Yeeeeeep I remember that. Some people in one of my other fandoms STILL use at least one of those and I'm like. ???? I thought I left this at the beginning of the decade.
Spoiler Cullen is such a sub i don't think he's out-subbed by anyone but Alistair. Honestly, the most dommy person in the entire series is Merrill and you will take this headcanon off my cold, dead hands. Oh, which leads me to another DA fic hatred: People treating Merrill like she's a three year old child, and thus implying that she Can't Do The Sex Ever Cause It's Gross She Doesnt Even Know What A Sex Is. or like, generally cant be trusted with her own decisions, which happens a lot. Like, treating an adult character that is naive/airheaded as a Total Child bugs me SO MUCH. Fics where it's just ACTION-DIALOGUE-ACTION and read sort of scriptlike also aren't my thing, but i grew up on tolkien and hugo, i like long descriptions and ass-pulled tangents.
Oh gods yes. If your story is just action and dialogue it is...Lifeless? It just doesn't breathe. But then I'm a Joycian whore so pay me no mind. I'd read a 200 page description of a sauna and a character's thoughts on it divorced from the plot.
yeah. i have once or twice put three-page long descriptions of the setting and worldbuilding around this particular place in works (and then cut it), which i'm sure is someone's fanfic gripe, but when it doesn't have some sort of fancy description and at least three metaphors it just feels a little dry
Yeah it's definitely someone's gripe. This sort of thing is very much an aesthetic taste sort of thing. Some like Hemmingway. Others love Woolfe. And so on.
@witchknights UGH YES I do hate that re:Merrill. Same thing also happens to Cole in Inquisition and it also annoys me. So much fanfic and fanart specifically treats Cole like a child, and tbh given how coded-neurodivergent he is it also bothers me a bit when people have "ace headcanons" for him because it's like... hmmm yes the character who likes to stim by tapping his feet against things and is baffled by certain social conventions is also mentally a child and has no understanding of sex and will not have a sex life ever...... what a novel thought...
Agreeing to all of this. In more general, infantizing any character. I've found it the most common in anime fandoms, but its also prolific in the DA fandom with characters like Merrill. Cole is a little different for me, only because his status as a spirit makes his ability to consent dubious, but that doesn't stem from his neurodivergence. But I remember the days when I was an obsessive USUK shipper in the Hetalia fandom *gazes into the distance* the ukefication I've seen. I still get flash backs to America's magic healing cock because someone (usually France though one time inexplicably Japan) raped poor helpless England and England is now incapable of doing anything but being cute and pathetic.
My main hetalia ships were Sweden/Finland and USUK and lithuania/Poland. i have severe flashbacks at the word ukefication
Those were dark days for all of us, friends. It was that fandom that broke my tolerance for 'one off joke about character liking weird thing taken to illogical extreme in fandom, where they constantly obsess over that thing they mentioned once in show'
THIIIIIIIIS. I love Darcy/Jane but I just can't read any Darcy fic any more because of this phenomenon. When I filter my search I have to take out her name entirely to avoid that trend, it's upsetting. Thing that drives me crazy: Movie or book AUs that lift the plot wholesale from the movie or book, hardly altering anything but the names. Using the scenario as a guide is cool - but please, please, change some things around, this is probably a fandom popular movie and I've seen ten AUs of it already. Not to mention half of the things that happen are OOC because you're trying to shove characters with different motivations into a plot written with other characters in mind. Please don't be afraid to change plot points based on the characters you are actually writing, geez. Also if I never read the word "canted" again it will be too goddamn soon. Stop having characters cant their hips when you mean tilt - it just makes me think of horses.
