Well it is kind of canon at least with the Curse Mark

 

Stories that pay any attention to the time between Dumbledore hearing the prophecy and Halloween, 1981. It's gotten to the point where, even if the author does something actually new, I'll either stop reading, or skip ahead. It's never interesting, and it almost never adds anything to the story in any meaningful way.

 

That reminds me. Stories that start with the night Harry's parents get murdered, or for Naruto the sealing of the kyuubi, and don't actually change anything.

Why make us read it if you're not going to change anything?

 

The illusion of length? I actually don't care too much about this one, but I think that's because I recognise the scene easily and start skipping through it paragraph at a time.

 

Maybe they feel it's too jarring otherwise to start off at the divergence. But yeah, this. For Naruto at least, so many stories start off recreating the final battle with Sasuke, it just automatically becomes filler to scroll past.

This has probably already been said but some authors can't find the balance between using Japanese. Using too much is cringeworthy -- replacing a perfectly usable word in technique with jutsu -- and using too little, especially suffixes, breaks immersion, IMO.

There was a story where the suffixes were replaced with 'Teacher and Lord Shadow'. I couldn't get past how stilted the dialogue felt because of it.

 

Pretty much any story that has a massive POD, only to keep pretty much everything else the exact same.

I once read a GOT story where several SIs manage to screw the War up in so many different ways (ranging from getting Eddard out of King's Landing to convincing several thousand former Renly followers to join the Starks)... and yet somehow the Red Wedding still managed to nearly happen (one of the SIs managed to stop it by threatening to kill Walder or something). How does any of that make sense?

 

One of my biggest pet peeves happens to be a grammar issue. It's when people mess up when writing possessive plural proper nouns (and improper nouns, and pronouns). When someone writes 'the Dursley's house' instead of 'the Dursleys' house' it just kind of miffs me. I'm perfectly okay with things like 'Dursleys's', strangely enough, but that's probably because some people write it like that for clarification.

Another thing that does annoy me (even if it is a guilty pleasure read of mine) is when Dumbledore or other characters (Assorted Weasleys, Malfoys, Snapes, WBWL!Potters, etc) are so one-dimensional it just jars you straight out of the story.

Another of my pet peeves is when the POV is third person omniscient and the author shows and tells everything the antagonists, protagonists, sidekicks, and their cats are thinking. I personally enjoy learning about the world alongside the characters, and when every motive about why the antagonist/villain is doing something is revealed before the protagonist learns why it just jerks me out of the story and leaves me there yelling at a fictional character, because when the reader knows it they tend to feel like the character should as well, even if they logically know that they don't.

 

This would absolutely drive me mad, as it is a misspelling of Dursley when done that way.

Dursley
Dursley's home (one guy named Dursley)
Dursleys's home (One person named Dursleys*)
Dursleys' home (multiple people named Dursley)

*Older style would be Dursleys' home.

 

That's the older style? I thought that was correct. Something about s's just looks wrong.

 

The inclusion of this line automatically makes me click the close button.

 

I can see where you're coming from, but a couple years ago I had several people get really upset with me for writing something like, well, 'the cats' toys' and they said it was confusing, so I used s's for a while mostly just because I had be told that was the right way to be clear.

 

I agree- it's entirely too lucid. Canon was much better:

 

I shall repeat myself because I saw it just recently in a fic for review.

Parseltongue - language

Parselmouth - person

Is it really that hard to gizoogle dat shiet, yo?

 

My favorite is still Parceltounge, the official language of the Magical USP.

 

As a follow-up, anything involving a written Parseltongue. People do know that snakes don't have arms, right?

 

Pet Peeve of the Day: authors not marking their stories as abandoned even it its been 3-4 years since they last updated.

 

Then, you're probably in your thirties to mid forties? Older? I was taught the exact same thing, that s's is wrong on plural proper nouns. According to the Chicago Manual of Style (which serves as the base style manual for a lot of American writing and, from what I understand publishing houses), it's now s's.

I'd stick with cats' toys and be done with it. Use it as an opportunity to educate others (as long as you're right).

Parseltongue, Parselmouth, ParcelTongue; they're but faint remnants of the original . . .

 

/vent

If you leave a review on DLP, I should be able to at least tell what fic you read by the contents of your review.

"good plot and I liked the characters, but the last third seemed to drag and I didn't like how Harry acted towards Voldemort in the climax."

No.

"something seems off about the writing, I didn't really like it. Time travel is a cool genre and there was good action but the writing was choppy."

Fuck you.

"Hermione seems too clever in this fic, I didn't like how Harry kept listening to her and she's always right."

You're the worst.

And of course, the cream of the crop, the ultra-generic:

"Great fanfic, loved reading it but there were some cliches."

I just made those up, and I'm not calling anyone out specifically. But it's a trend. And I don't like it.

Get. the. fuck. out of here with those weak-sauce FFN reviews.

You don't need to do a Taure-level analysis and drop a 2K word bomb on the thread, but you should have something to actually say. You can be wrong. You can go against the grain. You can obsess over the little things. What you cannot do is add nothing of substance and be mindbogglingly generic.

Just please, for the love of God, when you leave a review, make me think there's actually a mind at work. Show me you read the fic and have an original thought about it, or at least that you have an unoriginal thought and can express it in an original way. The bar is so very, very low.

Some people actually use the DLP threads to decide if they're going to try a new fic, and having them cluttered up with FFN-style reviews is just the fucking worst.

/vent over

This was entirely useless, because the people who are most likely to read it are the people who are already leaving good reviews. Just needed to blow off some steam.

 

That was an excellent read, write moar!

 

that was okay but could you make it Harry/Draco and also change updates to once every 47 minutes instead of once every two weeks? updates are too slow, thx.