What are your personal "red flags" before reading any fanfic?

To see his family. There are two schools of really effective interrogation; the first, based on someone being recently captured, exploits the fact that the mind transitions more slowly from "oh god I'm gonna die" to calm than the other way around and exploits that fear. The second is about psychological trickery with buttons and levers you can pull for a response, and requires extensive knowledge of your target.

Why does torture have to be unique, though? People getting tortured is people getting tortured. It doesn't necessarily need to be creative too

,, Fair enough

edited 15th Apr '15 3:41:04 PM by Murataku

Because so often in fanfiction, torture is a stand-in for "what's the most sadistic thing the author can think up". So seeing an author use something else other then violence that's in character can be really refreshing.

Also, plain pain-based physical torture is boring, and it does not get results.

Just seeing the typical stuff gets boring. Might as well just imply and skip it so you don't need to make the reader sit through a scene they've seen a million times before.

There's also the fact that such kinds of torture tend to have the victim tell you what he or she thinks you want to hear in order to make the pain stop, not necessarily the truth.

edited 15th Apr '15 10:17:31 AM by IAmNotCreativeEnough

Torture involving a reliable Living Lie Detector or Truth Serum, though, is an authoritarian state's wet dream, even if you do still run into the issue of the victim getting honestly confused or rendered unable to respond by the pain.

My personal red flags:

I Suck at Summaries

Bad spelling or grammar in the summary or first chapter

A summary or first chapter that obviously points to a Cliché Storm

Certain Fandom Specific Plots that suggest the above: for example, any Avatar The Last Airbender stories or crossovers that star Katara and Zuko make me wary.

edited 15th Apr '15 2:36:53 PM by LinkToTheFuture

Purple Prose. It's a warning sign that the main character is a Mary Sue and it also pads out the story to unnecessarily long lengths.

Purple Prose can be utterly hilarious when used right, though - mostly when it is parodied, and when paired with Beige Prose used as a punchline.

You can extend the "joke" to certain characters who are so flowery that Purple Prose is almost required.

I mean, if you're not writing Tatewaki Kuno like this, you're doing it wrong.

When a character uses it is totally different. Plus, Purple Prose goes really well with Sophisticated as Hell.

As I'm reading more fanfics, I realise that a yellowish-red flag for me is when the mood of a fic is too dissonant with the mood of the original work. It's obvious when a fic about a serious work turns it into a joke (unless of course it's an explicit parody), but I realised I don't like it either when a light work or a work requiring some suspension of disbelief becomes overly complex (not necessarily dark) to the point of feeling like a Deconstruction.

It's a yellowish-red flag because it may not stop me if the fic is well done, but I will probably enjoy it less.

Same here. Dark Fics can be okay, but more often it falls into Narm, and just like you said, dark works made funny, unless they are explicitly parodies or primarily a comedy, can be pretty jarring.

I agree... when it's missing the point rather than deliberately changing the tone. It happens more than you'd think, stories in which the author just blatantly misses when trying to make a story darker.

True. The reverse is also true, however: I've read a few Death Note fics where the author just hasn't quite figured out that you're supposed to be making a rather dark story if you're trying to match the tone of the source material, not just "And then some bad things happened! Oh no!"

edited 21st Apr '15 6:24:48 PM by LinkToTheFuture

That is true, yeah.

The worst part is that the grand majority miss the point in a very... boring fashion. Nothing as spectacularly over the top as Light And Dark The Adventures Of Dark Yagami.

Besides the normal stuff like spelling, grammar, and early Mary Sue flags, I don't get the appeal of High School AU stories and avoid them like the plague. I also tend to avoid anything with Ash or the anime-verse when reading a Pokémon fic because I don't care about him (and the writers tend to change him to the point that it's not him anymore in an attempt to fix his stupidity, which makes him unrecognizable to me).

I feel like that too. For example, I love the idea of a Continuation Fic starring a new Kira and a new set of characters, but the problem is most stories of this kind fall into the same pitfalls over and over again:

1. The plot is an almost exact copy of the canon story, with the same events happening with minor changes and absolutely drowning in expies and Copycat Sues

2. If the above is averted, than it will lack most or all of the Gambit Pileups and clever mind games that made the canon so interesting.

edited 22nd Apr '15 9:24:28 AM by LinkToTheFuture

• High School A Us.

• Bad summaries.

• Research and Lore failures. I found a guy called Balin Lord of Moria on Fanfiction.Net, and some of his stories were based around Sierra games- you know, King's Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest, Leisure Suit Larry enc -and... they were awful in so many ways. The LSL ones weren't even really stories at all, and he proclaimed "NO LEMON OR LIME" on at least one of them, which would be okay with me if it WASN'T the Leisure Suit Larry section, since that's a game series that is bursting at the seams with secual innuendo and the goal of the first game is to GET LAID. I EXPECT Lemons or Limes for LSL! I expect Rule 34! Not just bland descriptions of the ending scenes in LSL 1. It's clear he hasn't played any of the games he's writing about (he has said he hasn't played Space Quest 5 at the very least), as I see mistakes that no avid fan would make. For example, the "I Love You, Scars and All" story has Marie Bonds be distressed over the scars left from her stabbing incident, and Sonny tells her that he loves her anyway. The problem is the place she was stabbed was in the stomach, not the chest like the story says, and that makes Marie think that Sonny won't want to "make love to her anymore" because of them... which makes it sound like she thinks Sonny married her because of her looks (she and him were friends in high school and she became a hooker though Sonny helped her out of that line of work), and not her personality. Which sounds very shallow.

I just tried reading a fic that had a confusing first person POV that turned out to be an OC. There wasn't any indication that the POV was an OC until later. An OC POV can work, but it's easy to mess up if you don't know what your doing. And they rated the fic wrong by rating it "K" but using F bombs.

Which reminds me, shifting First Person PO Vs in general (especially if the writer decides to label whose POV it is now). Shifting Third Person can work, but not shifting First Person because it's confusing.

Anytime somebody uses a foreign language gratuitously, or even worse have the translation of that language shortly afterward. Congratulations, you know what country that character is from and you know how to use google translate. We're all very proud of you, have a gold star. One gold star.

Yeah considering I've seen plenty of widely read published authors do that, I'm going to lightly bap you on the head and scold you for complaining there.

especially if the writer decides to label whose POV it is now

Don't you mean especially if the writer doesn't label it?

It comes down to how it's executed. Some writers can give each character a distinct voice. So they can make it clear who's narrating from voice and other context, without ever directly telling the reader who's narrating.

But if the author does that badly, you wind up with a confusing narrative where no one can tell who the viewpoint character is.

Or you can directly tell the audience who's narrating. The subtle way to accomplish this is via the paratext. William Faulkner did that in As I Lay Dying: each chapter is named for whichever character is narrating in it. I've also seen fanfiction writers use section break markers with different symbols or colors to indicate the narrator of the next section.

The blunt, crappy way to do that is to slap a "This part is from Gary Stu's point of view:" directly in the text itself.

Animorphs also did the character name at the beginning of each chapter thing. I don't see what's so hard about it.