Infuriating Fanfic

[M Fnord]

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The Edfics. Ed Hzric IIRC. He writes in script format most of the time. All of the fics are completed, however he refuses to post the last chapter. You actually have to write him and give him advice on writing before he e-mails you that final chapter

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O_o
>_<
o_O
Wow. I don't know if that's hubris or just plain stupid. There can't be a better way to kill off an audience than trying to blackmail them.---
Mr. Fnord
Raving blogger
http://www.jihad.net/
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[Bob Schroeck]

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You actually have to write him and give him advice on writing before he e-mails you that final chapter

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Dear Ed:
My advice: Post the last chapter so people appreciate your work rather than write you off as a pointless dipstick.
Please send me my copy of the last chapter.
Thank you.
Sincerely...

And of course, a post in this thread wouldn't be complete without a new peeve:
People who write a single scene and call it a "chapter".

-- Bob
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For Jor-El so loved the Earth, he sent his only begotten son...

[Jenova Silverstar]

Disruptor's often lifeless characterizations and weak dialogue. I love a lot of the ideas he has come up with. (and some of them are slap my forehead why didn't I think that ideas.) But other than that, his dialogue is flat, making me think of cardboard cutouts.
"Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened."
--Dr. Seuss

[Foxboy]

He's not so bad. Who's worse is a fellow called MasterMage... he writes a prolific amount of Ranma fic... Except that it is almost always the same fic with tweaks.
He tends to write Ranma/Akane with the following elements:
*Mrs. Tendo was a powerful, near-immortal witch who got caught in a battle with witnesses, so she had to pretend to be dead. Notably, she has a name with little chance of actually being used as a woman's name in Japan, is tall and built like a (figurative) Amazon.
*Ranma gains control of his curse and learns magic on the side, complete with cut-and-paste exposition block that is the same for every fic.
*Tube tops. Lots of tube tops. The guy seems to have a fetish for tubetops worn with leggings, a miniskirt, fingerless gloves and a bolero vest.
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''

-- James Nicoll

[M Fnord]

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The guy seems to have a fetish for tubetops worn with leggings, a miniskirt, fingerless gloves and a bolero vest.

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...dammit. That costume sounds familiar, but I don't know why. Sounds like something out of a Square game, but I can't quite place it...---
Mr. Fnord
Raving blogger
http://www.jihad.net/
"when edison thinks down pipes into special Future Death Machine, in 21st Century another teenager on MySpace gets hit by a car." --Warren Ellis
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[VladimirTherin]

Tifa? from ff7?
Thats what springs to mind.

[Disruptor]

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Disruptor's often lifeless characterizations and weak dialogue. I love a lot of the ideas he has come up with. (and some of them are slap my forehead why didn't I think that ideas.) But other than that, his dialogue is flat, making me think of cardboard cutouts.

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I do need to work on that, don't I?
Yes, I am Disruptor.
Pretty much staying on Addventure for right now and my GTE account has gone down. Slayers Project L.
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Tom Mathews aka Disruptor

[Bob Schroeck]

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Tifa? from ff7?

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No, that doesn't sound like any image of Tifa I've ever seen.

-- Bob
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For Jor-El so loved the Earth, he sent his only begotten son...

[VladimirTherin]

www.celes-chere.net/tifa/...anding.jpg
/scratches head.
ok, obviously not a direct match; no leggings, and suspenders instead of a bolero.
ah, and a TANK-top, instead of a tube-top.

[Bob Schroeck]

That link gives me a 404.

-- Bob
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For Jor-El so loved the Earth, he sent his only begotten son...

[Sweno]

the 404 is designed to block hotlinking, drop down to the directory and then jump back up to see the image.-Terry
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"in comes a man in cameo with a american flag, because american flags float around in the wilderness." - Mike Keon
Please Remember: People are stupid... Programers are people.
-Terry
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"so listen up boy, or pornography starring your mother will be the second worst thing to happen to you today"
TF2: Spy

[Bob Schroeck]

So of course I try that at work, and find that the server is one that the godlike administrators here have decided is unacceptable...

-- Bob
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For Jor-El so loved the Earth, he sent his only begotten son...

