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Pet Peeves in Fanfiction

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GuesssWho said:
This has probably been said before, but why is 90% of fanfic shipping stuff even for stories in which no one is shown to be in a relationship even once? I do not care that the actor is hot, if you're writing fanfic for a fantasy, a horror story or a murder mystery in which the motive was not jealousy, there are no married couples and no one is mentioned as having a SO then adding a ship is missing the entire point.
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Like 80% of songs are about breaking up or getting together with someone and melodrama romance is pretty much one of the biggest literature/video/tv branches. Romance is a core aspect of many cultures and is something only a relatively small minority of people have no interest in. Sure not every story needs romance, but to a lot of people, it's something they want in a story.

A lot of people like the original work, but crave some romance in it. Other people want to take a work that has too much romance and trim it down so the story isn't about ships.

Take a setting that has basically no romance and that's a very easy thing for fans to add, likely because a bunch of people like that genre and it's the biggest/easiest gap to fill in creating fanfiction for that work.
 
Yeah, most fanfic is either 'more of the same' or 'thing that canon didn't do'; if the canon of the work doesn't contain romance, the second category absolutely will! People like to read romances, even when they're labelled as something else ( a lot of fantasy stories are romances that are marketed to men, for example).

And then you add on the 'i want to smush these characters together and make them kiss because i find them hot' thing that drives a lot of cffee shop/no powers/etc. AUs, it's just... inevitable that you'll have a load of romance. Sex is one of those fundamental human drives for the majority of the population, after all, so it's hardly suprising it's so prevalent.
 
Yeah, but when it reaches the point where you can't find fanfic about the plot of the canon I start wanting to scream. Like a murder mystery where none of the fics even mention a murder, for example.
 
GuesssWho said:
why is 90% of fanfic shipping stuff even for stories in which no one is shown to be in a relationship even once?
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One of the reasons to write fanfic is to expand the world.
Write what wasn't shown, or extra events.
Just re-writing canon is the least interesting.

So a story where there is no romance is the perfect target for adding it.
They don't have to dance around any existing relationships, or deal with any inconvenient traits, just do whatever they want.
 
GuesssWho said:
Yeah, but when it reaches the point where you can't find fanfic about the plot of the canon I start wanting to scream. Like a murder mystery where none of the fics even mention a murder, for example.
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I completely understand it being a peeve and honestly thought you wanted an answer for why romance is so prevalent(Autism tends to make me take every question at face value and not realize things are rhetorical comments leading to something different.

Taking a work that is unique and then making it more generic with the fanfic can be very frustrating. Especially when you're on the hunt for something both good/different enough for your tastes. When you find a work that ignores the romance and then it feels like almost every single fanfic ignores the premise of the work you loved, that's very irritating.

We have an answer for why it happens, but knowing why doesn't make it any easier to deal with.
 
GuesssWho said:
This has probably been said before, but why is 90% of fanfic shipping stuff even for stories in which no one is shown to be in a relationship even once? I do not care that the actor is hot, if you're writing fanfic for a fantasy, a horror story or a murder mystery in which the motive was not jealousy, there are no married couples and no one is mentioned as having a SO then adding a ship is missing the entire point.
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I hate to say it but, in this case, it's pretty true - most people who write fanfiction are women, especially young heterosexual women, and they focus on romantic relationships. There's a myriad of reasons for it that would be interesting to discuss elsewhere but I don't think this thread is the right place to do it.
 
Flightless Man said:
I completely understand it being a peeve and honestly thought you wanted an answer for why romance is so prevalent(Autism tends to make me take every question at face value and not realize things are rhetorical comments leading to something different.

Taking a work that is unique and then making it more generic with the fanfic can be very frustrating. Especially when you're on the hunt for something both good/different enough for your tastes. When you find a work that ignores the romance and then it feels like almost every single fanfic ignores the premise of the work you loved, that's very irritating.

We have an answer for why it happens, but knowing why doesn't make it any easier to deal with.
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It's okay. I'm autistic too, I make similar mistakes all the time :)

It's especially annoying when the fandom is small enough that you're probably not missing anything. Nope, the entire fanfic community has just ignored the entire point of the work. Worst when it's an interesting sci-fi or fantasy premise that you'll quite possibly never see again.

It's not quite as bad as when canon starts making the same mistake, like in every young adult dystopia novel ever, but still frustrating.
 
Blaflaix said:
One of the reasons to write fanfic is to expand the world.
Write what wasn't shown, or extra events.
Just re-writing canon is the least interesting.

So a story where there is no romance is the perfect target for adding it.
They don't have to dance around any existing relationships, or deal with any inconvenient traits, just do whatever they want.
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I'm autistic so I find an overt focus on relationships of any kind drill. I'm a plot girl. So yes so much shipping stuff makes be groan. Expect if it's smut
 
Blaflaix said:
One of the reasons to write fanfic is to expand the world.
Write what wasn't shown, or extra events.
Just re-writing canon is the least interesting.

So a story where there is no romance is the perfect target for adding it.
They don't have to dance around any existing relationships, or deal with any inconvenient traits, just do whatever they want.
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See, I tried to do that but ended up just contradicting ground that was laid out before.

So I bet you the same kids who do retread canon are just afraid of doing that.

Personally, I tried to re-consume canon and write notes to make sure its as accurate as possible.
 
