Sex scenes which if performed as described would look like this. I'm fairly sure dicks don't bend that way and even if they do everyone involved would have to be lacking legs.
@roach plagiarism is totally a fan fic gripe! I have to my knowledge, as far as I know (knock on wood) never been plagiarized! But one case of plagiarism that I caught will forever confuse the fuck out of me. It was a Inuyasha/Sesshomaru fanfic where uh...several paragraphs of "When Rabbit Howls" had been stitched in, describing an abuse scene between Sesshomaru and his father. I recognized the paragraphs but did not feel it in me to ask what the fuck the fan fic writer was thinking.
If I have given a summary, a tag, and a rating that makes it very clear what the topic of the fic I am writing is do not come here to passive aggressively insult its subject matter. You had your warning that it was mother/daughter incest. Get the fuck off my fic. It is Archive of our Own not Archive of things except these four or five that we arbitrarily decided aren't allowed here because you're a dirty person.
The physically impossible in general. I vividly recall a scene where a character somehow managed to accidentally cut his tongue entirely out by dramatically licking a knife. I'm fairly sure one has to dig around pretty deeply to do that. And then he somehow made a functioning prosthetic tongue out of a small flat rock with no means of actually attaching it at all.
A functioning prosthetic tongue out of a rock. I. Okay, sure. Even assuming you could attach it (which is a big "if"), a rock is not going to work quite the same as a muscle. It's not like using a marble as a false eye! A false eye is generally acknowledged as 'will only help with making sure your face stays the right shape, will not let you see properly again'. A tongue is a giant muscle and a prosthetic one would to flex and bend and curl like the real one (and also survive the environment of the mouth). I mean, I can see it if you're in magic fairytale land...but even then, the tongue of a boot or a shoe would work better and be more appropriate!
The same story, which was about furries, had a male squirrel dressing up in the skin of a female stoat and somehow passing for her perfectly to her group, including her husband, for months, despite having seen her for about one minute before killing her. I think the writer was trying to do a transformation fetish thing in a 'verse which doesn't have any magic. Next time, man, just say it's an AU which has magic. It would save a lot of problems. Also, can I use that boot-tongue thing for something in future? I have to use the word "somehow" a lot when describing this kind of thing. That's another gripe. It generally smacks of laziness on the author's part, and on occasions like this can hint at bizarro world.
Go for it! I'm pretty sure that it's something I've seen in a fairy tale somewhere, actually, or something that was set in a fairytale magic-type world. (It certainly follows fairytale magic's tendency to use sympathetic magic's logic.) Yyyeah, that's - it's a stretch even with magic, honestly, because even if using her skin let him look like her and transformed him so that he's physically a female stoat instead of a male squirrel, he'd still have to manage acting like her and catching references to things she'd know that he couldn't possibly get in any reasonable amount of time - all the little injokes and bits of body language that she's not going to think to mention (and might, in fact, deliberately hold back!). This is one of the things that tends to trip up spies in novels and fics where they're playing body double to someone!
Yeah, and I don't remember if she even had time to say more than a sentence before he whacked her. Not to mention it was made explicit that the husband somehow (there's that goddamn word again!) didn't notice while... in circumstances where he really should have noticed, if you get my drift. I don't want to think about how the hell he did that. I know this guy managed it, but yeah.
Yeah, and the Wikipedia entry even makes it clear that the main reason Shi Pei Pu got away with "oh yes, of course I'm a woman" is a combination of the mark not having any sex ed (especially with regards to how hetero sex is supposed to go) and making sure the lights were always off when they had sex. Someone who's actually had hetero sex before is significantly less likely to be successfully conned that way.
I'm honestly kind of annoyed by the fade to black in this case. I really want to know what the writer was picturing happening, and how stupid the characters would have to be to pull it off. I think this is my problem with a lot of fetish fics. I read them primarily as stories, and I expect them to make actual sense.
