omg omg omg omg! THAT WAS AWESOME! Now I can finally use AO 3!
TBH I just ignore pairing tags entirely, as long as it's not one of the really squicky ones (you know the kinds I mean). On AO3 at least, pairings are often tagged even when said pairing isn't really the focus of the story; if it is the focus, it tends to be obvious from reading the summary. If it's a good summary. If it's a bad summary, that just makes me less likely to read it anyway.
Otherwise, the mere inclusion of a (not-squicky) pairing isn't, by itself, a red flag for me since I don't tend to get that invested in a character's love life to start with. Character A loves Character X? Sure. Character A loves Character Y instead? Sure, why not? As long as you're not bashing Character X as well. :V
Edited by PresidentStalkeyes on Nov 14th 2020 at 11:37:39 AM
Those sell-by-dates won't stop me because I can't read!Anything that [[wouldn't]] make sense in the original material.
Edited by stanleypon on Nov 15th 2020 at 7:42:32 PM
I play cool music https://www.piano-composer-teacher-london.co.ukYou know, I'm not sure if this even counts as a 'red flag', but I just found a story with a description saying 'this story is just bad, please do not read it', or something along those lines. My obvious thought was 'okay, if it's bad and you don't want people to read it, why haven't you deleted it?' ...Some kind of Bile Fascination ploy, maybe?
Edited by PresidentStalkeyes on Nov 18th 2020 at 8:55:58 PM
Those sell-by-dates won't stop me because I can't read!Tags like that can mean one of two things. The first is that the author is really insecure about their writing. They want to warn people that it might be bad - that way, if someone does think it’s bad, at least they were prepared.
I don’t think it’s necessarily fishing for compliments. Sometimes intentional manipulation and being overly self-conscious look a lot alike, even if they come from different places. Some people probably are fishing for compliments, but it’s hard to say for sure if you don’t know the author. Regardless of how it’s intended, it doesn’t paint a good picture of the fic to have “this sucks, don’t read it” in the tags. Seems better to just put it out there and let people decide what to think on their own.
The second possibility is that the fic is really weird, crack-y, shitpost-y, or a troll fic. With those, you can usually tell from the other tags. Those are less likely to be insecurity and more likely to be “I can’t believe I wrote this.” Obviously they’re not too ashamed to post it in the first place, but they want to indicate that they’re self-aware about it.
I have another possibility. Maybe the fic is of acceptable (I wont say outright good) quality...to its fans. For the author its an old shame. I think that's a nice alternative to just deleting it.
I have seen plenty of good fics deleted out of the blue to think its an isolated incident lol.
As long as this flower is in my heart. My Strength will flow without end.In addition to the usual complaints, my main red flags when looking for fanfiction are:
1) Questions in the summary. Not the mystery-kind ones (Who killed the General? That's what Isabella must find out.), but the what-will-happen ones (Will they survive the storm? And will their love hold true?). It may be snobbish of me, but they make me think of some cheap soap-opera and I'm not into cheap soap-opera.
2) Lampshade hanging of conventions of the genre or restrictions of the medium. Deconstruction, reconstruction, etc. are one thing, but a cheap shot at what is well-known to be a narrative vessel just infuriates me. It doesn't help that I've usually seen the lampshade hanging a thousand times already.
3) Fics which posit as their premise that the original work is lying, à la The Last Ringearer. I don't enjoy the denegation of a story I like enough to go looking for fanfiction of it. Or, to think about it, even of story I do not enjoy. It just feels petty to me.
I hate bashing but I like it when the author takes a look at a trope, plot or even a whole character archetype and dismantle it to show it in a new, if usually negative light.
Finding a balance is hard to see and to write.
If you go too far in pushing a lot into certain direction, especially if it's negative, it can come across as bashing.
You gotta start somewhere.One of the biggest red flags for me is "Human!AU" or anything else that removes the fantastical elements from the characters or setting. Real life poisons us with enough mundanity already as it is and these people want to take fantasy and make that mundane too? Hell no.
Edited by Ghostninja109 on Dec 13th 2020 at 4:09:08 AM
I'm interested in the "Authors that just don't care" and the "All of fanfiction writers are lazy (or however someone said it)" topic/red flags.
And also, these nasty-arsed kinks (Crap, piss, farts, diaper varients, the like). Man, I literally dream of making those and the guy who invented them disappear. Literally the reason why most fandoms (Especially the cartoon section whose underrated fandoms get hit hard the most, like Rbuk) aren't even worth touching, unless you like nightmares and losing your lunch 24/7. Plus, why aren't we taking about the red flags in cartoon fics (I want to know the answer)?
Some sections are definitely best browsed with filters. AO3 Savior is...well, a lifesaver, and so are the on-site filters. But fanfiction.net’s filters are so limited they’re situationally useful at best. Section has a ship that aged like milk, and had a lot of stuff written before you could tag ships or characters? Good luck avoiding it if you dig too deep.
At least the stuff I’m thinking of has good stuff mixed in with the gross crap. Sounds like the one you mentioned doesn’t. Sorry to hear that - I’m sure it’s incredibly frustrating.
I don’t think there’s any particular reason no one here brings up cartoon fic red flags specifically. You’re welcome to do that if you have more to say.
Edited by SapphireBlue on Jan 3rd 2021 at 7:35:54 AM
I pretty much never go on fanfiction.net unless I know a specific fic or author I'm looking for. A03's tags are just so much better that I can't even deal. Unfortunately, some fandoms just use A03 as a dumping ground for their creepy fics. Which I guess is better than the other way around because you can filter them out, but still.
My favorite fanfiction site, though, is fimfiction. The UI is wonderful, the tagging and sorting systems great. And as a side benefit, since it's only one fandom, you don't have to deal with the A03 problem of kudos disparity between different fandoms. The worst Harry Potter fic will have more kudos than the best Glitch Techs fic, and that can cause problems with crossovers and if you sort by kudos and whatnot.
As for cartoon red flags? Most of the posts here are more general than that. Just an observation, it doesn't mean anything specific. You're certainly free to post cartoon red flags.
Writing a post-post apocalypse LitRPG on RR. Also fanfic stuff.I use FFN as well with any pre-2012ish fandom.
After that I find its very rare for stuff not to be crossposted to AO 3 anyway. But with older fandoms than that there's a lot of stuff that's only on FFN.
With newer fandoms there can be a gem on occasion though, although I'd estimate less than 1% of significant fics are on FFN and not AO 3 nowadays.
It's been discussed to death already, but the FFN style of tagging does have some benefits. A couple of days ago I was looking up fics in the My Hero Academia fandom focused on Gentle Criminal. But AO 3 is almost useless when searching his tag.
Edited by 32ndfreeze on Jan 4th 2021 at 6:03:49 AM
I feel like AO 3 would benefit from a limit on the number of tags on each story. Overtagging is a pretty big problem there.
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I only go to Fanfiction.net for older fandoms and the occasional really good authors who don't crosspost on AO3 The filters aren't terrible, but I wish there were better "without" filters. Preferably including the option to block words from summaries.
And yes, it is really annoying when people tag every single character who shows up in the fic (I've also had that issue in the MHA fandom when searching for moderately important characters sometimes). Or have massive walls of tags.
Edited by SapphireBlue on Jan 4th 2021 at 9:53:19 AM

In my experience, it's worse when you're primarily interested in a less popular primary pairing, that nevertheless ends up in the background of a lot of these stories, because then you have to sift through them to find any that are relevant to your interests directly.