Real-person fiction containing faeries is, I'm pretty sure, a textbook case of AUness. Don't try to tell me otherwise.

If Anne goes off in a boat Monday morning and doesn't come back to shore till Monday night, and Bob stays landside all day Monday, and the fandom isn't one of those such as HP where instantaneous transportation is possible, there's no way Carl can interact with both Anne on the boat Monday afternoon and Bob on the land Monday evening. Unless he swam, but somehow I'm inclined to doubt that he swam.

Do you tag your entries for your own purposes alone, or are the rest of us supposed to be able to make use of them? And if the tags are there for us too, why are all your Supernatural-related entries filed under 'snakebite'?

 Dear Author,

When I read in the summary that Jim Kirk had a stalker, I was intrigued. Especially because it was posted on the Kirk/McCoy com! I thought maybe Bones was stalking him.
But no. Oh god no.
Instead some creepy ensign stalks him. All right. I can run with this. 
That is, until the confrontation. When Kirk and Stalker finally meet and the stalker confesses his depravity, what does Kirk do? HE FEELS SICK AND HAS TO STRUGGLE NOT TO CRY. Excuse me? Have you seen Star Trek XI or even TOS? James Tiberius Kirk isn't exactly known for being weak. If he had a creepy stalker that's been following him for years, he is going to be pissed! Probably going to punch him, before ordering Spock to take him down to the brig. He isn't going to feel dizzy, or strip for him or suddenly become Bella Swan! 
Kirk is the male stereotype that most authors are trying to avoid! He's brave, honorable, handsome, strong and gets every girl. Do you even know who you are writing about?!

Kindly die in a fire,
ME


PS. His brother's name is George, not Sam. 

Please be showing more development on the relationship. Luffy at the moment most likely sees Hancock as a friend and it is for now one-sided. I do not get how Luffy suddenly decides to take a romantic interest in women all of the sudden. Also Luffy is pretty ignorant. He isn't going to ask questions all of the sudden about the size of umm...Hancock's assets. For fudge sake, he was in a bath with her naked and what he noticed was the tattoo on her back. PS: for the sake of lols and sh*t stirring, LuNa is gonna win!

( possibly triggery, and also longish )

ETA:  Added TV Tropes!

I really, truly, HONESTLY doubt that ELIOT would freak out, be white-faced, have a "blank, stunned" (how do you do that, btw?) expression on his face, and panic when his parents want to come visit, even if it has been eight years.

Be upset, maybe. Punch something, sure. But freak out and have no contingency plan?

Really, Leverage fandom? Hardison, yes, I can see him doing something similar if his grandma dropped by for a visit. But Eliot? Are we forgetting all the flashbacks to his past? In a room of seven, he stared one man in the face, sipped some hot drink, and took out the six guys with guns. Come on. This is ELIOT.

I totally understand him having an "OMGWHATDOIDO?!" moment of, say, half a second. But honestly, I'm sure he has SOME cover story in place, and that, even with not having spoken to his parents for eight years, his parents dropping by would be more of an inconvenience than a world-shattering event.

I highly doubt, as well, that Parker would take kindly to another woman (even Eliot's mother) referring to setting the table as "our jobs." It would garner at LEAST a bulging of the eyes or other type of twitch of irritation. Can we stop with all the other tiny instances of misogyny, too, please? Or maybe FFR has made me hypersensitive.

Also? "Eliot Spencer" is an alias, not his real name (per http://leverage-wiki.tnt.tv/page/Eliot+Spencer). _eta: At least, it's highly unlikely that "Spencer" is his real last name, since using your real full name whilst liberating Croatia and fighting the Butcher of Kiev is Really Quite Stupid. Having to have the team help run a con on his own parents, as well as having to use his real name with them, would be much more interesting if, y'know, done with more attention to his character.

. . .

All in all, though, the story idea was interesting, and most of the characterisations were very good. It ended sweetly.

Oaky, I'm off to search for some Bones/Leverage crossovers or, failing that, to write one myself.

