An English major, methinks.

 

http://peopleofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/I-heart-collage.jpg

 

Canon retreads are something I really dislike too. Of course, there are reasons for it. Following canon is like safety wheel on a bike. It takes away much of that hard plotting, gives a fic a ready direction and provided some measure of pacing. It also feeds into the common power trip fantasy of ‘Main Character does canon right’.

This leads to one of the other major problem with such stories. Since the main difference is often to give the main character something extra (super hidden ninja skills, powerful wandless magic, a stable home environment, a love of learning) while leaving other things the same, it means the story is conflict negative. The character faces less problems and overcomes them with less difficulty than canon. Done properly, the butterfly effect should take care of some of that but it wouldn’t be a canon retread if your letting the butterfly effect do its job.

Anyway, one of my major pet peeves is arrogance on the part of the main character and assumptions which are only right because the author wants them to be, not because they flow naturally from the information available to the character in question. If characters are making shot-in-the-dark guesses, they should back fire at least some of the time.

I remember reading a fic years ago which had Harry ‘work out’ that the Ministry must track underage magic by his wand despite having no evidence towards that conclusions. It even had him dismiss the Dobby incident, one of only two clear cut examples in canon, as ‘House Elf’ magic. It would be different if the author established some evidence towards this conclusion (Harry could research it or not set something off using another wand or any number of other things) but there was nothing of that sort, just character right because of author faint. Harry then went onto build a plan solely around this assumption. By all rights it should’ve ended badly.

 

I'm sick of hearing about "Sasuke-teme". God! It makes my eyes bleed! Teme is an extremely rude way to say "you". The worst part of it is that one of those internet dictionaries actually say that it means "bastard".

Now you've got everyone running around, thinking that they're so cool because they use "teme" incorrectly.

Right now, I'm starting to dislike bad code. Everyone's trying too hard to make the Order of the Phoenix like some kind of military.

"Snakeface is lying in the grass, waiting for Bumbles to make a move."

On top of being completely retarded, everyone can tell who they're talking about, anyway.:facepalm

EDIT: Pointless gay couples.

 

Close but no cigar. It is edu. of hearing impaired actually.

Huh I didn't know that too! But it is interesting.

 

You know, I was perfectly happy to poke fun at your English before you said this.

 

I'm guessing it's because of the anime. Someone heard "Sasuke, teme!" or something similar and then wrote it as Sasuke-teme in a fic. Then it all went to shit from there.

 

On the subject of Naruto, I dislike it when the author goes overboard with the Japanese. I prefer technique names to be in Japanese and I don't mind honorifics, but anything beyond that is unecessary IMO. It's just irritating and it makes the author come off as a Japanophile/anime tard. Usually this kind of fic suffers from poor writing as well; I know that when I see an overabundance of random Japanese that hitting the red x in the near future is highly probable.

 

I'll add to that by saying ANY foreign language added into the text. I can speak English, and I used to speak German, but haven't used it in years. Picking up a few words isn't a problem, but when someone goes and starts writing conversations in French (which you sometimes see in /Fleur fics) I might just go ahead and x out of it.

Of course, that's nothing compared to that one fic, where, instead of writing parseltongue in italics, or even just putting some form of signage around it, they used the paseltongue generator that Warnerbros put up on the net.

I really wish I was joking.

 

This.

Especially when it's so easy to indicate when someone's speaking in a foreign language without ruining the story.

 

This so much. I didn't mind it so much in the past but then it just became a hassle. Why say "Kuso!" which "Damn!" works perfectly?

I'm also iffy on titles; thing like Hokage, Sannin and Konoha work well but when you write the Seven Ninja Swordsmen of the Mist as "Kiri no Shinobigatan Shichinin Shuu", it ruins it for me.

 

While I agree that long stretches of a language contrary to the rest of your story can get pretty damn irritating, I don't quite agree with the quote above.

Sometimes, like when you're first introducing a new character to your protagonist, a few words (or even full statements that get translated 'in-story' later) of their native language can do a lot more for dramatic effect than just saying they're speaking Latin/French/etc...

 

Yeah, now I feel like a tool. Well, more so than usual, at any rate.