invented nicknames. like say.... a character is named Bob. everyone calls Bob "Bob". no one has ever called Bob anything but "Bob," except maybe Bob's very best friend Tim, who once called him "Bobbio" in a moment of levity. and then someone writes a fic in which Bob is shipped with Joe, and suddenly Joe is calling Bob "Bo" all the fuckin time. it is probably intended to make them seem closer than they were in the source material. instead, since no one in the history of the universe has ever called Bob "Bo", it is distracting and unnatural and makes me want to pull out my hair i have... many Hated Things: overwrought emotion from characters who don't really Do that. author soapboxing. matchmaking from a character who has not, historically, showed any interest in matchmaking. Everyone Is Gay Syndrome. sudden, inexplicable woobie. HEATFIC. Spoiler: slightly nsfw? A/B/O....... mpreg in general. but the "societal and sexual roles based on fake wolf hierarchy, also buttholes are lubricated now??" thing in particular makes my skin crawl. like lalala here our character goes, living his life, having a personality, BUT THEN!!! PUBERTY!!! and now he is either a wanton butt-slut or an angry reluctant tsundere butt-slut or a tragic woobie butt-slut or a naive oblivious butt-slut. that's the rule. and now he needs a Super Dominant Alpha Man to Sort Him Out and Claim Him (Sexually) because he Smells Super Good Or Some Shit Like That Spoiler: rude general writing gripe also, and this is more of a general writing gripe, but there are particular words/phrases that are, for some reason, used incorrectly really really often in fanfic: "loathe to" instead of "loath to" "adverse to" instead of "averse to" "complement" instead of "compliment" and v.v. "principle" instead of "principal" and v.v. "discrete" instead of "discreet" there are others, but those are the ones that seem to pop up the most. also while i'm complaining: PHONETICALLY RENDERED ACCENTS. HATE 'EM. they are just. the most distracting thing :( pulls me right out of the story. wehh wehh i'm a rude elitist but. i can't help it :( hi my name is apple and i Love To Complain :U
if a character says a thing and its just Not writtens in their voice. a failure to get it right and have the character talk like themself and use words they would use. its worse when the author has decided the character talks a certain way, but in canon they clearly dont. but the author is consistent in their wrong dialogue voice so i have to mentally re phras every line as i go along aughghh repeat offenders: thor and papyrus. thor gets long words for no reason and sometimes calls people their full names?? like why if tony stark introduced himself as... tony stark, would thor be calling him Ah Yes Friend Anthony My Shieldbrother like shuuuuut up i kept running into the same issue with papyrus where this one really long fic i was following made me roll my eyes because papyrus uses contractions in canon meanwhile this author had him talkig basically exactly like Toriel. bleh
So much this! I know, character voice isn't the easiest thing in the world, but the way to get good at it is to study the character. See how they pick words. How the rhythms of their speech go. When they get loud and when they get quiet. And especially when all the characters sound the same. I don't mind the tiniest touch of transcribing accent but it should be more like a few contractions here and there that are non-standard, that kind of thing. If a certain word is NOTABLY said weird in that accent, perhaps show that. But otherwise figure the audience knows or doesn't care and would rather it was readable.
Okay another one that was briefly touched on here... SOULMATE AU. I have never ONCE seen something interesting come out of this concept and to be honest I don't really think it can? What's the fun in a relationship that starts with the certainty that you're gonna be together forever and there's gonna be no other love for either of you? They always seem to be a handy way to skip a ton of development on both the relationship and the characters...
I find soulmate aus grating as a polyamorist. It's something where I recognize that it's harmless for most people and I don't see the point in policing it but it really... I guess it's a pretty big squick. I had it tumblr savior'd, let's just say. Imagine some omnipresent force deciding which of my girlfriends was my REAL girlfriend and stamping it on my skin. Brrrrrr.
Honestly even if the idea allowed for several "soulmates" I still think the concept is boring both in real life and in fiction. People aren't Cosmically Destined To Be Together, they find each other at a given moment in their lives and work to stay together. I find the feelings and the struggles and the moments of fragility and doubt to be what really makes a fictional romance mean something, makes it feel real and also captivating and worthy of emotional investment.
YES! Voice is so important...... I like barely writing the accent best, because sometimes there are situations where you need to write it at least a little. (Fandom-specific rant under the spoiler) Spoiler Look, I know accents are hard, but when the character was created as a subversion of a stereotype about a Japanese accent (Osakan, more or less re: the TV Trope "The Idiot From Osaka") it seems a little respectful to maybe not have him speak SUPER EXTRA PROPER English, geez. Like, at least throw in an "ain't" once or twice, I swear it won't kill you. Tumblr is so hype about representing minorities and discrimination in a Western context but when it comes to acknowledging anything outside of that framework? Fail. Clearly "representation" is coding the character as a POC because he has dark skin but ignoring the minority accent that he uses that's also discriminated against in actual real life. *Bangs head against desk* I've seen a couple cool-ish deconstructions of soulmate fic but the concept itself is pretty...eeeeh to me.
The only soulmate AU I've actively enjoyed was actually a book series, and at the end of the trilogy it's revealed that those fancy soulmate gems that light up when your One True Love came near? Yeah those were actually trackers monitoring genealogy and fertility, your One True Love is just the person who's most likely to help you make the babies Robot God wants you to make.
@wixbloom @littlewhitemouse In regards to soulmate aus, I really like them in two very specific contexts: the first is crack, the second is a ship that takes place in the soulmate AU but the members of the ship aren't soulmates (but still end up together). But yeah, in general i really hate soulmate aus. i'm a big believer is that a soulmate is something you grow into and become (and isn't limited to one person ever please lets kill this concept with fire)
...The Claidi Journals? :O Those books and Pearl of the Soul of the World are two of my favorite nostalgic series with girls who master weird science-magic in bizarre AU worlds Another fanfiction gripe - when the POV swaps between different characters in the space of the same damn paragraph. Though maybe that's just a writing gripe in general. Unless you're actually going for an omniscient outside narrator who knows everyone's thoughts and motivations on purpose, you gotta try to stay in one person's head for the whole scene, or indicate when you're switching to someone else's POV or something