Three rants for the price of none!

( Rant the First - brought to you by the Obtuse Angle! )


( Rant the Second, long-lost son of the First - brought to you by the Fibonacci Sequence! )


( Rant the Third, clone of the Second, engineered by the First - brought to you by pi! )

No love,

Me.

I was checking out an AU story in a certain TV fandom that, in its summary, said that the fic in question was loosely based on a book series that is somewhat similar to the TV show, only in a different time period. Since I like both the television show and the book series, I decided to check it out to... only to find that the fic is pretty much just the book series, with the TV characters subbed in for the book's characters, and most of the plot and dialogue is taken from the plot of the book.

I hate when people do that. I believe that there's a way to adapt one series into the world of another, but you don't have to use every single thing from the other source! Why do people insist on doing this?

Dear Fanauthors,

One of the handy things about FanFiction.net is the genre sorting system. You designate a thing as "Horror", and bam, it shows up whenever someone searches for "Horror" fics. Same with "Adventure" and "Drama" and so on.

So, when I'm in the mood to read things that don't really have that much romance in them, it should be as simple as me looking through the "General" category of my fandoms of choice.

( Should be. )

I feel cheap and dirty writing this, but...

( 3rd Rate Soft Drinks For The Soul. Just click. )

This looks like a job for my Jojo icon. YMMV, maybe.

Dear Author,

I like Horton Hears a Who!, and I see a lot of interpretations of the characters (not all of them flattering), but this takes the cake:

Did I miss a scene in the movie where Ned McDodd was a verbally/physically abusive, good-for-nothing alcoholic?

Honestly...Ned?

I understand that being Mayor is probably a stressful job, but...what.

More than a little disturbed,

Phanny

YMMV, but I don't consider the Colonel Bogey March to be an obscure tune. Even if you don't know the name of it, it's still an easily recognisable tune. Having a British, American or Canadian character, especially a military one, not recognise it is, in my opinion, a steaming heap of fail.

ETA: Also, it is not a funeral march. Again, YMMV, but it's a rather upbeat tune and not really fitting for a funeral, especially a military one.


If I am wrong about its obscurity, please tell me. My perspective may be skewed by years of listening to military bands.

A rant about a sort of subset of the Common Language Complaint.
In different areas in the world people make different "thinking sounds". Somebody in America will probably not say "ano" while thinking. (from what I know) Brits tend to use "er" more than the American "um". Other people might say "eh", "em", and various other sounds.
The point is, when distinctly non-Japanese characters are making sounds that are really not very common among non-Japanese speakers (such as "un!" for agreement), this is noticeable. And I may be being nitpicky, but it sort of bothers me.

Also, dear person reading my fic: I am aware that my characters were making sounds like "wei", "ei", "ah", and "aiya". That is because though they are speaking English, they live in a heavily Chinese-influenced society, and it makes sense that little things like that would be borrowed. No, this is not a mistake, I did not mean to write "um" or "hey" (or whatever the specific word nitpicked on was). I know that other people might not understand this speech pattern, or necessarily connect it to Chinese, but it's not a mistake, and it does appear sort of regularly in the story.

And to various archives who run fanfiction contests: even if it's not such a massive contest, even if the prize is nothing more than a banner, I think the people who took the time and effort to participate in your contest would appreciate having that banner. Ignoring the emails from people asking for a sign of life is unpleasant, and makes them wonder why they even bothered, since you don't seem to give much of a damn :/

Edited a few words in for accuracy and clarity.

I'm not even in Torchwood fandom, but I know a couple of people who are, and it comes up on my flist every now and again.

So, here is a little explanation, for those who fail at geography.

The United Kingdom consists of England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. There are a bunch of small islands that belong to the UK, too.

England, however, consists of England. That's it. England does not consist of England-and-Wales. Just England. Wales is not in England.

Right now, I am in a different country to my mother and father and sister. I am in Wales. They are in England. When they drive from England to Wales to see me, they will cross the English-Welsh border. There's even a little sign on the road they'll take in, with a Welsh dragon on it and "welcome to Wales".

