Achievement Unlocked: Things that will make me back button from your fic
I've been meaning to do this for ages, just to let off some steam (especially since fanficrants is far too full of trolls, which is their loss, I suppose), but I never got around to it. And now I have! Huzzah?
Top ten things that will probably make me not read your Who fic.
Well, any fic, but most of them are Whoniverse specific. They're really in no particular order, so it's not like the first one bothers me the most; I just sort of typed them out as I thought of them.
1. Donna is magically a Time Lady. If you explain it, I may go with it, but if she’s just suddenly a Time Lady and you expect me to go along with it for no reason....no. This doesn’t really apply to an author like katherine_b, who has done it enough times (and fairly well pretty much each time that I remember) that I generally understand her thought process regarding the change.
2. You refer to Donna as Wilf’s daughter. I assure you, he is her grandfather. Her mum is Sylvia. Sylvia’s dad is Wilf. This goes double if she later calls him Granddad. If you write her calling him Gramps, you know this as well, and thus should not have Wilf call her his daughter. Mislabelling other canon relationships falls under here as well, but this is the one I see most often and I simply don't get it. :/
3. Someone has a baby and it’s named after another major character with no explanation or reasoning. For example, Amy and Rory have a baby and name it Donna, or Donna names a baby Rose, in an AU where she never met Rose, or . The Donna example especially applies when you’ve shipped her with the Doctor and she decides it would be a good idea to name her child after her father’s ex. If the Doctor suggests it, I think it’s a bit strange, but I’ll at least give it a shot. The Amy and Rory example is just strange, especially if you make it clear that they named their daughter after that Donna, rather than just liking the name. (Hey, look, I get to make fun of myself. I have a fic hiding on my hard drive where Donna, after running into the Doctor post-JE, names a kid John because the Doctor helped her with something shortly before he was born. The fic is still on my hard drive, and while I do explain why she named him John, I’m still cringing a bit.)
4a. The Doctor calls Donna sweetheart. The reverse is also true. If they’re joking, I’ll take it, but they wouldn’t call each other that ever, even if they were a couple. Also, calling each other baby (or a lot of other ‘cute’ nicknames) falls into this category. I think it’s kind of creepy to call your S.O. baby anyway, but that’s me, and that’s another story. Still, it’s OOC for them to do it. River, on the other hand....*snickers* But yes. Nicknames that don't make any sense to be coming out of the characters' mouths will not endure me to your fic. Sorry, pumpkins.
4b. This also applies, on a more general level, to two characters (specifically here being Who fic, my favorite "pairing" being no secret) being a bit too cuddly at times in fics where they’re a couple. Sadly, it tends to put me off other ship fics where they’re not as schmoopy. On another note, they’re not going to just wake up one morning and decide they fancy each other. I’ll concede that, if the two characters did decide they fancied each other, they would make a pretty intensely awesome couple, but it’s not in their canon nature to do that. So I’ll read ship fics if there’s a reason for them to be together, or if there’s some sort of thought process involved, but I can’t get into a fic that insists that they’re a couple and always have been.
4c. You suck all the personality out of two people to have them be a couple. (MInd you, this isn't couple-specific. It applies to any ship that isn't canon and has to be mucked about with to work.) If you want two people to be together and schmoopy and happy and fawning over each other, give them different names, because they’re already different characters. You might as well publicize them as OCs, because....well, that’s what they are. For instance, Amy is probably always going to give Rory a hard time. Yeah, I think she does it too much, but to some extent I like it, and now that Rory’s fighting back a bit in canon I think it’s a wonderful dynamic. Amy’s not going to spontaneously start writing love poems, and Rory’s not going to tell her she’s a cow for giving him crap.
5a. You have major composition (spelling, grammar, punctuation, so as to be able to include them all without having a long list each time) issues. Run-on sentences will make me cringe and probably back button. Comma splices are also terrible, but I can at least pretend it’s a typo or that you’re from a different country where they punctuate differently (or that you write like Dickens; who liked to have semi-colons instead of commas). Misspellings, lack of capitalization, and the inability to differentiate between its and it’s, among others, will make my brain sad as well. However, if the premise is good and only the composition is bad, I’ll probably offer to beta, as I like to see good fics succeed.
