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Pet Peeves in Fanfiction

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If I have the option to describe Jane beyond calling her Jane constantly I am going to do that because it helps inform and expand her character.
 
Ophelia said:
Please please please please please don't use descriptions of a person instead of their name or pronouns.

Examples:

"Superman was tired. The last son of Krypton sat down."

"Hermione shook her head. The bushy haired genius couldn't believe her friends weren't taking their studies seriously."
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I remember reading a fanfic that would constantly juggle character name, hair color and profession. That would be bad enough on its' own, but it got really confusing during scenes involving multiple characters, *especially* original ones. I felt like I had to have a cheat sheet on hand to really know who's doing what. Bonus point for author getting a bit too fancy with their colors, so even that part wasn't obvious at a first glance.
 
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Susano said:
Yeah no. Pronouns work if a man and a woman are talking, or a man and an enby etc - but if there is two or even three women talking, you can be pretty sure I will use epithets instead of incessantly repeating their names.
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But what makes repeating the epithet better than repeating the name?
Unless you come up with a different epithet every time, but then you get into the quoted situations where each epithet is now multiple words and is far more jarring than a simple repetition of a name.
 
Susano said:
You can switch it up, which gives you three options per character (name, epithet and pronoun). That is usually enough.
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Godlike Ronald, the Son of Arthur, the red-haired warrior, for instance. Or Fleet-Footed Harry, the Slayer of the Basilisk, the child of Lily, whose wisdom was known to the gods!

Or Bushy-Haired Hermione, beloved by the gods, whose plans bring terror to her enemies, if you need to use three at once!
 
Byzantine said:
It's an ancient trick to avoid too much repetition of names; though it can sometimes get used... poorly.
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But there isn't a problem with repeating names.
It feels like it to the author because they are spelling it out, but to the reader, they recognize the name and move on.
Partially because it's capitalized, nicknames are fine.

If you're expecting a proper noun or pronoun and suddenly hit an adjective you actually have to read it and parse it.
Even if it's just a fraction of a second, that adds a surprising amount of delay in the reading.

I can read a paragraph with a person's name repeated twenty times and if you asked me afterwards I'd guess 5-6.
If you have a descriptor 3 times, I'm thinking "they're constantly using descriptors!"

Try reading a published book.
How many times do they use descriptors?
How many times do they use a name?
Do you think they used a name too many times?
Did they ever use a descriptor?
 
And typically the epithets wouldn't just describe Achilles as 'the blond' or whatever, you'd have 'swift-footed Achilles', and you'd notably typically have 'swift-footed Achilles', including the name itself. They were additive to the name, not stand-alone; you'd almost never just say 'the swift-footed', not least because you might be talking about Hermes instead.

So unless you're calling for 'and then dawn-haired Sakura, of the mighty fist and healing hands, replied' or similar, it's kind of a silly take. And that would look very out of place in an otherwise conversational fic, for example.

And it still would return to 'use the names of the characters you're depicting'!
 
Counterpoint: appearance-based epithets used as pronouns, in a context where the person to whom it refers can easily be determined, can be an effective way to avoid the "pause for description" issue in Fan-Fiction. (And in non-fan fiction. And non-fiction too.) i.e.

Fred was a lanky man with blond hair. Fred was tired. He sat down heavily in a chair.
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versus

Fred was tired. The blond sat his lanky form down heavily in a chair.
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Obviously it is something that can be overdone, but it serves as a way to weave information more smoothly into the narrative.
 
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Dear power fantasies: please stop giving the POV character so much sensory sidegrades they effectively have perfect information of everything in their surroundings by the end of arc 1 and cannot be surprised by anything but a new plot device.

Its not just about ruining the tension and making side characters feel redundant. It drags the story to a crawl when the POV has to read through the report of their 360 degree no scope plot event radar every ten seconds. For the love of god, use third person or jump to other POV characters if its that critical to describe every single thing that's happening to named characters in 5 mile radius.

And then comes the compounding sin when the SI has to verbally repeat to non-omnipotent characters everything they just internally observed... Multiple times.
 
Chronocidal said:
Counterpoint: appearance-based epithets used as pronouns, in a context where the person to whom it refers can easily be determined, can be an effective way to avoid the "pause for description" issue in Fan-Fiction.
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The issue with that is using a descriptor makes it seem like that description is relevant to the scene.
[The blond was easy to see in the crowd.]

If you say [Bob was easy to see in the crowd] the reader thinks of all the things they know about Bob, like the fact that he's 9 feet tall and has a halo and apply it to the scene.
If you reduce that to one descriptor, it implies that only one quality matters and they are interchangeable with anyone that has the same quality.
[The blond was easy to see in the crowd, but when they caught up to him, they realized it wasn't Bob.]

It's reductive and takes away their other qualities.
It's especially bad when you have a fairly generic everyman character and actively make them more one-dimensional by assigning everything they do to a handful of descriptors.


The other question is if you actually have to "pause for a description" at all.
Plenty of perfectly good stories give you almost nothing about the MC for a very long time.
 
