I'm a lot like Verily on the "how much the story cares" front. There's some fiction that's just setting out to indulge a particular emotion, and just doesn't have any of the characters react in ways that would get in the way of that because that isn't the point. So slasher movies being full of idiots and smutfic having people operate on whatever weird moon logic facilitates the most porn aren't flaws for that genre, even if they aren't actually mandatory or if they might not want to be what some people want to read, because "characters behave like intelligent human beings with good decision-making skills" isn't necessarily a priority when the point is to paint a particular emotional picture in big lurid colors. There's some fiction that invites you to question or otherwise engage with particular aspects, and in something like that, a mistake in the thing it's inviting the audience to engage with can be story-ruiningly fatal. If the resolution of a story about 12-dimensional mind game infini-chess like Death Note had relied on Light suddenly doing something breathtakingly dumb, it would be an unsatisfying resolution, and not just because it would be OOC. People don't sign on to a story like that to have the problem solved because the evil mastermind accidentally dropped a thumb drive containing a presentation explaining his whole complicated plan with a sticker on it reading "Project Overlord." But if it's an action movie about trying to find that information in time to foil said evil plan, that's not a critical flaw as long as the process of getting the flash drive and foiling the plan is cool enough. And if it's an episode of Leverage, the bad guy being brought down by exploiting his own stupid arrogance is a feature, not a bug. There are two big narrative holes in Umineko no Naku Koro Ni. One is a genuine plot hole in the factual underpinnings of the entire story, where the basic premise requires one character to have predicted something they couldn't possibly have known. The other is, essentially, someone not thinking to have their DnD character do a headcount and the DM exploiting this. Nobody cares about the former but everyone has an opinion about the latter, because only one of them affects what Umineko is about. People complain more about the villain's plan being excessively convoluted in Skyfall than they do in most other James Bond movies with convoluted plans, because the Daniel Craig Bond movies position themselves as more down-to-earth. A villain with an elaborate multi-stage plan that requires every step to go exactly as predicted feels far more out of place in a James Bond movie where the title character fails his physical, mental health, and marksmanship exams when he comes out of retirement. I'm not going to ask the same sorts of questions about how magic works in Uprooted that I would in the Stormlight Archive. I don't mind that Victor Frankenstein makes stunningly bad decisions that hurt him and everyone around him, because the story is a tragedy about how all of this could have been avoided so many times over. A story that hooks me can sweep me along so I don't notice even fairly flagrant plot holes; after one that grabs me especially well, I can laugh about the plot holes once I have enough space to see them without it at all reducing my enjoyment of the story or ability to resuspend disbelief when I go back to it. I can hold court on plot holes and silly things and inconsistent time travel mechanics in Radiant Historia for days, but that doesn't make me love it any less. But if a story does lose me, I'll often find myself shredding it apart.
This shit really bothers me. For a variety of reasons. Perhaps the biggest being that this plays into language based bigotry by way of othering people with accents (which is literally everyone but the public doesn't care about the technical definition of the term). And like it's grating with Germans but it reaches downright racist territory with, say, Japanese people or AAVE. Dear fucking god does 'phonetic' spelling of AAVE drive me up a fucking wall.
written out accents annoy the fuck out of me it'd still piss me off if they wrote out EVERYONE'S accents, but at least the unfortunate racist bullshit would be lessened also no one acknowledges how "weird" their own accents are and they should
On that note: Hispanic character exists in media. Hispanic character never uses pet names or peppers their speech with Spanish in canon. Literally half of all fics: "Ayyyy papi, let's hang at los biblioteca for a couple of horas. I don't hablar like this in canon but my autora took one semester of Español in high school and has Google Translate, so this is just how I am now." Bonus points for also leaning in hard on all the terrible Latin Lover stereotypes in the fic itself. :///
I remember hearing secondhand that there was a bunch of wank in Voltron fandom because some of the BNF writers did that with Lance, and then people started calling it racist not to.
cute fanon nicknames. especially three syllable nicknames.* especially when the character already has a perfectly serviceable canon nickname. *the character’s name is Leviathan and you choose to abbreviate it to Levia? WHY
i was looking at harry potter crossover fics last night, because i'd run across a few that were brilliant, some thoughtful, some hilarious. but then i hit this deep pocket of like... how do i describe this? Harry Potter Is Cooler Than Your Fandom And Marysues All Their Problems And Kicks Their Asses And Is Contemptuous And Laughs At Them And They Carry The Idiot Ball The Whole Time fics. fics in which a harry potter fan takes a piss all over a fandom they don't really understand, using harry as a proxy. harry is a better ninja than all the naruto characters (because the naruto characters don't use their canon skills). harry can hear the sound of hawkeye's arrow and turn and cast protego in time to block it (because arrows somehow work like that now). the winchester brothers are completely wrong about everything because all the supernatural things they're fighting are actually subject to the potterverse instead of the spnverse (even though harry went to them instead of the other way round). he's a better detective than sherlock holmes (because sherlock is -- no, let's be honest, bbc sherlock couldn't find his ass with both hands and a GPS if his canon didn't hand him clues on a platter). he is the cutest sad abused child and [loki, johnny marcone, tony stark, etc.] instantly adopts him and settles down to be domestic forever (because the selected Bad Boy Dad's canon -- and, usually, personality -- simply vanishes when a magical woobie appears). it's not the marysueing that bothers me. i prefer fics where the protagonist's abilities are fairly balanced by their challenges, but the occasional moment of complete overkill can be pretty satisfying. and contempt for other fandoms is usually boring to me, but i can't say i haven't been guilty of it a few times myself. it's that the contempt is based on ignorance. the winchesters are sometimes dumbasses and frequently assholes, but in their canon they do a shit ton of research and have access to a lot of correct sources, you can't retcon all that into Actually It's Potterverse. the avengers probably could be defeated by magic, but for fuck's sake figure out how, don't just write them being completely terrible at everything. gentleman johnny marcone murders anyone who finds out about the comatose girl whose medical bills he's paying, lest she be used against him; now he's going to bring an 11-year-old into mobster meetings, and amanda just... doesn't exist? I'M SO FRUSTRATED.
