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

Time travel and whether or not to avoid it largely boils down to the context of its use (even in normal published fiction), though I haven't had enough experience with it in fic to get a feel for what works and what doesn't.

edited 8th Oct '17 9:05:16 PM by Karxrida

Yeah, time travel ends up being a weird balance of 'oh come on why bother having time travel if everything is going to happen like in canon' and 'ok how is this one person changing literally everything to the point it's completely unrecognizeable'

Stations of the Canon is the main culprit here. Sometimes people stick to it because they're too familiar with the source material to change much, and in other cases some canon events have to play out depending on who and when you intend to time travel back with.

Yeah, that it is. But when you find a good Peggy Sue, damn can it be good.

Summaries that claim the story is "better than it sounds". Which isn't much better than I Suck at Summaries in that the author doesn't even bother to make sure the summary sounds interesting. If the summary isn't good, I highly doubt the actual fanfic will be much better.

Interesting... such as...? Honestly though, I absolutely hate time travel stories (not just fanfics) because I can never get behind the mechanics of time travel and alternate timelines/dimensions no matter how much justification (scientific or otherwise) they provide.

Well, first off you have to have the mechanics of it down which depends on the universe. Personally, I like Of Queens, Knights and Pawns. It uses mental time travel, and the very real facts that someone wouldn't remember everything that happened long ago to them or have paid attention to everything that happened long ago.

Though I will say Time Travel is easier to get away with in universes where it's common... like Marvel, DC, or Doctor Who

Would fics written entirely in present tense be a red or yellow flag for any of you? I don’t really mind it, but I find it a little weird.

I prefer past tense, but it's such a minor thing that it's not worth calling a red or yellow flag.

I prefer past tense, but as long as the tense is used consistently, I won't count it against a story.

Now, a story that can't keep a consistent tense, and bounces between past and present without rhyme or reason? That's something that can make me stop reading immediately.

Same here, pretty much. I have no problem with present tense as long as it’s consistent.

Fair enough. I can’t really see how it’d be much of a deal-breaker anyway.

Apologies for the double post.

For the most part, another red flag of mine is chat fics - that is, fanfics that depict the characters talking to each other via an instant messaging program. Such fics actually have the potential to be really interesting or funny if used with particular concepts - such as a mystery where all the clues are in messages rather than narrative descriptions, or a Crack Fic where the plot of the source material is told via Facebook statuses or somesuch - but the majority of the chatfics I see only consist of random humour, memes and/or trite teen drama that you'd already see a lot of in the average Discord server. Thus, most of them are just plain boring to read, and more often than not the characters are flanderised and/or completely OOC.

Yeah, I put chat fics in the same general category of script fics. You have to know what you're doing with the format to do it well

I wrote a few chat fics a long time ago, but never posted them. Which is good, because they were terrible.

They were fun to write, though, so I can see why they exist.

edited 29th Oct '17 9:11:08 PM by SapphireBlue

I suppose it would be fun to imagine what characters would be like as their online personas and such, but yeah, coming across chatfic after chatfic with the exact same basic premise (that is, the characters just goofing off and shitposting) gets old very quickly. Especially if they don't even retain much of their canonical personalities.

I feel like chatfics are more of a thing you just write for fun without much regard to quality or characterisation or anything; it's just that they're not really my cup of tea, personally.

Chatfics work pretty well for Homestuck, because so much of the original comic is internet chats anyway. And because a big part of Homestuck's appeal is seeing how everyone's personalities and typing styles bounce off each other.

Granted, that still depends on accurately capturing the characters' voices, which is easier said than done. Of the Homestuck fics I read, an embarrassing amount were plagued by forced repetition of Homestuck memes and other Flanderization.

I'm following one My Little Pony fic that's an interesting spin on the chatfic idea, though it's more fake forum posts than a fake chatlog. Rather than just characters shooting the breeze, there are a bunch of different plot lines all layered on top of each other. And few of the characters have obvious usernames, so it's an amusing mystery to figure out which forum user is which character from the show.

I find some chatfics have confusing formatting. Things out of order, you don't know who's replying to whom, etc. Really, formatting and grammar is a big bugbear for me in general. No run-on sentences, no dialogue without new paragraphs and commas, no confusing of homophones, no tense-switching, etc. Also, no described sex, but that's just because I'm a prude.

Scriptfics aren't a problem in itself, but it should be more for people to really jot down ideas or that it works pretty well when multiple people are writing chapters. It's a bit easier, especially for newer writers, to keep it simple.

I've also been a part of stories written in that format as well, which made it somewhat easier to read. Keep in mind that we sometimes had pictures in place of the character name, so it's clearly designed in a different way.

I enjoy reading both kinds of stories, and they both have their merits. I do agree that scripfics are definitely not as interesting overall, if only due to how hard it is to properly describe various stuff. It hurts the narration at times.

Another red flag I have is people asking for suggestions (in the summary or the author's notes), either as pitches, or the way the storyline should go. I know collaborative writing can be great (although here it's more a case of crowdsourcing), but in this context it simply feels unimaginative to me. If you have a story to tell, you don't need to ask people what they think it should be.

A completely subjective red flag I have (to the point of being useless to anyone who is not in my head) are stories whose pitch is similar to something I would like to write or am in the process of writing. I never read them, for fear of being either discouraged if they are too close to my story (and better) or to be unconsciously influenced by them.

One red flag i found in fanfics is that annoys me is the author tries to portray a bad guy sympathetic to make the audience feel sorry for them but ends up being Unintentionally Unsympathetic when the worse parts of the bad guy are revealed.

For example, in one Index Railgun fanfic i read, one thug calls out Mikoto for being a murderer since her attempt to subdue his best friend during a robbery using her electric powers accidentally killed him. Except the story portrayed the thug as a Holier Than Thou Hypocrite since earlier he admits he and his friend were part of a gang that would rob and attack people weaker than them and saw nothing wrong on what they did but took issue with the Level 5 Esper Mikoto was trying to stop them. And there's the fact some Level 0 thug was able to stop Level 5 Mikoto by throwing trashcans at her! Something that cannot happen in canon since Mikoto can easily stop the cans using her powers.

You rarely see it these days (or maybe I'm just good at avoiding lower quality fics), but I hate when writers disrupt the flow to add a "A/N" into a parenthesis. It's so annoying. 'Leave that for the end of the fic. I'm okay with adding a "*" and describing it at the end, but just adding the note then and there is an amateur mistake.

Agreed. It's very annoying and it completely interrupts me reading the story when it happens.

I also agree with the asterisks being used for notes. It's a much better alternative.

One thing that will, at the very least, make me rather skeptical of a fanfic is if the summary is written poorly in English (the only language I can speak) - I'd give an example, except it's been a while since I've read one (unless you want to count reading the one I'm writing to check for spelling and grammar mistakes/continuity errors - and even then, I'm writing that in a google doc, so it doesn't really have a summary). I can get that there are people who don't speak English as a first language/aren't that fluent in the language (and if they note that they aren't fluent in English, I'm willing to be more forgiving of mistakes in spelling/grammar), but for those who are fluent in the language, is it REALLY that hard to use a spell check?

I have to agree with that. If the summary is written with poor grammar or spelling, I highly doubt the story will be much better.

Though I have seen plenty of fics where the title and/or summary is in all lowercase letters, yet the story itself is perfectly fine. So that's more of a stylistic choice I guess.