We could have had it aaallllll- pet peeve fandoms

Does anyone else do the thing I do where there are specific works of fiction that you can't let go of your annoyance at? Not necessarily that I hate them- in fact, the problem is usually that I love parts of it, which makes the parts I dislike stand out that much more glaringly. These are the things where I can get onto rants about the flaws in the writing for hours at the drop of the hat.

Judging from the HP thread I'm not the only one who's perpetually unsatisfied with that one, but does anyone else have a list of pet peeve works of fiction you desperately want to rewrite/are just constantly disappointed weren't better?

 

Harry Potter comes to mind, and the Valdemar books, but I think it's because the latter doesn't hold up as well now that I'm older. Most of the books I'm deeply fond of I'm willing to forgive, but video games and TV shows it's harder for me to let slide (maybe because the time invested is by design much higher.)

Buffy, Firefly, and Angel all hit my 'pet peeve' and 'I love this' buttons so hard. I love so many of the shows Whedon headlines, and hate so many of the things he and his writers do with them. Season four and six of Buffy are all but unwatchable for me (and honestly, season seven isn't anywhere near as bad as six and I don't get people who say that was the season that ruined the show. Really?? Was I the only one who watched all of season six?????) and the more I hear about some of Whedon's plans for the second season of Firefly, the happier I am it got the plug pulled.

Face Off is probably my favorite show ever on right now, and the judges manage to piss me off almost every round. Cutthrroat Kitchen sometimes hits that button too, but I'm not sure if that's a "I wish this were better" and more of a "allowing me as an audience member see what the judges can't sometimes backfires" sort of deal.

Dragon Age definitely has its moments for me, but the real contender for "video game that grates on me and yet I can't stop playing it" is probably World of Warcraft. I love it so much but every time new lore comes out or they fuck with the gameplay (and inevitably reverse that fuck up) I want to grab the devs and shake them. I also want to grab the WoW forum goers and shake them, because you can trace a good 80% of the worst and weirdest ideas the devs have to whiny forumgoers who moan about Vanilla even though they joined on the tail end of BC.

 

The His Dark Materials trilogy. Such a good premise.
And then the third book happened.

 

For me the primary offenders are:

• Harry Potter- see HP thread. Far from the most offensive to me, but the sheer number of little things I can wank about is unsurpassed.
  
• Chrono Cross- simultaneously a masterpiece as a game and one of the most offensively bad sequels I've ever played
• Final Fantasy X- the worldbuilding is AMAZINGLY COOL, the combat and gameplay is really well-constructed... and the plot and writing is atrocious. I'm 90% sure part of the reason my favorite game came about was people who played FFX and decided to examine a central plot conceit a LOT more closely.
  
• The second season of Darker than Black- there are some good moments (and one new character I want to rescue from gross writers), but I still prefer to refer to it as "the nonexistent second season" for a lot of reasons. I think maybe... one recurring character was in-character and treated respectfully. In the entire show. And she was a minor comic relief character who showed up in only one episode.
• Suikoden Tierkreis- doesn't make me as angry as the rest, but it's like somebody came in halfway through writing and forced them to add stuff to take out any subtlety or ambiguity, like they were trying to turn it into formulaic shonen. And it's hilariously poorly-balanced. I'm not surprised a lot of series fans hate it, though it's an okay but slightly cheesy JRPG on its own. But it would be so easy to make it so much better, so whenever I think about it I start wishing I could rewrite it to fix it.

 

Smashes in yelling about Christopher Paolini and complete lack of queer representation.

Rolls away only to smash in again yelling about Tales of Zestiria sidelining a major female character most of the game.

 

Did Eragon ever actually end? I think I gave up when the should-have-been-the-third-book turned out to be the first third of it instead.

 

@PRelations season 6 of Buffy consists of OMWF and Tabula Rasa. just those two episodes. and Angel was good when it was a procedural but with vampire shenanigans; I binged it over a few weeks so luckily that's all I remember! all the vampire pregnancy stuff was just a weird fever dream I'm pretty sure.

Game Freak have this Thing where they come up with really cool mechanics in Pokemon games and then immediately drop them for ''replayability'' (i.e. go back and play the older games!) which is some motherfucking bullshit if they take away my DexNav I'm gonna have to cut someone (just kidding I've already made peace with the fact it's gone. too good for this world.)

Spike Chunsoft really needs to chill w/ the pantyshots and weird child molestation themes in the Dangan Ronpa series, it's real bad. And it makes me real annoyed because I love those shitty games and I'm not even sure why at this point.

RWBY, or "Why Is This Happening, What, Don't Just Introduce All This Shit And Then Immediately Literally Handwave It Away, Also No More Screentime For Jaune Ever Please": the show (granted this recent season has been better about it but I'm still salty about the Maiden stuff)

 

Whenever I do my rewatches, I watch those episode and those episodes only. Everything else goes in the trash bin, because basically all of season six should never have happened in the first place so: fever dream it is!

 

FOR REAL THOUGH, that drives me crazy too. What do you want to bet they'll take out Pokemon Amie in the next gen and have to come up with some new way to evolve Sylveon?

 

I mean, they did do basically that when they removed the day/night mechanic for Umbreon/Espeon. And the contest/poffin mechanic for Milotic. So it's pretty much guaranteed, and I hate it. The contest mechanic is so much fun (and I really miss doing the rhythm game when making poffins) and Amie is really relaxing and I just want to have both and not have everything taken out again.

