Hello lovable kiddos.

Ever read a book that you totally fall head over heels for. And then BAM your biggest pet peeves smacks you in the face, leaving you to just fluster over how much you hate when the main Character says ‘totally’ and ‘like,’ every five seconds.

Or the nerdy ‘unattractive.’ Girl gets a makeover and becomes a ‘mega babe’ which come on, no one needs to change who they are just to become cuter.

So today I thought I would share with you my biggest book pet peeves. So like the angry nerd rant begin!

 

The love triangles

I’m so sick, tired and over stupid love triangles. Some stories have done it very well But I feel like it’s something hard to master. And I feel a lot of times it’s just throw in to start shipping wars about Simon, Jacob, Gale and so, so, so many others just to build fake tense that didn’t need to be there in the first place.

But the real reason why I hate this is because it’s so totally clear who the MC is going to end up with. You can’t hind who the Love interest is and we know who is going to be left heartbroken. Unless god forbid no one is and the character realized that they only liked the MC like a sibling (not kidding, I have read a story like that please, PLEASE don’t do this.) and that’s just stupid.

Either way, I feel love triangles are just to add fake tense and start fan/internet arguments, which will bring all of the trolls out from under their bridges and go on a rampage and burn the fandom down. So moral of the story, don’t feed the trolls.

 

Perfect characters.

If you read my blog post, don’t write Mary Sues! you probably know my feelings on this.

But just in case you didn’t, let me give you a shorter (less Ranty.) version

I find perfect Characters boring and unoriginal. Nothing makes my eyes roll harder and faster than the ‘plain Janes.’ That somehow everyone wants to sleep with because they just don’t know how good-looking they are.

Or the ‘chose ones.’ That are the only ones that can stop the world from burning down. Even though they are only 12 years old.

Or the ‘oh I’m not good at anything.’ But magical good at everything even though they are ‘totally normal.’

The list goes on and on. But some of those are fine. I mean Harry Potter is awesome and that has a chose one in it.

But that I think is totally inexcusable is that perfect characters breeze though everything like a bag in the wind.

I want to see characters fail. I want to see them stubble, flap and flail around like a fish out of water. I don’t want to spend time with a book or characters if all it’s going to be is 300 or so pages of someone moping about how ‘uncool’ they are, all the while they bulldoze through everything like a totally Badass.

They don’t have to crash and burn but at least they could fall down a flight of stairs or two.

Bitchy/dickish characters.

While on the subject of characters, I HATE bitchy characters that are just that way from beginning to end. No change or growth or even any acknowledgement that they’re being a jerk.

A lot of time, authors try to write strong characters and strong characters stink up for themselves and say what’s on their mind. But you can do this without having them be jerks for no reason at all.

They whine and mope about not wanting to be the lead or the chosen one or whatever. Which is totally fine in the beginning, it’s a normal reaction for a person to have when throw into something like that.

But it just gets boring and annoying if they continue to mope about and are awful to everyone around them just for the sake of it.

I love seeing the growth in characters. I love seeing how they change and are different from the beginning to the end but having the character stays a dick is just a huge slap in the face for me.

Using ‘cool and hip.’ Slang/overuse crude language.

I use slang, everyone uses slang, People uses short hand words all the time, It’s great for helping give characters’ different voices. And make them not sounds so robotic and helps make the feel like a real person.

Different places around the world has their own slung which they use to spice up their language. and helps set your story.

But a huge turn off for me is when authors try a little too hard to be ‘hip.’ Overly using words and speech just to make their teenage characters sounds like teenagers or their early to mid 20’s sound like they are a little older. What’s worst is when it’s out dated words and slung that isn’t really used anymore.

And because it’s kind of the same thing I’ll add that I don’t like when books over use swear words or crude, overly sexual language.

I mean, I swear a lot in person but if it’s used a lot in book form it just gets boring and tedious. And it just starts feeling like filler content rather than adding emotion to the speech or a scene.

And again, authors will throw it in swear words to make the characters sounds young or hip but it just is off putting to me and overly sexual comments just because teenagers or 20 somethings are ‘Horny all of the time.’ And it just sounds too try hard for my liking.

Killing characters for the shock.

Death is supposed to mean something, it’s supposed to have an impact on the world in your story and the people on it and change them forever.

Maybe it’s their parents, a sibling, another love one, their soulmate, Maybe it’s just a stranger that died because of them.

I have spent many, many hours crying, feeling all the emotions that the characters feel, sadness, anger, emptiness. I mean, I spend forever crying over all of the death in Harry Potter. Mainly Because there’s a billion of them…

But in any case, when a character dies for no other reason than to make you feel sad over it is when I draw the line.

And I’m not taking about meaningless deaths likes ‘he died in the cave when the door was two feet from them.”

Or “that they died in a battle that they end up losing anyway.” These kinds of things have meaning behind why the author killed them. I mean having people die in a seemingly random way, giving a sense of cruelty to the world, a random act for characters and readers alike to hit too low to just show you what’s at stack here and add to a breaking point for a character.

what I mean is when the death feels like ‘okay this character filled their role and uhhh…. They died because what else am I going to do?”

or “and we’ll kill this girl just so you can be sad by it! Because books are supposed to rip your soul out and leave you on the ground laying in pool of your own tears. ”

those are just totally and company useless in my mind. If you are killing a character because you have no clue what else to do, then you are doing it wrong and either need to cut the character as a whole or change things to do something else with the character.

If you are killing off characters because you want shock your readers then you are also doing it wrong because they will just get mad at you…or turn your books into an HBO show. Either way it still grinds my gears.

Instant love

I know love at first sight is a real thing that happen to people, it’s something that people experience all of the time and as sweet it is to hear someone talk about their cute and epic love that started with just one look. It’s pretty boring to read about.

I mean, if your MC sees someone and their eyes meet, with one magical moment and then five pages later they are doing It in the rain and then for the next however many chapters with it all being peachy and that’s all the plot there is to the sub plot of your story or the main plot (or rather a lack of one.) it’s just painful to read.

Again, this goes back to how I want conflict and not a story about easy choices. If it’s love at first sight and then they realized that love and relationships are not easy and the two characters have to make it work then that’s fine totally. There’s some conflict and something driving a story forward. I love fluff as much as anyone else.

It just bugs me that these types of books that use this kind of instant love paint this picture that everything is all kittens and rainbows

when in real life and in any good love story, love takes a lot of hard work in order to grow into its own. and not only is it a bad message to send young readers that love should be perfect all of the time but it’s just boring to read.

Well there you have it. This is my list of pet peeves. I hope you enjoyed my ranting and I would love to hear about yours, so tell me yours via comments/twitter/facebook whatnot.

Until next time.