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There is using epithets and then there is this bullshit:
Almost none of the characters in the original text is given an explicit name. They are instead referred to by their function or role (e.g. Minister of the Left), an honorific(e.g. His Excellency), or their relation to other characters (e.g. Heir Apparent), which changes as the novel progresses. This lack of names stems from Heian-era court manners that would have made it unacceptably familiar and blunt to freely mention a person's given name. Modern readers and translators have used various nicknames to keep track of the many characters.
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The Tale of Genji seems like a pain to read even for contemporary readers.
 
Astrid Fornhoff said:
If I have the option to describe Jane beyond calling her Jane constantly I am going to do that because it helps inform and expand her character.
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I don't have a problem with descriptions of characters. I have a problem when it's used in place of a name ad nauseum. Readers will generally remember your characters' names, so why not use them? So much fluff and filler otherwise.

This:

"Harry brandished his wand. He spoke in a loud, clear voice."

"Draco and Harry stood across from each other. Harry was absolutely furious."

is better than this:

"Harry brandished his wand. The brown-haired savior spoke in a loud, clear voice."

"Draco and Harry stood across from each other. The Boy-Who-Lived was absolutely furious."

I see it in a similar way as when people dance around repeating the word "said" while writing dialogue. It's perfectly ok!

Could you give me an example of how you would do it? I'd like to hear your perspective.
 
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I have straight up dropped stories because they insist on calling a character by something else every other sentence. Like dude, I am reading this chapter that was posted months after the previous chapter. I can barely remember the name of your OC, yet alone figure out who people are by their hair color, and their title, and their race, and then occupation etc. Past a point trying to figure out who is who becomes so much of a chore it kills all of my enthusiasm in reading your story.

It really helps when you stick to one way of address that you use like 90% of the time. It doesn't even have to be a name. You can use a title or description (To give examples, Blue hair with piercings, The Lord Magistrate, The Baron) so long as you are consistent in what you call them.
 
The Narrator said:
There are people out there who absolutely do do evil things for no practical reason besides that they enjoy cruelty. Like, quite a few of them throughout history, and very famously a bunch of them in your country about 80 years ago.
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There's still a bit of a difference there. Sadism is a bad reason, but usually the person will either find an excuse for their sadism or tell themselves it isn't bad really. Not many people happily think of themselves as the bad guy. Hitler probably thought he was a beleaguered hero or some shit.
 
GuesssWho said:
There's still a bit of a difference there. Sadism is a bad reason, but usually the person will either find an excuse for their sadism or tell themselves it isn't bad really. Not many people happily think of themselves as the bad guy. Hitler probably thought he was a beleaguered hero or some shit.
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Idk, there's plenty of people who take pride in being jerks or assholes. Although I suppose that's different from being proud of being called evil.
 
Generally if a group is snatching people off the streets and torturing them for information, it is either because they want to intimidate the populace into behaving, because that are incompetent or because they get their rocks off from torturing someone.

If the torturer isn't being portrayed as sadistic, or isn't planning to bloodily scare off the populace from trying to fight back, and the torturer isn't portrayed as incompetent, and the torture actually works for info gathering and them succeeding is treated as matter of fact instead of them getting lucky, then that is the author doing bad research.
 
Rakkis157 said:
If the torturer isn't being portrayed as sadistic, or isn't planning to bloodily scare off the populace from trying to fight back, and the torturer isn't portrayed as incompetent, and the torture actually works for info gathering and them succeeding is treated as matter of fact instead of them getting lucky, then that is the author doing bad research.
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There's a much simpler explanation; tha author wants torture to be a viable method of information gathering.

Like, we can all pretend that chuds don't write fanfic and 99% of authors are, at worst, progressive Liberals but that's not the reality of the situation is it ?
 
Even outside fanfiction, there seems to be a weird insistence on the "heroes" forcing the truth out of someone in a time crunch through violence, or threats of such.
More or less any cop show you care to name.
Batman, or super heroes in specific.
Any adventure story with villains/henchmen and a time table.
 
Chronocidal said:
Fred was tired. The blond sat his lanky form down heavily in a chair.
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That's good only if it makes sense for the narrator to think about Fred in such terms. Which is why epithets (and especially hair-based ones) can be so jarring — and you know what, rather than just paraphrase let me paste what has already been said on the topic:


View: https://ernmark.tumblr.com/post/749117551994388480/in-writing-epithets-the-taller-manthe

In writing, epithets ("the taller man"/"the blonde"/etc) are inherently dehumanizing, in that they remove a character's name and identity, and instead focus on this other quality.
Which can be an extremely effective device within narration!
  • They can work very well for characters whose names the narrator doesn't know yet (especially to differentiate between two or more). How specific the epithet is can signal to the reader how important the character is going to be later on, and whether they should dedicate bandwidth to remembering them for later ("the bearded man" is much less likely to show up again than "the man with the angel tattoo")
  • They can indicate when characters stop being as an individual and instead embody their Role, like a detective choosing to think of their lover simply as The Thief when arresting them, or a royal character being referred to as The Queen when she's acting on behalf of the state
  • They can reveal the narrator's biases by repeatedly drawing attention to a particular quality that singles them out in the narrator's mind
But these only work if the epithet used is how the narrator primarily identifies that character. Which is why it's so jarring to see a lot of common epithets in intimate moments– because it conveys that the main character is primarily thinking of their lover/best friend/etc in terms of their height or age or hair color.
 
... given how often I transform my characters, it is at least partially the case that I use that method to remind people of what specific creature the character is at the moment.
 
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