yeah same i love the vamp tats tempted to go looking for fanfiction now honestly even though i know that i will Suffer in said quest edit: i found a 41K OCfic and this is the first time I've ever been tempted to read ocfic in my life, wth son of an edit: there's more crossover fic in the ao3 section than there is actual canon fic, i'm somehow not surprised
the red fledglings? dude I have NO idea and I somehow doubt it was actually ever explained. hold on let me see if there's a wiki - "Read Kristin Cast's defense of women in history and mythology who, like Zoey, have made a practice of juggling multiple men." you mean the one she didn't manage to fit into the narrative? ... what kind of wiki is this that doesn't have plot spoilers, this is a travesty. It doesn't look the red vamps are explained beyond "fucking with the corpses of fledgelings caused them to exist." apparently there's a Love Redeems lesbian couple in the last book? [/continues red spoiler trawling]
Another gripe; designated homophobic bastard characters purely to cause angst, even when it's really hard to picture those specific characters being homophobic. A friend of mine described it as the Chandler's Law of bad slash: "when in doubt, have a homophobe come in through the door". Worst case I ever heard of of this was several years ago when Fanficrants was actually funny. Someone wrote a Kingdom Hearts fanfic with Mickey Mouse in the role of the designated homophobic villain, talking like a stereotypical foul-mouthed angry bigot. Someone pointed out this was OOC, so the author replaced Mickey as the villain with Sephiroth. This was equally OOC and made even worse by the fact that she obviously just used find-replace, because she regularly called him Sephiroth Mouse and made mention of his big round ears.
I...have slightly different feels on that? I mean, my hackles would definitely be going up, and I would have So Many Questions about it, and if it's the Standard Christian Hell which is like a bug-trap that people go in and then never come back out of, then nope, fuck that, how do we dismantle it right now. And if it's, like, actual literal torture? Wow, no, who's in charge of that and how do I kick them in the junk until someone sensible and not pro-torture is in charge? But I do have a vague belief in an "all debts get paid" kind of afterlife? Where if you've got a good karmic balance and haven't been, say, trying to game the system by doing a good deed every day to try and avoid getting punished for all your puppykicking, you go straight to the nice bits, but if you've been pretty terrible, you have to do some work to make up for that first. But...in my belief here, no one gets stuck in the bad part; no one stays there, the universe doesn't get to shut down until every single person has been let into the good part. I'll admit I don't really have a clear idea on how things are operating in the bad parts - I don't know what someone would need to do in order to atone for stuff like theft, let alone worse things. But I do know that it can't be torture (or at least isn't supposed to be) because torture's never actually fixed anything. (I guess I'm picturing something like therapy, instead?) Eeee, other people read that! God, I would love a sequel, or even just...something else set in that same universe. There's just so many little details that the protagonist drops like she assumes the reader knows what she's talking about, and that leave you wondering and wanting more.
More; authors forgetting that there are more characters than the focal one/two who should be in the scene. Of Warlords and Pleasures had characters having sex on the walltop of a besieged building where everyone in the building should have been able to see them, and The Last War has the notorious line "The streets of London were deserted that night".
Yeah, in an rp I was in there was an npc who was like, a living purgatory where souls who (for whatever reason) were determined not to be ready to move on had to act as her servants until their debts were paid and they moved on, and while I wanted more details on how all that was determined and judged I wasn't super disturbed by it because it actually seemed like a mutualistic relationship, and not one she was in control of either. Literal torture and flytrap punishment afterlifes are pretty messed up, though.
I've seen a couple of cases in fiction where Hell wasn't originally supposed to be torture, but the good deities don't have authority there, and the inevitable result of putting so many dangerous people together happens. Not something I'd want to exist for real but much more interesting in fiction than the standard boxes.
This isn't exactly a gripe as I've only seen it once, but it stuck in my head for years. When I was a teen, I saw a fanfic which had warnings for extreme violence, foul language, and graphic sex, then opened with the framing device of a story being told to a gaggle of toddlers. That was jarring.
