Just a random guy on the internet who, on occasion, writes semi-decent/horrible stories that more often than not are left for dead.

Just my little rant-space...

Well, to start off with, AUs and fanfics: Personally, I don't get what the point of putting AU is. It's a fanfic. Obviously, it's going to be an alternate universe, elsewise it wouldn't be a fanfic. Thus, though not many authors really realize this, putting "AU" down in your summary is, for all intents and purposes, kind of useless.

Secondly, Naruto clichés: For the love of god, DON'T DO THEM! Don't do that stupid crap where episodes 1 and 3 almost exactly the same, except Naruto somehow finds someway to magically become bad-ass over night and tells off Sakura in an incredibly OOC fashion (I'm not an exceptional NaruSaku fan by any means, but there's no reasonable way in hell that he'd go from being head-over-heals for her to hating her guts), don't do that crap where he's got an "emotional mask", where he acts like a happy-go-lucky moron but is really some kind of emo, just DON'T DO IT! All of it's been over done, over used, it's not fun to read anymore, and it's just a waste of time. Trust me, I've written my fair share of stupid, unoriginal, convoluted stories.

Proper English: I cannot tell you how freaking pissed off I get every time I see a story that looks decent, only for it to end up looking like it was originally written in Czech (no offense to Czechs) and put through Google Translate. Please, proof-read your work or get a beta! You don't see actual book-writers releasing books dAt l00c Lik d1s, why the hell would you do it?

Being dramatic about god knows what: This one's sort of an excuse for me to rant about one thing in particular. A while back, Lord of the land of fire (one of my favorite authors here, though obviously he has his flaws) essentially threw a hissy fit over people insulting some poll he was holding, insulting his story That Look, insulting him, etc. etc. (that's just my opinion, you might think it's a hissy fit, you might not). So, he "abandoned" his story and left it for dead, only to update it 4 days later, with the author's note at the end of that chapter going into a rant about people insulting him, people insulting his poll, etc. etc. Now, if raging over some trolls and abandoning the story, only to pick it up again 4 days later doesn't annoy me (it does), what REALLY gets me off here is the fact that he basically shields himself behind statistics, which quite frankly do not mean a damn thing to me. Is he a popular author? Yes. Is he a good author? Yes. Is he the best writer there ever was? No. Will I miss him, should he decide to just up and leave fanfiction? Not all that much more than Sin of Existence, who was a decent author but not really a major one. Quite honestly, I can think of five authors, right off the top of my head, that I think are far superior to Lotlof. His stories are kind of rushed; not a great amount of detail, and often it feels like "Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!", from one thing straight to another, lacking commas (which, in the case of character dialogue, makes it seem like it's a run-on sentence), and several more things. With the previously mentioned authors, it feels a lot more like they take their time, they add a bunch of very vital details, and all-around their stories come out as very good pieces of work that feel like the authors went through a lot of painstaking effort to get everything exactly right, whereas with Lotlof I often wonder if he simply rushes the day before to get something down and then slaps it on the next day (I actually wouldn't doubt it; he had a whole daily-update thing going on with The Unsealed Vampire for a while, and he's been updating one of his more recent stories, Freezing: Hearts of Ice pretty rapidly). Now, don't get me wrong, his works are very good and he still ranks rather highly in my book, I'm just of the opinion that he shouldn't assume he's over-the-top phenomenal and that all of fanfic dot net would crumble if he stopped writing just because he's got good stats.

The moral of the story is, don't go on a hissy fit and cause drama over what is essentially just some stupid trolls doing what they're best (or worst, depending on how you look at it) at: trolling. And don't hide yourself behind statistics. Just because you're a popular author doesn't mean you're the best. I've got 119 reviews for my Foxes and Vampires story, which is more than most people can claim, does that make me a good author? Hell no, I'm fucking horrible. Most of those reviews are well-deserved flames or those random approving reviews from the people that don't seem to have incredibly high standards (sometimes I wonder if they'd give a good review to a poop-stain...then again, that's essentially what a lot of stories on this site are).

Plot holes: These don't come up quite as often (thank god), and tend to happen more in the canon itself than in fanfiction. The first, possibly most glaring plothole in the entire series (that I know of) is that Naruto apparently failed the academy graduation test twice before the first episode/chapter. This wouldn't be a problem, except that he's the same age as everyone else. Uhm, why? If he failed the test twice, wouldn't that mean he'd have to repeat the year twice, making him two years older than the other characters? Is there something I'm missing here?

