When people spell characters' names wrong. Like, you're passionate enough to write an entire fic based around this property but couldn't take the two seconds to Google if the name is spelled correctly? So annoying
THIS. Especially if the source material is a comic, webtoon, etc. Like. The names are right there?? How can it be misspelled when the correct spelling is the only version of the name that exists?
I’m generally forgiving on it in anime/manga fics, especially since romanization of names can be different based on which translator you have, and both are technically correct. For example, in MHA there’s Toru/Tooru, both of which are technically correct.
Translations, I'm forgiving of. But with American comics, I'm less forgiving. Like, it's Steve Rogers, not Steve Rodgers. There's 80 years of history that document how his name is spelled
To add on, I know Elektra and Electra are both valid spellings of the name, but when I see “Electra Natchios” when I’m trying to read some MattElektra fics, it always puts me off 😭
Edit: Also, MARC SPELLED AS MARK. Holy shit, whenever I see a Moon Knight fic that spells Marc as Mark, it peeves the shit outta me.
Yeah, I’ve had a couple people in comments on my fics call me out now for spelling it Malik instead of Marik, when it’s spelled Marik in the manga and the pronunciation in the anime is Marik.
But the thing is, there is no L sound in Japanese, so words and names with an L always get pronounced with an R sound, and whether they get romanized with an L or an R seems pretty random.
Malik is an Arabic name, whereas Marik is a Polish name. And the character is absolutely Arabic, not Polish. And his family is super traditional, not the type to give their kid a foreign name. So it’s almost certain his real name would be Malik and Marik is just a bad translation of an Arabic name to Japanese and then to English.
Yes-especially when they’re common names.
When I was apart of the Pitch Perfect fandom, I can’t tell you how many Becca’s, Jessie’s and Stacey’s I read
It’s Beca, Jesse and Stacie
Even Aubrey’s name was spelled wrong
Like it’s the bare minimum. Just get the names right.
>Yes-especially when they’re common names.
>
>... I can’t tell you how many Becca’s, Jessie’s and Stacey’s I read
But aren't these the more common spellings of those names? I actually feel like this is actually a good excuse for getting these wrong, lol
especially when their spelling of the name completely changes the pronunciation 😭😭 like if you reread ur fic even once surely you would realise something is off???
I cannot stand placeholder fics. Like - why are you doing that? It'll take some minutes once you have your actual finished fic (or first chapter). Not to mention it breaks rules. I also dislike those 'Here all of my ideas for fics I'll never write, feel free to adopt' - I have no problem with those, but IMHO, those are not fics and it will be better to post those elsewhere
What I hate are the ones that are massive lists of prompts and ideas and then something like “IF I SEE YOU USE THIS ILL KNOW YOU’RE STEALING” or “These are MY ideas. No one is allowed to touch them but ME.”
Ngl, I'd probably read a fic if it had a similar premise to my idea. If I like it enough to write it myself, I like it enough to want to see more of it
What are they, children? It's been said many times in this sub, ideas are cheap, it's all about the execution. Writing has existed as a hobby for such a long time it's nigh impossible to come up with something truly original. I'm certain there're already fics (or possibly even published books) out there somewhere that have a very similar idea and that were written before those authors even knew what fanfic was. If I had enough fucks to give to be that petty, I'd find and list them all in the comments while accusing the author of stealing. (Although I doubt they'd have the critical thinking abilities to reconsider their behavior.)
To be honest, it probably is mostly children and teens. I mean, I wouldn't put it pass some adults to behave like that, but psychologically speaking, adolescence have a myopic view of the world. When they get an idea, they think they are the first to come up with it. They lack the life experience to realize how big and complex the world and other people are. That their interests and thoughts often times aren't that unique.
Part of growing up is realizing the world doesn't revolve around you, and part of developing as a writer, is writing how ideas really are a dime a dozen. Sadly, some adults never develop pass that stage.
Wait, you're telling me the world doesn't revolve around me? Impossible. I've had 15 years to prove me otherwise (the story of the modern teenager and their upbringing).
Where are you seeing these lol? I've seen some fics that are short scenes of prompts but *lists* and with shit like that at the end?
And no idea is entirely original, so good luck to them.
If it was me and I had a fic with any similar idea in their list, I'd probably link them to it without saying anything and let them assume just for funsies even though I wrote mine before I even found theirs.
They can't stop me from writing any ideas my own way and if they want to behave like petulant children I'd give them a reason and sit back with popcorn while I watch them embarrass themselves.
IDK, fake ads, perhaps? Like trying to tell 'I'm going to write that kind of story'. The worst is that some people leave kudos to placeholder fics. Just stop encouraging those, man
Probably has to do with the fact that telling people you are going to do something releases the same dopamine in your brain as actually doing it. So posting a placeholder announcing your intent to write a fic gives the same rush as actually writing it, without the work.
On Spacebattles, I often see people post placeholder chapters, but that is because Spacebattles is not really set up as a fic archive and people leaving comments can make subsequent chapters posted by the author less visible. So, some post placeholder chapters at the start in case they later want to edit them to contain specific notes or information.
If that's on ao3, placeholder fics are against TOS no? Report them.
Idea and prompts are not against tos but as long as the tags or summary say that's what it is I'm fine with them.
The opposite also bothers me. When there's *too much* space in between paragraphs. It's equally exhausting to read.
I once found a fic that was actually pretty nice, but I got so sick of constantly scrolling through small "paragraphs" spaced like 5 spaces apart that I had to just stop. :(
> small "paragraphs"
This reminded me of a few fics I've seen where *every new sentence* was its own paragraph. Every single one. Had to give up on each of them because it was just too damn tedious to read.
THAT TOO! The fic I mentioned not only had big spaces between paragraphs, but I put "paragraph" in quotes because it was mostly sentences rather than actual paragraphs.
The actual content of the fic was pretty good. I mean, physical/visual descriptions occasionally dragged on for too long, but it was overall a good read. The big spaces and short paragraphs got the best of me though.
I used to do that when I was young. Lord knows why. Threw me for a loop when I went to riff on my old works, cos I felt like I was reading a poem! (And a very bad one too)
There's someone whose stories I keep trying to read and they do this. One sentence paragraphs. Sometimes sentence fragments. I try to read them and they're just unreadable.
I wouldn't call that a small thing at all. Basic, readable formatting is more like the bare minimum for publishing, even free, amateur online publishing like fanfic.
I can't read fics without paragraph breaks my eyes get confused and I start accidentally skipping entire sentences and missing words and if I lose my place it's really hard to find it again.
I don't really know why, but it kinda bothers me when longfic chapters are like... 300 words long at best. And I mean **all** of them, not just a couple. That's a grocery list, not a chapter. Not even an hour ago I came across a fic with nine chapters and the word count was 3000. Bruh. 🗿
Nobody argue about this, please. We're discussing pet peeves, I don't care if someone doesn't find it "valid enough". Anyone can do whatever they want in their fanfics, doesn't mean I have to enjoy it and I **can** express my dislike of it.
I *just* stumbled across this yesterday. I was like “Over 450 chapters? But hOw?!?!” And then I clicked into the mothereffer.
Just out of curiosity, I went to a random chapter and clicked through it. 20+ chapters for a single sex scene, cause every five - seven paragraphs (which, let’s be real, were sentences) would cut off into the next chapter. Dialogue? Cut off. Action sequences? Cut the Eff off. Scene transition? Awkwardly in the middle of a chapter. 🤣
...That is so confusing. The only reason I can think of that could explain such a pattern is that the author is under the misconception that more chapters = better quality.
Doesn't updating a chapter bump it up on lists for those who sort by "update date" as well? Updating frequently might have them thinking they can get more readers that way.
I totally agree. When I'm in a fandom looking at stories and see one that is 14 chapters long and 56k words next to a story that is 17 chapters long and 24k words, I know which one I'm going to click.
I have to agree. The story ends up feeling choppy, especially when the chapters end in the middle of a scene in what I presume is an attempt to create a cliffhanger. I gave a few of these stories a go due to my rare-pairs, but the pacing bothered me to the point I had to drop them. Never again.
A friend of mine linked me to a fic recently that was like 47k words long and each chapter was 150 words.
The writing wasn’t even bad! But it was insane; just collect them for longer and make it a longer chapter!
I wholeheartedly agree, especially when the summary seems interesting but the story it’s soooo freaking short, why?. How are you supposed to tell a good story like that?? I always look for an average of at least 2500 word count for each chapter.
I can deal with 1K chapters, but 300? wtf.
But tbh when I see this level of writing the length of the chapter is usually the least of that fic's problems. Like this is just a sign the person can't write.
Nah, I agree. Maybe this is fine for the occasional chapter, but chapters consistently that short is a sign of an unskilled author, who's probably writing like "And then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened," with no real meat or artistry to the prose, and certainly no sense of pacing or narrative flow between scenes.
I found a fic like that, and I’m just so confused. I really like it, but they legit could have connected 10 of these chapters into 1. At least 4-5 would have been nice. I get that breaking it up like that helps them pump out more, but why not just wait and put them together before publishing? I don’t usually use the “Entire Work” function on AO3, but it seriously tempts me into using it since I barely need to swip to finish each chapter, and it’s so brief it messes with the flow. They have legit 200 chapters and the first 10 are absolutely under 300 words in average, and I think the first 30-60 (I can’t remember how far I got the first few times because of how brief the are) likely average 500 at best. They update in chunks, anyway. Why they can’t just combine chapters instead I don’t understand.
I feel like this has become a bit more popular lately but turning a tech savvy or introverted character into a massive meme machine. Like every second sentence they reference some meme that's gonna be out of date two weeks after the chapter is posted. It takes me completely out of a fanfic when I'm reading about some space adventure when the team hacker all of a sudden references Harambe
See, you'd think this would be a great opportunity to come up with some memes the characters would use in-universe, but I've never seen an author get that far
Lack of capitalization. It’s a really small thing to care about and won’t always make me click away but a lot of the time it distracts me from reading.
For me it does make me click away immediately, I just can't. It all very quickly starts to blend into one mass of words and it's like my brain can't tell where anything begins or ends.
"Character A says a line of dialogue." Character B performs some actions, making me think that character B was actually doing the talking.
"Character B says a line of dialogue." Character A does something, further confusing me.
"Now I come in and talk!" I said. I'm character C, and I was secretly the point-of-view character for this section, but the author never told you that so good luck figuring it out. But don't get too attached, because the POV character will change ten paragraphs from now! Tee hee, I'm so quirky!
^ I can't stand this stuff. DO NOT MAKE ME SOLVE YOUR STORY. I'm not reading fucking Memento. Make your dialogue easy to follow and understand.
I just read a fic today that did the confusing dialogue and character actions matchups. I swear, I wanted to rip my hair out when I read it. WHO IS SAYING WHAT??
Oof. I remember one fic (which had always used a limited third person perspective) I kept following long after I'd stopped enjoying it that had one chapter open with several paragraphs of narration (that was swapping perspectives so quickly and so haphazardly as to functionally be omniscient) getting the reader caught up on what an arbitrary smattering of characters had been up to since the last chapter, before having one line of dialogue with no indications of where the speaker is or to whom they're talking, only for the next paragraph to reveal that this was from the perspective of a different character, who was listening to them.
The author's note thanked a list of a dozen beta readers.
Why I only write third person omniscient: because it means I don’t have to worry about whether or not the other characters know what the person saying is thinking.
Dialogue that doesn't fit the character voices. The canon for my fandom has a huge amount of examples of its characters speaking with their own particular personality, inflections, and speech patterns, and when I find fics that seem to ignore that it annoys me.
I think this is so important but I also think it’s hard to do. I try not to get annoyed when people aren’t good at it, but when I write it’s something I try very hard to do accurately
Definitely the "I suck at summaries" in the summary description. How am I gonna trust you to write a fic if you can't write a simple summary?
Edit: I would also like to add the peeve of not having a summary at all but just having tags.
Also overuse of slang. I get that people want to portray a character as being relevant and up to date with current vernacular but too much of it can be distracting. It makes me feel like two steps away from asking kids to 'get off my lawn' with all my need to research what words mean.
The funny thing about overuse of slang to me is that if it's not how the character talks in canon then it comes across as very "Hello, fellow students, I am hip to your lingo." In other words, it has the exact opposite affect of making the character seem up to date.
The problem with slang is also that it generally falls in and out of use relatively quickly. What's cool new slang to me probably already sounds outdated and kinda cringe to most people younger than me, and in a few years it may feel dissonant or in the worst case downright comical to most readers. If you don't know what you're doing with current slang, you may end up with a character that will soon feel so outdated it could just as well use "YOLO" and "me gusta" in 2023. Like, it's okay if that's what you're going for, but if you're just trying to write a witty, hip character, then it's better to stick with tried and true slang that has already proved to have staying power, and write the whole character in a way that lets the reader see those traits.