If my children aren't being told tales of death and fucking at a young age what kind of mother am I. WHAT. I would be depriving them of good nursery rhymes!
hello i am back i have something to complain about okay so. you know that thing where a character will express an opinion and it's something that we the readers know to be Factually Incorrect or Philosophically Questionable or Heavily Biased? like "bob passed sheryl in the hall. she smiled and greeted him with bubbly cheer, and bob narrowed his eyes. typical superficial nonsense. people like sheryl were only ever after one thing." or "jill couldn't help but wince at the look on her aunt's face. she was disappointed in her. of course she was, jill thought miserably. why wouldn't she be when jill had let her down so terribly? jill was a disappointment." or "[minority analogue character] was a disaster, erica thought with disgust. a drain on society. he ought to be put down, he and all the rest of his kind. they deserved nothing better." yknow. like, unreliable narrator stuff! that's all well and good. what REALLY GRINDS MY GEARS is when the author then goes and shoves in some variation on this sentence: "or at least, that was how [character] saw it." STOP DOIN THAT!!! own the character's shitty opinion!! own their flawed perspective!!! if you're writing from their POV don't yank me out of immersion to reassure me that you, the author, know that their opinion is Incorrect. if you're writing in 3rd person limited, then limit yourself!! like it sounds like such a specific complaint but it pops up all the damn time in fanfiction >:I grump grump grump
No, that's really common and I hate it. Like, disclaim in the author's notes, if it feels necessary. But not in the text, that's...tacky.
That really annoys me because you can pull off some very beautiful things with an unreliable narrator. One of my favorite Dolofang works uses that to great effect. While you the reader probably know that there is something deeply unhealthy and terrible going on, given Dolly's perspective you sort of lose track of what you already know. Which is that Mindfang is a terrible rapist who is mind controlling her. Then comes the end when it is revealed that a thought Dolly thinks she's having is actually Mindfang's and she has reached the point which so terrified in the journal entry in canon we see: when her thoughts and those of Mindfang's are no longer distinguishable. And the fact that she seems to be genuinely happy with her situation makes it worse. However this wouldn't have worked were we not limited to Dolly's thoughts the entire time. If the author had broken character to wink and nudge at us and go "Yes, Mindfang is behind it all" the ending of the work wouldn't work. I also get kind of annoyed when even limited third person narrative isn't tailored to the character in question stylistically. If I read a lot of works by the same author I will eventually get a feel of how this person writes. However some authors are capable of altering their style to better be in line with the character they are focusing on, regardless of the perspective of the text. An example in my own writing would be how when writing Handmaid centric works I make heavier use of short, clipped sentence fragments then I naturally tend to. I also tend to only use euphemisms or epithets for characters and often times verbs are added towards the ends of sentences in a way a friend of mine compared to Yoda. It is exceptionally rare when the Handmaid pieces use character names or when they become more flourished and not as back loaded and stylistically that serves a point. It is meaningful when the narrative refers to the Dolorosa not as "The Woman" but as "Porrim". And I wish I saw that sort of thing more often in other people's writing. It's one of my favorite bits about writing different characters, honestly. Finding voices even in third person for characters is just very meaningful to me.
A friend of mine made a comment along those lines. "Because we all know how much better Philosopher’s Stone would have been had this happened: Harry was just helping himself to a jacket potato when Professor Quirrell came sprinting into the hall, his turban askew and terror on his face. Everyone stared as he reached Professor Dumbledore’s chair, slumped against the table and gasped, “Troll – in the dungeons – thought you ought to know.” He then sank to the floor in a dead faint. Perfect, thought Professor Quirrell, who was only pretending to be unconscious. Now they’ll be too busy chasing the troll to notice me stealing the Philosopher’s Stone so I can bring Voldemort, who’s hidden under my turban, back to life."
One of my favorite books in high school was a novel where there are two first-person narrators, the usual main character of the series and a long-time friend of his. And they go about their business, getting up to shenanigans and doing detective work and also crimes, for the whole book. And then at the very end the main character lays out that over the course of the story he's realized that his old friend the cat burglar is secretly an alter ego for one of the most dangerous and powerful people in the world, because she offhandedly mentioned stuff like what using an obsolete magical weapon from a hundred thousand years ago felt like when it went off in your hand. And on a reread you can spot places where she danced around it, like mentioning that she "went home to get some things" but never specifying what those things were. I loved it.