Pretty sure Wanda Maximoff would be exactly 0% intimidated by a skinny nerd wielding a glorified stick and some pseudo-Latin.
honestly I see more of that specific brand of "better than u" stuff coming out of the discworld fandom, but it's equally annoying from the harry potter fandom I get the impulse to say your pet fandom is the best ever, but it's so goddamn frustrating to go looking for interesting fusions of the universes and getting "OUR MAGIC SYSTEM/PLOT/CHARACTERS ARE BETTER THAN YOURS"
I still remember the days of Ye Olde FMA Fandom when Ed was the savant of choice for crossovers. It was fucking obnoxious then, and it hasn't aged into anything better.
Yeah, the extreme hagiography of many of the characters is one of several reasons I'm... often reluctant to engage with transformative Discworld fandom.
Goddammit, crossovers should be a gateway drug for the other fandom(s). Not "My fandom is better than your fandom."
Though the FMA team freaking out about Potterverse not making sense and having sharp critiques concerning the Order of the Phoenix while having mild PTSD because immortality obsessed bad guy in silentwalrus' "snipers solved 99% of all problems" is killing me with laughter.
I was a baby netizen on StarDestroyer.Net which is pretty much the epitome of 'my canon could beat up your canon', and that can be a lot of fun sometimes, but also sometimes... give it a break. Just chill. You don't need to win all the fictional physics forever. If you're that worried about conforming to THE SACRED CALCS, then... don't try to cross over such big disparities? Or... even then there's ways to make blatantly OP crossovers interesting. I liked the Unity Series, for example: A ST/SW Crossover by SFDebris who is at least partially in the 80 gigaton turbolasers camp, where they have a vast power disparity but the Trek characters don't suddenly become idiots, and manage to accomplish a lot even at a steep disadvantage. (Including, for one, destroying the Death Star via actually well implemented Treknology Bullshit). ALSO ALSO like... I don't think Harry Potter would be a powerhouse among the Avengers, exactly, but he certainly has... some very interesting capabilities that no one else on the team really does (maybe Dr. Strange, but 'maybe'). Next to the early Winchesters, well, he's a wizard, but the Winchesters' entire lives basically consist of 'dealing with weird stuff that is almost universally stronger than them'. Naruto... in a fight high-tier Ninja are pretty bullshit, though Harry's powerset has its own advantages, though he'd half to deal with being much squishier overall. Dresden Files... each canon aggressively breaks the other's laws of magic (both physical and legislative) by existing (I do not want to see how the White Council would react to the idea of Obliviators. Actually, I do, from a great distance.), though Harry himself isn't that bad. Especially when the fandom in question is Harry Potter, which like. It doesn't even have rules. (Well, it has like, three.) That's cheating. (Though I'd generally say HP's stuff is pretty meh, aside from a few logic bombs that just induce a 'wait what' when thought about for more than .2 seconds.) But honestly a lot of versus stuff runs into problems where Canon A's unstoppable force runs into Canon B's immovable object. It's always an interesting exercise to take two incompatible (or at least not meant to be compatible) sets of 'rules' and make them work together. Or I guess you could just say 'neener neener, mine is better'. Like someone who is boring.
Worm seems like the sort of fandom that would magnetically attract that sort of thing, honestly. It's pretty funny to me that Harry Potter is the new Crossover Stu du jour, because for a few years it seemed like that happened much more to Harry Potter. Maybe it's just a reflection of the popular "I'm smarter than canon" HP fic genre of choice shifting from parody fic nitpicking plot holes (real or "zomg, she had a BRAZILIAN snake say 'amigo,' that's SPANISH, they speak PORTUGUESE!!!") to "#Smart Harry Potter #Powerful Harry Potter #Dark Harry Potter #Lord Potter #Master of Death Harry Potter #Pureblood Culture #Albus Dumbledore Bashing."
Spoiler: Spoilered bc I feel bad bc someone linked it in the fic rec thread Sometimes, people do it TO the HP fandom instead. Look, yes the wizarding world is isolationist but having Sirius Black not understand PAINT is bullshit. For one thing, paint existed long before the wizarding and muggle world split, and for another unless i am vastly remembering he interacted with the muggle world plenty while on the run. Arrrgh.