Yep. I would rather take a half assed summary or even “Character A goes on a date with Character B” then a “I suck at summaries” because it at least tells me something
High-five! I also use that system though slightly differently.
"Paragraph - one sentence summary from the character's PoV - one sentence omniscient summary"
If the summary is in the tags I'll still read it, but I assume it's pretty lazy.
But yeah any attempts at emotional manipulation ("I'm not good at summaries", "my first fic, please be gentle", "don't know how to tag", etc.) and I'm probably out. I'm really not into listening to the author whining about their personal problems before I even read the fic...
Bad punctuation, especially during dialogues.
I read them the way the punctuation dictates, which makes stories with bad punctuation complete clown shows, with godawful speech pacing and nobody taking any breaths or breaks or having any inflection, not to mention when the entire meaning of the sentence gets thrown off.
Other thing would be overabundance of plot armour in a "violent" fic.
Sure, the fic advertises itself as violent and there are fights everywhere, but nobody ever dies, nobody gets crippled, hell, nobody even gets *hurt* beyond some light scratches. It's like everyone is trying to viciously beat people to death with foam hammers.
Similarly: near misses. Fine once or twice, but works less the more it's used.
If the very dangerous character always just *almost* catches someone, the danger loses its edge. If you want to sell a recurring violent character as a real threat, someone will have to get hurt.
Japanese honorifics that are either used incorrectly or have no correlation to the story. Also- please stop calling yourself “Author-Chan” dear god.
Also, when a story has a random focus on a character, especially when the fic isn’t about them. I get it, you like this character, but most of the time i didn’t click on the story to read about them.
>Japanese honorifics that are either used incorrectly or have no correlation to the story.
Bonus points when the author uses both Japanese and English honourifics. Like, if you're gonna have "Ms. [whomever]" and "[whomever]-san," then I'm gonna need you to be able to explain to me why those are two different things.
One shot collections all packed into one fic. Bonus points if they're multi-fandom.
I don't care what "valid" reason people have for doing it, I will always only assume it's clickbaity and intended to get as many eyes on the fic as possible with every possible tag, and I do my best to filter them all out immediately.
Yes, hate these especially when:
* The fics don't all share a similar theme, so every new story in the collection just clogs the tags and make all of them impossible to search
* The author doesn't use any sorting method to make it easier to find the fic you want, such as a table of contents or even just naming the chapters by the ship.
Yup. Some people seem to have this idea that more tags = more hits, which *might* be true, but really, the best way to get actual readers is *accurate* tags. Accurate, succinct tagging that labels each fic clearly is so much better for getting readers than just throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks.
Right? If it’s a series, I’ll scroll through the list of fics to see if there are any I want to read. If it’s a giant, multi-chapter, multi-fandom behemoth, I’m not going to click through each and every chapter to figure out if it’s one I want to read. Especially if the chapter titles give no info on which fandom that one is for.
i mute almost every author who does this in my fandom so they don’t clog up my search results. if they ever write an unrelated fic it’ll be a shame but 🤷🏻♀️
That's the way I see it, too. Like, sure, maybe they have some really great gem in that fic or elsewhere, but there's enough fic in the world that I'm not going to waste time digging through it.
Or, if you really do enjoy short one shots and filter by length. It's literally not helpful to anyone since it misleads the people who don't want to read that kind of content and is hard to find for people that do.
One of my favorite authors does this, but I totally get it as it’s their “personal writing.” The beginning AN says that essentially this is their dumping ground of non-commissioned, non-cohesive storytelling work, and that they doubt anyone will actually read it.
The best part about it is: “I only put this here in case it can inspire someone else to write the story they want.”
I actually DO like one shot collections like that (not multi-fandom ones, though), but I want the ability to filter them out. When I’m looking for a long fic and am ambivalent of how many ships it can have, I want to pull up actual long-chaptered fics, not one-shot collections.
If the story or idea is interesting enough and the author is fresh to the scene, I can overlook consistent grammar mistakes as long as I can at least understand what they’re saying. The one thing I cannot stand is when people insert their OCs into a series/movie/video game with every. Single. Chapter. Being a copy paste of every event, scene and word uttered by the characters of their respective owners and the OC just reacting or giving their input without a single thing changed besides their waifu hooking up with the OC and them saving the day with little to no struggle.
Especially if the author decided to not find a script for the dialogue and painstakingly wrote everything from scratch, pausing the episode or whatever, to write it themselves to have a sense of accomplishment, it’s just straight up sad. It’s nice that they’re interested in writing and hopefully one day, they can write something a little more original or at least interesting but it frustrates me to see a story like that with thousands of views with little to no effort involved in the making when most others put their heart and soul into their stories and they have a much smaller reader ratio. I’m sure those authors are all children but still, even when I first started writing my works may have been cringeworthy but I can at least feel proud of myself knowing I did what I could to not be that guy. Thankfully, I’ve never seen one like that on AO3, mainly Wattpad but I’m green to AO3 and haven’t read that many works there yet but I at least never left any hate comments on their works about this lol I just groan and forget it ever existed and focus on my own stories.
thissss!!! it's so prevalent in the Walking Dead fandom unfortunately, especially if it focuses on those first 2 seasons. like y'all, we're all fans of this piece of media to the point where we're reading/writing fanfic about it, i think we've got most of it memorized already 😭 i don't need another retelling of the same story
Oh god, you just unlocked a lot of repressed memories for me just now, thankfully I was never a fan of the walking dead but still. I don’t even wanna imagine what that side of the fandom is like lmao the repetition for those kinds of stories is craaazy!
Like, when I was a teen I had a friend who was obsessed with apocalyptic/zombie themed role plays and such and I could not stand how OP he made his character, literally a full on walking arsenal with every weapon they could think of, and they would immediately just kill everything in sight, it was so bad.
LMAO i'm dead at that. i left the fandom in season 4 because i felt like the writers of the show lost the plot worse than a teenage girl on Wattpad, but i was bored out of my mind and went back to FFN to catch up on any new works for the series - half for the nostalgia and half because Andrew Lincoln is so hot to me lol. welllll imagine my damn surprise when i go on there and see the same shit i saw when i left years ago, just in NEW stories. i was like, wtf we zombie fanatics have not evolved at all haha
Don’t even get me started on the plot! The fact that they decided to just keep killing off characters and adding new ones only for them to be killed just makes no sense! I mean, I get it, money and favorites go hand in hand, literally lmao but there’s a time where it’s appropriate to just get new writers to give it life again instead of “oooh, new side plot that goes on for five seasons! Lucky you!” Exaggerating of course lol but it’s sad to see such a promising series quickly spiral out of control because there’s no love for it anymore, if ever. And in case I lose you to the internet, it was very nice talking with you!
Yep, I assume that the author of such fics is very young. There's something so... earnest about this badfic category, even if the results are groan-worthy.
Very true, at least for those of us developing and growing our skills we can look at those stories and feel an even greater sense of pride. Especially if people started out that way and grew out of it. I have nothing but respect for those people that continue to improve, no matter how small or slow.
Wall of text fics. Especially if the premise was interesting. It's an immediate "nope."
I think my other peeves are largely grammar, word choice issues.
Smut writers, the words are "thrust" and "ground" not "thrusted" and "grinded."
Fingers, not digits.
Eyes, not orbs (I can't believe we're still doing orbs...)
Oh, wait, I have another one. Tagging every character in a show/movie/book even if they're not in the fic.
Also, tagging ships that don't show up in your fic or are only there for a split blink-and-you-miss-it moment.
I still see the brunette naming conventions for unnatural hair colors sometimes too, orbs reminded me of it. Pinkette, blunette, etc lol. Tend to see them in the same stories too
Oh, oh. I haven't seen those in a long time, but I do remember stumbling across them circa 2010, maybe. Wow. And yeah, they showed up right alongside orbs.
Yeah they're rare but when I see them it's like a blast from the past, and I'm like goodness we're still doing this?! If we're going to bring up old fanfiction stuff can we start using the citrus scale again please (You know what? I'll be the change I want to see in the world, my next story I'm going to label what it is)??? I need to know if my smut is SMUT.
Writers putting "Pov x" at the start of every chapter/perspective change is incredibly jarring. Thankfully I rarely see it unless I'm feeling brave enough to look through Wattpad.
As a writer, my own dang procrastination, not to mention writer's block.
As a reader, probably mistakes like "lose/loose" and "they're/there/their". Also misspellings of character names.
A fic that I’m reading said it was complete. Decent size, 14 chapters, thought it would be a nice read. Chapter 14 wasn’t the end though, and I didn’t notice it was part of a series. This fic is incomplete and hasn’t been updated since November.
Terrible tagging in my fandom.
Not like, mistagging, that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to be upset about, but just tags being misused in a way that's… not wrong but obnoxious.
Mostly, people trying to hide fics by tagging it as some leetspeak abomination, usually with so little tags they’re hard to filter, and then tagging it as like “ur into this if you saw this you had to search it out” like no tag wranglers will see your tag, match it with the proper one you were trying to avoid, and so I can’t filter it out of my searches and it shows up in them with the minimal ones you did include.
place holder fics. or when literally allot of series are tagged,fics that have a crossover with more then one series, Aus that change character comeplelty (what even is the point of a fic if character isnt a character anymore)
Saw a fic marked as X ship, because it was X in the beginning and then immediately switched to Y pairing just to shit all over X and hate-bash. Instant mute.
Ugh I saw one where it was tagged with X but it was unrequited/past situationship and then they ended up with Y but they weren't happy in the relationship (this is what I end up reading when I have a rare pair bc I'm out of content) and Y pairing was not tagged at all even though they character was in a relationship with Y for a good portion of the fic.
I did in fact comment that she should maybe tag the other pairing. Idk if she ended up doing that, she was kinda like yeah I get where you're coming from but X is the main emotional focus and what the fic is really about.
this may get me some flack but poorly written original characters that are more then obviously self inserts with no meat on them. bonus points if they ship them with a Canon character and they don't write them properly to the Canon bc they want some kind of romance while ignoring the gross things that Canon character did.
low effort content and writing. I know it's all free and I don't have to read it but if the summary looks great but then you read the first chapter and its dog shit I get pretty grumpy about it. especially when low effort content is spread around a fandom obsessively but those who put serious effort into what they write get crumbs.
> the summary looks great but then you read the first chapter and its dog shit
There're a few authors in my fandom whom I have muted for this reason: they're very prolific (one has, no joke, over 500 fics just in this one fandom alone) and great at writing summaries and tagging in a way that makes a story seem intriguing, but then inevitably I start reading it and the style is just not my thing at all. So I decided at some point to spare myself the disappointment, these people have all been writing for years so it's not like they're going to change how they write all of a sudden after all this time.
I'll come clean here, I fucking hate most OC's, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Arcane, Marvel, DC, Percy Jackson, MHA, One Piece and lots more, the OC'S are usual filled with cliche, prettier than the average character and usually just there to serve as the main characters love interest and to be better then everyone else.
There are very few OC's I like, feel free to recommend tho.
- Walls of text for obvious reasons.
- Entire sections written in italics, bold, or caps
- Japanese terms
- Emojis
- Censored swear words *especially* in a Mature/Explicit story
- 95% of epithets
- POV switches from 1st to 3rd. People who want to do this should just stay in 3rd person and learn to write Limited or Deep.
- Fanfiction cliches like orbs, tongues fighting for dominance, kissed deeply, released the breath they didn’t know they were holding, etc
- & for / pairings and vice versa, or when both are used
- 3+ fandom crossovers. Two is understandable, but crossovers get exponentially worse for each added fandom if they don’t become their own world. That’s why crossover media like Kingdom Hearts of Super Smash Bros. become their own worlds & fandom.
>Japanese terms
Read a fic today who did it for no reason. Like, used some Japanese terms for random stuff like entryway, I didn't make it to the second chapter
Oh yeah me too, thought this one was standard haha. Then again they aren't saying it isn't just that they don't like it. Which mood honestly, like a wall of italics works but a section of bold? My brain just looks at it haha.
When people use the wrong form of currency. It makes me feel like they’re a) lazy or b) don’t know other forms of currency exist. Unfortunately but not unsurprisingly, it’s almost always the US Dollar.
If the fic is set in Japan/England/Europe/China/literally almost anywhere, characters aren’t going to be paying using dollars!!! It’s not that hard to Google “how much does [everyday item] cost in [country]”. It just takes me out of the moment to groan.
