Somebody stop me...
Jun. 6th, 2005 02:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trinityvixen'Cause I'm at it again. Whenever I can't get into my writing groove, I tend to take it out on people who should have stopped writing before they got started. This time, it was someone who picked at two pet peeves of mine: one, she reposted a fanfic to a mailing list because she didn't get any reviews. Two, she said she'd stop writing if no one reviewed.
I fucking hate threats like that. Newsflash, no-talent asswipe? You suck. Your writing made me want to disgorge my stomach virtually of especially vile and volatile components onto the heaping pile of your story and thus improve its foul odor. The writing wasn't the unreadibly ungrammatical or misspelled stuff I reviewed last time I went out for typewritten tongue-lashing, but I think that made it worse as I could see someone with a grasp of the English language and the concept of sentence construction turn out something as trite and hackneyed as the plots of Smallville for the last three seasons (oh yes, I went there).
Worse, she has a fucking Mary Sue in the story and the story itself? It's a retelling of Blade: Trinity. Keep in mind, I like Blade: Trinity; I even like retellings of it in novelization form (the better to linger over scenes of shirtless Ryan Reynolds, of course). Instead of retelling, however, and just inserting her squitty-shitty little Mary Sue, she retells it just slightly off to make it clear that a) she hasn't watched the film recently or more than once, b) she hasn't looked up character names on the fucking IMDB, and c) that she's close enough without succeeding to copying the plot so that it looks even more like she's copying the plot but trying to pass it off as her own. Cue me groaning here.
So, I let her have it. Choice selections of my review include:
--"....I think you mean to say that the flames were reflected in his sunglasses. That’s fine. However, I doubt it would take a bonfire on the scale of an explosion for one to tell that he was wearing sunglasses in the first place...."
--"You cannot have a style for killing that can be seen when you’re NOT doing it. "
--"This is the least painful paragraph so far, and that includes the one-sentence paragraph I critiqued earlier. "
--" 'Knowing the city well’ doesn’t do jack for turning your car 180 degrees and jumping into pursuit in the middle of a freeway."
THEN THE MARY SUE ENTERED THE PICTURE...
--"Warning Sign #1 with a bullet: you’ve just written the longest paragraph so far devoted ENTIRELY to a description of this character’s body, wardrobe, and sexual appeal, right on down to her strange hi-lites. Warning Sign #2: she’s only just appeared and already excuted a maneuver that should be physically impossible for a normal human. Warning Sign #3: She carries an unusual weapon that happens to complement the main character’s. Warning Sign #4: She has a ‘history’ with the main character. Warning Sign #5: Main characters behave differently around your Mary Sue.
--"Even with NOS injection, the car won’t ‘leap into the air’ unless it hits a bump."
--"Warning Sign #2, part b: She not only possesses powers greater than that of the average denizen of the fandom, but she possesses powers not previously ever mentioned as existing in that fandom. Elemental of Lust? Who are you kidding? This isn’t Dungeons and Dragons, and I’m not even sure they have an ‘elemental of lust.’ Lust isn’t an element!"
--the line reads: since both had keen eyesight they saw some [sic] struggling to his feet. "Why does that take keen eyesight? People are large and hard to miss. Oh, and he was also JUST IN A CAR CRASH."
--"And since when has Blade taken to STABBING with a sword? Learn some sword etiquette and technique, or at least watch some movies and you’ll see that the type of sword he uses is not predominantly a stabbing weapon—a katana is a slicing weapon. Kill with the tip sure, but nine times out of ten, the art is in the edge. They’re not edge weapons for nothing…"
--"One more time: why does being an embodiment of lust give Karla good eyesight? Why? Explain it to me in a way that isn’t just ‘well because I said so.’ "
--"You do this every paragraph. Something happens, we can tell it’s not good, and then you TELL us that it’s not. Here’s a sample so I can show you what I mean. Suppose you saw this sentence. “A little girl was crossing the street with her beloved puppy when a truck ran it over.” Two guesses as to how the little girl feels about that? You should only need one. However, your type of writing would follow that sentence with an eye-rollingly obvious statement, such as “This made the little girl very sad because her puppy was dead unexpectedly.” Fix this tendency, do it before you write any more. Do not explain every motivation and do not re-explain it in case we missed it. We GOT it, I promise."
