What are your fan fiction gripes?

The way I always feel the need to overcomplicate things, and the hassle of trying to pick appropriate Chinese zodiac signs for immortals in a human AU while being uncomfortable with changing them from their apparent ages.

 

I keep making more crossovers and AUs for Kencyrath shit and the next one on the docket is Mistbornyrath and I fucking hate myself. How many more, Aon. HOW FUCKING MANY MORE. I KNOW MISTBORN JAME WOULD BE RAD AND SHE'D LOOK HOT IN THAT COAT BUT HOW MANY MORE.

 

Half the Mistborn AO3 section is Mistborn AU crossovers, so you are not the only one to think that way.

Wait until you learn about the secret spoiler magic system, the urge will get even worse then.

I'm not saying I also Mistborn-AU'd my special interest fandom but I totally did.

 

It won't be posted in the Mistborn part of Ao3 though because I HAVE SOME MOTHERFUCKING STANDARDS.

 

I just read someone using the word "principle" correctly in a fic and it was actually jarring? Like I had to go back and read it again to convince myself they hadn't written "principal."

 

asdgf i have the same problem and it kills me,,,, like just the use of the word "bear" or "bare" in fanfic gets my attention even if it's used correctly, and i think "wait was that the right one? did they use the right one. is that right?" and then i wish for death. the same happens for several other homonyms that are often misused, especially "discreet" vs. "discrete."

ETA: ALSO "PHASE" vs "FAZE" bc people get it wrong so much and now i second-guess myself whenever i use it

 

Thing from a critique of Sonichu (technically fanfic) which crops up in other fanfics a lot:

 

See also that one Tumblr post: "But are they even, like, friends?"

 

No, author, unless cloning or IVF is involved you can't have a twin two years older than you.

 

or time travel </pedant>

 

or space relativity fuckery

 

There was an accident with a contraceptive and a time machine. /Zaphod Beeblebrox

 

Latest call for the Department of Redundancy Department: "licked it with his tongue". Because it's so common to lick things with your ear.

 

That is definitely gonna show up in my PearlRose flower disease AU, omg.

 

(thinks about how incredibly dead Lemony Snicket would be in any flower-disease AU) nice

eta: but also yes omg @Acey and you know Pearl would think smoking was so gross

 

or your mom gave birth to twins and immediately sent them off into an alternate dimension where they chilled kinda suspended in time for a few centuries and the one who absorbed more of the food stored with them got 'born' first and came out of the other dimension, leaving the other to emerge a few realtime years later and create an age gap :U

(cookies for anyone who can identify the weirdass anime that this happened in)

 

she had the thing I am just too lazy to type it myself

and you think I read far enough to find that out? no. no I did not.

 

What does everyone think of setting up a thread for picking out ideas written terribly in other fiction and brainstorming how to make them better? I see ideas with potential done badly a lot.

 

i'd like a thread like that! i have a lot of fun doing that, personally, and i like seeing other people do it (like with the flower lung disease)

 

i like that thread idea! if it was a thing, i'd bring up jean aule's supermemory neanderthals and how i wish the earth's children series was much more about that than ayla/jondalar and Ayla Invents Everything. i don't know what i'd want to do with the supermemory neanderthal concept exactly, but it's a really cool concept i wish was explored more.