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

I think a better way to describe these characters might be Hero-Worshipper?

I mean, Original Character is a broad description anyway.

Ah sorry, you called it fanboy/fangirl. I thought you meant like said, a Hero-Worshipper (a character who is a fan), not an OC or fan character (as in a character created by a fan). Original Character, as a term, isn't gendered.

Yeah, self insert OCs are generally not my thing. I guess I vaguely prefer them over CanonCharacterxReader fic, simply because trying to put myself in most of those situations is a bit Squicky to me. But even the few self inserts I read and enjoyed were more of a Guilty Pleasure than anything good.

Edited by Stillalive on Feb 26th 2021 at 10:11:50 AM

@Anasui I did mean iffy and irregular in ways that constantly breaks background settings, characterisations or such.

Honestly, I think I just got burnt way too badly by a couple of badly written fics? For example, on a fanfic of a fandom which had teleport as strictly villain-only magic due to side effect of mental corruption, the author had his non-magical Original Character appear in every assault that happened simultaneously over an entire continent on strategic points by the Big Bad 's organisation. All locations were, if I remember right, scattered far enough to take at least a month on horseback. To be honest, I only read it for more than three chapters because that fandom wasn't very popular and limited to my mothertongue, not to mention it was over two decades ago.. (The fandom died in a couple of years after I read that fanfic, if I remember right. And I can't even find anywhere selling that novel these days..)

Anyway, I think that particular fanfic's author had been quite young, but at the same time... He had zero willingness to listen/answer to any readers' comments, from what little I remember of the comment section..

My personal dislike of that one particularly badly written fanfic aside, I generally avoid fanfics with zero character developments, or irregular in ways that the settings change every time when author feels like.. I do love unexpected well-written plot-twists and such. Just- I expect continuity of events.. If a building got burnt down, I expect repair/rebuild or something to be done before author decides to set another event within that building. Not- everything went back to normal. (Miraculous Ladybug! at least gives a plausible reason canonically.) After a bad fight, you resolve that issue between two friends before they act friendly again- off-stage events or references are fine, but still.

That said- In case of avoiding fanfics with fangirl/fanboy type characters, it's purely personal preference. I just have find them confusing, even in RL... As I can't empathise with main characters, I can't enjoy those fanfics as much as others.

Edited by Kalias on Mar 4th 2021 at 7:13:07 PM

If it's about anthro animals that aren't Pokémon or BNA beastmen or whatever (and even then, there are RULES in those series about who can reproduce with what and/or what their offspring will be) and there's unrealistic interspecies reproduction, I'm right out. The "Unholy Trinity" of anthro fandoms (Netflix Retsuko, Beastars, and Zootopia), as I like to call them for myriad reasons, this being one of them, are especially bad in this regard. I don't care that it's canon in the former two because they're both shit and make me want to stab small children when I think about them.

Edited by Bismuth83 on Mar 5th 2021 at 6:02:45 AM

Then maybe you could do it better than they did, show em how's it's done. Prideful, I know, but if they want to be like the big guys in fanfiction writing, then they gotta watch and learn. Unless they're fottuti idioti.

What does "can't empathize with main characters" mean?

It means you can't understand or relate to the main characters problems and actions.

Okay, this will probably sound heretical to the great majority, but what's the biggest red flag for me?

A story's main selling point as pitched by the author being the story's primary relationship.

I mean, if the argument is that there is joy at discovering the relationship while reading it, that's actually pretty reasonable.

Not everything has to be about ships, right?

What I meant isn't the selling point being a particular ship, I meant the selling point being a ship.

I'm not a fan of romance either.

I feel like not that many people in this subforum like romance or shipping lol

I was under the impression only a very tiny part of the fanfiction community isn't shipping-obsessed.

And that small minority happens to congregate here, it seems. Everywhere else, it seems like fans are going "SHIP!" over any close relationships between two characters.

Does it really congregate here?

I read a lot of ship fics, but I hardly ever post in this thread about them because this is a red flag thread.

So most shipping related posts here will be about what people don't like about it. Not positives. The green flag thread after all is much smaller than this one.

I think the shippers here are usually lurkers or just stay more quiet on whom they ship.

Just look at how many works have shipping-related tropes entries on this website...

Of the other fanfiction communities I frequent, Spacebattles and Sufficient Velocity care more about Crazy Awesome than shipping, Alternate History is self-explanatory, the Fanfiction subreddit is extremely shipping-focused and the GenFic subreddit created specifically for non-shipping discussion pretty much died stillborn a few months after being created, with nowhere near the traffic of the main subreddit.

I think there's plenty of people here who do ship, but don't talk about it in this forum because we have so many people who talk about shipping derisively.

That may be it. I don't mind canon relationships, but I'm not likely to read a fic that's only about their relationship. E.g. I'll read a fic where Clark and Lois happen to be married and go capture a villain in a hair raising adventure, but not a story that's just them gushing about how much they love each other.

Yeah, it seems that fics entirely focused on shipping and non-canon ships are not very popular in this thread.

By the way, I don't really mind shipping fics in themselves - they are not my thing, but it's not what I call a red flag. It would be comparable to fics about a work I don't know, I'm simply not interested.

Non-canon ships, on the other hand, are usually No Yay for me and are red flags (basically any ships that require characters to act against their canon sexual orientations, allegiances, or family relationships).

We all know why the majority of prudes here (no offense) aren't fans of romance. You've heard of the internet rule, have you? It's pretty simple.

Bit besides that reason, it's because the circumstances of it happening is did to death and cheesy. Like, meeting at a coffee shop, accidentally touching hands, and all day jazz. The good kind of romance fics that start from those things are either ancient, dead, or non-existent.

Edited by Anasui on Mar 10th 2021 at 6:39:31 AM

Correct! Rule 34 scenes don't appeal to me.

In my case, it's more than romance usually bores me (even in original works) if it takes too much space in the story, unless I'm in a very specific mood.
Rule 34 is a different case. Most of the time I'll be instantly put off by this kind of fanart, but it heavily depends on the work concerned and the location of my mind relatively to the gutter at the moment.

This is a shipper than posts here, but I'm sure he's not like the stereotype most of us are talking about when we complain about them.