I know there isn't an episode like that. I'm saying that if it existed it wouldn't surprise me.

 

Saw a "realistic" Pokemon SI fic yesterday.

The SI ends up a Pokemon, a carnivorous Pokemon; that's fine. What's not fine is the SI barely addressing the fact that in the story Pokemon are demonstrated to have human or near human intelligence after killing and eating several Pokemon, and the SI only mentions any concern for this fact when the mother of one of the Pokemon they ate decides to try kill them. It gets like two lines.

You either need to address this matter properly, or not write your grimderp nonsense where you reveal you're a sociopath.

 

"All of those girls are only interested in The Boy Who Lived. None of them know the real me... because I'm just Harry."

Can you guess which fanfic I'm quoting? Trick question-- only about 378,000 of them feature some variation on this crap. Usually starring Hermione as the only possible girl who could ever get to know the real Harry. This has got to be the laziest crap in the HP fanfic world.

 

But 'Arry you are zee only one who knows the real me.

 

It might be a stereotype in fanfic but its actually very realistic, that's a common complaint from celebrities. It's even seen similarly in non celebrity wealthy people, who struggle with folk dating then solely for their money.

 

That's true, however they always use the 'I'm just... just Harry' line. Now, when I saw the first movie 20 years ago, I can admit that Dan's awkward acting was kinda amusing when he said that, but it was talking to Hagrid and expressing the fact that he didn't know anything about magic. It had nothing to do with romance, and yet it seems like its practically a required scene in all the cheesy 'Harmony' love stories out there.

 

There really isn’t anything quite as capable of screwing up a good idea as a romance by an average ff author. Preferably with blushing, fedora tipping m’lady Harry. That skips right past the awkward “interesting, but also shit” stage straight to red X.

 

I guess this isn't an ordinary pet peeve, but I feel like griping.

I commonly post of Spacebattles, mostly because I have more fandom interests than HP. But there seems to be a distinct lack of any writing creativity or the ability to use your head and find ways to write around problems. I suggested in the Pokemon thread a story that has anime Misty go in search of her Togepi/Togetic. It was supposed to be some heart-warming reunion thing.

First comment "but how will Misty run her gym from Hoenn?".

I was puzzled by this question as I did not suggest at any point that Misty would be staying there. So I said that. Said person followed it up with "but Togetic is the guardian of the Togepi Paradise!" as if it was the end-all of the discussion.

There seems to be a distinct lack of people being unable to think of any possible solutions to that. It has been several years in-series since that episode, but apparently people are unable to imagine things like maybe Togetic has trained up some others in the kingdom and now they don't need her to watch over them, or maybe the political situation in the Mirage Kingdom has stabilised enough that they can protect it like they used to, or maybe the Hoenn elite four and champion are now involved and have made protecting them part of their purview, or maybe any other idea you could come up with if you spent more than 30 seconds thinking about it.

But no, the average user there is simply inflexible.

This isn't the first time I've been bewildered by this lack of imagination. I made suggestion in the Dragon Ball thread, a what if after being outclassed by Goku and Vegeta, humans like Krillin or Tien wished with the Dragon Balls that humans had the same fighting potential as a Saiyan. First comment: "but they still don't have super saiyan!" as if that does not fall under "fighting potential" and a flexible wish like what I suggested from a non-monkey-paw wish granter could never account for that.

 

The commonality with these anime is that they're both pretty saturated with nostalgia. Changing up the formula in a meaningful way is going to ruffle some feathers with a lot of the fans. They'll get tired of reading samey stories at some point. I'm not saying everyone nostalgic for something doesn't like change, but it seems like the most likely explanation.

 

I think you're right with the DBZ idea. People like to wank Saiyans and don't want their carefully crafted wanking to be interrupted by some mere humans. I'm not sure that's the case with the Pokemon idea though. It does not seem to fit in my mind as a Misty story ticks the nostalgia boxes.

 

I think this is closely related to one of my greatest annoyances as a writer. I've started calling them 'bad-faith plot holes'.

Basically, a writer creates some AU of a setting. It doesn't even really need to be an AU, but could also be a 'fill in the gaps' kind of thing and they don't want to go into exhaustive detail about how minor elements of that setting work (for example, which of the two-dozen ways the Gym issue could be 'solved') because those things are simply unimportant to the story that is going to be told. In this situation they will almost certainly receive a number of complaints along the lines of 'thing X in your story is incompatible with thing Y which I think should have happened, so this whole thing is stupid.'

