Today I attempted to read a story when I saw that the summary looked cute. I opened the first chapter and then could not get past the first 4 paragraphs.

The author (and I am not trying to pick on people, so I won't get too specific), had a legend at the top of the chapter delineating how to read the story, and a little glossary with commonly known Japanese terms listen with definitions. Those are two huge pet peeves of mine.

Maybe I'm being anal retentive and/or petty, but almost anyone (except extremely new readers) will know what all the basic terms are. If you're going to use random terms that you had to pull from your Japanese/English dictionary that most people don't know, okay sure, put in some defined terms then, but I know what a miko is (as do 99.999% of all other readers).

In addition to that, telling me that thoughts are in single quotes and speech is in double quotes feels a little insulting. Aren't those basic rules in American English writing? I mean, I have read loads of other stories without that little definition chart and had no problem. It just irks me I guess, and it's even worse when they specify things like "Beast thoughts = ~*blahblahblah*~, Beast speaking = *blahblahblah*". I mean, if you're going to include dialogue with Sesshoumaru's multiple personalities, just write them in as regular dialogue. I have even seen people italicize or bold them to note a difference, but they still used normal quotation marks for thoughts and speaking. I feel like that is better than doing weird asterisks and tildes that you have to inform us before hand how to interpret.

As previously noted in some of my other posts, I am perfectly willing to accept that I am crazy!

Those are my fanfiction pet peeves. What are yours?

My primary pet peeve about fan fiction, is the use of Japanese words. Now I will admit, that in my works, I often use the words, miko, inu, hanyou, ect. But I believe, that most of my readers already know, and are familiar with those.I do not go out of my way to find extra Japanese words to throw into the story for what ever random reason.

I guess my pet peeve is using more Japanese words, and terms than necessary, when writting for a primarily English speaking audience. It's just silly. I mean if I have to keep going back to a legend to figure out what the characters are talking about, it just really takes away from the story. But that's just my two cents.

I would have to say over description is my biggest. Its such a fine line between too little and too much but when its to the point of

" The house had green curtains that sat casually against the windowsil except for moments when a gust of air would disturb their resting place and cause them to flutter nonchalantly in the breeze only to return to their rightful position covering the window...."

Everytime a character walks into a new room i can't help but swear at the color of the damn couch ruffles!!

Lady Sianna - EXACTLY! I mean, if someone has to use a guide book to read and understand a fic, it seems pointless. And really, most (but not all) of us are primary English speakers. Overly using Japanese terms seems kind of odd to me.

Nobody - I find that very frustrating sometimes too! It's all about readability, and when someone uses 2 paragraphs to describe a couch it's total overkill!

LOL. I agree! I don't need to know the colors of the walls, and the posters and the bedspread unless it has some significance to the story at large.

You pretty much listed all of mine right there. I'd also have to add author's notes in the middle of the story. Or when people use ***FLASHBACK*** to indicate a flashback, rather than finding a creative way to weave the past into the present of the story.

Example:

Kagome was eating peas. It made her sad because he liked peas.

***FLASHBACK***

"I like peas," said Sesshoumaru.

HATE THAT. Delineating flashbacks like that is an old scriptwriter's trick, but being that we're all writing prose, using a scriptwriting trick is not only WRONG but just plain annoying. It completely breaks the flow of the narrative for me and I find myself shying away from stories like that. In fact, ANYTHING that breaks a story's flow is annoying to me. I feel like I'm seventeen all over again and my mom just busted into my room and interrupted a good make-out session with my boyfriend. MAN, that's annoying!

Noacat wrote:

Example:

Kagome was eating peas. It made her sad because he liked peas.

***FLASHBACK***

"I like peas," said Sesshoumaru.

...

I feel like I'm seventeen all over again and my mom just busted into my room and interrupted a good make-out session with my boyfriend. MAN, that's annoying!

LOL!!!

You're totally right!

Yeah, one of the rules here is to only use author notes at the beginning or the end of the chapter, but not everyone reads the rules. I'm pretty tolerant of that kind of thing. It is enough to actually put your stuff out there for others to criticize to pick on all the little things. Of course, I'm pretty tolerant of spelling and grammar problems too!

noacat you get a karma for that one! Its soo true. When ever i see that i think of a play we did and to indicate a flashback we all had to huddle and do something painfully siilar to spirit fingers to distract the audiance from the set changing.

Oh i hate lame summaries. They should be treated like a paragraph in your story. I never read a story when the summary is confusing, or has horrible spelling and grammar.

Oh, I've got another one. I HATE certain grammer mistakes. Like when people use "then" when they should have used "than." Grrrrrrr! I'm not sure why, but that is really annoying to me. I understand that it is easy to confuse such words as then, and than, accept, and except, ect. But use your dictionary people! I mean, there is one in most of our programs that we use for writting! Microsoft word, or what ever. And you can always go online!