(Edit: Okay. Apparently not a different country in the strictest sense. You still cross a border. There is a dividing point where it ceases to be England and becomes Wales.)

Wales has a capital city. That is Cardiff. (Not London, as one idiot said.) Cardiff is not in England, either. Cardiff is in Wales. South Wales, if you want to be really accurate, but since you can't seem to grasp that England is not Wales, the differences between North Wales and South Wales will probably escape your grasp.

One specific person managed to get that Wales had a language of its own, but still called it England, and had an English character get awfully confused by the signposting in Cardiff and order silly things in a restaurant because they don't know the language. The only reason you're going to get confused by signposting in Cardiff is if you speak neither English or Welsh: both languages are always present. And if you go to a restaurant, chances are the only signs of Welsh are maybe a "croeso" chalked on a board somewhere. I've eaten at quite a few restaurants in Cardiff over the twenty years of my life and I'm pretty sure I've never come across anywhere with a menu solely in Welsh. Not in Cardiff.

And you don't really hear that much Welsh in Cardiff. I guarantee that if you got lost and the English had rubbed off all the signposts simultaneously, you wouldn't be lost in a sea of foreign language. You could probably grab the nearest person and have them speak English as well as you do.

On a similar note to the beginning of this rant, please don't call a Welsh person English, especially when how very not-English they are is carefully spelled out for you in canon. Bran Davies would not approve. Bran Davies would probably punch you, and I can't say I'd be far behind. British, yes. English, no.

Don't do it. It's stupid and plenty of people find it offensive.

(Edited for my silly typo. Sorry Irish people.)

Okay, I appreciate the fact that you took the time to leave a review. It's very kind and all, but spending the entire second half ranting about a mistake that isn't actually there? Yeah, it's only going to make me headdesk. Not at my stupidity, at yours.

You see, oh worldly-wise fanthing, I do realise that flights from America to France are probably somewhat expensive. It's the reason I've never been to the US myself, as prices from England are similar. However, the same does not apply for flights between the UK and France. In case you hadn't noticed, we're almost next door to each other, and I've been spending nearly every summer in La Belle France since I was two. In fact I'm in France right now, having flown out just a week ago. You, meanwhile, have never troubled to look at the relative prices, assuming that the ones your country has to pay will apply to everyone else in the world.

Do learn some basic geography before putting on a pretentious tone like that again, won't you?

No love,

Me

Psychopaths and villains aren't cuddly (Appropriate icon is appropriate).

Total revelation, I know. But I *keep* seeing this in fics (this is what I get for reading Bleach fic). Psychopaths aren't cuddly sweet guys deep underneath who just kill because they're dreadfully misinformed but they can be healed by your Sue's sparkle.

People who don't think twice about killing someone, brutally or not, aren't gonna suddenly smile and go "Aww, aren't you a cute little girl? I'm gonna take you in and then fall in love with you and fuck you and become a good person and we can raise children." They might spare her life to toy with her or because she serves some purpose to them, but they're not gonna mellow out.

On the complete opposite side of the spectrum, not all psychopaths/villains are gonna horribly physically torture/rape all their prisoners. Some of them will, but some of them won't. Some of them are much more into psychological torture. Some of them will just completely ignore that they have prisoners.

Now, some villains aren't pure evil. Some of them do "evil" things because they have a firm belief in something and think that doing what they do is the best way to go about it. Some of them are just evil and enjoy suffering. Villains are not cookie-cutters: you can't force them to fit your idea of one. But the vast majority of them are *not* waiting for your Sue to come along and "fix them".


Bonus Mini-rant:
Dear very misinformed sex scene writer:
An orgasm *is* coming/cumming. Saying, "s/he had many orgasms until s/he started coming" sounds very very weird. It's loltastic, but weird wrong.

ETA: fixed a word.

Jesus Christ, people. If you're not into BDSM, please do a little research before writing hardcore BDSM fics, okay?

