GENERAL DISCUSSIONS

Firefly Fanfiction: What Are Your Pet-Peeves?

POSTED BY: XEYRA
UPDATED: Thursday, November 29, 2012 16:57
SHORT URL: http://bit.ly/X5fdQE
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Wednesday, September 27, 2006 10:48 AM

TERRI


Okay, I totally agree with everything in the above post. I'm the kind of fangirl that doesn't take well to fanfic. It tends to muck up my insides just a bit too much. If Joss didn't write it, I usually don't want anything to do with it. Not that people aren't creative, and good writers, but fanfics just bring to mind a deep, dark place I don't want anything to do with. As far as slash goes; well, I had a bad experience with a Mulder/Skinner and I'm scarred for life. So as far as Rayne goes, and Miver, and whatever else someone could come up with, I'm just not feeling it. It all bothers me on one level or another. Just some worse than others. Oh and thanks for putting Tamcest in my head. I'm going to have nightmares about that.


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Wednesday, September 27, 2006 11:28 AM

HUMBUG


Quote:

Originally posted by RMMC:

Critiquing etiquette.

(1)If you're going to comment on someone's fic, sign in or at least give your name at the end of your review.

(2)If you have a criticism, word it politely.

(3)For every criticism, you should also point out something that was well done.

(4)If you think its something you could do better, and say so, then put your money where your mouth is and do so. Then be prepared to take comments for and against in kind.

RMMC



Right on! I HATE criticisms of fanfic because you don't like the pairing. No one is forcing you to read a fanfic. Read the summary and stay clear of any pairing or type (ie slash) you don't like. Also, if you don't like a writers style, but others do, don't flame them or write harsh criticism. Show your dislike by not reading it. If no onereads your fic, you may not continue posting.

I may seem thin-skinned, but i don't like hyper-critical comments. If you really don't like it, say so briefly and please don't make it personal.

I really think some comments are so nasty that they should never be psoted. So go easy.

Okay - flame me. I dare you...

Humbug

"You know what the first rule of flying is?... Love. You can learn all the math in the 'verse, but you take a boat in the air you don't love, she'll shake you off just as sure as the turning of worlds. Love keeps her in the air when she oughta fall down, tells you she's hurting 'fore she keens. Makes her a home." Mal, BDM

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Wednesday, September 27, 2006 1:01 PM

RMMC


Quote:

Originally posted by Humbug:


Right on! I HATE criticisms of fanfic because you don't like the pairing. No one is forcing you to read a fanfic. Read the summary and stay clear of any pairing or type (ie slash) you don't like. Also, if you don't like a writers style, but others do, don't flame them or write harsh criticism. Show your dislike by not reading it. If no onereads your fic, you may not continue posting.

I may seem thin-skinned, but i don't like hyper-critical comments. If you really don't like it, say so briefly and please don't make it personal.

I really think some comments are so nasty that they should never be psoted. So go easy.

Okay - flame me. I dare you...



No flames, I promise. I'm fairly thin-skinned myself.

Looking at that (wow! May!) I should have made a number 5:

(5) Critiquing should never be on a personal level. Anything you wish to point out as a possible/probable issue should be objective issues such as, but not limited to:
a.) Grammar mistakes
b.) Editing errors (I've seen unintentional oopsies of folks forgetting to remove remarks from their betas)
c.) Spelling mistakes
d.) Incorrect word choices (I'm not talking about homonyms, but someone using a word that doesn't mean what they thought it did)
e.) If something sounds 'off' such as dialogue.

In all cases, if you're going to take the time to point out anything you feel isn't right please follow three rules:
a) Be kind Word it politely. Anything less makes you look like the back end of a beast of burden.

b) Show what would be correct in its place.
c.) Explain your reasoning, if possible.

You should never critique for personal biases, such as not liking slash, character death, religous viewpoints, etc. Those have no business in a critique. The purpose of critiquing is to help the authors better themselves at their craft, not to have stories tailor-made for your personal tastes. If you want that, see rule # 4 above.

