We could have had it aaallllll- pet peeve fandoms

Once Upon a Time. I sort of hate watch it nowadays. Back in season one I thought it was a legitimately good show with interesting takes on fairytales and a wonderful mix between romantic love, familial love, and platonic love. Nowadays it is a trainwreck of bad plots, bringing back characters I hate and wish would stay dead, and botching legitimately good myths and legends in favor of throwing in the Disney versions (like right now, I am yelling at OUaT for fucking up Greek mythology because they decided to go with the animated Hercules crap rather than wonderful myths about my two favorite greek gods)

Edit: Anything that portrays Hades as a villain and doesn't give me Persephone is bad in my books

 

I know it was written by the same guy, but like. Xenogears was almost both FF7 and Chrono Cross. EVERYTHING Square was making at the time was almost Final Fantasy and almost Chrono. So I could totally see if they just had this grab bag of game concepts and this was the one that happened to get labeled the sequel to CT and get the Radical Dreamers and poorly-written "deconstruction" (read: "I just killed off everyone you liked offscreen for no reason lol I'm so ~EDGY~") slapped onto it. There's not even the most cursory of recurring elements you normally have in RPG series- few recurring items, no recurring random monsters, no recurring worldbuilding concepts. Change a few proper names, remove the ghost kids, and alter the orphanage layout and people would barely connect it to CT at all.

 

Anyways other than HP, which is a given, and Eragon, for the reasons already listed, there's, hm. I'm too tired to think of specific examples but just about everything ever by virtue of being extremely white for no good reason, and 99% of all anime by virtue of being super fancervice-y. (ok actually specific example there: One Piece. I love One Piece. I love One Piece so much. I have cried while reading it, multiple times. But that is not how boobs work!! That is not how waists work!! Why are you doing this!!!! Yeah I think OP is probably the #1 offender for me when you don't count HP)
....also general pet peeve: girls fighting in heels. why. you're going to break your ankles please stop

 

My stepmom watched Legend of the Seeker, and I watched a few episodes with her, and thought "hey, this is pretty good."

Then I found out it was based on a book series!

Then I read the Sword of Truth series. Or tried to. After the second book I couldn't do it anymore. WAITER PLEASE TAKE THIS BACK TO THE KITCHEN, THIS IS NOT WHAT I ORDERED D:

*pours one out for the Pokewalker* like... Game Freak... okay maybe I can understand you not using that in Black/White but the 3DS has a pedometer function built in for fuck's sake, why didn't you work that into X/Y and ORAS?

 

Incidentally, re: one of my pet peeves, I've developed this elaborate AU where our world's version of Final Fantasy X is somebody's OC-insert fanfic of the real thing (because Tidus is literally an OC-insert Mary Sue within the story itself. I'm not kidding or exaggerating about this.).

AU is as follows:

Spoiler: Long and spoilery

In the original version of FFX, Yuna was the main character. Tidus never showed up in the game itself, but he was referenced repeatedly in Jecht Spheres you could find throughout the game. Jecht addressed a whole lot of messages to his estranged son, which painted a picture of a bad relationship made worse by Jecht's former alcoholism, but with an undercurrent of Jecht realizing what a terrible parent he'd been and awkwardly wishing he could make it better. Fandom jumped on this, and there are hundreds of fics with premises like "find Tidus to give him the spheres" or "Tidus and Jecht finally reconcile," and dozens of interpretations of what Tidus is like, since all anyone knows is Jecht said he used to be a crybaby.

