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

If you´re asking me,I don´t like extreme gore, main character deaths, troll fics, incest (have two sibings, so huuge trigger point for me) and getting rid of any characterist I´m not that bothered by Yaoi/Yuri, except it´s seriously out of canon (looking at you Star Fox shippers)

Edited by CrossoverFan23 on Oct 26th 2018 at 1:06:42 PM

See, to me, there's gore and then there's edge. Like, a little bit of graphic detail can sometimes not feel terribly out of place. But when the guy's just gushing (heh) details about just how perfectly some guy hacked off another dude's arm so that there's at least three streams of [CONFETTI] going in several directions, with all of the [PINATA CANDY] and [BALLOONS] underneath being described to exquisite detail, that, to me, is going too far.

As for main character deaths, for me it just depends on how well it's executed. If they be killing off main characters for no apparent reason or Die for Our Ship, then it's a no from me.

Troll fics, again, it depends on execution. There are some legitimately great troll fics out there. Hell, Those Lacking Spines started as a troll fic, and a damn good one, and then it just suddenly got an actual plot and stuff.

As for incest, I'm a huge fan of A Song of Ice and Fire and all, but that doesn't in any way make me want to read stories thinking they can do incest just because George R R Martin had Cersei and Jaime going at it. No from me, dawg.

Strangely enough, I don't actually mind reading incest if it's canon, and the original setting justifies it (i.e. it's set in an Older Than Feudalism era where marriage within the family is not only seen as OK, but even encouraged). What bothers me is when fans pair up family members because they happen to have a loving relationship, and love = romance.

Edited by Adept on Oct 28th 2018 at 12:46:59 AM

I just hate it when true, unconditional love = sex. I was reading a fanfic where the climax was ruined because a character's Heroic Sacrifice was dismissed in a sex scene as the "second best thing anyone's ever done for her." Her boyfriend's sex was the best.

That is wrong on multiple levels.

This is less of a flag and more of a pet peeve, but a good way to get me to walk away from a fic is misspelled character names. I understand if it's a minor character with an unusual name, but if it's a main character literally named after something you could easily look up the spelling for, there's no excuse.

Though considering how we have Spell My Name With An S and Dub Name Change, it might not entirely be the author's fault if they use a non-official transliteration of a character's name.

Yeah, looking at Gokaiger fanfic, everyone would transliterate Warz Gill's name differently before the show properly translated it through a newspaper printed in English. Translations would be from something close like Wals Gil to something out there like Olies Gil.

It depends on the show. Sometimes there's no clear way of writing the name but in other cases, especially with fairly common Japanese names, there is only one agreed upon way, or at least a small handful of variations (usually based on how you choose to write the long vowels).

Back to love and sex talk, I'm a huge fan of CS Lewis' concept about The Four Loves, where you have different words for different varieties of love that English with its one word can't quite encapsulate. You can see them all on the page itself, but there's a case made for each one being very separate from each other, and it sounds like a lot of people are complaining that several fanfic writers seem to think agape == eros, when they're two vastly different things.

Basically, the Four Loves is how I judge love in fiction.

This is hardly just a fanfic thing, but speaking of the “four loves” concept, seeing romantic love treated as just plain better than the others (particularly love between friends) is something of a pet peeve of mine. They’re different things that sometimes overlap, but that doesn’t make one better than the other.

I’m not talking about stuff like unrequited love between friends, because (assuming it’s not handled in a creepy Entitled to Have You type of way), that’s more like “this type of love is nice but it’s not the one I want.”

Fanfics that glorifies Fascism and Racist beliefs especially if the authors really believes these ideas. (eg. Saying stuff like being racist, homophobic and sexist is great and is their right or saying disturbing stuff like in one fanfic i read, a character proclaims how great that Britain is under Fascist rule and they can now get rid of those no good lesser races).

It's one thing to write about characters who work with fascists who are either naive, misguided or just evil but it's whole other story when the author is using those racist beliefs into their work and saying "Fascism is great".

Where the hell did you find something like that? D:

At fanfiction.net of all places. I forgot the title and who wrote it since I don't want remember that "work".

I sadly am not surprised considering how political a lot of places are getting.

The disturbing part to me is that I also would not be surprised if the author wasn't parodying racist views and instead completely believed in the shit they were spewing.

Just out of Bile Fascination, what was the fandom (and a little more context on the actual set-up would help too).

I think it's more likely that it's not a parody. A few years ago, I might've assumed it was one, or maybe a particularly malicious troll fic, but not now.

They just said they didn't want to remember it.

Edited by SapphireBlue on Nov 4th 2018 at 6:27:48 AM

I remember reading a MLP fic that spent a good ten paragraphs going on an anti-abortion rant in the midst of a moment where Twilight was considering keeping a foal she was pregnant with or not. It was a fic featuring Twilight's child be by Shining Armor, aka her brother. It was also rated E for Everyone, somehow (author probably thought "No porn, no swears, no M, no T.").

The single most Alabama fic I have ever read about colored horses. I couldn't tell you the title, I've tried to forget that fic even existed, but I distinctly remember reading about it on FIMFiction and I distinctly remember being drawn in by the high dislikes-to-likes ratio and definite Bile Fascination.

Edited by Rytex on Nov 5th 2018 at 10:26:16 AM

Good, more ammo for my anti-didactic stance on fanfics. I've seen too many fanfics where "nazis" were brutally sodomized and beaten all because they believed something about gun rights. It read as if Lily Peet wrote the thing.

Speaking of gun rights, if you're going to teach a moral that resonates with the real world, make sure it makes sense. Gun control in the Marvel or DC Universe seems very minute when making deals with the devil to gain a demon horde or hellfire powers should be a bigger priority.

Huh. I must be spending way too much time on AO3, because for a while I thought E would be an appropriate rating for that kind of fic, since "E" means "Explicit" there.

Edited by Adept on Nov 5th 2018 at 10:25:09 PM

Yikes. I usually try to keep away from Explicit content, since you don`t know what can be in there in AO 3. Mature`s chill for me, but I have a small concern regards E fics.

I thought explicit meant it was literary porn. Nope for me also.

Y Eah, FIMFiction Uses Everyone, Teen, and Mature as ratings. Most stories on the site are rated E, with a close second being T. There are a lot of Ms, but there are comparatively few M-rated stories that don't feature porn.

Unless it's the type where it's tagged with like...ten different sex acts, and a few kinks thrown in for good measure. Then you know exactly what you'd get. Which I guess is better than not knowing, since it makes it easy to avoid if you aren't interested, but sometimes just scrolling past them is TMI. That's why I tend to filter out explicit-rated stuff across the board - I'm almost never interested, and there's enough Squick (personal or general) mixed in that I'd rather just not see them.

Mature-rated fics tend to get that rating for a wider variety of reasons (especially in fandoms where the source material is darker to begin with), so even if I'm less likely to read them, I don't filter them. Unless it's Fanfiction.net, where it's the highest rating and people sometimes ignore the rules and put up full-blown porn under that rating anyway.

That's typically what it means. Sometimes it's just a few chapters that are like that, but even in those cases, you can expect those few chapters to be really graphic.

Edited by SapphireBlue on Nov 6th 2018 at 9:47:43 AM

When it comes to unpleasant stuff, there needs to be a good reason! It can't just be for Darker and Edgier for the sake of it. Like don't describe something gory for paragraph after paragraph until it stops being horrifying and starts being goofy and still nauseating.