Remove ads

Pet Peeves in Fanfiction

Reader mode
Pet Peeve - Weird readers that leave borderline unreadable, nonsensical 'suggestions.'

This isn't exactly in fanfiction but I think it's related enough. I've never had to contend with this but every time I see comments like those, I have to wonder if there's a bot behind them. I kind of hate them, first of all, their comments are literally unreadable 90% of the time. Like, they're absolutely terrible at English which raises the question of why and how they're even reading these stories.

The real big thing that gets on my nerves however are the comments' contents. It's always dictatorial 'how things should go' and they're always advocating mary sue writing. For example, let's say there's a fine Jon Snow SI then you get these readers that come in and say stuff like "explore Winterfell crypts for dragon eggs." Do these people have no sense of plot? What is this? These commenters are the type to cheer for stupid harems and neglect fanfics. They're not a big deal, no writer with two brain cells to rub together listens to them but they get on my nerves.

Also, I've found they're most common on AH and FF.NET, of course, I'm convinced that the latter is populated by people who are high as a kite so I'm not too surprised in that case. Evidence is in literally every FF.NET comment section.

Another Pet Peeve - When paragraphs have no empty line between them.

I just can't read fanfics that have that kind of writing style. It makes things muddled for me. Also, too short paragraphs combined with this make for absolutely unreadable.
 
Last edited:
Information: Thread Opened Again
  • Staff Post
    • thread opened again
    I have opened the thread once more. Thank you for your patience and make sure to remain on-topic and respect the thread policy.

    @Prof.MoreRight has received a Staff Notice for the following post:

    Prof.MoreRight said:
    I hate it when a AU story acts like minors and adults having sex should be considered healthy and normal even when the author claims otherwise outside the fic, oh I know what some of you folks online really believe and if I had my way you would be barred from ever being around kids.
    "Oh it's just a natural, consequence stop being mean." Really!? That's an interesting and statistically improbable consequence...

    Some may call me an impatient prude, and to that I say F you as if I am not into you or what you are into then I am not into you or what you are into, and you should not expect people to act like sycophants.
    This does not make me homophobic or prudish any more than it makes anyone here that begs to differ heterophobic or lecherous.
    I know considering what some folks are like, the current climate, and how popular the described category of fanfiction is I might get threadbanned for this, but it has to be said and especially seeing as not everyone actually shares this interest.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    The Rules of Sufficient Velocity do not consider it acceptable to compare homosexuality to pedophilia, and I expect that you will not do it again.

    Thank you all for your time.
     
  • Staff Post
    • ...okay, it's been a while since I've been to this thread (or SV in general) and I gotta ask: how often does this thread gets locked anyways? For the last year or so, I've just kept getting notifications for Staff Warning or Thread Locks over and over.

    You know what, whatever, it is what it is I suppose.

    SpiraSpira said:
    Harem fics break my immersion more. To the point where I can't even read them, these days. Gaining the powers of a saiyin is much more believable than one young man (its generally always young men!) keeping 4 or 5 women satisfied without someone strangling someone else.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    Eh, it really depends I guess. So long as they have good chemistry, then it's generally fine with me. Granted, I've spend a decade reading various eroge, and is a giant Rance fan (and Alicesoft in general) since the days of Sengoku. So for me, it's jut a core conceit of the story that it's "possible" so what's left is just making sure that the various chemistries fits well enough and that it doesn't drag the story down.

    And it's a wish fulfillment / fantasy thing. Which is fine, as long as it's entertaining. Everyone has their own fantasies - I don't have any problems with the amount of M/M stuff on AO3, it's not my thing, but I respect it (and I've even read a few that's written well and doesn't lean too much on just its M/M aspect). By the same token, I think it's fine to also enjoy these kind of story, even if I do have my own criteria as to what makes them interesting read.

    Of course, lately I've been reading a lot from QQ than any other sites, and the venn diagram of people who are okay with harem and people who reads QQ is probably almost a circle within a circle.
     
    BeeBadidoo said:
    Also, I've found they're most common on AH and FF.NET, of course, I'm convinced that the latter is populated by people who are high as a kite so I'm not too surprised in that case. Evidence is in literally every FF.NET comment section.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    What is AH?

    And yeah those comments throw out the most absurd things. And that is if the commentors aren't ranting about the main character having flaws.
     
    Rakkis157 said:
    What is AH?

    And yeah those comments throw out the most absurd things. And that is if the commentors aren't ranting about the main character having flaws.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    AH is alternatehistory.com. There's some really good stuff on there albeit locked behind having to make an account. To the second part, absolutely, I don't know how a person can come up with these things. I highly suspect they're really young, they remind me of myself when I was like ten.
     
