Ah, self-deprication. How I did miss thee.
As all of my long-time readers should know by now, I'm a nerd. A pretty damn big nerd. I adore Batman and Doctor Who, I read and loved Harry Potter, I generally get pretty good grades, I'm abit of a Grammar Nazi, I love to learn about stuff, I write fanfic, I play Pokemon and am pretty in-touch with what new video games are coming out for modern consoles, I'm a Chemistry Tech major, I'm so comfortable with the internet that it's like I have a second life online, I have a blog, and I love Statistics. I am also a weirdo - I read Creepypasta and then go to sleep without any trouble whatsoever, I think bats and snakes are cute, I actually really like spiders, I write horror stories, and I am a huge Edgar Allen Poe and H. P. Lovecraft fan. If you're new to Musings, first of all, welcome, and second of all, I'm sorry you had to find out from this entry that I'm a freak (If it helps, I am also a bitch, a lover, a child, a mother, a sinner, and a saint; I do not feel ashamed). But really, I just tend to think of myself as having some very myriad, nerdy interests.
So it should come as no shock to any of you that I also have some serious nerdy pet peeves. Those little things about my fandoms and interests that just stick in my craw and never seem to be things that I can get over, no matter what I do. Being a nerd's in my blood, along with being snarky and a little bit of ethanol on any given night when I'm not working - and there's just some things, because of that, that I cannot let go of. I'll normally let them pass if it's a joke, or if someone's being a troll on purpose. I'll also normally let them pass if it's an honest mistake. But when I keep coming across these little annoyances, then something begins to ever so slightly fray in Sugary's silly little brain, something that really makes me want to grow claws and fangs and bite your head off.
Usually, these annoyances are caused by severe stupidity or ignorance of the fandom from which they come, and if it's one thing I can't stand, it's stupid for the sake of being stupid. Usually these annoyances come from fandom newcomers as well - and when people are new, I do try to be nice. We were all noobs of our respective fandoms once; we can all be forgiven for little sins like thinking that the Joker was played best by Jack Nicholson or Heath Ledger (false, the correct answer is Mark Hamill), or foolishly believing David Tennant to be anything other than the best Doctor of all time. But not knowing a character's name when you get into a fandom, or doing dumb things just because you feel bad that someone doesn't like your fandom? Bitch, please. And if you commit any of the five grievous annoyances below? Lord have mercy upon your soul, foolish mortal, for your actions were bad and you should feel bad. In no particular order, here are my five biggest nerdy pet peeves. Granted, the aren't all nerdy, but they all do revolve around fandom of something, so there you go. My logic is superior. You know it to be true.
- Grievance the First: Calling the Doctor anything other than "The Doctor". Look. I understand. I was a new Whovian once. I used to think his name was literally "Doctor Who" too, simply because the show was called that. But it's not. Really. It's not. His name isn't "Dr." either. His name is "The Doctor". Do you know why his name is "The Doctor"? Because while he's running around in a big blue time-travelling phone box with whatever human he felt like kidnapping this regeneration, he also fixes shit. Because inevitably, without someone to fix it, 95% of everything will turn to shit. Everything that can go wrong, will. In fact, Doctor Who might as well as be renamed to Murphy's Law: The TV Series, because no matter what, even when the Doctor shows up to fix things, shit goes down. And it rarely goes down in his favor, or in the favor of humanity or whatever alien race of the week he needs to save. Certainly didn't go down well for Amy Pond, who was held captive and pregnant on board a spaceship while some freak with an eyepatch waited for her to give birth so she could take the baby from her and train said baby to become a merciless assassin. Certainly never goes down well for half the humans touched by the events, and what about Dalek Carmen from this season? She freaking got blown up on a planet for crazy-ass Daleks after finding out she'd been a Dalek all along! And shit never, ever goes well for poor Rory, who got sucked back in time by a time rift, ended up a Roman soldier, sat around hundreds of years waiting for Amy to get out of a box meant to be the Doctor's prison, has died or nearly died many times, recently ended up being divorced from and kicked out by Amy, and that's just the tip of the iceberg of shit the poor guy's been subjected to over Matt Smith's run as the Doctor. Also, the Doctor himself - dude lost his whole species. Dude is the last Time Lord alive, and his nemesis went nuts because the Time Lords were pretty much jerks. Dude is still extremely hurt and hateful of himself despite what he's tried to do to get over some of that trauma. So the least you could freaking do, you ungrateful newbie, is call him by his proper name. Which is "The Doctor". In fact, "I'm the Doctor!" "Doctor who?" is a running gag in the show, purposefully making fun of both the fact that we don't know his true Time Lord name, and making fun of the idiots who keep calling him "Doctor Who". And no, it is not acceptable to abbreviate "Doctor" because he does not have an actual Doctorate. My Organic Chemistry professor, Dr. B, DOES have a Doctorate. In Chemistry. The Doctor, to my knowledge, does not, unless he obtained one sometime within the original series' first 8 regenerations. So stop doing this. It's so simple, and yet it keeps happening. And it makes me want to send armies of Daleks to your house by air mail because of it. You look like an ignorant American newbie fan when you do this, and you're making Matt Smith cry. :c
