Well, duh. I realize Redwall is murky about size differences, but like. Mouse. Otter. It would probably be fatal even without the typo. :::PPP
One more; wimpification of characters, usually female ones, who in canon fought Dark Lords and pirate kings and won at the age of twelve. I've written a spitefic involving Mariel Gullwhacker making extremely painful use of those big chisel teeth mice have in such a circumstance.
And another; obvious double standards. Hogwarts Exposed yet again; Ginny is demonised for wearing a revealing dress, yet the entire story is about how great it is to be a nudist. I've also seen a work in which one character committed rape and this was bad, but when another character (who was significantly less attractive so that wasn't the explanation) did the exact same thing and committed a lot of violence to boot, the victim thought it was perfectly okay. Unconnected, but I can also no longer read scenes where authority figures confront the protagonist over an illicit relationship without mentally hearing "Why did you do such a thing, you mediocre dunces?"
Oh god, yes. I can think of a lot of For Want Of A Nail fics where something that should be relatively important changes, and...then the author just writes out the canon with minor alterations. Sometimes with whole blocks of italics, because they're using italics to indicate when they're quoting from the original source. And time-travel fics especially should have something change as a result. Even if the time-traveller is trying to keep things as similar as possible, they're going to be reacting slightly differently, and that should change things! And if nothing at all changes, that should be a plot point. I suspect that the dearth of poetry fic is related to the distressing abundance of lyric-fic and filks in the 90s and 00s. Some of them were well-done, others...uh. Not so much. I recall a few instances of fics where it was just...the lyrics of a song, spaced between the rest of the fic. But I think people tend to shy away from it now to avoid the accusations of being a lyric-fic. I can see adult-age Harry Potter being really clueless? But more in an "I was busy fighting a war and taking down a Dark Lord, and any awareness of hormones and people I found attractive was sort of at the periphery" way. I find it really strains my belief when Harry (or anyone else, for that matter!) is depicted as just...unaware of what his junk does or how to make it do things that feel good. Like, honestly - don't tell me that Harry Potter never masturbated as a teenager, he had access to Muffliato, Silencio, and also curtains that fully enclosed his bed. Plus, he did experience infatuation and crushes, it's shown in canon that he did! Spoiler *bounces excitedly* Eee, other people who read the Valdemar series! Okay so, I suspect that one of the things that's making the soulmate mechanic different for you, Quicksilver, is the way it's handled - it's not used as a pass for the characters needing to do the work to build and maintain the relationship. In fact, one of the characters in "Storm Rising" (I think - I know it's the second part of the Storm series) is pretty blunt about that when someone else is romanticizing soulbond relationships, stating that he never wants to have one - he'd rather have a regular relationship, where he'd never have lingering doubts about how much the other person would've liked him without the soulbond in play. He also points out that the soulbond really, really doesn't just automatically resolve all difficulties - it just removes one of the options for resolving them (picking up and ending the relationship) and it places pressure on both halves of the soulbond to fix things because if one of them's miserable, they'll both be miserable. That exchange also provided an explanation for why there's an unusually high instance of soulbonds in the Herald corps - "it'd be like gathering up all the [gay people] and putting them into close proximity at all times" basically, meaning that it's just a side-effect of all the Heralds being more likely to be mutually compatible with another Herald (who will understand the stresses of the job) than with a random civilian. Spoiler I remember the exchange you're talking about, Toaster - and from what I recall, it's more stating that it wasn't necessarily preordained in that instance? Because it's a weird instance of a soulbond between a Herald and his Companion, which the Companion deliberately created since her Herald was Lavan Firestorm and his trauma was getting in the way of him being able to control his gift at all, so she shoved herself in there as a control mechanism. (It's also played as a very asexual relationship, to avoid any suggestion of bestiality; Lavan never shows any interest in sex or romance, either before or afterwards, though and it's not like Lackey didn't know how to show it if he had any. Which makes me wonder if there's a control on the soulbond mechanic, ICly, that prevents it from happening between two people whose orientations would be incompatible. (For example: someone who's sex-averse or asexual wouldn't get soulbonded to someone who'd expect or desire sex from them, and so on.) Anyways - it's stated that if things had gone differently, Lavan and his Companion wouldn't have soulbonded because that extra external control wouldn't have been needed - the ideal would've been for him to be able to control his gift without that extra help, but with the