For added annoyance, make 'thing Y' something entirely non-canon which the reader has mistakenly come to think is canon (fanon, head-canon).

In Harry Potter, common examples of this are:

• But that transfiguration couldn't possibly last that long. Harry isn't that powerful! Lern to magic, scrub.
• Why doesn't he just use the Tempus charm to work out the time, lol? Retard Harry in retard story.
• lol, this story is stupid. Why doesn't he just use the Point Me charm to find the MacGuffin? Could be done in one chapter then.
• Daphne's blonde, moron!

The transfiguration example is notable because you will get a 'lern to magic' response if you include either temporary transfiguration or permanent transfiguration. People are so incredibly married to their own preconceptions (or misconceptions) that they will fight you tooth and nail on these things unless you specifically telegraph them within the story.

"Harry decided to gift Umbridge a transfigured dildo, modelled on his own manhood, for her Birthday. Thanks to the permanent nature of all transfiguration, it would provide her... relief... for many years to come."

If you don't call it out as specifically permanent, you will get comments complaining that 'it won't last forever, noob!' Even if you do include the call-out you'll probably have some fine and upstanding Guest mansplain to you why it's stupid/non-canon/broken that it can be permanent.

It can be incredibly frustrating. Outside fanfic people are usually willing to just kinda roll with these things. 'Oh, okay, so that's how the world works'. Within fanfic an author is in a constant battle with the readers' own preconceptions and if you do not wish to draw their ire you have to be far more exhaustive in your world-building than is really good for the story.

The Point Me one just infuriates me. I've had multiple people complain that my HP/DC crossovers could be resolved by simple use of that spell (Point Me MacGuffin!).

A spell which in canon only points fucking North.

A spell which, if it did point at any random person or object like these people believe, would utterly break canon as well. In a dozen different ways.

But instead of stopping and thinking for a moment, 'my preconception based on shitty indy-Harry fics doesn't seem to fit in this story, maybe the author is working under a different assumption', they write an imverysmart review and make me grind my teeth for thirty seconds at the idiocy of some people.

 

I mean... in all fairness, this one is legit.

Tsk...
Legally speaking, you have to own a pair of clown shoes to unironically use that expression.

 

Point Me Voldemort Intensifies

 

Why would you say-

Oh, of fucking course. Point me Voldemort's Horcrux . Hmm. Doesn't work? Maybe I should learn more about it/them and be more specific. Point me Ravenclaw's Diadem

Edit: to go back to Pet Peeves: if I see the Uzumaki clan also specialize in swordsmanship (kenjutsu) in a Naruto fic, that's two strikes immediately, so I hit 'close' on the next idiotic thing I see. I don't know why, but while I don't hate Naruto using a sword, making it an Uzumaki clan thing is a no-no for me.

 

Personally I am annoyed at giving any role to the Uzumaki Clan.

Though that annoyed me in canon too, since they always got new abilities out of nowhere(like that collection of masks they have that can fucking control Shinigamis). Espically since Kishimoto goes out of his way to specify that Naruto didn't inherit any talent from his parents anyway.

 

If i see best-friend-Neville-chad-transformation one more time I'm going to lose it.

 

This crosses into a canon peeve.

I really hate an aversion to powerful weaponry, particularly in the context of universes where they are absolutely necessary.

Take the MCU. Earth is invaded by aliens multiple times with each time Earth demonstrating they are way behind everyone else in the universe, only surviving due to the timely intervention of superheroes. So seeing fan and canon writers go on about how evil (or an in general "bad") it was for SHIELD to develop weapons from the Tesseract is grating at best, and disgustingly naive at worst.

Now, yes, Hydra ending up with these weapons is bad. But until Hydra were revealed to living inside SHIELD, that's not an argument against SHIELD building these weapons. Tony Stark opposing this is okay if you're writing him as a man who isn't dealing with his father's and his own legacies very well, but that doesn't really make his opposition logical. Steve Rogers opposition makes sense (but isn't rational) if it's a response to the fact they're working with old Hydra tech, but making him in general support disarming the planet in the face of alien attack is just lunacy.

