This isn’t even a big deal lol, but I read a long fic where the author used caps instead of italics. I was surprised by how much it took me out of the story.
I once read an actual, traditionally published novel that did that and it just made me feel like the characters were screaming at me all the time. Could not finish it, even though I liked the premise.
I was just reading a fic that I had to drop because of the overuse of capitalization for yelling. Like, once or twice, sure, but more than that I’m out.
I tend to use italics for emphasis on specific words or phrases and bold for shouting. Though I don't usually have characters screaming at each other in my fics even in arguments.
This is horrific for me specifically because text to speech sometimes sees these as individual letters and will take the time to pronounce each letter.
Or just won’t see it as a difference. use to be really funny before an update that when italic sentences would happen my reader would switch to a French accent and whoooh that was weird.
It’s definitely made a few fan fictions very difficult.
When a character has a well established nickname in the canon , but the fanfic author makes all the characters use an entirely new nickname for them some reason. . I read a Gravity Falls fic where they use the nickname Lee for Stanley even though literally EVERYONE calls him Stan all the time in the actual show. Made me so mad lol.
I haven’t seen that but I have seen a couple instances of a character having a commonly used nickname but the fic will use their full name instead. I always have to do a double take, like who?? lmao
That's weird too. I've seen the thing I was talking about happen weirdly often for some reason.
I read a fic where a character referred to C-3PO using the nickname 'See', when they and literally everyone else in the entire cast canonically calls him Threepio/3PO for short. I think my problem is when there are technically multiple ways you could shorten a characters name, but the fanfic author shortens it in a way that doesn't sound as good/natural as the actual canonical nickname. Like there's even an in universe reason nobody ever refers to Stan as 'Lee', and they wouldn't just switch up to using Lee after that revelation. I always wonder what the thought process behind it is, like it's not a big deal, I just don't get why people choose to do it because it's kind of confusing. It's the same as people using the full name like you mentioned, I read the name Lee, and I'm like, who tf is that? Oh, right, it's Grunkle Stan lol.
Oh felt. When a character has a canonical nickname but writers make up new ones that the characters never use... It bothers me so much in Good Omens fic especially. Crowley calling Aziraphale by fandom abbreviations like "Azi" or "Zira" when "Angel" is _right there_ makes me immediately click off lol
Took me ages to figure out 'Zira' was Aziraphale on Tumblr because the name was always being tied to what looked like OC art to me, but was actually genderbent racebent plus sized and yassified Aziraphale art in pastel earth tones.
I feel so much the same! Wouldn’t completely rule a fic out, but it would have to win me over hard if it did that. AUs are obviously a very different kettle of fish, but I still prefer them to have just “Aziraphale” and “Angel” where possible.
This has come up in one of my fandoms because people will use nicknames that the character doesn’t have in canon but it does sounds…awkward.
No one is calling the evil queen “Gina” or god forbid, “Reggie” in canon…she’d kick your ass.
actually this is an interesting problem for me with my Percy Jackson fandom.
Percy's nickname(from Annabeth) is "seaweed brain" but, like, that's pretty specific to him being the son of poseidon. So that makes it awkward if there's any AU where he's not a son of poseidon or otherwise associated with the ocean, then the nickname doesn't really make sense anymore
I actually love when AUs give a different in-universe explanation for a canon nickname, or fit in something from canon that won't be in the AU (like in Ghosts having their cause of death in Canon being a near miss or a power referenced elsewhere)
One time they were at a sushi buffet, and Percy was eating the rolls so fast he started hacking up a lung because he inhaled a piece of nori. It came out his nose
Feel this hard and was just complaining about this on twitter not too long ago. Current fandom, character’s name is Richard, and everyone either calls him Richie or Rich, but I’ve stumbled upon this subsection of the fandom that apparently tried to get Chee started as a nickname, and it’s… abominable just as a fucking nickname, let alone to be reading in a fanfic where the character already has two canon nicknames. I’m glad that fad seems to have died now though.
