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Pet Peeves in Fanfiction

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Kazuto Morimoto said:
I really don't know why this happens to me or why I have such physical reactions to this kind of thing. Like a really bad case of stomachaches and sometimes makes my head feel light.
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I have trouble disconnecting myself from what I'm reading too. It's why I don't read dark stories and sometimes (silently) quit fics in rage or revulsion when I strongly dislike whatever I just read. I know I have anxiety, but I'm not sure if that's related.

As for pet peeves, one fandom I'm interested in seems to have a running theme of whether it's ok for superheroes to kill. Unfortunately, most of the stories with this theme handle it badly. One story I read had the hero ruminating over how he could never support villains being killed when there was a chance that they could be redeemed and some of them had bad childhoods. This would have been more sympathetic if a baby hadn't died earlier in the chapter because of a serial arsonist that had broken out of prison yet again. The hero didn't even take that death into consideration for his internal debate.

Another fic might have a different hero being shown as obviously correct for being willing to kill villains. However, the author will then ignore the repercussions that killing villains should have. A villain who knows that the hero is willing to kill is likely to take more drastic actions than when they're dealing with a hero they know won't kill them. The villain is not going to just continue their routine and let themself be killed.

If stories insist on addressing this issue, I'd prefer for it to be shown as a complicated issue with various heroes taking different stances. It doesn't have to be treated the same as the author's real-world beliefs because the real world doesn't have superheroes and supervillains. The vast majority of people sent to prison in the real world do not break out of prison and commit terrorist attacks.
 
Chronocidal said:
we appear to agree on the same basic underlying concepts and conceits, with the only differences being in the choice of definition for the term "magic" and quite what thus qualifies therein.
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Okay but do we ?

The initial kickoff was that a relatively recent upheaval of peoples understanding of reality should make them more easily accept others; a Worm character shouldn't go 'oh so you're a parahuman' at Naruto, a SG1 character shouldn't go 'wow, cool robots' at Zuko, they should be willing to countenance that these people actually have magic powers(ignoring, for the moment, that parahuman powers are in essence magic because they are a different KIND of magic).

Which is a much more brittle, one might even say structurally unsound, argument than 'this observable effect which we do not understand yet might be related to this observable effect we do not understand yet.' or 'this observable effect which we do not understand yet might be related to this observable effect we understand'.
 
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Anyone that says in Worm of all settings a power wouldn't be parahuman is ignoring what worm is.
aka, shards are abilities that are eaten/condensed nonsense from other realities/worlds that the entities have already ate.
Chakra would be a shard.
Stands, a shard.
For hells sake the shards 'first' ability was the possibility to access other versions of thier own home planet.
They are multiverse trash compactors that are actively trying to prevent the end of the multiverse themselves by eating everything to see if there is an answer to stop the end of all things.
 
Kazuto Morimoto said:
Why is it that I don't feel comfortable with names in fanfics?

To clarify, when a character is named like "Kiss Shot Acerola Under Blade" I become confused, bemused, amused and other -used. I think to myself "They really named the character that?!?" and then slightly cringe but won't feel any discomfort. But in the end, I will find it endearing and then it will grow on to me which leads to acceptance.

On the other hand, when someone name their OC "Nexus Ultima" I proceed to cringe, grimace and have stomachaches(this tends to happen when I read bad fics for some reason) really hard. Questioning why a lot of people thinks this is a good name.

I really don't know why this happens to me or why I have such physical reactions to this kind of thing. Like a really bad case of stomachaches and sometimes makes my head feel light.
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Depends on setting. Both the names you listed would fit right in if used in Gundam, where we already have South Burning, Full Frontal, and Revive Revival as names.
 
Pet Peeve: Turning up the Contrast

You have a setting with a lot of factions with complex and nuanced interests balancing many good and bad goals.
Or maybe you have a bunch of flimsy justifications and retcons desperately trying to explain why everyone is crazy.
The result is a setting that is filled with shades of grey.

Then a fanfic author comes along and says "to hell with moral complexity, I'm going black and white."

I don't mean an AU genre shift where the world is different and the people are adjusted to it.
I don't mean a story where the MC (or author) are simply oblivious to the complexity.

I mean a story where minor changes have been made to the background to "clarify" the various dubious decisions with little to no mechanical effect on the rest of the story.
The massacre never happened.
The disease can be cured by some easily accessible means.
The threat never existed.

The characters are still doing the actions, they just lack half the justifications for why.

This gives the protagonist the freedom to smash through the setting without any thought whatsoever.


