What kind of fanfics do you hate?

[Rei-chan]

Number two; Tense issues. Slightly related to grammar, but I feel that it's a large enough issue to have it's own comment. See, the thing is, unless you're writing a story in either script format or in first person perspective from one of the characters as they experience things, you should never write a fic in present tense! You are telling a story here, and as such you are recounting events that have already happened!!! Ye Gods, that pisses me off so much...

Hehehe, yeah sorry about that. Shouldn't be doing it again. Got most of the rust off my writing abilities finally.

[TerraEpon]

As an aside, I don't mind it mentioned if the "pairing" has already happened as it were. In fact, I like when there's no remantic conflict to get in the way of what the author is trying to tell (as I said before). Hell, I've tended to find I much more enjoy stories where Ranma and Akane are already together than ones that bring them together.


-Joshua

[Drawde]

I can put up with most of the stereotypes, but the two I can't stand are Uber-bitch Akane and Evil-bastard Ryoga. Those two are by far the most common. Would it hurt anyone to write a story that doesn't smash those two characters into oblivion for once?

A lot of people think it would. Too many times, I'm reading a draft of a story, and several of the comments are along the lines of "when are you going to bash Akane?" or "the story would be better if you bash Akane". Though Genma's a close second. I fully expect to be reading a story, where the author said flat out it's a Ranma/Akane fic, and someone still asks, seriously, "when are you going to bash Akane?"

[Cyber_Skaarj]

A lot of people think it would. Too many times, I'm reading a draft of a story, and several of the comments are along the lines of "when are you going to bash Akane?" or "the story would be better if you bash Akane". Though Genma's a close second. I fully expect to be reading a story, where the author said flat out it's a Ranma/Akane fic, and someone still asks, seriously, "when are you going to bash Akane?"

I believe people who ask stupid questions like that are moronic Akane haters that want instant gratification. Such individuals are, in my opinion, probably responsible for the huge amount of non-stop Akane bashing that seems to inhabit the vast majority of fics these days. Which goes to prove that it's not just the fics that need to be hated, but those that encourage those fics as well.

[CJN]

Here are the major things I dislike. I'm not going to bother listing technical things like spelling.

1. Long info-dump dialogs
Typical scenario: Character A meets character B. Character A tells their long life story spanning several thousand words. Yawn. Reader skips to next chapter.
Show, don't tell! And if you show, keep those flashbacks short.

2. Breaking of suspension of disbelief
Plot and events aren't believable in the story context will sooner or later make me stop reading. Most on my grievances comes under this heading, the major subcategories are:
2a. Characters act OOC
Common examples: Angsty Ranma, angsty Naruto, Kakashi-Iruka pairings, Spike-Xander pairings.
2b. The plot is not plausible
Examples: The worst of crackfics, plots that makes too many 180 turns.
2c. Incompatible universes
This is something that even experienced authors are ignorant of. My personal annoyances are Tenchi-Sailor Moon (worst), Tenchi-OMG and Sailor Moon-OMG.

3. Pacing problems
Too fast pacing and there is no time for any meaningful character interaction, too slow and things gets boring. Too fast is worse IMO.

4. Darkfics & angstfics

[lwf58]

1. Long info-dump dialogs
Typical scenario: Character A meets character B. Character A tells their long life story spanning several thousand words. Yawn. Reader skips to next chapter.
Show, don't tell! And if you show, keep those flashbacks short.

The problem is that long expository monologs, dialogs, or even mongraphs are part and parcel of stories in general. You aren't going to get away from them, and telling fan writers that they are wrong to write them is far from the truth. Every pro writer does them, and they sell books. A classic example. Look at Robert Heinlein's stories. In one of his more popular stories, he wrote something like a three-page exposition about how internal combustion engines work. Didn't stop millions of people from buying and reading the book. And if you took away expository dialogs way from series like Ghost in the Shell, you'd cut the average episode down to about 4 minutes or so.

