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

Well, from what I understand, a lack of het ships may be an indication that the male-female relationships in the work aren't particularly well written (hence the relationships being regarded as rather boring), while a large amount of slash pairings might mean that same-sex character interactions are being done pretty well, which leads to some deciding that a romantic pairing could convincingly spring from them.

Are there any fandoms in particular that you're having trouble finding het pairings in?

That's almost never the case from what I find, with noted exceptions (Korra comes to mind and that relationship and it's affect on others is actually good fanfic fodder since it came straight the hell out of nowhere in the show).

And again, that's saying all relationships MUST be romantic, which is a clear misunderstanding of the human condition.

edited 13th Sep '16 10:02:45 AM by Beatman1

This. It's pretty much The Law of Conservation of Detail as applied to relationships. The most important relationships most people have in real life are usually of the romantic variety, so the logic goes that the most important relationships we seen on screen are probably romantic as well. Never mind the genre, characterization, etc.

As someone's who ace, I tend to read original works that don't have as much focus on romance as they have on worldbuilding, True Companions, etc. The fanfiction of those works tend to all be romance, most of it slash. I pretty much learned how to filter out everything but Gen works on AO3 out of necessity; it saves me such a headache.

Lets see here Worm is particularly bad about this atm. If there is any pairings at all I guarantee it will be a lesbian one. I have only seen one het pairing (not counting the canonical ones). Albeit admittedly Worm has a literal prominent LGBT hero in-universe and he is literally one of the nicest people you could find there so maybe that's why gay fics/pairings are so popular in that fandom if they even pop up at all.

Korra and even the original Avatar fandom was also kind of bad about that. I could not tell you how many Jet and Zuko, Sokka and Zuko fics I saw. It was either that or Zutara fics which were also very annoying and cliche. Very few actually unique pairings in that fandom.

The MLP: Fi M is really bad about this. No contest. Admittedly I can kind of see why as male characters aren't a focus of the show and one the main characters gets stereotyped a lot ironically enough but in the case of that I just go WHY CAN'T THEY JUST ALL BE PLATONIC?.

I also see this a lot in anime fics. Just in general. Attack On Titan for example has the disturbing fics involving Eren and Levi everywhere. This is despite the fact that Eren is 15 and Levi is in his 30s. Those two aren't exactly friends either.

Teen Titans has also been getting this a lot lately. I am honestly not quite sure why (Maybe Teen Titans Go is the reason why their is so many lesbian fics or plot points popping up?). At one point I went into a fic for an interesting idea behind it only to find a crudely shoehorn of a lesbian couple in it.

...Tell me, do you ever find het pairings that you think would be better off if they were platonic?

Many actually. Avatar for example has plenty of good platonic pairings. Teen Titans also was pretty much built like that as well. Beast Boy and Cyborg, Starfire and Raven, Robin and Cyborg.

There is quite a lot of good platonic pairings out there now I think about it. Part of my annoyance is that some fanfic writers take a Ship Tease (or what they perceive as one) and run with it. Even in cases were I just don't think a romantic couple like that would work. Invader Zim for example has so many goddamn Dib/Zim fics that it is not even funny at times. This is despite the fact that those two hate each other most of the time and are Vitriolic Best Buds the rest of the time. I could see them being platonic version of Vitriolic Best Buds but nothing more

Take Zootopia for a counterexample. That movie was probably the best example of a platonic pairing that I have seen in recent years. And I could completely see were people are getting the romantic idea from as the chemistry between Nick and Judy was pretty good.

edited 13th Sep '16 8:57:05 PM by Ecrivan

I get being annoyed by an overabundance of shipping, and people saying 'if you don't ship it you're problematic!' (Though that seems to be more of a tumblr thing). But that's just in general. I get annoyed at sudden Zutara overabundance as much as Jetko. And I understand being annoyed if one popular ship swamps out the ship you want to read about. But you have to understand that fanfiction is a place for people who aren't straight to write the stories they want to see, where Clark Kent can be bi without censors or Moral Guardians getting up in arms about it.

I usually don't care much about ships (to be quite honest, I don't care much about romance in the original works either).
If done well, I can tolerate them, unless they lead to overextended sex scenes - I don't care either for sex scenes in a story, unless it's plot-relevant, and that's rare. I'm old enough to understand what will happen where two characters enter a bedroom together and if I want to read a sex scene I will just look for some porn stories.

