3161: Many Questions But Few Answers - Carrie Nancy

[pottersues]

Here is day thirty-three. Today's Disney character is Nancy, who is from the film Enchanted. She is Disney's only live action princess.

TITLE: Many Questions But Few Answers
PERPETRATOR: lin Kim
SUE-O-METER:

Comments

[afleur_de_lis]

This story would be much better if the author had actually taken the time to have a build up period and fully introduced her character to us. I don't mean the name or anything like that, but her background story, her history and everything like that. She seems very unrealistic to the storyline she's been dumped into. I mean, she looks like she was just created to follow Harry around and that is it.

The one thing that really stands out to me (and it really does stand out because it doesn't make any sense) is the fact that this character seems to know more about Voldemort than Harry does. Within the series, Harry's knowledge of Voldemort grew with each year. He didn't know at first the full extent of what Voldemort was truly like at first, all he knew was the fact that Voldemort caused his parent's deaths and that he was a horrible man... or entity... wizard?

Harry is annoyingly out of character in this story. He seems like a flat character that was handed a new personality and character.

The way this author uses Japanese and the culture isn't really necessary for the story. It reminds me of some of those authors in the d'Artagnan romances that have dialogue in French and the story is all in English. Not only is it annoying (especially if the author google translates), but it is very unnecessary to the story.

[yemi_hikari]

On the last part... we get this a lot in the Anime fandoms as well from writers who are heavily influenced by Anime. I even used too much Japanese in my first Anime fic and an amazing reviewer who knew I was actually trying to have the right balance between the two kindly explained how to pick out which words to use.

[afleur_de_lis]

It makes sense if something is needed because it is related to the fandom. In the case of Anime (even if I don't watch it or like it much) I know that there are a lot of influences of Japanese culture that is seen within them. So the names and such, mannerisms and all that would all relate to that culture. However, too much of it written down in a story is rather excessive and begins to bog the story down.

However, in one of my main fandoms, the characters are French so they have the French culture and the French mannerisms which are rather distinct than the English- especially back in the 17th century. One of my pet peeves is when authors put dialogue in French and not in the language their story is in (so an English story). Usually an indication: "The man asked his question in English to Athos" or "The young woman spoke broken French and resorted to speaking in Spanish" would be much better than the random language dumps as they are referred to.

Don't get me wrong, I've been guilty of the same thing. One of my original characters is a Spanish soldier that had been captured during a battle and I had Spanish dialogue placed into the story. However, I learned not to do that because it placed the story in a very unwelcome light.

I mean, I understand that in the case of Anime and other television shows or books that there is a distinct presence of another culture, but it helps to research it and try to see what is needed in a story and what isn't. Sometimes I feel that many writers disregard this rule and want to incorporate a culture or language into the story without first realising that it may be completely unnecessary to add so much.

[yemi_hikari]

I've actually read novels translated from other languages and one of the rules I've seen is that there are words added in to help flavor the text. One of the things kept was in fact words that reflected mannerisms, kind of like how we use Mr. and Mrs. in our language, they kept the original. One of the contentions against using any words is because it is a story written in our language, but the problem with this is that the language they are speaking is another language. That also said, there are so many creative ways to show language without over doing it.