--Mary Sue says, "We sure as hell are going to need a place to hide now." As opposed to his normal, where he’s ‘wanted for questioning,’ a ‘suspect for over a hundred murders,’ and thought to be a danger to society? Oh no, before tonight, he was living on Park Slope and all the neighbors though he was such a quiet man."
--"And how quick-thinking does she have to be to know they can’t stay at the scene of a murder with the weapon and the murderer—the already wanted murderer—right there?"
--The other woman was Asian dressed in a white shirt and black jeans, and her clothing was just about as typical as her appearance. "How can clothing be typical without saying what it’s typical of? Does she dress like a typical vampire? So far, all signs point to ‘no’ since vamps dress rather well and expensively to boot. Does she dress like a typical woman? A typical Asian? Typical of WHAT?"
--"Logic problem #24601: you do not get an olive-skin complexion from too much sun. It is an ethnic inheritance. "
--There one could easily see the emotions of boredom and angst there... "Don’t say ‘emotions of boredom or angst’ because not only is that inaccurate—neither boredom or angst are, in fact, emotions—but it would be redundant to say 'emotions' if they were."
--"He's a threat" Dania hissed, "And we have done our best to destroy him but all our efforts have failed. That's why we found you." "Not found. That’s why they sought him, brought him back. The ‘why we found you’ is because they had the right information and dug in the right place. That’s why they found him. Why they went looking for him is to have him come kill Blade. These nitpicks might seem inconsequential, but the word choice makes all the difference."
--"[Blade's] weakness is being caught on tape killing someone? How is that a weakness? If Drake met Blade in a fight, could he use that to win? “Ah-ha! You may have knocked away my weapon, but….I have you on tape killing someone!” Blade staggers back and loses?"
--The more she thought of it, the more she wondered if she would become jealous. "Oh. Dear. God. The more she thought about it, the more she wondered if she would become jealous. Have you any idea how awful that sounds? One, it’s clear she’s already jealous. Two, you do not wonder about adapting to another person with jealousy. Three, you do not become jealous; if you are the envious party, you are most likely unaware of it creeping into you until you are good and firmly covetous of everything this other person has. Since ‘Dania’ is already jealous, this might be seen as an ironical statement, meant to make us laugh and to show her in denial. Well, it failed. You have to be more exaggerated to convey the irony. If it’s too understated, it just appears as weak writing, and nothing that preceded suggests you’ve a talent for the former instead of the latter.
Meeee-owwwww!!! ::hisses, brandishes claws::
I do feel better though. Hopefully, she'll get back to me with an angry letter that I can make fun of here, too. It's less fun when they apologize for sucking like a black hole on speed....
I fucking hate threats like that. Newsflash, no-talent asswipe? You suck. Your writing made me want to disgorge my stomach virtually of especially vile and volatile components onto the heaping pile of your story and thus improve its foul odor. The writing wasn't the unreadibly ungrammatical or misspelled stuff I reviewed last time I went out for typewritten tongue-lashing, but I think that made it worse as I could see someone with a grasp of the English language and the concept of sentence construction turn out something as trite and hackneyed as the plots of Smallville for the last three seasons (oh yes, I went there).
Worse, she has a fucking Mary Sue in the story and the story itself? It's a retelling of Blade: Trinity. Keep in mind, I like Blade: Trinity; I even like retellings of it in novelization form (the better to linger over scenes of shirtless Ryan Reynolds, of course). Instead of retelling, however, and just inserting her squitty-shitty little Mary Sue, she retells it just slightly off to make it clear that a) she hasn't watched the film recently or more than once, b) she hasn't looked up character names on the fucking IMDB, and c) that she's close enough without succeeding to copying the plot so that it looks even more like she's copying the plot but trying to pass it off as her own. Cue me groaning here.