A brief primer:

( Cut for BDSM talk. )

In short, Wikipedia is your friend.

Transformers writers--especially Transformers Animated writers, because this seems to be where the biggest problems come up--please remember that the Transformers are not all the same size. The animation is a little inexact, and a lot inexact in the original cartoon, but you can generally get what size they are by watching.

For example, Bumblebee's about uke height to Prowl, with the top of his head somewhere around the region of Prowl chest. However, that does not make him standard uke height to the rest of the cast. He's far shorter than Prime, he's barely up to Megatron's knee. Similarly, Bulkhead is large, not just pudgy, so his size is a factor in his interactions with others.

And on a related note, why would Megatron 'sparkbond' with Bumblebee if that means one of them will die if the other dies? Why would Megatron bond with anyone for that matter, let alone someone who could cause his death if Blitzwing accidentally sat on him?

I LOVE THIS STORY! IT ROCKS!" La La Land girl "Hey, fellow writer! I've gotta say, that was amazing! I love the story." Alexis Brewley "Very interesting..." Pala-and-Papipa "love it!" iloveme5895 "Her story is absolutely fanstastic." Miss Tear-Chan




This is annoying enough on the rear cover of a paperback.  As a summary on Fanficnet?  Major fail!  It may convince us you have a big fat ego, but it won't entice us to actually read your fic. 

...I find it bad form when there are comments on a kink meme about how gross x, y, and z prompts/fics are.

Seriously? Grow up. Other people have different kinks - if you don't like it, scroll past it.

ETA: Oh, and old rant is old, but the prostate is not a bundle of nerves. Plz to be learning basic anatomy, kthnx.

Our fandom hasn't been active in awhile. The show was cancelled 2 years ago, and the fics only trickle in these days. So why would you post a fic to the fic comm with a fake cut to your journal, when it's friends only?! Guess what? I can't read your fic this way. And I really want to because of the lack of new, well-written fic in this fandom. You really suck for doing that, and no one in the comm who isn't also on your friends list will be able to read your fic. I'd love to be there as you wonder why more people aren't commenting on your fic.

Just a little mini-rant here.

To the world in general, especially a certain fandom with Jeffrey Combs and a very... er, lively severed head-- I'll try to be briefish.

( Cut for sex terminology and probable squick. )

It's not cool to curbstomp another fandom in a "crossover" fic.
( Really, it's not. )

Dear fandom forum #1:

Please stop acting like worth is measured by how much fic a person writes. Being "prolific" does not make your opinion sacred, and it does not put you on some special rank of fandom above the people who churn out very little fic, or even none at all. Writing is not the only valid way to be a fan. Get over yourselves.

___


Dear fandom forum #2:

Please stop acting like people who post fic should "stop showing off and interact with the community." Fic is not a magical thing that just appears naturally on a writer's hard drive without any work on their part. And the effort that it takes to think up a story and write it down is a way of interacting with a community - or, at least, reaching out to one, and hoping someone will reach back instead of being derisive about it.

___


Dear world:

If there were any justice in you, the previous two rants would cancel each other out.

So Light's been locked up- i.e. put in a position where he can't kill, and because he was put in that position unexpectedly, he wasn't able to accomodate it into his plans and thus the killings stopped a couple of weeks after he was put in a cell. Everything fine so far.

What I completely fail to grasp, however, is the role L plays in this story. Not only does he sit there willing Light on as the team works to find him, hoping for his safe return (the L I know would have been watching that video feed from the cell waiting for Light to crack and confess, as he does during the canon incarceration), he also fails to notice any connection between the kidnapping and the way the deaths stop.

I mean, I'm not a detective myself or anything, but I doubt he'd have risen to be the three greatest detectives in the world with observational skills like that, would he? It wouldn't have been so bad if anyone else had noticed- being the trained police detectives/criminals with a lot to gain from Kira's capture that they are, but they don't.

Pls to be getting some basic knowledge of your main characters in future. Some logic wouldn't go amiss either.