    BeeBadidoo said:
    Also, I've found they're most common on AH and FF.NET, of course, I'm convinced that the latter is populated by people who are high as a kite so I'm not too surprised in that case. Evidence is in literally every FF.NET comment section.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    It's probably that FFN has a bunch of kids and people from other countries whose experience with English are subbed anime, manga scanlation, and LN/WN translation blogs. And also, I know someone who is like that, and they're from a SE Asian country like me but not as proficient with English -- in which case, yes, they don't 100% understand English, but, like with watching subbed anime, you can sort of infer what the story's doing.

    But I get what you mean, sometimes it is kind of annoying, but it is what it is. The internet invites everyone from everywhere with any level of understanding of English language, writing, and preferences. It's less worse on platforms like SB and SV, as they do have a decent amount of barrier of entry over "just click on the review box, and send an anonymous suggestion."
     
    Rakkis157 said:
    What is AH?

    And yeah those comments throw out the most absurd things. And that is if the commentors aren't ranting about the main character having flaws.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    alternatehistory.com -- theres a lot of, unsurprisingly, alternate history stories there. examples are, what if germany won WW2 (man in high castle style), what if France held off Germany in WW2, what if Genghis Khan died earlier,later, what if the Qing dynasty didn't implode, how would that change things, would Mao have still had a revolution if it wasn't against ROC? etc etc etc. There are tons of them.

    Also they have a lot of ISOT style stories, like a single person or a group up to a whole nation going back into time, etc. It's actually quite amusing if you like history. (These are my favourite, actually as I have a guilty pleasure for stories where people from modern era go back in time, especially if they have a chemistry book with them!)
     
    Last edited:
    Feng Lengshun said:
    Eh, it really depends I guess. So long as they have good chemistry, then it's generally fine with me. Granted, I've spend a decade reading various eroge, and is a giant Rance fan (and Alicesoft in general) since the days of Sengoku. So for me, it's jut a core conceit of the story that it's "possible" so what's left is just making sure that the various chemistries fits well enough and that it doesn't drag the story down.

    And it's a wish fulfillment / fantasy thing. Which is fine, as long as it's entertaining. Everyone has their own fantasies - I don't have any problems with the amount of M/M stuff on AO3, it's not my thing, but I respect it (and I've even read a few that's written well and doesn't lean too much on just its M/M aspect). By the same token, I think it's fine to also enjoy these kind of story, even if I do have my own criteria as to what makes them interesting read.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    "harem fic and gay romance are the same kind of wish fulfillment/fantasy" is a wild take, my guy.
     
    Squirtodyle said:
    "harem fic and gay romance are the same kind of wish fulfillment/fantasy" is a wild take, my guy.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    ...well, when you put it like that...

    I mean, it's not like they're mutually exclusive? I have nothing against people who want a gay harem with multiple MPreg twin babies. Let it be said that the dream of having your own loving harem and big families says nothing about it being for specific gender/sexuality.
     
    BeeBadidoo said:
    Another Pet Peeve - When paragraphs have no empty line between them.

    I just can't read fanfics that have that kind of writing style. It makes things muddled for me. Also, too short paragraphs combined with this make for absolutely unreadable.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    From a style-guide perspective, the important thing to remember here is that the new paragraph should be indented when this happens. For example, books published (professionally) in the UK and Commonwealth will have no blank-line between paragraphs, first line of the paragraph is indented, use single-quotes for dialogue, and use italics for thoughts. Whereas books published in the USA will have a blank-line between paragraphs, no indentation, use double-quotes for dialogue, and use single-quotes for thoughts.

    US StyleUK/Commonwealth Style
    Chronocidal looked at the thread. 'Ah,' he thought, 'I know what is causing at least part of this disconnect, and hopefully I can explain it.'

    The issue was, to some extent, that many forums and websites would ignore Tabs, and automatically delete extra spaces — and, in some cases, additional new-lines. This made the paragraphs harder to separate in both Formatting Styles, because it broke the Formatting.

    "From a style-guide perspective…" he began to write.

    While formatting his reply, he also discovered that blank-lines between paragraphs in a Table would be deleted if you hit the Backspace button while writing the paragraph after the blank-line. Curiously, pressing the Delete button did not cause this to occur.    		ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ Chronocidal looked at the thread. Ah, he thought, I know what is causing at least part of this disconnect, and hopefully I can explain it.
    ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ The issue was, to some extent, that many forums and websites would ignore Tabs, and automatically delete extra spaces — and, in some cases, additional new-lines. This made the paragraphs harder to separate in both Formatting Styles, because it broke the Formatting.
    ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ 'From a style-guide perspective…' he began to write.
    ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ While formatting his reply, he also discovered that blank-lines between paragraphs in a Table would be deleted if you hit the Backspace button while writing the paragraph after the blank-line. Curiously, pressing the Delete button did not cause this to occur.

