Time to throw my hat into the ring....
And the follow-up to this, and a personal annoyance of mine, is
the other numerous 'fanfic-conventions' that you never find in normal
fiction. Flashback indicators aside, there's the large number of
dialogue/thought indicators: asteriks, tildas, etc... Personally, I
can't
think of a single novel I've read that does so.
That's because most books use an italics format, which is not capable
of translation intot he text format. For example, with most of my
fanfics, I publish both a text version, and a MS Word version. The
MSW version, I follow all the standard author conventions, such as
italicized though patterns and the like, but in text, I'm forced to
basically use what I can do deliniate thoghts and so forth and so on.
And, for the record, there are numerous works of professionally
published fiction that used (()) et al, for thoughts and the like.
Mostly, they tend to be science fiction or fantasy novels, dealing in
telepathy or the like, or foriegn languages, but there are recorded
cases.
Then there's the occasional act of sheer laziness on the part of
an author: describing a character via episode or manga references
(ie.
'she was dressed just like in that OAV episode where...'). It'd be
like
reading a novel where the narrator inserts, "and she had a
Rachel-from-Friends haircut..." -- I suppose that could work, with a
specific type of narrator, but anime characters, of course, are not
aware
of their status as pop-culture creations. Unless you're writing a
fairly
odd story, but that's a different topic altogether...
This I agree on. The "I'm-too-lax-to-bother-with-descriptions"
attitude has lowered the quality curve on fanfics, and further serves
the erroneous "Hey! I can write a fanfic, too!" attitude that has so
seemingly permeated the FFML and fanficdom in general as of late.
Basically, if you can't be bothered to fill in the blanks on your own,
don't bother to pick up the pen in the first place.
There are other little nitpicks: things like situating the story,
giving pages of force-fed introductory details, for instance. Is it
really necessary to say: this story takes place after v.32, but before
v.34, though the Googlesmash hyper-blast mongotechnique hasn't been
learnt
yet? If the reader is familiar with the series (and that, as far as
I can
tell, is the greatest inherent benefit of fanfiction) then he/she will
figure it out pretty quickly. If one sees Ranma walking into the
schoolyard as Akane beats up hordes of guys, we'll probably assume
it's
day one; if he launches a Hiryu Shotenha, we know its later; if
there's a
mention of Saffron, we know it's after v.38.
Again, something I agree on. The reader should already be aware to a
degree of the timelines of the fiction, and where it stands with the
canon timeline. This is, again, another failure to effectively
describe, this time temporal details that serve to give the sense of
place within the series. If you don't think your readers are
intelligent enough to figure out details like that, perhaps you should
be writing Sesame Street fics, not anime. Admittedly, while some
people need things like that hammered out to them, it is the exception
rather than the rule; at least I would hope so.
===
--Rob (The journey, not the destination, becomes a source of
wonder.--Loreena McKennit)
ashita@cchono.com, ashita@rocketmail.com, AIM: CaliCatCaf
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The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which
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-- Joseph Heller
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