Out of Character.
I may not be a wonderful writer myself, but something I absolutely can not stand in fanfiction is outrageous OoC-ness among main characters. Today I was reading a fic with Zack (Zack Fair, Final Fantasy VII) and Angeal (Angeal Hewley, Final Fantasy VII) in it, and Angeal was amazingly OoC. The other characters were definitely OoC too, but he was just so...blatantly out of character I had to stop reading that fic altogether.
Don't get me wrong, I don't really hate all OoC-ness. I know everyone sees the characters differently, so what I think of as OoC may seem completely normal to someone else. And it's not always bad, anyway. Sometimes it's nice to see that character acting differently. But sometimes there seems to be no other excuse than that the author dislikes the character. And that is the part that really pisses me off. Not the disliking of the character, but the fact that the author seems to feel the need to make them into the quintessence (use of vocab word in rant- +5pts.) of a bad person, so everyone else will hate them, too. I have many characters I dislike, but that doesn't stop me from trying to keep their personality in my writing the same as their personality in whatever universe they came from.
So stop the pointless and annoying making-over of perfectly good characters into whiny, bitchy little wackos.
Don't get me wrong, I don't really hate all OoC-ness. I know everyone sees the characters differently, so what I think of as OoC may seem completely normal to someone else. And it's not always bad, anyway. Sometimes it's nice to see that character acting differently. But sometimes there seems to be no other excuse than that the author dislikes the character. And that is the part that really pisses me off. Not the disliking of the character, but the fact that the author seems to feel the need to make them into the quintessence (use of vocab word in rant- +5pts.) of a bad person, so everyone else will hate them, too. I have many characters I dislike, but that doesn't stop me from trying to keep their personality in my writing the same as their personality in whatever universe they came from.
So stop the pointless and annoying making-over of perfectly good characters into whiny, bitchy little wackos.