Infuriating Fanfic

[M Fnord]

Pulled this choice quote from the latest rec thread:

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Oddly enough, I found brainchild's works to be the most infuriating pieces of fiction I've ever had the misfortune to read.
I was heartily disgusted with them by the second chapter, and forced my way to the 5th or 6th in most cases before giving up in a fit of loathing.
It's not that they're poorly written, they just wanted to make me smack him/her, if that makes any sense.

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I know what you mean. I've seen fanfic that's caused that kind of visceral reaction. F'r instance, take Skysaber's Eva adventure; I was rolling with it most of the way, but when I got to the part where Jared claims kinship with one of the lost tribes of Israel, I damn near put my fist through the screen. My WSoD snapped back so hard it took out an eye, and maybe a couple of people standing behind me.
Anybody else have that kind of reaction to a story that was written well (not the usual poor-spelling-poor-grammar horrors that end up as MST3K fodder) but just manage to rub you utterly the wrong way?---
Mr. Fnord, interdimensional man of mystery.
http://www.jihad.net/
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[Necratoid]

Jared's Mirror's Multiplied.
One it had 'Ranma' as an Uber-(fill-in-the-blank, 3 bajillion times over)... getting a massive harem of everything with boobs in a 40 mile radius. Worse legally... by effectively divine right, and including Goddess'.
I put up with it. Though the breif stint as the genius baby (a concept that puts me into the critic's version of a killing rage).
But the thing that made me spent the next hour or so ranting in my head and pacing around.. was that he goes off on Akane as the berserker, antichrist figure with no redeming value in any time line while Nabiki is just an innocent, fluffy kitten hiding in a icy shell waiting to be loved. Said shell is thawed in 2.3 seconds by his charm.
Nevermind this 'Ranma' (the name is telling even if the charicter is unrecognizable) has rewritten history with a magic wish crystal so many times that if he was removed history and that universe/multiverse would arbitrarily collapse black hole style under the weight of its own extreme contrivance and the gods know it. Nevermind this negate the Uber-Omni, claiming to be Ranma, own previous statement that none of his wishes could contradict each other and his insanely convelluted random counter arguements and reaffirments. Nevermind that the author was being serious about this.
What killed me the most was after his Anti-christ Akane speach... he just stopped writting it for a year or three. Meanng that speach was the point of the entire fic getting written.

[Bob Schroeck]

I've admitted it before, Skysaber's stuff is one of my guilty pleasures. But yeah, there are points where it's just too much to take. I never had that problem with "Mirrors Multiplied", oddly, but the Eva fic's now-missing 18th chapter with its long, extended diatribe about how the American school system is deliberately designed to churn out good little social conformists just disgusted me. (It may be heading that way now, but only because it's been undermined for decades. Saying it was deliberately built that way is just ignoring history.) What made it worse was that he used an entire classroom of students as a collective sockpuppet with a single speaking voice.
I was actually amused (mostly) by the Jewish heritage thing and in fact enjoyed the Talmudic argument passage quite a bit. (In fact, I wrote Jared and told him I found the 18th chapter disappointing and that the diatribe paled in comparison to the Talmudic sequence. Of course, he never wrote me back, as regardless of the good stuff I said to him, the criticism that came with it was probably all he perceived, and he ever had thin skin where that was concerned.)

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

[Foxboy]

I know where you're coming from. While Grey/Metroanime and Ornstead have their shining moments, they tend to drift too easily into multi-crossover mishmash featuring Sailor Moon and Ranma.
Add the fact that their every instantiation of Ranma is heavily Akane-bashing... The character *is* a violent, insecure, jealous tomboy, but those were intended as flaws to keep her from being "Saint Akane." The character is *not* the only less-than-stellar person in the immediate vicinity.
I feel they based their interpretation of her solely from the anime, and took the series far too seriously. It's more or less the anime equivalent of the Three Stooges, after all...
''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

[jpub]

If you want highly disturbing to the extent if makes you want to cry, check out 'Katar Hol' on Xanderzone. The guy *honestly* thinks that everyone in BtVS and Angel will fall for the vampires, and Xander's going to end up as this Igor-esque whipping boy.--
Christopher Angel, aka JPublic
The Works of Christopher Angel

[classicdrogn]

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I feel they based their interpretation of her solely from the anime, and took the series far too seriously. It's more or less the anime equivalent of the Three Stooges, after all...

