Things you hate in fiction

Fifthfiend · 05-09-2008, 02:00 AM

Just generally speaking things in fiction that annoy the hell out of you when writers do them. From books or comics or TV or whatever.

To start with, writers having their characters talk on and on about how totally great one of their other characters is supposed to be. It actually combines two things I find to be low-level annoyances, which are telling a reader something the writer can't bother to actually demonstrate and hijacking a character's voice to make whatever point he wants forced into the story, into sort of of an amplified mass of awful.

There's a depressingly long tradition of this in comics from Brian Bendis' habit of turning every comic into a dicksucking party for whoever is his favorite pet character this week all the way back to Chris Claremont where every time Storm walked into a room you would invariably have another character churn through the same goddamn eight-paragraph inner monologue which included the word "goddess" a minimum of four times. Or like Harry Potter is a good example where you'll have everyone from Harry's classmates to his principal falling all over themselves to tell him what a totally great wizard he is. In fact Dumbledore's a good example of a particularly obnoxious strain of this kind of thing where a writer specifically puts her forced praise into the mouth of a character she's actually bothered to build up on his own merits as totally great in order to try and glom some of that awesomeness off onto her pet protagonist.

Mainly it comes down to I far prefer to see a character just be awesome by his own efforts, if a character really is that totally great then a writer doesn't need to waste valuable time saying how awesome said character is because hey, everyone already knows.

Oh! You know what's a good example, is the first Pirates of the Carribean. In that quite a lot of people spent a lot of time saying how totally hard Jack sucked, which made it that much better when Jack continually managed to demonstrate that he was, in fact, totally awesome.

05-09-2008, 02:00 AM	#1
Fifthfiend for all seasons Join Date: Feb 2004 Posts: 19,409	Things you hate in fiction Just generally speaking things in fiction that annoy the hell out of you when writers do them. From books or comics or TV or whatever. To start with, writers having their characters talk on and on about how totally great one of their other characters is supposed to be. It actually combines two things I find to be low-level annoyances, which are telling a reader something the writer can't bother to actually demonstrate and hijacking a character's voice to make whatever point he wants forced into the story, into sort of of an amplified mass of awful. There's a depressingly long tradition of this in comics from Brian Bendis' habit of turning every comic into a dicksucking party for whoever is his favorite pet character this week all the way back to Chris Claremont where every time Storm walked into a room you would invariably have another character churn through the same goddamn eight-paragraph inner monologue which included the word "goddess" a minimum of four times. Or like Harry Potter is a good example where you'll have everyone from Harry's classmates to his principal falling all over themselves to tell him what a totally great wizard he is. In fact Dumbledore's a good example of a particularly obnoxious strain of this kind of thing where a writer specifically puts her forced praise into the mouth of a character she's actually bothered to build up on his own merits as totally great in order to try and glom some of that awesomeness off onto her pet protagonist. Mainly it comes down to I far prefer to see a character just be awesome by his own efforts, if a character really is that totally great then a writer doesn't need to waste valuable time saying how awesome said character is because hey, everyone already knows. Oh! You know what's a good example, is the first Pirates of the Carribean. In that quite a lot of people spent a lot of time saying how totally hard Jack sucked, which made it that much better when Jack continually managed to demonstrate that he was, in fact, totally awesome. __________________ check out my buttspresso