[Necratoid]

Well I was reading "Far Beyond Normal", www.tthfanfic.org/story.p...chapter=1, a Buffy/Stargate crossover...
My complaint? Its an almost good story. Almost.
Now, some characters are different from the cannons, which is covered in the reviews. A little annoying, but it happens. The setting is far more dark in places, but its an AU. The author sets up some dimensional equivalents of the Buffyverse characters... then throws them into the woodchipper of one shot background characters.
None of this really bugs me as much as the real issue... the political rant chapters. Its not so much the politics or how the two rant chapters, as of 15, make me skim a bit thinking 'Okay, okay, we get it... shut up and go on with the story already.' Its not so much on how Buffy's views are counter to her own cannon views, I can take that as a self deluded character flaw, it happened to her so its bad now.
No, the issue is that Buffy spends a chapter arguing with Hammond about how its a employing me and keeping Earth from being a nuclear wasteland contract negation, and declares that she'll never work for someone that authorizes Gloobleflarg. After an arguement and a not so subtle channeling of a political arguments, Hammond finally agrees that he'll prevent anyone working for him from performing Gloobleflarg. Then Plot happens and the story continues.
You may be asking, what is a Gloobleflarg and why is it so contested? Its the opposite of what the Turkey City Lexicon calls the "Call a Rabbit a Smeerp" phenomenon. A Gloobleflarg is a word that is important and not really defined in an adequate way that is central to a plot point. In this case 'torture'.
They argue over the Gloobleflarg called 'torture' and just never define what it is that Buffy is so hell-bent on getting banned. Okay, sure they mention some of the horrible ways that Buffy is tortured by a government group... but its pretty clear by how horrified the SG people are that see it are (not to mention the president of the US) that the Home Vivisection game (with the new 'bone cracking' minigame and the classic 'psychotropic drugs and meaningless looping cinema
minigame) that the evil, kidnapping government group is playing is not SOP.
So if SG and the president of the US are sickened and outraged by what the DVD of what happened to Buffy, then its clearly not legal or normal. So WHY did Hammond bother putting up a fight to ban 'torture'? Its like they did practice that in the Stargate program, so it needed to be kept around. But the character interaction made it clear that that wasn't SOP... or sane.
So to summerize, use of a Gloobleflarg, or a previously existant word that is redefined in story, but plays a major role in events anyway.
This is different, though related, to redefining a word so it looses all of it previous meaning, like 'hero' which apparently now means things like, any cop or fireman that bothered to show up at work that morning. As opposed to someone who does something spectacular and brave they didn't need to.

[ECSNorway]

Have to agree here. It's not just similar, it's flagrantly identical, to the recent Congressional debates on the use of "torture" by US interrogators. Start with something that everybody agrees is horrible and awful (electrodes to the genitals, dental work, etc), and generalize it to any form at all of agressive or forceful interrogation more intrusive than polite questions, until the general public is told that depriving prisoners of television priveleges constitutes "torture".
The only conclusion I can come to is that those behind it deliberately and maliciously wish to strip us of the tools we need to prosecute a war against fanatics who want us all DEAD and will stop at nothing to get what they want.
Which is what really pisses me off about this 'fic, because he's casting Buffy in exactly that role while at the same time making her the "hero" of the piece.
Can we just line her up right next to the NID fuckwits and shoot them all?
(Oh, and I keep waiting for Buffy to suggest bringing Willow in to look at the Xerxes code... after all, she's the hot-shit computer genius...)--
"I give you the beautiful... the talented... the tirelessly atomic-powered...
R!
DOROTHY!
WAYNERIGHT!
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.

[Custos Sophiae]

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The only conclusion I can come to is that those behind it deliberately and maliciously wish to strip us of the tools we need to prosecute a war against fanatics who want us all DEAD and will stop at nothing to get what they want.

