Fanfiction Turn-offs: Heroes edition
Jan. 14th, 2008 05:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakAt a guess, as readers of fanfiction, we all have our buttons, not just the good ones which make us love a story immediately but also the ones that take us right out of the narrative. Doesn't always have to be something glaring, or something that would even matter to any other reader, but they exist. I've found some of mine in just about every fandom I was/am in, though it usually takes a while for me to discover what they are. After three quarters of a year of watching Heroes and reading Heroes fanfic, I have come to the conclusion that the following things especially annoy me when they show up in a story:
1) The name thing. Back in the Jossverse, I used to groan over the existence of "Delia"; it's not like BTVS and AtS are short of nicknames, and the woman in question is "Cordelia" or "Cordy". Nobody, but NOBODY on either show ever called her "Delia". So why introduce that in fanfic? In Heroes, the two equivalents of "Delia" are "Pete" if used by someone other than Nathan, and "Nate". Nathan occasionally calls his younger brother "Pete" instead of "Peter"; not all the time, just now and again, and it usually conveys something emotionally. Nobody else does. Which makes Sylar's use of "Pete" so effective a taunt in the climactic revelation scene from "Five Years Gone", as in "But we know better, don't we, Pete". Consequently, if Peter gets called "Pete" all over the place, be it by Claude or someone else, it irritates me. The use of "Nate" irritates me even more, because that's entirely made up and not used by anyone on the show, including Peter. (It also immediately brings Nate Fisher from "Six Feet Under" to mind.) Now everyone has their own fanon - mine is that Nathan would either ignore people calling him "Nate", given them one withering stare and then ignore them, or make a sarcastic remark, depending on who they are - but I think the way Heroes uses pet names, or doesn't, isn't just random. It's menat to signify something about the characters. The fact that Noah Bennet calls his daughter "Claire Bear" is one of the first humanizing touches we get, an early hint that the character who got introduced to us as a sinister force might have a different side. Nobody whom Peter meets calls him "Mr. Petrelli", everyone uses his first name, which fits Mr. Instant Bonding. By contrast, when Matt meets Nathan at the police station in Lizards and reintroduces himself, mentioning they met briefly in Odessa when Nathan retrieved Peter, he calls Nathan "Mr. Petrelli". So does Mohinder. The big exception is Hiro. Hiro gets Nathan's full name during their first encounter, and also gives his full name, but on subsequent meetings, when he doesn't call him "Flying Man", he calls him "Nathan", and Nathan when explicitly seeking out Hiro in Parasite also addresses him as "Hiro". (Whereas he always refers to Mohinder as "Suresh" or "Dr. Suresh", as in "We can talk to Suresh". The only time he uses Mohinder's first name is when it's not Nathan but Sylar in disguise, in "Five Years Gone".) Matt and Nathan graduate to last names without "Mr." or "Detective" pretty soon, and Matt uses "Nathan" for the first time when trying to get Nathan out of his Maury-induced nightmare; Nathan keeps switching between "Matt" and "Parkman" for the rest of volume 2. Kensei/Adam nicknames Hiro "Carp" early on, and keeps using the pet name after their breakup, usually at a point when he wants to convey bitterness and betrayed affection. Bob uses his "call me Bob" opening time and again, and never makes anyone call him "Mr. Bishop"; it's part of his "I'm harmless and forgettable, underestimate me, please!" facade. Oh, and while we're talking Elders, if Kaito, who not only has known Angela for decades but used to have a sexual relationship with her, doesn't call her by a nickname but "Angela", I very much doubt anyone else did. Again, all of this gives us indications about how the characters see each other and themselves, how distant or close they are. So when in a story details like this are randomly ignored, I am anal enough to react badly. Lastly: what is it with Mohinder suddenly calling Matt "Matthew"?