Is that so much to ask, GameFreak.

 

Okay but guys someone brought this up to me and I'm legitimately afraid
what if
no more Wonder Trade

 

Oh man RWBY. The music's great, the Final Fantasy-esque fight scenes are great, potentially interesting world, all female team...But I can't stand the pacing, the animation, the focus on one male character at the expense of the other characters. I get why people would like it, and its got serious potential, I just don't get why its so popular when it wastes so much of that potential. (disclaimer: I have not watched past the end of season 1)

Heroes post season 1

Let's just throw all of TGWTG and related people on this list too.

The Pendragon Adventures. Great series...just ignore the author's attempts to sound "hip" and write your own last book.

Age of Wushu or My Favorite Game I Will Never Ever Play Again. I could live with it's many many flaws quirks until it got stupidly pay to win and i am eternally mad about it.

 

YES, THANK YOU. This game still makes me angry and it's been sixteen years.

 

RWBY had so much going for it for the first eight episodes. Sure, the animation wasn't great, and the voice acting wasn't great, and it was chock full of stupid anime cliches, but it had so much clear potential. And then the fighting ended and writing happened and it went so far downhill. Everything about the writing is so awful and I'm going to keep watching it because I am so invested in the characters as portrayed in the first eight episodes, even though they don't appear to have been in the show since.

 

Re: RWBY: sibling's still watching it and says the writing and pacing got WAY better later. Which. I sat through the first season going -_- and had no desire to keep watching, but.

I'm still pretty consistently fond of Linkara.

I can whine about this game for HOURS like GODDAMN. The fact that every goddamn game Squaresoft was making in the late 90s was almost part of another series shows SO BAD, because CC is blatantly something totally unrelated to Chrono Trigger which got somebody's hatefic slapped onto it with bits of Radical Dreamers for legitimacy and labeled a sequel.

 

It sure seems that way, but if the wikipedia article is anywhere near correct, it actually was written by the same guy who wrote Chrono Trigger - except this time, he didn't have a higher up to stand over him and go "No, this is stupid and bloated." Which, if it's accurate, is even MORE depressing.

 

Teen Titans Go. Just. Teen Titans Go.

I grew up with Teen Titans, ok, I still watch episodes sometimes because they're good. But TTG is just so - so careless and shallow and so obviously someone trying to make money because they saw things like Adventure Time and went 'ok the kids want random humor' without thinking about it at all. I mean, a more lighthearted cartoony Teen Titans reboot could have been good! But what they made is so - AUGH.

All the Titans are horrible people, except for Starfire, and most of the morals there are just hideous. Like, there's an episode where Starfire gets labelled as dumb because she... has trouble speaking fluently in a second language, has trouble with idioms and grammar? And that makes her an idiot? And then Raven* gives her a magic amulet that makes her smart, which then translates to everyone hating her more, and then they change her back more or less by shaming her with how stupid (read: not as good at speaking English as a native speaker) she used to be? What the fuck.

*Sidenote, when I talk about how Teen Titans Go could have been good, the relationship between Raven and Starfire is part of that. Most of the team, especially the three boys, are perfectly horrible to each other, but Raven and Starfire seem to be actually friends and when the episode removes the three male characters from the screen then it can be actually good. There's an episode where Robin, Beast Boy, and Cyborg sell Silkie (yeah) and Raven believes Silkie is happier where he is, whereas Starfire thinks he must be miserable. So Raven teleports them to where Silkie is, sees that he's actually not happier, hears that Silkie loves Starfire, and promptly sincerely apologizes to both Silkie and Starfire, and then they go and have fun together. Whenever the guys are around they're either being obnoxious morons or (less Cyborg, more Beast Boy and Robin) being obnoxious morons who can't take no for an answer - Robin more or less stalks Starfire and asks her UNDER A LIE DETECTOR whether she loves him, gets a straight no, and just keeps being a creeper. Raven and Beast Boy just seem to be completely at odds all the time, with the show pushing the fact that they have absolutely no common interests or non-antagonistic relationship moments as somehow being romantic, ignoring the fact that the Beast Boy-Raven shipping came from when they SUPPORTED each other and were NICE.

Also there was an entire episode of Raven being reduced to 'sexy legs character' which. Yeah let's put a female character down to ONE PART OF HER BODY, that's practically the definition of objectification, and also that only happened because Robin STOLE RAVEN'S CLOAK while she was in the shower and then the rest of the Titans promptly ignored Raven's clear, obvious demands for it back and her saying that she was angered and distressed by what they were doing, which is NOT OK.

 

TTG is one of those things that feels like a monkey paw wish in action. A Teen Titans sequel! A new series, to pick up where the last left off!

Wait. No. God why.

 

Fucking xxxHOLIC. I love the concept, I love the aesthetic, I love how it works, but holy shit does everybody treat Watanuki like shit fucking 1000% of the time and I cannot take it at all. >:(

 

This is literally exactly what I did and I still don't know what happens in the actual last book. And I used to love Eragon. (I was tiny and uncritical of books! There were dragons! I was intensely gay for Arya, which worked out bc Eragon liked her too! ...and then I spent the entire last half of the third book being like ??? HOW IS HE GONNA DO IT. HOW IS HE GONNA WRAP IT UP IN A SATISFACTORY WAY WHEN THERE'S SO MUCH LEFT TO DO AND SO FEW PAGES. And then he didn't, and I have never felt more betrayed.)