I'm seeing "Olympe Maxine" written in many fics. The proper spelling is "Maxime" what is so hard about getting names right in fanfiction?

 

They rarely even use her first name: Probably because they don't know it either.

Maxime is such an easy name, too. This is simple laziness at every step. Lazy because they fail to look up the relevant character information before writing/publishing, and lazy for not spell-checking before publishing.

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I've probably mentioned this before, but...

Come on/Common/C'mon

I'm sick and tired of seeing people 'shorten' "come on" to "common." What kind of troglodyte does that?

A: Common is already a word with a completely different meaning. By using it as a replacement for "come on" you are only making your writing confusing.

B: It doesn't even do what it's supposed to, and that is to replicate a lazily pronounced "come on" in dialogue, because common is pronounced "kaw mun" and the lazy pronunciation is KUH'mawn; surely people know this. Either spell it correctly or at least use a spelling that would actually sound like the sound you're trying to replicate: C'mon!

Idiots of the world, please stop it with that shit.

 

Never seen this one before. Where do you get this stuff from?

 

Umbridge mpreg fics.

 

Umbridge is an mpreg? That explains everything.

 

All over the place. It's not exactly a rarity.

You're here for the scintillating Real Life board, aren't you? There's this thing called fan fiction... :awesome

Okay, that I have not seen.

 

When the author tries to be what I call "tvtrope-y".

Suddenly, out of the deep turquise-blue, the author inserts a pop culture reference and instead of cutting it off for a quick punch of humor, they go on a tangent about how Twilight sucks or that whatever show went bad after season whogivesafuck. And they think they're being soooo clever, being the critic and completely ignoring the story they're writing for a few paragraphs.

If you're going to use pop culture references, know how to do it. And don't insert one into every scene, because then it shows that you're trying too hard - trying too hard means an automatic fail.

It's great that you were able to write 500k words, but when a quarter of that is failed shoehorned pop culture humor, you done goofed.

Jesus fuck.

 

This is probably just an extremely narrow nitpick, but one trend that's growing increasingly agonizing is the deluge of long, quirky, uncapitalized titles usually pulled from baby's first college lit classes, terrible music, or worse poetry, usually with (part of it in unnecessary parentheses of profoundness). They're pretty common in tumblr-based fics and are all over Ao3. There has also been an uptick in similar infestations at FFN. Stuff like this made-up example:

you know how i am (deal with it)

It's got to the point where I can see one of those and know exactly the sort of fic it is -- usually a romance-focused one-shot with competent, if purple, prose and a lack of focus.

On the bright side, being able to skip past that stuff by sight is nice.

 

The prose is usually pretty bad in those. Lots and lots of adverbs.

you know you love this (sort of fic)

 

Heh, I like that sort of fic. I have a thing for flowery prose in shorter stories.

 

Talking about Tumblry writing - intricately describing the smells and tastes of characters, usually love interests, and with words such as "smoke" or "honey".

 

The very new Miraculous Ladybug fandom is infested with this shit. It's was so bad at one point that most of the recc's on TvTropes didn't have a single capital letter in their titles despite the fact that if they had cut and pasted the title from FF.net it would have been capitalised. Thankfully someone with more patience than I went through and fixed that problem.

---------- Post automerged at 18:14 ---------- Previous post was at 18:13 ----------

Wait, no, someone seems to have undone it. Faaarrk.

 

I won't lie; I have read a lot of them and enjoyed some, which is why I hate those stupid titles so strongly. Trash fics are like junk food. I know I shouldn't indulge and that they're probably ruining my perception of what is "good" but sometimes I just want to fill myself with unrepentant garbage.

Speaking of trash, another pet peeve of mine is the "Slytherin Sex God" thing. Draco Malfoy. Lucius Malfoy. Snape. Occasionally Zabini or Nott. Always Tom Riddle. They're beautiful bad boys, they're always great in the sack, and they're incredibly OOC.

No.