2c. Incompatible universes
This is something that even experienced authors are ignorant of. My personal annoyances are Tenchi-Sailor Moon (worst), Tenchi-OMG and Sailor Moon-OMG.

Whereas I think all of those combos are perfectly fine. An author who is part of the Lost Library, Brian Randall, took all of the above and a whole bunch of other series besides, and put it in one story called Process of Elimination. He made it all work out fabulously. What I'm saying is that there aren't any "bad" crossovers. There are only bad writers.

A good author can take any combination of series and mesh them together to make a fun read. A bad author, on the other hand, can take a good series that is very popular, and make a story no one wants to read, crossover or no. It's the writer that makes it work.

[Dumbledork]

A good author can take any combination of series and mesh them together to make a fun read

I'm not so sure about that. There are some crossovers where the author would have to be a genius writer to make it work. For example a Ranma/Candy Candy crossover. Or I don't know Ranma/The Smurfs, Ranma/Maya the Bee...


OK, here are some more things I don't like:

Ranma/Akane pairings (there are some exceptions). Even if that is the pairing that's supported by Rumiko Takahashi at the end of the manga. There simply can't be a relationship without total trust... point. I especially hate Ranma/Akane fics where Ranma is constantly abused until at some point Akane suddenly thinks "Hey, maybe I should be nice to the poor guy"

Moé and lolicon fics (as wella s manga and anime). I think that's disgusting and equals pedophilia to me.

[lwf58]

Just takes imagination. A Ranma/Smurfs crossover, for example, is very possible. Think, if you will, about this: Ranma, while wandering untracked wilderness searching for a cure, gets lost and runs across the Smurf village. Needless to say, he's horrified as anyone not 6 years old about the way they act. But he's lost and needs one of them to guide him to a road. He takes on their antagonist to get them to help.

Admittedly, it'd be a very short story because that bad guy (Gargamel, or something like that?) isn't exactly a challenge for Ranma. The real story would be playing up for laughs Ranma's attempts to keep his sanity around the little beasties. In the hands of someone with a talent for comedy, it could be a riot.

To put in an attempt not to be too far off-topic, I dislike yaoi and yuri fics among the other things I've said before.

[Crescent Pulsar]

Grammar and spelling that makes it too hard to read, as well as a lack or non-existence of paragraphs.

The plot moves in a direction that blatantly aims at taking out the parts of the canon that the author doesn't like, and needs to do so in order for their story to go where they want it to. For instance, Akane acting all homocidal-mad, Ranma snapping, then he decides to move on... Whereupon the author suddenly starts to put in an effort for the rest of the story so it's actually serious and means to be believable.

A story whose author doesn't place said story in an alternate universe when they do a bad job of expressing the characters or don't even bother to try. This can also be due to an author who writes with little knowledge of the series they write in. Just because they heard about a moko takabisha doesn't mean that it's on par to the power of a super saiyajin's freakin' kamehameha. When I read a non-alternate universe story, I expect the characters and environment to follow the canon's factual details at least decently-well.

[Alathon]

I don't think anything makes me grind my teeth the way angelic character fics do, regardless of whether they're Perfect Ranma or Blessed Akane. Though, they're by far the worst when it's Saint Nabiki who slaves away to support the Tendo household, who is emotionally chained by her 'Ice Queen' persona, who.. yeah, right, whatever. But even angelic-Kasumi kinda irks me.. this is a woman who sat on her ass and did pretty much nothing about anything that happened in 38 volumes worth of crazy shit going down. These drive me nuts because not only are the characters wildly OOC and borderline unrecognizeable, but the concepts that have supplanted their canon concepts blow 'suspension of disbelief' out of the water. They reek of bullshit and fanboi worship.

