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

I will agree with the x reader fanfics to an extent. A lot of the shipfics are to men who tend to be those top-kind of people. I know a lot of people do Reader Fics with Levi and the Hetalia cast. It also falls for the second person trap of "You do this, even though you'd never do this in your life!"

X-reader stuff just weirds me out. I'm also not a fan of fics with no plot that're only about sex...

My AO3. Results may vary

I've never read anything X-reader and I really don't want to. Just the idea creeps me out to no end.

It's really common in MCU fics on AO 3, every time I see one I get a little shudder. I even tried reading one or two since I figured I should at least give one a chance, they just devolve into character shilling of both the character and the reader so fast that I couldn't stomach more than a third of a chapter before ragequiting.

Got a new one: characters who are too mature for their age or characters that don't act realistically at all for their situation.

Just today I was reading a Pokémon fic where a 12-year-old girl finds a Larvitar egg. This fic is supposed to take place in a world where Pokemon don't (or at least didn't) exist in any form, and she doesn't freak out and acts way too unrealistically for the situation (she guesses that Pokemon say their species name somehow, because that's how it works in the universe she doesn't know anything about). The Larvitar also behaves itself despite being a newborn and already knows how to communicate, which was just too much for me. The worst part is I wanted this fic to be good because I really like the base premise.

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody remembers it, who else will you have ice cream with?

You see that appear in fanfics were children are being hunted by mutilated monsters a lot for some reason. It's jarring to see anyone no matter what age handle that well at least initially.

edited 30th Jul '15 6:41:56 PM by Bleddyn

On the topic of people replacing characters, I'm not sure if this is a common trope, but when a Self-Insert Fic (particularly one where they end up from our world into their world) winds up replacing The Chosen One.

An example would be a Fire Emblem: Awakening fanfic, where someone from our world wound up replacing Robin. The game spells out just why Robin (or any version of the Avatar) is The Chosen One and not a random schmuck from our world.

I think that falls under "OC character replaces Canon character for whatever reason".

But that is very irritating. Especially since you don't really need to do it for a Player Character because, well, they're supposed to represent the player (most of the time).

"Thanks for the lesson. But I don't need you to tell me who I am."

I can live with it in Pokemon because the PCs are basically blank slates anyway.

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody remembers it, who else will you have ice cream with?

I would get it if said person they were replacing was a blank slate like, say, The Lone Wanderer or The Courier, but for characters like Robin or Shepard, where their past is what led them to why they're either the protagonist or The Chosen One, having them go through that "I came from the real world and now I'm the main character!" phase (especially if they have an established personality to begin with) isn't gonna fly for me.

edited 31st Jul '15 1:35:06 PM by Psyga315

Shepard, not Shepherd.

edited 31st Jul '15 1:34:50 PM by GeekCodeRed

They do have medals for almost, and they're called silver!

Fish out of Water stories in general are becoming this to me. Very few of them are ever done well. Especially the Fish out of Temporal Water ones....

Fish out of Water is one of my favorite premises ever, but yes, it is so rarely done well. What a shame.

New one for me: When they use male/female as descriptions for people. Unless the person talking/POV character is talking about a perp, or an autopsied corpse, or maybe the character is an alien or something, if you use this too much I'm just going to quit reading. What's wrong with using man/woman? or boy/girl if they're younger. Seriously.

One thing related to this is ridiculous descriptives just so they have to avoid using pronouns or the character's name. Fine, I can deal with using hair (unless you use bluenette. Stop. Yes, that anime character has blue hair. No, that doesn't make it sound any less dumb), or a character's job, but if it's not relevant to the scene, it just makes it painful to read.

I know, it might be a bit confusing, especially if the scene has two characters of the same gender, but if you're gonna use this shit on a scene with only one character, and that character doesn't even talk or think about some other character—- gaaah

(Another one, which is kinda maybe tangential on the grounds that it's technically not reading and technically not fanfic, but it's fanmade: okay, so the art/doujin is very pretty and the story is nice, but why is that character thin as a twig when he was ripped as fuck in canon, ugh)

(my tumblr) (my fics) (anime i watch)

I think the first one has to do with how many fanfic authors havn't clued into the fact that a person's name is almost like a pronoun. You almost never see descriptions used to differentiate people in a scene in most good fiction, and when it is used, it's usually to draw attention to a detail about them on purpose.