When I was a kid I devoured comic books by the boatload, and one of my favorites was the first Wolverine mini-series. In it, Logan travels to Japan to see Yuki or whatever her name was, and gets into a war with her father and his hundreds of ninja flunkies.

This being Japan, lots of the dialogue was in Japanese, and aside from the obligatory "-san" added onto names, most of the Japanese dialogue was simply printed in English with < and > around it, and an asterisked footnote at the beginning of each comic to explain it was "translated from the Japanese" or something similar.

Personally, I'd prefer to see that used in any fic involving what is to me a foreign language, especially if the author isn't a fluent speaker of that language. I mean, if you're going to do no more than drop a sentence or phrase into Babelfish or Google Translate, do us all a favor and Just Don't Bother.

 

Also, consider it in-story. If it's say, Harry, overhearing the conversation in whatever foreign language, he wouldn't be able to understand it (unless he learned that language, but we're assuming canon-esque Harry here). If you're writing in his POV, it'd be best if he caught the first two words and the rest were babble to him, or simply that whoever were speaking "conversed in language-X" and he couldn't understand at all.

It irritated me to no end in this one fic, using mostly Hermione's POV, when there were long stretches of Krum-Karkaroff conversation in Bulgarian, and the author put in the Bulgarian conversation with the English at the bottom of the chapter. It was clumsy, annoying, and unnecessary.

 

When I see Japanese in fics, and I'm feeling pissy at the moment, I'll leave a review in Japanese . . . In Okayama-dialect just to make sure that google spits out garbage.

 

It can be a valid technique, if the character who's perspective you are writing from is not supposed to understand what is being said, but you as the writer want to throw the reader a bone. If they want to translate the text they can get a bit more information about whats going on, if they don't they don't. This only works of course, if the writer can properly write the language. Never ever just dump a sentence into a translator and let it do its work. That just results in pain!

 

Pus.

I don't know if I've ranted about that before in this thread, but I just recently spotted it in another story, so I figure it's time to dust this peeve off and bitch about it.

It really bugs me when I read a combat scene and a character gets hit with a spell, only for pus to spew from the wound. Look, pus is not some sort of bodily humor that is ever present in one's system. It is a waste product produced in response to an irritation or infection.

Thus, if a perfectly healthy person takes a cutting curse to the chest, blood would be a perfectly normal and expected thing to see... not pus.

If someone's eyeballs burst, blood and vitreous humor would be present... not pus.

If someone takes a piercing curse to the stomach, blood and bile would be appropriate, possibly even mucus... not pus.

If one were to be gouged about the abdominal region, an eruption of fecal matter would not be out of place... not pus. In an extreme situation, amniotic fluid could be present, but still no pus.

If the victim has already been suffering from a long term infection, then maybe there would be pus present in the wounded area, but this begs the question of why (if they have built up enough pus for it to actually explode forth from a wound, which they would surely feel prior to being wounded) they haven't gotten it magicked away by then. :facepalm

Even reanimated corpses, like Inferi, would NOT be swollen with masses of pus! A dead body would not have a defensive biological response to the presence of any irritant, bacteria, virus, et cetera, and thus there would be no production of pus. So, unless the reason they were a corpse to begin with is that they had a MASSIVE, system-wide, untreated infection, they would not be brimming with a reservoir of pus, ready to spray from any wound.

Even then, one would naturally think that they would have to have been turned into an Inferius immediately after death and then be wounded/damaged right after that, for the pus to be present in a fluid state, instead of dried up/coagulated into an unrecognizable mess.

In the case of Harry Potter fan fiction, we are talking about magic, so it is entirely possible for a perfectly healthy person to be hit with a spell that causes instant and aggressive putrefaction of the wound. In that scenario, it would be appropriate for pus to spray from a freshly created wound in an otherwise healthy body.

Otherwise, knock it off with the fuckin' pus, okay? It doesn't make your battle scene grittier, it just makes the reader wonder about your hygiene and/or knowledge of biology. :fire

 

Don't think I've ever seen that before.

 

You two now I my self am not actually hearing impaired right? :facepalm I simply work with hearing impaired kids. You know teaching. So you can poke fun as much as you can. I don't mind. English my 2. language after all.

 

It shows.:awesome