- Grievance the Second: Calling Slenderman "Slender". Okay. Let me make this as simple as I possibly can for you morons. There is no creepypasta being that lives in the woods and kidnaps children named "Slender". There has never been any webshow, blog, or internet series about any scary, teens-with-cameras-stalking being named "Slender". There are no stories about any being named "Slender", and there will never be any stories about any being named "Slender". There is, however, an internet-created entity called Slenderman, and there have been stories, webshows, blogs, etc. about it. There is also an indie horror game called Slender, about a young woman running around the woods at night collecting pages while running from a tall, slender, faceless being. A being named Slenderman, not "Slender". The entity was never called "Slender" in any stories about it. It has been called the Operator, Mr. Thin, Tall Faceless and Spooky, Slendy, etc. I even saw a fanfic where the child protagonist called it Mr. Fancy (because it is fancy, that is, it looks like it's wearing a suit). You can call it freaking Fluffy the Terrible for all I care, but its name is not "Slender", and its name has never been "Slender". The only reason people keep calling it "Slender" is because of the video game of the same name, and because said video game became very popular, because the Slenderman Mythos is very popular. I get it. I understand if you're newer to the Mythos. I got into Slenderman and other Creepypastas through a potent combination of taking a wikiwalk through The Creepypasta Wiki and playing the game Slender. I understand being new and making this mistake. But continuing to call it "Slender" as a fandom nickname even after you know the being's real, canon name is stupidity on top of stupidity. Let's put it this way - the first time you film yourself walking through the woods and you see Slendy just standing there (... menacingly...!), you can certainly be forgiven for trying to get closer to get a better look. But the second time you see it (assuming you lived the first time), you would be a freaking moron to not stop what you're doing and run the other direction. In this scenario, you are the moron with the camera, and I am Slendy. And I have my tendrils out because I am extremely, extremely fucking pissed that you keep calling me "Slender" (Aaaaand Metaphorgotten...). Go watch some fucking Marble Hornets and learn the name of the central monster of your damn fandom, and don't come back until you've watched every single entry. It's only one more syllable. One more word. It can't be that freaking hard to append the word "man" on the end of the creature's name.
- Grievance the Third: Writing the Joker as being redeemable. No. Just. Fucking. NO. I have ranted on this topic far more than is probably healthy, and yet it still annoys the shit out of me. The Joker is a great many, many things - a lunatic, a killer, a freak, a monster, hilarious, terrifying, etc. What he is not is redeemable or otherwise able to be saved. He doesn't want to be saved, because he's having just so much fun being evil. He does not beat and abuse Harley because he "loves" her. He does it because he thinks she's a worthless minion that, every so often, is a fun bedroom toy. He does not torture people because he is secretly a tortured soul. He does it because he thinks torture is fun and death is a joke. He does not fight Batman because Batman started it first. He fights Batman because he is taunting him, and because he actively enjoys messing with Bats' head. The Joker is a sadist. He's such a monster and he so much enjoys being one that Arkham Asylum, a place for the criminally insane, could not get him to stop. Hell, they can't even keep him inside of its walls half the time. He is not a soft-serve ice cream cone. He is a sick, twisted, scary motherfucker that would just as soon stalk you or torment you as kill you. Would you like to know what the Joker would really do to your precious self-insert OC, fangirls? >:3 He would hide under your bed and wait for you to go to sleep just so he could wake you up, kidnap you in the middle of the night, tie you to a chair, and drip acid into every possible orifice that acid could get into. He would make you watch your family suffer terribly at his hands and taunt you the whole time he did it. He would then try to make you crack under severe mental pain, maybe use you as bait for Batman or force you to make a sadistic choice. Everything the Joker does is meant to cause as much chaos and misery as possible, while making such madness seem like a horribly unfunny joke. If he can get you to laugh at the schadenfreude, he's happy - and then he will shoot you between the eyes, which will make him even happier. He manipulates and controls people because it amuses him. None of these qualities make for someone who is redeemable via love or any other method, and they never will. This stands true regardless of what flavor he's in - Ledger, Nicholson, Hamill, Comic, none of those are redeemable in any way, shape, or form whatsoever. The last time the Joker was anything resembling maybe, kinda, sort of harmless was in the Silver Age, and the time after that was when Cesar Romero was playing his purple-suited ass. YOU CANNOT REDEEM THE JOKER BECAUSE HE IS IRREDEEMABLE BY DEFAULT. Get this stupid ass idea the hell out of your tiny, tiny little minds, and fling it far away into the nearest fiery pit you can find. Hell is best for this of course, but the deepest depths of Mordor will do just fine.
