True. When I woke up in a friend's bathtub, my hand encased in 1 kg of ground pork, and subsequently smeared it over my confused face, I could feel the malignant auras of said friend, even though he was in another room and still sleeping.

 

It is only fun if it doesn't happen to you.

It's okay to laugh if someone is the victim of a prank which forces him to confess love in the middle of the Great Hall.

But then, what if it happened to you? I'm not sure I'd be laughing if someone pranked me like that. That sort of embarrassment and humiliation is not something I'd easily laugh about.

 

Does Voldemort ever actually torture his followers in canon? I'm willing to say he may have once or twice, but I can't remember any specific scene.

Which brings me to my complaint, I'm really sick of him just mindlessly crucioing his followers, it's just so bland.

 

I just wrote him as dead. It made life easier.

 

He does, but only twice that I can find. Once on Avery, and once on Pettigrew.

 

Repetition of various kinds. I was reading a fic the other day and I swear I was seeing the same phrase multiple times in every chapter. I'm not talking about stuff like "he/she said" which is one of those things that brain kind of skips over, but they help create a smooth flow. Three words were repeated in every action scene to the point where they stood out like a flashing neon sign and threatened to poke my eyes out every time.

Then, the action scenes themselves. Horribly generic filler with so little variety that I missed those tidbits when they appeared because I scrolled past multiple paragraphs. And there were entire chapters full of this stuff. Long, 10k+ chapters. Also, yeah. The whole fic is 600k words, of which, I'm sure, half could be cut and the fic would be better for it. It felt like there was filler in between filler.

 

What made you continue reading it? Good general idea but poor execution?

 

I'll second this hard, while acknowledging the fact that this is something that's pretty tough to self-edit. A good beta can help you a lot, but the mind loves its well-worn grooves.

But, yeah, this is super annoying to read, because once you pick up on it, you can't not see it.

There was that one Harry/Fleur/Gabrielle/Hermione soul bond fic that made me permanently hate the phrase "lovely ladies." The fic was terrible for a lot of reasons, but it's the one I remember most clearly.

I like blank101's Star Wars trilogy as much as anyone else, but holy god does that guy have a love affair with the word "mercurial." (Also Mara Jade's characterization has some issues and the author leans on in-scene POV switching, but that's another post entirely).

Getting into RWBY fanfic in the last couple weeks has made me allergic to Weiss and Yang being referred to as "the heiress" and "the brawler," respectively.

It's like a small pebble in your shoe. Always there, always annoying, always making the thing you're trying to enjoy a little less fun.

 

I think the same thing has happened to me with the word meanwhile. I've read a couple of fics in the past - hell maybe it was just one and it stuck in my head that badly - that tried to juggle up to 4 scenes going on at the same point in time and every other paragraph started with, "Meanwhile, bla was doing bla".

The word is now dead to me.

 

This happens to me with some real authors. A couple I can remember are Tom Clancy and GRRM. In each of their books there are words that for some reason seem to pop out of nowhere and keep reappearing.

For example in A Dance With Dragons the word 'Serjeant' started appearing everywhere and I couldn't remember seeing it at all in the previous books. Tom Clancy just tends to choose some word or other in each book to overuse but I can't be bothered re-reading one to give an example.

Ok, so I'm probably a bit anal-retentive but some authors can avoid that.

 

It often happens when I picked up on a new word while reading and then subconsciously start to implement it wherever I can. And that's all beside the usual placeholders like smiling, frowning, grinning, laughing, walking, and so on. It's good practice to keep a list of self-identified favorite phrases and words, and then search for them while editing. Makes it easier to avoid said pitfalls.

 

Why do all Tom/Voldemort & Harry stories have to end up as slash. Reel me in with an interesting premise and then bam, that, every time.

Something felt fishy early on this time so I read ahead in the reviews and...yeah...

Is there a list somewhere of Voldemort in Harry's head or similar stories that are actually good? I think I've read a total of three, 2 of which were unfinished and the 3rd shouldn't have been.

 

Ugh, yeah. There's the mundane variety, where the person repeats the same word, multiple times, in a paragraph, because they've apparently never heard of a thesaurus... or because they wrote a scene in pieces and didn't notice that the end result reused a particular word conspicuously often (that's what proofreading is for, geez).

Then there's the more annoying, more in your face, personalized version. Some authors seem to have a glaringly obvious catch phrase that they just can't stop using. It becomes idiosyncratic to that author, and you see it everywhere in their work.

That one's the worst. One has to sit and ask themselves, does the author not realizing how often they're saying this stuff, or do they think the use of that phrase is somehow elevating their fic?

O RLY?

 

"Certain" is a big one too. "A certain <descriptive> person", a character said in a teasing voice.

Makes me want to walk away. It's never just once either, if it's used once I guarantee it's used once every chapter minimum.

 

Would you kindly...

What if it's an arc word/phrase?

 

esran: I didn't finish reading it. Stopped at about a fourth of the wordcount. If the author failed to improve over 150k words, I think I can guess the pattern going forward.

Download: The repetition in question wasn't a plot point, just a health hazard for readers.

My post prompted more responses than I expected. I might as well warn you of the fic in question.

Mass Effect SIs are a guilty pleasure of mine. *looks down in shame* Grandfather of the genre is the Mass Vexations trilogy. The first story is okay, I read it a few years ago. I decided to take on the sequels recently, but MV2 is just so bland... Flat action scenes and the overuse of the phrase "cocking the shotgun" might have scarred me for life. The one good thing MV did was starting a trend that produced Masses to Masses series.

edit: wtf u doublepost phone

 

That bullying scene in time-travel or SI stories.
You know the one.

Where the adult protagonist (in a child's body) feels the need to put some pre-teen bully in their place. It most often involves verbal humiliation or even physical violence. Tends to be completely over-the-top and gratuitous.
I hate that scene. What is the author trying to accomplish? I think I'm supposed to root for the protagonist, but really I just come away thinking they are an asshole.

 

I dislike it when a story aggressively attacks all the 'bullies' in Hogwarts. The only real case of bullying I personally think occurred was Luna having her stuff taken and hidden repeatedly and being locked out of her common room - that was canon right? fanfic has corrupted me so. The rest is just typical school yard bullshit and frankly, I don't have much of a problem with it.

Fics that try to create some kind of Utopia at Hogwarts where everyone is kind and respectful of each other are laughably unrealistic.

 

I honestly can't remember. I'm pretty sure her stuff occasionally gets taken and she gets called 'Loony' but I don't think she ever got locked out of the common room?

I remember reading a Dark!Harry fic where he (as a teacher) permanently turns one of the bullies into a pig and all the other teachers are all like 'Oh well'.

I've also decided that if I ever come to include Hermione's parents in any fic they will be Danielle and Emmet (Danny and Em). Just because.

 

Conflict and learning to deal with it is a part of growing up.