let's discuss!

[drasticbarbie.livejournal.com]

this if for those of you who read fanfic, which is hopefully most of you.

what are your fanfic pet peeves? is there a pairing or genre you won't read? do you hate mistakes in canon?

for me it's more about grammar. i get irritated with bad spelling (use spellcheck!), poor use of punctuation (besides commas because there are about 40 rules. you should know the basics), and capitalization. in posts i don't bother with caps. but when i publish i try to make it as correct as possible.

other things are the use of certain words. there/their/they're, we're/ were/where, bare/bear, lie/lay/laid etc., i/me, overuse of italics and bold. to me italics are good for emphasizing certain words that should be stressed, either in dialog or narration, sounds coming off the television/phone or written words read by the narrator or out loud in dialog, musical lyrics. it just makes it easier to understand that it isn't normal sounds. i only use bold in my author's note, disclaimer, and warnings.

also, i won't even read a fic that has all the text bunched up because someone didn't press enter. or something with only about 200 words.

also, when you address someone it should be like,   Person, blah blah. with the comma there. that just bugs me.

for specifically CM i won't read Morgan with anyone but Garcia. i don't know, i just think they belong together and i love that Garcia is one of very few average sized women on television. in spite of what hollywood wants us to think, most women are more Garcia's size than JJ's.

Comments

[scarredlove.livejournal.com]

Oh lord, don't even get me started on this. Lol. I have so many things that bother me. I really am very picky when it comes to fanfiction.

First, and foremost, if the title itself isn't capitalized correctly and has spelling errors in it or the summary, I won't even try to read the fic. I can understand a typo here and there in the story itself, that's something everyone does, but if you are constantly misspelling words and it's blatantly obvious you didn't use spell-check or go over your own work, I'm out.

This probably sounds weird. In my own writing I misuse commas a lot, but when reading fic written by someone else I can tell if a comma is used correctly, and when they're not it bothers me. That's mainly the reason I don't write fanfiction myself. I figure if I do something that completely irritates me, I'm not gonna irritate someone else with it. I have written a few two or three part stories for the South of Nowhere fandom, but nothing major. I write well as far as spelling, grammar usage, and plot are concerned, but I'm horrible at using semi-colons and commas correctly.

I hate when author's notes are put into the story. That really bugs me because you could be having a really heavy and well-written moment and then you completely break the atmosphere by adding that in. It just ruins the whole thing for me.

Characters that are written to OOC to even be the same character bothers me.

Misspellings of characters names and lack of the basic knowledge of the show.

Do some research. Find out how their desks and offices are placed in the show. Find out the provided character history before writing for that character.

Another thing that really bothers me is when people write JJ as Jennifer throughout their fics. I can't stand that. I can see if someone gets closer to her and they use it every once in awhile, but she is known as JJ or Jayj for the most part, so I feel it should be written that way.

As for pairings, I am pretty flexible, my OTP is Emily/JJ though. I LOVE them. I can't explain it, but those two just clicked for me and that's just who I prefer to read.

I can read Emily/JJ, Reid/JJ, Reid/Emily, Morgan/Garcia, and Hotch/Hayley.

I can't read Rossi or Gideon fics unless their gen...it just weirds me out.

I agree with someone above me who said they feel Morgan would have trouble with same-sex relationships because of his past. I definitely think that would be an issue for him. Now, I can read Morgan/Reid, but it has to be established that his past affects certain things.

Don't like a story with too much dialogue, but also don't like one with not enough. It has to be balanced pretty well. I also don't like what someone else referred to as "wooden dialogue", it's horrible.

Um, I just can't read crossover fic or songfics at all. They usually bother me. It has to be really well done and have a strong and interesting premise for me to even give it a shot.

I am kind of a sucker for the angsty kidnapping, rape, character death, abused or tortured by an UnSub stories, but they have to be written well.

I could go on about this awhile, but basically you have to write really well and put a lot of effort into the fic for me to read it. I like it when they have extensive knowledge of the show, and really good plot.

[drasticbarbie.livejournal.com]

i also dig the hurt/comfort stuff. i can't explain. it's just weird.

i've thought that maybe i shouldn't write fanfic either because i'm not very good at getting the pacing and so forth of a story. but i feel i have good concepts for plots. i like to find out what people get irritated by because that's what you like to avoid.

seriously, though, there are about 40 rules on comma usage. that's more than anyone should have to remember.

[scarredlove.livejournal.com]

Way too many rules to memorize. Seriously. I would literally have to sit with a book while I am writing and double check every five seconds and that would get old quickly.