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Pet Peeves in Fanfiction

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Deliberately using "bad" tropes / bad fanon. Sure, it's theoretically possible that a writer would deliberately use a bad trope/bad fanon to make a point, but honestly? More often than not, it's just end up being a bad story full of bad tropes/fanon with the author saying in the author notes that it was deliberate. Which leads me to the question of: if you know it's bad, why not write something good instead?

For example, in at best 99/100 cases, bashing a character just makes the story worse. Saying afterwards that you know that the characterization is bad fanon doesn't really change the fact that by bashing a character you made the story worse than it could be. So why do it?
 
Well, there's that one KH fic called Fandom Hearts and I found it entertaining even if there were moments of sluggishness with the pace.

Or that one Naruto fic Fanon no Jutsu. I haven't had a good laugh in a while before reading it.
 
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I am ever so glad I don't hang out in enough fannish spaces to pick up the terrible fanon for things.
 
Death Tickles to people who tag every single character who sticks their elbow on-screen. No, I don't care if Harry showed up in the background of a TV broadcast your characters are watching. He's not even named.
 
Trestira said:
Honestly, I'd flip that around; if you're only involved in doing something to make fun of it, why bother?
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As that oft screencapped tumblr post goes:

"Sometimes fanfiction is a love letter to the original canon, sometimes it's just that one telegram that says "Fuck you. Strongly worded letter to follow". And sometimes it is nailing 99 theses at the door."

All fanfiction is, by necessity, engagement with canon. Fanfiction can in fact be critique of canon. After all, works exist to provoke emotional engagement. You can be emotionally engaged by the original work, and that emotion can be "being disturbed" or "being enraged". By something you saw in canon, by something that you saw happen. And writing out that particular emotional engagement, getting it into fic form, that's no different than getting other emotions about the original work into fic form.

Not all critique needs to be an essay. It can in fact be literary.
 
The only time I've gone near that is my Episode IX fic tbh, and actually that was fueled much less by spite than my thoughts and feelings about the characters.
 
hghwolf said:
skill issue

Because making sport of bad media is entertaining ?
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The problem most fanfic has with making critique entertaining is that to do so requires you to actually write a joke.

And no, "Look! I did the stupid thing! But I was really obvious about it and had a character wink at the camera!" does not count as a joke.

Actually, I'll use that to springboard into another thing I see fairly frequently (while admittedly more in omakes than full on fanfic, I do see it pop up in both.) I think of it as the joke without a punchline, or the "wouldn't it be funny if..." joke.

What happens is that the bad writer sets up a funny situation. Maybe it's even a very funny situation. Character personalities are about to clash, or a series of wacky coincidences have all come together, and... The narrative just moves on. There's no payoff, or rather, the author seems to believe that the setup is the payoff, that just writing about what could happen is equivalent to actually showing it happen. "Look," their writing implies. "I've thought of this really funny thing that could happen! Wouldn't it be funny if it did? And here's how it could happen!" But, disappointingly they never actually show it happening. There's no punchline, no culmination of the setup the author has just detailed. The reader is left to fill in the blanks themselves. It's infuriating.
 
I've written a Samus and Ridley with a kid and a soul bond fic, where the entire point is to poke fun at the ideas.
As in I know that Samus/Ridley is a messed up paring, and that soul bonds tend to force oddball parings for poorly defined reasons, so I came up with a joke way of hinting at both of those, while technically being neither.
... I have not written all the other stuff I've considered with that base idea that unfortunately trends towards playing those things straighter due to how much crack storytelling was needed to just make the one-shot.

It can be strange what sorts of ideas actually capture inspiration to write.
 
lentil said:
The problem most fanfic has with making critique entertaining is that to do so requires you to actually write a joke.

And no, "Look! I did the stupid thing! But I was really obvious about it and had a character wink at the camera!" does not count as a joke.

Actually, I'll use that to springboard into another thing I see fairly frequently (while admittedly more in omakes than full on fanfic, I do see it pop up in both.) I think of it as the joke without a punchline, or the "wouldn't it be funny if..." joke.

What happens is that the bad writer sets up a funny situation. Maybe it's even a very funny situation. Character personalities are about to clash, or a series of wacky coincidences have all come together, and... The narrative just moves on. There's no payoff, or rather, the author seems to believe that the setup is the payoff, that just writing about what could happen is equivalent to actually showing it happen. "Look," their writing implies. "I've thought of this really funny thing that could happen! Wouldn't it be funny if it did? And here's how it could happen!" But, disappointingly they never actually show it happening. There's no punchline, no culmination of the setup the author has just detailed. The reader is left to fill in the blanks themselves. It's infuriating.
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Damn, I haven't seen this in a while - I'm guessing because I've become more able to identify what to avoid over time ie. more picky - but damn if there isn't a swath of unmemorable and vague recollections of exactly this in my memory banks. I couldn't give you a single example, no single fic would be nameable (and isn't that an indictment on its own?), but the experiential memory is there.

