnesses, many of which would probably go all pitchfork and flambe on them. Then the chapter/scene ends on the cusp of violence and we jump cut to later, with no reference to how the character got out of there or what happened and the entire thing is treated as though it is either resolved or never happened.
 
FeigningGrey said:
I must not plagiarise. Plagiarism is the mind killer
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I am never forget the day
I first meet the great Lobachevsky
In one word he told me secret of success in mathematics:
Plagiarize
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the vale said:
Chapter/scene transitions that make no sense. Like, for instance, the character is exposed as having done something impossible in a mundane setting, surrounded by witnesses, many of which would probably go all pitchfork and flambe on them. Then the chapter/scene ends on the cusp of violence and we jump cut to later, with no reference to how the character got out of there or what happened and the entire thing is treated as though it is either resolved or never happened.
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I actually like this occasionally when it's treated as sort of a down low noodle incident. There's a great deal of room for absurdity in that kind of setup, it just needs to be played right.

It do be cruddy when it ain't played, though. That's just teasin' in the worst way.
 
Plans, powers, someone is magic, lance, daemons
Should be a plan, a power, someone is magical, if you're not on a horse then it's a spear, demons coz daemons are nice, get your mythology correct and not just throw similar words coz they sound cooler.
 
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ZhaWarudo said:
Plans, powers, someone is magic, daemons
Should be a plan, a power, someone is magical, demons coz daemons are nice, get your mythology correct.
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Demon and daemon are, unfortunately, the same word separated by hundreds of years. If you want to make the distinction clear may I recommend daimon, the original Greek spelling for the lack-of-moral-judgement word for supernatural entities?

(Also you can, in fact, have multiple independent plans and powers so I'm not sure why those bother you?)

Tax: When a work purports to be one genre and never actually bothers to be that genre; if I'm looking for mystery fics then I do not want to be bombarded with bad romances (rah rah ah-ah-ah etc.)
 
Pet Peeve: Crossover fics where only one character is brought over just to appear cool and only make minor changes to help out. This is not because the character is UNABLE to help more, but the author has apparently decided that the crossover character will work to maintain the canon timeline because "bad things have to happen to get the best timeline results" or something like that. In the latest example I've run into, the crossover character doesn't even have the ability to see the future! He just knows another character who can see all of the future timelines, but the other character does NOT share their knowledge nearly as readily or in detail in canon as the fic suggests.

I dropped the story I ran into when the crossover character tells Tony Stark to continue with a project that ends up killing AT LEAST hundreds of people because "bad things have to happen to get the best timeline results". Look, I might not know everything about the MCU canon, but I don't think that what Ultron did in Sokovia is necessary to achieve the "best timeline". It's definitely not the best timeline for all of the people who died there.
 
I always find it funny when someone puts in "rational/ IRL logic" into their fics just because something in canon doesn't make any sense to them. Even if the the setting clearly ignores/obliterates it a lot.

Like Spiral Power in gurren lagann, the "game system" or other variation of it on every isekai, or even the Olympian Mechas and GudaGuda in FGO to list a few.

Especially, trying to apply logic to GudaGuda.
 
Kazuto Morimoto said:
I always find it funny when someone puts in "rational/ IRL logic" into their fics just because something in canon doesn't make any sense to them. Even if the the setting clearly ignores/obliterates it a lot.

Like Spiral Power in gurren lagann, the "game system" or other variation of it on every isekai, or even the Olympian Mechas and GudaGuda in FGO to list a few.

Especially, trying to apply logic to GudaGuda.
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Don't forget when they also proceed to ignore the imposibility of how bad things happen and still keep them in. So it's impossible that the character shounen wins a fight, but the bad guy just keeps his plot armor.
 
Melakias said:
Don't forget when they also proceed to ignore the imposibility of how bad things happen and still keep them in. So it's impossible that the character shounen wins a fight, but the bad guy just keeps his plot armor.
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This is something that always bothers me with people that complaint about shows:

Something good and/or convenient happens to the good guys?

"Plot armor! Mary sue! Deus ex machina!"

Something good and/or convenient happens to the bad guys?

*Complete silence*
 
Personally i get pissed at both.
Heroes should need to work for their victories.
But so should villains.

Way too many stories hand the villains such a strong plot armour that the heroes can't conceivably win without getting ridiculously lucky.
 
Along similar lines, the Heroes make some preparation which should help, and the villain completely blows through it making all that effort useless.
Not bypasses it, not out-prepares it, just completely ignores it.

Usually this happens with the more indirect conflicts.

Example:
The Heroes go to extreme efforts to hide their trail, and the villains catch up an indeterminate time later.
Maybe they would've caught up sooner without those efforts, but it makes no difference practically.
The Heroes made some costly decision, gained no benefit, and never reflect on it either to increase their efforts or discard them as useless.

As near as I can tell, the author wants to underline their work for some character development but doesn't want it to interfere in their very simple plot.



"We have to kill the witnesses."

"What? No! That's evil!"

"I don't like it, but I'm a Hard Man Making Hard Decisions™ and I'll do whatever it takes."

*One massacre, 10 minutes, and one capture later*

"So, we're caught."

"Yup."

"Any thoughts on that 'killing the witnesses' thing?"

"Nope. Not really."

"Like how it turned out to be completely useless?"

"Look, that was last chapter. It's over now. It has nothing to do with current events."
 