Hmmm...I thought about eliminating rule #1 since there's no more anonymous reviews allowed, but it's good to keep it in mind when posting on other sites, so I'll let it stand.


Oh. I got a bit wordy again. Sorry about that, folks.




********
RMMC
"Those grenades?"
"Captain don't want 'em."
"Jayne, we're robbing the place, we're not occupying it."

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Wednesday, September 27, 2006 1:53 PM

SABRI3L


In general :


~I don't like crossovers

~I don't like it when fics don't stay in their rating category

~I hate hate hate overly wussy Wash. A sweet, sarcastic Wash is nice, a Wash that acts like overly hormonal emo 14 year old girl...not so much.

~I don't like fics that don't warn me of squicks or slash beforehand.

Knitter of Cunning Jayne Hats

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Thursday, September 28, 2006 12:42 AM

RIVERISMYGODDESS


Quote:

Originally posted by RMMC:
No flames, I promise. I'm fairly thin-skinned myself.

Looking at that (wow! May!) I should have made a number 5:

(5) Critiquing should never be on a personal level. Anything you wish to point out as a possible/probable issue should be objective issues such as, but not limited to:
a.) Grammar mistakes
b.) Editing errors (I've seen unintentional oopsies of folks forgetting to remove remarks from their betas)
c.) Spelling mistakes
d.) Incorrect word choices (I'm not talking about homonyms, but someone using a word that doesn't mean what they thought it did)
e.) If something sounds 'off' such as dialogue.



On this note, when I see spelling, editing, grammatical, etc errors, I usually send the person a PM instead of leaving it as feedback. I prefer to talk about just the story when I feedback, and the little technical things that can be edited out don't matter as much (unless there are a whole lot of them).

One time, however, before I implemented this policy, I had a writer bitch me out because I left feedback about leaving a comment about a typo in their feedback, because it couldn't be erased once they fixed the error. Yeesh, people can be so techy .

~Jimi
jimi dot spettel at gmail dot com
Self-Proclaimed Grand Vizier of Georgia

- Animation by DesktopHippie

"Marijuana not only should be legal, it should be manditory." - Bill Hicks

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Thursday, September 28, 2006 2:36 AM

XEYRA


Oh, someone brought this thread back to life. Thank you! :)

I have a new pet-peeve, which I've come across recently and is really annoying to me: River refering to Mal as 'Captain Daddy'.

I know this seems to be a fandom term that stemmed from the episode Safe, as some people believe she is referring to Mal when she says 'daddy will come', but does she have to call Mal 'captain daddy' to his face in fanfic when she never does use that term at all in the series/movie/comic book? Not that I remember, at least.

Moreover, Mal doesn't even blink when she says that. No one does. Seems to be as ingrained a thing as River always referring to herself in third person or as 'the girl'...

If someone points me to a single instance in the official 'verse where she calls Mal 'Captain Daddy' (might have missed something, one never knows), I'll stop being annoyed and accept it. Otherwise, I just don't understand it. Why does she have to refer to him like that? Only as a joke, please, if at all.

Sorry, I'm somewhat vocal with my pet-peeves. Not my intention to insult anyone.



"People tell you things all the time, without talking. The way they move, the way they aren't talking." - River Tam

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Thursday, September 28, 2006 5:00 AM

DRAGONESS


Wow, I'm glad to see I'm not alone in the 'verse.

Many of the peeves already listed above I agree with. The biggest ones:

Grammar out of control. (I can deal with an occasional misspelling, but how hard is it to read back over what you just wrote?)
Everybody paired off like Noah's Ark.
Non-cannon actions or relationships - especially slash relationships between characters who were clearly hetero in the show.
Mary Sues.

I don't mind OCs IF they don't overshadow the original characters.