So there's a thing that happens in Dorian-centric DAI fics. Not often, but occasionally. In the game, he's a character who has a critical back-story mission where his trauma relating to magical conversion therapy gets related to the Player Character by his own choice (he specifically asks the PC to stay, because he doesn't want his trauma swept under the rug, and the mission is only unlocked after a certain degree of approval with him is reached) and in later romance scenes, talks about a lot of the bad headspace he has wrapped up in the down low and hookup culture of Magical Homophobic Rome. So. Bad Dorian Trauma reveals in AU fic are usually pretty well handled, but sometimes. Sometimes. It'll go one of two way: "hello, my name is Dorian, we've talked for three minutes and now I'm Divulging All My Trauma" or "hi, I'm going to never talk about my trauma or the ways my home country and negatively affected me, despite doing so in canon, because That Would Be Weak And I Am Not Weak", both of which are pretty out of character. The first is annoying, but happens early enough in the fic usually for me to exit out before I'm invested. The second.... It's frustrating, because the general overtones from other characters about Dorian's moral compass and character? Still there. The dismissal, the condescension, the snide remarks, the constant assumptions that he's a Big Baby Who Just Needs To Get Over Himself? Still there. Dorian's own trauma reactions to things, which get repeatedly waved away by other characters? Still there. The reveal where he gets to actually explain his trauma reactions (again! something that happens in canon!) and, while maybe not excusing some of his more asshole tendencies, being able to work past the assumptions everyone else is making? Never happens. It's... infuriating. It's like a hurt/comfort fic that never moves out of the "hurt" section. Worse, sometimes the authors make it clear that Dorian deserves the constant assumptions about his moral (and sometimes sexual!!!) character, because he was a little rude while being triggered. And it kills me, because a lot of Dorian fic is sort of, by rights, issue fic due to his backstory-- if the fic is planning on exploring that or his psyche, it's going to have to address the deeply homophobic culture he comes from, and how that affects him despite his other merits of privilege. There's a lot of fic that just glides by it (a quiet confessional three months into the relationship, a remembrance of it in the past, some kind of acknowledgement that he's addressed it and moved forward from it) and that's... more acceptable to me than the stuff that plays it up like they're going to have the hugely emotional scene and then they just. Don't. I just sad here and read through nearly 120k words waiting for the moment when people were going to stop kicking him while he was down, and it just never happened. Dorian is a Bad Person for having hangups. Dorian doesn't deserve the Lovely Love Interest he has, even if they do end up happy. Dorian should just lie down and accept that everyone else knows better and he's an idiotic person for ever dreaming of being accepted by anyone. (I mean, okay, I get it. Other Fans Liking The Character Wrong is a dumb thing to be annoyed about. But when it's this particular thing that just... crops up sometimes, it's so goddamn frustrating. The fics are usually really well written otherwise, but the authors seems to take a great deal of joy in heavily implying that flamboyant gay men with trauma are somehow deserving of everything they get because they happen to be?? Not Perfectly Straight Laced All The Time?)
A new an exciting peeve! Reviews listed in the summary. Especially when those reviews are "OMG LITERALLY SO HAWT". Like, I already don't like reviews on paperback books, but even those I will grudgingly allow for because the intention is that 'hey, this author/critic I know and like said it was good, so I'll read it' will be a viable draw. That... doesn't work in a fannish sphere. Especially not when the "critical acclaim" is "OMG LITERALLY SO HAWT" from CullenFucker69. I don't know CullenFucker69. I don't know how good CullenFucker69's taste is. To be quite honest, I don't think CullenFucker69 has good taste, if the only part of their comment worth posting in the summary of a fic with 90 comments is "OMG LITERALLY SO HAWT". I mean, it's great that CullenFucker69 thinks that. It really is. But boy did that turn my already middling interest in this fic straight into complete and utter disinterest.