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Well, I got back into mecha from superheroes because of Chris Meadows, who wrote "Team M.E.C.H.A." on the Superguy group. Then, I poked around to see what else he'd written, and found Undocumented Features, and thoguht, "Hey, this fanfiction stuff is pretty cool!" Then, I read Twisted Path and thought, "Hey, this Ranma stuff sounds pretty cool! Too bad there's so many bad fics about it too.... I get the anime!" And I got the OVA box set. I it was like the bads fanfic, where Akane is this abusive ogre and any humor is completely lost in the andless cycle of stupidity and Ranma-pounding.
It's a good thing I got BGC about the same time, or I'd probably have dismissed anime as only worth letting other people endure so some of them could write good fanfiction... Reading how different people said manga Akane was from anime Akane, I downloaded it (not wasting money on THAT series again) and found that while less extreme, she was still the least sympathetic "continually rescued girlfriend" character I'd ever heard of, and the rampant stupidity was still thicker than ... well, normally I'd say "Ryoga's skull" but that's kind of the point.
So... I hate to tell you, but apparently a significant minority of us actually see characterising Akane as an abusive, violent ogre as accurate - though it is possible she loves Ranma in her own twisted little way, like Kodachi. Does this justify writing a fic with the the express intention of bashing her? No. But neither does it justify those of you with a more sympatheic view getting all confronational about it, and the "Which Fiancee?" Ranma fan flame wars are legendary (and I'm not going to even get into that argument if it starts.)
In short, the ORIGINAL Ranma - anime and manga both - is like the fanfics that were the original topic of this thread (except that I have issues with the technical competence of it at times as well) and about as funny as Mommy Dearest. Evangelion is another - but I've gone into enough screaming fits about Eva for everyone here to know what I think of that. The one that really suprised me was Cowboy Bebop - it had everything I should like, was well written and animated, and I still can't explain why it irritated me so much. Fanfiction... I don't usually keep reading if a fic bugs me. There's so much out there that there's really no point.
- CDSERVO: Loook *deeeeply* into my eyes... Tell me, what do you see?
CROW: (hypnotized) A twisted man who wants to inflict his pain upon others.
Dr. Akagi will recover. Observe, Rei smiled. Shinji-kun, are these your clothes?
Ritsuko shot up like a spring loaded meerkat. What? Shinji-kun is naked?
See, Anata? Dr. Hentai is alive and well. - Innortal's _I Do_
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

[Bob Schroeck]

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In short, the ORIGINAL Ranma - anime and manga both - is like the fanfics that were the original topic of this thread ... and about as funny as Mommy Dearest.

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Well, like someone once said, comedy is terrible things happening to other people.
After all, if a Three Stooges short happened in the real world, there'd be ambulances and police cars showing up maybe three minutes in...
Part of the root of Ranma's comedy is you get to watch all these profoundly stupid people -- and yes, they are all stupid, even Kasumi, who is no Zen master much as I love the idea -- and you can sit back and legitimately say, "Lord, what fools these mortals be!" at them. But yes, looked at without the filter of comedy, Ranma is a tragedy of spectacular and even Shakespearean proportions just waiting to happen. All it would take would be the right trigger, and Nerima would be awash in blood.
Somehow, that seems to make the comedy all that more piquant...

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

[Rieverre]

Well, I may not remember any infuriat ... wait. Kinsfire. Natch.
Any Xander-does-Halloween-differently fic that says 'to hell with timeframes' and has him dress as somebody from a blatantly 'current' show or film.
I can't think of anything else at the moment, though I'll agree with the bits about Skysaber's Mirrors Multipiled and misc stories. Grey's stuff isn't as much infuriating to me as it is mildly annoying when a story reaches a certain length, but I'm chalking most of that up to him focusing on worldbuilding a bit too much. Wish he'd stick with a setting and character focus instead of adding more elements (maybe if he'd done a less over the top Retake ... big maybe).
As for anime? *snickers* Naruto? I remember the first time I watched it, it annoyed me to no end. Oh, there were fun bits (which is, I guess, the reason SSS exists) and I liked some of the fanfic, but the fights dragged and called up unfavorable flashbacks of DBZ - which I have never liked, and will never like.
-Griever
When tact is required, use brute force. When force is required, use greater force.
When the greatest force is required, use your head. Surprise is everything. - The Book of Cataclysm