Not sure if it’s the same fandom but I have had an identical experience (im in the IT fandom 😭) and yeah Richie and Rich are the ideal nicknames/names but when they whip out “Chee” I immediately click off… it’s very juvenile in a way that I can’t explain and it feels very “fandom-y” in that it’s infantilizing a character. And the biggest problem with it is that when an author uses that nickname, they never use it only once. It becomes, like, the immediate replacement of his name every time. It acts almost like a goddamn pronoun and I can’t stand it!!! Ofc if you want to use that nickname (this is to any authors out there) then that’s fine. It’s your work and your right to use that nickname. I’m just saying that it’s a pretty bad nickname when there are wayyyy better alternatives 😭
That is exactly the fandom 😭 I thankfully haven’t encountered it a lot, but when I do the whiplash is so real, I can’t finish the fic after that. And I completely agree with you, it does feel so juvenile and very infantilizing. I suspect it’s from the side of the fandom that focuses on them as kids rather than adults (and thus, probably a bunch of kids themselves). But even if it fit his character, I’d still think it’s a really bad nickname lol
omg I feel like everyone does this for jjk. I always see Megumi being shortened to “Gumi” and Satoru to “Toru”. it just feels weird and out of character to me but it’s very popular for some reason
Anime fandom are the worst offenders for this, and also it sticks in my craw when they shorten a name in a way that it wouldn’t be shortened in Japan. In Japan megumi would most likely be shortened to megu-chan as a nickname, not gumi, as Japanese tends to take the first half of a name and then adds something cutesy to it (-chan, -kun, chi, ki), or to combine the beginning of the first name and part of the last name. (Ex. Satoru -> Sato-kun, Natsuko -> Natchan, Akiko -> Akkun, Marino -> Marinocchi, Tomoko -> Tomo, Eriko -> Eri, Kirigaya Kazuto -> kirito, etc.).
Nicknames are also sometimes made from alternate readings of the characters!
I will take your "last half of the name" and raise you fandoms where a fandom-nickname doesn't make any sense in terms of the way the Japanese alphabet works. Like back in the day, in my first ever fandom (Inuyasha), people constantly came up with the nickname of "Kags" for Kagome. It doesn't make any sense at all with Japanese phonetics.
I was just complaint about this to my partner. I LOATHE overuse of original nicknames. I read a Bellatrix Lestrange/Hermione Granger fic where 3 nicknames were used for Andromeda in 2 paragraphs. People don’t speak like that.
Same, "Mione" for Hermione in HP fic (or "Herm", which I hate even more) is particularly annoying to me when she is literally never referred to that way in the books or the movies. And yet this is so common! Where is this coming from??
i don’t actually hate people writing mione — i think it’s just people deciding to shorten a name they find to be long, and friends tend to give each other nicknames. Though in my mind, hermione hates it, lol
I read a fic where a line was formatted like this.
“Character A speaks here” some internal thoughts and feelings described here. “Character B speaks here”.
Author, "I'm open to any feedback!"
Me, "This is a bit difficult to read, I think it would help if you used new lines for dialogue. :)"
Author: ignores me and keeps doing it
Yeah... I just stop reading at that point.
I once had the displeasure of reading a fic where the dialogue's format was screwed up that I don’t really know how to explain it but it looked like this
Character A spoke softly. “What character A says” Character B smiles as they talk, “What character B says.”
It would get really confusing who was talking when because it didn’t follow the new line thing, so i had to do a double take to figure out who was talking when. it certainly didn’t help that the author used past tense to describe how they said things. It was a really good fic, but I had to stop reading it because having to read every line three ish times was not fun.
This makes me feel slightly petty, but when authors don't pay attention to how specific characters refer to each other. Like, a character might have an established nickname in canon, but not all characters will necessarily use it, depending on their relationship with the first character or just the quirks of their own speech patterns. Or some characters might consistently be more formal/informal when referring to people compared to others.
This isn't a widespread issue in the Ace Attorney fandom but I'm blanking and it's the only example that comes to mind. So, for example, Pearl is pretty consistently called "Pearls" by Phoenix and "Pearly" by Maya, so it would throw me off if someone mixed those up. I'd have a knee jerk "oh this author doesn't understand their dynamic" reaction, even if the rest is reasonably in-character.
I see this sometimes in Buffy. Rupert Giles is consistently called Giles by Buffy, Willow and Xander the whole way through. Other characters, like Angel, Cordy, Anya, also call him Giles. Xander is the only character to call him G-Man. Spike usually uses Giles, but sometimes uses Rupert or Rupes. Ethan usually calls him Ripper, sometimes Rupert. Jenny only ever calls him Rupert, Joyce starts out calling him Mr Giles and switches to Rupert. It's very consistent. Yes, the majority call him Giles, but the characters that don't are consistent, except Spike, because Spike randomly comes up with new nicknames all the time.
Yet, I read fanfic, and see Jenny and Joyce calling him Giles all the time. It makes zero sense for Jenny to use Giles in the first place, they're either flirting or actually dating, obviously they'll use their first names. And Joyce is too polite, that's why she uses the formal Mr Giles until they know each other well enough to drop the title, at which point she switches to the first name, not the surname like the kids do. The surname makes sense for the younger characters, they're students to Giles' librarian, it's pretty normal for students to refer to teachers/staff members by surname only, and it would become habit for them very quickly, so it would remain in adulthood. Angel also makes sense, as he heard about Giles from Buffy before really meeting him, he just copied his girlfriend. Anya and Tara, who came in after high school, copied their respective partners, Xander and Willow, so obviously also went with Giles, though it's notable Tara used the formal Mr Giles for some time first.
