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

And then there's the people who simply want to mess with anyone who wants a heterosexual ship, tagging a ship with a heterosexual pair while the description proudly describes how they're having characters "being gay". At which point I want to say some very very mean things.

By the way, and please tell me if this sounds mean, but your description saying characters are "being gay" equates with "I am a lonely teenage girl and want to fantasize about two men having sex with each other. Also my writing is terrible."

edited 19th Sep '16 12:28:55 PM by Beatman1

I don't frequent AO 3, so I'm not too familiar with the tagging system, but if that's the best way the writers can describe their characters and/or relationship, I doubt they can be expected to write any sort of mature, thoughtful plots.

That's not even the tags. That's the proper description. The tags will promise a F/M relationship only to pull the rug out because the author is an angry teenage girl.

Troll tags? Pretty dick move.

In my experience its more often confusing because some authors tag based on the main pairing rather than active mistagging. And some tag based on any pairing that appears in their list of 10+ pairings listed in the story.

"But if that happened, Melia might actually be happy. We can't have that." - Handsome Rob

You want to see a bad fanfic being MS Ted?

Then here:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/lb_i.php?lb_id=14362071400B63016300

You gotta start somewhere.

'Canon pairings exist' is such a useful tag when you want to indicate 'yeah the canon couples will be together but that's not the point of the story, they're trying to save the world here'.

I understand wanting to tag a pairing that's a huge NOTP for some people even if it plays a small role, but as always tags shouldn't look like a paragraph

My AO3

Well, that assumes your fandom HAS stories about saving the world, and not endless high school/college AU's.

I've ranted about it before, but it really gets pretty damn depressing when EVERY SINGLE fic is a meaningless diary about high school. I didn't like high school. I admit that. So why, oh why, would you take characters from a dynamic, interesting setting and put them there? And clearly I am in the minority on this one. I hate to keep picking on them since they're becoming a Steven Universe level punching bag for me, but the Voltron fandom, again. A show about giant robots beating the crap out of giant robots and giant monsters. I think, no joke, I am one of maybe...five people who wrote about giant robots in a fic for that series. Everything else? Gay couple high school AU. Gay couple college AU. Gay couple coffee shop AU. Gay couple college AU. Gay couple college dorm AU where the biggest dilemma is getting the laundry done.

It's infuriating. It's either people miss why people like the show in the first place, or I'm missing it, being out of touch and need to abandon fandom and make some Iron Blooded Orphans fanfics instead.

In order to filter out stuff in AO 3, you need to put a "-" sign in front of the tag in the "search within results" box. So the best way to search for F/M pairings is to click the F/M box and then put in "-f/f -m/m" in the search terms. I pretty much use "-f/f -m/m -explicit" every single time I search for stuff as it cuts the results out by at least half, if not more.

Ao3 Savior works for tags if you want to filter out specific pairings. Doesn't work for ratings or relationship designations (F/M, F/F, M/M) though. I wish it did though, because I'd love to filter out all the explicit-rated fics.

Also, do you guys have issues with gay ships because they're gay, or because they're usually not canon? I'm not much for shipping, but I tend to prefer canon pairings when I do have preferences, so if that's the case I get it. But for the last page or so, a lot of you seem to just be bashing slash in general.

edited 22nd Sep '16 10:39:13 AM by SapphireBlue

Not canon and my general dislike of romance. It also is pretty obvious that slash pairings are so the teen girl writing it can have twice the male hotness to lust after. And slash pairings often have characters that I view as surrogate brothers, so you get the incest squick. Oh, I also don't like anything that may have Unfortunate Implications in a one of the parties should be on a sex offender list kind of thing.

edited 22nd Sep '16 11:32:06 AM by bookworm6390

My issue is their pervasiveness between characters who show nary a hint of it, and that it becomes the only thing people want to write about, more often than not putting them in the most mundane settings instead of the show settings which are often a million times more interesting. It becomes egregious when fan girls are all "this is canon" and get offended when people want to discuss characters outside of their designated gay ships. It honestly gets to the point the original work suffers because of it.

When every single story is this gay ship at a coffee shop, or (ugh) high school when the show is about giant robots beating the crap out of each other, or kung fu, or a superhero, I can only ask if I'm watching the show for the wrong reason or if they're better off watching a soap opera.

edited 22nd Sep '16 11:04:15 AM by Beatman1

I have neither issue. Just the general risk of the story being bad like anything else carries.

This is pretty much how I feel about slash, but I never thought of explaining it using those terms, so thanks for giving me ideas.

Not against slash in general, but really popular M/M ships tend to have a lot of baggage. Sometimes the age difference and/or emotional incest squicks me out (Anakin/Obi-Wan, Obi-Wan/Qui-Gon, and for Voltron Shiro/Keith). Other times it seems incredibly OOC, and I haven't really seen fics that make it seem realistic (Captain Cold/Flash). And although this doesn't always happen, canonical female love interests getting massively twisted or shoved to the side to make room for the M/M ship is a major turn off and probably the biggest issue (Iris from Flash, Guinevere for BBC's Merlin, Padme for Star Wars).

