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

[ladyhatshepsut.livejournal.com]

First, I have a couple of add-ons to previous comments, my own and others. I just ran into another example of the British/American phrase war in a story where Reid gets hit by a car. He's thrown up on the car's bonnet and I have a vision of a big pink polka dot...thing, edged with lace, draped over the hood of the car. I has to stop reading, I was giggling so hard.

Someone else wrote about being able to tell the writer isn't too familiar with the fandom, like calling Spencer's mother Diane. I'm in the middle of re-reading the BtVS/SPN series where Dawn is the magickal child of Buffy and John Winchester. Throughout the whole series Glory is never referred to by her full name. It's like the author has never heard the word Glorificus. (Don't mistake me. I LOVE the story, I just think the writer should have done a bit more research.)

I noticed another thing from that series, comparing it to the CM series where Spencer is Rossi's son. Buffy: when Mary's father received a notice in the mail of Sam's acceptance into the medical program at the hospital where he works, one of the young (and that's how she's described: young, meaning she wasn't around when Mary died) interns recognizes the Winchester name. Mary's been dead 23 years; how would she know this. I doubt the doc has told all the staff for the last 2 decades everything about his missing grandsons and son-in-law.

In contrast to this author having her characters spewing all there life stories when they don't need to there's the CM story where Reid's teammates figure out or are told, one by one, that he's Rossi's son. It's all driven by circumstance, one person wants to know why they're each others emergency contact, another wants know why they seem so close, Elle runs into Reid at Rossi's book signing. Everything is on a need to know or a 'yes, it's right in front of you so I'm admitting it but don't tell anyone else' basis. I love both series, but this writer seems much more adult, or maybe I should say advanced in her writing. That's something that comes with time and experience if they keep writing, I guess. (And a damn good reason I stopped. I love to read the fic, but my own writing sucked.)