Because yeah, I'm a nitpicker.

Once again, laila's fancy has been lightly turning to thoughts of fangirlishness. Largely because she wants to update her LJ and can't think of anything else to put in it that won't be either ghastly or boring. Voluntary work, tiredness, writer's block, I feel sick, I hate the benefits agency and have issues with my parents - ghastly, isn't it? No wonder I don't like writing about my life. Fandom it is, then - at least that I can actually be funny about without wanting to give into despair that here I am trying to make mild narcolepsy, sending out peer reviews and mainlining Terry Pratchett seem somehow amusing.

Anyway - fandom. Yes, once again it's about fanficcers. Specifically, about my status as a Canon Nazi and how this is a miserable thing to be because it automatically means about 85% of fanworks just piss me the Hell off. Sometimes it's obvious why they'd do that: e.g., Youji Kudou is not a rapist; no it would not be better if there was like, a girl in Weiss; Ken Hidaka is not going to kill himself because Aya ditched him, ohnoez; this series is set in Japan.

The rest of the time, though? Well, the rest of the time I'm busy working myself up into a frothing, semi-coherent rage because some fangirl's overlooked some tiny little nitpicky detail that most people aren't even aware exists in the first place, still less that it could cause an otherwise thinking, rational human being like myself (for all in my case this is a rather intermittent state of affairs) to go off into a ten-minute ranting fit at anyone handy about how Weiss Kreuz just Doesn't Work Like That. It's not quite got to the point where I'm tearing out throats because someone out there gave Youji the wrong eye color, but... well, sometimes it's getting close. How close? Well, take Ken's shirt...

None of these details that so are things which, in isolation, can make or break a fan work. I'd be prepared to bet that most people don't even notice them. They do, however, share one thing in common: they really, really piss me the Hell off.

• Ken is all too often portrayed as a complete incompetent around anything that can't be kicked or beaten up, but it's pretty obvious from canon that he's actually a perfectly proficient tech guy in his own right. He frequently uses a computer in Kapitel, seemingly without encountering any difficulty whatsoever, and in Gluhen has almost completely taken over the technical side of Weiss's operations in the absence of Omi. That being the case, Suethors, you're going to have to find another reason to bring in your OC than 'oh, Weiss need a second hacker'. They've got a second hacker and its not Aya.
  
  
• Omi is seventeen years old and, in the scenes in his school, is shown working in a third-year classroom. As Japanese high schools run on a three-year program, this means he's in his final year and is not likely to get bullied by the big boys.
  
  
• Schuldig clearly prefers to travel by car. He spends a large chunk of Kapitel driving around looking for people to harass. In fanfic he does much the same thing, but curiously seems to insist on doing it all on foot. Is his car constantly in the shop in fanon?
  
  
• The Koneko no Sumu Ie is Momoe's shop and, for all she may seem pleasantly demented, she's still perfectly capable of running it by herself. In fact, she frequently does so. It's actually considered pretty rare for all of Weiss to be in the store at the same time. If something comes up that takes all of Weiss out of the shop for one reason or another, that's just too bad. These guys aren't really florists and are not going to put compost and lovers' arrangements before their actual job - and certainly not when Momoe can pick up the slack.
  
  
• Ken could not teach small boys soccer for a living. It doesn't pay enough. I know he's shown coaching small kids in the interregnum while Weiss is disbanded, but that doesn't mean this was what he was doing for a living while he wasn't working as an assassin any more than the scenes with Youji mean he was making a living taking blonde girls out for ice cream.
  
  
• Youji's car doesn't have a trunk. It shouldn't have a back seat either, for that matter, but since even Weiss's animators don't seem to be quite clear on that detail, that much we can let slide. Even so, a Lotus Seven is basically an engine with wheels attached and a couple of seats balanced precariously somewhere above it. It barely has anything that could add extra weight to it, and certainly isn't going to have a trunk. It's a car to pelt round race tracks or down country roads in, not do the shopping or drive to the airport.
  