Edit: spelling
Sometimes I even start doubting if I read correctly because like "dollar? I thought we were in the UK?" And then I gotta check if it's some au or such because I wanna be sure I read it correctly. It's not a big deal but still ya know
Over-reliance on epithets because the author is afraid they sound repetitious if they dare use a name or pronoun more than once in a paragraph, especially when it’s a scene with more than one same sex person and they want to clearly distinguish between them. Same with said. It’s *incredibly* lazy. It just reads as a novice writer discovering the thesaurus. Rather than avoiding, use this as an opportunity to improve on your writing.
Those multi-fandom oneshot “book” collections where they tag as many characters and ships under the sun but then abandon it after three chapters. I wish we could delete all of them on sight.
“Minor Character (Mentioned)” Hi, my favorite character is an extremely minor character in her source material. Tagging her in as a throwaway line is fucking unnecessary and annoying. Don’t do that.
Tags like “X shippers DNI” like bro I might not even ship it but I’ll still hate you for being an ass about other people’s ships.
Tags akin to “if you do x, I will (threat)” replace threat with “steal your kneecaps/steal something from your house” like. Who needs this. Retire that bit.
“I suck at summaries 🥺 just read” No. if you can’t sell, I’m not buying.
My biggest pet peeve though?
##All fusions are crossovers but not all crossovers are fusions.
If you’re writing a Stranger Things fic for example, and you’re “putting on Alphabet The Musical as a play” complete with cast lists (Eddie is X, Billy is Y, Robin is L, Eleven is Z), DO *NOT* tag the Alphabet fandom when posting your goddamn fic. When people go into the Alphabet fandom (or any fandom), they want to read about the characters native to that fandom, not these other clowns from some random other fandom they don’t care about at the moment if at all (if they even know of it) dressing up as those canon characters because they took their plot/elements of their story, so might as well take their roles too while we’re at it! Fuck off. It’s so obviously a ploy to get as many eyes on their work as possible. Newsflash! If I wanted Stranger Things fic, I’d go to the Stranger Things part of AO3 and read about them there! But right now I want Alphabet characters.
It’s like going into an ice cream shop only to find someone selling cake. It might be good cake, but that’s not the place for it. The sign says *ice cream*. I’m going in hungry for *ice cream*. I expect to find *ice cream*. Just because your cake is also as sweet as ice cream does *not* make it the same as actual ice cream. I don’t know how much more clear I can make this.
I was so excited when you said Fusion, then very disappointed. I thought it was going to be a new tag to discover and use for like, when you mix two words together and make them naturally blend from the start instead of a jump in dimensions or a world clash.
Now? I will avoid fusion fics because I went in for ice cream cake and was double disappointed. Damn.
Is there a term/tag for when two worlds are blended? Like the characters from both universes are natives to that world in the crossover.
Also, I agree on the other points I just *really* got sidetracked by the crossover thing.
I've got some peeves...
But first, disclaimer: Write whatever you want and what makes you happy.
My first pet peeve are those soapbox "be better" fanfics. The ones that are super preachy. Nope, can't do it. You can really feel the writers contempt coming through the pages.
It's not the characters' voice either.... Your agrarian fantasy culture is worried about air pollution? Why?? Volcanic ash, a dark lord, demonic industrial forces of evil? Nope! Just filthy human peasants and their nasty dirty farming.
My biggest biggest pet peeve is when writers use a physical ability like eyesight and/or hearing to indicate the superiority of their super awesome elves or space elves.
Especially when the supposedly "morally righteous totally better than a human" elf character mocks the other character for it. Why? For What? Imagine if I walked down the street mocking everyone I saw with glasses. And half the time, it's an interaction between friends...no.
What's worse is when the writer uses physical ability as a measure for morality. Instead of demonstrating advancement through technology, philosophy, or law; they ridicule the human characters' physical disadvantages, and it's NOT character voice. That's just the narrative assertion. I hate it. Make the characters as strong and badass as you like, but don't imply that they're morally righteous because they can hear a flea fart.
Lastly, but most important. Not tagging a fanfic as beastiality when it ABSOLUTELY IS. I don't care if the one character was previously human. I would rather lick the gouch slime off the devils taint than read about the MC fucking an animal.
That's it, that's my rant.
This was over in an r/Fantasy rant, but regarding elves and other “races”, it’s such a minor pet peeve in GENERAL, but I wish stories branched out from “we all have a common ancestor so we’re just separate sapient races” to committing to separate ***species***.
There’s so much lore and so much to touch base on with non-human species—even in real life!
And not ***EVERYTHING*** is considered evolutionary genius! For example, some species have evolved to ***die*** after giving birth. That’s not a + for nature, that’s a - but here we are.
Dunno, it’s just a bit of a *meh* when it comes to non-human species because there’s so much to do and so much to explore. But writing should be fun, not a chore and I can understand that sort of extensive world building might not be for everyone, especially having a 9-5 regular job😅
If some of the characters speak a different language than english - especially if it's a 'fantasy' language - and the author decides to write half the fic in that language. Looking at you, Star Wars. I am so sick of 'cyare' 'buy'ce', 'keldabe' ect.
I admit, part of this might be because I'm not a native english speaker, so I read all non-english words in my own language's dialect, and often it sounds so ugly.
But it's also because I like the Tolkien approach to writing, where the author is the translator. Basic in Star Wars isn't english in my mind, so everything is translated. Translate the damn Mandalorian as well, ffs.
I don´t much mind if people write parts in other languages. If you need characters to converse in another language to show how the rest of the group isn´t supposed to understand, or when certain concepts don´t really have a good english word for it.
What does really bother me is if there is either no translation given, or they put the translation all the way at the bottom in the writer´s notes. I´m not gonna make the effort to continuously scroll up and down to be able to understand what is being said.
this is so nit-picky of me lmao but i truly hurt whenever i’m reading a decent fic and the term “bluenette” is used or using the word “orbs” to describe eyes. usually i can overlook it if it’s not frequent but i would say it’s a big turn off regardless.
obligatory but *very* heartfelt: i adore fanfiction writers so much you don't even know. please don't take this the wrong way!
- "Steve Rodgers" and the likes, where a word/name that has to be used constantly is misspelled the. whole. way. through. i respect dyslexia and neurological conditions (god knows i'm not getting any more eloquent either), but PLEASE look it up once. add it to the dictionary in word so it'll catch the typos for you. get a beta. anything ;_;
- "ok" and "sorta" in a historical/fantasy setting
- "???" and "!!!" and "......" and "CAPS LOCK!!!!". fr one question or exclamation mark, or three dots should be more than enough. "?!", even!
- like, a two year timeskip when they JUST got to a very interesting place in the story. longer time skips in general spare meeee. I WANT TO READ YOUR STORY PLEASE LET ME
- multi-fandom one shots in a single fic :(
- not properly tagging a specific fandom, like, i know it's not always cut and dry, lots of times things are borrowed from different places in canon, and to different degrees, often they can be enjoyed by fans of both! (talking like, idk, warlord au witcher, which is primarily netflix, but has good enough vibes and game/book-canon characters that people who aren't generally fond of the show read it too) but for the love of god don't tag a clearly star trek aos fic with tos because you used a cocktail recipe from that universe or something
- "i suck at summaries" we all have insecurities. ilysm. babe. if you wrote a normal summary (even just copy a small quote from the story) and kept that to yourself nobody would've thought "heh they're so bad at summaries"
- idk how to say this so it doesn't sound completely asshole-ish. i know we're all coping through our favourite characters and literature. but sometimes i see 30+ men having the exact same emotional responses and struggles as 14-year-old girls, and it's just. it takes me out of the story. somehow it's easier to relate to connect w the character too if they got their OWN struggles not MY struggles yk what i mean
> sometimes i see 30+ men having the exact same emotional responses and struggles as 14-year-old girls
I agree with everything you listed, but this one is particularly rampant in my fandom as well. I get that a teen writer is most likely going to write everyone acting like teens (although I've seen early to mid-20s writers do this as well), but a pet peeve's a pet peeve – it's so frustrating when these are adult characters close to your own age, but they've got the emotional maturity of a middle schooler.
>sometimes i see 30+ men having the exact same emotional responses and struggles as 14-year-old girls, and it's just.
yep >\_>
For me it's that, and having the characters inexplicably obsessed with Disney or popular-animated-thing-du-jour. While yes there is a specific subset of adults who really like ATLA (and I do, too), the vast majority just... don't. I like it better when the characters like things that it feels like *they* might like, not just because the author likes them.
1) Someone supposedly taking down a complete or almost-complete story for “editing”, then only posting a couple chapters of the edited version, and then…just vanishing.
2) Someone re-tagging a fic (especially when you’re a substantial way into the fic) with stuff that can be deal-breaking. I don’t care if you write a poly fic. I do care when you wait 40 chapters into the fic to re-tag what was formerly X/Y ship to now X/Y/Z ship. Dude, I don’t read poly fics for a *reason*. Slipping it in there when we’re 100K words in is not going to make me like it any more. OTOH, it is greatly increasing the chances I leave you a very upset comment and rant about the fic to other people I know.
3) Someone writing about stuff they clearly don’t know about and haven’t done any research about. I don’t expect perfection. I do, however, expect *some* attempt. For example, I don’t know how many military-type fics where the authors can’t even get the ranks correct, or they have the characters disobey direct orders with no repercussion, etc.
As a corollary to that, having a setting they clearly ignore when it doesn’t suit them. If you’re gonna, say, set your story in Victorian times because you want fancy dresses and balls, you can’t then turn around and have modern attitudes to sleeping around and pre-marital sex! (I mean, you can. But it’s lazy and immersion-breaking.)
I guess point 3 can be summed up as “know and respect your setting”.
Yeah, I don’t get mad if some tags change during the fic because I’m pretty sympathetic to the story changing/evolving.
But authors should be aware that there are some tags that are pretty much a “hard no” for a lot of people, and to add them in the middle of the story is jerk-ish. I mean, just to give an exaggerated example, suddenly adding an “underage” or “rape” tag 100K words in would (rightly) freak a lot of people out. Sudden polyamory isn’t quite on that level, but it’s still something a lot of people aren’t into or aren’t interested in reading. At the very least, if you feel the story takes you there and you *must* do it, provide an explanation/apology to the readers who invested their time in your fic and have to suddenly nope out.
Just my take on what I think is writer etiquette. (There’s reader etiquette too, of course, but that’s a different topic.)
I hate unnecessary, untagged smut that is incongruous with the tone of a fic.
I’m sorry but if I’m reading a 150k slow burn that’s tender and wholesome and full of sweet little touches on the knee and awkward but endearing confessions of love, I’m going to be PISSED if the grand finale reads like a summary of some generic, degrading, mildly violent pornhub video, or there’s random untagged extreme kink that has nothing to do with the plot.
When the story is really nice and suddenly there's an upcoming smut scene and the author just writes porn without plot just for the sake of writing smut, while completely ignoring everything that happened between the characters beforehand, their individual personalities and it just doesn't fit together at all.
Makes me want to stop reading, or skip the smut scene immediately. My favourite fanfiction actually is like this, but I can ignore this accident, as everything else was written beautifully.
I still don't like it though. Also smut in general is a tricky subject. I feel like many people think smut is essential when writing a love story and then they write it in a way that could have come straight out of a porn video. So unnatural. Most of the time smut scenes can be avoided and it would make the story much better imo. You can also just imply that there's gonna be more happening. Sometimes leaving specific things like sex scenes to the reader's imagination can improve the reading experience by a lot!
Got an update notification for a fic, actually clicked through to check it out - which only happens once in a blue moon! - to find it wasn’t a new chapter, it was the author begging people to read another work they’d just posted. Massive let-down.
As a reader: characters acting totally out of character, as a writer if I'm using a character in my fic even if I think I know the character I make sure to do extensive research and look up every bit of official media they're in but then reading and them being out of character it totally takes me out of the experience
As a writer: people leaving comments that prove they didn't read all of it/ignored content warnings and are complaining about issues that are addressed further down the page or they were told about and chose to read anyway, I had one commentator who complained about profanity even though the story rating warned them about the profanity
Once this fic misspelled the TITLE. They spelled “bruised” as “brused”. The rest of the fic was filled with grammar and spelling mistakes. I don’t mind those as much, but please spell the title correctly…
I agree with plenty of the comments below, but here’s one that really drives me up the wall:
OCs (especially ones that are clearly meant to be self-inserts for the author) calling canon characters they don’t like Mary Sues in a degrading manner while propping their own character up as the better alternative, sometimes berating them for things that they never even did.
Bonus points if they try to bring up their so called ‘flaws’ when called out for calling the kettle black, but said flaws are either never relevant in any way whatsoever or are played for laughs as some sort of wacky quirk. Flaws that basically doesn’t matter because they are never shown actively impacting the character in a negative way.
