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

What are those?

That's more "Choose Your Own Adventure" than a true fanfic.

The Pit bans CYOA for a good reason.

What is the Pit?

Fanfiction.net, nicknamed 'The Pit of Voles'. Why voles specifically, I have no idea.

Wait, what? Does fanfiction.net have some kind of bad reputation or something? I mean, aside from that whole Sturgeon's Law thing?

This nickname originated in the PPC, AFAIK. Why it's so, though, I have no idea. Connected nicknames: Uber Pit of Voles (Adultfanfiction.net) and the Circle of Lemmings (Quotev.com).

Yeah, I tend to avoid reading infamous fanfiction. I prefer to seek out good ones; bad works are only enjoyable if you're viewing/reading it with friends and making fun of it, and that's harder to do with bad fanfics than bad movies.

Well, ff.net does have a really broken comment/"review" system.

Chapter 3: "Batman has to trek through the thick jungle of the island to find clean water, to treat Gendo's wounds and help him recover from his fever."

To be fair, this is perfectly in-character for Batman. Batman would even save the Joker's life under similar circumstances as long as he could do it, and even if he had to risk his own life over it. Because he's Batman.

Now, if it were Gendo racing to save Batman, yeah...

Funny that you say that. A common thing that me and one of my friends like to do is intentionally look up bad fanfiction and do dramatic readings of it. It's a lot of fun.

Sadly my friends who would be into that are the friends that I see rarely.

Oo! Huge Red Flag; it's rapidly apparent that they have never researched the place they're setting their fic, especially if I've been to/know that place well.

Like using British english for American characters and American English for British Characters?

What if both appear in the same story?

I just found a new red flag after reading a story. Putting this (Insert song here) or putting the words of said song into the story thinking it helps. It doesn't, it brakes the flow.

Unless the song is actually playing in the story, I'm guessing?

I have yet to read a fic where inserting an actual song helped a fic so I'm a bit skeptical if it could work. Then again, 10% rule.

I've read a few. Either it's a fic of a musical, so it fits, or it's just the characters having some fun.

Writing it is the closest I'm ever going to get to actually seeing Priss Asagiri perform Marry The Night, so I'm hoping I manage it decently.

edited 26th Jan '15 5:33:40 PM by Night

I've written a story where I included Real Life song lyrics because the song in question was playing in-story. I didn't pick a song to set any sort of mood—honestly, to my knowledge no one has recognized the song, and I don't expect anyone ever will—but because the lyrics were thematically relevant. And rather than posting the lyrics as a big block of unwanted poetry, I broke them up with descriptions of what the characters were doing while they listened to the song.

My two doorstopper fics include a lot of verse for stylistic reasons. My current project is in the style of The 1,001 Nights; and although Nights is a prose work, some of its component stories include a lot of poetry. I include song lyrics and other poetry to somewhat duplicate that feel. A few of these even appear in-universe, such as when the bookworm character has occasion to recite "The Raven" to his campmates. (There's even an original blank verse speech based on the famous "St. Crispin's Day" speech.) Based on the feedback I've gotten, the poetry is one of the story's more polarizing elements, and a reader poll is more or less evenly divided between those who like the poetry and those who tend to skip over it.

My earlier doorstopper (which I hesitate to call a fic because it's really more a work of scholarship) is a crossover that focuses on the song lyrics and recitatives—all 8,000 lines of them—because it's really the point of the work: the premise of Total Drama Island by Gilbert and Sullivan is Exactly What It Says on the Tin.

I occasionally put lyrics in my fic, but only a few lines when a character is singing or if a song is in the background, just to make it clear that there is a song. Doing a full on musical number in prose would be far too difficult, though I have seen it done before.

A non-diegetic song is a bad sign. There's nothing wrong with songs in fiction — if a guy sings and you think you can write the song well enough, give us a verse or two, why not?
Of course, if it's bad then it kinda ruins the experience.

edited 27th Jan '15 1:47:19 AM by desdendelle

Here's one that's been bugging me a lot recently: Gratuitous amounts of swearing in works that normally contain little to no swearing. Nothing breaks the immersion more than Mario dropping the F-bomb.

Agreed. Gratuitous sex and violence also. There should be a reason for the things that happen in the story. Even if the reason is to give the readers a chuckle or scare them. What about randomly killing characters that have Plot Armor in the source material just for shock factor?