At the end of the pilgrimage, when the party confronts Yunalesca, Yuna steps forward and says she won't let this cycle continue. Yunalesca has her freakout and there's the boss fight, but at the end before she fades she gives Yuna her blessing and says she's Spira's only hope now. Yuna goes to the fayth for advice, and they say that thanks to Yunalesca's gift they can help her to do a modified version of the Final Summoning which is somewhat less fatal. This results in a version of the final boss fight which is even more long and protracted than our version- Yuna essentially turns all five of her guardians into a temporary Final Aeon, so after Yu Yevon works its way through all her Aeons, it starts possessing party members, going from the one she met latest (Rikku) to the earliest. Which is Auron. And Yuna Sends him. This takes too much out of her, so cue melodramatic death scene where everyone cries and she talks about how she achieved her dream of bringing peace and happiness to the people of Spira better than she ever could have hoped for.

Yuna was fic writer's favorite character, and they were so upset. And the "Yuna comes back as an Unsent" cottage industry didn't do it for them, so they tearfully wrote a Tidus-based fixit fic where she NEVER HAD TO DIE IN THE FIRST PLACE. Unfortunately, they were pretty bad at writing Wakka's racial prejudice, didn't care about Kimahri (they shoved in a mini-arc for him near the end to appease his fans, but it was pretty cursory), got rid of most of Yuna's agency to give Tidus more chances to shine, sucked hilariously at writing parental abuse, left out a lot of canon character development scenes because they assumed the readers would already be familiar with them, derailed Dona into a Generic Bitchy Rival because they hated her, had a pretty half-assed way of beating Sin without the Final Aeon, turned Auron's "this is your story" line into a borderline catchphrase, made Tidus into a spokesperson for the viewpoints they knew were right because they'd finished the game and knew all the plot twists, and got so excited about the stuff they were adding that they went out of their way to make Tidus point it out in the narration to make sure people wouldn't miss it.

But somebody did at least convince them that it wasn't really FFX unless someone died at the end, so they killed Tidus off. :::PPP

 

Yes, it finished at the very end of 2011.

To be fair, when the third book came out he'd already been saying for several months that OOPS, trilogy creep was happening. To be ALSO fair, the end of the last book was also unsatisfying.

 

THIS. also the whole blitzball thing with wakka was just fucking impossible! it took forever and was a huge pain imo. i really liked the music too - i have a couple of the albums on my itunes.

 

Blitzball bored me to tears. Like, game, if I liked sports, I wouldn't be holed up in my room playing PS2 JPRGs on my laptop.

play radiant historia, it doesn't have blitzball and has good music and handles some of the same plot concepts way better and the main character acts like a goddamn adult

Haha what was that, anyway see above.

 

The Ar Tonelico games. The soundtrack, the backstory, the world building, the characterization is all really really good, but it's all trapped under a thick chalky layer of anime titties and innuendo and stripping and 'eh' gameplay. I am literally seeing the games for the music by this point, but Akiko Shikata deserves better. The madmen in charge of the series invent a language with multiple dialects to represent magical songs that are formatted somewhere between a computer program and a prayer, but then they go on to write paragraphs about how stripping will make you better at fighting evil. I'm so mad about Ar Tonelico.



Listen to that, the franchise deserves better.

 

Ar. Fucking. Tornelico.
Here have a couple more Ar Tonelico songs because I'm so mad

 

Man I heard some of those songs, they always sounded really pretty.

 

I hate many, many works. This is not even annoyance with a thing I love. It is actually viscerally hating the thing for failing to live up to potential. I am not annoyed. I am enraged. My precious hates I love to talk about more than the ones I like, honestly. Like I could talk about Sailor Moon or I could go on about how much I hate Ocarina of Time and why. It's a sort of respect thing. I can see flaws and I can see how I could have possibly had more. I can see in some cases where we have pushed the bar and affected things on a significant note. Like OoT's camera? Big fucking deal. But I hate OoT. A lot. That doesn't stop me from replaying it every year though. In fact it just seems to encourage it.