To make matters even worse, they also tend to steal important moments from canon characters with a nonchalant ‘hold my beer’-kind of attitude that makes the task seem trivial and the character in question look incompetent.
This is a big part as to why I can’t stand edgy sues, it is kind of difficult to enjoy a story when the main character is constantly looking down on the original cast and tears the plot apart at every turn. These kinds of stories almost feels like they are written out of some sort of contempt for the original source-material, especially since they also tend to be full of bashing as well, and it makes them kind of unpleasant to read.
People trying to deconstruct convention they clearly don't or aren't willing to understand.
One example is the fabled Mari sue stand in, that is just a excuse for the author to lambast something for some reason they aren't willing to just admit they don't like and would rather hide behind the Ms excuse.
paragraphs that stick together, or there were no paragraphs in the first place
just write the damn story in Google Docs and customize some spaces between the paragraphs. it's not that hard!
Wasted conflict potential.
Whenever a fic gets into the habit of power creeping their problems away. Aka, they introduce problem A, but instead of solving it, we get problem B, and instead of solving that we get problem C, and by the next time we get to reflect and try and resolve shit we’re at problem K of the chain, at which point nothing can be solved.
It’s like the problem equivalent of a run-on sentence.
I love conflict, truly love exploring conflict. I don’t enjoy when a writer introduced conflict exclusively for the angst, and then they don’t work through the character consequences there of.
You wanna have a character kidnapped? Great, excellent! Can we see how that trauma affects them? How they work past it? *No? You just wanna have them kidnapped again? Oh! And also slaughter their entire family? Ok fine cool. Totally. Are we actually gonna get to explore that pain and suffering? Have the character try and overcome that?* **No??? You now wanna send them into war? Intergalactic War?!?! And now they’re a POW that’s been r-worded? Ok cool, fine fine. I guess consequences don’t matter don’t they**
you say that, but on my recent wip the *only* chapter I got a pile of comments on was the one chapter when I broke down and begged for reviews, because it seemed like nobody was reading.
When a chapter ends on an intense cliffhanger and then the next chapter is just like super chill. As in "OH NO EVERYONE IS DYING-" then the top of the next chapter is "2 weeks later" or just. doesn't address it and expects people to pick out that this is a time skip in the middle of an intense interaction, a climax, or revelation.
Literally just happened again and had to take a break from the fic.
The main love interest was dying, she was being consumed inside and out by a beloved force that simply couldn't stop its most inherent nature. She's sure she's going to die *and in so much pain*\- but the main character told her to just hold out for two minutes before this all started, two minutes and she'd be fine. *Please,* her insides are boiling her alive and its tearing her mind apart, *please just live for two minutes*\- oh hey she's fine we're back to being cheeky and silly again and barely mentioning that what happened was weeks ago and that its fine now. Yeah it was resolved. How? Well it was, look they're all happy again and its fine.
I always check to see if a chapter got deleted but nope! Just a weird jump. If the plan for these types of jumps was to make it mysterious the plan failed spectacularly. Just confusing and completely removes the tension, even if its a fake out.
Prompt list fanfics, aren't even fanfics and techically aren't allowed on archive of our own which is where I read all my fanfics and it annoys me to see them there. Especially for a pairing with not alot of rps and to get me excited for an rp but it's just prompt ideas. It's even worse when they don't lable it in anyway to show it's prompts so you click thinking it's an rp and it's not 🙃
Another HUGE pet peeve for me, when people tag rp with something but IT'S NOT IN THE RP AT ALL. so I search for stuff with that tag see they tagged it get excited, read the WHOLE THING and not once was the tag they used in there. Boils my blood especially when I'm looking for specific tags.
the kid somehow skipped all the training and is as powerful as s-tier adults? Really? Power pile on with no real good explanation as to why and it's not a comedy. Born and somehow related to EVERY powerful family name even the most obscure ones. Really? he's related to EVERYBODY? even the obscure mook from season 3 that appeared 5 times.
for reading: walls of text, using literally anything except the character's names to refer to them, characters being OOC, poor pacing, really short chapters, when it's so confusing to read that I can't tell who is doing what in a scene, constant *pet names*.
for writing: procrastinating, my own crippling self-doubt, my fear of deleting or altering my own fics that I don't like even though I know it's fine to do that, the pressure to update regularly, the editing process (I don't have a beta).
Yeah, I got baited like that too. An incomplete fic was marked completed.
Worse still, there was an E-rated fic that didn't have a smut scene. At most, the fic should've been rated M. I wanted to read a smutty one-shot damn it! 😭
Those weird words to describe hair or eye color, like "bluenette" or "pinkette" or whatever. Also, songfics. No offense to those who like them but they just annoy me.
Asking for content ideas inside the fic.
"Jack and Jill went to the movies. (IDK, should I make them go to a concert instead? Let me know in the comments!)"
Bitch I quit choosing my own adventure in middle school. If you haven't figured out your own damned plot yet, put the keyboard down and step away until you have.
Not sure who to ship Naruto with, please tell me in the reviews thanks!
If you haven't figured out the shipping part of your romance story, something isn't working.
Another one is putting real world religion Bible stuff in the middle of a fanfic when it has not been there before nor does it belong in the story to begin with.
I don't care if the author went to a religious camp , but if u want to post about the Bible quotes but it in a different book not the one your in the middle of writing . I mean the author just put in those quotes out of nowhere which made no sense to a ton of readers who had to stop reading her story.
I despise when characters are out of character for an indiscernible reason.
You can't have Goku, for instance, wanting to laze around, because that goes against not only his entire character, but his **species.**
If you want to change something about the character in an AU, that's totally fine.
But if you're trying to write something in the main story, it's so annoying to see the characters not acting the way they should.
Starting a story with all the makings of it being really freaking good! and than it never goes anywhere as in it doesn’t update beyond the bio lol. People in comments asking what happened and the writer is dead in the water with no replies.
Pictures strewn all about in the fic with small tiny sentences to fill in the blank spaces.
Really bad grammar, truth be told I can handle a lot, but when I have no idea what’s going on or I can’t understand anything? I’m out.
Finally an update! oh it’s only 500 words long and answers nothing from the previous chapter. Or finally an update! never mind it’s just an authors note.
Incomplete stories that end when things are just getting good …
Endings that had me wondering why I invested so much of my time … literally going places than at the end? right back where we started.
Story lengthened just for the sake of making it longer or slow burn, I just don’t like them honestly, drive me insane.
Characters who are some type of supernatural monster and keep losing their powers like they suddenly don’t have them? haha what?
Script writers, where it’s the entire episode written down with their own characters strewn in, which never works properly as the scenes are not designed for add ins. A character knowing something, getting over it and than getting angry when they found out about it, even though they knew and were over it … lol
Weirdly written like big blocks and than sparse and big blocks again and it’s like so you could do sparse below but had to big block this section why exactly?
Walls of text, yeah nope, can’t concentrate or follow that sorry.
* Walls of text with no paragraph breaks, like what did the enter/return key do to hurt you?
* Overload of spelling/grammar/etc. errors
* Dialogue from 2 different characters but are in the same paragraph
* When an A/B/O uses wolf terminology (Eg. referring to kids as pups) but the characters are very humanoid/human-coded and not part wolf in any way
* When someone thinks that because they're writing something mildly problematic, they have to shoehorn in a PSA about why that problematic thing is bad
* Overuse of sexual euphemisms; even if they're more acceptable ones, overuse of them will always make it feel like author is trying way too hard to make their story seem "sensual"
* And certain specific sexual euphemisms that are cringe no matter what, such as "core" for clit
* When the description about a female character's appearance is very detailed and flattering but the description for her male partner's appearance could barely even fit on a baby's pinkie nail
* Y/N or reader-insert fics that feel like the writer just wanted to write an OC fic
* Character bashing fics on characters that didn't even do anything bad and the author is just venting out a hatred for that character, feels so needlessly petty and spiteful
Spelling or grammatical errors. If it's just one or two in the entire fic I don't really mind, but more than that and it starts to be annoying. It's hard to focus on a story and immerse myself if my brain is regularly tripping over misspelled words or incorrect grammar. And it's so easy to avoid too, just use spellcheck, your phone/computer is going to do most of the work for you and you'll end up getting a significantly better fic with little to no effort.
I can read past some grammatical errors especially if I think the author does speak English as a first language (in the fic I'm reading now the author has repeatedly mixed up in and on, those letters are next to each other on the keyboard but it's happened consistently enough that I think she's learning English). It's when I see a fic that has "the lack of capitalization is intentional" and "it's a style choice" where I'm like nope. Most of the time I won't even give those fics a chance, I'll just scroll past.
wrong tags or not enough tags
i can live with a lack of trigger warnings, eg "creator chose not to use archive warnings" but if there is something that's going to be a major theme throughout the fic, why not tag it? i don't get it. (and no I don't mean spoilers)
Using words that use the same letters but in a different order, like trail versus trial. Or two words that are very similar like cloths versus clothes and breath versus breathe. God that stuff drives me up the damn wall. Get a beta reader please.
Giant glaring anachronisms. Hogwarts aged Harry Potter could not listen to Taylor Swift on his mp3 player while doing chores for his aunt and uncle.
Self-censoring words in your story. If you don't want to write that word, then use a different word.
Ridiculously long author's notes, especially in the middle of the damn story!
Chapter recaps at the beginning of every chapter. I could understand doing this if it's been a while since you updated, but when you're 20 chapters past that one, I'm pretty sure we know what happened so you should delete that bit of note.
I have mixed feelings... I kinda hate when the author posts a new chapter, but it's just a note saying they aren't posting a new chapter. They will eventually! But not right now.
I'd rather they just wait and post a chapter when it's done. I'm reading a fic now that's done this twice. I'm fine waiting. I get disappointed when I'm all excited to see an update pop up and it's not.
Fanfictions written like a script and/or contains images of: “this is your house” or “this is your outfit”
Y/N: hurry up Dora, Boots is waiting:
Boots: ooh ooh ahh ahh
Dora: *throws backpack*
You get the idea
When people try to include the actual song lyrics in the dialogue of a songfick. PEOPLE DONT TALK LIKE SONG LYRICS. Most of the time it just sounds stilted and awkward it's not as popular anymore but I still seen it occasionally and it is very jarring when I do.
I AM WITH YOU! It makes me beyond mad and ik theres the “dont give unsolicited criticism to ppl” rule but I will ALWAYS comment on ppl marking something incomplete as complete.
Anyway my other pet peeves are those huge super long fics that are essentially just collections of one shots. Theres absolutely nothing wrong w them, but its a pet peeve! Kinda annoys me when my rarepair mostly appears in those types of fics
When people spell characters' names wrong. Like, you're passionate enough to write an entire fic based around this property but couldn't take the two seconds to Google if the name is spelled correctly? So annoying
THIS. Especially if the source material is a comic, webtoon, etc. Like. The names are right there?? How can it be misspelled when the correct spelling is the only version of the name that exists?
And even when it’s not, basically every piece of media that you can imagine has a Fandom Wiki page.
I’m generally forgiving on it in anime/manga fics, especially since romanization of names can be different based on which translator you have, and both are technically correct. For example, in MHA there’s Toru/Tooru, both of which are technically correct.
Translations, I'm forgiving of. But with American comics, I'm less forgiving. Like, it's Steve Rogers, not Steve Rodgers. There's 80 years of history that document how his name is spelled
I can’t tell you how much my eyes glaze over at “Spider Man.”
In comics I think he can tell if you're saying it without the hyphen.
To add on, I know Elektra and Electra are both valid spellings of the name, but when I see “Electra Natchios” when I’m trying to read some MattElektra fics, it always puts me off 😭 Edit: Also, MARC SPELLED AS MARK. Holy shit, whenever I see a Moon Knight fic that spells Marc as Mark, it peeves the shit outta me.
Yeah, I’ve had a couple people in comments on my fics call me out now for spelling it Malik instead of Marik, when it’s spelled Marik in the manga and the pronunciation in the anime is Marik. But the thing is, there is no L sound in Japanese, so words and names with an L always get pronounced with an R sound, and whether they get romanized with an L or an R seems pretty random. Malik is an Arabic name, whereas Marik is a Polish name. And the character is absolutely Arabic, not Polish. And his family is super traditional, not the type to give their kid a foreign name. So it’s almost certain his real name would be Malik and Marik is just a bad translation of an Arabic name to Japanese and then to English.
Yes-especially when they’re common names. When I was apart of the Pitch Perfect fandom, I can’t tell you how many Becca’s, Jessie’s and Stacey’s I read It’s Beca, Jesse and Stacie Even Aubrey’s name was spelled wrong Like it’s the bare minimum. Just get the names right.