So, I let her have it. Choice selections of my review include:
--"....I think you mean to say that the flames were reflected in his sunglasses. That’s fine. However, I doubt it would take a bonfire on the scale of an explosion for one to tell that he was wearing sunglasses in the first place...."
--"You cannot have a style for killing that can be seen when you’re NOT doing it. "
--"This is the least painful paragraph so far, and that includes the one-sentence paragraph I critiqued earlier. "
--" 'Knowing the city well’ doesn’t do jack for turning your car 180 degrees and jumping into pursuit in the middle of a freeway."
THEN THE MARY SUE ENTERED THE PICTURE...
--"Warning Sign #1 with a bullet: you’ve just written the longest paragraph so far devoted ENTIRELY to a description of this character’s body, wardrobe, and sexual appeal, right on down to her strange hi-lites. Warning Sign #2: she’s only just appeared and already excuted a maneuver that should be physically impossible for a normal human. Warning Sign #3: She carries an unusual weapon that happens to complement the main character’s. Warning Sign #4: She has a ‘history’ with the main character. Warning Sign #5: Main characters behave differently around your Mary Sue.
--"Even with NOS injection, the car won’t ‘leap into the air’ unless it hits a bump."
--"Warning Sign #2, part b: She not only possesses powers greater than that of the average denizen of the fandom, but she possesses powers not previously ever mentioned as existing in that fandom. Elemental of Lust? Who are you kidding? This isn’t Dungeons and Dragons, and I’m not even sure they have an ‘elemental of lust.’ Lust isn’t an element!"
--the line reads: since both had keen eyesight they saw some [sic] struggling to his feet. "Why does that take keen eyesight? People are large and hard to miss. Oh, and he was also JUST IN A CAR CRASH."
--"And since when has Blade taken to STABBING with a sword? Learn some sword etiquette and technique, or at least watch some movies and you’ll see that the type of sword he uses is not predominantly a stabbing weapon—a katana is a slicing weapon. Kill with the tip sure, but nine times out of ten, the art is in the edge. They’re not edge weapons for nothing…"
--"One more time: why does being an embodiment of lust give Karla good eyesight? Why? Explain it to me in a way that isn’t just ‘well because I said so.’ "
--"You do this every paragraph. Something happens, we can tell it’s not good, and then you TELL us that it’s not. Here’s a sample so I can show you what I mean. Suppose you saw this sentence. “A little girl was crossing the street with her beloved puppy when a truck ran it over.” Two guesses as to how the little girl feels about that? You should only need one. However, your type of writing would follow that sentence with an eye-rollingly obvious statement, such as “This made the little girl very sad because her puppy was dead unexpectedly.” Fix this tendency, do it before you write any more. Do not explain every motivation and do not re-explain it in case we missed it. We GOT it, I promise."
--Mary Sue says, "We sure as hell are going to need a place to hide now." As opposed to his normal, where he’s ‘wanted for questioning,’ a ‘suspect for over a hundred murders,’ and thought to be a danger to society? Oh no, before tonight, he was living on Park Slope and all the neighbors though he was such a quiet man."
--"And how quick-thinking does she have to be to know they can’t stay at the scene of a murder with the weapon and the murderer—the already wanted murderer—right there?"
--The other woman was Asian dressed in a white shirt and black jeans, and her clothing was just about as typical as her appearance. "How can clothing be typical without saying what it’s typical of? Does she dress like a typical vampire? So far, all signs point to ‘no’ since vamps dress rather well and expensively to boot. Does she dress like a typical woman? A typical Asian? Typical of WHAT?"
--"Logic problem #24601: you do not get an olive-skin complexion from too much sun. It is an ethnic inheritance. "
--There one could easily see the emotions of boredom and angst there... "Don’t say ‘emotions of boredom or angst’ because not only is that inaccurate—neither boredom or angst are, in fact, emotions—but it would be redundant to say 'emotions' if they were."