5b. You credit a beta and still have major composition issues. How am I supposed to offer to beta something when you’ve already (allegedly) had a beta for it? I’d insult both you, dear author, and your beta, and I don’t want to do that. *whimpers* I guess I just won’t read your fic. This, by the way, is why I generally don't credit a beta (at least as a beta, rather than as “someone who helped with this”) unless they truly offer concrit rather than just telling me that it’s lovely. Back-patting is nice, but a beta should, theoretically, be able to point out at least one thing that could use improvement. There’s always room for improvement, even in professional novels. (This is a downfall of mine as well, in that, having no beta who concrits, at least for most of my fics, I tend to assume that the fic is decent enough to post, only to come back to it a while later and wonder why anyone would let me have a character speak a certain line. So please, if you see something in a fic that doesn't look right, PM me or put it in your comment or something. Sometimes I’m unsure if I’m imagining a flow problem, and if no one says anything I tend to assume that it’s all right when it might not be.)
6. Someone is having a conversation, and it goes like this. Bob nodded, “I want to go to the market.” he said. Word won’t even let me try that; it tries to capitalize the he, which makes me wonder how this happens (because I see it with ‘he’ and ‘she’ as much as with ‘River’ and ‘Donna’ and ‘Harriet Jones, Prime Minister’). This has its own number because it irks me that much. Ending a sentence with a comma is, as far as I know, not correct in any country. A more minor annoyance is something that’s written as follows. “I want to go to the store,” Bob walked away with a nod. I don’t like that format, but it’s used in some ‘real’ writing (aka published stuff, because that makes it more real, riiiight), so I technically can’t harp about it. It reads weird though. Read the latter example out loud (if you’re alone, or if you’re not alone and you’re brave) and then insert ‘said, and’ after Bob and read it again. Maybe it’s just me, but dialogue flows better with speech modifiers. Something written like that, however, will not keep me from reading a fic. I may not enjoy it quite as much, but I’m hardly going to call a fic horrible because it’s written in that style. Some people seem to prefer that flow, and that’s their choice.
7. Donna undergoes drastic changes after her mind’s wiped. I’m talking about a fic where she becomes a drug addict because of the ordeal, or turns into a complete cow, or goes insane, or gets brain cancer. All of these can work, and I’ve seen them all done well (and even done a few of them), but it doesn’t really work to just have it happen. If the brain cancer is brought on by the changed chemistry in her brain, or if she turns into a jerk because no one will talk to her and she gets frustrated by everyone thinking she’s crazy, or if she becomes an alcoholic because it makes all the strangeness go away, and this is dealt with well and properly explained, I can deal with it. But when the Doctor come back to see her fifty years later and realizes she has a brain tumor, just for the sake of angst, it looks a bit contrived. I didn’t include depression in this list because that seems, to me, like a possible natural consequence of this. Suddenly having MPD, however, would not be. Look at me and my fake psych degree. Aren’t we shiny? Seriously, though, getting a random mental illness like schizophrenia or autism (WHAT?!?!) would probably not happen. And while she may like bananas and randomly be able to fix the toaster, she’s not going to build a rocket ship in her garage without her head exploding.
8. You misspell a canon character’s name. Shaun is the one who this happens to most often in Who fic, and it’s rather the BBC’s fault for spelling it that way in the first place, but a quick googling would let you know how it’s spelled. (And Shane? Seriously? Go write for the Walking Dead. Actually, on second thought, don't. Shane is a jerk and should be spoiler spoiler spoiler.) The same applies to Sylvia, which is Sylvia, not Silvia or any other spelling, and Sarah Jane, which does in fact have an H on the end. *pets Lis Sladen, whose real name was also misspelled many a time in many a place, bless the poor sweet girl* There's also Kara Thrace, just about any character from Firefly (Jayne, Niska, Inara, Kaylee, etc.), Priya from Dollhouse, and several other characters whose names are easy enough to spell if you just google them. Likewise, planets aren’t that hard to spell if you look them up. I’ll give you Raxicoricofallipatorius though. Dang.