It doesn't mean I won't read any slash pairings, though. I'll read Obi-Wan/Anakin A Us were Obi-Wan did not raise Anakin and they got together as adults, I'm fine with Eddie/Barry and Eddie/Iris/Barry, and I'll do crack ships like Darth Maul/Anakin out of sheer curiosity.

A lot of these issues can happen with any fan favorite pairing. But sometimes fan culture can turn rabid around slash.

My AO3

Yeah, OO Cness is one of the main reasons why I stay away from slash fics.

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

From my experiences with gay fics (F/F and the occasional M/M) it's generally not the fact that it's a gay pairing that is really the problem per say but it's the fact that it is rarely ever done well (much like many hetero pairings for that matter). I have seen way too many occasions were the pairing was just shoehorned in. In most cases this can either detract from the plot or just come off as unnecessary titillation to the author or the author's fans. In some cases both.

Admittedly as said before this happens with hetero pairings as well but I am not quite sure if hetero pairings are as common as they used to be in the fanfiction spheres.

Honestly the whole shipping parts of fandoms in general can be a mess and they also can be really cringey at times.

Formerly known as Bleddyn And I am feeling like a ghost Resident Perky Goth

Slash fics are kind of a Guilty Pleasure for me, but even then I tend to be pretty picky about it - I don't like Wimpification or any other cases of blatant OO Cness. And I like to experiment with different pairings as well, test out their dynamics and such.

x4 Yeah, Die for Our Ship can be a serious issue with some pairings.

And that reminds me: when I do read slash, actually seeing the words "seme" or "uke" is a massive red flag. It's pretty rare in the fandoms I visit, but that particular cliche and the way it lends itself to writing characters OOC needs to die.

Yeah, generally I like to see characters be as IC as possible. It's forgivable if they're in a situation they're unlikely to be involved in in canon that might change their personality a little (e.g. a tough badass losing his love or best friend to the clutches of death), but if it looks to me like the author's not even trying, then I'm not even gonna bother.

Also, I, too, hate the whole "every slash pairing must have a seme and a uke" thing. Actual gay couples don't even work that way, so why bother?

edited 24th Sep '16 4:49:05 AM by Psychedelicate

Yeah, I don't see the point in shipping two people if they're OOC. You might as well be shipping two completely different people by that point. The reason why I ship these is because I like their personalities and can imagine them together, with their personalities intact.

Separate, but related, but this is also why I tend to avoid Harmonian fics. They (the bad ones, at least) tend to bash the Weasleys and turn Harry into someone who's rather studious and erase Hermione's personality.

edited 24th Sep '16 7:23:52 PM by dysphere

Oh, new three for me:

Character shilling, character bashing and Die For Our Ship.

I found them in the same story in fact.

Okay, I was reading this Sonic fanfic that I read back in the day and hasn't aged well to say the least.

Amy was a Purity Sue of the highest calibur. The fanfic ignores that Amy when asking Sonic out on a date that she threatens him with hitting him with her hammer and chasing him through what has to be thousand of miles just to ask him the same question over and over again. In fact that shit is portrayed as cute and adorable. Excuse me while I cringe so hard in my chair until I die. Oh and she's physically 16 (thanks to a magic ring, in reality she's 12) while Sonic is 19. Yeah.

Sonic is portrayed as a pathetic cheater even though, again, Amy is 12 and the person he slept with was Sally, his childhood friend and is NOT a minor. So is he bad for not bonking a pre-teen? Fuck you, writer.

Sally is so out of character, I think that the writer hates her and only added her so she can be a hate-sink. And I hate it because she and Amy are supposed to be friends in the comics (even though I think that Sally and Amy should not be friends because they're so different.) but whatever I guess. Her crime at first, is just sleeping with Sonic but then the writer just piles on that she's been sleeping with other people too. Great. Fuck this fanfic!

Knuckles is this Relationship Stu who just acts like the perfect boyfriend instead of the rash and naive Echidna that we all now and love.

Now if you excuse me, I need to blast some Cyberdemons with the BFG 9000.

You gotta start somewhere.

Oh dear, look at those awful cliches.

I once stumbled on a Percy Jackson fic. It had a harem.

And dick girls. So many dick girls......

edited 26th Sep '16 11:33:31 PM by Vampireandthen

Please allow me to introduce myself, I am a man of wealth and taste. Nice to meet you, hope you can guess my name.

There's leeway for OOC in a parody, but nothing kills a fic more than OO Cness.

Although with OO Cness, there is some leeway in characters who have existed for decades under different interpretations and writers, but you have to specify if you're doing Silver Age Batman or Nolanverse Batman.

My AO3