Which brings me to a more general related peeve of mine that I suspect isn't shared by a lot of people. Poorly executed satire. See, satire in itself is exaggeration, irony and mockery, but it has to be paired with humour to work in my opinion. It needs the subversion or the punch line, to somehow be making a point and encapsulating a coherent idea, or else it is just awkward and uncomfortable mockery based more on cruelty than observation, that is just left hanging in the air incomplete, going nowhere, making no point, existing as an idea half finished. Yet somehow, people (the ones writing it mostly, I'm sure, but plenty enough people go in for this kind of crap) think this is entertaining and clever, despite the fact they weren't able to bring the thought to it's conclusion.

And yet it is somehow popular. Cruelty as entertainment never goes out of style I guess.
 
lentil said:
The problem most fanfic has with making critique entertaining is that to do so requires you to actually write a joke.
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Not really ?

You can write a fanfic that's critical of the source material - or the wider context of fanfic of the source material - without it being funny just fine. A punchline can be helpful, for those in the audience who haven't caught up yet, but the primary message of critique and satire is always 'this is bad, here's why, do something else'.
 
hghwolf said:
Not really ?

You can write a fanfic that's critical of the source material - or the wider context of fanfic of the source material - without it being funny just fine. A punchline can be helpful, for those in the audience who haven't caught up yet, but the primary message of critique and satire is always 'this is bad, here's why, do something else'.
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You're aren't wrong, but I was specifically referring to critique in the context of the larger discussion we were having; the style of critique that is just mocking the stupid canon or fanon thing by doing it, but more exaggerated.
 
ive read versions of twilight that are focused more on the povs of the indigenous characters, feminist retellings and queer retellings, but the reason i even engaged with them was because i found some things about the original genuinely compelling. They critique the original story not by winking at the audience with a shitty nostalgia critic skit, but by showing that it was possible the entire time for the story and world to be more complex.

I think a lot of retellings (and even parodies honestly) by people that hate the source material completely miss the appeal of the original works. So i don't want to read fanfic written by them. I dont want twilight fanfic that isnt a little horny and full of clumsy yearning- that's the appeal of twilight. for another example, a lot of rwby rewrites are lacking in that linkin park amv energy. I think by not being fans, they also miss more subtle and nuanced critiques in the work just by virtue of not knowing it well. like someone who cant get past one piece's character designs and pacing is not going to be able to meaningfully analyze its themes on the place of women in monarchies, theyre gonna be playing the whole series on 2x speed.
 
lentil said:
You're aren't wrong, but I was specifically referring to critique in the context of the larger discussion we were having; the style of critique that is just mocking the stupid canon or fanon thing by doing it, but more exaggerated.
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Okay but that can work. DADA, for example, is a hilarious roast of Wormfic by just being very deliberately obvious about which tropes it's only very slightly exaggerating and what fics it's referencing. By making the implicit statement you are asked to accept an explicit statement you are asked to mock it dispels the inherent pretense and lets you enjoy the absurdity by laughing at it rather than make you feel vaguely insulted that it's asking you to accept this.

It wouldn't be near as funny if the reader weren't familiar with Wormfic, of course, but it's basically effectively impossible to satirize something if the audience isn't familiar with it.
 
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lentil said:
What happens is that the bad writer sets up a funny situation. Maybe it's even a very funny situation. Character personalities are about to clash, or a series of wacky coincidences have all come together, and... The narrative just moves on.
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Even worse, replace "funny" with "dramatic."
There is a really important issue that they are going to have to reveal/resolve and they just slide on by.

Like the author suddenly realized that it's a difficult situation and they have no idea how to work through it.
Or that maybe their favorite pairing actually has a big problem and once they try and sort out the feelings, it ends up being not so romantic.
Or that the entire premise of the fic doesn't actually make sense and once they examine it everyone will look like idiots.
 
SectionXIII said:
An annoyingly certified hood classic. It's always a genocide of a non-European group too, these kinds of authors would almost never dare to say a bad thing about them while consigning anyone with a different color or lifestyle into the dustbin of history with nary a thought. Nomads and tribals are annoyingly common as a target in fantasy especially.
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Its also telling that "Humans as a space level polity" is usually treated as synonymous with "they're predominantly Western and white coded". Which in turn means that if they get victimized by the Turians or Minbari or whoever, there will be a shitton of big mad fanfiction where humanity totally stomps the shit out of them.

"West-coded society is put in the role akin to the sorts of societies Western imperialism grounded into pulp" is not far removed from "What if black people oppressed white people, really makes you think huh" and like its counterpart it doesn't really inspire much thinking, just an affirmation of the virtuous necessity of the ingroup to preemptively crush all outgroups before they crush the ingroup. I can only imagine what sort of response Mass Effect canon would've gotten if they'd just gone full "actually the Turians roll the humans with ease and make them a client race".
 
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As someone who's made their fair share of writing mistakes, I fairly recently ran into a case where I was done with a scene, and then realized that it doesn't make sense to just leave a thread from that scene dangling like that, even if by my initial intent the specific thing that would have been left hanging was secondary to something else. So it's marked down as something to edit when I'm doing my last pass.

I feel like that's rarer to run into than just building up to a scene and not knowing how to actually resolve it, but it's generally similar in how it comes off to the reader, I think.
 
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