It's especially ridiculous when they come up with a different description every time the character is mentioned, even in the same paragraph. And when the descriptions involve stuff that the viewpoint character doesn't even know.

Blind Final Fantasy 6 Let's Play

Surprise Massive Multiplayer Crossover. If I want to read X/Y crossover, I want to read X/Y crossover.

Not X/Y/Z/T/R/H/G crossover that was never mentioned.

I may be guilty of using different descriptive for a single character. I don't do it very often, but sometimes I find that using the name of the character (or he/she) all the time becomes repetitive, and end up using some descriptive like as "the tall man", "the blond-haired girl", "the king" etc (provided these descriptives allow to identify the character without a doubt given the setting). So this does not bother me in a fic, unless it's becoming some Purple Prose descriptives changing every sentence, of course.

Whatever your favourite work is, there is a Vocal Minority that considers it the Worst. Whatever. Ever!.

I think that is a difference between writing something and reading it. While reading something, seeing just the character's name flows smoothly, because you know who the character is already. Seeing just descriptions causes the reader to have to work at figuring out who the description is referring to.

Let's be fair, it's not like fanfiction.net will even allow you to tag multiple fandoms^note though supposedly AO3 will, which means you have to take up writing in the summary or the first chapter. Also, some stories are designed so that the crossover aspects are supposed to be a surprise, both to the characters and the readers.

That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw

^ AO3 does let you tag multiple work crossovers. Of course, this then leads to the red flag where the amount of fandoms a work takes place in is longer then the actual fic summary... Actually, that red flag goes for tags that are longer then the actual summary...

And AO3 still hasn't figured out how to code a "without" filter for ratings/pairings/tags/etc. so in order to find the fics you do want to read, you have to slog though all the fics you don't want to read... which takes a really, really long time if you don't want fics with romance or that aren't rated "explicit"...

For all that fanfiction.net could use more tags, it does have the without filter so I can get rid of all the fics that have pairings, or certain characters tagged as main characters or are certain genres (no fics tagged as romance!) so I spend a lot less time looking though fics as opposed to actually reading fics on that site...

Writers who submit their stories to AO 3 also like to tag goddamn everything, which is a red flag for me because I don't need everything tagged and it's information overload.

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody remembers it, who else will you have ice cream with?

A surplus of tags is usually a red flag anyways, because, especially with pairings, it indicates they either didn't get the point or oh god this is going to be entirely pairings and that's a very slippery slope.

Nous restons ici.

Uh, actually you can filter stuff you don't want in AO 3, in the Search Within Results bar. It searches everything—from the categories to the ratings and the tags and the summaries. Just put a dash/minus sign before a word (or if you want to exclude a phrase, surround it with double quotes). You can even do a boolean OR search.

Of course, you have to know the canonical tag to filter it out, but I think using a synonymous one works too, provided the wranglers linked both tags as synonymous.

For the lots of Fandoms tagged (in AO 3 at least), I find that they're almost always a collection of oneshots/drabbles a writer's too lazy to separate as single works. I hate those. It's fine if it's for two or three fandoms, but when it's 10 or more, it just gets annoying. Just make it a series instead of one work if you want to see it as a collection so much.

As for the tagging, while I do agree that a wall of tags is very very off-putting (I'm looking at you, Hetalia writers who tag every goddamn one of the countries in their fics even if it's just a cameo or some shit), I'd rather have that than those barely tagged at all. So you just tagged the Relationship, and maybe the characters, then you better make sure your summary is informative and enticing as fuck. Oh, and good luck for your work ever showing up in a search result.

(Btw, if you have an AO 3 account there's a feature to hide the additional/freeform tags, so there's that.)

edited 3rd Aug '15 11:19:42 PM by ramenradian

(my tumblr) (my fics) (anime i watch)

I wonder if using machine learning to autotag stories would be helpful. I'm sure there's algorithms out there that can do it.

Blind Final Fantasy 6 Let's Play