Babies? If the story makes a point of dealing with all the complications a child would bring, I can handle ONE. More than that is just not plausible. (Unless they're twins - ooh, THAT would be an awful mess on board, wouldn't it?)

Dragoness

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Thursday, September 28, 2006 5:31 AM

MAL4PREZ


Quote:

Originally posted by Xeyra:
I have a new pet-peeve, which I've come across recently and is really annoying to me: River refering to Mal as 'Captain Daddy'.



I know I've already voiced my opinion on this (more than once) and I'm going to being annoying soon (already?) but I have another angle to take...

Imagine the end of OiS, River drifting down to be caught by Mal on the outside of Serenity, and then saying:

"Permission to come aboard, Captain Daddy?"

If anyone can actually picture that without shudders of wrongness, well... I'm out of arguments.

-----------------------------------------------
I'm the president. I don't need to listen.

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Thursday, September 28, 2006 10:40 AM

TOBEDOG


Being Late. I just can't stand setting something up for a certain time, people commiting to that timeframe and still being late. It seriously eats at me.

"Six men came to kill me one time. The best of 'em carried this. It's a Killhan full-bore autolock, customized trigger, double cartridge, thorough-gage. This is my very favorite gun."

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Thursday, September 28, 2006 11:02 AM

COZEN


My pet peeve? Glad you asked!

My pet peeve about Firefly fan fiction is that it is all being written to fill a void left by a television series that has been killed in its infancy, rather than complementing an ongoing, vibrant television show that is still being written by Joss Whedon and others of Whedon's choice.

Yeah, I know, this adds nothing to the discussion, but it is my peeve.

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Wednesday, June 13, 2007 11:53 AM

MACQYVER


Quote:

And if you are going to insist on Zoe having a baby, then for the love of Joss don't give it frickin' blue eyes. Brown is dominant and hers are very very brown. Lighter skin, lighter hair, bit more believable. Maybe even hazel eyes. Not blue, though, that just bugs me.


I know I should probably just leave this alone, and more than half the people reading this will probably not care, but I just started the genetics unit in my bioligy class, and if I let this go it will bug me all day.

Yes, brown is the dominant traight, but that doesn't mean that Wash's kid would have brown eyes. If Zoe's genes were heterozygous( had the dominant and recessive trait for eye color. also a great word to know if your playing scrable), which is very possible, and Wash has to have homozygous resesive (only the recessive genes for eye color, another good scrable word). Since the characteristics are inherited independently, with no regard for dominance, there is actualy a 1/4 chance that Wash and Zoe's child would have blue eyes.

Sorry, but I just had to correct that. (If a didn't, I wouldn't be an anoying highschool student, now would I)

If one must fail, Fail spectacularly
(mabey thats the atitude keeping me from getting a girlfriend?)

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Wednesday, June 13, 2007 3:52 PM

TUJIAOZUO


Good scientific insight to the eyes. I learned about that a ways back, but I rarely remember it lol.

Pet peeves... I'm probably the wrong person to be in here posting on it since I know my fics fall into a few of these catgories, but I have peeves too.

Simple stuff, can't stand slash, not big on smut (I like it when there's something left for the imagination... IMO it just reads a bit more tasteful, but hey that's me). I won't read slash at all and as for the smut, if it's just a smal portion of the story I'll skip over it. For some strange reason, J/R and M/R tend to be very unsettling, although I will tolerate it sometimes just because I started reading and I will be determined to finish the fic. Mary Sues are probably another really big pet peeve, because I want to read about Joss' characters and not someone elses..