Okay, what? I've never read a fic that was quite so confusing.

First of all, why would Omega make Daleks? I mean, I can see why he'd work with them, because, y'know, enemy of the Time Lords and all that, but making them? Aren't Daleks a bit sophisticated for Omega, anyway? If he could make something as articulate (and I use the term loosely) as a Dalek, I'd think he'd have done exactly that instead of sticking with the gel-thingies and the Ergons. Even a Dalek makes for better company than an Ergon.

And how . . . how did he take over the universe just like that? He's mind controlling everyone -- Jack Harkness, Rose Tyler, etc., but apparently he can't do the same thing to the Doctor or any of the Time Lords (who have apparently returned because the history of the Daleks has changed. This I could accept, except how did Omega change the history of the Daleks in the first place?). And . . . what's this about the mind-controlled Rose not being the real Rose? Is it a ruse to confuse Omega? If so, I sympathize with the poor man. It's confusing me, that's for sure. If it's not a ruse . . . what? If she's not the real Rose, who is she? Omega certainly can't create a working copy of a human. When did she replace the real Rose? Why?

And then the Doctor knocks the gun out of Omega's hand by throwing his sonic screwdriver at him, and disables 'the machine,' a machine, might I add, which has never been mentioned anywhere in this story! And everything is back to normal.

What? What? What?

I am so lost. I should know better than to search for fic of my obscure favourite characters on FF.N.

Specific Torchwood author. I liked your story. It was well-written, spelled and punctuated correctly and the you'd had clearly looked into British banks. You even spelled "cheque" the British way. Unfortunately the thing you missed was that (to the best of my knowledge) no contemporary employer in the UK pays their employees by cheque. [1]. Everywhere that I know of pays their staff directly into the bank, or by cash (although that's much less common than it used to be).

So to have Jack handing the Torchwood team envelopes containing their "paycheques" was quite jarring.  If it had been a throwaway reference, I probably wouldn't have minded, but the focus of the story was on why the pay for Torchwood operatives is so high, which made it harder to ignore. And you could have got exactly the same effect by using "payslip" which is what we tend to get over here - a printed slip with details of pay and deductions (tax, National Insurance and such).

I suppose you could argue that Torchwood is unconventional in many ways, but given that it was established by Queen Victoria, I think it's going to be traditional in a lot of ways too and follow the British way of doing things.


[1] If I'm wrong about this, then I'll gladly apologise, but I don't know of anywhere in the UK that does this, or has in recent memory. It's certainly not the default, or even common.

(Edited to fix a typo)

ETA :- overchay  has pointed out  that Gwen refers to a "pay cheque"  in canon. so I should really have been complaining in canonrants . Sorry folks. (further edit to fix HTML fail. Oh dear.)

Let's share our rants that are too small for their own individual posts!

1. Sam Winchester cannot avoid his brother by sleeping in the bathtub. Nor can he take a relaxing bath. (I've seen both of these pop up multiple times in fic.) Sam Winchester does not fit in normal-sized tubs. Maybe if they're in some kind of suite, I could believe it.

2. Good way to make me hit the back button: have Dean think any aspect of Sam's powers are cool. That is so OOC it hurts. Are we even watching the same show?

3. I may have to come back to edit this post if I think of more later.

Irrespective of the fandom, what are your mini!ffrants?

He knew very well not to Mendel in their affairs but this one was….he was...

We had the spellcheck discussions here, but this is a whole new level. Even if you don't know who Mendel was, you should at least realize that this capitalized word can't possibly be a verb.

Edited for the question: What could "mendeling with someone' affairs" possibly look like?

EDIT again for this sentence that just popped up later in the fic: “You have received a litter, sir. From the palace,” Rey announced
It was too good to keep it from you.

Look, I get that they're actually related terms. I get that they're spelled similarly. I get that the longer version lures you with its fancy extra letter, just like orientate** looks so much cooler than orient.

** Yes, I know some dialects consider orientate to be a real word, along with preventative (for preventive). Mine isn't one of them; the terms are variant forms with the same meaning; moving along.