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Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity. Many of those are unconsious hypocrite - they talk about respecting other cultures but at heart they believe, and act, as if everyone was like them, as if bin Laden was no different from the Archbishop of Canterbury. They do not comprehend the nature of a fanatic. Nor does declaring evil a null concept make it so.
As for 'Far beyond normal', it is using Buffy axioms which don't work well in crossovers. In Buffy virtually every authority group is corrupt or incompetent, sometimes both. Buffy and friends are the only effective group with a working moral compass, and everyone else must defer to them.
Take this assumption into crossovers and you get SG1 (or Dumbledore, or even Gandalf) meekly accepting Buffy and friend's moral superiority, as here, but SG1 et al are themselves heroes. To have them defer to Buffy on their home ground, with no more than a token attempt to question her moral authority, shows no respect for their characters
I find it particularly annoying when post-season 7 Willow shows up all glowy-eyed to lay down the law. Too often, it makes her seem no better than a playground bully, and it is sheer hubris. The brightest star can fall, blinded by its own light.
[However, I will note the same author as handled these same issues much better in another fic, The Bitter Truth
Torture is wrong, but sometimes there are no good choices left. Sometimes we can only choose the lesser evil, which is acceptable provided we do so reluctantly, never forgetting it is evil or coming to enjoy it.
NID have crossed the line; SG1 haven't, and never would.
Given a choice between torturing a Goa'uld and the enslavement of the entire earth, I'd go for the red hot pokers every time, and a bottle of vodka for afterwards.

[ECSNorway]

General Landry has come close, given his treatment of Nereus. But I don't think putting an obsessive gourmand on a prison diet quite constitutes torture, outside of the minds of the current anti-torture lobby.--
"I give you the beautiful... the talented... the tirelessly atomic-powered...
R!
DOROTHY!
WAYNERIGHT!
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.

[deadpan29]

If it's the political line of the Buffy in this story that irks you, she has another speach later on that's more hawkish, about not letting enemies get away with attacking you at home. At that point, she is also learning a lot from General Hammond about leadership and from some of the other soldier-types about profesionalism.
On the other hand, her slayer sense is getting out of control. Picking up on the spy in the SGC cafeteria, was OK. Tracking another one across town was more of a stretch but can be explained with a non-hellmouth environment and fewer non-humans around to pick up on. Real-time tracking of spaceships out by Jupiter with no light-speed delay and enough precision for firing solutions? Way too much Deus Ex Machina here. Even if a Deus (PTB or Acended) shows up to explain their Machinations in setting this up, it's just too much Uber-Buffy paired with continuing under-utilization of the other characters available.
I have to agree with the initial post on this. It's bordering on being a great fic, but being that close without being there is more aggravating than a mediocre throwaway fic.
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No, I don't believe the world has gone mad.  In order for it to go mad it would need to have been sane at some point.

[ECSNorway]

The Jupiter thing isn't Slayer sense, it's a combination of prophetic dreams and a hell of a lot of sheer luck.
As Jack says, "We KNOW we're gonna get a hit, 'cause Buffy dreamed it. So we shoot. Don't worry too much about the targeting, just get the lead downfield." Or something along those lines.--
"I give you the beautiful... the talented... the tirelessly atomic-powered...
R!
DOROTHY!
WAYNERIGHT!
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.

[Necratoid]

Custos Sophiae, I think you missed a bit of my point... They never defined torture in 'Far Beyond Normal'... so When you say:

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Torture is wrong, but sometimes there are no good choices left.

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We can't actually say that about the story in question. This is, because "torture" in this case is a Gloobleflarg. It is NEVER actually defined in the story, when they are arguing over it (my main problem with it)... so 'torture' cant actually be declared wrong... because it is never defined. Only that Hammond forbid it. Which either means he had people working for him doing the kinds of things that happened to Buffy earlier, which contextually he blatantly wasn't. Or that he looked up the current legal definition of torture... and since he didn't allow that anyway he just let her have a meaningless victory... except it was pointless to have the argument in the first place in that case.
I did mention that Buffy was rather self-deluded in this, possibly a direct side effect of her brain chemistry being altered by all those psychotropic drugs they injected her with. Come to think of it, we never did find out how much time she was tortured for did we?
I also noticed that many of you picked up on one of my other points "the woodchipper of one shot background characters". Faith was basically released in the wilds to fend for herself. More importantly (well not to Faith), Willow could have solved the "Xerox"'s main issue. Not just because she is Uber hacker, no, its because she is an outside prospective that can use the POWER of plot herself. The Uber system has been down for weeks or months, nebulous time in effect here, possibly those psychotropic drugs again. By the Cheese Scented god of Monky Spleens, it would probably end up 30% better if Willow got screen time again. I mean, without those sorcery skills to eat character creation points this Willow could probably write the entire code from scratch in a week and have it be better.