The side characters end up bashed/lionized, having all their decisions rendered simple and obvious.

The story is weirdly hypocritical in a meta sense, because the MC may loudly complain about how everyone regards things as black and white, while their own actions are "grey."

The world itself is less interesting, having lost a great deal of detail and structure.

And ultimately the main character is stripped of the opportunity to make a serious moral decision, instead being handed an obvious solution on a silver platter.
 
I'm going to repeat my meta-dislike of fanfiction sites that have downvotes/etc. I've literally only ever seen it used as a way to brigade stuff, and I wouldn't like it even if it was brigading actual sketchy shit, let alone the use I often see it get used as, which is, "This is controversial/gay/queer/trans, I'm going to downvote it as a matter of course."
 
Anaja said:
Got a link?
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I assume they mean The Dragon King's Temple, which is a quite good fic, although the author's not as familiar with SG-1 as with ATLA and did make some small errors.

The Dragon-King's Temple - Chapter 1 - Kryal - Stargate SG-1 [Archive of Our Own]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
archiveofourown.org

Someone complaining about Carter trying to find a technological explanation for bending is... interesting, considering that "your gods are charlatans and their magic is fake" is pretty much the basic premise of Stargate.
 
The Narrator said:
Someone complaining about Carter trying to find a technological explanation for bending is... interesting, considering that "your gods are charlatans and their magic is fake" is pretty much the basic premise of Stargate.
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Thinking about it, it would be kind of funny to have a story where the "gods" were confronted with that and just thought it was something obvious that everyone already knew.


"Of course divine powers are based on science and technology! What did you think they were? Magic?"

"..."

"...I mean, you do know there's no such thing as magic, right?"

"We totally thought they were magic."
 
It often comes down to definitions.
Because in settings where there is "magic", that magic is basicly just science and technology.
What someone defines as "god", can very much depend on their culture, and even the term god can have some heavy cultural implications because that just the word in one language so it might not necessarily translate properly over different cultural/religious groups.

I'd rather see a story where someone goes to "educate" the planet of hats people how their magic is just technology and the gods are not all powerful and can be killed, only to meet utter confusion over why these newcomers are babbling such obvious things and expecting that to change things.
 
Valmond said:
I'd rather see a story where someone goes to "educate" the planet of hats people how their magic is just technology and the gods are not all powerful and can be killed, only to meet utter confusion over why these newcomers are babbling such obvious things and expecting that to change things.
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Especially that gods can be killed. The response should absolutely be "well duh, that happened plenty during the GodWar" because I dare you to find a pantheonistic religion that didn't have a GodWar or two. The idea that god(s) is an unkillable and infallible entity is… I mean I can't say it's unique to judeo-christian faiths because I'm not a scholar of world religions but it's not exactly common.
 
Pethrai Darkos said:
Especially that gods can be killed. The response should absolutely be "well duh, that happened plenty during the GodWar" because I dare you to find a pantheonistic religion that didn't have a GodWar or two. The idea that god(s) is an unkillable and infallible entity is… I mean I can't say it's unique to judeo-christian faiths because I'm not a scholar of world religions but it's not exactly common.
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Yes; I've noticed a fair amount of "they aren't really a god" arguments in & about fiction are made with the unthinking assumption that a "real god" must fit the Judeo-Christian model, when most gods of myth didn't.

If you told some ancient person that "X isn't really a god, they are just an immortal being from the stars with powers beyond your understanding" many of them would probably look at you with puzzlement and ask "But...how is that not a god?" And in fantasy settings where beings called "gods" actually exist it's even worse, since it's likely that the local definition of a god is to metaphorically point at one and say "That's a god".
 
Pethrai Darkos said:
Especially that gods can be killed. The response should absolutely be "well duh, that happened plenty during the GodWar" because I dare you to find a pantheonistic religion that didn't have a GodWar or two. The idea that god(s) is an unkillable and infallible entity is… I mean I can't say it's unique to judeo-christian faiths because I'm not a scholar of world religions but it's not exactly common.
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In this case I think it's a matter of viewing the concept of "god" through an ancient Greek lens, rather than an Abrahamic one. You're right about unkillable gods not being particularly common, but the Greek pantheon is an exception (hence their GodWarring getting resolved with imprisonment and the odd mutilation rather than death) and Europe has a whole historic era characterized by a raging Classical-antiquity boner.
 
There is a difference between "gods can be killed by other gods" and "gods can be killed by a sarcastic guy with a submachine gun," which is usually what happens in Stargate SG-1.
 