[jpub]

Kinsfire's fics are like watching train wrecks, really. The self-depreciating Harry in them is too ludicrous to be believed.
Half the time I read his stuff with sheer disbelief, the other half I read them with disgust. He belongs here.--
Christopher Angel, aka JPublic
The Works of Christopher Angel

[CattyNebulart]

The fics that have a very strong nature is good/technology is evil stance, unless it's done very well (Tolkien is one of the few that managed to do it very well and I love his books. I just hate their POV, though I can certainly understand it in Tolkiens case.). It's unfortunatly way to comon. Also I dislike the human-behaving AI, unless there is a reason for it or it's a comedy. Which is why I hate Data with a passion.
E: "Did they... did they just endorse the combination of the JSDF and US Army by showing them as two lesbian lolicons moving in together and holding hands and talking about how 'intimate' they were?"
B: "Have you forgotten so soon? They're phasing out Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

[Necratoid]

I'd have to say written for romance fics... or movies, or stories, or whatever.
I don't mean fics with a romance subplot, I mean the entire point of the fic is to make a couple into a couple. A major reason is that the rest of the plot is poured in around this should be bit plot or the plot mostly icing on hagis. I like the icing... but why the hagis? Why is there so much hagis involved? I went in expecting a cake and got hagis.
Worse is when the summery sounds intreging... and they gloss over that part for the couple (or harem). In addition, even if the plot gets moving and intresting this fics ignore it for 40 pages of craptastical mush. Meanwhile the plot dies of starvation or drowns in the sugary mush... or slips into a diabetic coma for a few months.
Added fun is X with ... pole. Thats right you made an intresting story that kept my attention for a few chapters... lets let an abruptly inmportant plot point be choosen by the ramblings reviews proclaiming their slavering devotion to their favorite charicter.
Few things are more infuriating than good story abruptly crashing into a fawning relationship that came out of nowhere.
As long as we are discusing infurating abrupt charicter interaction halting the plot... I noticed Tolkien mentioned. I couldn't reasd Tolkien everytime I got involved every in the story that infernal bard drop kicked my attention span.
*rants off into the distance about pandering to English Majors, something about adding in a charicter only they like and proclaim the story ruined without the bard*

[Florin]

How about rampant sodomization of an anime's timeline and character's personalities, for no good reason? A great example of this is Side Effects by ChibiRisu-chan. It's well written, and the jokes are funny, but it's painfully obvious that the author has barely any knowledge of the series. Sarutobi and Tsunade are both in Konoha at the same time? Sasuke's just shy (and, if I remember correctly, is inexplicably missing his curse seal)? Oh, and going by Kakashi's comments about his favorite books, Jiriya is apperently very very gay.
Another one that bothers me slightly is alot of dave-d's stuff. He's written some very good Full Metal Panic stuff, but alot of his fic's tend to borrow from eachother, sometimes word for word, and he doesn't always tell you which fic's are linked. Also, his Kaname and Tessa have a more adversarial relationship (almost Ranma Fiancee Level) than the show itself had. Of course I haven't seen Second Raid or volumes 3 + 4 of Fumofuu (which he's decided is canon0 yet, so maybe it heats up there.--
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. 

[VladimirTherin]

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Also, his Kaname and Tessa have a more adversarial relationship (almost Ranma Fiancee Level) than the show itself had.

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It's there, and some times it is not just adversarial, but actually personal.
Spoiler:

Near the start of 2nd raid; Tessa( for non-romantic reasons ) pulls Sousuke out of Tokyo, and goes so far as to order him explicitly to avoid all further contact with Kaname. This of course after Sousuke actually comes within a hair's breadth of a clue regarding her feelings.

[Necratoid]

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How about rampant sodomization of an anime's timeline and character's personalities, for no good reason?