Ships that raise a red flag for me are those that 1) turn a canonically non-romantic relationship into a romantic one (e.g. Incest Yay Shipping, Heterosexual Life-Partners becoming love interests) 2) ignore the characters' respective alignment (Foe Yay Shipping) and 3) ignore a character canonical sexual orientation (if it is quite clear in the original work).

Writers fanatical about their OTP are annoying, although really that's only a subset of writers who think that their headcanon is the one and only correct interpretation. Although the critics sent at those who complain against a pairing can be entertaining - I remember seeing someone labelling those complaining about Elsanna as homophobes.

edited 14th Sep '16 12:20:57 AM by C105

Those people need to have a hard reality check.

Oh believe I am kind of used to all of the bad romance fics these days. It's annoying but there is next to nothing anyone can really do about it. Not even the small fandoms get off the hook in regards to that.

Still, sometimes I wish I didn't have to wade through crap or cliches to find gems. Albeit that goes for a lot of works out there....

Well that's just Sturgeon's Law in effect. But it does get to be quite annoying when 95% of the fics you find for a certain series are all yaoi based romances, with people literally getting angry at the 5% for not being yaoi based. Again, Legendary Defender.

Going way back:

Guilty as charged, where a male and a female characters who are adult and unrelated.

Recently scrolled through all Supergirl fanfics on AO 3, and I swear 99% of them are Cat Grant/Supergirl. Given that their dynamic in the show is more abrasive mentor/sweet mentee than romantic, and the fact the age difference is large enough that Supergirl dated Cat's son, I really wish AO 3 had a without filter.

I personally prefer gen with background romance at most (romance is like parsley for me- a good garnish and spice, not something for an entree). I tend to scroll through sex scenes when I'm reading a good story too. It just becomes an issue when you're spending a long time trying to find a fic that isn't romance, or when you post something on Tumblr and the discourse begins.

I'm rewatching Supergirl on Netflix, and Cat Grant is essentially a J. Jonah Jameson expy.

Which makes that seven levels of OH GOD KILL IT WITH FIRE. Het is not Ew. THAT is Ew.

Honestly I see how people ship Kara/Cat. I mean it's at least a partial reflection of the Lois/Clark relationship. Plus their mentor/mentee relationship is one of the stronger parts of the show. And from my understanding The Devil Wears Prada had a similar reaction of behalf of the shippers

That said, I personally really dislike the ship myself. The age, experience and power difference just squicks me out.

edited 17th Sep '16 5:37:50 PM by 32ndfreeze

I'm not surprised that people ship it- at this point, I think it's hard to be surprised that people ship anything- the most surprising part is how pervasive it is, and is by far the number one pairing.

And since I have the same reaction to that pairing as you, and the second most common pairing is emotional incest (though on some level it's probably technically about as squicky as Barry/Iris on the current Flash series, but the difference being that Supergirl keeps on presenting it as sisterly while Flash presents Barry having a crush before he moved in), it means there aren't many Supergirl fics out there that I want to read.

AO 3 doesn't let you filter out romance?

AO 3 lets you filter for only gen. However, if you want to read a specific romantic pairing, then it's harder to filter out other pairings you don't want.

And for particularly pervasive pairings like Kara/Cat you still end up with a lot of slice of life fics with them together in the gen category.

AO 3's tagging system is certainly more substantial that FFN's one. But because of the way most people tag fics I find it really difficult to search for specific pairings.

edited 18th Sep '16 9:38:00 PM by 32ndfreeze

I remember trying to filter F/M and got metric tons of M/M fics regardless. So yeah, useless.

I tried to filter for f/f fics in the Harry Potter fandom and got a lot of mixed pairings, but if I filtered for m/m pairings, the problem wasn't as big. So to a certain extent, successfully filtering for one type of pairing depends on fandom.

So then my choice of fandoms sucks. Got it.

Not to mention I really don't want to be that guy but it gets annoying when you want to read a Gen fic or God forbid according to these people, - F/M and there's endless, ENDLESS M/M stuff, written by people...who have no idea how men act. Stuff where it is blindingly obvious the authors are teenage girls.

edited 19th Sep '16 5:58:11 AM by Beatman1

Yeah, there definitely tends to be a lot more m/m stuff than the other categories. I'm sure some are very well written, but those weren't really what I was looking for.

I managed to get 90% fics focused on an F/F pairing when I was searching for a male character. Admittedly, that's probably because AO 3 doesn't differentiate between major and side character in tagging.

Speaking of which, what's your tagging etiquette for characters? Like, how often do they have to appear in a fic to tag them on the work?

They must have a major presence in the fic. They don't have to be main characters, but they need to contribute to the story the fanfic is telling.