What are you reading?

[Anastasia]

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/6556187/42/In-Flight

In Flight updated. Just a heads up, y'all.

[Yuthirin]

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/3456907/1/Doctor-in-the-House

Doctor Who/House crossover.  Redo of the (first) Christmas Invasion.  This good enough for you? ;)

Gave it a read. My impressions are as follows, in no particular order. Spoiler tags because long post is long.

NOTE: None of this criticism is directed at you. The fic is the target here, and my comments will be e-mailed to the author.

Spoiler: ShowHide

Summary: The tenth Doctor (played by the delicious David Tennant) has arrived but, due to a well intentioned time machine, will not be being nursed back to health in a London flat by Jackie Tylor. If House gets a hold of him though, he might be less grateful for this fact.

Oh dear.

"Of all the times for the tardis to mess up, it would be now."

Excusable for a fan of solely the series revival.

"We're in the car park of the Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. Wherever that is." She shrugged with one shoulder, glancing round her. "Though by the looks of those cars I reckon we're on earth, and 'bout the right century, at least."

I consider myself nitpicky, but you've gotta capitalize the name of the planet you're on.

Doctor Gregory House's fingers drummed a distracted tattoo on the polished wooden handle of his cane. He stood perfectly still, an immovable rock amidst the clamour of the overcrowded waiting area, gazing thoughtfully after the splash of gold hair he'd glimpsed through the slowly decreasing pendulum swings of the clinic doors. A pensive frown cut deep creases into hollow, heavily stubbled cheeks. His eyes narrowed slightly in thought as he studiously ignored the short, stocky woman in front of him. This was quite a feat considering the fact that she was waving a bawling, red faced chubby child dressed in a twee overlarge Santa suit in front of his face. His distraction was put on hold with a wince as the semi-hysterical mother's demands became shrill to the point of physical discomfort. His arctic blue eyes focused on her with an almost audible snap.

Getting the feeling that this is written by a woman, and she likes this character too.

* Yuthirin checks author's name.

Yup.

Wilson leaned back in his chair, a frown creasing the smooth lines of his boyishly handsome face.

See, I hate this type of writing. It's obvious to me so far that the author idolizes three of the four main characters set before us so far. Rose got barely a description of her hair  and grubby cheek. House got a giant blocky paragraph. Tennant was called delicious. I frown on this type of worship in prose. It speaks of a general lack of self-control and an inability to write in such a way that you make people love your characters. Generally speaking, you probably already like the characters if you're reading the fanfic but you can't just assume that. This type of behavior in writing isn't acceptable from either gender.

Probably whilst he was failing to get off with a nurse!"

House leaned forward conspiratorially, looking both ways in exaggerated secrecy. "Shhh, be werry werry qwiet! I'm hunting blondes!" he whispered in an exaggerated lisp.

House doesn't talk or act like that. Let's try to stay in canon here.

End chapter two, and that was not an in depth criticism. Just a few glaring points. She overuses the word 'cos.' I define 'overuse' in this as using it anywhere outside of quotations. It has no business being in a descriptive paragraph, even inside parentheses. Also, the random spots of verbosity just really confused me.

[Jason_Miao]

Arg, the same bit of fanon that Aon's flagship DotE was meant to sell:

Spoiler: ShowHide

That the Amazon Law concerning the kiss of Death/Marriage was 'just a test for outsiders'.  Shampoo knowing the cost and choosing to break the law for Ranma is significantly more sympathetic than, "Lawlz, I was just lying to your face to gauge your worth."
It's a bit too apologist, I think.

Did that ever attain the status of fanon?  I always just thought it was one of those devices that lazy people who dislike character flaws wave around to make them go away, but not something that anyone actually believed.

[Brian]

I think in a technical sense it could be fanon, but I don't know if there are quantitative limits we have to reach.  I do know that Aon always used it, and I believe I have seen it in a few other fics.

[Brian]

Cell Saga updated, and there's now a discussion thread about it.