But with that said I have two original characters myself, and on top of it one of them pulled a Mary Sue in my fic Stang and saved the day so I sound like the world's biggest hypocrite right now lol. Still, I like to think that the characters I created have a purpose :)

As for my grammer, I know it's not perfect, and I check and re-check my stories over and over to keep them as correct as possible. However I don't have a beta and I doubt I will for awhile. In the other fandom I write, I used to have a beta and we had been parnters a long time. But a few months back on one of my fics she didn't like the way it was going and abandoned me. Then when I continued on without her into controverisal waters, she flamed my feedback, then hacked into the webmasters account and deleted my entire account. Which wiped out all of my fics, plus my status in the top 5 writers list. So yeah, little wary right now (I put my account back up there but I have yet to actually add to any stories) and that whole 'for the love of god get a beta' really doesn't work for me right now.

I digress, I doubt anyone really wants to hear me yammer

Ash

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Wednesday, June 13, 2007 6:55 PM

YINYANG

You were busy trying to get yourself lit on fire. It happens.


Aside from the general bad grammar, bad characterization, bad plot (poorly thought out or not thought out at all), and space incest, I have just one pet peeve (and it's my biggest one, too):

Mal/Zoe

I think I'd rather take a fanfic riddled with errors (one giant paragraph for the whole story, no notions of spelling and grammar, and downright crude descriptions) that centers around a Book and girls orgy before Mal/Zoe. It is only out of a morbid curiosity that I read one story surrounding this pairing, and I don't think I'll be doing that again. I feel that it is so glaringly obvious that their relationship is platonic; explore the idea all you want, but please try not to take it too seriously. Romance between these two, in my opinion, is antithetical to the very basics of Firefly.

I apologize if that was harsh. However, that is my stance.

"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

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Thursday, June 14, 2007 3:49 AM

DARKFLY


My biggest Pet-Peev is acutally all Fan Fic's which are about the crew of Serenity, though I'm fine if they pop up in the fan fic every now and then but I always feel a tad disappointed at fan fic's with our Big Damn Crew since the quality of the writing will never compare to Tim Minear's or even Joss's since Tim Minear wrote the best episodes in my opinion. Though there are a few entertaining ones about our BDC but not many.

I love fan fics which are about made-up characters, its more interesting then, and you don't have to try to mimic any character's personality, cause its your character

---------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.myspace.com/darkfly7
Darkfly's Fan fiction, The Dark Chronicles OUT NOW, Chapters 2-4 have been added

Want pics, vids, ringtones,ect releated to Serenity and Firefly
http://www.fireflyfans.net/thread.asp?b=2&t=26986

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Thursday, June 14, 2007 4:06 AM

AGENTROUKA


Quote:

Originally posted by MacQyver:

Since the characteristics are inherited independently, with no regard for dominance, there is actualy a 1/4 chance that Wash and Zoe's child would have blue eyes.

Sorry, but I just had to correct that. (If a didn't, I wouldn't be an anoying highschool student, now would I)





It's STILL incredibly annoying, though.

Everyone has the babies having blue eyes (beyond the new-born blueness, I mean.) Everyone has the characters imagining their babies with the blue eyes their partner might have.

It's as if brown eyes are stigmatized or some such. It's such a cliche! Be bold, people. The baby will still be special enough with the less rare eye color.

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Thursday, June 14, 2007 4:32 AM

MAL4PREZ


Quote:

Originally posted by AgentRouka:
It's as if brown eyes are stigmatized or some such. It's such a cliche! Be bold, people. The baby will still be special enough with the less rare eye color.

LOL! It's like a Mary Sue baby! Can't the poor kid have a chance to be well rounded? Comes right out of the womb idealized...

Edit: Must add another peeve: Doesn't it seem like River is calling Simon a *boob* in like every other fic? I like to think the FF writers would have come up with new words for her to use. I wish fic writers would too!

I guess the more general peeve is writers recycling lines from the series over and over again, instead of coming up with new things. Um... new things that aren't "cappy daddy" LOL!

I'm impossible to please. It's true!

-----------------------------------------------
I'm the president. I don't need to listen.

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Thursday, June 14, 2007 4:43 AM

XEYRA


Oh, wow, talk about resurrecting threads! :)

I have a couple more pet-peeves worth mentioning while I'm here.