    Personally, I try to match style and spelling to their US or Commonwealth version depending on either the Author's nationality or the story's setting; i.e. use UK spellings/formatting for a Harry Potter fic, but US spelling/formatting for a Worm fic.

    Of course, wide-screen monitors don't play quite as nicely with the UK style as they do with the US style, because you can fit a lot more text on a line before it wraps around than on a portrait sheet of A5 paper for a book.
     
    Last edited:
    Damn this thread moved fast while I slept.

    As to "grey" families in Harry Potter. Generally I see those as "we don't actually care about the blood status thing, but we also aren't willing to die for either side. We're glad to be old and established enough that the Dark side assumes we agree with them and leaves us alone"

    The Draco thing. with Draco, he's just a kid for most of the story. Generally people want to assume that kids can be shown a better path. You see this in Worm too, usually with Rune or Bonesaw. People feel bad for kids trapped in the sins of their parents/forced into evil.
     
    Feng Lengshun said:
    ...well, when you put it like that...

    I mean, it's not like they're mutually exclusive? I have nothing against people who want a gay harem with multiple MPreg twin babies. Let it be said that the dream of having your own loving harem and big families says nothing about it being for specific gender/sexuality.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    Okay to be clearer—

    Gay romance is not a fantasy or wish-fulfillment. It's a real thing that happens.

    Harem romance is nothing but fantasy and wish-fulfillment. It's not a real thing that happens.

    Equating the two is weird.
     
    Squirtodyle said:
    "harem fic and gay romance are the same kind of wish fulfillment/fantasy" is a wild take, my guy.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    I think they meant more the turning canonically straight characters gay. At its core level I can kind of see what was meant. The wish fulfillment part of a harem fic is not having to choose/having a bunch of awesome partners wanting you and being fine with sharing. Technically the wish fulfillment part of the sexuality change fics is just having the partner you want also be interested.

    Arawn_Emrys said:
    Damn this thread moved fast while I slept.

    As to "grey" families in Harry Potter. Generally I see those as "we don't actually care about the blood status thing, but we also aren't willing to die for either side. We're glad to be old and established enough that the Dark side assumes we agree with them and leaves us alone"

    The Draco thing. with Draco, he's just a kid for most of the story. Generally people want to assume that kids can be shown a better path. You see this in Worm too, usually with Rune or Bonesaw. People feel bad for kids trapped in the sins of their parents/forced into evil.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    I feel like people have two different definitions of Grey family. Do we mean the type of magics they use? Or do we mean the side they chose in the Voldemort war? Because I;ve seen both definitions used for the Light/Grey/Dark arguement and feel both sides need to be in agreement.

    Draco never really does anything irredeemable until book 6(He got a dark mark and that requires artocity) and it's made pretty clear he was pressured into it. People don't seem to realize the pressure/angst was more about his age/it being people he was in constant contact with, than his personal morals. If it was 5 years later, I could easily see Draco having none of those qualms.
     
    Last edited:
    Thread policy violation - There were two Staff posts saying not to do this sort of thing within a day of this post
    Squirtodyle said:
    Okay to be clearer—

    Gay romance is not a fantasy or wish-fulfillment. It's a real thing that happens.

    Harem romance is nothing but fantasy and wish-fulfillment. It's not a real thing that happens.

    Equating the two is weird.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    Idk, if you want to write characters that are straight into having a homosexual relationship, then I count that as a wish fulfillment. Nothing wrong with it of course, I may not be into DekuTodo, but I can't deny that that one fic I read about it was a pretty good one. It's also not canon at all and nothing suggests they'd swing that way (with Deku at least), but if that's the pairing you wish for...

    Do note that I specifically said M/M in AO3. I don't know about gay romance elsewhere (I'm only barely dipping my feet into Otome as a genre, and my only experience with BL was Yuri On Ice) but I know what I see in M/M AO3.
     
    Last edited:
    Squirtodyle said:
    Harem romance is nothing but fantasy and wish-fulfillment. It's not a real thing that happens.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    Technically there's polyamory, but comparing polyamory to harem romance is like, I dunno, comparing actual radioactivity to superpowers-and-kaiju radioactivity

    Edit: Not that polyamory's automatically poisonous, just the first real vs unreal comparison that came to mind
     
    Last edited:
    Chronocidal said:
    From a style-guide perspective, the important thing to remember here is that the new paragraph should be indented when this happens. For example, books published (professionally) in the UK and Commonwealth will have no blank-line between paragraphs, first line of the paragraph is indented, use single-quotes for dialogue, and use italics for thoughts. Whereas books published in the USA will have a blank-line between paragraphs, no indentation, use double-quotes for dialogue, and use single-quotes for thoughts.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    Where did you get the idea books published in the USA don't indent their paragraphs? It's far more common than not over here. I can reach over to the bookshelf next to me and pick a book at random (and just did) and it was published in the USA and had indented paragraphs. I could repeat this experiment dozens of times and expect pretty much the same result, with books published over a wide range of decades.