- Grievance the Fourth: Wanton cruelty to the common apostrophe. This is sadly far, far, far too common in fanfiction and other spots. People, some words have more than one similar-sounding word associated with them. For example, you can have "your", and you can have "you're". They imply different things - the first indicates something you have or are denoting as yours, and the second is a contracted form of "you are" - that is, it describes what's going on with you. These two words are not interchangable, and thinking they are is an elementary-level mistake commonly made by third-graders until they know better. So, assuming that everyone who writes fanfiction made it through elementary and middle school, why do so many people make this fucking mistake? In middle school, okay - nobody is smart in middle school. But High school? College? A freaking workplace?! That's stupidity at its finest. It's not even ignorance - ignorance implies that you don't know what you're doing wrong, and I would hope you would know if you're doing something wrong, because I need to cling to my fragile, naive belief that not all humans are complete morons. You should know by the time you're in your senior year of high school that you use an apostrophe only to indicate a contraction of a word - like "it's" for "it is" or "they're" for "they are". You would not use "its" or "there/their" to indicate these contractions because that is not correct english, which you need to function in everyday life in an English-speaking country. I can forgive this if you are very young, or if you're not a native English-speaker. It happens. I know Spanish, and I still make stupid Spanish errors that make real Spanish-speakers cringe/giggle because I am not a native speaker, and never will be. I was born in America, not a Spanish-speaking country like Venezuela. I can even forgive it if it's a small mistake that happens only once or twice in the story - we all make typos, and that's what Spellgrammarchecking is for. Your favorite word processor should have this feature pre-installed, and if it doesn't you should find one that does. Even Excel, a spreadsheet program for crunching data, has a spellchecker for the idiots out there who can't spell "Sales Tax". Look, I'm not saying you have to speak the Queen's English or even write in it all the time. But dammit, if you're writing a story, then yes, you do need to use proper spelling, punctuation, and grammar. Why? Because it looks sloppy if you don't and you're giving us other fanfic authors a bad name. People already think that all we write are OC Mary Sue crapfics 24/7. Why give them more ammo by proving their stereotype that fanfic authors are all young females in high school that can't spell? This isn't an error your spellchecker will catch either - you have to be vigilant with this, because it's making us look terrible, and it's pissing me off. If you can't use the proper homophone when you're writing something, you do it constantly, and you think this is okay, then you are a moron. Your fic is bad, and you should feel bad.
- Grievance the Fifth: Fights between Bronies and Anti-Bronies. Shut. The fuck. Up. Please. I can promise you that the majority of the world, and probably the majority of the internet, does not care if you are a Brony or not. I can also promise you that nobody in the entire world on the entirety of the internet thinks you picking on a Brony is interesting. Not a single person outside of the Brony fandom cares if you like Rainbow Dash, Pinkie Pie, or Fluttershy better. Not a single person inside of the Brony fandom cares if you think the idea of grown men watching a show about ponies is "gay". Nobody in general thinks your fighting is cool, funny, or enjoyable. You want to know how I know this? Because I am in the majority camp, which has a big ol' banner above it that says "We Do Not Care Either Way About My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic". Yes, it is a thing. Is it cute? Sure. Is it nice to see people taking a children's show about love, tolerance, friendship, and acceptance to heart? Yes, especially so on the internet, where everyone is an asshat. I am not a Brony, and I'm not an Anti-Brony, either. I am, however, interested in internet memes, and I am extremely fucking sick and tired of trying to watch a video about the Brony meme or otherwise see someone bring up Bronies, and then seeing a big-ass fight start in the comments below the video. Shut the fuck up and go away. It's clear you just want attention. Look, Bronies - I think it's commendable that you're sticking up for your fandom, but Anti-Bronies are picking on you because they are sick and tired of some of your behavior. Perhaps it's time to modify said behavior so people won't think you're so obnoxious. That is why Anti-Bronies exist - they think you're obnoxious. Similarly, Anti-Bronies, I get it, really - I hate obnoxious people too, and I also have my moments where trolling is just too fun an idea to pass up. But it's getting old. You're beginning to look just as annoying as the people you mock. The whole Brony vs. Anti-Brony thing is essentially just like the Christian vs. Atheist thing, or the Republican vs. Democrat thing - it's infighting, on the internet, in a comment section somewhere. The difference? It's far, far, far more stupid than either the religious or political flamewar flavors. People, you are arguing over a difference of opinion on a cartoon intended for little girls. Bronies, it's time to stop pretending you are the target demographic of this show when you never were and never truly will be. Anti-Bronies, it's time for you to wake up and realize how stupid you sound arguing against people liking a cartoon just because you don't like the idea that someone outside the target range likes it. Now can we please, for the love of God, just stop the arguing and flaming over My Little Fucking Pony? Please?