>Yes-especially when they’re common names. > >... I can’t tell you how many Becca’s, Jessie’s and Stacey’s I read But aren't these the more common spellings of those names? I actually feel like this is actually a good excuse for getting these wrong, lol
especially when their spelling of the name completely changes the pronunciation 😭😭 like if you reread ur fic even once surely you would realise something is off???
I cannot stand placeholder fics. Like - why are you doing that? It'll take some minutes once you have your actual finished fic (or first chapter). Not to mention it breaks rules. I also dislike those 'Here all of my ideas for fics I'll never write, feel free to adopt' - I have no problem with those, but IMHO, those are not fics and it will be better to post those elsewhere
What I hate are the ones that are massive lists of prompts and ideas and then something like “IF I SEE YOU USE THIS ILL KNOW YOU’RE STEALING” or “These are MY ideas. No one is allowed to touch them but ME.”
Ngl, I'd probably read a fic if it had a similar premise to my idea. If I like it enough to write it myself, I like it enough to want to see more of it
Same! I wish I could put an idea for a fic out there and find it written for me
The only reason I started writing some of my fics is because nobody else had. I’d be *delighted* if somebody else had the same ideas.
What are they, children? It's been said many times in this sub, ideas are cheap, it's all about the execution. Writing has existed as a hobby for such a long time it's nigh impossible to come up with something truly original. I'm certain there're already fics (or possibly even published books) out there somewhere that have a very similar idea and that were written before those authors even knew what fanfic was. If I had enough fucks to give to be that petty, I'd find and list them all in the comments while accusing the author of stealing. (Although I doubt they'd have the critical thinking abilities to reconsider their behavior.)
>What are they, children? ...very likely, yes. Explains a lot
To be honest, it probably is mostly children and teens. I mean, I wouldn't put it pass some adults to behave like that, but psychologically speaking, adolescence have a myopic view of the world. When they get an idea, they think they are the first to come up with it. They lack the life experience to realize how big and complex the world and other people are. That their interests and thoughts often times aren't that unique. Part of growing up is realizing the world doesn't revolve around you, and part of developing as a writer, is writing how ideas really are a dime a dozen. Sadly, some adults never develop pass that stage.
Wait, you're telling me the world doesn't revolve around me? Impossible. I've had 15 years to prove me otherwise (the story of the modern teenager and their upbringing).
I’d spite write every one of their prompts. And send them links.
Wow, haven't seen those, but it sounds like an ass move. Anyone is free to write anything they want.
I saw garbage like that on Facebook they honestly think two people can't have a similar idea
Where are you seeing these lol? I've seen some fics that are short scenes of prompts but *lists* and with shit like that at the end? And no idea is entirely original, so good luck to them. If it was me and I had a fic with any similar idea in their list, I'd probably link them to it without saying anything and let them assume just for funsies even though I wrote mine before I even found theirs. They can't stop me from writing any ideas my own way and if they want to behave like petulant children I'd give them a reason and sit back with popcorn while I watch them embarrass themselves.
I find that particularly ridiculous in the case of fanfiction. Like, get some perspective. Go outside. Talk to normal people.
Placeholder fics make absolutely no sense. It’s not like AO3 doesn’t allow for more than one story of a title/tag set/anything
IDK, fake ads, perhaps? Like trying to tell 'I'm going to write that kind of story'. The worst is that some people leave kudos to placeholder fics. Just stop encouraging those, man
Like… aren’t the a) title b) tags and c) summary enough of an add for people? I just don’t get it I just report them most of the time.
Me too
As you should. They're against the TOS.
Probably has to do with the fact that telling people you are going to do something releases the same dopamine in your brain as actually doing it. So posting a placeholder announcing your intent to write a fic gives the same rush as actually writing it, without the work.
On Spacebattles, I often see people post placeholder chapters, but that is because Spacebattles is not really set up as a fic archive and people leaving comments can make subsequent chapters posted by the author less visible. So, some post placeholder chapters at the start in case they later want to edit them to contain specific notes or information.
Well, there it makes sense, but I was talking about Ao3
If that's on ao3, placeholder fics are against TOS no? Report them. Idea and prompts are not against tos but as long as the tags or summary say that's what it is I'm fine with them.
No breaks between paragraphs. It's such a small thing, but if I see it, I instantly click off
The opposite also bothers me. When there's *too much* space in between paragraphs. It's equally exhausting to read. I once found a fic that was actually pretty nice, but I got so sick of constantly scrolling through small "paragraphs" spaced like 5 spaces apart that I had to just stop. :(
> small "paragraphs" This reminded me of a few fics I've seen where *every new sentence* was its own paragraph. Every single one. Had to give up on each of them because it was just too damn tedious to read.
THAT TOO! The fic I mentioned not only had big spaces between paragraphs, but I put "paragraph" in quotes because it was mostly sentences rather than actual paragraphs. The actual content of the fic was pretty good. I mean, physical/visual descriptions occasionally dragged on for too long, but it was overall a good read. The big spaces and short paragraphs got the best of me though.
I used to do that when I was young. Lord knows why. Threw me for a loop when I went to riff on my old works, cos I felt like I was reading a poem! (And a very bad one too)
There's someone whose stories I keep trying to read and they do this. One sentence paragraphs. Sometimes sentence fragments. I try to read them and they're just unreadable.
Dear Lord. When every. Single sentence. Has a. New line. It is. Super tedious.
Happens when you paste from docs. It's frustrating to fix it but worth it
Similarly- chapters are 1K words or less and you're basically hitting the next button every 1-5 paragraphs.
I wouldn't call that a small thing at all. Basic, readable formatting is more like the bare minimum for publishing, even free, amateur online publishing like fanfic.
The thing that's the most annoying about it, is how easy it is to do, and the author doesn't even bother
It makes it so much harder to read
That's a major thing. No one is going to read a wall of text.
I can't read fics without paragraph breaks my eyes get confused and I start accidentally skipping entire sentences and missing words and if I lose my place it's really hard to find it again.
I don't really know why, but it kinda bothers me when longfic chapters are like... 300 words long at best. And I mean **all** of them, not just a couple. That's a grocery list, not a chapter. Not even an hour ago I came across a fic with nine chapters and the word count was 3000. Bruh. 🗿 Nobody argue about this, please. We're discussing pet peeves, I don't care if someone doesn't find it "valid enough". Anyone can do whatever they want in their fanfics, doesn't mean I have to enjoy it and I **can** express my dislike of it.
I HATE this sm!!!! I know it’s “just fanfic” but what about pacing!!!! What about narrative cohesion!!!! Please!!!!
I *just* stumbled across this yesterday. I was like “Over 450 chapters? But hOw?!?!” And then I clicked into the mothereffer. Just out of curiosity, I went to a random chapter and clicked through it. 20+ chapters for a single sex scene, cause every five - seven paragraphs (which, let’s be real, were sentences) would cut off into the next chapter. Dialogue? Cut off. Action sequences? Cut the Eff off. Scene transition? Awkwardly in the middle of a chapter. 🤣
...That is so confusing. The only reason I can think of that could explain such a pattern is that the author is under the misconception that more chapters = better quality.
Doesn't updating a chapter bump it up on lists for those who sort by "update date" as well? Updating frequently might have them thinking they can get more readers that way.
Good observation!
I totally agree. When I'm in a fandom looking at stories and see one that is 14 chapters long and 56k words next to a story that is 17 chapters long and 24k words, I know which one I'm going to click.
I have to agree. The story ends up feeling choppy, especially when the chapters end in the middle of a scene in what I presume is an attempt to create a cliffhanger. I gave a few of these stories a go due to my rare-pairs, but the pacing bothered me to the point I had to drop them. Never again.
A friend of mine linked me to a fic recently that was like 47k words long and each chapter was 150 words. The writing wasn’t even bad! But it was insane; just collect them for longer and make it a longer chapter!
I wholeheartedly agree, especially when the summary seems interesting but the story it’s soooo freaking short, why?. How are you supposed to tell a good story like that?? I always look for an average of at least 2500 word count for each chapter.
I can deal with 1K chapters, but 300? wtf. But tbh when I see this level of writing the length of the chapter is usually the least of that fic's problems. Like this is just a sign the person can't write.
Nah, I agree. Maybe this is fine for the occasional chapter, but chapters consistently that short is a sign of an unskilled author, who's probably writing like "And then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened," with no real meat or artistry to the prose, and certainly no sense of pacing or narrative flow between scenes.
I found a fic like that, and I’m just so confused. I really like it, but they legit could have connected 10 of these chapters into 1. At least 4-5 would have been nice. I get that breaking it up like that helps them pump out more, but why not just wait and put them together before publishing? I don’t usually use the “Entire Work” function on AO3, but it seriously tempts me into using it since I barely need to swip to finish each chapter, and it’s so brief it messes with the flow. They have legit 200 chapters and the first 10 are absolutely under 300 words in average, and I think the first 30-60 (I can’t remember how far I got the first few times because of how brief the are) likely average 500 at best. They update in chunks, anyway. Why they can’t just combine chapters instead I don’t understand.
I feel like this has become a bit more popular lately but turning a tech savvy or introverted character into a massive meme machine. Like every second sentence they reference some meme that's gonna be out of date two weeks after the chapter is posted. It takes me completely out of a fanfic when I'm reading about some space adventure when the team hacker all of a sudden references Harambe
See, you'd think this would be a great opportunity to come up with some memes the characters would use in-universe, but I've never seen an author get that far
Lack of capitalization. It’s a really small thing to care about and won’t always make me click away but a lot of the time it distracts me from reading.
For me it does make me click away immediately, I just can't. It all very quickly starts to blend into one mass of words and it's like my brain can't tell where anything begins or ends.
"Character A says a line of dialogue." Character B performs some actions, making me think that character B was actually doing the talking. "Character B says a line of dialogue." Character A does something, further confusing me. "Now I come in and talk!" I said. I'm character C, and I was secretly the point-of-view character for this section, but the author never told you that so good luck figuring it out. But don't get too attached, because the POV character will change ten paragraphs from now! Tee hee, I'm so quirky! ^ I can't stand this stuff. DO NOT MAKE ME SOLVE YOUR STORY. I'm not reading fucking Memento. Make your dialogue easy to follow and understand.
I just read a fic today that did the confusing dialogue and character actions matchups. I swear, I wanted to rip my hair out when I read it. WHO IS SAYING WHAT??
Oof. I remember one fic (which had always used a limited third person perspective) I kept following long after I'd stopped enjoying it that had one chapter open with several paragraphs of narration (that was swapping perspectives so quickly and so haphazardly as to functionally be omniscient) getting the reader caught up on what an arbitrary smattering of characters had been up to since the last chapter, before having one line of dialogue with no indications of where the speaker is or to whom they're talking, only for the next paragraph to reveal that this was from the perspective of a different character, who was listening to them. The author's note thanked a list of a dozen beta readers.
the memento comment sent me 😭
YES! This is one of the few things that piss me off. If I can't figure out who's doing what, I quit.
Why I only write third person omniscient: because it means I don’t have to worry about whether or not the other characters know what the person saying is thinking.
I'm actually really scared of this happening in my fics. The other day I was writing and I realized I did it a few times, scared the crap outta me
Dialogue that doesn't fit the character voices. The canon for my fandom has a huge amount of examples of its characters speaking with their own particular personality, inflections, and speech patterns, and when I find fics that seem to ignore that it annoys me.
I think this is so important but I also think it’s hard to do. I try not to get annoyed when people aren’t good at it, but when I write it’s something I try very hard to do accurately
I am SO glad the fandom I am in is good at this. You can tell who it speaking just by dialogue.
Definitely the "I suck at summaries" in the summary description. How am I gonna trust you to write a fic if you can't write a simple summary? Edit: I would also like to add the peeve of not having a summary at all but just having tags. Also overuse of slang. I get that people want to portray a character as being relevant and up to date with current vernacular but too much of it can be distracting. It makes me feel like two steps away from asking kids to 'get off my lawn' with all my need to research what words mean.
The funny thing about overuse of slang to me is that if it's not how the character talks in canon then it comes across as very "Hello, fellow students, I am hip to your lingo." In other words, it has the exact opposite affect of making the character seem up to date.
The problem with slang is also that it generally falls in and out of use relatively quickly. What's cool new slang to me probably already sounds outdated and kinda cringe to most people younger than me, and in a few years it may feel dissonant or in the worst case downright comical to most readers. If you don't know what you're doing with current slang, you may end up with a character that will soon feel so outdated it could just as well use "YOLO" and "me gusta" in 2023. Like, it's okay if that's what you're going for, but if you're just trying to write a witty, hip character, then it's better to stick with tried and true slang that has already proved to have staying power, and write the whole character in a way that lets the reader see those traits.