trauma he got hit with, he wasn't going to be able to work his way into controlling his gift in time to be any use to the country. So his Companion stepped in. You're definitely right, from what I recall, about the balancing thing - Person A nearly always has the really powerful gift, and Person B is very down-to-earth and provides a stabilizing influence. I also liked how the series also commented on the fact that one of the protagonists always has exactly what's necessary to save the day, by noting that the Heralds tend to see an increase in whatever gifts are going to be needed for upcoming conflicts, usually just long enough before the conflict happens that they'll be able to rush people through training and get them officially qualified to be in uniform, and no one really knows what's causing that or why. (It's implied that it's literally a piece of deux ex machina in play, if I remember right.) Oh god, yes - that's something that bugs me so much. I'm remembering a few Buffy/Spike fics, where Buffy and Spike just cannot stop making out or full-on Fucking long enough to properly do a patrol, and it's played as a sign of how into each other they are; it's sometimes also used as a symbol for New Relationship Energy. Which, okay, there's some precedent for it - Buffy and Riley did once actually focus so much on makeouts that it actually became a plot point for an episode. But if I'm remembering right, they weren't making out while they were supposed to be working. They were making out at every free opportunity, sure, and Buffy's friends were getting exasperated with it, but they weren't doing it in the middle of patrols. Augh, that. It throws me out of the story so much when that happens! "Wait, why is this suddenly - wait, when did we switch POV? Why are we Dave now, instead of Sollux?" I end up having to go back and reread to try and figure out if I missed something. Yeah, Sans is...really not one of the people who'd be out killing people. He doesn't even try to fight you, no matter who you kill, as long as you're not literally in The Worst Timeline Possible - in which case, he figures there's no point in holding back any more. Sans isn't going to fight except as a last resort. He might definitely have befriended the previous fallen humans - maybe he even had a hand in their deaths! Or at least didn't keep them from dying! But he's not a murderer. *winces* I'll admit to trying to use a Russian accent for one of my characters in a fic I'm working on - but I am doing research to try and make sure that it actually sounds like something that'd come out of a real person's mouth, and not like a stereotype. Aaaaa, lyric-fic. And also Sudden Unexplained Musical Fic, yes. (...I don't even remember if I've ever seen Sudden Unexplained Musical fics now, actually.) Also, something that bugs me - when fic authors just roll with the assumptions given in the Accursed Epilogue, and shove Ron and Hermione together or Harry and Ginny. Or both! I don't think either of those couples is an actually good pairing, come the end of the series - Ron and Hermione are good friends, but they'd be terrible for each other in a relationship. Harry barely knows what he wants at all, and it'd be more plausible to me that Ginny wouldn't be too keen on the Boy Who Dumped Her For Her Own Good, especially when he fucked off on an artifact hunt for the better part of a year and left her at a school where his association with her was extremely well-known and everyone also knew that he was best buddies with her brother.
I don't exactly read a lot of HP fic, but I imagine I'd feel this way about people taking "Harry becomes an Auror" for granted. That's always bugged me even more than everyone getting married off in neat little straight couples and having 2.5 children named Dead Guy Jr.
If by having a hand in their deaths you mean deliberately leading them into something fatal, or telling other people to come kill them, I think he probably wouldn't. Given how strict he can get when he judges you, he doesn't seem like the type of person to consider moral loopholes like that valid. He's pretty big on accepting the consequences of your actions. Unintentionally contributing to their deaths, or just choosing not to act either way, now that I could see. Again, this is just my interpretation, but I think Sans just flat-out doesn't believe he actually could successfully save anybody, so he no longer bothers trying.
Augh, yes, that too! I can marginally tolerate, these days, the fics where Harry's trying very hard to be an Auror because he assumes that this is just what he's supposed to be doing with his life now? But where it's shown that he really does not fit the job well at all, and that the job makes him miserable, and where someone (usually Draco, in the fics I've seen) ends up pointing out that he's allowed to quit the job and do something that makes him happy, he doesn't have to be tied to endless servitude to the wizarding world, he's done enough. But the ones where it's just "of course he's an Auror, he said he wanted to be one once, when he was fifteen, and McGonagall said she'd help him do it, so of course he is now wedded to that choice Forever And Ever", it's just. It makes me wince. No, I agree that Sans wouldn't do something like that - the most he could've done is unintentionally contribute. I suspect that he's tried to save people before, though - and it failed to work so many times that he's burnt out on trying any more.
