I've become an insufferable snob in my advanced years. Any inelegance in language, characterization, description or plotting offends me. I have my aesthetic preferences regarding HP fics, but I wouldn't mind if a writer ran roughshod over canon, if it was done competently and with flair.

Furthermore, gross mismatches between a character's and its author's intelligence, especially if the former is intended to appear brilliant, annoy the hell out of me. If I'm spending my time, so to speak, inside the mind of a supposedly ingenious character, I better be impressed with what I see.

Of course, these peeves make finding decent reads nearly impossible nowadays. Also, trying to live up to these standards makes my own attempts at writing gruelling and, generally speaking, abortive.

 

Hmmm.

Well, to be perfectly honest it bugs the crap out of me when someone doesn't finish dialogue and leaves it open - "Hello, my name is Bob"

Something in Naruto fanfiction that really bugs me is the cowering to all females and that if they look at a good looking female they are automatically a pervert. But the most annoying thing in Naruto fanfiction is all the people who write Sakura smashing Naruto over the head like really hard if he says something she doesn't agree with. Hell man, I've seen some people have her do it for him commenting about the weather and stuff.

Sometimes I just want Naruto to fuckin' get up and smack her back. Because I really don't find Sakura abusing Naruto funny. It makes her as a character really shallow when she has a good amount of potential to be a great character, love interest or otherwise.

 

Oh god, those sort of stories make me feel sick. Like wifes/girlfriends hitting their male partner over the smallest thing. It's pretty horrifying that there are people who think that's okay, something to laugh about.

 

By this point I have read that happening so often in otherwise good stories that I have gotten exceptionally good at completely ignoring that shit. Thus unless Sakura punching Naruto when they are 8 is indicative of instinctive chakra control that produces strength on par with Tsunade's technique I don't even notice. Except that is also pretty common so yeah very annoying.

 

Just something that can sometimes pop up even in the good fics: potions to tell you what your Animagus form is. Or that everyone and their fucking grandfather seem to be an Animagus, as though it was a choice and not by random chance.

Or books about Occlumency which apparently teach you everything to master it in less than a week. Granted, that shit is less common in good fics, but it still happens.

 

Judging by the rarity of the Occlumency books...

 

In fanfiction, they're about as rare as cats.

 

Even worse is that more often than not occlumency doesn't even have any relevance to the plot or character development. Pretty much the same as with animagus.

It's actually kind of like The Shopping Sequence: it seems to be something people think needs to be there even though the story would be better of without it.

 

But what would Harry do without his expanded trunk with its fully functional potion lab? How else is he going to practice his favourite course?

 

Buy himself an illegal Time-Turner, obviously.

And then pillage Grimmauld's place and its library for "Secrets to the Universe, or how to become OP as fuck over the course of one summer away from Hogwarts".

 

Another options include fraternising with the goblin nation, becoming the king of vampires, allying himself with the Noblest and Ancientest House of Greengrass, who are actually more politically powerful than Malfoys only they've been keeping a low profile or the House of Parkinson, and Pansy is actually hotter than Emma Watson, but she's been using her dogface as a shield, much like Daphne's Ice Queen persona and Fleur's Frost Bitch exterior.

 

Who shall prevail? Frost or Ice?

Also, it's not really an accomplishment to be hotter than Emma Watson. The first actress that played Pansy in Philosopher's Stone grew up to be quite a looker.

Anyhoo, concerning Fleur, it's more often than not in her pairings with Harry that she's even more angsty than him because of the whole Veela thing. There's only a few stories where she's quite the bitch and even then it doesn't last long.

 

Whichever manages to get Harry to bone them first.

-_-

 

Well, I notice that those fics generally have every single pureblood over the age of 10 with occlumency skills to rival Snape (literally). Surely that AU must be simply swimming in occlumency books.

Oh look at you, all cool and studly. "Yah yah, I'd totally turn Emma down if she propositioned me, I mean, have you seen the size of her forehead, yeugh!"