It's lunacy in most modern people, but for a guy raised in the 1930s and fought in WW2 it would be really odd for him to oppose weapons development given better weapons mean more of the enemy die while less of your squad mates die. This would have been a reality Steve lived with.

As I said, this crosses into canon as this was never really addressed properly in canon either (because big honking space guns sort of undermine superheroes), but the number of disgustingly naive fanfic writers who treat Stark's "rules for thee but not for me" bullshit as good and not an irrational product of guilt (a term I use loosely given his habit of blame shifting guilt) is agonising.

It's probably a product of the average fanfic writer's immaturity. A lack of perspective.

It would be nice if nuclear weapons didn't exist (or their universe's equivalent), but they continue to be a necessary evil while our enemies still possess them.

I've seen this in Harry Potter (mostly crossovers) and Stargate too. The episode where they test a new nuclear bomb on a deserted planet is a key contender. If they'd stuck to just a "we haven't done enough research on the test site's suitability" plot it would have been fine, but it instead turned into an anti-nuclear weapons speech while they were facing down the goa'uld. And then a few seasons later we get like two lines where they discuss the unsettling power of one of these weapons.

 

wbwl is friends with the Weasleys, especially Ron.
I haven't read very many wbwl stories, mostly because I've heard they're angsty shit and not worth the effort, but it only makes it more disappointing when there's enough quality there to make it worth the effort, but they didn't put a basic amount of thought into why the canon characters act the way they do. Arthur Weasley and James Potter were probably total strangers; there's half a generation gap in between them, so unless you're going to change things and show Arthur as having joined the first Order of the Phoenix, there is no reason his children would ever get to know either of the Potter boys. The encounter between Harry and the Weasley family at the train station was probably the first time a Potter introduced himself to a Weasley, and it was entirely a chance encounter.
In two fics that have been decent enough to keep reading, at least by my estimation, not only were wbwl and Ron best friends before Hogwarts even started, they're total fucking jerks to Harry. Even if you have some sort of reason for wbwl to be a jerk to Harry, was Ron a jerk? Did he canonically make friends with famous jerks because they were famous? I literally don't understand how you read the first book and didn't come to the conclusion that Ron didn't hero-worship Harry from day one; he wanted to be friends because he saw the boy who lived was a normal, humble kid, maybe a bit down on his luck, who doesn't particularly like the spotlight. That's literally all it was. Unless you're rewriting the war to where the Weasleys swore fealty to the Potters or something, Ron decided he wanted to be friends with the kid who was raised by the Dursleys, not the snooty rich kid the wbwl usually is.

 

My 'favorite' kinds of story updates...

1. Just a poll.
2. Just complaining about drama in the reviews section.
3. Ye olde notice of hiatus.
4. Typical notice of abandonment. / Notice of adoption by another author.
   
5. Rage quit. "Fuck you ungrateful fuckers! How dare you criticize me... at all! And why don't I have more likes/reviews? I quit!"
6. Apathy quit. "The creator/owner ruined the franchise and I can't go on writing. No, I can't just ignore the current canon, even though (by definition) my fan fic already largely ignored canon."
7. Weird quit. "I got a threatening message, so I'm out." / "Someone plagiarized me, so I'm removing my story, consequently making them look more like they're the actual author. Yes, this makes complete sense to me."
8. Literally the same as the previous chapter, but from another character's frustratingly near-identical POV, with the entirety of the previous chapter's dialog repeated.
9. Literally a near verbatim transcription of a canon chapter: No more, no less. Nothing new to see here.
10. "Oops, sorry for the double post..." / FFN sent duplicate alerts.
11. And finally... "I'm the author's spouse/sibling/parent/child/friend, just thought you should know they're dead."

 

I try to not let the classic spelling/grammar mistakes bother me, because, y'know, fanfiction, but lately I've seen one crop up all over the place that for whatever reason just extremely tilts me.

Breathe / breath.

"Stop choking me, I can't breath."

I just... how is it possible to get this wrong? Doesn't it look glaringly, obviously wrong on the page to everyone else? For some reason I've been seeing this more and more, and it stops me in my tracks every time. Pure homophones, sure, I can see how if you think apostrophe = possessive getting its/it's wrong, or a classic their/there/they're or whatever, but this one is kind of beyond that.

I wouldn't mind so much except that it completely ruins whatever flow I had going, reading-wise.