Part of it for me is also that it makes zero sense with the Elder Wand stuff. If he's supposed to live his life and die still in command of the Elder Wand to break the chain, Wizard Cop is the absolute worst job he could possibly go into.
Yeah, exactly. I tend to read him as having a kind of learned helplessness going on. Between Flowey's resets and whatever Shit Went Down with Dr. Gaster, he's been shown thoroughly, painfully, and repeatedly that any attempt to help people or improve things will at best be undone and at worst fail horribly on everyone unlucky enough to be involved. So even if he does wind up in a situation where he could do something, he doesn't because he's essentially been conditioned to believe that it'll be, at the very least, ineffectual.
Then again, For Want of a Nail fics which do change things can be significantly more disturbing - see In This World and the Next.
Does the fic I wrote about all the timelines that led to a time traveler interfering to create the canon timeline count as a For Want of a Nail fic? :::PPP
This one isn't actually a gripe because it brings me much joy, but... if I burst out laughing at a sex scene, the author's quite probably doing something very wrong. Spoiler: Thoroughly NWS example. Dandin licked slowly deeper, not surprised at the cleanliness of Mariel's anus, for she was the cleanest, most pure mousemaid he had ever known, both in body and spirit.
okay new fanfiction gripe: In This World And The Next is so terrible. I'm not even halfway through the first chapter and Ron beat up Hermione with his fists because she wouldn't have sex with him? And Hermione spends every night crying in Harry's arms? And Hermione's dad just gave Harry the 'my little girl needs a man to protect her and it'll have to be you because i can't anymore' speech?? help
I know, right? I can see Harry being oblivious enough to think it'd be a good idea - but don't tell me that no one else who knows he has that thing would have gone along with it. Especially not Hermione Granger.
Fandom-specific gripe; Hetalia fics in which conquest equals rape and I'm supposed to sympathise. Apart from the fact that it's contradicted in canon (wouldn't Austria have found out Italy's Y chromosome much sooner?), how am I supposed to feel sorry for a victim when history shows they would have done precisely the same thing a few hundred times and this isn't acknowledged? Why does it make the perpetrator a card-carrying villain this time but not any of the other hundreds of times various other characters would have done it?
I've only read some of this thread so far so forgive me if someone else has already snarled at these things, but - - Draco In Leather Pants Syndrome. DRIVES. ME UP. THE FUCKING. WALL. Both kinds of it, as well - a character who canonically is kind of a flinching coward is suddenly a badass 'coz that's hot, and woobiefication of canonical Not Nice People... dude. DUDE. I will backspace if your Sephiroth is anything but domineering, arrogant, and mad as a cut snake. (As an often-times RP player of canon villains - "Cool motive, still murder (and I enjoyed it :P)" does not seem to cut bread with half the people willing to play with my character. Either my character is meant to be an absolute pit of moral depravity and the entire scene is supposed to be raping and torturing and murdering, or else they're a misunderstood flower who would never do any of that and needs your character to coddle and protect them... I just. No.) - Also, I guess this is a rarer fandom grievance, but it's still left scars on my soul - does anyone else get pissed off when canon couples just... don't seem to exist in fanfic? I left the FFXIII fandom long before any sequelitis hit because - yeah, shoot me - I shipped Serah/Snow like a hurricane and couldn't find it ANYWHERE. Gentle dainty smol with tol brawler who thought she hung the moon? Urgh, yes please. And yet nobody else I met even wanted to consider it?? - Also also, I am ENTIRELY WITH the whole 'trying to make pitch ships flushed' rawrdafsjjkl D: It drove me crazy long before I'd even HEARD of Homestuck! Can someone rec me some good rivalship fics because I kind of hate having to trawl through A03 for some decent liquorice when all I can find is candy XD (Bro, I'm ALREADY diabetic. Gimme some more sour in with my sweet, kthanx.)