I'm guessing you're a boobs man, no shame in that I suppose. :awesome

 

I have soured on the notion that Occlumency is a wide-spread skill, as is so commonly the case in Fanon. As Snape put it, Occlumency is an obscure branch of magic. I have no reason to doubt that that's true. In my own version of fanon, Occlumency is so obscure that there are no books at all describing the art, and the skill is so highly individual--one must master one's own feelings--that there can't be any specific guideline, no simple steps to follow to mastery.

 

Take an Internet for that post.

 

...Well, this doesn't qualify as a pet-peeve for actual fanfiction as much as it is a pet peeve about fanfiction readers in general - well the fanboy ones atleast.

So the other day I'm reading a story that said in the summary that Naruto was gonna be dark as hell because in it Mizuki actually liked Naruto and tried to stick up for him and help him during his time in the academy. And eventually Mizuki decided a safe haven with Orochimaru was risky but better than the hate Konoha was piling on the kid - atleast Orochimaru would help him reach his full potential because hey - Kyuubi Jinchuuriki subordinate how awesome would that be?

Anyway, when they steal the scroll and attempt to leave it is assumed to be only Mizuki's idea and he's quite literally beheaded by an anbu in like a nano-second after they find him.

Again moving on. So five chapters later Naruto still hasn't even acted 'dark' like at all. Infact, if anything he's even more of an idiot in this and lets Sakura beat him around silly wile continuing to act the clown.

So I reviewed and said thus - 'The writing is pretty good, but in six chapters he's yet to display one proper 'dark' action - this is pretty much false advertisement. - the writer replied saying that it was still early yet in the story and this was just developement for now. so I replied - 'Fairy enough, I'll keep an eye on it and check back in once you've got a few more chapters.'

I woke up and checked my e-mail inbox a little while ago and noticed I had a pm from somebody I didn't recognize so I opened it up and was met with this:

'A translation of your review:

Sob sob sob. This Naruto isn't awesome and getting all the bitches I so desire immediately, as one can see by looking at the harem fics on my profile and in my favorites list. His development into a villain is gradual, rather than something that happens randomly, overnight, without any real buildup. Now, I can't jack off with my mother's underwear in the toilet while pretending that I'm Naruto, which is just completely unacceptable. And so, because I can't find any other issues, I'm going to complain that this isn't a dark Naruto and run away like a little bitch.

My response:

Good riddance, you useless turd.'

The funny thing is that the guy is a lurker on even fanfiction. He has nothing on his profile - nothing written or even favorites.

So yeah, story fanboys are a peeve of mine aswell. Especially when they've posted nothing they've written themselves. I mean, if the actual writer of the story doesn't get mad over the review what right do random fanboys have to?

 

Yeah I have rather bad experiences with that, don't recall the story or even the forum it was but quite a while ago after finding a story as it began and commenting on how several things were portrayed well, despite me initially not even liking the premise, the new update had several characterization problems in my view thus I commented to explain why I thought that hoping for clarification on the issue and perhaps even changes. Also took time to ensure it wasn't coming across as "You should write this because I say so" and even added other comments on what was done well and some speculation to round it off as well as I could.

I think pretty much every poster in the thread fell on me like I had just insulted their entire families, it was so unexpected and jarring I actually went back to see if I had done something like that. After a few replies only making the whole thing worse I just abandoned the thread and never posted again since it wasn't worth the bother.

The author himself was pretty decent about it and disagreed with actual points raised though the fanboys screaming prevented much of a discussion happening before I gave up. Don't know the details of afterwards since I didn't even want to look at the thread anymore but I did keep track of the story itself and saw days later the author rewrote the scene to pretty much exactly what I said. This at least means the effort wasn't wasted but this along with several other events did sour me to thoroughly reviewing fanfics to the point now I have trouble doing it even in DLP where I know people will be reasonable and the worst that would happen is me being stupid and people explaining precisely why I am stupid.

 

Hell, those kind of reviews on my stories usually end up being four or five messages long as I try to nail down exactly what the reviewer is saying and why. I figure if they take the time to put some thought into the review, I should take the time to respond to it—provided they didn't completely misinterpret the story according to their little fanboy worldview.

 

You know the author is imagining an anime rather than writing a story when you see shit like "tick marks", "sweat drops", group faceplants, and (my personal favorite) "anime style tear rivers".