www.ditl.org

1. J.K. Rowling: Hermione and Ron's marriage. Fans who were a bit perplexed that Hermione Granger ended up marrying Ron Weasley got a bit of vindication when Rowling revealed back in February that the pair weren't a plausible couple. The Sunday Times reported:

"I wrote the Hermione/Ron relationship as a form of wish fulfillment," she admitted. "That's how it was conceived, really. For reasons that have very little to do with literature and far more to do with me clinging to the plot as I first imagined it, Hermione ended up with Ron."

She went on to say Harry would have been a better match. Rowling has also said that, after killing all those characters in all of those books, there is one minor character that she regrets marking for death.

5. J.R.R. Tolkien: Calling any of his characters "Elves." It's hardly a surprise that the linguist Tolkien has a regret that's less about story than semantics. But Tolkien was concerned not just with how the story appeared in his own head, but also how it appeared in readers' heads. One of the problems, Tolkien felt, was with the Elves.

When Tolkien called one of his races "Elves," he was not thinking of small, slender, point-eared people of contemporary folklore, but of tall, legendary beings. In a 1954 letter to Hugh Brogan (numbered Letter 151), Tolkien writes:

Also, I now deeply regret having used Elves, though this is a word in ancestry and original meaning suitable enough. But the disastrous debasement of this word, in which Shakespeare played an unforgiveable part, has really overloaded it with regrettable tones, which are too much to overcome.

Tolkien would sometimes rewrite his books for later editions. Most famously, he rewrote the "Riddles in the Dark" chapter of The Hobbit so that Gollum would be more aggressive, as he had been corrupted by the One Ring. He also changed the word "Gnomes" in The Hobbit, which he originally used to refer to certain Elves, but which he felt was mistranslated in readers' minds. The words "Elf" and "Elves" stayed, however.

8. Vince Gilligan: Killing the Lone Gunmen on The X-Files. It somehow seems fitting that one of Vince Gilligan's big regrets from The X-Files comes from an episode titled "Jump the Shark." After The Lone Gunmen spinoff show was cancelled, Fox refused to let the conspiracy-loving trio back on The X-Files. So writers Gilligan, John Shiban, and Frank Spotnitz ended up killing them off. Fans were distraught, and in the end, the writers weren't thrilled with the decision either.

In The Complete X-Files, Gilligan told Chris Knowles and Matt Hurwitz, "I still think we made the wrong choice on that one." Spotnitz was a bit softer on the decision, saying:

I can't say I regret killing them off, as you know, no one really dies in The X-Files [...] But I do feel tonally it was a mistake to end the episode on such a somber note. I wish we'd ended it on a laugh or smile.

Nutso wrote:

8. Vince Gilligan: Killing the Lone Gunmen on The X-Files...

5. J.R.R. Tolkien: Calling any of his characters "Elves."

Teaos wrote:Tolkien reclaimed Elves. Now when we say elves we think 6 foot warriors, not 6 inch pixies.

7. J. Michael Straczynski: Making Norman Osborn the father of Gwen Stacy's children. If you thought that Sins Past, the story that reveals that Gwen Stacy fell in love with Norman Osborn and bore him twins, was out of left frakking field, you're not alone. Straczynski himself claims that he hated the idea of Norman and Gwen having kids, and has said that he only went along with the idea because he thought he could retcon it away:

I wanted to retcon the Gwen twins out of continuity, which was something I always assumed I could do at the end of my run. I wasn't allowed to do this, and yes, it pissed me off.