We could have had it aaallllll- pet peeve fandoms

Me and my bestie were rereading the first book a while back because of reasons and we both agreed there should never have been trilogy creep if the editor had done a better job from the beginning. So. Much. Padding. There was so much that could have been taken out and there were so many plot hooks that never came to fruition

 

Oh yeah, that's definitely in there. Most of my biggest issues, though, are more plot/theme-central things. Like the entirety of Mohs' characterization--what a pointless waste of a really important antagonist role! And the classic JRPG difficulty with remembering the difference between antagonists having sympathetic motives and their actions being sympathetic. And ideally the writers would also learn to exposition better.

... Also, on a more specific pet peeve note, I will forever have a lot of issues with how the final part of Arietta's plotline is handled. In particular, the way Largo talks about her makes me rage (and tbh is probably ~60% of the reason I seem to be the only person in the fandom who can't stand Largo.)

Also I'm still mad about all the boob jokes, but what else is new. :| (And to think Abyss is one of the better games in the series about creepy fanservice...)

 

More of a pet peeve fandom (though canon isn't guiltless either) would be the Hetalia fandom, particularly american USUK shippers. My best friend and I were super into Hetalia at the end of high school and it was my first experience of fandom. For those who don't know, Hetalia is a web comic/anime that follows personifications of world nations through history. It's sort of slash shipper heaven because the cast (with /very/ few exceptions) are very attractive anime boys.

Basically my problem with the western fandom is that 95% of all ship fics run with the uke/seme dynamic and reduce complicated and badass characters to weird, vaguely sexist and homophobic caricatures of themselves. I completely gave up on the fandom when someone asked me on one of my fanfics (Which was labeled GEN) whether it was USUK or UKUS, which is how the fandom denotes seme/uke status in ship tags. :[[[[[

 

Urgh. I feel the same about the Kingdom Hearts fandom. Too much shipping at the expense of characterization. Or, well, how I felt. KH was baby's first fandom for me, and I've long since moved on, but. Still my first. Important, that.

 

Harry Potter gives me the extreme rage that only something I loved which let me down can inspire.

Has anyone else here listened to The Black Tapes Podcast? It's so popular and I can't figure out why- the main characters are terrible in largely unacknowledged ways, the central mystery can't seem to make up its mind which mystery it actually is, and oh god the Devil's Door episode.

 

Dangan Ronpa, honestly. I tried really fucking hard to get into it, but...the characters, at least in the first game, are boring as hell. Which sucks, because the concept of the game is really interesting. I dunno. I might enjoy it more if I end up playing it myself, but as it is I just found it disappointing.

 

I'm sorry, what was that? I can't hear you over the 650 hours of game time I have in DAI! ;P

 

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Agreed! I really liked the first book, but I couldn't get over the fact that the main from that book got sidelined for a boy with a knife for the two following books, I thought the girl was interesting, but she ended being portrayed as a passive love interest that needed her hand held by the boy all the time (I read it awhile ago, so I don't remember their names).

I just reread this and holy shit I agree. It doesn't help that the only humor in the books involve watanuki getting upset and people ignoring his concerns because his rage is 'so funny'. I see that kind of humor all the time in anime/manga (especially one with a teacher/student dynamic).

As for my pet peeves - I used to read alot of yaoi manga, but now it annoys the hell out of me. The insipid ukes, stone faced inhuman semes, the weird power dynamics, the fact that the pair always have to fall in love no matter what horrible things the seme has done to the uke, the crying.. But what I really hated was how the uke's personality would disappear and be replaced by 'generic supportive wife #350' as soon as they got in a relationship with their seme. I'm so glad that slash has become a bigger thing in the past few years, so I don't have to put up with all that anymore in my erotica.

 

Re: HDM: I should start a Daemon AU thread. Because daemon AUs are the best thing to come out of HDM.

 

I want to like His Dark Materials a lot but I found the writing super dry and "Wow, look you killed God" is already a tiring story but it's basically completely unlikable when done by an atheist. I really like the whole daemon concept and some of the other world building though. Like wow warrior polar bears that talk? How is that not cool?

 

(instead of flipping a table, runs so fast that I ~vibrate at the same frequency as its molecules~ and phase through it) THE FLASH

 

I think he said he wrote it as an opposite to Narnia, and I'm a bit, "Congratulations, you have managed a perfect horseshoe-theory equivalent to the way Narnia went from a story and setting that was cool on its own merits to an obnoxious preach-a-thon where the religious message tramples right over everything we actually cared about."

 

We do not speak of Narnia's ending. Though I find that far more tolerable than His Dark Materials. I will fucking fight the author. Because he wrote a boring piece of shit that ended in the most infuriating fashion AND HE BURNED HIS ACTUALLY COOL WORLD BUILDING TO BE A SHIT.

FUCKING FIGHT ME PULLMAN OR WHOEVER YOU ARE.

 

And this is why I'm torn on ever reading HDM

 

And now again I must admire Tolkien for managing to make his books hideously Catholic and yet also not preachy. Like people bitch about Tolkien's writing all the time but I rarely hear people bitch about how furiously Catholic everything he wrote is. It's more that he has far too big a history and linguistics boner and that he put in characters who are narratively useless because he liked them and because the man is far, far too fond of the narrative structures of things like Beowulf.

 

Plus didn't Tolkein end up deeply regretting making the orcs Always Chaotic Evil but he never got around to writing something that fixed that? Wish he had, I want more of orcs who aren't just big dumb assholes.

 

He did, yes. He also toyed with the idea of them being more tragic in the First Age material. Especially with the origin story where they were Elves who were tortured and mutilated into orcs and then forced to breed to create a massive slave army as a fuck you to Elf God.

 

Even in LOTR, I don't think they were really just big dumb assholes. I have never forgiven Peter Jackson for neglecting the ruinous almost-nobility in Uglúk's command, or anything even vaguely equivalent to Shagrat and Gorbag...

Um, I kind of have some Orc feels, sorry. Basically I feel like he wrote them much more as soldiers than the barbarians we get from the shallow imitations or the Noble Savage Proud Warrior Race we tend to get from deconstructions of those. And of course he was a soldier.

 

Oh they are definitely written as soldiers. Highly technologically advanced ones at that. The orcs have the best tech on the whole fucking continent. Which might be partly due to Morgoth's and Sauron's doing because, well. Outside of Aule they are the most talented people in the realm of technology. If we're going to say their achievements aren't real because of that though then neither are the Elves. Who learned pretty much all they know from Aule, Morgoth, and Sauron or those schooled by them.

 

That reminds me of a realization I had about Zelda and why I love it so much. Zelda's world is one brimming with religion. Religion is fucking everywhere in Zelda. EVERYWHERE.

But no one bitches about this. Hell, many don't even think about it.

but it's there

everywhere you look