2) That projected knowledge and feeling thing. This I found more in roleplay journals during the course of the last year than in fanfic, but it's in fanfic as well, and again, Heroes doesn't do anything there which other fandoms haven't done as well. To wit: the writer projects her/his feelings about another character on the character she's writing, regardless of how "her" character sees that other person on the show. In Heroes, stories that have Peter hostile towards his mother stumble right against my suspension of disbelief. Post-volume 2 stories are an exception; it's anyone's guess how Peter will react. But if you are setting the story before the season 1 finale, I don't care how much you dislike Angela Petrelli. Peter doesn't. He takes her part, not Nathan's, in the show pilot. His scenes with Angela are free of the tension that characterizes the interaction of Angela and Nathan. He looks neither surprised nor skeptical when she says he's her favourite. Mind you, it also never seems to occur to him to tell her about the flying, or to give her an alternate explanation for the incident that lands him in the hospital than the one Nathan gave, and he clearly disbelieves her "he doesn't love you" in the pilot, so you can make a case for Peter not being as close to Angela as he is to Nathan, or for not believing her every word. But he clearly loves her and has no anger or hostility towards her. (If Peter is hostile, he kind of makes that noticable. Ask Isaac.) What's more, please don't write stories in which Angela forbids Peter to go to nursing school and Nathan supports him. We have canon on that. In "Six Months Ago", Angela makes her "we need a nurse in the family, we have enough lawyers" remark, and Peter, kissing her and saying "thanks, Mom" clearly takes that as approval. Meanwhile, Nathan just as clearly at best doesn't take Peter's job very seriously and at worst sees it as something below his brother. (The shoes are a joke between brothers, but in the car scene when he's talking to Heidi, he sounds clearly annoyed when he says "my brother the nurse, can you believe it?" and in the pilot of course he basically says "the whole dreamer thing is cute, but it's time to get a real job" and offers Peter one at his campaign. Now what I can buy is that Angela, being the arch manipulator she is, wasn't keen on Peter being a nurse, either, and first had Arthur play the bad cop to her good cop and after Arthur's death tried to make Nathan into the bad cop. But if so, she successfully disguised it, and a pre-season 1 finale story has to take that into account. (A post season 1 finale story could have Peter react to the whole Charles Deveaux-Angela conversation he overheard, of course, but then the problem is that during the three months at the Company, he had other things to angst about, and afterwards, he had amnesia. In "Out of Time", when he gets a series of memories about Angela back, they obviously are positive ones.)
3) Admittedly solely based on summaries: Sylar isn't Mr. Hyde, and Gabriel Gray isn't Mr. Jekyll. In other words, the man isn't schizophrenic, and Gabriel isn't an alternate well-meaning but weak personality. We got a good long look at Gabriel pre-Sylar in Six Months Ago. I seem to remember an obsessive type who really, really wanted to be special and had quite a temper when hearing he might not be. So if a story is summarized as portraying some Sylar-Gabriel struggle, I am tempted to suspect the writer has watched AtS' Orpheus once too often.
4) Also based on summaries and a few aborted attempts to read the stories in question: Claire might have a penchant for hurting herself, but at no point is she portrayed as downright suicidal. At her most desperate and guilty-feeling, about the seemingly dead Noah in Truths and Consequences she wishes the Haitian would take her memories away. She doesn't wish herself dead. So I very much doubt that she spent the months between seasons 1 and 2 suicidally pining for Peter and wishing she had died instead. In fact, the phonecall from Four Months Ago portrays her in a rather healthy state of grief, the moving on one. And there is no reason why she shouldn't. Yes, she did the instant bonding with Peter, and he deeply affected her, but the most time she spent with him was a week (between her arrival in New York and election day). This does not make her Juliet in the last act. Note that in her brief conversation with Nathan, she goes from I know why you do this, I miss him, too to talking about the way she can't deal with pretending to be someone else and to figure out who she is, which makes for the main part of the conversation. If you want to write for a female character who is feeling suicidal with grief, go for Maya.
5) Claude: Not Nine In Disguise. Any stories in which Claude behaves towards Peter like Nine did towards Rose instantly make me click away. Those were two different characters, people, and two entirely different relationships. I think around "Unexpected" Claude had reached the point where he thought he maybe didn't hate the kid. But then came kind reminders of the past, and he got out of Dodge post-haste. But even if you postulate he was a firm believer in tough love, had an instant attraction to Peter he cunningly disguised with snark and somehow knew Peter wouldn't die when thrown of a roof, no matter whether or not he'd be able to use a power, we've yet to see any sign he didn't do just what he said he would - get out of town, since he had no intention of either getting himself captured or being there when the big exposion happened. So stories in which Claude really was invisibly body-guarding Peter or angsts about Peter non-stop have the clicking-away-instantly effect on me. And let's not even mention stories in which Claude lectures Nathan on his behaviour towards Peter. See above, re: projecting feelings on characters.
