I was thinking worse for whatever dramatic mood the author was going for, but no, you're right. The Backstroke of the West makes everything better. :D
Not exactly a gripe, but spawned from one; I really super love deconstruction fics which have a villain underestimate the hero, attempt to do whatever the popular badfics have them do, and get their ass handed to them with the hero's canonical abilities. Please point me to any you find.
You say that and all I can think of is that scene in The Force Awakens where Kylo Ren tries to interrogate Rey and she about sends him running out sobbing.
i'm pretty sure that sans can't return to mount everret since he's never even been there in the first place. mount ebbot, however, that would actually make sense.
You know what, every petty gripe I've had before now is meaningless in the face of this: people who don't fucking punctuate dialogue. HATE. HATE AND DESPAIR. WORD LITERALLY HAS A GRAMMAR CHECK. YOU COULD READ THROUGH IT AND CATCH IT YOURSELF!! WHY HAPEN. (note: not actually a direct quote of anything just a basic sketch of the BANE OF MY EXISTENCE in this fandom)
Actually, as a corollary to the above: if the game has subtitles on by default that give you the punctuation for the dialogue, then if you're going to copy the dialogue directly, you better fucking maintain the punctuation. Putting a period where there's an exclamation mark-- or vice versa-- changes the entire fucking tone of the scene!
Ugh, yes, it's bad enough when fics regurgitate canon dialogue unchanged for whole scenes and even worse when they regurgitate it wrong.
god i hate that so much i was complaining about a fic with that problem last week & i went back to find it here's a quote with the character names taken out it was everything i thought i wanted - sickfic, wingfic, hurt/comfort.... but GAHHHH, THE UNPUNCTUATED DIALOG KILLS ME this kills the man.jpg
It is the pettiest thing to get upset by but oh my god it throws me out harder than typos or clunky writing ever could. Just. Punctuation and capitalization errors are like getting smacked in the face with a paper tube every time my brain stumbles over a bit of writing where it should be, but isn't.
(I would also like to add a corollary to this for when people get the dialogue text right, but describe the scene completely incorrectly, so you end up with the text equivalent of Spoiler: gif )
can confirm, snas has never visited Mt. Everett, aka my house Also yeah, dialogue without punctuation sounds like it's being read with no inflection. "No" he said "$CHARACTER I thought you were going to go do the thing" "That's where you're wrong", $CHARACTER shot back "Its you who is going to do the thing although not before I murder your team your car and your friend" ...anyway that's just a caricature, i havent read anything that bad recently
same, oh my god. PUNCTUATION MATTERS GUYS PLEASE. things that also matter: NEW PARAGRAPH FOR NEW PERSON SPEAKING FOR FUCK'S SAKE.
The best way to read dialogue like that is in the voice of actors from bad movies. Add "o hai Mark" to the end if you need to. :::PPP
New goal for Aon: write a fanfic with the form of Ulysses. Explain nothing and leave people to wonder why there are no quotation marks and why the subjects of paragraphs keep changing.
So. Pregnancy fic and/or baby fic. Why is this so hard. I love these kinds of fics, I'm willing to forgive a lot of sins for the sake of some good old pregnancy times. I'd happily swim in an ocean of babies for days on end. But oh my god, is it really that hard to let your characters keep their original personality when babies enter the picture? I'm pretty sure there's not some kind of toxin that babies secrete to turn you into the most generic possible stereotype of a doting parent. And honestly, I'm not even noticing this as much in the characters who are actually, you know, pregnant. I'm totally up for the subtle shifts in character and priorities that come with having some precious little ol' sentinet parasites germinating inside you. But the partners of the pregnant folks. Oh my GOD, even at the best of times, I'm not that interested in cooing and fluttering and stuffing dialogue as full of prepackaged endearments as you can. But when you get character A, who's kind of an asshole, knocked up by character B, who's kind of an asshole (with bonus absolute bananas amounts of emotional repression). Why is character A still getting to be kind of an asshole, while character B is all tender touches and massages and reassurances and Every Bland Romantic Story Ever. You can have both these things, I swear, it's more interesting that way. You aren't making this any better by brute-forcing them into this ridiculous mold of an ideal sugar-sweet perfect relationship. Oh, you're interested in this character, presumably because of who he was in the original canon? Well why don't I just take this power tool and sand off all those flaws that made him interesting in the first place
I saw that power tool pic and assumed you were talking about DIY sex toys, for some reason. Oh boy, I had successfully repressed those memories of that one article I read back in the day about how DIY sex toys are fucking horrific, until today. Oh boy.