9. Donna is a whiny baby. Equally, if the Doctor is a whiny baby. I’m referring to fics where one of them has a minor (repeat, minor) injury, and proceeds to go all weak and need to be fed through a straw or something. If they protest at least once and then decide that the other really does know what they’re doing, it’s a different story, but neither of them is going to whimper and plead for help, at least not for something minor. There are occasions where it works, but they’re very rare, and too often a character (Donna especially) will start to cry any time the Doctor tries to touch her, which turns him into a teddy bear that he is, and yet isn’t, at least to the extreme that I’ve seen it. (And I confess, I’ve fallen prey to this one a few times, so it’s something I’ve been trying to stop doing as well. We all have things we could use work on, after all.)
10. The human Doctor is named John Smith, or John in general, unless you come up with a clever last name for him. Noble and Tyler don’t count. I’m sorry. I’ll take exception for those fics which actually explain, for instance, Marvin (my own pet name, which to be fair is just as silly), and his thought process regarding his name, but it’s such a common occurrence and so many people don’t bother to pick out a unique name that I have to at least pause before clicking every time I see it, even if it’s an author I love. Personally, I’d rather just call him the Doctor, but if you have an AU where he ends up back with Proper Doctor, I can understand why Other Doctor would need a different name, because unless you do it right, differentiating them as ‘the man in brown’ and ‘the man in blue’ will get old fast (though I’ve seen it done right, and it works). Oh, and if Rose is the one who gave him his name, and it’s John Tyler or John Smith or something similar (as mentioned above) I will, unfortunately, not be reading. He may go with a suggestion, but they should at least have a conversation about it, not just have Rose turn around and inform him of what he’ll be called. The Doctor wouldn’t stand for that. The human Doctor wouldn’t either.
So if you're posting fic and you're not getting comments from me, assume that it's for one of these reasons (or because I'm unable to due to technical difficulties or....ahem....laziness, but I really try to leave a comment if it's something I enjoy).
A note: I’m sure I could have come up with positive alternatives to a lot of these, like I did with Katherine, but I typed this post offline and didn’t want to spend tons of time looking through people’s fic posts for examples. I used Katherine’s because she posted fic recently in which Donna’s a Time Lady, and it came to mind while making the point about the subject. So, to the rest of the lovely authors who may be reading this, don’t feel as though I don’t appreciate you. Katherine just has epic timing skills. ;)
ETA: I have a similar post with tons of things that irk me about my own fics, but it's still growing, so I'll probably post it later on today. Oh goodness, so long. *twitches*
Top ten things that will probably make me not read your Who fic.
Well, any fic, but most of them are Whoniverse specific. They're really in no particular order, so it's not like the first one bothers me the most; I just sort of typed them out as I thought of them.
1. Donna is magically a Time Lady. If you explain it, I may go with it, but if she’s just suddenly a Time Lady and you expect me to go along with it for no reason....no. This doesn’t really apply to an author like katherine_b, who has done it enough times (and fairly well pretty much each time that I remember) that I generally understand her thought process regarding the change.
2. You refer to Donna as Wilf’s daughter. I assure you, he is her grandfather. Her mum is Sylvia. Sylvia’s dad is Wilf. This goes double if she later calls him Granddad. If you write her calling him Gramps, you know this as well, and thus should not have Wilf call her his daughter. Mislabelling other canon relationships falls under here as well, but this is the one I see most often and I simply don't get it. :/
3. Someone has a baby and it’s named after another major character with no explanation or reasoning. For example, Amy and Rory have a baby and name it Donna, or Donna names a baby Rose, in an AU where she never met Rose, or . The Donna example especially applies when you’ve shipped her with the Doctor and she decides it would be a good idea to name her child after her father’s ex. If the Doctor suggests it, I think it’s a bit strange, but I’ll at least give it a shot. The Amy and Rory example is just strange, especially if you make it clear that they named their daughter after that Donna, rather than just liking the name. (Hey, look, I get to make fun of myself. I have a fic hiding on my hard drive where Donna, after running into the Doctor post-JE, names a kid John because the Doctor helped her with something shortly before he was born. The fic is still on my hard drive, and while I do explain why she named him John, I’m still cringing a bit.)
4a. The Doctor calls Donna sweetheart. The reverse is also true. If they’re joking, I’ll take it, but they wouldn’t call each other that ever, even if they were a couple. Also, calling each other baby (or a lot of other ‘cute’ nicknames) falls into this category. I think it’s kind of creepy to call your S.O. baby anyway, but that’s me, and that’s another story. Still, it’s OOC for them to do it. River, on the other hand....*snickers* But yes. Nicknames that don't make any sense to be coming out of the characters' mouths will not endure me to your fic. Sorry, pumpkins.
