I've seen one where Harry has "pussy" wounds. :awesome

 

I direct you to this post.

 

I just came across a bit of dialogue that couldn't have failed any harder if the author had tried.

I had to fight the urge to facepalm IRL.

 

THAT'S NOT EVEN GRAMMATICALLY CORRECT!

I have never actually been tempted to post something on ffrants, but now I want to. That dialog hurts.

 

I guess this is obvious but i really hate it when writers make characters, who are suppose to be the same in cannon, peronality wise, act totally different.

Also overly bashing and shit pisses me off.

I was reading a Naruto story that started off on the wave mission and he always wrote Sasuke like a broken record having him say; 'Where does he get that power from, i am an Uchiha, an elite, i should have that power. I will find out where he got that power and take it for myself!.'

Seriously? Never once in canon has Sasuke said anything like that. He barely says anything for the most part except one word responses or short insults. I seriously face-palm myself when i read shit like that and the fact that it is in a ton of stories is even more rediculous.

 

The perfect Troll.

 

Where to begin...
-Poor grammar

-Basic spelling errors ("thou" for "though", "thru" for "through", "math" for "maths"

-"Americanisms" - Harry going to "downtown London" or a randomly numbered street.

-Harry deciding to go to America, an American exchange student and so on. (Seems to me like a case of severe butt hurt that the HP universe is focused on Britain)

-10,000 word chapters detailing every day of Harry's summer following the 5th year (and this from someone who only considerings reading fics over 150k words)

-Following on from the above, Harry doing a million and one things in said summer and having the war wrapped up nicely before even going back to Hogwarts

-Stories that completely lose track of where they started and where they are going - again this follows on from the last two points, I've read some where, by mid-August, Harry has amassed a large muggle army

-Redemption fics where Snape/Malfoy instantly go good. I don't mind it if there is a well written reason (there was one, for instance, where the dark mark was influencing the darker parts of Snape. Once it was removed he was still a long way from being a beacon of Light, but he was less of a git and became almost likeable) As for Malfoy, it is more believable than Snape due to his circumstances and seeming reluctance in cannon. Still, overnight "OMG I'M GOOD NOW <3<3<3" turnarounds are ridiculous.

-People forgetting when the stories are set, there have been more extreme examples, but in one I read earlier, Dudley was playing his Playstation 2 following OotP.

-People forgetting how old the characters are! This is a big immersion killer for me, Harry was 16 at the start of HBP, which is astoundingly young. You only realise how young 16 is a few years later when you look back. And yet everyone acts as though they are much older (speech, actions, reasoning etc.)

-Writers being unable to differentiate characters speaking patterns.

-Misspelled names, how is this one even possible?

-Slash, really? REALLY?

There are more, but those are all I can remember for now.

It is hard to write good fanfiction, several years ago I wrote a surprisingly popular Inheritance Cycle fanfic on the fan forums, which had people falling over themselves to praise it. Looking back at it now though, I can see how dreadful it was, so I can forgive some mistakes on the authors part.

 

Indeed.

 

That could have been deliberate. Dudley was playing with a Playstation in GoF before it was released.

 

Maybe the PS is acceptable but the second I see iPhones and iPods in the story I know it's time to close it.

 

Why would one wrongly placed piece of technology differ from any other piece of technology? The playstation wasn't released until December 1994, the ps2 wasn't out until March 2000, the xbox 360 came out in 2005. So if a fic is set before 1994, no one should have any of these, and its just as bad if they have one as if they have any of the others.

 

^ Exactly

This one annoys me as well, I usually see it in manipulative!Dumbledore fics which generally aren't the greatest. Perhaps the author/s forgot that Britain actually rather progressive throughout history (see slavery, suffrage, etc)

 

It's different for me because it's a canon mistake and someone could make it by writing directly from the books, not bothering to check the facts. Let's face it, there aren't a lot of authors that double-check information and canon should give writers a small measure of confirmation at least.

 

Petpeeve: The word 'evilly'. Seeing phrases like 'he smiled evilly' or 'she laughed evilly' just pisses me off for some reason.

 

...uh, no. I call bullshit.

Well, perhaps there is a small grain of truth here - most writers won't automatically go check information - but that doesn't mean they shouldn't. I don't care if it's canon or history or real fucking facts - if they are wrong in stories and I can visibly spot the wrongness, the story is dead to me, because it shows the author just didn't care enough to check his/her facts (and yes, I know Rowling fucked up with the Playstation reference).

Let me give you an example: I spent a good two hours combing through whatever resources I could find to track down the dates when Frank and Alice Longbottom were attacked by the Lestranges and Crouch Jr. for a fleeting reference in Renegade Cause. I did this not because the information was particularly relevant or interesting or special (although I've always been curious about how long the 'mop-up' period between Voldemort's disappearance at the end of the First War and a complete return to peace was), but because getting it wrong hurts the world I'm trying to build. Eventually, I couldn't ever find good data on it, so I just went with a set of dates that even got questioned here. It's the same thing with little details like what year Tonks was in at Hogwarts, or an acknowledgement of building locations in Diagon Alley or Department locations in the Ministry For Magic - if you're working your ass off to build an internal mythology and world, the little details and care shows. That's while I'll overlook a LOT when it comes to some stories, just because I know how much effort world-building takes. And frankly, if your characters are interacting at ALL with the Muggle world, little details are all the more important, and in the age where we have Google maps and research capabilities, there's no excuse for sloppy geography either.

But yeah, newest pet peeve? Sloppy world-building and inconsistent internal mythologies. If you're creating new brands of magic to use, put some work into making them balanced and magically consistent within the world. If your characters are walking about a dark Muggle street, find that street and put a name to it. If you're going to create a rich history, don't forget the details, and if you're going to use Rowling's history, account for it properly.

Bottom line: if you're not going to put the effort into research and writing, I'm not going to put the effort into reading.

 

I didn't say that they were right, just that canon is generally considered a safe information source.

When you quit a story because someone got a fact wrong don't you differentiate a bit between the little things that you know but are obscure enough so that the general population wouldn't know and the rest?

I'm not trying to defend the writers who don't research every fact that they aren't sure of since it's extremely annoying to read about something that the author clearly has no idea and can't be bothered to find out but it seems to me that you're eliminating about 90% of the fanfiction out there.

 

Filtering bad fanfics written by lazy authors is what DLP does.

 

Got me there. Still, I'm sure there are some decent fics written by lazy authors... somewhere.

 

You've not been reading fanfic for very long have you?

 

A few years actually but I've been avoiding fics not recommended by anyone for quite a while. Must be the reason why I still have faith in humanity but if keeping distance from fangirls and idiots works, why ruin it?