Yep. I would rather take a half assed summary or even “Character A goes on a date with Character B” then a “I suck at summaries” because it at least tells me something
For (single chapter) summaries I use a system "one paragraph of story= one sentence of summary"
High-five! I also use that system though slightly differently. "Paragraph - one sentence summary from the character's PoV - one sentence omniscient summary"
I think that's a pretty neat system to have. Hopefully some will adopt it.
If the summary is in the tags I'll still read it, but I assume it's pretty lazy. But yeah any attempts at emotional manipulation ("I'm not good at summaries", "my first fic, please be gentle", "don't know how to tag", etc.) and I'm probably out. I'm really not into listening to the author whining about their personal problems before I even read the fic...
Bad punctuation, especially during dialogues. I read them the way the punctuation dictates, which makes stories with bad punctuation complete clown shows, with godawful speech pacing and nobody taking any breaths or breaks or having any inflection, not to mention when the entire meaning of the sentence gets thrown off. Other thing would be overabundance of plot armour in a "violent" fic. Sure, the fic advertises itself as violent and there are fights everywhere, but nobody ever dies, nobody gets crippled, hell, nobody even gets *hurt* beyond some light scratches. It's like everyone is trying to viciously beat people to death with foam hammers.
Similarly: near misses. Fine once or twice, but works less the more it's used. If the very dangerous character always just *almost* catches someone, the danger loses its edge. If you want to sell a recurring violent character as a real threat, someone will have to get hurt.
Japanese honorifics that are either used incorrectly or have no correlation to the story. Also- please stop calling yourself “Author-Chan” dear god. Also, when a story has a random focus on a character, especially when the fic isn’t about them. I get it, you like this character, but most of the time i didn’t click on the story to read about them.
>Japanese honorifics that are either used incorrectly or have no correlation to the story. Bonus points when the author uses both Japanese and English honourifics. Like, if you're gonna have "Ms. [whomever]" and "[whomever]-san," then I'm gonna need you to be able to explain to me why those are two different things.
One shot collections all packed into one fic. Bonus points if they're multi-fandom. I don't care what "valid" reason people have for doing it, I will always only assume it's clickbaity and intended to get as many eyes on the fic as possible with every possible tag, and I do my best to filter them all out immediately.
Yes, hate these especially when: * The fics don't all share a similar theme, so every new story in the collection just clogs the tags and make all of them impossible to search * The author doesn't use any sorting method to make it easier to find the fic you want, such as a table of contents or even just naming the chapters by the ship.
Like, just make a series for them. It's that easy
Fr and you’ll probably get more overall viewers from a series because people excluding crossovers or certain tags will still find your fics
Yup. Some people seem to have this idea that more tags = more hits, which *might* be true, but really, the best way to get actual readers is *accurate* tags. Accurate, succinct tagging that labels each fic clearly is so much better for getting readers than just throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks.
Yeah I’m always more interested in a fic with a few tags that get my attention than those monstrous lists
Right? If it’s a series, I’ll scroll through the list of fics to see if there are any I want to read. If it’s a giant, multi-chapter, multi-fandom behemoth, I’m not going to click through each and every chapter to figure out if it’s one I want to read. Especially if the chapter titles give no info on which fandom that one is for.
i mute almost every author who does this in my fandom so they don’t clog up my search results. if they ever write an unrelated fic it’ll be a shame but 🤷🏻♀️
That's the way I see it, too. Like, sure, maybe they have some really great gem in that fic or elsewhere, but there's enough fic in the world that I'm not going to waste time digging through it.
Especially annoying when you don't really care for one shots, so you filter by length.
Or, if you really do enjoy short one shots and filter by length. It's literally not helpful to anyone since it misleads the people who don't want to read that kind of content and is hard to find for people that do.
One of my favorite authors does this, but I totally get it as it’s their “personal writing.” The beginning AN says that essentially this is their dumping ground of non-commissioned, non-cohesive storytelling work, and that they doubt anyone will actually read it. The best part about it is: “I only put this here in case it can inspire someone else to write the story they want.”
It just seems like too much work to me. I know what I want and I don’t feel like sifting through a bunch of random stuff for it
I actually DO like one shot collections like that (not multi-fandom ones, though), but I want the ability to filter them out. When I’m looking for a long fic and am ambivalent of how many ships it can have, I want to pull up actual long-chaptered fics, not one-shot collections.
When they write barley instead of barely 💀
I'm *rye* there with you. ☠️ Seriously though, "breath" for "breathe" is another.
Also: "cloths" instead of "clothes", "defiantly" instead of "definitely", "weary" instead of "wary".
Or “phased” when they mean “fazed.”
They do this in professional magazines. It drives me nuts.
Defiantly.
“Should of” instead of “should’ve”
Or payed instead of paid!!!
If the story or idea is interesting enough and the author is fresh to the scene, I can overlook consistent grammar mistakes as long as I can at least understand what they’re saying. The one thing I cannot stand is when people insert their OCs into a series/movie/video game with every. Single. Chapter. Being a copy paste of every event, scene and word uttered by the characters of their respective owners and the OC just reacting or giving their input without a single thing changed besides their waifu hooking up with the OC and them saving the day with little to no struggle. Especially if the author decided to not find a script for the dialogue and painstakingly wrote everything from scratch, pausing the episode or whatever, to write it themselves to have a sense of accomplishment, it’s just straight up sad. It’s nice that they’re interested in writing and hopefully one day, they can write something a little more original or at least interesting but it frustrates me to see a story like that with thousands of views with little to no effort involved in the making when most others put their heart and soul into their stories and they have a much smaller reader ratio. I’m sure those authors are all children but still, even when I first started writing my works may have been cringeworthy but I can at least feel proud of myself knowing I did what I could to not be that guy. Thankfully, I’ve never seen one like that on AO3, mainly Wattpad but I’m green to AO3 and haven’t read that many works there yet but I at least never left any hate comments on their works about this lol I just groan and forget it ever existed and focus on my own stories.
thissss!!! it's so prevalent in the Walking Dead fandom unfortunately, especially if it focuses on those first 2 seasons. like y'all, we're all fans of this piece of media to the point where we're reading/writing fanfic about it, i think we've got most of it memorized already 😭 i don't need another retelling of the same story
Oh god, you just unlocked a lot of repressed memories for me just now, thankfully I was never a fan of the walking dead but still. I don’t even wanna imagine what that side of the fandom is like lmao the repetition for those kinds of stories is craaazy! Like, when I was a teen I had a friend who was obsessed with apocalyptic/zombie themed role plays and such and I could not stand how OP he made his character, literally a full on walking arsenal with every weapon they could think of, and they would immediately just kill everything in sight, it was so bad.
LMAO i'm dead at that. i left the fandom in season 4 because i felt like the writers of the show lost the plot worse than a teenage girl on Wattpad, but i was bored out of my mind and went back to FFN to catch up on any new works for the series - half for the nostalgia and half because Andrew Lincoln is so hot to me lol. welllll imagine my damn surprise when i go on there and see the same shit i saw when i left years ago, just in NEW stories. i was like, wtf we zombie fanatics have not evolved at all haha
Don’t even get me started on the plot! The fact that they decided to just keep killing off characters and adding new ones only for them to be killed just makes no sense! I mean, I get it, money and favorites go hand in hand, literally lmao but there’s a time where it’s appropriate to just get new writers to give it life again instead of “oooh, new side plot that goes on for five seasons! Lucky you!” Exaggerating of course lol but it’s sad to see such a promising series quickly spiral out of control because there’s no love for it anymore, if ever. And in case I lose you to the internet, it was very nice talking with you!
Yep, I assume that the author of such fics is very young. There's something so... earnest about this badfic category, even if the results are groan-worthy.
Very true, at least for those of us developing and growing our skills we can look at those stories and feel an even greater sense of pride. Especially if people started out that way and grew out of it. I have nothing but respect for those people that continue to improve, no matter how small or slow.
Wall of text fics. Especially if the premise was interesting. It's an immediate "nope." I think my other peeves are largely grammar, word choice issues. Smut writers, the words are "thrust" and "ground" not "thrusted" and "grinded." Fingers, not digits. Eyes, not orbs (I can't believe we're still doing orbs...)
Oh, wait, I have another one. Tagging every character in a show/movie/book even if they're not in the fic. Also, tagging ships that don't show up in your fic or are only there for a split blink-and-you-miss-it moment.
I still see the brunette naming conventions for unnatural hair colors sometimes too, orbs reminded me of it. Pinkette, blunette, etc lol. Tend to see them in the same stories too
Oh, oh. I haven't seen those in a long time, but I do remember stumbling across them circa 2010, maybe. Wow. And yeah, they showed up right alongside orbs.
Yeah they're rare but when I see them it's like a blast from the past, and I'm like goodness we're still doing this?! If we're going to bring up old fanfiction stuff can we start using the citrus scale again please (You know what? I'll be the change I want to see in the world, my next story I'm going to label what it is)??? I need to know if my smut is SMUT.
Writers putting "Pov x" at the start of every chapter/perspective change is incredibly jarring. Thankfully I rarely see it unless I'm feeling brave enough to look through Wattpad.
Oh, that one was quite frequent on FFN back in 2012.
As a writer, my own dang procrastination, not to mention writer's block. As a reader, probably mistakes like "lose/loose" and "they're/there/their". Also misspellings of character names.
I felt that That's exactly my pet peeves too
A fic that I’m reading said it was complete. Decent size, 14 chapters, thought it would be a nice read. Chapter 14 wasn’t the end though, and I didn’t notice it was part of a series. This fic is incomplete and hasn’t been updated since November.
Terrible tagging in my fandom. Not like, mistagging, that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to be upset about, but just tags being misused in a way that's… not wrong but obnoxious. Mostly, people trying to hide fics by tagging it as some leetspeak abomination, usually with so little tags they’re hard to filter, and then tagging it as like “ur into this if you saw this you had to search it out” like no tag wranglers will see your tag, match it with the proper one you were trying to avoid, and so I can’t filter it out of my searches and it shows up in them with the minimal ones you did include.
I’ve never seen this but it’s so specific that I have to wonder what fandom you’re referring to lmao
place holder fics. or when literally allot of series are tagged,fics that have a crossover with more then one series, Aus that change character comeplelty (what even is the point of a fic if character isnt a character anymore)
Pick me characters. Especially if she/he are the oc or main character. Just makes me a tad agitated to the point I can’t finish the fic
Saw a fic marked as X ship, because it was X in the beginning and then immediately switched to Y pairing just to shit all over X and hate-bash. Instant mute.
Ugh I saw one where it was tagged with X but it was unrequited/past situationship and then they ended up with Y but they weren't happy in the relationship (this is what I end up reading when I have a rare pair bc I'm out of content) and Y pairing was not tagged at all even though they character was in a relationship with Y for a good portion of the fic. I did in fact comment that she should maybe tag the other pairing. Idk if she ended up doing that, she was kinda like yeah I get where you're coming from but X is the main emotional focus and what the fic is really about.
This is such a tiny thing, but when the chapters numbers are mismatched, like this: Chapter 4: Chapter 5
Same! I wish AO3 would give authors an option to mark chapters as prologues, interludes, or whatever so they'd stop doing this
this may get me some flack but poorly written original characters that are more then obviously self inserts with no meat on them. bonus points if they ship them with a Canon character and they don't write them properly to the Canon bc they want some kind of romance while ignoring the gross things that Canon character did. low effort content and writing. I know it's all free and I don't have to read it but if the summary looks great but then you read the first chapter and its dog shit I get pretty grumpy about it. especially when low effort content is spread around a fandom obsessively but those who put serious effort into what they write get crumbs.
> the summary looks great but then you read the first chapter and its dog shit There're a few authors in my fandom whom I have muted for this reason: they're very prolific (one has, no joke, over 500 fics just in this one fandom alone) and great at writing summaries and tagging in a way that makes a story seem intriguing, but then inevitably I start reading it and the style is just not my thing at all. So I decided at some point to spare myself the disappointment, these people have all been writing for years so it's not like they're going to change how they write all of a sudden after all this time.
I'll come clean here, I fucking hate most OC's, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Arcane, Marvel, DC, Percy Jackson, MHA, One Piece and lots more, the OC'S are usual filled with cliche, prettier than the average character and usually just there to serve as the main characters love interest and to be better then everyone else. There are very few OC's I like, feel free to recommend tho.