Nobody wrote:
noacat you get a karma for that one! Its soo true. When ever i see that i think of a play we did and to indicate a flashback we all had to huddle and do something painfully siilar to spirit fingers to distract the audiance from the set changing.

Haha! Spirit fingers! Now everytime I read a story with a "**FLASHBACK**" in it I'm going to imagine that too!

I think pet peeves are all about being illogical and perhaps even a little nit-picking in nature. It's usually stuff that just irks you to no end and you don't even know why - and that is what is usually so funny about pet peeves in general.

Nobody, I also don't understand why people put things like "I'm not good at summaries" in the summary. Even if the summary isn't THAT fabulous, as long as they bring across the point of the story, I will still probably read it. But the self-depreciation is kind of a turn off.

I think my number one pet peeve would be using the word "drug" for the past tense of "drag." I see it so often in many different authors' stories. As far as I know, the past tense is "dragged." I even doubled check by looking up the words and "dragged" is the past tense of "drag."

My next biggest pet peeve would have to be the use of "bridal style" to describe someone being carried. Really, it feels like laziness whenever I see it and usually situation does not involve marriage so it sounds really out of place. I mean, what can it hurt to just use a couple more words to describe the image?

These two peeves didn't really bother me before. However, having spent years reading fanfics, I found these nitpicks of mine to be prevalent in every single fandom I have frequented. So the annoyance sort of grew over time.

Mines a more general one on a topic - warm and fuzzy rape stories that end all happy after no time at all.

:: pushes soap box into room:: There is NOTHING WARM AND FUZZY ABOUT RAPE! Rape is a violent crime that is among the most damaging thing you can do to a being. I've seen far too many of these and the disgust me to no end. I read one (got through two short chapters before i wanted to put my fist through the monitor and my fiancee didn't make it through the first chapter before he started screaming in outrage) that was so warm and fluffy and made the RAPIST (Sesshomaru) the good buy that everyone felt sorry for. WRONG! Sorry no rape is rape is rape, there is nothing fluffy about it!
Danyealle

Lady Sianna wrote:
Oh, I've got another one. I HATE certain grammer mistakes. Like when people use "then" when they should have used "than." Grrrrrrr! I'm not sure why, but that is really annoying to me. I understand that it is easy to confuse such words as then, and than, accept, and except, ect. But use your dictionary people! I mean, there is one in most of our programs that we use for writting! Microsoft word, or what ever. And you can always go online!

I am currently helping my uncle with his story (it's not inuysha he writing his own story to follow his set of comics he drew) and his grammer is horrid! he has a real problem with tenses issues. when ever i find to many tenses issues in a story i just wanna cringe.

Some of my pet peeves are misuse of words (it's and its being one of them, though I can't even count how many times I have heard that Kagome "pulled the bow taunt." What, did it suddenly thumb its nose at her enemies and say "neener neener neener"?) and mischaracterization. A little OOCness is fine and I can deal with it, especially if it is caused by something in the story. But when an AU starts off with Kagome as a goth highschooler I start getting twitchy.

Oh! And when authors feel the need to dress characters in shirts with messages on them? I don't get that, unless it actually pertains to the story and how other characters perceive that character because of the shirt.

Overdescription of dress in the first chapter bugs me, too. I have to agree about the flashback, excessive use of Japanese, and fancy denotations for thoughts and dialogue, as well.

One that really gets me, though, is when people substitute the word "onegai" for "please."

"This food is oishii! Pass the potatoes, onegai."

BOTHERS THE CRAP OUT OF ME. Just say please, please. Onegai is a plea, not a nicety.

...There are a lot of things that bother me.

Yeah, OOC'ness is another one. I mean, in this fandom, most of us like to pair Kagome and Sesshoumaru up in a romantic sort of way. With that in mind, I understand first hand how difficult it can be to figure out what Sesshoumaru might be like in that type of situation. But I've seen stories where people don't even try.

I mean when you start a story off, and they just fall into eachother's arms in the fist chapter, it is just not at all believable! Not only for the two of them, but for any two people!

In the world of fanfiction, I feel like it is the author's opportunity, to re-make the story, characters, and plotlines as they see fit. I won't badmouth anyone who writes stories about Sesshoumaru being a light-hearted, friendly, fluffy-wuffy gentleman. Or about Kagome being some kind of vampire dominatrix, but I certainly will not read it!

Danyealle Myst wrote:
Mines a more general one on a topic - warm and fuzzy rape stories that end all happy after no time at all.

