All the Queen's Bitches

[keiramarcos]

So, I think my position on nitpicking is pretty well known. I certainly don't tolerate it with any kind of good grace or manners and I've been told by several asshats that it makes me "ungrateful and horrible". Whatever. That's not actually the whole point of this post... it's this:

Did you know that I've received emails from FIVE different authors since January telling me that they actually stopped posting their fan fiction on the Internet because of nitpickers?

The thing is that nitpickers don't piss me off anymore. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that my "give a damn" on the subject of nitpicking is broken. I mean my "give a damn" had a great fall and all the queen's bitches don't stand a chance in hell of putting it back together again. Just so we're clear. Right. Moving on.

Maybe I'm using the wrong term here because I don't mean people, who out of the good nature of their hearts, point out typos when they are asked for. I mean people who offer unwanted critique. I mean people who think if you don't run over to your site and correct the problem they had with your fic that you will forever be viewed as ungrateful and cruel and a no-good, horrible bitch.

It's just sad, really, that these asshats actually run people out of the fandom with their crap. Really sad. Fandom is supposed to be fun, right?

Comments

[quadratur.livejournal.com]

I have some weird relationship with nitpicking. Typos and such don't bother me, especially not when it comes to fanfic. Okay, sometimes I feel tempted to offer my help as a beta-reader but most of the time I don't. If the story as a whole is good I can deal with some typos. None of us are perfect and in the end fanfic is a hobby for the writers and something we all get for free. I care much more when it is a professional publication, but even there I can forgive typos.

Same when it comes to interpretations of characters or events and such things. Every writer has their own individual interpretation of such things and to some extend that is what fanfiction is about. Variations of a theme. Why should I make myself and someone else miserable just because I think character X should twitch left instead of right. The writers interpretation is as valid as my own and might even offer me new insights.

The stuff that really bothers me though is sloppy or non-existing research, especially when it involves other countries/cultures and languages. It sometimes feels like a slap in the face. Fandom is international and it shouldn't be that hard to find someone willing to translate a few sentences into another language or to explain that there are no skyscrapers in area X or that there are no longer any border patrols between Germany and France.

But I no longer say anything. In the past I occasionally offered my help in a PM or e-mail and was either ignored or slapped down. Now I no longer bother to read these writers. There are enough other good writers around who try to do research or ask for help.

And like you I have seen numerous writers be driven out of fandom by these nitpickers who want things in one specific way, forgetting that fanfiction is a hobby done out of joy and love. I always want to tell these readers: Try to imagine what fandom would be like if all writers (and artists) had enough and stopped writing, or stopped sharing their writing?

Ungrateful bunch.

[ladymina.livejournal.com]

Word, sloppy research can sometimes put me off a story.
Though mainly when the sloppy writer boasts how much research they did on that country!
Like "I did weeks of research on getting the stuff in England right and making it feel English"
- Yeah, no, England does not use the Euro, they use the Pound, you still drive on the left side of the road, and the Autobahn as a kind of legal racing grounds is not in England but in Germany! Oh yeah and the legal drinking age is not 21.

I don't care about some mistakes like that usually, because I can never write totally correct US settings because I have never really experienced that culture, but making a big deal about having researched a country for your fic and then using the wrong currency ... that is the point where it gets absurd.- And I stop reading.

I usually only leave cc when the Author asks for it.

What gets me too though, is when people misspell character names regularly and have similar named characters that start to meld together.
One of my first fandoms was Tamora Pierce - Song of the Lioness Series, they have a character called Roald and one called Raoul, and someone mixed those up every third paragraph into something that could have been both - it makes getting a story very hard when Roald is the King of the country and Raoul is a fellow of the heroine who is a mere noble boy, (page, squire, knight) who hates having to attend to balls and the like and has no hand for politics. It would make quite a difference to the story if the blunder with the diplomatic mission to Tusain came from a green knight or the King.
So that ones I did drop a comment ... a nice one asking her to spellcheck those names to avoid confusion, but still kinda nitpicking.