Effort should be, if not rewarded, then at least aknowledged.
It is ok if protagonists go to some lengths to prepare, and fail.
But if the audience can't honestly believe that anything they could have tried would have failed, then there's not much of a reason to care.
Because at that point you are no longer seeing people struggle or learn, you are just waiting for the timer to run out where the heroes suddenly win before the end credits.
 
Kazuto Morimoto said:
the "game system"
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It would be funny if someone actually used the lore of The Gamer manhwa. Ultimately it's the power of his own soul that chose how to express itself to him in a way that he could quickly acclimate to using his power. He's the Ichigo Kurosaki of his universe.

A regular person gaining the canon Gamer power would probably be capped at level one because their soul isn't strong enough to do more.
 
Sonifri said:
their soul isn't strong enough to do more.
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*pulls out ritual dagger* this, we can fix this, yesss

It wouldn't necessarily be an entirely uninteresting premise, though. Actual level cap would be like, what, five or six or something (whatever normal people were reading as, it tops out higher than that, but I don't quite remember what -- the mother at a minimum is shown with an expected adult level at one point, though), which would probably be enough for ID and zombie farming at a minimum, which is steady employment and crafting/trading shenanigans at the least. Gamer's shtick was remarkably broken compared to non-empowered folks even at low levels, it wouldn't take much of the canon empowerment to provide a lot of room to play with.

It'd quite possibly even open up a huge field to play with in interacting with the rest of the wild stuff in that setting, iirc there's nothing stopping a gaia-empowered individual from just going and learning some of the things that don't require world-soul fiat to learn. Like summoning literal shoggoths :V
 
The whole, only some souls are powerful/special enough, that annoys the hell out me and like when soul mates/bonds come up in fiction, I almost instantly drop a work.

Look at the people with the "strongest" souls on Earth right now, they really aren't that much more well off than anyone else. MAybe a "level or 2" above the average person at most outside of a very specific field. Sure Michael Phelps might be unbeatable in a pool but he's not better at everything physical he does.

People might have a few perks/skills that someone else doesn't, but the actual stats don't have that big of a range for people. No one in reality is actually as stubborn as people like Goku, otherwise we'd actually have people flying around and shooting out Ki blasts.

No living human has a soul as 'strong' as shonen characters and it's ridiculous to think otherwise.
 
No living human does, sure, but we don't even know if living humans have souls, at this point. In reality they're unmeasurable speculation at best, so far.

In a setting where a soul is an actual thing with identifiable effects, the story obviously becomes wildly different, heh. If you're dealing with a setting that's supposed to be non-magical or whatev', soul stuff is going to be a silly thing to include. If you're not dealing with that (and boy howdy is The Gamer setting in particular not dealing with that, though whether it's the power of souls or the power of magic genetics wasn't something that had been made clear up to the point I last caught up with it, heh), well... you're not dealing with that. Soul stuff may become a point of note.

... totes agree soul mate/bond stuff specifically tends to be a major negative, though. I can't recall ever encountering something that wasn't substantially worsened by its inclusion in the story, heh, for a whole pile of different reasons. Better just to leave that out.
 
Frumple said:
No living human does, sure, but we don't even know if living humans have souls, at this point. In reality they're unmeasurable speculation at best, so far.

In a setting where a soul is an actual thing with identifiable effects, the story obviously becomes wildly different, heh. If you're dealing with a setting that's supposed to be non-magical or whatev', soul stuff is going to be a silly thing to include. If you're not dealing with that (and boy howdy is The Gamer setting in particular not dealing with that, though whether it's the power of souls or the power of magic genetics wasn't something that had been made clear up to the point I last caught up with it, heh), well... you're not dealing with that. Soul stuff may become a point of note.

... totes agree soul mate/bond stuff specifically tends to be a major negative, though. I can't recall ever encountering something that wasn't substantially worsened by its inclusion in the story, heh, for a whole pile of different reasons. Better just to leave that out.
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And that's why it's a peeve for me. If the Author is acting like it's all real (or at least believes it as much as astrologists believe in a horoscope), it generally makes me think it's something written by an inexperienced teen.

If it's just being explored as an idea and the Author isn't backing it as reality, I can give it a chance.

I'm just so tired of teenage authors writing about a character who wins because they have a soul so much stronger than everyone else in the entire series and it's very clearly an Authorial insert(maybe even a SI). Specifically with them acting like it's a new idea and not something done to death.

The Soulbond stuff just tends to be the female version of the "strong shonen soul"
 
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Flightless Man said:
No living human has a soul as 'strong' as shonen characters and it's ridiculous to think otherwise.
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It also has some unfortunate implications.

The Heroes save the village!
Why did the village need to be saved?
Their souls weren't strong enough.

That's a very short step to considering them "lesser" or "NPCs" or "side characters."

Making it a factual part of the setting just makes it worse.


And in most cases, the author probably doesn't intend that.
What they're really trying to do is justify their untrained idiot protagonist being the most powerful person in the world.
Yes, they work hard, but so does everyone else.
Why is the moron the most successful?
They have more mana/power/soul!
They are a superior lifeform!
That's why they have a harem!
Eugenics!
 
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This mention of soul-mate type stuff has reminded me of the most uncomfortable part of the Raptor's in the Rainforest series of fanfics.
There is this casual, "of course this is normal", and heavily present reference to how the bond between human and raptor in that series is taking the place of a bond that is usually human to human in the setting.

The way it is phrased is just so odd. As if it is something that even the readers should find clear and obviously a thing humans have.

It doesn't entirely ruin the series for me, but I have not gone back to it in a while because of how odd that was.
 
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