1) The name thing. Back in the Jossverse, I used to groan over the existence of "Delia"; it's not like BTVS and AtS are short of nicknames, and the woman in question is "Cordelia" or "Cordy". Nobody, but NOBODY on either show ever called her "Delia". So why introduce that in fanfic? In Heroes, the two equivalents of "Delia" are "Pete" if used by someone other than Nathan, and "Nate". Nathan occasionally calls his younger brother "Pete" instead of "Peter"; not all the time, just now and again, and it usually conveys something emotionally. Nobody else does. Which makes Sylar's use of "Pete" so effective a taunt in the climactic revelation scene from "Five Years Gone", as in "But we know better, don't we, Pete". Consequently, if Peter gets called "Pete" all over the place, be it by Claude or someone else, it irritates me. The use of "Nate" irritates me even more, because that's entirely made up and not used by anyone on the show, including Peter. (It also immediately brings Nate Fisher from "Six Feet Under" to mind.) Now everyone has their own fanon - mine is that Nathan would either ignore people calling him "Nate", given them one withering stare and then ignore them, or make a sarcastic remark, depending on who they are - but I think the way Heroes uses pet names, or doesn't, isn't just random. It's menat to signify something about the characters. The fact that Noah Bennet calls his daughter "Claire Bear" is one of the first humanizing touches we get, an early hint that the character who got introduced to us as a sinister force might have a different side. Nobody whom Peter meets calls him "Mr. Petrelli", everyone uses his first name, which fits Mr. Instant Bonding. By contrast, when Matt meets Nathan at the police station in Lizards and reintroduces himself, mentioning they met briefly in Odessa when Nathan retrieved Peter, he calls Nathan "Mr. Petrelli". So does Mohinder. The big exception is Hiro. Hiro gets Nathan's full name during their first encounter, and also gives his full name, but on subsequent meetings, when he doesn't call him "Flying Man", he calls him "Nathan", and Nathan when explicitly seeking out Hiro in Parasite also addresses him as "Hiro". (Whereas he always refers to Mohinder as "Suresh" or "Dr. Suresh", as in "We can talk to Suresh". The only time he uses Mohinder's first name is when it's not Nathan but Sylar in disguise, in "Five Years Gone".) Matt and Nathan graduate to last names without "Mr." or "Detective" pretty soon, and Matt uses "Nathan" for the first time when trying to get Nathan out of his Maury-induced nightmare; Nathan keeps switching between "Matt" and "Parkman" for the rest of volume 2. Kensei/Adam nicknames Hiro "Carp" early on, and keeps using the pet name after their breakup, usually at a point when he wants to convey bitterness and betrayed affection. Bob uses his "call me Bob" opening time and again, and never makes anyone call him "Mr. Bishop"; it's part of his "I'm harmless and forgettable, underestimate me, please!" facade. Oh, and while we're talking Elders, if Kaito, who not only has known Angela for decades but used to have a sexual relationship with her, doesn't call her by a nickname but "Angela", I very much doubt anyone else did. Again, all of this gives us indications about how the characters see each other and themselves, how distant or close they are. So when in a story details like this are randomly ignored, I am anal enough to react badly. Lastly: what is it with Mohinder suddenly calling Matt "Matthew"?
2) That projected knowledge and feeling thing. This I found more in roleplay journals during the course of the last year than in fanfic, but it's in fanfic as well, and again, Heroes doesn't do anything there which other fandoms haven't done as well. To wit: the writer projects her/his feelings about another character on the character she's writing, regardless of how "her" character sees that other person on the show. In Heroes, stories that have Peter hostile towards his mother stumble right against my suspension of disbelief. Post-volume 2 stories are an exception; it's anyone's guess how Peter will react. But if you are setting the story before the season 1 finale, I don't care how much you dislike Angela Petrelli. Peter doesn't. He takes her part, not Nathan's, in the show pilot. His scenes with Angela are free of the tension that characterizes the interaction of Angela and Nathan. He looks neither surprised nor skeptical when she says he's her favourite. Mind you, it also never seems to occur to him to tell her about the flying, or to give her an alternate explanation for the incident that lands him in the hospital than the one Nathan gave, and he clearly disbelieves her "he doesn't love you" in the pilot, so you can make a case for Peter not being as close to Angela as he is to Nathan, or for not believing her every word. But he clearly loves her and has no anger or hostility towards her. (If Peter is hostile, he kind of makes that noticable. Ask Isaac.) What's more, please don't write stories in which Angela forbids Peter to go to nursing school and Nathan supports him. We have canon on that. In "Six Months Ago", Angela makes her "we need a nurse in the family, we have enough lawyers" remark, and Peter, kissing her and saying "thanks, Mom" clearly takes that as approval. Meanwhile, Nathan just as clearly at best doesn't take Peter's job very seriously and at worst sees it as something below his brother. (The shoes are a joke between brothers, but in the car scene when he's talking to Heidi, he sounds clearly annoyed when he says "my brother the nurse, can you believe it?" and in the pilot of course he basically says "the whole dreamer thing is cute, but it's time to get a real job" and offers Peter one at his campaign. Now what I can buy is that Angela, being the arch manipulator she is, wasn't keen on Peter being a nurse, either, and first had Arthur play the bad cop to her good cop and after Arthur's death tried to make Nathan into the bad cop. But if so, she successfully disguised it, and a pre-season 1 finale story has to take that into account. (A post season 1 finale story could have Peter react to the whole Charles Deveaux-Angela conversation he overheard, of course, but then the problem is that during the three months at the Company, he had other things to angst about, and afterwards, he had amnesia. In "Out of Time", when he gets a series of memories about Angela back, they obviously are positive ones.)