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That runs into a other subcategory... Writers who have a 'political' agenda for writing about X series and X charicter.
I don't mean like Onstead with his apparently deleted rant about the American school system. I mean like Onstead and his Anti-christ, irredemable in any timeline verse of Akane.
People who write fanfiction specifically to write against one or two charicters. Fics that are great except that one near unrecognizable charicter that the writer insists is the canon accurate charicter it bears the name of.
For example I started reading fanfiction back in 1997-8, so it was at the tail end of the fiance wars that spawned from Ranma 1/2. I liked a lot of what I read... but noticed that I was getting wildly different discriptions of the charicters.
So I bought the first 2 seasons... and was confused by how exactly the non-Akane Tendo sisters were described. So after a few months I came up with this:
People read the manga and it was good. So they made and anime that amplified the bad points of charicters, and made them charicterures of the manga. That and learned that and the Kuno family ninja is actually a charicter lifted (with permission) from Japanese fanfiction of the manga.
Once in America (in fansubs and untranslated manga) the fanfiction community desided they liked Ranma, but the females competing for him broke people into violently disparate groups (I mean flame wars and hacking each other websights to destroy them). For me the exact details are lost to time, but the results were clearly notiable in the fanfiction after that.
The same thing happens in lesser scale to this day... but more important to this discusion is that it resulted in hundreds of writers that wrote Ranma fanfiction without any direct exposure to the cannon or none outside the first season.
They tended to break off into groups that were based on whoever they read first shaped their opinions of the charicter warped. Much charicter bashing badness was born.
So two groups of badness:
1) Agenda writers.
2) 'I never seen the series, but after reading so-and-so's work I've decided to join his band wagon and write about the series anyway' writers. These have a tendancy to mentally declare the first guys writing based on baseline cannon and writer then makes an even worse charicture.

[deadpan29]

On the subject of Ornstead: He's great 90% of the time. His Eva Revolution fic, at least the first 2/3 of it, is one of the funniest and most entertaining stories I've read. This is true only as long as I can keep viewing it as a parody.
Unfortunately, in the other 10%, his work stops being a story and becomes an essay. It is not uncommon for a writer's beliefs and opinions to come through in his work, but in these instances the story just stops dead for a socio-political editorial or a disertation on the psycology of a character.
That the opinions put forth in these op-ed sections usualy seem kind of screwy to me doesn't help, but what sinks things is the preaching-rant way he writes the section and the way it breaks the flow of the story.
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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.

[classicdrogn]

I think I have another category of fics to add: Those where the protagonist is constantly blackmaled or otherwise coerced into doing what his antagonists want - I'm not saying he or she need to be in control all the time, because it's hard to have any conflict if so, but being the forcible puppet of another is just irritating.
Yes, this means I gave up on reading Saving Connor. The fact that a Snape who honestly wants to produce a Slytherin hero and show him off to the world makes me want to murder him in more protracted and painful ways than the the willing traitors of numerous other fics, that the Malfoy who is in the gradual process of becoming a more normal person without the total dependence on his father to make up his mind inpsires a greater desire to fling him into a pit of quicksand laced with contact-absorbed muscle relaxant more than the mean-spirited, swaggering ass of canon, and the title character, primary of the Boy-Who-Guards, makes me want nothing more than to put him in the Long Term Spell Damage ward beside the Longbottoms, does NOT a successful fanfic make. A pity, because it's nice and long, and might even have lasted me the weekend if it had been tolerable.
- CDSERVO: Loook *deeeeply* into my eyes... Tell me, what do you see?
CROW: (hypnotized) A twisted man who wants to inflict his pain upon others.
Dr. Akagi will recover. Observe, Rei smiled. Shinji-kun, are these your clothes?
Ritsuko shot up like a spring loaded meerkat. What? Shinji-kun is naked?
See, Anata? Dr. Hentai is alive and well. - Innortal's _I Do_
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

[Soutern Cross]

O.K.,here comes an Akane fan to defend Ranma's True Fiancee...
First off Ranma 1/2 is a FAILED comedy in that nothing has been resolved at the end of the series.
Secondly,for all her many flaws,Akane is the best of,let's face it,a pack of loonies that nobody in his right mind would want to marry.
For starters,she's actually the LEAST violent of the fiancee brigade (see issue #25,where all of them clobber Ranma),and she's the only one who WON'T try to use drugs or mind control on Ranma (Read the "Umbrella Of Love" story,in which Akane and Ukyo are the only fiancees present)."There's only one kind of monster that uses bullets"-Colonel VanHeusen , from "It! The Terror From Beyond Space"