4b. This also applies, on a more general level, to two characters (specifically here being Who fic, my favorite "pairing" being no secret) being a bit too cuddly at times in fics where they’re a couple. Sadly, it tends to put me off other ship fics where they’re not as schmoopy. On another note, they’re not going to just wake up one morning and decide they fancy each other. I’ll concede that, if the two characters did decide they fancied each other, they would make a pretty intensely awesome couple, but it’s not in their canon nature to do that. So I’ll read ship fics if there’s a reason for them to be together, or if there’s some sort of thought process involved, but I can’t get into a fic that insists that they’re a couple and always have been.
4c. You suck all the personality out of two people to have them be a couple. (MInd you, this isn't couple-specific. It applies to any ship that isn't canon and has to be mucked about with to work.) If you want two people to be together and schmoopy and happy and fawning over each other, give them different names, because they’re already different characters. You might as well publicize them as OCs, because....well, that’s what they are. For instance, Amy is probably always going to give Rory a hard time. Yeah, I think she does it too much, but to some extent I like it, and now that Rory’s fighting back a bit in canon I think it’s a wonderful dynamic. Amy’s not going to spontaneously start writing love poems, and Rory’s not going to tell her she’s a cow for giving him crap.
5a. You have major composition (spelling, grammar, punctuation, so as to be able to include them all without having a long list each time) issues. Run-on sentences will make me cringe and probably back button. Comma splices are also terrible, but I can at least pretend it’s a typo or that you’re from a different country where they punctuate differently (or that you write like Dickens; who liked to have semi-colons instead of commas). Misspellings, lack of capitalization, and the inability to differentiate between its and it’s, among others, will make my brain sad as well. However, if the premise is good and only the composition is bad, I’ll probably offer to beta, as I like to see good fics succeed.
5b. You credit a beta and still have major composition issues. How am I supposed to offer to beta something when you’ve already (allegedly) had a beta for it? I’d insult both you, dear author, and your beta, and I don’t want to do that. *whimpers* I guess I just won’t read your fic. This, by the way, is why I generally don't credit a beta (at least as a beta, rather than as “someone who helped with this”) unless they truly offer concrit rather than just telling me that it’s lovely. Back-patting is nice, but a beta should, theoretically, be able to point out at least one thing that could use improvement. There’s always room for improvement, even in professional novels. (This is a downfall of mine as well, in that, having no beta who concrits, at least for most of my fics, I tend to assume that the fic is decent enough to post, only to come back to it a while later and wonder why anyone would let me have a character speak a certain line. So please, if you see something in a fic that doesn't look right, PM me or put it in your comment or something. Sometimes I’m unsure if I’m imagining a flow problem, and if no one says anything I tend to assume that it’s all right when it might not be.)
6. Someone is having a conversation, and it goes like this. Bob nodded, “I want to go to the market.” he said. Word won’t even let me try that; it tries to capitalize the he, which makes me wonder how this happens (because I see it with ‘he’ and ‘she’ as much as with ‘River’ and ‘Donna’ and ‘Harriet Jones, Prime Minister’). This has its own number because it irks me that much. Ending a sentence with a comma is, as far as I know, not correct in any country. A more minor annoyance is something that’s written as follows. “I want to go to the store,” Bob walked away with a nod. I don’t like that format, but it’s used in some ‘real’ writing (aka published stuff, because that makes it more real, riiiight), so I technically can’t harp about it. It reads weird though. Read the latter example out loud (if you’re alone, or if you’re not alone and you’re brave) and then insert ‘said, and’ after Bob and read it again. Maybe it’s just me, but dialogue flows better with speech modifiers. Something written like that, however, will not keep me from reading a fic. I may not enjoy it quite as much, but I’m hardly going to call a fic horrible because it’s written in that style. Some people seem to prefer that flow, and that’s their choice.