--"He's a threat" Dania hissed, "And we have done our best to destroy him but all our efforts have failed. That's why we found you." "Not found. That’s why they sought him, brought him back. The ‘why we found you’ is because they had the right information and dug in the right place. That’s why they found him. Why they went looking for him is to have him come kill Blade. These nitpicks might seem inconsequential, but the word choice makes all the difference."
--"[Blade's] weakness is being caught on tape killing someone? How is that a weakness? If Drake met Blade in a fight, could he use that to win? “Ah-ha! You may have knocked away my weapon, but….I have you on tape killing someone!” Blade staggers back and loses?"
--The more she thought of it, the more she wondered if she would become jealous. "Oh. Dear. God. The more she thought about it, the more she wondered if she would become jealous. Have you any idea how awful that sounds? One, it’s clear she’s already jealous. Two, you do not wonder about adapting to another person with jealousy. Three, you do not become jealous; if you are the envious party, you are most likely unaware of it creeping into you until you are good and firmly covetous of everything this other person has. Since ‘Dania’ is already jealous, this might be seen as an ironical statement, meant to make us laugh and to show her in denial. Well, it failed. You have to be more exaggerated to convey the irony. If it’s too understated, it just appears as weak writing, and nothing that preceded suggests you’ve a talent for the former instead of the latter.
Meeee-owwwww!!! ::hisses, brandishes claws::
I do feel better though. Hopefully, she'll get back to me with an angry letter that I can make fun of here, too. It's less fun when they apologize for sucking like a black hole on speed....
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
No, lust is not an element...
Date: 2005-06-06 07:00 pm (UTC)I'm exhausted/bored out of my skull. Feel free to put me outta my misery. *hands you a gun*
no subject
Date: 2005-06-06 07:01 pm (UTC)I heard that you had an SW Trivial Pursuit showdown WITHOUT ME! *growls threateningly* There must be a rematch so that I can show my prowess. I also heard you lost badly.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-06 08:43 pm (UTC)Yeah, I did. We'll definitely have a rematch, promise no Ep 1 cards allowed. I lost because I was playing BSD's freaky obsessive friend and Pooch who's read more of the books and shit than I have that take care of all the niggling details like how many S-foils something something are on an X-Wing. Eh? Also, whenever it came to piece questions, I got like really awful questions.
Without looking, what's Han Solo's first line in The Empire Strikes Back? I will allow that you are a bigger fan if you know off the top of your head. But yes, time for me to bone up on the original trilogy. Happily, I can!
no subject
Date: 2005-06-06 09:01 pm (UTC)Luke says, "Echo 3 to Echo 7. Han, old buddy, do you read me?"
Han says something like, "There's not enough life on this ice cube to fill a space cruiser." But I'm sure he says something before that. And I didn't get the Ralph McQuarrie question, either (Pooch quizzed me when I got home), though I knew the name as soon as I heard it.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-06 09:03 pm (UTC)Crap! I knew there was a pointless expository line first. Well, I got his second line. Does he really say "What's up?" And the S-foils on the X-wing are the wings. I don't know if there are 2 or 4 though. ("Lock S-foils in attack position!")
no subject
Date: 2005-06-06 07:21 pm (UTC)Also, you should join one of those bad-fic mocking lj communites. I think there's one called mary_sues_suck.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-06 08:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-06 10:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-07 12:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-07 04:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-06 07:48 pm (UTC)Unless someone else reviewed her first, in which case you performed a valuable public service. No way can she read the computer screen through the tears streaming from her eyes, nor can she type with her fingers trembling from rage and frustration. If she can even bear to sit at her desk ever again.
Also, second season Smallville wasn't that bad.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-06 08:45 pm (UTC)Second Season wasn't that bad, you're right. But it wasn't that good neither.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-08 03:55 am (UTC)somebody needs a hug.
or prozac.
*hands dayle teddy bear peace offering*
look at the nice teddy bear that does not write bad bad things....