This isn't fanfic either but it's fanworks: I HAAAATE the majority of SCP Readings out there. They hit all my annoyances; droning monotone, reading the stage directions aloud instead of using sound effects, obviously unrehearsed stumbling and mispronunciations, feeling the need to recap the entirety of the thing WE ONLY JUST FINISHED LISTENING TO, WE KNOW WHAT IT'S ABOUT... and when I find someone who's really good at the readings, they do maybe the same three popular ones and never do another.
Not exactly plagiarism, but I told an ex-BFF who was a faster writer than me that I had an idea for a fic I wanted to do about her favourite character and discovered next morning that she'd immediately gone and written it herself and had a billion comments. I have also had a sex scene plagiarised. And it was also wholly inappropriate for the characters that it was inflicted upon. Particularly since neither one of them was Really A Dragon. Sadly for you but fortunately for us neither piece exists on the internet anywhere at this time; mine was bad, some 20 years ago--but hers was infinitely worse. It was a friend that time, too, only a different friend. I told her I was Very Disappointed and by the way she looked like an idiot because you actually have to read things through after you global replace the names to make sure that the descriptions of the characters and the like are applicable.
Ah, global replace. Now we're back to Sephiroth Mouse. And the incident I've seen going round on Tumblr about how someone tried to use that to convert American English to British English and ended up with a case of the clbuttic, or in this case the clarseic, mistake.
So some months back, my housemate who I beta for wrote a fill for the TFA kinkmeme. It's short and simple -- Hux can't get to sleep so he has a wank to the thought of showing off the Starkiller to Tarkin. Perfectly serviceable quick fic, nothing special. A couple of months later, housemate found this in the Tarkin tag. The style is different, and it's a little longer, and for some reason Krennic is there too, but it's pretty clearly using her fic as a model. But hey, we thought, transformative works, nothing wrong with a bit of remixing, and after all it might be a perfectly innocent coincidence. Then we got to the end and discovered that it had lifted the climax formatting and all and nope, all sympathy evaporated. We were proud of that bit. They had also kept a bit that made sense in the original (Hux is surprised at how effective the fantasy was) but didn't make sense in theirs (they'd established at the beginning that this was an old fantasy he knows will work). And they didn't seem to really get how a wank fantasy is different to an actual sex scene. And their dialogue was terrible. And Tarkin didn't suffer the loss of the Death Star, he was on it when it blew up, and if Hux is a Tarkin fanboy he'd know that. Grumble grumble if you're going to rip something off at least do a good job. We agonised over confronting the author, because while we both long to Get In Fights On The Internet we also both don't want to hurt anyone. Eventually we decided the most righteous thing to do was just leave it alone. Then we saw they were getting comments so we commented with a link to the original fill out of spite.
I mean... several of the characters are literally skeletons, and as such likely have no brains at all... so I'm not sure quibbling about brain mass is really... plausible.
Fics focusing on minor characters which feel the need to gratuitously bash the main characters when it's not a spitefic. These baffle me. If you hate the characters the story is actually about so much that you need to pointlessly harm and humiliate them constantly, why are you still saying you like the canon?
Ford would like to say that this explains a lot, but I won't let him because that would be rude, Ford, rude! (also I just realised that it's rilly ironic and super silly that Papyrus and Valiska fight over killing people so often, when Valiska hates sapient death so much she wants to make it optional. their values are not nearly as opposite as they think, she's just an obligate carnivore who's also had to fight for her life a lot and while she hates death, sometimes her attitude toward it is a shrug and 'better him than me.' Or Ford or Sev or anyone else she cares about. cc: @swirlingflight) I suspect the lack of space for brains in a skeleton is less upsetting than the lack of space for brains in a reptile, because living reptiles actually exist and function according to known rules, whereas living skeletons don't. And all monsters may be equally magical in the canon, but that doesn't stop human brains from going "reptile=living thing that exists and follows rules of science" as opposed to "skeleton=magical creature, who knows how that do?"
