User blog comment:Adelina Le Morte March/Fanfiction Pains: annoying things I've noticed related to Merlin fanfics/@comment-5674726-20130127001243

I've got a few general pet peeves for fanfics.

One relatively minor thing that really bugs me is dialogue between two characters where they address one another by name in virtually every sentence. It's one thing with Uther, for example, since it makes sense that 'Your Majesty' and 'Sire' would be used more than once in a conversation, but to have Merlin and Gaius, or Arthur and Guinevere, repeating one another's name in each line of a dialogue between them makes it seem unnatural and forced.

I'm not a fan of Mpreg and don't understand its appeal but, to be fair, it's hardly unique to the Merlin fandom and most authors seem to label it in the summary.

Another pet peeve is blissfully happy endings in situations where the logical outcome would be something significantly less pleasant. For example, in canon, Uther was decidedly not a fan of the idea of his son marrying a servant girl, so I'd find a story where he is apparently delighted to accept the marriage off-putting if there's no plausible reason given for why his attitude would change so dramatically.

One of the worst things I've come across is actor fic. Pairing off the fictional characters is fine but I think that it's inappropriate to write about the actors, particularly when the story is basically PWP. I know that Fanfiction.Net bans stories about real people but they spring up like weeds.