Before we start, I'd like to note that none of this is intended to say that any one particular person or story is bad. Cliches can turn out to be fun stories, and if it's done very, very well, even rapefic can be worth reading. This is a generalized list typed by one person with input from several others. Your mileage may vary.



It's been about a year since Sarea Okelani said that what the world really needed was a self-uploading D/G archive and Megh and I got to work and made one happen, and I've learned quite a bit in that time. Having discussion upon discussion about what we want the archive to be led us to the ground rule that we do not screen stories for content; as long as it is D/G and has decent spelling and grammar (and is not plagiarized), we'll accept a story no matter how much it makes us want to gouge our own eyes out. However, for the good of humanity, I'm compiling a list of things that really irritate the hell out of us, the Cabal.

First off, let's mention the main rules briefly and why they're in place. That the story should be D/G to be uploaded on a D/G archive seems obvious, doesn't it? We've had to reject more than one fic because someone just did not get this concept. Yes, it does boggle the mind.

The other big rule is that the spelling and grammar have to be to acceptable levels, and you would not believe how much dealing with enforcing this rule makes me despair for the American educational system. (Although our friends from Canada aren't immune from this despair, given some of the examples that have crossed my path.) Why, oh why, is it so very difficult to form a sentence? And for God's sake, there's just no excuse whatsoever not to spell-check. If you don't have one on your word processor, there are spellcheckers aplenty online. I can understand that not everyone is able to spell automatically, and that not everyone was taught the proper forms of punctuation, but this is why most of us use beta readers - someone who can read the fic and realize that having a period inside a quotation mark when the sentence continues is wrong.

Call me a bitch if you want, but, y'know, English is my second language, and I'm dyslexic. If I can figure out how to form a sentence and what the difference is between you're and your, I think that all of you out there can, too, or can find someone to fix it for you. This is your creativity and best efforts, your brainchild, which you're displaying to the world. If you don't care enough about it to present it in the best fashion you're capable of, why should I care about it enough to read it?

And don't, whatever you do, ever, ever, EVER tell me that you can't possibly need a beta because you are a beta. If you tell me this after I've had to reject your fic because it's making my eyes bleed from all the misplaced apostrophes and bad punctuation and just fuckin' out there capitalization and misspelled character names? I will make voodoo dolls and do my best to make sure you never sit down comfortably again. Just so you know.

Since I mentioned them, let's talk about misspelled character names, or make it broader and talk about canon terms in general. The point of writing fanfic is that you love the original world and want to expand on it, to explore things that the author of the original book did not, presumably because you love the original. This is fine, this is great, this is groovy - but if you love the original, why the hell can you not take two seconds to go back to it and verify that the spelling of your main character's last name is "Weasley", not "Weasely" or "Weasly"? If you're going to use a name from canon that only appeared once instead of just making up a new name, why not use the actual canon name? It's even in our site guidelines that you have to look at every time you upload, and we still get people calling Blaise Zabini "Blasé Zambini". Why? I don't get it. If you really don't give a shit, why are you writing? And how can you expect anyone to read it?

Let's see, what other rules do we have? No plagiarism. You'd think this would be a given, but people still try it out. In the first week the archive was up, someone attempted to submit a story that had Draco and Ginny's names put into a novel. Draco mysteriously gained a brother while Ginny lost all of hers, and they were in Regency London. The chick hadn't even changed the title. And don't even get me started on the whole Cara debacle, because I feel like I lose IQ points every time I try to wrap my head around the thought of someone submitting a plagiarized version of a D/G fic to a D/G site, only the fic had been changed to an R/Hr pairing... And then trying again multiple times.

No netspeak, ever. This one was all mine, as I advocate flogging for anyone who uses netspeak over IM, let alone in a fic. "You are", not "u r". It's not that much longer, people, and it prevents you from looking like a total moron.

No in-text author's notes. This is one that I dislike, but not the way that one of the other Cabal members does. Dude, she practically froths at the mouth, and I believe the words "firing squad" were mentioned as the appropriate response to submissions that contained these. Why would they raise this much annoyance? Because it's a really dumb way to express yourself. Yeah, I'm a bitch, live with it. If you can't say what needs to be said within the scope of the story, you need to work on making your storytelling less clumsy. Put in an author's note at the top or at the bottom if you absolutely need to, but if you've got a phrase like "Draco put on his white t-shirt (like a muscle shirt - Draco would look so hot in that! *drool*)" in your fic, you're doing a piss-poor job of writing.

Now onto stuff that's not against the rules but still irritates.

Blackmailing for reviews. You've seen these fics, I know, the ones that have a note at the bottom like "If I don't get ten reviews for this chapter, I'm not publishing the next one!" Don't do this. Just don't. It's childish and stupid and makes the vast majority of (intelligent) people avoid reviewing, or reading the rest of the fic. It's one thing to say "hey, guys, I really want reviews", it's another thing to be shameless and undignified and just plain tacky. I'm as big a whore for reviews as anybody - if we didn't want lots of reviews, none of us would put our work out there for people to see. Still. The blackmail thing is just not on.