:: pushes soap box into room:: There is NOTHING WARM AND FUZZY ABOUT RAPE! Rape is a violent crime that is among the most damaging thing you can do to a being. I've seen far too many of these and the disgust me to no end. I read one (got through two short chapters before i wanted to put my fist through the monitor and my fiancee didn't make it through the first chapter before he started screaming in outrage) that was so warm and fluffy and made the RAPIST (Sesshomaru) the good buy that everyone felt sorry for. WRONG! Sorry no rape is rape is rape, there is nothing fluffy about it!
Danyealle

I 100% agree! I've never been the victim of a rape (nor do I know anyone personally who has been) but I know damn sure that if I was raped, I wouldn't want to be anywhere near my rapist. I also don't think I'd want to right away jump into the sack with someone else to "erase the memory" of the rape. All too often there are 'Naraku/Inuyasha rapes Kagome, Kagome turns to Sesshoumaru who makes sweet, sweet love to her, erasing the memories of the rape' stories. There's nothing realistic in a fictional or nonfictional sense to them at all. The mind boggles!

Lady Sianna - I don't mind if characters go OOC after an explained reason (for example, personalities changing due to tragedy or reasonable circumstances clearly explained in the story), because then I think it's nice that the author has molded the characters in such a way that it explains why they are different than canon. But when I start reading a story where Kagome is entirely someone else and Sesshoumaru is like "HEY GUYS! WHATS UP! WHERE MY BOYZ AT?!" then it's like... *click* NEXT! I don't think I'd ever leave a bad review unless I knew for sure it wasn't a crack!fic or a parody and the characterization was SO bad it was like other people with their names... and even then I would probably say something like "you might want to warn people in your summary that your characters are OOC".

HeartSpasm. Don't get me wrong. I didn't mean that all OOC is bad. I completely understand what you mean about a person having a personality change due to tragedy, or some other circumstances that are explained in the story. I've even read stories were Sess's character has changed, simply due to time. Where he was in the modern era. He wasn't way off, and it was still very believable. That's fine. But like you said if he walks into a room and says "HEY GUYS! WHATS UP! WHERE MY BOYZ AT?!" I will most definitely lose interest. (You get a karma for that by the way. That was hillarious! )

I definitely agree, I think rape is a very traumatic and life changing experience and should never be made light of. I have never been raped, but I know someone who has. To be violated in such a way really effects the victim, whether they are male or female. It also causes complete psyche, personality and livelihood changes and in most cases those changes do not include hopping back in bed with the offender or "sexual healing." It may take years to overcome and even then one doesn't completely overcome it because they're not the same person they were before, and may never be.

I hope I don't offend anyone but one of my biggest pet peeves are Sess/Kag high school fics. Most are done horribly. There are few, very few, that are well written.

Lady Sianna wrote:
HeartSpasm. Don't get me wrong. I didn't mean that all OOC is bad. I completely understand what you mean about a person having a personality change due to tragedy, or some other circumstances that are explained in the story. I've even read stories were Sess's character has changed, simply due to time. Where he was in the modern era. He wasn't way off, and it was still very believable. That's fine. But like you said if he walks into a room and says "HEY GUYS! WHATS UP! WHERE MY BOYZ AT?!" I will most definately lose interest. (You get a karma for that by the way. That was hillarious! )


Exactly! I totally understand!

(haha and thanks for the karma! I gave you one back )

Lady Scheherazadea wrote:
I hope I don't offend anyone but one of my biggest pet peeves are Sess/Kag high school fics. Most are done horribly. There are few, very few, that are well written.

But it's really true. A lot of people use the 'high school' situation to make Kagome a completely different character. I mean, in the series, she IS in high school. Changing her into anything else (like OMG KAGOME FILLED OUT THIS SUMMER AND NOW SHE WEARZ SKANKARIFIC CLOTHES WITH HER MIDRIFF SHOWING) is like making her a Mary Sue.

Lady Scheherazadea is so agree something about Sesshomaru in highschool makes me nuts. Also ooc Sesshomaru makes me crazy. I mean some change is understandable but the sesitive and caring sesshomaru with his heartfelt pep talks makes me cringe. I can handle Kagome ooc because she is so young and its plausible.

Another pet peeve is short-hand instant/text message script some authors use. I haven't seen that much on Dokuga but it is so prevalent on ff.net. Every time I see it I cringe and I can't escape from that page quickly enough.

Okay, I have another one. Forgive me, but I guess I'm just sort of a nitpick about certain things. I mentioned something like this on another thread, but I can't stand the use of vulgar words in lemons. YUK!!!

Now this is just me, but I like to build a romantic relationship between my characters. And so far, I have yet to write a work of fanfiction that does not have at least one lemon. (You read my banner right? ) But personally I like lemons to read like something romantic, and beautiful. Not like pornography. And believe me, there IS a difference. Just another one of my pet peeves.

Lady Sianna

You don't like the word "pussy juice"?