On top of that, in the exact same episode, Mizuki tells him that the Kyuubi's sealed inside him, and yet Naruto apparently completely forgets/doesn't care until Jiraiya comes. This, again, is stupid. I mean, you'd think that maybe he'd be kind of like "Ok, wtf?" to Sarutobi for never telling him, or maybe he'd think a little differently about things knowing that he's the Kyuubi no Kitsune's jinchuriki. But no, he remains the same blissfully ignorant dumbass without a care in the world. You're a real cool guy, Kishimoto.

Yaoi: There are WAAAAAAAAAAY too many yaoi fics out there. I have nothing against homosexuality, but for god's sake, STOP WITH ALL THE YAOI! I honestly cannot use the FanFic search engine without giving very explicit keywords/do-not-includes because every time I do, it's a shit-ton of yaoi fics with the occasional het mixed in. Infact, typing "yaoi" in the search engine brings up approximately 77,714 results, whereas typing "yuri" in the search engine only brings up approximately 8,174 results. This, in my opinion, is not only proof that there's WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY too much yaoi, but that the number of females who would fit under the category of "pervert" (since I'm about 95% sure that almost all of those 77,714 results were created by fangirls, or at the very least are women in general) greatly outnumbers the number of males that would fit under the category of "pervert".

Suffice to say, QUIT WITH THE YAOI. Can I PLEASE actually be able to use the search engine without running into a wall of SasuNaru fics which are pretty much all the exact same story written by different authors?

Everyone in the village fawning over Sasuke: Honestly, this belongs in the clichés section, but I felt like making a new section for this. Now, I'll admit, most of what I'm going to say here really doesn't apply to a lot of fics, simply because it wasn't revealed in the manga at the time those fics were posted. For said older fics, the general cliché rules above apply. For newer fics, however, when they depict pretty much all of Konohagakure as fawning over Sasuke, they miss one very important detail. The village, quite frankly, hates the Uchiha clan. Their loyalties were always questionable, and they were suspected of having something to do with the Kyuubi attack. So, I suppose you could consider this a case where plot holes, clichés, and the circumstances of the situation come together to just make a big, annoying turd.

Moka's less than positive outlook on humans being plothole-inducingly exaggerated: To take a break from Naruto, let's talk a little bit about Rosario Vampire fanfics. In specific, how in some of the particularly popular stories (especially Mistress Winowyll's Get What You Wanted, and all of its spin-offs), Moka's hatred of humans is stretched to the absolute maximum, for really no particular reason. Let's think about this for a second. Moka was...what, bullied? Verbally made fun of, maybe pushed and/or shoved around every once in a while when she was going to human schools? Ok, fair enough, I guess that would make anyone sour. But, let's compare that to what happens when she goes to Youkai Academy:

Monsters repeatedly attempt to rape her.

Monsters repeatedly attempt to kill her.

Monsters repeatedly attempt to eat her.

Monsters repeatedly attempt to torture her.

And that's not even counting what her own family has done to her!

So, my question is, why exactly in stories like Get What You Wanted is Moka just so bitter towards humans, so much so that she would willingly invite Gin into her house in order to give her a baby that she'll be aloud to raise among monsters, when, comparing her experiences between high school and middle school, middle school was like a walk in the park? Honestly, it just doesn't make sense to me.

Now, don't get me wrong. Get What You Wanted is a great story that I really liked, and Mistress Winowyll is one of my favorite authors. It just astounds me how much anti-human bias is just blatantly and carelessly thrown around despite how much of a nightmare come true Youkai was. Which leads me into my next topic...

Anti-human bias: As I was saying before, anti-human bias is a very defining characteristic in more stories, Rosario Vampire or otherwise, then I'd like to count. Even worse is how carelessly it always seems to be thrown out there, no matter how outrageous it seems in the circumstances provided, such as in many Rosario Vampire stories where people try to make out monsters as being "misunderstood" and humans as complete and utter evil, even though students at Youkai Academy are pretty much allowed to kill, eat, torture, or rape other students or even teachers with, at maximum, a suspension as punishment, if they're even punished at all.

Really, come on. It's unoriginal. It's been done over and over and over and over again. It stopped being entertaining when it made sense. It's even worse now when people essentially shove it down your throat at every available opportunity, whether or not it makes sense to. "Oh, hey, what did you have for dinner?" "I had a nice, fresh batch of monsters are misunderstood and humans are evil!" "That's one of my favorites!"