Really outrageously bad characterization. Anybody who is not the author of the original work will have some degree of OOC-ness; it's inevitable. There are also different ways to interpret the same characters and actions, and so two entirely different characterizations might be equally valid. However, there's a limit to how far you can stretch that - turning Hermione into a vicious, man-hungry slut? Way beyond that limit. I once read a story where, honest to God, the fanfic author had Draco moaning in an inner monologue about how he should have been in Gryffindor, which would have allowed him to be close to his goddess, but he had begged the Sorting Hat to put him in Slytherin so that his father wouldn't put him in the iron maiden. If you're even thinking of a storyline like this, I beg of you, don't. If you want a tortured hero to set up with Ginny, either go join the H/G fandom or find a way to make Draco a hero on his own terms - don't just dye Harry's hair blond and rename him. With Draco and Ginny specifically, there's a lot of room for interpretation because we've seen so little of them, but there's still some things that are there, and there's no excuse for just casually deciding that you don't give a damn what the books say. If you want to write a character that has nothing to do with the original, just give him or her a new name and call it original fiction, because you're no longer writing fanfic.

Setting. On a related note, these are wizards. English wizards. In the early 1990s. They would not be listening to Linkin Park. They would not be wearing bondage pants. They would not, repeat, would not be shopping at Hot Topic. The same thing goes for Destiny's Child and belly shirts. Back then, bellbottoms were considered massively, unbelievably dorky, to the point where even a slight hint of a flare would get you mercilessly teased in school... And the waistbands actually reached the waist. There was no such word as "hoodie" in usage, or "lippie", and "hottie" had not yet made it into the vocabulary, let alone "hott". Yes, I realize you think you're being terribly cool in having the HP characters dress and act like your ideals of currently popular fads. You're not.

Description. We also don't need two pages of description of how incredibly gorgeous each person is, or of what they're wearing. Unless it actively matters to the story that someone is wearing tight leather pants, the only description you need is along the lines of "Draco stood in the doorway, lounging casually despite the tightness of his leather pants." See how that only took one sentence? We do not need a dissertation. Similarly, we don't need to know what our heroine and each and every one of her friends are wearing to the school dance, down to lipstick and underwear color. Tell us enough information to get the idea and then stop. If we were interested in reading breathless descriptions of clothing, we would be reading catalogs.

Also, stop with the messy or sloppy buns for formal occasions. A sloppy/messy bun is what you shove your hair into when you're doing physical labor and you need it out of the way. A loose bun is what you wear when you want your hair to look done but touchable at a formal occasion.

Mary Sue. You know how I mentioned our heroine and all her friends just now? This brings us to the world of Mary Sue. Mary Sue is an ideal, the perfect girl. There's plenty of places out there where you can get a full workup of who Mary Sue is, but be aware that canon characters can also be turned into Mary Sues. Check out this litmus test for a start, but be aware that you have to come slightly out of the land of denial for this to be effective - I know someone who writes one of the world's biggest Mary Sues, but she claims to have passed the litmus test. If you want an idea of what the vast majority of fanfic readers think of Mary Sues, check out Pottersues or Deleterius. BTW, if you keep the star as a canon character like, oh, say, Ginny, but give her a random "best friend" or five who are beautiful and hip and just plain crazy/sexy/cool, you are still guilty of Mary Sueing.

Getting canon wrong. This is one that just grates up and down on my nerves like sandpaper. Stuff like Hermione swearing by Merlin - she's a muggleborn, people. In times of stress, you swear the way you heard people swearing when you were very young, and when she was very young she would've heard the word "shit", not "Merlin's beard!" Also, Dean Thomas is muggleborn, as is Colin Creevey. Making them anti-muggle racists? Totally makes me want to take out my hardback copy of Order of the Phoenix and beat you with it. Getting Ginny's eye color wrong is not that big a deal, although there is The Harry Potter Lexicon to serve as a reference, but getting Harry's eye color wrong? It's shoddy writing and again brings me back to the question of why you even bother.

Bad Summaries and/or Titles Summaries or titles that contain some variation of the concept of "I am too lazy and/or stupid to actually think of a title or summary, but just read it okay!!!!!" The issue of whether to make this against the rules has been debated time and again and we still haven't decided to outright ban them, but it's fairly close. Your summary and your title are the first things people see, the things that spark interest and make people want to read your story. When you title it something like "I suck at titles!!!" and give it a summary that says nothing about the actual story, what you are actually saying to people is "I don't give a shit about my crappy story, and I don't want you to read it!"

