Remove ads

Pet Peeves in Fanfiction

Reader mode
It's particularly noticeable when there's no nuance.

They keep their Magic Skill secret for whatever reason, so they keep their Sock Darning Skill secret too, and then the enemies discover the secret and use it against them and they still keep it a secret...

If the character says "I have secret A and secret B, and I can reveal A but B has to stay secret" it comes across as a reasoned choice, even if the reasoning is weak.
If they randomly decide to keep a secret and rigidly hold to it no matter what, it comes across as just cosplaying as Person With A Secret.
 
Ultimate said:
Sounds like half of the problems people have with Amber.

Also, for that reason, not sure if this is specific to fanfiction. Unless you've just seen it more often there.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I've seen it more often there, and I think it is because a lot of authors find it easier to stick to the rails of canon if they have those who were changed because of whatever inciting incident keeping their changes a secret to try and 'be normal'.
 
Super-powered, "smart," or dark Harry fics really bug me. Just be honest and say it's an SI power fantasy. That's cool with me.

"Oh, if Harry had a brain, he wouldn't do xyz."

No, if Harry had a brain, he still probably wouldn't have done that. You're talking about yourself, and you wouldn't have done xyz because you exist outside of his world and have knowledge that he cannot possibly have.

Methods of Rationality and Partially Kissed Hero fall into this category, and it's obnoxious to read page after page of "I'm smarter than this fictional character and the author, and I want you to clap and tell me what an awesome person I am. Oh, by the way, I totally get all the chicks irl, and my mom says I'm cool."
 
'if character was smart' usually means 'ignoring all this person's characterisation and discarding their emotions, and granting them all the meta-knowledge i have, they'd do this', yeah.

That MoR is deliberately written as a cult recruitment tool doesn't help, of course.
 
Kadmus said:
'if character was smart' usually means 'ignoring all this person's characterisation and discarding their emotions, and granting them all the meta-knowledge i have, they'd do this', yeah.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
It can also mean rules lawyering and "no one said you can't do that". Speaking of Harry Potter, that would probably be the "get rich by exchanging magical coins for real life money and vice versa". Also, make sure to ignore the part where fiction writers are creating stories, not law books - and they're not going to describe every single rule and bore readers to death.

Generally, I like to assume that fictional worlds aren't filled with complete idiots, so someone already thought about it and it didn't work for X reason. Maybe it's the same thing as dividing by zero. Maybe it's closer to insurance fraud. Or maybe it does work... except not in a way you thought - or it's far more complex than it seems and thus not worth it at all.
 
Yeah, you want to apply the principle of charity most of the time for fiction; if a thing isn't mentioned, it's not because it doesn't exist, but because it's not necessary to mention it to tell the story. If you've thought of 'one clever trick' then so too will have basically all the grifters and criminals/intellectuals/scientists in a work, after all.
 
And if you make a change to the story for whatever reason, you have to let the other characters react to it.

I've seen so many stories where the MC's "brilliant idea" was basically exploiting a really obvious AU element that apparently nobody ever noticed before. :rolleyes:
"Hey, if you use magic a lot, you get stronger! Amazing! Why didn't anybody try that?"
 
Kadmus said:
'if character was smart' usually means 'ignoring all this person's characterisation and discarding their emotions, and granting them all the meta-knowledge i have, they'd do this', yeah.

That MoR is deliberately written as a cult recruitment tool doesn't help, of course.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I admit to being a fan of fiction with smart characters, Death Note installed that into me.
 
I'd be more of a fan of it if they didn't typically cheat by randomly plucking information and conclusions out of the air that, frankly, nobody should be able to reach with the information they already have. Anyone can look smart when they're handed the script to the plot in advance.
 
I'm a fan of fiction with thoughtful characters.

I don't have much expectations either way for smart, since the outcome will be whatever the author wants anyway.
If the stupid response gets good results, and the smart response gets bad results...

I actually do like rational!fics like HPMOR because the characters sit down and explain what they are thinking.
So many characters will set up something that is not only stupid, but actually impossible to succeed, then act shocked when it doesn't work.
The rational!character is forced to actually show their reasoning, flaws and all, where a normal MC will just announce their plan and ignore the problems.