[classicdrogn]

NONE of...
Every character...
No. I'm not getting into this. All I'm going to say is that I dislike the idea of abusive relationships as humor in general, not as applied to any specific character - Akane was just the one under discussion when it came up. Character X pounding Character Y, but it's okay because really Character X loves Character Y and it's Y's fault for making X feel jealous/embarrassed/unappreciated anyway, is just not funny.
- CDSERVO: Loook *deeeeply* into my eyes... Tell me, what do you see?
CROW: (hypnotized) A twisted man who wants to inflict his pain upon others.
Dr. Akagi will recover. Observe, Rei smiled. Shinji-kun, are these your clothes?
Ritsuko shot up like a spring loaded meerkat. What? Shinji-kun is naked?
See, Anata? Dr. Hentai is alive and well. - Innortal's _I Do_
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

[katreus]

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Those where the protagonist is constantly blackmaled or otherwise coerced into doing what his antagonists want - I'm not saying he or she need to be in control all the time, because it's hard to have any conflict if so, but being the forcible puppet of another is just irritating.

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Meh, I still keep up with the Saving Connor series because it's written well imo. Harry isn't an abiding lil puppet -- the only reason he was in the first place was because of an installed compulsion in his mind. Once he gets free... Don't wanna spoil the plot -- so have you read up to the Lily and Harry confrontation at home? True, there's a fair amount of angst but I don't think it's overwhelming nor do I think its unreasonable.

[A117]

I tend to avoid Ranma/Akane pairings ... it's canon already.
Also tend to avoid crossovers with Dragon Ball, Harry Potter and Star Wars in it.
Also tend to avoid yaoi fanfics. Haven't got the stomach for it.
Fanfics that are very interesting and very short in content ... less than 2K infuriate me when it stops at a very interesting juncture.
Think that's about it.

[Bob Schroeck]

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Character X pounding Character Y, but it's okay because really Character X loves Character Y and it's Y's fault for making X feel jealous/embarrassed/unappreciated anyway, is just not funny.

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Yes, we're looking at you, Naru Narusegawa.

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

[Necratoid]

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I tend to avoid Ranma/Akane pairings ... it's canon already.

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Personally, I find that attitude annoying I already covered made for the coupling commentary above so I'll refrain from futher comentary.
Lets go with: Genma is not Ranma's REAL (genetic) father stories. Though I imagine that this happens in other series as well.
Why? The reason is that most of them end up with the plot point that most of Ranma's skills/power actually come genetically from his real father and that Genma's training was entirely useless.
Another one is the temporal loop catalyst divergeence point. These stories are where Ranma spends the first part whining about how everyday is the same, often to the second, with two or three differences (random idiot attacker of the day for instance). Ranma then tells one or two of the charicter (usually Kasumi, less often Akane), that he can't take it anymore and leaves for another series. The story itself can be good on the whole, but that part is endlessly repeated and for some reason they can't just write a paragraph or two explaining he bailed, because it was repetitive and he couldn't take it anymore.
Which leads me to: The main charicter is an experience point black hole stories. In these only the main charicter gets more powerful or the main character level several times faster than everyone else for the same effort.

[Soutern Cross]

Actually,one of my pet hates is the Ranma/Nabiki pairings that so many fanfic authors write.Rumiko herself stated that Happosai and Nabiki were the two truly evil characters in that series.The character they call Nabiki bears no resemblance to the Rumiko Takahashi character,save for being a beautiful fiancier."There's only one kind of monster that uses bullets"-Colonel VanHeusen , from "It! The Terror From Beyond Space"

[A117]

hahahahahahahaha ....
I am bias against Ranma/Akane pairings in fanfics ...
Not in the anime though. I believe the Ranma/Akane pairings should be left to Rumiko Takahashi to write ... otherwise it would be blasphemy ...

[Disruptor]

AnimeAddiction's fics.
the fics of Mike Rhea
Both of those are a bit heavy on the character bashing. What tops it even more, is that both claim they are writing the canon characters. AnimeAddiction also put a rant in the middle of one of his fics about how Shampoo would know certain martial arts attacks.
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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Tom Mathews aka Disruptor