Admittedly OOC. Similarly, if you put in your summary or your story "some OOC", you're copping out. Either you think they're close enough to IC to publish it as a fanfic or you don't. It's like getting all dressed up and looking fabulous but saying "I may look like shit" just in case someone else thinks you do and says so, so you got to say it first. You can do it, but it sucks that you think you have to, and it makes other people focus more on your flaws than they would have otherwise.

Religion in the Wizard World. Now for one of my own personal pet peeves - "that weird muggle cult called Christianity". People, if the wizard world didn't know of Christianity and were all druids? They'd have Yule or Winter Solstice celebrations, not Christmas. They'd celebrate the Vernal Equinox (Ostara) instead of Easter, and they'd have the Feast of Lupercalia rather than Saint Valentine's Day. Hogwarts has holidays for Christmas and Easter, though, just as regular British schools do, and that's laid out as of the first book - and Valentine's Day is clearly in the second one, so the "but I wrote this before OotP!" excuse doesn't work with this one. You've got some wiggle room - certainly there exist pagans and purebloods would be in a better position than most to have ties to ancient religions - but to never have heard of Christianity? No. That's the point at which you are twisting canon to reflect your own personal beliefs and desires, a Mary Sue-ing of the entire universe.

The Americanization of Hogwarts. God help you if you pull this one on a certain Cabal member's watch - as she is of British descent herself, it's not just irritating, it's offensive. Now, in the first book or two, in the American version, some words were changed, such as "jumper" becoming "sweater" and "holiday" becoming "vacation" in some cases. However, not once, in any of the versions, has a mother in a Harry Potter book been called "Mom". It's always, always, always Mum. Just don't do the Mom thing.

Also, it's bollocks, not bullocks, I don't care what Word's spellcheck tells you. And never spell it bullox or I will find a way to reject your fic even if everything else is perfect. It's that annoying.

And one last thing before I move on... There are certain words that aren't going to come out of the mouth of a British youth in the early 1990s. "Drug" or "drugged" as a tense of "drag" is one of them. This shouldn't even be in your writing, unless you're deliberately trying to sound Southern, as in Scarlett O'Hara kinda Southern (although it's also shown up in recent days in the country slang that Destiny's Child likes). And while we're at it, "brung" and "hung" are also verboten as tenses of "bring" (it should be "brought") and "hang" ("hanged" is the past tense - "hung" refers to a man being phallically blessed). Waiting on someone means you are their servant and are serving them. If you're standing around until they arrive, you're waiting for them. And now I think I'll stop before I spend all day here.

Harry as a rapist. I've also seen it done with Percy twice. You know the stories I mean, where Ginny gets raped or almost raped and she turns against her cruel family and the Gryffindors because the only person who believes her or is on her side is Draco, who is loving and supportive and unfailingly kind. This kind of thing just makes me sick. Technically I suppose this falls under characterization, because Harry's just not that kind of boy (and leave poor Percy alone!), but it's especially irritating because it takes a very serious issue and trivializes it.

Rapefic in general. For that matter, just the use of rape and other serious subjects as trivial plot points. People, do your fucking homework! Someone who is raped is not going to be all giggly and happy fun the next day. She's not going to cry and have a tantrum and think about killing herself only to go out and start picking out baby clothes alongside her rapist, who is now her True Love. This is even more sickening than making Harry a rapist, because not only does it make Draco a complete and total villain, it makes Ginny so idiotic as to be inhuman. If you're going to take on a repulsive subject like rape (or incest, or cutting, or suicidal behavior), do it right. Treat it with the seriousness it deserves. Even five minutes looking at sites found through Google will let you know that victims of sexual assault don't tend to snap out of it just because a hot guy treats them kindly, that women who are abused don't go out to lunch with other men, and that there's a huge difference between stupid teenyboppers who think that cutting is cool and people who suffer from actual grief. Turning Draco or Ginny into that kind of pathetic weenie who wants attention rather than needs a way to cope isn't doing anyone any good.

Technical matters. There's a reason why you have to preview your fics before they go up. Is it really all that much to ask that you use it? If your story didn't upload, or uploaded all as a single paragraph, leaving it there for the Cabal member is a waste of time, as you're just going to get rejected. Reading the help page would explain an awful lot to someone in this situation.

And finally... On a less serious note, stop with the use of "Mal-ferret". It's not clever. It's not funny. It's stupid and it's clichéd and it doesn't characterize Ginny as a spitfire. It characterizes her as someone who can't come up with a decent insult.


There's a lot more I could say, God knows, but I think this is long enough for now. It might not be a bad idea to check out whatever reviews eventually show up for this little diatribe, as I'm betting a lot will be on the lines of either "OMG, you suck and are a hypocrite because you're not perfect either!" (which has some degree of validity to it, as I'm not), or "Yeah! And another thing..." (which can be handy in the sense that you'll get more than just my ideas as to what's irritating.