I have a problem with fics that disregard some continuity. Granted, Joss himself did it when he had Simon break River out from the Academy for the movie, which makes for some interesting fan wank theories, but that's different than having, for example, a AU fic before OiS where everyone seems to know River is psychic without giving an alternate explanation on how it was discovered (since, in canon, it's only 'discovered' by Mal in OiS).

Also, why the heck do people insist on having Mal refer to River as Albatross Pre-BDM? People, Albatross was a reference the Operative made that Mal took to. It didn't even exist Pre-BDM. So don't go have Mal call River that in pre-movie stories!

Okay, shutting up now.



"People tell you things all the time, without talking. The way they move, the way they aren't talking." - River Tam

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Thursday, June 14, 2007 6:06 AM

AGENTROUKA


Quote:

Originally posted by mal4prez:
LOL! It's like a Mary Sue baby! Can't the poor kid have a chance to be well rounded? Comes right out of the womb idealized...





Indeedy!

Fanfic babies are also often miraculously silent and sleep whenever conversation needs to take place - or when they are crying they aren't, say, actually holding their parents' attention, they just provide dramatic background noise for the parent's stressed pain.

No fanfic parent is ever caught talking about rashes or leaky diapers or the paining combination of breastfeeding and teething. New parents are notoriously awful to be around because they talk about nothing else. I want to see everyone avoiding the parents because of these things!




Another pet peeve: Anything that has River actually enjoying her fighting skills and getting all sensually deceptive Jayne-esque about it all. It may be a powerful image, but it's not really the girl we see in show and movie.


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Thursday, June 14, 2007 7:51 AM

CRUITHNE3753


I pretty much avoid fan fiction, and I won't touch "slash fiction" with a bargepole. If I want to read some Firefly fan fiction, it would constitute a good episode story, and be well written.

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Wednesday, November 28, 2012 7:35 PM

PENNAUSAMIKE


Quote:

Originally posted by angieh:
Quote:

Originally posted by Darkfly:
I love fan fics which are about made-up characters,
its more interesting then,
and you don't have to try to mimic any character's personality,
cause its your character



If the characters are from ones own mind then how can you call them fanfiction?
I believe that would simply be called reading a book.
SNIP




It is still fanfiction because it is placed in another person's already created Intellectual Property.
I don't want to see amateur writers trying to re-write characters
who are who they are because of the guiding hand of their original creators.

I personally have lamented many times on boards and in articles I have written, including
http://www.fanfilmfollies.com/featured/firefly-fan-films-on-fan-film-f
ollies

that people are always mimicking the show rather than expanding the 'verse.
There are many other Firefly ‘verse stories to tell.
Story arcs exploring the reach and machinations of Blue Sun,
tales of Companions and politics, cops and robbers,
dissatisfactions within the Alliance;
the Firefly ‘verse is rich with story ideas
beyond a simple “peril-of-the-week-for-the-crew”.
I don't mind a canon character being a peripheral character,
but I prefer the main character and their development/ journey
to be an original creation.

I also have NO interest in "dead Wash" stories.
In my mind, the crew put Wash in River's cryo-box to take him home for burial. Along the way, they are informed by Simon that the same medical tech that produced Tracy's hopped up internal organs ("million credit meat" in Tracy's words) are accessible at Government research facilities. Using a bit of improvisation and Book's ident card, they sneak Wash in place of a politico who bumped a deserving recipient (ala PA's governor Casey who bumped everybody down the list for his transplant). Alliance bashing, witty dialog and some gunplay ensues. The Firefly 'verse returns to normal.
In my mind, Wash lives. I feel so strongly about his place in the Firefly dynamic that if no more Firefly can come after Serenity without dead Wash, I'd rather it end at Serenity and allow me to finish it out in my own mind in a way that makes me happy.

Mike
My Firefly/Serenity Collection:
http://fireflydvd.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=3541

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