If you don't want to retread canon then change the ending. Add things to the middle. Change perspectives. Drop the characters in a whole different setting. Give a tragic character a happy ending. But for God's sake, I don't care about who's kissing who.
 
fanfics that are just "hey what if these two characters fucked?? what if they had a slow burn relationship over 200,000 words" are just... so boring, to me

romance in stories is fine, because there's usually other things besides just the romance. but if the romance is the main driver of the story, then it just feels like a lotta fluff taking up page-space. you barely get crumbs of other interesting stuff
 
It's worse when a romantic relationship is introduced midway through and starts eating up a previously interesting story like some kind of malignant cancer, which happens far too often.
 
Arden said:
It's worse when a romantic relationship is introduced midway through and starts eating up a previously interesting story like some kind of malignant cancer, which happens far too often.
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The amount of Wormfics I've had at least some level of interest in that I have seen piledrive themselves into the dumpster because somewhere in the middle Taylor meets Amy or someone and goes "uwu so cute" and 50% or more of the word count from then on is dedicated to their relationship... well, it's a hell of a lot of fics, that's for sure.
 
McFluffles said:
The amount of Wormfics I've had at least some level of interest in that I have seen piledrive themselves into the dumpster because somewhere in the middle Taylor meets Amy or someone and goes "uwu so cute" and 50% or more of the word count from then on is dedicated to their relationship... well, it's a hell of a lot of fics, that's for sure.
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Same. All I can ever think is "what a waste of a decent story concept" whenever that happens.
 
Arden said:
Same. All I can ever think is "what a waste of a decent story concept" whenever that happens.
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*Nervously glances at my MHA/Worm fanfic that ships Deku with Skitter midway in it*

In all seriousness, I think there are bigger problems with my story than just a romance being introduced in the middle. Maybe the problem is if the other factors in a story are ignored. (@Jensaarai commented on this) Or if the other factors just aren't good enough and the characters just act out of character during the romance. Which was another problem with my fanfic. (It wasn't very well received either. Mainly because of the poor characterization, I'm planning on rewriting it)
 
I will clarify: the problem is not when a story merely has a romantic relationship. It's fine so long as they remain low-key and not the focus of the story. It's when they develop into a plot tumor that takes over the entire narrative that I drop the whole thing, because that's not what I'm there for and it's not what I enjoyed the story for. When entire chapters are wasted on will-they won't-they nonsense and inanely in-depth depictions of going on dates and other such stupid stuff, there's no story left to follow, only the writer being self-indulgent to the exclusion of all else.

And that also happens way too often.
 
Ultimate said:
*Nervously glances at my MHA/Worm fanfic that ships Deku with Skitter midway in it*

In all seriousness, I think there are bigger problems with my story than just a romance being introduced in the middle. Maybe the problem is if the other factors in a story are ignored. (Jensaarai commented on this) Or if the other factors just aren't good enough and the characters just act out of character during the romance. Which was another problem with my fanfic. (It wasn't very well received either. Mainly because of the poor characterization, I'm planning on rewriting it)
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To be fair, my problem isn't really "how dare romance exist at all" in fics, it's a story element as much as any other if it develops. My problem is more when a story where romance or shipping wasn't the initial pitch and premise take a hard right into nothing but said romance material. Can't speak for your fic since I haven't read it, but it's the difference between "Deku and Skitter start dating, we get a bit more screentime with them together and maybe a date chapter or two" and "here's 30 chapters in a row that focus entirely on Deku and Skitter's developing relationship".

Or to give a more specific example, while I can't recall the fic name anymore and I believe it's long dead, there was a story where the initial premise was something along the lines of "Lung kills Danny, Taylor gets Exalted powers and swears revenge and goes all Punisher on the ABB". Cool story, great fight scenes... until partway through she gets picked up by the wards and starts spending all that screentime instead playing junior hero politics, and then eventually ending up in an poly relationship with Lisa and Amy that takes up what used to be cool fight space. Say what you want about character development or plot changes, that ain't what I opened the fic for originally.
 
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A similar pattern is the romance is slow burn, and sort of sidelined, until it finally blossoms and suddenly the entire story is about it and you realize the author was just marking time using the Stations of Canon and had no actual plan.
Sort of a stealth ship-fic because they pretend they are going somewhere, but they really just want the romance.
 
Ophelia said:
*tugs at collar*

In my defense, it was only about 50k words... plus probably another 20k if I'd finished it.
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50-70k words is a good novel length; there's nothing wrong with doing a romance novel-length romance.

200k is really too much, but that's because it's too much for, well, almost any single thing. And dragging out a romance, where the core of the appeal is these characters getting together, over like 3-4 novel's worth of words, is just not good writing? If you're doing a romance work where the characters actually get together within the first 50k words, and the further stuff is about the now-established romance, that's a different beast to 'these characters are going to get together, i totally promise, what do you mean i've written literally ten books worth of words about how they haven't got together'.
 
Y'all might be in different points in your lives than the average fanfic author, methinks.
 
I mean, SV is also overwhelmingly male, while writing fanfiction is majority female, IIRC, so you're going to have some clashing views on what's 'normal' or 'good' or not purely due to socialisation, if nothing else.
 
If a majority of people don't like something, but the critics/academics say it's one of the best, but the fans love a piece that is considered mediocre by those same people, who is right?

Like it's one thing to say romance in a story bothers us, it's a completely different thing to advise someone to not put it in a story, even though the majority of viewers will want romance. That kind of advice needs to be clarified that the writer is no longer targeting the masses and is aiming for a cult work that has rabid fans (though way less overall). If you write what's popular, you make more people happy, but if you write what's missing, you make the unhappiest readers happy for the first time in a ling time.

Do you provide school lunches for everyone every day, or do you make a gourmet meal once a week?
 
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