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

Lowercase letters in summaries are almost always stylistic. You see it on Ao 3 a lot.

I have no clue how to do summaries. I usually dislike when writers just copy from their story, but that's actually a lot easier than coming with an eye-catching custom summary.

Critical Research Failure when it comes to the source's lore should be a red flag, I feel, but you'd probably have to read the fic to notice it.

Definitely. It's frustrating when a fanfic breaks the rules of the series's continuity.

I feel like that ties into people completely changing how something works from the canon lore, like redoing a magical system

I have different standards for continuity for different fandoms.

For something massive like the Pokemon anime I'm fine with changes and errors because honestly who has the time to watch / remember everything.

But for something like Harry Potter, where the resources for pretty much everything is available on wiki's its much more annoying.

I think it's also worth noting that sometimes, people just genuinely misremember how things went, and don't realize it until later.

Yeah, sometimes you misremember details and it doesn't even occur to you that you're getting them wrong until someone points them out, because you thought you had it right. I remember when I was a kid, I wrote a fanfic where I screwed up one of the most basic details: I gave the protagonist the wrong eye color.

In an anime. Where the eyes are half of the f*cking face.

Fortunately, that was really easy to fix.

edited 22nd Nov '17 4:00:41 PM by TobiasDrake

Considering that the fanfic I’m writing takes place in a subtly canon divergent variant of the game it’s based on, meaning everything for the most part stays the same, I do sometimes get the sequence of events or something wrong even though I re-watch parts of Let's Plays of the game to make sure it’s all accurate. I think my most noteworthy blunder was having a particular character discharged from the hospital a day earlier than he did in canon. So I understand the struggle to get every little detail accurate.

Fair enough. If doing a fic in comics canon, I think the readers would be amazed if you managed to have something with perfect continuity, given how often the universe gets remade.

But there are some things that are pretty integral, and when an author blatantly says "I don't like how magic works in this universe so I'm taking this system from another set of books" it kind of makes me side eye the fic.

Not just the source material, but if you're making something long enough, then you have to start keeping track of details from your own fic as well. It can get a little confusing when those start intermingling with canon, so I can't blame authors for occasionally getting something wrong unless it's REALLY off-putting and can't be easily fixed.

And sometimes Word of God itself pulls the rug out from under you and retcons details that now make you look that bad. Happened to me when writing a Zootopia fic and Disney swapped around like half of the background officer names. But a lot of others were tripped up the same thing, so no biggie.

Yeah, that happened to me too. A story I was writing involved a character inheriting a wedding broach from her mom. Like, two chapters after I'd introduced that plot point, an episode of the show came out that not only introduced the character of her mom for the first time but actually showed her wedding, sticking me with the burden of this broach that was clearly not involved in said wedding.

Fortunately, the same episode also asserted that the character in question had totally been lied to about all of the details surrounding her mom prior to that point, so it's not an unmanageable Jossing.

edited 23rd Nov '17 10:24:53 AM by TobiasDrake

What show was this?

My Little Pony. For six years, the show implied that the character Applejack's parents were dead. In season seven, her parents were introduced as Posthumous Characters through a flashback episode revealing to AJ the shocking true story of who they are and how they met and fell in love.

edited 23rd Nov '17 10:30:39 AM by TobiasDrake

Ah, okay.

Canon did mess up some things for my Gundam fanfic, but I carried on anyway, because I knew what I introduced was unlikely to show up in the actual series the exact same, anyway.

Right, that reminds me.

Summaries Where Every Word Is Capitalized Like This Drive Me Crazy. I Have No Idea Why Anyone Does It, And It Just About Guarantees That I Won't Read The Fic.

I never understood that either. Especially when it requires significantly more effort than just typing normally. Why go through that much trouble to make your writing look worse?

Oh my god, I agree with this so much. Why do people do that? It’s such a headache to read, and it especially annoys me when people type like that all the time. And, unlike all lowercase letters, there’s no way you can use the excuse of stylistic purposes.

In Homestuck, every single character had some kind of stylistic quirk to their typing and speech, And One Of Them Always Typed Like This. Even in that context, it was pretty annoying.

BuT sHe WaSn'T aNyWhErE nEaR aS bAd As ThE gUy WhO tYpEd LiKe ThIs.

I always thought it was rather charming when Kanaya did it - it gave her a voice that seemed both refined and somewhat stilted, which I thought meshed well with her personality.

edited 26th Nov '17 4:23:00 PM by KarkatTheDalek

I mean, it works for specific character dialogue. But it just comes off as weird and hard to read as regular writing.

Yeah, I'll give you that.

@5305: Pokémon has Bulbapedia and, heck, even Tvtropes. It's not super complicated. I could see an issue with more obscure adaptations or titles, but the main stuff like the anime and mainline games are well-documented.

One of my biggest red flags is fusion fics in general, the second type at least. Trying to do canon welding for one work can be hard enough, but it is really difficult to meld two distinct stories into a convicingly realistic story or background. As random as a negative space wedgie or a macguffin dumped x character(s) into a different world can be, to me it's still preferable.

A secondary concern is a poor wordcount to chapter ratio. I can accept a minimum of about 1500 words per chapter, and even that's only on recommendations. Usually I limit reading things like that to explicitly oneshot collections/story idea archives that some authors do.

Yeah, if a story only has like 1k words or less each chapter, it causes some pretty bad pacing problems. Otherwise, the length of each chapter largely depends on what kind of story it is and how the PO Vs will be managed (e.g. the POV changing every chapter).