agilebrit: (sod off)
[personal profile] agilebrit
Okay. Is it too much to ask, that if you're going to be a big enough "fan" of a show to write stories about it, that you learn to spell the characters' freaking names? I've been perusing the "Angel" section over at the Pit of Voles today (why? Guess I'm just a glutton for punishment), and I've found a bunch of misspellings just in summaries. I shudder to think what's in the stories themselves.

For example, I found this beauty today: "Worfam and heart." The sign for the law firm was in every single episode during the last season. Would it be too hard to actually read it? It's "Wolfram and Hart." "Hart" is capitalized. It's a name. References were made more than once during the course of the series to "the Wolf, the Ram, and the Hart." So why is it so hard to spell?

Tara Maclay. Doesn't seem that hard to spell, does it? She has more mini-trolls than any other character. Terra, Tarra, Tarah...and I don't even want to get into how they butcher her last name. Cordelia is a toughie, granted, as is Illyria, but they're not that hard, and I've set my spell check so that it catches if I misspell Illyria's name. Wesley Wyndam-Pryce. I always have to check to make sure I've spelled it right; and, no, it doesn't help that the transcript for "Lineage" at Buffyworld spells it "Price"...but it's not that difficult to look up. How many times have I seen Angel's name spelled "Angle"? Ugh. Too many. They're relying more on their spell check than they are on proofreading, and that's bad.

Poor Xander. Zander, Xandre, Zandre...the list goes on and on. Giles has his share. I've even seen Buffy's name misspelled. And Spike's. How hard is that? "Gunn" has two N's, people. And "Winifred" has one. "Connor" has two N's as well, and also two O's. It's not spelled "Conner," "Conor," or "Coner."

And other fandoms have the same problem. How many permutations of "McGonagall," "Voldemort," "Hermione," and "Dumbledore" are there? It took me all of two minutes to find the correct spellings, and I've never read any of the books or seen the movies. And I'll bet that anime fandoms have an even worse problem, if there are discrepancies between the animated series and the manga.

Argh.

Date: 2004-09-01 12:30 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] agilebrit.livejournal.com
Well, but your misspellings aren't a result of lazy writing. In the fic that inspired this rant, let's count the mini-trolls, shall we?

Lorin
Gun (or gun)
sunydale
Worfam and heart
Cordillia

She frequently forgets that a character's name should be capitalized. One of her OC's has "burnet" hair. Funny, I'd think that salad greens on one's head would be annoying, and you'd want to take care of that little problem sooner rather than later. And then there's a continuity error where "Lorin" apparently forgets that he met the girls just two (short) chapters before. At least it's not my Lorne being such an idiot.

There's no excuse for this. I can't even give it concrit, because there's absolutely nothing good to say about it. Not that she'd listen. Her little friends have given her ten fawning reviews.

Date: 2004-09-01 01:03 am (UTC)
ext_15169: Self-portrait (Default)
From: [identity profile] speakr2customrs.livejournal.com
I've seen some strange things on ff.net but this has to set some sort of record. The Author's Note that preceded the story was incomprehensible and it went downhill from there. The capitalisation of proper nouns seemed so random that it appeared to have been determined by dice throws, the apostrophes were so aberrant that they could have inspired a sequel to "Eats, Shoots & Leaves", the Mary Sues made Sam Riley look like a logical and carefully-considered addition to the Buffy pantheon - and the reviews! Or "reveiws", as they have it more than once.

I had a look at the story by the other one of the two Mary Sues, read the reviews there, and saw this comment by someone not one of the little incestuous clique: "I will pay you one hundred million dollars to never write anything again. Ever." They were deeply offended. It's the only genuine review among 46 pieces of self-congratulatory drivel.

Why couldn't they just have e-mailed these "stories" to each other and spared the world much suffering?

In 20 minutes "The Black Shield of Falworth" is on ITV1, offering me the chance to hear Tony Curtis uttering such immortal lines as "Yonder lies da castle of my foider". I shall watch it with renewed appreciation now that I've seen how much worse writing can be.

Date: 2004-09-01 01:23 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] agilebrit.livejournal.com
Oh, hey, Tony Curtis was good even when he was bad. Enjoy!
!

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