After that... Anyone x Anyone in the title or summary. There are times when it's kinda obvious where the story is gonna go based on the title or summary, but I can live with that.. at least there's hope. I honestly don't think I've ever read a good story that explicitly specified the pairing ahead of time, and I read several hundred (at least) before I started skipping anything with a predetermined 'ship. I think there're multiple problems here; not only are the authors stating outright that there will be no tension or real conflict in the story because it's all decided in advance, but they're flagging themselves as 'shippers who are focused on pushing a particular pairing, all too often to the exclusion of anything else in the story.

Misoandry and mother worship. They don't necessarily have to go hand and hand, but all too often do.. though the former is usually implicit rather than explicit. In Ranma 1/2 we have a comedy where both genders behave badly, and it's painful to read stories where Ranma is immediately elevated to acceptance and a good life by being or becoming female, by attaching himself to Nodoka, or getting knocked up. These are almost always paired with healthy doses of abuse dealt out to Genma, Ryoga, and whichever other males are available to be punished for their maleness. Which is weaksauce in general, but just plain pathetic in the context of Ranma 1/2 where the major male characters have at least some redeeming values, and many of the female characters (Nodoka and Shampoo most obviously) do not.

[TerraEpon]

Moé and lolicon fics (as wella s manga and anime). I think that's disgusting and equals pedophilia to me.

Just to be a devil's advocate...how do you feel about stories where a character rapes or kills another? Why is that much different?


-Joshua

[Tuisto]

1.Extreme OOC'ness. (lovey-dovey Akane, or a happy-go-lucky Alucard, or a non-confrontational Skuld... etc...)
2.The writer has stripped away everything about the character, and is basically just using a name.
3.Bad writing, sure there are exeptions, but when a fic has obviously been written be a juvenile with hardly any thought, or understanding of how to write and actual life reactions to situations... it just irks me.
3(and a half). Endless spelling and grammatical errors. If any of you ever see a review by me on ff.net you'll see that's how I grade fics. I don't care about small things, like some missing punctuation. But run-on sentances, over-use of excalmation marks so-on etc. are so tiring to have to muddle through.
4.Script format. Just don't like it. Never will. I like narative or first person to an extent.
5.Yaoi, not too keen on much of the yuri and shoujo-ai out there either, but meh... note number 3...
6.Inane cross-overs. Anyone notice the rash of rather poor Ranma as a sentai fics lately? Yeah.. like those...
7.Overly complicated. You know the kind, where at some point you think "WhiskeyTangoFoxtrot is going on!"

There's probably other things that my beer filled mind is not catching on right now...

[Dumbledork]

Just to be a devil's advocate...how do you feel about stories where a character rapes or kills another? Why is that much different?

Quite frankly, I have no idea. I hate rape of course, but I accept it in a story because it's generally a very important fact the story is based on.

[Drawde]

The plot moves in a direction that blatantly aims at taking out the parts of the canon that the author doesn't like, and needs to do so in order for their story to go where they want it to. For instance, Akane acting all homocidal-mad, Ranma snapping, then he decides to move on... Whereupon the author suddenly starts to put in an effort for the rest of the story so it's actually serious and means to be believable.

The only time I'm willing to ignore it, besides if it's just a good fic, is when the modified characters hardly show up any more. The reason for this, is because I doubt most people want to spend too long writing a different fic than what they planned on. In other words, would someone writing a "Ranma and Ukyo's life after they get married" fic really want to spend the time to write a 100k+ word "Ranma and Akane break up" fic first? Yes, good and reasonable explanations can help a fic, but these ARE fanfics, which are usually a spare-time hobby for most people.

[Drawde]

One type of fic I can't stand are the ones where the main character's a criminal, who wasn't one in the original. I don't care why they became one, I just can't stand them.

Once type I can read, just don't care as much for, are the ones where Ranma's forced to spend time as a girl, usually away from everyone else, and assumes that "her" better life is because he's female, not because he's away from all his problems. Especially since he NEVER gives being male an honest try again in them. I'll accept being female if there's a good reason for the choice (like in most of Sunshine's fics), but most of the time there never is.