But the word you're using doesn't mean what you think it means. Your character might be modest or might mean to disparage himself; good for him or, you know, whatever. Unless he's anthropomorphized AIG stock or some similar financial instrument, however, he is not self-depreciating. He is self-deprecating.

They're different words. They mean different things. Now cut it out.

ETA: Oh noes! Garner says I'm wrong -- not only that "self-depreciating" is the older term, but that "self-deprecating" has "mistaken origins"! He grants "self-deprecating" Standard American English status only grudgingly, and only because it was 50 times more common in written sources as of 2003! I say dustbin of history, dude. heh.

Alright. Here we go.

I am sick to death of all the overdone token eating disorder fics that seem to leap out from behind every fandom lamp-post. I mean, I get it - eating disorders are srs business, you know this, you suffer from one or have a friend who suffers from one, so you want to show the world what horrors lie in wait for those who starve themselves, etc. I'm not personally a fan of the whole ED genre because I very seldom find it done well, but if you feel absolutely compelled to turn your favourite character into an obsessive calorie counter or b/p-er, please bear in mind:

1. It's not always about being thin. Not everybody who has an eating disorder looks in the mirror and sees a grotesquely fat individual staring back at them. For some people it's about control, an escape from an uncontrollable world through something that's solid and definite. For others, it's self-punishment. Denying yourself food is brutally destructive and painful. A lot of eating-disordered girls have been sexually assaulted, and it can become their defense mechanism - making themselves as skeletal and sexually unattractive as possible keeps them safe from further attack. Some people are hurting and just want their bodies to reflect how fragile they feel. It can be all of these reasons, or none. There are all kinds of motivations for eating-disordered behaviour. It doesn't have to be about looking like the cover-girl of a Vogue magazine.

Also, I would like to draw fandom's attention to the fact that said Vogue aesthetic is a cultural thing. 'Skinny' has only very recently become synonymous with 'attractive' in the eyes of pop culture. People far removed from this culture are unlikely to be convinced that weighing 45 kilos will make them beautiful. Hermione Granger probably isn't overly fussed about having a supermodel's body. Legolas probably doesn't look at his reflection in puddles and go 'oh man, I wish I looked more like Mary-Kate Olsen.' Lucy Pevensie isn't going to adopt 'bones are beautiful' as her motto for life.

2. Anorexia is not the only way. The 'perfect anorexic' doesn't really exist. Real anorexics don't live off air and water - their daily intake is insufficient and highly regimented, but they still eat. Also, they fluctuate. They fuck up, they decide to 'get better' and then relapse, and sometimes they'll eat a lot more or less than other times. Bulimic behaviour is even less predictable - they are usually (and I'm generalizing) much less regimented in pretty much everything. They're likely to be more openly out of control. Also, middle ground is possible. Not everyone has to be The Most Extreme Anorexic Evar. Ever heard of ED-NOS? Binge-Eating Disorder? There are plenty of ways to have messed-up attitudes to food without subsisting on two cornflakes a day.

3. Cuddles and tearful catharses do not fix eating disorders. The End.

If you're going to answer your own prompt on an anonymous kink meme, you might want to wait more than two minutes between making the prompt and putting up a response. Just so it's not blaringly obvious that you're just putting up your own fic under cover of meme.

For bonus points, make sure you haven't posted the response somewhere else a few weeks before you actually put up the prompt on the kink meme.

All right, guy. When I post to the discussion forum asking for advice on what to do with my current project, I do not expect you to camp in my thread and ignore all my attempts to make conversation in lieu of pimping your own terrible fics. This is made even more frustrating by the fact that you tack generic advice like 'introduce the characters first' to somehow balance out the fact that you spend two block paragraphs chattering about how you've written a crossover in which the heroine of the series hooks up with Captain Marvel, and that makes you a revolutionary.

People writing College!AUs or, for that matter, anything with roommates.

( It's not as simple as you seem to think it is... )