I hate OoT and because of that I like to spend time with it. I want to learn all I can about OoT. To find all of its flaws but also all of its strong points. To note those out and go, yes. Good game, OoT. You got something right for once you shitfuck. In a way this hate is a sort of fondness. I run pitch as fuck for OoT

My deepest levels of disgust are reserved for the works that bored me though. They provided absolutely nothing to me. Or at least very little and overall the product is neither good nor bad. It just is. Chrono Trigger is that sort of game for me. I really like Frog and also Corridors in Time. Everything else is just fairly standard SNES fare I had already seen. It wasn't even charmingly awful like the first Breath of Fire games or Phantasy Star 3. It was just. Average. I've nothing much to talk about save that I am annoyed that I have nothing much to talk about.

 

Spoony is still my problematic fave tbh.

 

While we're at it, Naruto. Wonderful premise. Could've been a wonderful stealth/intrigue shonen with quirky characters. Instead we got a classic fighty shonen with "ninja" skins and almost no girls.

Or Yu-Gi-Oh. oh my gods, yu-gi-oh. The games before the card game took over everything were. so. good. yami yugi was so nasty. great character. and then the card game happened. ::/
gimme a game of shadow monopoly before another card game, please.

Akagami no Shirayukihime. Classic romance shoujo with a pseudo-medieval theme. very beautiful. interesting characters. hints of court messes but it just goes too smoothly. we could've had a plucky plebeian heroine who works herself up in a court that opposes her and her budding relationship with the second prince at every second turn, conflicting loyalties, things that must be done but none of the people who do it really want to but that's the rules. but even those who oppose her come to like and respect her very quickly and everyone else is swiftly and justly dealt with.

 

Artemis Fowl. I love the first five books, love them. Then the sixth book happened, didn't really understand it, was a bit weird. The seventh book was better, it was back to what I like about Artemis Fowl. Then the eighth book happened, and I hated it.
Stupid Opal Koboi is back for the tenth millionth time, when she really should have just rotted in prison and not be dragged up again.
Also, I have like one OTP in all of my 'fandoms', one. And Eoin Colfer shit all over it. Holly and Trouble Kelp. They totally should have been together forever. I would have been okay with it never happening in series, but it only happening for one date, it being a disaster and then Trouble dating the 'airhead' does not compute! Ugh.

 

I remember that I stopped being surprised when opal appeared because she always always was the villain in the even numbered books.

 

True, but I think it was credible in the second and the fourth books. After that it just got increasingly ridiculous.

 

I forget when I stopped reading them, but for me none of them really lived up to what I liked about the first book. (It just wasn't as much fun when Artemis was a good guy instead of straddling the line between "antihero" and "villain protagonist.")

 

Yeah, this is how nearly all my biggest grudges against canons come about. Nothing sets me seething with frustration like great potential that never gets properly followed through on, or great ideas that deserved to be part of a less shitty canon. It gets to the point where I try to just avoid discussion of the works in question on principle, because it'll just set me off again and no one needs to waste more time on that particular rant, least of all myself. (The other day my brother and I were talking when one of us mentioned Code Geass in passing, and we both just... paused for a second, and then went "SPEAKING OF things that aren't this rant again" and moved on before either of us could get started.) Not that it's exclusive to canons I don't like--Tales of the Abyss, for example, is one of my favorite games, and its bad writing choices have me seeing spades at least as much as canons I hate, possibly more.

... So yeah, in short, I'm nnnnot going to mention details here because I am not up for doing the whole rants again, at least not while I'm this damp and sleepy. But I will narrow my eyes and hiss "999" under my breath before slinking off hatefully into the shadows.

#other notable members of the list include Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World #if only because I have had to fight the urge to do a pointlessly self-indulgent rewrite for years #...I guess Vesperia should also merit a mention but honestly I don't think anyone knows what was going on with Vesperia's "plot" #least of all the writers

 

You mean like

Spoiler

the party still dicking with Guy's phobia even after they find out what caused it?

My biggest complaint about that game is that you have to replay it a bunch of times setting arbitrary, unsignaled dialogue flags and redoing all the puzzles, so it's really easy to burn out and never see the proper ending (which is what happened to me).