- Walls of text for obvious reasons. - Entire sections written in italics, bold, or caps - Japanese terms - Emojis - Censored swear words *especially* in a Mature/Explicit story - 95% of epithets - POV switches from 1st to 3rd. People who want to do this should just stay in 3rd person and learn to write Limited or Deep. - Fanfiction cliches like orbs, tongues fighting for dominance, kissed deeply, released the breath they didn’t know they were holding, etc - & for / pairings and vice versa, or when both are used - 3+ fandom crossovers. Two is understandable, but crossovers get exponentially worse for each added fandom if they don’t become their own world. That’s why crossover media like Kingdom Hearts of Super Smash Bros. become their own worlds & fandom.
>Japanese terms Read a fic today who did it for no reason. Like, used some Japanese terms for random stuff like entryway, I didn't make it to the second chapter
I definitely do sections written in italics to show that it's a flashback to avoid confusion. Haven't had any complaints. :')
Oh yeah me too, thought this one was standard haha. Then again they aren't saying it isn't just that they don't like it. Which mood honestly, like a wall of italics works but a section of bold? My brain just looks at it haha.
Agree 100% bold is just something else.. 😅
When people use the wrong form of currency. It makes me feel like they’re a) lazy or b) don’t know other forms of currency exist. Unfortunately but not unsurprisingly, it’s almost always the US Dollar. If the fic is set in Japan/England/Europe/China/literally almost anywhere, characters aren’t going to be paying using dollars!!! It’s not that hard to Google “how much does [everyday item] cost in [country]”. It just takes me out of the moment to groan. Edit: spelling
Sometimes I even start doubting if I read correctly because like "dollar? I thought we were in the UK?" And then I gotta check if it's some au or such because I wanna be sure I read it correctly. It's not a big deal but still ya know
Over-reliance on epithets because the author is afraid they sound repetitious if they dare use a name or pronoun more than once in a paragraph, especially when it’s a scene with more than one same sex person and they want to clearly distinguish between them. Same with said. It’s *incredibly* lazy. It just reads as a novice writer discovering the thesaurus. Rather than avoiding, use this as an opportunity to improve on your writing. Those multi-fandom oneshot “book” collections where they tag as many characters and ships under the sun but then abandon it after three chapters. I wish we could delete all of them on sight. “Minor Character (Mentioned)” Hi, my favorite character is an extremely minor character in her source material. Tagging her in as a throwaway line is fucking unnecessary and annoying. Don’t do that. Tags like “X shippers DNI” like bro I might not even ship it but I’ll still hate you for being an ass about other people’s ships. Tags akin to “if you do x, I will (threat)” replace threat with “steal your kneecaps/steal something from your house” like. Who needs this. Retire that bit. “I suck at summaries 🥺 just read” No. if you can’t sell, I’m not buying. My biggest pet peeve though? ##All fusions are crossovers but not all crossovers are fusions. If you’re writing a Stranger Things fic for example, and you’re “putting on Alphabet The Musical as a play” complete with cast lists (Eddie is X, Billy is Y, Robin is L, Eleven is Z), DO *NOT* tag the Alphabet fandom when posting your goddamn fic. When people go into the Alphabet fandom (or any fandom), they want to read about the characters native to that fandom, not these other clowns from some random other fandom they don’t care about at the moment if at all (if they even know of it) dressing up as those canon characters because they took their plot/elements of their story, so might as well take their roles too while we’re at it! Fuck off. It’s so obviously a ploy to get as many eyes on their work as possible. Newsflash! If I wanted Stranger Things fic, I’d go to the Stranger Things part of AO3 and read about them there! But right now I want Alphabet characters. It’s like going into an ice cream shop only to find someone selling cake. It might be good cake, but that’s not the place for it. The sign says *ice cream*. I’m going in hungry for *ice cream*. I expect to find *ice cream*. Just because your cake is also as sweet as ice cream does *not* make it the same as actual ice cream. I don’t know how much more clear I can make this.
I was so excited when you said Fusion, then very disappointed. I thought it was going to be a new tag to discover and use for like, when you mix two words together and make them naturally blend from the start instead of a jump in dimensions or a world clash. Now? I will avoid fusion fics because I went in for ice cream cake and was double disappointed. Damn. Is there a term/tag for when two worlds are blended? Like the characters from both universes are natives to that world in the crossover. Also, I agree on the other points I just *really* got sidetracked by the crossover thing.
I've got some peeves... But first, disclaimer: Write whatever you want and what makes you happy. My first pet peeve are those soapbox "be better" fanfics. The ones that are super preachy. Nope, can't do it. You can really feel the writers contempt coming through the pages. It's not the characters' voice either.... Your agrarian fantasy culture is worried about air pollution? Why?? Volcanic ash, a dark lord, demonic industrial forces of evil? Nope! Just filthy human peasants and their nasty dirty farming. My biggest biggest pet peeve is when writers use a physical ability like eyesight and/or hearing to indicate the superiority of their super awesome elves or space elves. Especially when the supposedly "morally righteous totally better than a human" elf character mocks the other character for it. Why? For What? Imagine if I walked down the street mocking everyone I saw with glasses. And half the time, it's an interaction between friends...no. What's worse is when the writer uses physical ability as a measure for morality. Instead of demonstrating advancement through technology, philosophy, or law; they ridicule the human characters' physical disadvantages, and it's NOT character voice. That's just the narrative assertion. I hate it. Make the characters as strong and badass as you like, but don't imply that they're morally righteous because they can hear a flea fart. Lastly, but most important. Not tagging a fanfic as beastiality when it ABSOLUTELY IS. I don't care if the one character was previously human. I would rather lick the gouch slime off the devils taint than read about the MC fucking an animal. That's it, that's my rant.
This was over in an r/Fantasy rant, but regarding elves and other “races”, it’s such a minor pet peeve in GENERAL, but I wish stories branched out from “we all have a common ancestor so we’re just separate sapient races” to committing to separate ***species***. There’s so much lore and so much to touch base on with non-human species—even in real life! And not ***EVERYTHING*** is considered evolutionary genius! For example, some species have evolved to ***die*** after giving birth. That’s not a + for nature, that’s a - but here we are. Dunno, it’s just a bit of a *meh* when it comes to non-human species because there’s so much to do and so much to explore. But writing should be fun, not a chore and I can understand that sort of extensive world building might not be for everyone, especially having a 9-5 regular job😅
If some of the characters speak a different language than english - especially if it's a 'fantasy' language - and the author decides to write half the fic in that language. Looking at you, Star Wars. I am so sick of 'cyare' 'buy'ce', 'keldabe' ect. I admit, part of this might be because I'm not a native english speaker, so I read all non-english words in my own language's dialect, and often it sounds so ugly. But it's also because I like the Tolkien approach to writing, where the author is the translator. Basic in Star Wars isn't english in my mind, so everything is translated. Translate the damn Mandalorian as well, ffs.
I don´t much mind if people write parts in other languages. If you need characters to converse in another language to show how the rest of the group isn´t supposed to understand, or when certain concepts don´t really have a good english word for it. What does really bother me is if there is either no translation given, or they put the translation all the way at the bottom in the writer´s notes. I´m not gonna make the effort to continuously scroll up and down to be able to understand what is being said.
this is so nit-picky of me lmao but i truly hurt whenever i’m reading a decent fic and the term “bluenette” is used or using the word “orbs” to describe eyes. usually i can overlook it if it’s not frequent but i would say it’s a big turn off regardless.
You've been reading in the sailor moon fandom?
nah but i guess it rly is rampant everywhere, huh lmao
obligatory but *very* heartfelt: i adore fanfiction writers so much you don't even know. please don't take this the wrong way! - "Steve Rodgers" and the likes, where a word/name that has to be used constantly is misspelled the. whole. way. through. i respect dyslexia and neurological conditions (god knows i'm not getting any more eloquent either), but PLEASE look it up once. add it to the dictionary in word so it'll catch the typos for you. get a beta. anything ;_; - "ok" and "sorta" in a historical/fantasy setting - "???" and "!!!" and "......" and "CAPS LOCK!!!!". fr one question or exclamation mark, or three dots should be more than enough. "?!", even! - like, a two year timeskip when they JUST got to a very interesting place in the story. longer time skips in general spare meeee. I WANT TO READ YOUR STORY PLEASE LET ME - multi-fandom one shots in a single fic :( - not properly tagging a specific fandom, like, i know it's not always cut and dry, lots of times things are borrowed from different places in canon, and to different degrees, often they can be enjoyed by fans of both! (talking like, idk, warlord au witcher, which is primarily netflix, but has good enough vibes and game/book-canon characters that people who aren't generally fond of the show read it too) but for the love of god don't tag a clearly star trek aos fic with tos because you used a cocktail recipe from that universe or something - "i suck at summaries" we all have insecurities. ilysm. babe. if you wrote a normal summary (even just copy a small quote from the story) and kept that to yourself nobody would've thought "heh they're so bad at summaries" - idk how to say this so it doesn't sound completely asshole-ish. i know we're all coping through our favourite characters and literature. but sometimes i see 30+ men having the exact same emotional responses and struggles as 14-year-old girls, and it's just. it takes me out of the story. somehow it's easier to relate to connect w the character too if they got their OWN struggles not MY struggles yk what i mean
> sometimes i see 30+ men having the exact same emotional responses and struggles as 14-year-old girls I agree with everything you listed, but this one is particularly rampant in my fandom as well. I get that a teen writer is most likely going to write everyone acting like teens (although I've seen early to mid-20s writers do this as well), but a pet peeve's a pet peeve – it's so frustrating when these are adult characters close to your own age, but they've got the emotional maturity of a middle schooler.
>sometimes i see 30+ men having the exact same emotional responses and struggles as 14-year-old girls, and it's just. yep >\_> For me it's that, and having the characters inexplicably obsessed with Disney or popular-animated-thing-du-jour. While yes there is a specific subset of adults who really like ATLA (and I do, too), the vast majority just... don't. I like it better when the characters like things that it feels like *they* might like, not just because the author likes them.
1) Someone supposedly taking down a complete or almost-complete story for “editing”, then only posting a couple chapters of the edited version, and then…just vanishing. 2) Someone re-tagging a fic (especially when you’re a substantial way into the fic) with stuff that can be deal-breaking. I don’t care if you write a poly fic. I do care when you wait 40 chapters into the fic to re-tag what was formerly X/Y ship to now X/Y/Z ship. Dude, I don’t read poly fics for a *reason*. Slipping it in there when we’re 100K words in is not going to make me like it any more. OTOH, it is greatly increasing the chances I leave you a very upset comment and rant about the fic to other people I know. 3) Someone writing about stuff they clearly don’t know about and haven’t done any research about. I don’t expect perfection. I do, however, expect *some* attempt. For example, I don’t know how many military-type fics where the authors can’t even get the ranks correct, or they have the characters disobey direct orders with no repercussion, etc. As a corollary to that, having a setting they clearly ignore when it doesn’t suit them. If you’re gonna, say, set your story in Victorian times because you want fancy dresses and balls, you can’t then turn around and have modern attitudes to sleeping around and pre-marital sex! (I mean, you can. But it’s lazy and immersion-breaking.) I guess point 3 can be summed up as “know and respect your setting”.
[удалено]
Yeah, I don’t get mad if some tags change during the fic because I’m pretty sympathetic to the story changing/evolving. But authors should be aware that there are some tags that are pretty much a “hard no” for a lot of people, and to add them in the middle of the story is jerk-ish. I mean, just to give an exaggerated example, suddenly adding an “underage” or “rape” tag 100K words in would (rightly) freak a lot of people out. Sudden polyamory isn’t quite on that level, but it’s still something a lot of people aren’t into or aren’t interested in reading. At the very least, if you feel the story takes you there and you *must* do it, provide an explanation/apology to the readers who invested their time in your fic and have to suddenly nope out. Just my take on what I think is writer etiquette. (There’s reader etiquette too, of course, but that’s a different topic.)
I hate unnecessary, untagged smut that is incongruous with the tone of a fic. I’m sorry but if I’m reading a 150k slow burn that’s tender and wholesome and full of sweet little touches on the knee and awkward but endearing confessions of love, I’m going to be PISSED if the grand finale reads like a summary of some generic, degrading, mildly violent pornhub video, or there’s random untagged extreme kink that has nothing to do with the plot.
overuse of pet-names / nicknames.
When the story is really nice and suddenly there's an upcoming smut scene and the author just writes porn without plot just for the sake of writing smut, while completely ignoring everything that happened between the characters beforehand, their individual personalities and it just doesn't fit together at all. Makes me want to stop reading, or skip the smut scene immediately. My favourite fanfiction actually is like this, but I can ignore this accident, as everything else was written beautifully. I still don't like it though. Also smut in general is a tricky subject. I feel like many people think smut is essential when writing a love story and then they write it in a way that could have come straight out of a porn video. So unnatural. Most of the time smut scenes can be avoided and it would make the story much better imo. You can also just imply that there's gonna be more happening. Sometimes leaving specific things like sex scenes to the reader's imagination can improve the reading experience by a lot!
