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

No, no, I get it. I was more running with the ball GCR rolled. But yeah, fan wankery is dumb.

I'll admit, I kinda spoke a bit too much of my personal preferences there. I dunno, just still feels awkward to me, y'know? Like treating Kyon Big Damn Hero's "crossover with TV Tropes" as a serious statement.

Wait, people actually bother to keep the Stand arrow around? People don't just go "BAM! Got me some Stand powers now!"

I'm more talking about them taking a single element. I've seen a lot of fics where people simply take the dæmons from His Dark Materials and give them to other universes.

To explain, a dæmon is a person's soul, with it's own physical presence and personality, outside the body and in the form of an animal (or, very rarely, a mythical creature). Usually the animal form is representative of the person's personality, with varying levels of subtlety. (One character is a loner and a fighter, his dæmon is a cat. Servants usually have dogs. On the other hand, one main character has a Pine Marten (aka a nobler weasel: she's very good at lying), another has an Alpine Chough (I'll leave you guess that one).)

Fic writers who take the idea simply use it to basically murder subtlety.

It'd be interesting to see one where they use the daemons to screw with expectations.

I guess it'd be kind of similar to fics where everyone gets digimon partners, which can take a similar tack.

As long as it's advertized as a partial crossover instead of canon I don't have an issue with it. Sometimes I only want to read canon stuff, other times it can be really fun to read the same type of crossover (especially if they're usually short) and see which author does it best.

The thing is, all of these red flags can, in theory, be false alarms. We've discussed this already.

But they're red flags for a reason, and that reason is that most fanfic writers are pretty damn terrible, and pretty much all of the red flags we've brought up come from either knee jerk reactions to concepts we just find disgusting or concepts we've seen overdone so much and so poorly that the concept, in and of itself, even if it's pulled off well, becomes something we dread seeing in any fanfic.

Not because it is a bad idea in and of itself, but because it's been done so poorly so many times.

What you're bringing up is an instance of things being done in a less annoying way.

Saying "Hey, people, I'll be borrowing elements from x series" already sets us up with what to expect and so we react less unfavorably to the crossover concept because it's not blindsiding us. Now all that you've got left to do is to change it so that it's not just an excuse to make your self insert seem cooler and we're set.

edited 25th Jun '15 9:44:04 AM by IAmNotCreativeEnough

This thread has certainly discussed it many times, and the closest thing to a general consensus is that there are two camps. On one side, these flags are signs of caution, and the message is to tread through carefully. On the other side, these flags are immediate danger flares, and the message is to get out ASAP and move on. On one side, certain ideas have potential to be done well, but have been done so poorly so often that they most likely won't. On the other side, certain ideas are just terribad in concept, and could very well be deal-breakers alone.

And the thing is both sides are perfectly acceptable responses, given personal expectations and tolerances. I'd even go further to call it case-by-case, since one can easily be on one side for one particular thing and the other for something else. So....um.....yeah.

......Shit, I can't even remember if I had a more-related point. I've just been meaning to vent this for a while but every time it comes up I can't respond in time. Don't take any of this personally.

Have I mentioned "The story goes into way too much detail about the main character's money" yet? Because that's a common one in Harry Potter fan fiction.

Haven't really encountered that one. But then again I've only read Albus/Scorpius, and either both families are loaded, or it's not just mentioned on the fic.

And I just realized I reject reading fics on principle with horrendous HTML. I've seen one where each chapter is just one huge <p> tag and a lot of <br> tags to break actual paragraphs. If you don't want to learn basic HTML (and basic CSS, because while hardcoded paragraph indents are only mildly annoying, it's still annoying), at least learn Markdown.

Well, it comes up. For example, in Partially Kissed Hero, where we're treated to entire chapters full of descriptions of the hellspawn's properties and lands and how they're going to be making more money on shit. Or in one fic that someone on this site made a thread for, where the entire first two chapters are basically giving a rundown of the genderflipped "Athena" Potter's lengthy list of titles, properties, and vault contents.

Bonus points going to how said protagonist has documents in her vault going back to Morgan Le Fey, i.e. the medieval period, and just having some mere difficulty reading it, nevermind the fact that Medieval English is for all intents and purposes a completely different language from Modern English.

He's not kidding.

In Partially Kissed Hero, we get pages upon pages upon pages of exposition about the Monster of a Protagonist's fiefdom, about how cool and awesome it is, about how much money he has and how much money he makes and how he makes it...