7. Donna undergoes drastic changes after her mind’s wiped. I’m talking about a fic where she becomes a drug addict because of the ordeal, or turns into a complete cow, or goes insane, or gets brain cancer. All of these can work, and I’ve seen them all done well (and even done a few of them), but it doesn’t really work to just have it happen. If the brain cancer is brought on by the changed chemistry in her brain, or if she turns into a jerk because no one will talk to her and she gets frustrated by everyone thinking she’s crazy, or if she becomes an alcoholic because it makes all the strangeness go away, and this is dealt with well and properly explained, I can deal with it. But when the Doctor come back to see her fifty years later and realizes she has a brain tumor, just for the sake of angst, it looks a bit contrived. I didn’t include depression in this list because that seems, to me, like a possible natural consequence of this. Suddenly having MPD, however, would not be. Look at me and my fake psych degree. Aren’t we shiny? Seriously, though, getting a random mental illness like schizophrenia or autism (WHAT?!?!) would probably not happen. And while she may like bananas and randomly be able to fix the toaster, she’s not going to build a rocket ship in her garage without her head exploding.
8. You misspell a canon character’s name. Shaun is the one who this happens to most often in Who fic, and it’s rather the BBC’s fault for spelling it that way in the first place, but a quick googling would let you know how it’s spelled. (And Shane? Seriously? Go write for the Walking Dead. Actually, on second thought, don't. Shane is a jerk and should be spoiler spoiler spoiler.) The same applies to Sylvia, which is Sylvia, not Silvia or any other spelling, and Sarah Jane, which does in fact have an H on the end. *pets Lis Sladen, whose real name was also misspelled many a time in many a place, bless the poor sweet girl* There's also Kara Thrace, just about any character from Firefly (Jayne, Niska, Inara, Kaylee, etc.), Priya from Dollhouse, and several other characters whose names are easy enough to spell if you just google them. Likewise, planets aren’t that hard to spell if you look them up. I’ll give you Raxicoricofallipatorius though. Dang.
9. Donna is a whiny baby. Equally, if the Doctor is a whiny baby. I’m referring to fics where one of them has a minor (repeat, minor) injury, and proceeds to go all weak and need to be fed through a straw or something. If they protest at least once and then decide that the other really does know what they’re doing, it’s a different story, but neither of them is going to whimper and plead for help, at least not for something minor. There are occasions where it works, but they’re very rare, and too often a character (Donna especially) will start to cry any time the Doctor tries to touch her, which turns him into a teddy bear that he is, and yet isn’t, at least to the extreme that I’ve seen it. (And I confess, I’ve fallen prey to this one a few times, so it’s something I’ve been trying to stop doing as well. We all have things we could use work on, after all.)
10. The human Doctor is named John Smith, or John in general, unless you come up with a clever last name for him. Noble and Tyler don’t count. I’m sorry. I’ll take exception for those fics which actually explain, for instance, Marvin (my own pet name, which to be fair is just as silly), and his thought process regarding his name, but it’s such a common occurrence and so many people don’t bother to pick out a unique name that I have to at least pause before clicking every time I see it, even if it’s an author I love. Personally, I’d rather just call him the Doctor, but if you have an AU where he ends up back with Proper Doctor, I can understand why Other Doctor would need a different name, because unless you do it right, differentiating them as ‘the man in brown’ and ‘the man in blue’ will get old fast (though I’ve seen it done right, and it works). Oh, and if Rose is the one who gave him his name, and it’s John Tyler or John Smith or something similar (as mentioned above) I will, unfortunately, not be reading. He may go with a suggestion, but they should at least have a conversation about it, not just have Rose turn around and inform him of what he’ll be called. The Doctor wouldn’t stand for that. The human Doctor wouldn’t either.
So if you're posting fic and you're not getting comments from me, assume that it's for one of these reasons (or because I'm unable to due to technical difficulties or....ahem....laziness, but I really try to leave a comment if it's something I enjoy).
A note: I’m sure I could have come up with positive alternatives to a lot of these, like I did with Katherine, but I typed this post offline and didn’t want to spend tons of time looking through people’s fic posts for examples. I used Katherine’s because she posted fic recently in which Donna’s a Time Lady, and it came to mind while making the point about the subject. So, to the rest of the lovely authors who may be reading this, don’t feel as though I don’t appreciate you. Katherine just has epic timing skills. ;)
ETA: I have a similar post with tons of things that irk me about my own fics, but it's still growing, so I'll probably post it later on today. Oh goodness, so long. *twitches*