Writers: Pet Peeves When Reading Novels

[sanitylimited]

Overpowered MCs that they can 1v1 Frieza after Chapter 1

i read a dragon ball fanfic where they go off to deal with the red ribon army after unlocking god ki.


i can't stand when the protagonist slaughters countless foder, only to let the main antagonist live, just to make sure more plot can happen because of that character

 

[TheEldritchGod]

I don’t like when a disabled person is cured of their disability without that person‘s consent,

I'm just sadistic about this. MC cures the cripple who's been a beggar for 40 years. He has no job skills, people won't give him money because he's now got legs, his life falls apart, so he commits suicide on the MCs doorstep with a note that says, "You ruined my life."

 

[Deleted member 113259]

I don’t like when a disabled person is cured of their disability without that person‘s consent

"No, you gave me $1000 without my consent!"

 

[Midnight-Phantom]

this thread is going totally crazy direction ..

 

[TheEldritchGod]

this thread is going totally crazy direction ..

Is it? IS IT? No. A crazy direction would be at a right angle to all the known directions. You know, up-down, left-trump, John cena-emo sandman wanna be, forward-Spiro Agno. Not one of those directions would be crazy.

 

[RepresentingWrath]

Is it? IS IT? No. A crazy direction would be at a right angle to all the known directions. You know, up-down, left-trump, John cena-emo sandman wanna be, forward-Spiro Agno. Not one of those directions would be crazy.

Bruh.

 

[Midnight-Phantom]

.. um that's not crazy .. that's Karren's morning routine ..

Is it? IS IT? No. A crazy direction would be at a right angle to all the known directions. You know, up-down, left-trump, John cena-emo sandman wanna be, forward-Spiro Agno. Not one of those directions would be crazy.

Bruh.

 

[BearlyAlive]

I've got a pretty long list of pet peeves, should I be worried?

-Characters losing their character and turning to background after their character arc is over. Harem novels are pretty much always guilty of this.
-Characters that repeat the same mistakes they should have grown out of. Most if not all weak-willed and/or Shounen protagonists. "Trusting obvious villains that totally will betray us isn't bad! It's my conviction that they can be good people!" *pukes*
-Idealistic characters that don't get reality checked by their story. Especially bad if the story twists and turns to their convenience, so they're always right.
-Sympathetic villains. Why does every villain nowadays need to be redeemable? Why can't we have more glorious bastards we love to hate? They always spoil the mood by having a tragic backstory they need to spill just when things are getting good.
-Using convoluted words or writing to sound smarter. Psst, it doesn't work, it only makes you sound pretentious.
-Finishing off a threat offscreen. It's alright if the said threat is replaced by another, but just killing off a danger without at least giving a POV on how or why it happened? Lazy deus ex machina.
-No friction in a group of characters that are together for their own reasons. Makes no sense. Where there's people there's conflict, especially in a group that's together for their own interest.

 

[Deleted member 113259]

Characters losing their character and turning to background after their character arc is over. Harem novels are pretty much always guilty of this.

Bold of you to assume they even get that.

 

[ElijahRyne]

"No, you gave me $1000 without my consent!"

Removing someone’s disability may not be inherently positive, for example what counts as a disability? Does autism count? If so do you have to change that person’s entire personality before they are ‘cured’? Does someone born with irregular sex organs count? Do you preform surgery on the baby just to make them more ‘normal’? Does someone missing an arm count? What if they really like their prosthetic and/or they don’t want to spend 2 years learning how to use said arm?

It is not like people with a disability need a cure, some might want it but others might not. If some alien randomly gave you four arms because they thought you were disabled you would probably be pissed and have to relearn everything, however if they asked beforehand and you were given time to seriously think over and prepare you might agree. This is a similar concept.

 

[Deleted member 113259]

Removing someone’s disability may not be inherently positive, for example what counts as a disability? Does autism count? If so do you have to change that person’s entire personality before they are ‘cured’? Does someone born with irregular sex organs count? Do you preform surgery on the baby just to make them more ‘normal’? Does someone missing an arm count? What if they really like their prosthetic and/or they don’t want to spend 2 years learning how to use said arm?

It is not like people with a disability need a cure, some might want it but others might not. If some alien randomly gave you four arms because they thought you were disabled you would probably be pissed, however if they asked beforehand and you were given time to seriously think over and prepare you might agree. This is a similar concept.

So autism and nonharmful irregularities are what you're referring to. In that case is it safe to assume you have no problems with curing the blind without their consent?

 

[ElijahRyne]

So autism and nonharmful irregularities are what you're referring to. In that case is it safe to assume you have no problems with curing the blind without their consent?

No ask them first, being blind is something they have probably lived with their entire life not giving them the agency to choose is the same as me deciding that Jim isn’t worthy of having children and then preventing him. If the blind person wants to see, then they will tell you.

 

[Deleted member 113259]

No ask them first, being blind is something they have probably lived with their entire life not giving them the agency to choose is the same as me deciding that Jim isn’t worthy of having children and then preventing him. If the blind person wants to see, then they will tell you.

1. No it isn't you've given the blind man the ability to see. That's giving him an option not taking it away. It would be more accurate if Jim was infertile and you made him fertile.

2. The reason you were disagreeing was because it's not always a benefit to cure a disability so in what way could being blind possibly be more beneficial than being able to see?

 

[ElijahRyne]

1. No it isn't you've given the blind man the ability to see. That's giving him an option not taking it away. It would be more accurate if Jim was infertile and you made him fertile.

2. The reason you were disagreeing was because it's not always a benefit to cure a disability so in what way could being blind possibly be more beneficial than being able to see?