Also, here's a tip:

Authors, if you've never studied economy, either micro or macro, if you've never studied how any form of business works, if you don't know how the stock market works, if you don't know how banks work... then don't try to write that stuff in. Just say the protagonist is rich and leave it at that. You don't need to go into detail. It's just you stroking your self insert's dick and we don't want to see that.

Or at the very least, don't be "above" asking for advice on things you want to include but don't understand.

When it comes to running across content you have no knowledge of in your story, you really have only three valid options:

1. Do the research

2. Don't include it

3. Include it anyway, but play it for laughs

Best option if you want to include it anyway in a somewhat serious fashion...

Don't go into details. You can sell it if you don't go into details.

Especially with science stuff. If you want to make the protagonist's DNA weird, don't do it by messing with the number of chromosomes because people with extra chromosomes (like chromosome 21) have genetic diseases that do not give people physic powers. Just say they have weird DNA!

Stuff like this is the reason that whenever I write any non-realistic fiction it tends to be on the fantasy end of the spectrum. That way I can just establish the rules of how things work myself rather than worrying about getting the science right.

I tend to just do as much research as I can, particularly for settings/ geographically locations. This goes for published things too—if the climax of your book needs to take place on a mountain covered in eucalyptus trees, maybe do a quick check to see if there's even a single one in the entire city you're claiming reeks of it.

But that's a red flag for me— geographic inconsistencies that could be easily rectified with google. Like folk in the Big Hero 6 fandom having massive snowstorms snow everyone in when there's been snow in the SF bay area maybe 6 times in the last 22 years, and not more than an inch or so on the tallest hills. It's not bad but it's jarring, and I find I spend more time going " what? but that...?" then focusing on the story.

I don't know about San Francisco specifically, but it takes a lot less snow to shut down a city that's unprepared for it. Atlanta has been shut down by snow several times in recent memory despite averaging 2.2 inches of snow a year.

One of my friends who used to live in an area that doesn't get snow often used to talk about how any snow at all could shut down everything, even if it wasn't enough to actually cause any problems. He once had a snow day when there was only half an inch (which melted by the end of the day) because of how badly everyone over-reacted.

That said, having a massive snowstorm hit an area that normally doesn't get any snow is a pretty bad inconsistency unless the weirdness of the weather is a plot point.

edited 29th Jun '15 8:07:03 AM by JapaneseTeeth

The worst geography I've ever seen was in an actual movie.

Fuck you, Leap Year. You went to Ireland for filming, for fuck's sake.

, Yeah. The problem is that the writers don't go with " an inch shutting down the city" (and I wasn't really clear— that inch is the record, and it's in the hills NEAR/ ACROSS from SF, not in the city itself.) Because that's not dramatic enough. And they never put it as a plot point so much as a reason to get characters stuck together. The fact that it's snowing never fazes anyone until there's a lot, and then it's " oh, wow, I guess we're snowed in!"

I was in Atlanta when "Snowpocalypse" happened a year ago. Couple inches turned the entire interstate into an honest-to-God parking lot. As a New Yorker I spent the next week constantly laughing.

Speaking of New York, it always felt to me as though New York City and Tokyo had similar seasonal weather patterns, which is kinda kept in my mind with some of my writing. I have no idea how accurate that is though.

There's a reason why most people accept Creator Provincialism, after all... Best let them make everything take place in their home, over having to write of a place they've never been and known nothing of.

Tied into geographic failures is accent failures. It's better to describe an accent in the tags than to overdo it in a stereotypical manner. And when people mess up Philly and New Jersey accents, I just want to roll my eyes.

Trying to write out an accent and over doing it is a red flag for me. I hate have to spend five minutes trying to figure it all out. using certain words (Ma or Mom or Mam or Mum, for example, or yard sale vs rummage sale, garage sale, porch sale, thrift sale) works very well to give an idea of dialect. but spelling out/writing out the sounding out everything gets old /fast/. I am so with you.

I learned this the hard way. I thought it would be a fun idea to give one of my OC's an accent, than started to regret it as I kept having to write out that accent over and over and over again. I can't just stop doing it since I want to stay consistent, and it just so happens to be for my most recurring OC too.

Learn from my experience people. Accents suck!

edited 1st Jul '15 1:38:49 PM by Berserker88