    EDIT: For that matter, when I was in school (in the USA) they taught us to indent our paragraphs, I just don't usually bother in internet forum posts.
     
    Last edited:
    Man, I thought we left the validity 'war' against 'the shrieking hordes of yaoi fangirls' behind in the 2010s.

    I'm not sure why I'm surprised, to be honest.
     
    Arawn_Emrys said:
    As to "grey" families in Harry Potter. Generally I see those as "we don't actually care about the blood status thing, but we also aren't willing to die for either side. We're glad to be old and established enough that the Dark side assumes we agree with them and leaves us alone"
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    Which is still fucked. "I'm indifferent on the issue of racism. Just indifferent, yes. If the south or the North win, there's no difference to me" was a bad position then, and it's a bad position in magical hell land.

    I mean, I still read a lot of Harry Potter shit with that sort of premise, but you can really see just how little thought the writers actually have when it comes to ethics.
     
    Chronocidal said:
    From a style-guide perspective, the important thing to remember here is that the new paragraph should be indented when this happens. For example, books published (professionally) in the UK and Commonwealth will have no blank-line between paragraphs, first line of the paragraph is indented, use single-quotes for dialogue, and use italics for thoughts. Whereas books published in the USA will have a blank-line between paragraphs, no indentation, use double-quotes for dialogue, and use single-quotes for thoughts.

    Personally, I try to match style and spelling to their US or Commonwealth version depending on either the Author's nationality or the story's setting; i.e. use UK spellings/formatting for a Harry Potter fic, but US spelling/formatting for a Worm fic.

    Of course wide-screen monitors don't play quite as nicely with the UK style as they do with the US style, because you can fit a lot more text on a line before it wraps around than on a portrait sheet of A5 paper for a book.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    Most US published books I'm familiar with do not have a blank line between paragraphs and very much do use indentation. Lack of indentation is more common on the Internet, as is the use of whitespace between paragraphs. And that ties into the remarks in your third paragraph (giant sentence that it is).
     
    Simon_Jester said:
    Most US published books I'm familiar with do not have a blank line between paragraphs and very much do use indentation. Lack of indentation is more common on the Internet, as is the use of whitespace between paragraphs. And that ties into the remarks in your third paragraph (giant sentence that it is).
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    Correct. Generally accepted practice in the USA in typesetting is not to include a blank line after a paragraph, so long as the graph has been properly indented. Although, these days it is almost an anything goes kind of field. In the past before widespread self-publishing though this was a pretty firm guideline, as all typesetting rules were.
     
    hghwolf said:
    Man, I thought we left the validity 'war' against 'the shrieking hordes of yaoi fangirls' behind in the 2010s.

    I'm not sure why I'm surprised, to be honest.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    For what it's worth, I think the climate is a lot less hostile against those type of works these days. And you get more of it in the open too -- as a VN reader, it's legit astonishing the amount of BL stuff that gets posted in the past few years. Mind you, that doesn't mean there's a big market for it (even in QQ, you would barely get more than a handful of replies for the thread before it dies), but I'm just glad there's more market for it now.
    Estro said:
    Which is still fucked. "I'm indifferent on the issue of racism. Just indifferent, yes. If the south or the North win, there's no difference to me" was a bad position then, and it's a bad position in magical hell land.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    Fucked doesn't mean it isn't a rational position to take. You can't exactly ask backwaters 20th Century magical England to stick their neck out when they'd rather get on with their life, especially not when there's a known group of violent racist still around and they came out of the war that's partly about it.
    Flightless Man said:
    I'd much rather see a mixed sex 4-5 person ship than a harem. It would be something I really only see done (in a healthy way) in the Scooby Doo fandom.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    Probably not going to be easy to write. I think I've seen a nice fic where Harry has both Draco and Daphne as his love interest, but it isn't something that I go out of the way and seek.

    Personally, as someone who's just frustrated when reading LNs and the best girl isn't chosen, I'd rather have harem where each girls can get their own time in the limelight and have their own relationships with the MC develop in the story. My thought process is something the line of "Hey, I like moege, I like watching MC and Heroine have cute couple moments, and you're saying I could get all five routes at the same time? Don't mind if I do, then."

    Man, if only it isn't such a big time commitment, I'd love to re-read Kamidori Alchemy Meister again. Diplomacy is overrated, Dickplomacy is where it's at. Man basically united a dozen countries/species through his harem alone. I wish we had more of the ripper girl but I'm just happy we got anything for her.
     
    Reader mode
    You must login or register to reply here.
    Remove ads
    Back
    Top