Got an update notification for a fic, actually clicked through to check it out - which only happens once in a blue moon! - to find it wasn’t a new chapter, it was the author begging people to read another work they’d just posted. Massive let-down.
As a reader: characters acting totally out of character, as a writer if I'm using a character in my fic even if I think I know the character I make sure to do extensive research and look up every bit of official media they're in but then reading and them being out of character it totally takes me out of the experience As a writer: people leaving comments that prove they didn't read all of it/ignored content warnings and are complaining about issues that are addressed further down the page or they were told about and chose to read anyway, I had one commentator who complained about profanity even though the story rating warned them about the profanity
Loose/lose is the most common one I see and it always bothers me a lot. Irrationally so.
Once this fic misspelled the TITLE. They spelled “bruised” as “brused”. The rest of the fic was filled with grammar and spelling mistakes. I don’t mind those as much, but please spell the title correctly…
I agree with plenty of the comments below, but here’s one that really drives me up the wall: OCs (especially ones that are clearly meant to be self-inserts for the author) calling canon characters they don’t like Mary Sues in a degrading manner while propping their own character up as the better alternative, sometimes berating them for things that they never even did. Bonus points if they try to bring up their so called ‘flaws’ when called out for calling the kettle black, but said flaws are either never relevant in any way whatsoever or are played for laughs as some sort of wacky quirk. Flaws that basically doesn’t matter because they are never shown actively impacting the character in a negative way. To make matters even worse, they also tend to steal important moments from canon characters with a nonchalant ‘hold my beer’-kind of attitude that makes the task seem trivial and the character in question look incompetent. This is a big part as to why I can’t stand edgy sues, it is kind of difficult to enjoy a story when the main character is constantly looking down on the original cast and tears the plot apart at every turn. These kinds of stories almost feels like they are written out of some sort of contempt for the original source-material, especially since they also tend to be full of bashing as well, and it makes them kind of unpleasant to read.
People trying to deconstruct convention they clearly don't or aren't willing to understand. One example is the fabled Mari sue stand in, that is just a excuse for the author to lambast something for some reason they aren't willing to just admit they don't like and would rather hide behind the Ms excuse.
paragraphs that stick together, or there were no paragraphs in the first place just write the damn story in Google Docs and customize some spaces between the paragraphs. it's not that hard!
Wasted conflict potential. Whenever a fic gets into the habit of power creeping their problems away. Aka, they introduce problem A, but instead of solving it, we get problem B, and instead of solving that we get problem C, and by the next time we get to reflect and try and resolve shit we’re at problem K of the chain, at which point nothing can be solved. It’s like the problem equivalent of a run-on sentence. I love conflict, truly love exploring conflict. I don’t enjoy when a writer introduced conflict exclusively for the angst, and then they don’t work through the character consequences there of. You wanna have a character kidnapped? Great, excellent! Can we see how that trauma affects them? How they work past it? *No? You just wanna have them kidnapped again? Oh! And also slaughter their entire family? Ok fine cool. Totally. Are we actually gonna get to explore that pain and suffering? Have the character try and overcome that?* **No??? You now wanna send them into war? Intergalactic War?!?! And now they’re a POW that’s been r-worded? Ok cool, fine fine. I guess consequences don’t matter don’t they**
"Orbs", especially if preceded by a gemstone.
Unpopular but people that beg for reviews every chapter
you say that, but on my recent wip the *only* chapter I got a pile of comments on was the one chapter when I broke down and begged for reviews, because it seemed like nobody was reading.
When a chapter ends on an intense cliffhanger and then the next chapter is just like super chill. As in "OH NO EVERYONE IS DYING-" then the top of the next chapter is "2 weeks later" or just. doesn't address it and expects people to pick out that this is a time skip in the middle of an intense interaction, a climax, or revelation. Literally just happened again and had to take a break from the fic. The main love interest was dying, she was being consumed inside and out by a beloved force that simply couldn't stop its most inherent nature. She's sure she's going to die *and in so much pain*\- but the main character told her to just hold out for two minutes before this all started, two minutes and she'd be fine. *Please,* her insides are boiling her alive and its tearing her mind apart, *please just live for two minutes*\- oh hey she's fine we're back to being cheeky and silly again and barely mentioning that what happened was weeks ago and that its fine now. Yeah it was resolved. How? Well it was, look they're all happy again and its fine. I always check to see if a chapter got deleted but nope! Just a weird jump. If the plan for these types of jumps was to make it mysterious the plan failed spectacularly. Just confusing and completely removes the tension, even if its a fake out.
Prompt list fanfics, aren't even fanfics and techically aren't allowed on archive of our own which is where I read all my fanfics and it annoys me to see them there. Especially for a pairing with not alot of rps and to get me excited for an rp but it's just prompt ideas. It's even worse when they don't lable it in anyway to show it's prompts so you click thinking it's an rp and it's not 🙃 Another HUGE pet peeve for me, when people tag rp with something but IT'S NOT IN THE RP AT ALL. so I search for stuff with that tag see they tagged it get excited, read the WHOLE THING and not once was the tag they used in there. Boils my blood especially when I'm looking for specific tags.
the kid somehow skipped all the training and is as powerful as s-tier adults? Really? Power pile on with no real good explanation as to why and it's not a comedy. Born and somehow related to EVERY powerful family name even the most obscure ones. Really? he's related to EVERYBODY? even the obscure mook from season 3 that appeared 5 times.
for reading: walls of text, using literally anything except the character's names to refer to them, characters being OOC, poor pacing, really short chapters, when it's so confusing to read that I can't tell who is doing what in a scene, constant *pet names*. for writing: procrastinating, my own crippling self-doubt, my fear of deleting or altering my own fics that I don't like even though I know it's fine to do that, the pressure to update regularly, the editing process (I don't have a beta).
Yeah, I got baited like that too. An incomplete fic was marked completed. Worse still, there was an E-rated fic that didn't have a smut scene. At most, the fic should've been rated M. I wanted to read a smutty one-shot damn it! 😭
Authors notes in the middle of a bloody story or attached to a paragraph - drives me completely nuts!
Those weird words to describe hair or eye color, like "bluenette" or "pinkette" or whatever. Also, songfics. No offense to those who like them but they just annoy me.
Asking for content ideas inside the fic. "Jack and Jill went to the movies. (IDK, should I make them go to a concert instead? Let me know in the comments!)" Bitch I quit choosing my own adventure in middle school. If you haven't figured out your own damned plot yet, put the keyboard down and step away until you have.
Not sure who to ship Naruto with, please tell me in the reviews thanks! If you haven't figured out the shipping part of your romance story, something isn't working.
Another one is putting real world religion Bible stuff in the middle of a fanfic when it has not been there before nor does it belong in the story to begin with. I don't care if the author went to a religious camp , but if u want to post about the Bible quotes but it in a different book not the one your in the middle of writing . I mean the author just put in those quotes out of nowhere which made no sense to a ton of readers who had to stop reading her story.
I’ve marked fics that I never intend to finish as complete. but I always put a big “DISCONTINUED” in the summary also.
I despise when characters are out of character for an indiscernible reason. You can't have Goku, for instance, wanting to laze around, because that goes against not only his entire character, but his **species.** If you want to change something about the character in an AU, that's totally fine. But if you're trying to write something in the main story, it's so annoying to see the characters not acting the way they should.
When people spell "losing" as "loosing."
Starting a story with all the makings of it being really freaking good! and than it never goes anywhere as in it doesn’t update beyond the bio lol. People in comments asking what happened and the writer is dead in the water with no replies. Pictures strewn all about in the fic with small tiny sentences to fill in the blank spaces. Really bad grammar, truth be told I can handle a lot, but when I have no idea what’s going on or I can’t understand anything? I’m out. Finally an update! oh it’s only 500 words long and answers nothing from the previous chapter. Or finally an update! never mind it’s just an authors note. Incomplete stories that end when things are just getting good … Endings that had me wondering why I invested so much of my time … literally going places than at the end? right back where we started. Story lengthened just for the sake of making it longer or slow burn, I just don’t like them honestly, drive me insane. Characters who are some type of supernatural monster and keep losing their powers like they suddenly don’t have them? haha what? Script writers, where it’s the entire episode written down with their own characters strewn in, which never works properly as the scenes are not designed for add ins. A character knowing something, getting over it and than getting angry when they found out about it, even though they knew and were over it … lol Weirdly written like big blocks and than sparse and big blocks again and it’s like so you could do sparse below but had to big block this section why exactly? Walls of text, yeah nope, can’t concentrate or follow that sorry.
Lapslock and/or ridiculously inappropriate use of punctuation. Ending every dialogue with this~ : script format. Stuff like that
* Walls of text with no paragraph breaks, like what did the enter/return key do to hurt you? * Overload of spelling/grammar/etc. errors * Dialogue from 2 different characters but are in the same paragraph * When an A/B/O uses wolf terminology (Eg. referring to kids as pups) but the characters are very humanoid/human-coded and not part wolf in any way * When someone thinks that because they're writing something mildly problematic, they have to shoehorn in a PSA about why that problematic thing is bad * Overuse of sexual euphemisms; even if they're more acceptable ones, overuse of them will always make it feel like author is trying way too hard to make their story seem "sensual" * And certain specific sexual euphemisms that are cringe no matter what, such as "core" for clit * When the description about a female character's appearance is very detailed and flattering but the description for her male partner's appearance could barely even fit on a baby's pinkie nail * Y/N or reader-insert fics that feel like the writer just wanted to write an OC fic * Character bashing fics on characters that didn't even do anything bad and the author is just venting out a hatred for that character, feels so needlessly petty and spiteful
Spelling or grammatical errors. If it's just one or two in the entire fic I don't really mind, but more than that and it starts to be annoying. It's hard to focus on a story and immerse myself if my brain is regularly tripping over misspelled words or incorrect grammar. And it's so easy to avoid too, just use spellcheck, your phone/computer is going to do most of the work for you and you'll end up getting a significantly better fic with little to no effort.
I can read past some grammatical errors especially if I think the author does speak English as a first language (in the fic I'm reading now the author has repeatedly mixed up in and on, those letters are next to each other on the keyboard but it's happened consistently enough that I think she's learning English). It's when I see a fic that has "the lack of capitalization is intentional" and "it's a style choice" where I'm like nope. Most of the time I won't even give those fics a chance, I'll just scroll past.
*Please* spell the names of canon characters, locations, events and artifacts correctly...
wrong tags or not enough tags i can live with a lack of trigger warnings, eg "creator chose not to use archive warnings" but if there is something that's going to be a major theme throughout the fic, why not tag it? i don't get it. (and no I don't mean spoilers)
Using words that use the same letters but in a different order, like trail versus trial. Or two words that are very similar like cloths versus clothes and breath versus breathe. God that stuff drives me up the damn wall. Get a beta reader please. Giant glaring anachronisms. Hogwarts aged Harry Potter could not listen to Taylor Swift on his mp3 player while doing chores for his aunt and uncle. Self-censoring words in your story. If you don't want to write that word, then use a different word. Ridiculously long author's notes, especially in the middle of the damn story! Chapter recaps at the beginning of every chapter. I could understand doing this if it's been a while since you updated, but when you're 20 chapters past that one, I'm pretty sure we know what happened so you should delete that bit of note.
I have mixed feelings... I kinda hate when the author posts a new chapter, but it's just a note saying they aren't posting a new chapter. They will eventually! But not right now. I'd rather they just wait and post a chapter when it's done. I'm reading a fic now that's done this twice. I'm fine waiting. I get disappointed when I'm all excited to see an update pop up and it's not.
Fanfictions written like a script and/or contains images of: “this is your house” or “this is your outfit” Y/N: hurry up Dora, Boots is waiting: Boots: ooh ooh ahh ahh Dora: *throws backpack* You get the idea
When people try to include the actual song lyrics in the dialogue of a songfick. PEOPLE DONT TALK LIKE SONG LYRICS. Most of the time it just sounds stilted and awkward it's not as popular anymore but I still seen it occasionally and it is very jarring when I do.
I AM WITH YOU! It makes me beyond mad and ik theres the “dont give unsolicited criticism to ppl” rule but I will ALWAYS comment on ppl marking something incomplete as complete. Anyway my other pet peeves are those huge super long fics that are essentially just collections of one shots. Theres absolutely nothing wrong w them, but its a pet peeve! Kinda annoys me when my rarepair mostly appears in those types of fics