It is worth pointing out that Harry in HPMOR isn't actually right a lot of the time.
He has some successes, and a lot of spectacular failures, then fucks up so horribly that he basically retires at the age of 12 because he doesn't trust himself to make good decisions.
I get that the author and a bunch of his followers are idiots, but the fic itself is a really bad sales pitch for the philosophy.
"Think like this and you too can horribly fuck everything up."
Which is exactly what happened.
 
Blaflaix said:
I get that the author and a bunch of his followers are idiots, but the fic itself is a really bad sales pitch for the philosophy.
"Think like this and you too can horribly fuck everything up."
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Knowing some background on the guy, it's clear that he sees it as "I'm just too smart and dangerous, the world isn't ready for me yet," but this is very humorously true.
 
FFN's poor control over repeat rule violations. A few other people and myself have been reporting the same moron (who's used 4 or 5 different accounts so far) who keeps uploading the same 6 explicit one-shots (being a bit generous with that definition) and keeps giving them K- and T-ratings. Despite multiple warnings and having had them deleted multiple times. Also... *glances at the very explicitly worded summary of the rage-post they put up recently (also rated K or T) telling the reporting parties to commit suicide, among other things*

(That said, reporting them is a daily occurrence now, and I'd be lying if I said I haven't been having fun with it.)

EDIT: Oh, would you look at that. They're doing it again!
 
Last edited:
Blaflaix said:
That poor AI bot is wondering why people don't like its story.
It set all the most popular settings...
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Oh, it's very much NOT a bot. I'm 99% sure a bot wouldn't have that much sheer vitriol in it's responses.
I read just enough to confirm that each story went full-on explicit before I reported them. It's... just passable writing, to be honest. And it's all the author having sex with their OC. I think there's only one or two sentences in the first one that actually indicates that the setting category was intended. I'm not sure there's anything like that in the rest of them.
If people want, I'll tell them which FFN category to visit. But nothing more than that.
 
Are people really surprised about the lack of moderation on FFN? It hasn't been properly moderated since the 00s.
 
If anything, I'm just consistently surprised FFN still exists at all. It's been in a slow decline to total collapse for years, maybe even a decade now, even has the occasional site wide outage for a day or two that makes me go "oh was that it, the final dying breaths?"

With the condition the site is in, no way they're actually paying for decent moderation.
 
They never did pay for moderators, they were volunteers, and when the volunteers stopped so did moderation.
 
It's still a repository of a lot of great fics, many of which aren't mirrored anywhere else and possibly never will be. I wouldn't be happy to see it go, as dilapidated as it is.
 
I will weep bitterly the day it's no longer around. Admin went all in on an official app, you can get it on smart-things that spy on you and ebook things that spy on you too.
 
Arden said:
It's still a repository of a lot of great fics, many of which aren't mirrored anywhere else and possibly never will be. I wouldn't be happy to see it go, as dilapidated as it is.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Yeah, there is at least one favorite fic of mine that is, as far as I know, only on FFN. And the site doesn't allow you to copy or save the text in any way, so we can't even save a backup copy of those stories to keep them from being lost forever when the site finally dies.

If you have fic on FFN, get that shit mirrored onto AO3 while you still can.

(EDIT: Looks like saving the HTML file of the web page does work on FFN, so I'm off to go right-click and select "Save Page As..." seventy-one times.)
 
Last edited:
The Narrator said:
Yeah, there is at least one favorite fic of mine that is, as far as I know, only on FFN. And the site doesn't allow you to copy or save the text in any way, so we can't even save a backup copy of those stories to keep them from being lost forever when the site finally dies.

If you have fic on FFN, get that shit mirrored onto AO3 while you still can.

(EDIT: Looks like saving the HTML file of the web page does work on FFN, so I'm off to go right-click and select "Save Page As..." seventy-one times.)
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Also, the mobile version does have copyable text.
 
The Narrator said:
(EDIT: Looks like saving the HTML file of the web page does work on FFN, so I'm off to go right-click and select "Save Page As..." seventy-one times.)
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Get yourself a web crawler of some sort. There are tools that are meant specifically for downloading entire HTML trees in one go, it's automated. Saves you the bother.
 
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top