Well, okay, people should write what they want, even if I loathe it. Not like I can't skip it. I just want authors to try and make it as in-character as possible, (unless there is a really good AU reason for it to be otherwise). Staying in-character is part of the challenge in writing fanfic. Of course, if I ever find that anyone has written a blustering, cowardly bully resting on his father's laurels; a dangerous, lying bigot serving a madman; or an unwashed, stalker-ish, obsessed manchild as plausible romantic interests with zero whitewashing involved, I'd be impressed.

As it stands now, finding a gen fic with those characters above is searching for a needle in a stack of needles. And the needles are coated in poison. Poison that is made from cheap yaoi cliches.

 

...Snape? Beautiful? Now I've seen everything.

Actually, the thing about sexual prowess is really weird in a way. Like, I didn't think about this before, but now I suddenly notice that a certain type of writer makes every single character they like amazing at sex, and every single character they hate awful at it. Even when it's completely irrelevant. Even in stories which have no sex scenes at all. Just, some character will inevitably mention in passing that, oh, Sasuke just doesn't have stamina like Naruto does (wink wink nudge nudge eye roll).

Why? Can you not let me quietly ignore the sex lives of children in peace?

 

Speaking of Slytherins, I would really love it if I run into a Slytherin girl that isn't depicted as a Slytherin ice princess. I mean I get it-- a girl in a house like Slytherin, it's natural to assume the girls are a little meaner, colder, tougher. But then it's always just one special girl who is written that way.

 

I've got a few pet peeves on my mind.

The first being OC's. Not just any original characters however, but the addition of them in Harry's Year Level. I know that Fanon seems to have people convinced there's only one way to write the other students in Harry's Year, but it's not true damnit. There's no need to add in OC's to fill whatever void you feel is missing because there's a bunch of side characters who have essentially no canon personality. When I see a summary telling me there's going to be focus on OC's I just refuse to click on the fic.

The second is one I know will never cease to exist.
The Prophecy.
Every damn fic I read seems to love using the Prophecy as if its true. Whether it be for that whole shtick about Dumbledore being evil or the other option of making Harry super speshul (or both).
But if you've read the books you know that the Prophecy is essentially only true because Voldemort knows part of it, and doesn't appreciate threats to his life, even from babies.

The final peeve I can think of is the incessant playground insults you see scattered all over the fandom. It's name-calling. Dumbles, Moldyshorts, the Dork Lord, etc. etc.
Any fic using these terms makes me retch and quit reading. There's nothing clever about name-calling. It's what six year olds do to each other. You hate someone, you call them an asshole like a normal person.

 

While I agree that it's annoying, to be fair, our characters ARE teenagers, in worst case 11 years old, therefore, namecalling wouldn't be that uncommon would it? Espically something like Umbitch, while annoying for a great many of he readers actually sounds kinda like a teenage me would call her. Fuck young me DID call teachers something like that. Of course i was not even ten, but there are many people who does that in their teens.

 

The problem is reading about 15 and 16 year old kids calling her Umbitch among other things, and that is what is most annoying. If you recall in HP Ron was the only one who called her a 'hag' the rest including Harry never referred to her in such annoying nicknames.

 

Thing is the name calling doesn't occur when they're eleven, or at least not as often as it happens when they're teenagers in fics. And maybe I just had a different experience as a teenager but making up names for people was pretty low on our list of insults.

The weirder thing I can think of is when they're supposedly writing an intelligent Harry and then he uses name calling as way to insult people. That's really jarring to read.

 

I have a reviewer who exclusively refers to Voldemort as Moldy Shorts, Death Eaters as Death Munchers, and the whole Gred and Forge thing. I know I'm supposed to be grateful for their review but I always just want to tell them to shut the fuck up.

I suppose that's another pet peeve really, not in stories but within fanfic... People who review all of your chapters with actual nonsense, never giving you any actual feedback. Often they just regurgitate what happened in the chapter.

One more petpeeve - Puritanism being heaped on female characters, often Ginny, making such a huge deal of virginity and all the older brothers she has. It's so dull and turns Harry into a pathetic quivering mess.