IDK ask a blind person, all I know is not giving them the agency to choose is the same as someone removing your agency to choose what happens to your body. It is not as if people have to be perfect machines for them to be content with life. If someone were to magically cure my asthma without notifying me, sure I would be able to breathe easier, but what gives that person the right to violate my body? If they asked me before hand and described what the cure entailed then I might agree, but violating someone’s agency is horrible.

 

[StaleRice]

Overpowered MCs that they can 1v1 Frieza after Chapter 1

OP characters are only bad 99% of the time. Its about figuring out how to add stakes and actual intrigue and tension despite that OP-ness

Like in Overlord, you get to know weaker characters, and then watch the OP characters pass through like a storm praying they dont kill your new favorite adventuring party/ soldier girl/ a persistent character that you know well can die any moment but dont want them to.

The alleged protagonist is the source of tension and crisis, so, basically, the real antagonist in the story. This can work even if the OP MC is a "good person", because even a saint will sometimes need to maim or kill enemies who, for example, became bandits because their village burned down or their family is starving at home. But OPEEEMCEE doesn't know that, or even if he does, he can't do anything about it. That kind of drama can be really fun

OR the tension and stakes might have to do with interpersonal relationships, fate, events on a scale the strongest person can't reach, etc. Friends, loved ones or relatives being threatened somewhere the protag can't see or get to. That kind of thing.


The reason this trope is a marker of terrible writing is, its not used correctly.

 

[bulmabriefs144]

I think what you are looking at here is a straw man.


And I hate it too. It doesn't even have to be gay vs religious. Though that is a very common one. Golden compass is another example. An author makes groups of people who hold to a faith seem homogeneous and portrays them in as bad of light as possible.

This can go the other way around too. Like I just read a book where people north of the wall in Brittan are barbarians. They break treaties, raid town take slaves. Obviously, their pagan beliefs are to blame for them being so uncivilized right?

This is a poor way to create an antagonist. I think @TheEldritchGod once said your protagonist can only be as good as the antagonist. So relying on straw men types of villains limits a story.

Well there was straw man, yes. I'm currently writing a superhero story and basically all the villains are allegorical, so they may veer close to straw men. But what bugs me more was the sort of "let's ignore the real troubling target, and gripe about the target that probably won't push back if we insult them." It wasn't so much the easy target status as that the IRL equivalent was not really a threat. Sort of the equivalent of complaining about one's parents (who bend over backwards, yet the MC can't cope with a minor point), but their gf who accepts that minor point physically or otherwise abuses them. Complete lack of perspective bugs the hell out of me.

The other thing was the contrived circumstances.

What makes a good antagonist? One that makes the team good seem like the bad guy. Yeah, they may be murderers but if the protagonist tribe has blood on their hands too then who really has the moral high ground?

This is an important point, and hard to work into the story. But I agree that it's necessary. What is a good place to insert this villain is as a late story villain, so that way, the audience roots for the character and then is suddenly thrown into doubt when they're like "Holy crap, I've been rooting for the wrong person all along!" The problem is avoiding the Mary Sue pitfall, where you've already set a character up as someone who can do no wrong.

In the case of the Abrahamic God, the answer is simple. He offered you paradise. You said, 'I want to know what good and evil is.' In other words, you wanted to make your own choices. You wanted free will. Since he is, you know, God, he knows what as close to a perfect existence is as you can get. Anything less than what he laid out for you, would be, by definition, not perfect.

Why would he help with X and not go all the way to give you paradise?

Sometimes "paradise" really isn't, and choices are important. At least one person mentioned this was a setup.

Which I guess leads to a big peeve. When most readers of a text don't allow alternate interpretation of the text, and there's an orthodoxy. This has nothing to do with the author, and everything to do with people taking text at face value.

 

[HelloHound]

amnesia plots, the love interest always being the knight on the horse or being the damsel in distress forever, harem stories where the gals are just cardboard cutouts in terms of personality, big blocks of text with no indentation or breaks, Mary sue/Gary stu, unnecessarily perverted protagonist being a fuckin creep, etc.
I'm awfully picky for someone who reads like this

 

[bulmabriefs144]

I get the others, but why amnesia stuff?

 

[laccoff_mawning]

If you want free will, then it's hands-off. You can't interfere a little bit, even in just this ONE CASE, and still let people have free will. You can't have it both ways. You can have perfection or free will. It is one or the other, not both. A perfect society and free will cannot co-exist. (This argument holds true, regardless or not He exists, for those of you who don't believe.)

Indeed, this is (sort-of) the correct answer to the omnibenevolent-omnipotent argument.

He can and had intervened- such as raising people from the dead, causing the rotation of the earth to stop for a day while Israelites wage war, and is legally entitled to because he still owns the universe.
But he cannot mind-control or influence our choices, leading to the only way to get rid of evil being the end judgement. That's somewhat offtopic, but I enjoyed reading the answer, so I thought I'd comment on it :3.

Back on the original topic, I have many hates. The first being harem. There just isn't a point in having multiple female leads with one male lead when you could just write two seperate couples. Or almost anything else. For romance, Quality >> Quantity

Stemming of from that, my second hate would be a moral-less world. I don't mean immoral characters, or an immoral world, but when morality isn't factored into anything at all. Everyone just acts for the sake of "the strong eating the weak" or something.

 

[Drytron]

Stemming of from that, my second hate would be a moral-less world. I don't mean immoral characters, or an immoral world, but when morality isn't factored into anything at all. Everyone just acts for the sake of "the strong eating the weak" or something.

This + a reincarnated/transmigrated mc who forced the world to change by enforcing our world version of morality is an instant drop for me.