[Anastasia]

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/9044833/16/My-Love-s-Flame

My Love's Flame updated. It's not a huge chapter, but just a warm up now that he's back from his other fic.

[Dracos]

Bitch,bitch,bitch  :P

Power of Gossiping...

Why don't we talk about Delende Est?  http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5511855/1/Delenda-Est Updated the other day, Now with 100 percent more lecturing.

[Yuthirin]

It's trying to end on a high note. I think the author is wrapping things up WAY too fast.

[Dracos]

Absolutely true.  The rate of issues getting resolved has accelerated dramatically and resulted in a very pass over the lines situation.

[Yuthirin]

The fact that some characters are rapidly LEAPING to accurate conclusions that I cannot really fathom how they got to is really getting under my skin.

[Dracos]

Would be this the Potters?

Because the Potters have had problems in that areas since Psychic Potter was introduced.  Something I jabbed at with them being kind of annoying that way.

[Yuthirin]

YES. Specificaly Lily. "Harry is my son. I don't know how I know, but surely his ability to travel through time confirms it!"

Rose or Sidra or whichever character is psychic today I just really sort of ignore. They're there, but they're OCs. OCs that I don't really care about because I haven't been given sufficient reason to do so.

[Jason_Miao]

[...]They were the first in line at Borders to buy each new novel, like eager cats wiggling before a dangled string, so they could pounce on it and be catty and tell everyone how bad it was.  How terrible, just like ever last page of his last novel, and ever page of each of his other novels, each of which they read twice just to make sure of how badly it was written.

^{[citation needed]}

I've followed the Randland novels since I was eight (though I'm waiting for the last three books to come out in paperback before picking them up), and have never heard of such people.

Really?  I recall running into those people fairly often - not precisely every day, but often enough that "Jordan-haters" stuck in my mind as a distinct clique as opposed to just being an opinion some people had.  No citation, because I don't know how to meaningfully provide a citation to spoken discussions in college over a decade ago (after which, I generally stopped having much time for fiction, reading or writing, for a number of years).

As an aside, since you've been following WoT, do you know of a site that gives an outline of the ones that Jordan finished?  I really liked the two series of Sanderson's that I've read (Well of Ascension and Warbreaker),   I've been split between wanting to read what he's authored for WoT and not wanting to read through most of the earlier books for context.

People complaining about Fic A (or Fic A + Fic B) once other people are upset about an event late in fic Fic B makes sense to me, though; they've always been bitter and hear the upset as validation; they're looking for a big "I told you so!"

Perhaps it's just an alien mindset to me.  We rag on Skysaber a fair amount in here, but I don't think most of us are motivated to seek whatever his latest work is to complain about it.  The sheer effort some go through feels like a labor of love.  Or as you've suggested, hate.  Or per my impression, love-hate.



Back to the point of the thread, more fics I stumbled across:

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/9489910/1/The-Boy-in-the-Park

It's by the same person who wrote that angst fic I posted earlier, but it's WAFF/Slice of life.  So if you hated the earlier story because it was angsty, it might be worth trying this one.  If you hated the earlier story because of the writing itself, this isn't going to be much different at all. 

I do give it some credit because it does try to (slowly) build to a larger story over the each part, and the writer does actually give each character his or her own voice.  Then I have to take some away because the fic slides into this weird harem-manga arc about half way through.  Again, it feels like the writer is trying to experiment by throwing together lots of writing techniques/ideas, some of which work and some of which don't.


http://www.fanfiction.net/s/7125108/1/Impacted-Souls

Ranma/SM xover in a EVA-themed world?  I haven't actually read much of this yet, so no comment for now.

[Yuthirin]

Sanderson actually did a good job with the last 3 WoT books. I quite enjoyed them.

If you're looking for an outline of the WoT series, you're gonna need more than that to understand anything that goes on in the last three books.

You're better off just reading the books. They're good!

[Brian]

Well, if you're set on not reading the older books, there's undoubtedly a wiki.  Though how you'd avoid spoilers on the last books ... I do not know.