So the sarcastic guy had a magic weapon, and comes from a society where almost everyone is a sorcerer of some kind.
So what?
 
Even that misses the fundamental point that the Goa'uld masqueraded as gods to rule people. They did not present themselves as being able to be killed by mortals, not even with magic. (And between personal shields and medical tech that can effectively raise the dead, it was pretty hard to do so and make it stick.)
 
Yes; the Goa'uld were deceptive and manipulative; they were con artists from space, so one might as well call them "fake gods" without quibbling about definitions. Depending on how one defines "god" they were either fraudulently claiming to be gods, or gods that were frauds but they were definitely frauds either way.
 
Avernus said:
Yes; the Goa'uld were deceptive and manipulative; they were con artists from space, so one might as well call them "fake gods" without quibbling about definitions. Depending on how one defines "god" they were either fraudulently claiming to be gods, or gods that were frauds but they were definitely frauds either way.
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Pretty much, definably they are gods but only if your definition doesn't include respectable.
No different than the definitions of good and evil tend to be.
 
I mean, if just being worshipped makes someone a god then they are "gods" the way a real life cult leader who convinces their followers to worship them as a god is one. But that kind of godhood just means you are good at manipulating people, not some sort of higher being.
 
They are also immensely more physically capable (in a host, when they aren't they're a slimy worm-snake thing IIRC) than a standard human, even before their tech comes into play; that's enough to be a god in many belief systems.

God doesn't necessarily mean 'higher being' in any way but literally better than a human at some things; sometimes not even that.

But yeah the Goa'uld are actually the opposite of false gods in Stargate; they are the gods named and worshipped by many Earth religions. Like, literally the same people. They might not be gods by your standards but they are, in-universe, gods by name and history.
 
Kazuto Morimoto said:
I think he is talking about an ordinary gun not the magical kind.
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Vyslanté said:
He's saying that as far as the people on the planet of hats are concerned, a P-90 is a magic weapon, and that as such it would not shatter their mythology to have some guy with a powerful magic weapon to kill a god.
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And, to push it bit further, even if you spent large amount of time explaining how the gun works, and the scientific principles behind it, the gun could still be a powerful magic weapon.
Because even if you learn how the magic trick is done, it does not stop it from being a magic trick.

Much of the "that's no god" and "that's not magic" stuff in fiction comes from a world view that is rooted in fairly secular, and Christian, world view.
Someone living in a less secular, or less rooted in empiricism, society, might not be able to understand why all these newcomers are so exited about gods being exactly what they always knew gods to be, powerful but limited beings, or why they keep incisting magic is not real while constantly performing it.
 
Kadmus said:
But yeah the Goa'uld are actually the opposite of false gods in Stargate; they are the gods named and worshipped by many Earth religions. Like, literally the same people. They might not be gods by your standards but they are, in-universe, gods by name and history.
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Correction: the official lore is that the Goa'uld assumed the identities of the gods of the people they enslaved rather than inspiring every religion in the ancient world.

Valmond said:
Someone living in a less secular, or less rooted in empiricism, society, might not be able to understand why all these newcomers are so exited about gods being exactly what they always knew gods to be, powerful but limited beings,
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Gods in polytheism might not be omnipotent, but neither are they usually so weak that they could be killed by mortals. People in Ancient Greece didn't think they could overpower and kill Zeus, or they wouldn't have put up with his shit to begin with. Thinking that one could challenge the gods was the origin of the word "hubris" and in the myths always led to defeat and ironic punishment.
 
The Narrator said:
Gods in polytheism might not be omnipotent, but neither are they usually so weak that they could be killed by mortals. People in Ancient Greece didn't think they could overpower and kill Zeus, or they wouldn't have put up with his shit to begin with. Thinking that one could challenge the gods was the origin of the word "hubris" and in the myths always led to defeat and ironic punishment.
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But at the same time there's a number of stories where mortals succeed (or at least get really close) at tricking gods. Sisyphus succeeded at chaining the God of Death, and the reason that stopped was because Ares intervened not because Thanatos was able to get himself out of it (details vary from version to version). There's also how Hercules got Atlas to take his place holding up the sky.

If a member of SG1 kills a Goa'uld the reaction is less going to be that the Goa'uld wasn't a god than it is that SG1 are demigods of some flavor or even full gods pulling the "one eyed traveler with ravens on his shoulders and a Not-Odin tee" schtick rather badly.
 
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