Completely and totally butchering a character: I don't mean this in the bashing sense. What I mean is when somebody takes a character and completely changes them, so much so that you can't really even recognize them, for no really good reason. Let's take a look at an example. A story I just read, a high-school-setting (yes, I know) Naruto fic, completely and totally butchered Naruto. Oh, you expected the wonderful ol' happy-go-lucky idiot we all know and love? Nope, instead you get some douche bag with fifty million piercings and tattoos, a goatee, a trench coat, no shirt (which in itself is incredibly stupid, considering it's a HIGH-SCHOOL setting), and some kind of aura about him that comes off as the author trying to make him badass and failing miserably. Not only that, but the character is just so un-Narutoish that it really makes you wonder why the hell the author even bothered to try and convince the readers that he's Naruto.

Now, I can understand if something in the story happens that dramatically changes a character. I mean, obviously if Naruto has some kind of insane orphanage matron putting him through torture genjutsu, then ya, he's probably going to be a little off his hinges later on. But for god's sake, you can't just go and make a completely new character who doesn't even look similar to the original character, let alone actually acts anything like them, and then stick the original's name on it!

Naruto getting brutally beaten/tortured/ostracized/whatever by the villagers: This one, truth be told, I don't really have so much of a problem with, mostly because there's a lot of really good stories out there that use this really well (such as one of the stories on my favorites list, Destiny is a Hazy Thing, in which Naruto's mind is basically snapped in half by an insane orphan matron using torture genjutsu on him). But I still feel the need to bring attention to it, primarily for two reasons: the fact that most Naruto-centric stories use this as a plot device, and the fact that, in canon, virtually none of the abuse that is so widely portrayed as being Naruto's childhood actually happened. Naruto, for the most part, was ignored. People might've thrown dirty looks and maybe said a few things, but nothing crazy like what's in fanfics ever actually happened. The Mizuki affair was an isolated incident and was very much the exception, not the rule. Now, it's all well and good if a few people want to do what-ifs about Naruto getting the shit kicked out of him by the villagers when he was a kid, but we don't need twenty-million stories, all using the same exact premise that's kind of dumb anyways.

Deviations from canon: This isn't so much a "this is dumb because", but more of a point about my personal preferences when it comes to fanfiction. It's sort of hard to explain. The problem I have here isn't so much the deviation from canon itself (that's more than welcome by me: after all, that's more or less the premise of fanfiction in general), but rather what deviation from canon brings with it: major changes in a character or characters (and I'm not talking about coming up with a completely new character and sticking the original's name on it for absolutely no plausible reason at all, as per the point two points above this one). Frankly, I'm fairly conservative with my fanfiction. I like exciting changes and brand new twists that I haven't seen before, but I'm a little uncomfortable with major personality changes in a character, even when there's actually legitimate reasons for them. A good example of this is Destiny is a Hazy Thing (which you can find in my favorite stories list and I highly recommend reading it, although it starts off a little slow), in which because Naruto is raised for several years in his mind by the Nine-Tailed Fox and some mysterious entity in his mind, Daiki, he never really has any particular want to become Hokage. It's a respectable change and one that makes sense, everything considered, but I'm still kind of hesitant about it since Naruto's dream of becoming Hokage is a big part of his motivation and what makes him who he is, and taking that away is a big departure from the good ol' Naruto we all know and love.

At the end of the day, however, it's honestly just me being a whiny little bitch who doesn't like change, and it doesn't change the fact that stories like Destiny is a Hazy Thing are amazing and that other stories that completely butcher a character for no reason other than the author felt like it are bullshit.

People saying, "Well why don't you just make your own story?" in response to criticism: Doesn't have so much to do with the story itself as it does with feedback and the author's response to that feedback. I've noticed that fanfiction authors often reply to negative reviews with something along the lines of, "Well, if you don't like it, why not make your own?" My personal issue with this reply is due to the very reason professional critics exist. We don't expect them to make their own movies, games, books, or what have you, so that they can vindicate themselves and justify their criticism, so why is it exactly that fanfiction writers must do so? Furthermore, if we continue on with that logic, then it will inevitable morph from "only people with stories can complain" to "only people with good stories can complain", and so on and so forth, until ultimately only one person has any right to complain and criticize anyone else. This is the logical fallacy of the "Well you can only criticize if you've done it yourself" mindset. That, and, well, the authors that use that mindset are generally the terrible ones that employ it for no reason other than to dismiss the (usually well-deserved) criticism of their reviewers.

I'll find more things to rant about later, but this is it for now...