This is somewhere between "fanfic gripe" and "headcanon gripe," and a highly subjective one at that, but: when you see an AU premise and you're like, "Yes, I can see exactly how this would work" and then the author is just wrong about it. Example: YOI Badfic Friend found a Victuuri fic a while back where Yuuri and Victor were cast members in a crosscast production of Phantom of the Opera. But the author had Yuuri playing Christine (with no mention of the part being rewritten for a male voice; we concluded that a) the author had never actually HEARD Christine's part and b) Yuuri was a castrato) and Victor playing Raoul. And we were like "absolutely not" because it is transparently obvious that Victor would consider Raoul incredibly boring, and equally obvious that Yuuri would be too Anxiety to apply for the lead role in a production where it would get as much attention as it would here, especially when it would make his celebrity crush his love interest. How this AU obviously should have gone is that Victor is playing Christine, and Yuuri applied for a part as an extra to see his celebrity crush in person but got offered the part of the Phantom and now he's like "AAAAAAAAAHHHHHH??????" :::PPP (This isn't exclusive to fanfic- I got really angry recently at a reblog chain about a hypothetical Discworld-LotR crossover that was offensively wrong about absolutely everything, including factual details and broad narrative themes, in both works.)
The fic itself was marked as complete, but apparently it was the first part of a larger multipart series with a cliffhanger ending! I didn't read 400k words to not have a conclusion!
Original fiction gripe: "Sorry, this story has been removed because I'm looking to get published. Thank you for your support!" Boy
I've been seeing that happen a lot and my question is... Why? Are publishers requiring this?? is it on advice of PR or marketing? Quite fuckin' frankly every time I find published authors ALSO have fanfic sitting out there I get so excited and feel like I can connect to this author better and shit. Feels like we're all the same here and not like I'm talking to a brick wall. Edit: and it's not like pseudonyms aren't a totally accepted part of publishing, or that you can't keep your online fandom identity seperate from your irl one.
Sometimes I think it's that the author might be trying to get the fanfiction published, with the names swapped out, if it was AU enough compared to canon that it wouldn't be plagiarism. Edit ^ninja'd Could also be that the author is afraid of someone hunting down their *embarrassing old fic, but they aren't willing to recreate their online persona entirely from scratch for a professional blog/reputation/etc. Either way, I greatly dislike deleted fic - seeing a bookmark deleted in my AO3 list is the hardest thing, because AO3 doesn't even leave the title for you to try to search for saved copies on other sites *embarrassing from their perspective
From what I've heard, it's because publishers like to have complete control of the story. They'll Google lines from a work, and if they find anything online, you'll get denied.
One of my favorite Les Mis fanfics got deleted a while ago because the creator wanted to publish something totally unrelated. It's extra frustrating because they left another one of their Les Mis fics up - an unfinished crossover with some series I don't give a shit about >:V
right??? there was a really nice homestuck smutfic i liked where sollux had just molted and ended up pailing himself, and i LIKED IT A LOT, only one day when i went through my bookmarks looking for it i couldn't find it and i only saw "this work has been deleted" and i was just like where did it go, what was its title
Shit that might have been a blackeyedsusan fic. They nuked their ENTIRE Homestuck fic collection, of which there was quite a lot and much of it in my favs piles. No warning or explanation just -poof!- gone.
And this is why I actually started saving copies from AO3 for the first time this past year. Mostly just the long fics I reread constantly, but god, if I had the space on my computer...
I swan to John if I read one more Star Wars fic where the author's best idea about what space fascist torture consists of is "and then they hit him with their human fists", I am gonna. Be impotently cross for a tick.
They have fucking torture droids who have drugs that they administer which specifically decrease the pain threshold. Along with all sorts of lovely pokey and sharp and burny things.
I don't even need any new and inventive ways to cause pain, like. In a space ship, the environment is entirely controlled. Can you imagine all the ways you could fuck with someone's perception of time?? Just. Humiliation and helplessness and stuff besides aimless hurt.
I'm just more annoyed because we canonically know how they torture people. And it's with droids and weird drugs primarily.
(Someone should write a new trilogy fic where Kylo Ren goes rogue/is otherwise out of commission and some poor First Order trooper has to dig the torture droids out of supply cabinets and figure out how the hell the damn things work because nobody remembers anymore because Darth Emo was so much better at getting information out of people that they haven't used the droids for anything important in years. Hijinks ensue.)
Oh wait, you meant a fic about the new trilogy, not a tri part series about. Okay, okay, I see now, I see how that would have made more sense, I understand my folly.
