Canon elements you hate to work with

DONT SPEAK POORLY OF OUR NAKAMA!

LOL JOKE.

But seriously the word Nakama should die.

Well, not exactly Canon, more like Fanon, but....

I think almost everyone here, at some point, meets the hurdle of Shipping. Which, in itself, isn't that bad, but when Shipping Wars and Die for Our Ship Madness Mantra begun to be chanted....

For example, NanoFate And YuunoHa. Now, thankfully, most fans already simmer down. Mostly.

ChroNoha 4 lyfe, yo.

Nanoha/Everyone is the way to go.

She can take it.

While I do have ships, I can't work them into fanfiction to save my life without it feeling completely out of place. This even happens with ships I'm familiar with such as Candace and Jeremy and Arnold and Helga.

Ironically, if romantic relationships between my original characters (or original fan characters) come up somewhere, I don't have much trouble.

Lindy/Zafira 4 lyfe.

I'd like time travel's wonky logic to at least be explained by saying 'It's worse than quantum mechanics, and nobody is 100% sure how it fully works, so be careful'.

Tight timelines and 'what-ifs' are also hard, as you need to juggle the impact of a small change on every living thing. Then again, that's part of the fun- but it can be cumbersome.

Wait, what's wrong with the True Companions trope again?

I don't think there's anything with the trope itself, but with how Japanese pop entertainment treats it most of the time; less as actual True Companions and more as The Hero and his Cheerleader Squad.

edited 26th Oct '15 1:34:24 PM by NapoleonDeCheese

I rather like how One Piece, and to a certain extent Fairy Tail, handle it. Have each member of the True Companions deal with the Quirky Miniboss Squad while The Hero, who tends to be the strongest aside from FT were the author changes that on a whim, deals with the Big Bad.

I also always liked how Naruto vs Pain also played out, sure Naruto was the only one who could fight Pain while the only other people could do that were either exhausted keeping everyone from dying or out of the village, but it was thanks to everyone else gathering data that Naruto didn't have a harder time.

The final fight in FMAB was also good.

Though I concede there is a paradox in manga where they present 'You must work with the group' but also its good to have a one on one fight.

edited 26th Oct '15 2:11:06 PM by Archivist10

Specific to Zelda: Twilight Princess, the fact that there are so many missing moms. Ilia, Luda, Ashei, Agitha, Prince Ralis, even Midna are all missing mothers/both parents, and it's incredibly awkward trying to work with that since I want to keep the majority of the lore intact (even though I threw all that to the wind to justify my OC...) but everyone seems to have a tragic background of their mother passing away or disappearing or some such.

For all its core female characters, Zelda sure does like to stuff the minor ones in the fridge...

The Three Goddesses have mother issues and unconsciously take it out on the world?

edited 27th Oct '15 6:55:51 PM by 32ndfreeze

It's odd, but a lack of canon female characters a lot has made it where I rarely make a male OC. Like, if I need a receptionist for characters to deal with, it's going to be female. Bus driver? Female. I just default to female characters.

Lack of female characters is a problem, along with misogyny in the original. Lot R has this problem a lot. I tend to either sweep it under the carpet or blatantly disregard it in fanfic.

And then there's the movies, Lot R and Hobbit. Where the dwarves get to act like people for about 90% of the time, but have to play the role of stupid comic relief sidekick the other 10%. I ignore that, too.

If an author wants me to stay close to their canon, they have to do it well. If they don't that's their problem. Tolkien and C.S.Lewis are more or less the only authors I have voluntarily read and for whose works I even feel the need to change canon.

Bad portrayal of a Native American character? Scrap it, do research and do it better. I guarantee you, there will be people who want to read that.

Hella. Sometimes it can be difficult to find good research, but the effort is always fun at minimum. And worldbuilding can be so fun.

Also, I do like to clean up technobabble. I'm a scientist by trade, so if I can make a better sounding justification, I will.

As someone who intends on writing Old World Of Darkness fanfiction, the metaplot is extremely problematic. I usually have to end up declaring a mild AU situation and simply remove it completely but keep all the other canon material the same.

Les Mis continuity in fanfic is a mess of book continuity, film continuity, musical continuity, anime continuity, fanon (oh god, the fanon is so deeply enmired in the fandom some people won't enter the fandom because they have no idea what's happening), historical extrapolation and headcanons. I love the fandom, and I write for it sometimes, but figuring out what to include and what not to is a pain due to the multiple incarnations and translations, especially since many of the iconic lines from the book have radically different interpretations. The fanon is so heavily embedded in the fanfic I didn't realise Javert doesn't actually have a horse called Gymont somewhere in the 1200-odd pages of the brick until I saw a picture of the —get this— tweet by Russell Crowe about the name of his horse in the film that brought the character of Gymont into fandom. There's also the problem of sorting out backstories for the characters, especially if you're concerned primarily with Les Amis, as their backstories are for the most part vague enough that we don't know the first names of the majority of them, and getting the extremely complicated characterisation of the characters right—if there was one thing Hugo could do, it's create well-rounded characters. It's fun, and interesting (especially the research), but also tedious.

As TL;DR for the above, vague backstory of vagueness, complicated characterisation, Lots And Lots Of Characters (many of which have beguiling backstories/actions/etc.), very specific temporal setting, a very nerdy, argumentative fan base and the denseness of fanon can cause problems for novice fic writers.

When writing a fairly canon Dragon Ball fic, there's annoying shit like relative power levels and power scaling and techniques being useless that's just super annoying and rigid and I really wish I could just ignore sometimes.

I think for me it's when working with Pokemon, and specifically the Mon. It's tough, because Speaks Fluent Animal (in this case fluent Pokemon?) is so common in the fan works now, especially when it's only the main character, that having that topic and not making it seem as a cop out is hard. Yet I find that I have trouble making the 'Mon have a personality without dialogue to present it. After all, there's only so many adverbs in the world.

Also is sorta lowers the coolness value of the character I made right after Pokemon Movie 8 hit english speaking countries, whom used Aura to speak to Mons.

For me, I just forego having trainers being around and have my Pokemon stories take place in the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon setting or one similar to that one. While I do write-but-mostly-draw one other humans-and-Pokemon series of fanfics, the humans being able to talk to them there is justified because usually they are talking to Legendaries (the central Pokemon to the story) or other Pokemon capable of telepathy or speaking.

The constant horse puns in MLP's toponymy is a very deep source of Narm in world-building.

I love this thread, its so amazing.