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

On friendships, I wish Fim Fiction Dot Net and FanFiction.Net had tags for family fics or friendship fics. It's difficult to weed out romance fics when you just want familial fluff. Archive of Our Own is a bit better about this, but many people still mix up "/" with "&".

Edit:

'Forgot about them. Many people on FF tag "family" for Kid Fics when I wanna read sibling or parent/child fluff instead.

Edited by Pichu-kun on Jul 22nd 2019 at 8:54:55 AM

Fanfiction.net does have friendship and family genre labels, though I don't know how frequently they get used in general. I use them fairly regularly.

You can also use the "without" filters on Fanfiction.net to block fics with certain characters listed as being paired.

Of course, that won't help you with older fics that were written before you could mark pairings and were never edited later, or ones where the author didn't mark it correctly.

It also doesn't help that, at least on Fanfiction.net, you cannot use the filters to prevent stories by specific authors from popping up in the search results.

Edited by CybranGeneralSturm on Jul 18th 2019 at 2:17:17 AM

Im going to be the one with the unpopular opinion, that other than finding some really nice fics there I HATE ARCHIVE OF OUR OWN! Its just a mess. Sorry.

It has all these tags for characters that just includes everyone if they are just MENTIONED and its really annoying.

That's more on the fault of the authors tagging the characters than the site itself. I have seen some fics that use "character (mentioned)", but those are a rarity.

I know its a guilt by association thing. But this thing just doesnt happen on Fanfiction.net .

I can agree. Archive of your Own has some really good fanfics but its really hellish to find them due to how the tagging system works.

Finally! A kindred spirit!!!!

Looking for fanfics of a rarepair you love is hellish since ships are often tagged in oneshot collections, chatfics or, worst of all, fics focusing on another ship where the ship you want only gets a mention or otherwise very little attention or development. You'd think authors would be more cautious about this and stick to tagging ships and characters that get a significant amount of focus in their stories, but apparently that hardly occurs to anyone.

Certain authors do abuse AO3's tagging system by putting as much tags as they can manage so that they'd appear on more searches, I guess.

That being said, FFN isn't that much better in that regard, especially since they added more character tags. So if I want to find a fic focusing on A and B, half of the search result would probably be fics that actually focus on A & C or B & D instead, with the other half of the character you want to read about being just a background character.

Edited by Adept on Jul 23rd 2019 at 2:27:24 AM

One AO3 annoyance is people misusing the "canonical" tag. It's not supposed to be for characters being canonically [x] in your story, but in the source's canon.

How bad does a story's grammar have to be before you call quits? I've read through several fics with frequent spelling errors and grammatical problems because they were good stories nevertheless.

I usually give up very quickly on bad grammar, but I can occasionally suffer through it if the fic is short.

I don't like AO 3 as a whole. I'm sex-repulsed and sometimes even the TAGS can gross me out.

For that matter, though, explicit material in fics that aren't the right rating for that.

People constantly get the Mature tag mixed up with the Explicit tag.

Speak up! Im glad to see more AO 3 haters.

I like the site in general, but having a browser add-on to block things makes it much easier to use. I know exactly what you mean about the tags alone being TMI.

It’s not that I mind this stuff existing, though. There’s clearly an audience for it. I’m just not part of it. I’m probably sex-neutral ace (assuming so until proven otherwise, anyway), and graphic sex scenes in fanfics just make me uncomfortable. So if that’s the bulk of the fic, I’m not going to read it.

Edited by SapphireBlue on Jul 22nd 2019 at 11:27:12 AM

At least you can filter out those tags now. I know triggers are a thing so you don't want to even have to do that, but it used to be that you had to manually filter out tags in the search bar, and it was extremely unreliable. Trying to filter out Supernatural, for example, could get rid of any fic that even mentions the word "supernatural."

Yeah, having "without" filters is a godsend.

Trying to filter the tags you don't want out doesn't even worth half of the time though, it's really infuriating.

It works for me, though ironically I wish the site would allow more tags so I can find certain plot bunnies easier.

On grammar, I can read a long story with poor grammar so long as I understand the ideas being conveyed. There's a Fate/Grand Order Friend Insert I used to read purely because I thought the ideas it used were interesting enough stand it.

On that note though, Friend Inserts are another red flag for me. I get the concept of emulating a DND session, but in practice it's all the issues with a self-insert with even less chance of having an interesting protagonist with believable reactions to everything and a willingness to examine personal flaws. I can read one if I pretend the Friend Insert in an OC, because let's face it they are in any sense, but I'll abandon it if things go south.

I notice in the self-insert community that there has been this trend recently to make the inserts god awful people. It's been kind of infuriating to see really as while Mary Sues were really dumb and annoying I would take them over an extremly powerful creepy asshole tool of a character.

Its also weird considering they are self-inserts.

Cause edgy assholes are supposed to be "cool."

It's why the "Ash gets betrayed, renames himself Red Satoshi, goes to train for a few years, and goes on a killing sprees" stories are still popular despite making him an overacting jackass.

I absolutely cannot stand it when fics are written badly on purpose.

Edited by Mroh on Aug 12th 2019 at 7:15:26 AM

Troll Fics are a very special art. Very few are worth reading because they're so hard to write properly. They're not ironically funny or So Bad, It's Good, they're just bad.