[Custos Sophiae]

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Custos Sophiae, I think you missed a bit of my point... They never defined torture in 'Far Beyond Normal'... so When you say:
Torture is wrong, but sometimes there are no good choices left.
We can't actually say that about the story in question. This is, because "torture" in this case is a Gloobleflarg. It is NEVER actually defined in the story, when they are arguing over it (my main problem with it)... so 'torture' cant actually be declared wrong... because it is never defined.

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However, we the readers can provide our own definitions of torture, and reason appropriately, provided we are given enough information.
The problem is that the author, and Buffy, may be using an absurdly broad definition of torture and expecting it to carry all the moral weight of the normal, narrow, definition (may because, as you say, the author never actually states their terms, which they should have.)
If we knew what the so-called torture entailed we could judge for ourselves if it was acceptable, given the circumstances, but for SG1 the author has hidden that information from us, which makes it very likely they are using false analogies to make a political point.
What the NID did to Buffy was torture, and unacceptable. Buffy dangling a cross in a vampire's mouth was torture, and acceptable under the circumstances. In both cases we can make that decision for ourselves, based on the evidence, without needing the author to define torture for us.
With SG1, the author has denied us the information needed to make that decision so they can be forced to accept Buffy's moral superiority, and the author can expound politics, which is not good writing.

[ECSNorway]

The problem is that the author, and Buffy, may be using an absurdly broad definition of torture and expecting it to carry all the moral weight of the normal, narrow, definition (may because, as you say, the author never actually states their terms, which they should have.)
It's interesting, really, because this distinction lies at the root of the current political debate about the use of torture. It's hard to tell exactly which definition is in use by any particular participant.
Which may make this 'fic a very interesting statement about that debate.--
"I give you the beautiful... the talented... the tirelessly atomic-powered...
R!
DOROTHY!
WAYNERIGHT!
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.

[Florin]

The really stupid thing is that neither the SGC or the NID should need to resort to torture for information gathering, they've got enough access to nifty alien technologies to do it in much simpler ways.
And I really don't see Hammond arguing FOR torture.--
Oh, what has science wrought? I sought only to turn a man into a metal-encased juggernaught of destruction powered by the unknown properties of a mysterious living crystal. How could this have all gone wrong?
--
If you become a monster to put down a monster you've still got a monster running around at the end of the day and have as such not really solved the whole monster problem at all. 

[ECSNorway]

I don't think he really was, it was more of a reflexive "What the hell are you getting in my face for after I just put this entire world on the line to save your ass, girl?".
Or a Bush allegory.--
"I give you the beautiful... the talented... the tirelessly atomic-powered...
R!
DOROTHY!
WAYNERIGHT!
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.

[WengFook]

Just weighing in with a little peeve of mine that I simply don't understand.
Why do authors that write Harry Potter as an animagus automatically give him a phoenix form? and then forget about it alltogether unless they need a uber plotbreaking Deus Ex Machina?
I mean one fic even went so far as to give him multiple forms. including the invisible thestrals and partial transfigurations as he pleased? its really just so incredibly ludicrous that i'm getting leery of reading further in the series simply because I find it hard to leave my suspension of disbelief at the door -_-
_______________________________
"We few, we happy few. We band of buggered"
_________________________________
Take Your Candle, Go Light Your World.

[Soutern Cross]

You're referring to the H/G fanfic "Harry Potter and The Time of Destiny" aren't you?
Personally I think that the people making Harry a phoenix Animagus are doing so not only to give Harry those cool phoenix powers,but also because Harry is totally loyal to Dumbledore,and phoenixes are renowned for loyality to their human companions.
"There's only one kind of monster who uses bullets"-
Colonel VanHeusen, It! The Terror From Beyond Space (195 "There's only one kind of monster that uses bullets"-Colonel VanHeusen , from "It! The Terror From Beyond Space"