3) Admittedly solely based on summaries: Sylar isn't Mr. Hyde, and Gabriel Gray isn't Mr. Jekyll. In other words, the man isn't schizophrenic, and Gabriel isn't an alternate well-meaning but weak personality. We got a good long look at Gabriel pre-Sylar in Six Months Ago. I seem to remember an obsessive type who really, really wanted to be special and had quite a temper when hearing he might not be. So if a story is summarized as portraying some Sylar-Gabriel struggle, I am tempted to suspect the writer has watched AtS' Orpheus once too often.
4) Also based on summaries and a few aborted attempts to read the stories in question: Claire might have a penchant for hurting herself, but at no point is she portrayed as downright suicidal. At her most desperate and guilty-feeling, about the seemingly dead Noah in Truths and Consequences she wishes the Haitian would take her memories away. She doesn't wish herself dead. So I very much doubt that she spent the months between seasons 1 and 2 suicidally pining for Peter and wishing she had died instead. In fact, the phonecall from Four Months Ago portrays her in a rather healthy state of grief, the moving on one. And there is no reason why she shouldn't. Yes, she did the instant bonding with Peter, and he deeply affected her, but the most time she spent with him was a week (between her arrival in New York and election day). This does not make her Juliet in the last act. Note that in her brief conversation with Nathan, she goes from I know why you do this, I miss him, too to talking about the way she can't deal with pretending to be someone else and to figure out who she is, which makes for the main part of the conversation. If you want to write for a female character who is feeling suicidal with grief, go for Maya.
5) Claude: Not Nine In Disguise. Any stories in which Claude behaves towards Peter like Nine did towards Rose instantly make me click away. Those were two different characters, people, and two entirely different relationships. I think around "Unexpected" Claude had reached the point where he thought he maybe didn't hate the kid. But then came kind reminders of the past, and he got out of Dodge post-haste. But even if you postulate he was a firm believer in tough love, had an instant attraction to Peter he cunningly disguised with snark and somehow knew Peter wouldn't die when thrown of a roof, no matter whether or not he'd be able to use a power, we've yet to see any sign he didn't do just what he said he would - get out of town, since he had no intention of either getting himself captured or being there when the big exposion happened. So stories in which Claude really was invisibly body-guarding Peter or angsts about Peter non-stop have the clicking-away-instantly effect on me. And let's not even mention stories in which Claude lectures Nathan on his behaviour towards Peter. See above, re: projecting feelings on characters.
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Date: 2008-01-16 08:43 am (UTC)Heh, pretty much. The thing about love saving the world, to a certain extent, was true, since Peter inspired that in Nathan enough to get him to save the world. But Nathan's speech in 0.07% is far more predictive of that than anything Charles said.
And now I'm wondering if 5YG!Peter got the pep talk from Charles. Because the showdown still happened at Kirby Plaza, but it probably happened in the day time (if Hiro's visit to the future in One Giant Leap was still accurate). Claire was around in that time line, though, so she could have run and sent him off into a panic. Hmm, he probably did. Poor guy. He gets a big speech about how he's going to save the world, and then he blows up NYC.
but how people square the idea of him as the lone innocent soul among the Elders with the fact he's on perfectly friendly terms with Angela when discussing their differing views on Plan Blow Up New York and that he didn't deem it necessary to warn Simone about any of this is beyond me.
A very large percentage of fans seem to entirely forget about Simone's existence. Which, given that she's in that episode, is a little strange to me. And the idea that any of the Elders is not completely, boundlessly sketchy is just really bizarre. Being "nice" doesn't mitigate that!
(Also, apparantly saying "Peter is so insecure he's always in his own way" is evil, but saying "you're seeing Nathan through rose-coloured glasses; he never loved you" and "my boys, getting along for a change" is not, despite the fact the former is said to a friend with every appearance of being sincere and the later is said with every appearance of being meant as manipulation.)
The former is also true, the other two are blatant lies. Of course, watching Peter's stricken face while she says that doesn't really help endear her to the audience, but it's really no worse than anything she's ever said to Nathan, or even her thing about covering up Peter's death.
I feel an Angela and Kaito, covering various stages of their affair, quickly coming...
\o/