  
• Though it is never really only infrequently shown in Kapitel canon, Weiss may actually do have a van. The problem is that this is far more likely to be a delivery van than some cool assassin-type covert operations van, and thus is going to be full of soil and floristry equipment and probably has their business name stencilled on it somewhere and therefore will not be much good for the night job. Regardless, they certainly don't seem to make a habit of tooling around in it after hours: the pink delivery bike of death gets more screentime.
  
  
• Schwarz do not have all the time in the world to devote to tormenting Mary Sues and/or their opposite numbers because they have full-time jobs. Being a bodyguard wouldn't just involve Schuldig sticking his head round Takatori's door a couple of times a day to make sure the guy was still breathing then wandering off to do something kinky. Bodyguard work takes a lot of time, energy and outward devotion, it is not something that Schwarz can do in a couple of minutes before spending the best part of a week awesomely raping a captive Aya or leering over some speshul girl they'll forget all about the minute the next one pitches up.
  
  
• Schwarz's living arrangements are never really shown in any great detail. All we know is that they have access to 1) a creepy fucking space room; and 2) a padded cell. These rooms may or may not be in the same building. Consequently, there is no reason to assume these guys even have to live together (well, would you want to share a house with Farfarello?), still less that they all live together in what can only be described as Stately Schwarz Penthouse.
  
  
• That orange thing around Ken's waist is not a sweater, it is a shirt. In the last scenes of Kapitel, Aya and Sakura are both seen wearing it unbuttoned and draped over their shoulders. This, for obvious reasons, would not be possible if Ken wore a sweater around his waist.
  
  
• Weiss don't actually use their codenames on missions, presumably for the same reason that they don't cover their faces: anyone who hears their names shouldn't be alive long enough for it to matter. While there's nothing to stop fanficcers from having them use their codenames in the field if they want to, perhaps because it makes them seem more like a black-ops team, authors who don't have them doing this are actually following the canon. For that reason alone they should be allowed to get on with it without being told they're Doing It Wrong as while having Weiss use codenames in the field may seem logical, it also contradicts canon.
  
  
• It is the late nineties. That means Weiss should not have access to iPods, XBoxes, Wiis, BlackBerrys, PS2s or 3s, or anything else that couldn't have been found knocking around Japanese homes before the year 2000 because it hadn't been invented yet.
  
  
• Weiss actually seem quite fond of the girls who hang around the shop, who normally are not in Hard Day's Night mode. The most scathing comment that ever gets made about the fangirls is Ken's describing them as 'pests', and even that line is delivered in such a way that it sounds more like a playful tease to provoke a reaction than a completely accurate assessment of his feelings about them. They're perfectly friendly to them the most of the time and, consequently, would probably not be massively grateful or even particularly polite to any total stranger who cruised on in and started insulting them.
  
  
• Schuldig is a mind reader, he can't read the actual body text of a fic he's been written into - not even if it's in the first person. End result? He shouldn't be replying to the narrative in all italics because he can't do that. Heck, he doesn't even make a habit of projecting his own snarky commentary into people's heads when he could just talk to them and spare himself the headache.
  
  
• Kritiker is not an international agency. It doesn't even seem particularly interested in anything that happens outside of Tokyo, for the most part - understandable, considering how dependent on the Tokyo police department it is. Consequently it doesn't have teams in foreign countries (whose members can conveniently pitch up in Japan demanding to join Weiss) and it's extremely unlikely to send Weiss chasing after anybody who isn't perpetrating their dark deeds on Japanese soil.
  

All of which reminds me, I have a Mary Sue rant I could be getting on with. Some sort of advice guide on how to write a Weiss OC without making a complete hash of it. Maybe I should give that a go sometime when I'm not so heavily aware that I really should be trying to write something a little less utterly pointless. Why is it that the only thing I've actually been able to write lately is an utterly gratuitous Schuldig/Ken sex scene for Acts and Omissions, anyway? I tell myself that if you can't be gratuitous in porn fiction where can you be, but even so...

Anyway, I need to eat or something. I'm feeling a bit funny again.