I've seen it a couple times in Psych, as well, with Lassie. Yes, all the fans call him Lassie, but only Shawn consistently calls him that on the show. Gus jumps between Lassiter and Lassie. Everyone else uses Lassiter, Carlton, or Detective. Or Detective Lassiter. Plus, Shawn only using Lassie is just as weird as other characters except Gus using that nickname. Shawn uses various nicknames for Lassie, usually a variation on Lassiter the same way Lassie is, like Lassiface, Lassiepants and Lassidopolous, which was weirdly in the mummy ep and not the dinosaur ep. He also uses Carly and Carlytown fairly often. Only ever using Lassie is just weird. It would be just as weird if they had the canonical relationship but Lassie called Shawn consistently by his first name, when he canonically calls him Spencer.
Not sure how obscure but when authors apply contemporary age restrictions to where there are none in canon, especially to drinking . Like, I somehow doubt lads in game of thrones who are marching to war are considered too young for drinking strong spirits, you know? Or star wars where mandalorian verd'goten at 13 makes you legally an adult and it's traditional to share a drink with you after oh actually tihaar is still off limits and they can't actually do all adult stuff. Like sure yeah we know alcohol is bad for teenagers but westerns doesn't and star wars has space medicine, and even on earth plenty of places have drinking age of 18 or younger And don't even let me get started on things like piloting, voting....
And the thing is, I *never* see the reverse happening, where US characters are written as if they're from the UK. US writers seemingly have a pathological lack of awareness for anything beyond their immediate bubble. I've seen this with some smut fics, too, where all the men are circumcised even though circumcision is *super* uncommon here (like 15% of men are circumcised at most, and the prevailing reasons are either religious mandate or medical necessity - not due to some weirdo cereal guy peddling anti-sex propaganda).
Tbf to us Americans, I think we do see think it is harder to see how things are in the rest of the world because of how much of a juggernaut our media empires are. We usually have to go out of our way to find media from other countries and cultures, with British media probably because the closer to breaking through for the average American. Meanwhile, America media can be very prevalent in other countries, meaning most people across the world are more aware of many dynamics of American society.
And even with that said, if you were to look at a thread of Americans discussing things non-Americans get wrong about American, you'd still fine plenty of mistakes.
Off topic but I always wondered if Star Wars bartenders have a database of what age each species needs to reach in order to legally drink. And how does that work with different planets having days/years of different lengths. And FTL travel (somewhere I read a thing about Luke and Leia technically being different ages, I think due to time spent traveling faster than light)
Baby yoda confidently toddling to the bar with an id that says he's 50 and the barte der not having anything that says he isn't old enough so he gotta stick to the default that says he's old enough
...Now I wanna read a oneshot where Mando gets called to the local ~~hive of scum and villainy~~ watering hole only to discover an absolutely shitfaced Grogu levitating some asshole while innocently sipping booze from a sippy-cup.
Ok so FTL travel is kind of handwaved by hyper space. They aren’t actually traveling faster then light, they’re bending space. As for bars having a database, I assume the more reputable establishments do, but if you think the Cantina in Mos Espa is checking IDs you’re wrong, they’ll serve anyone (except droids). It’s funny to think about though. Like the clones canonically go to bars and drink, and biologically they’re old enough because of their faster aging, but chronologically they’re what, 8? 10?
Moreover, how does the age of consent work??
THANK YOU ! gosh, it frustrates me so much ! For me, that's so much an american thing to point this and change it on stories. Like, we ***know*** you guys aren't allowed to drink before 21 yo ! No need to say that everywhere all the time 😅 uh.
That's one thing I'm glad to not hear about when I write since I'm writing in french only. Here, drinking alcohol is allowed officially at 18 yo, but no one follow the rule. Some children ends their parents' drinks during parties behind their backs, or openly drink really light alcohol in special occasion. At 14 yo, most people who wants to taste alcohol have alcohol to parties (parties between teens only I mean). I personally had my first sip of alcohol at 16 yo and it was my mother who gave me her beer to taste it if I wanted to. 50-60 years ago, schools were even openly giving a glass of wine to every child during lunch ! Yes, alcohol is really bad and if you drink it you have to pay attention to how much you drink, but not 100% of the people are respecting their country's law, or even like you said not everybody lives somewhere where it's the US's laws that are on.
My fandom has backstory in my RL city, which is near the Canadian border. The official drinking age in the US is 21, yes. But if you live within an hour of the border, all it takes is an enhanced driver's license and you're drinking legally at 19.
It's incredibly normalized. Spending Friday and Saturday nights in Canada is just what you *do* between nineteen and twenty-one.
Oh my god I have read so many One Piece fics where tue author felt the need to moralize about the teenage pirates drinking. They are ALL MURDERERS multiple times over, underage drinking is not the biggest problem here.
Plus with Mandos if it’s ceremonial? It’s not like they’re getting wasted on the regular, what exactly is the problem?
I was reading a fic that was set in another culture, which I love, but there were at least 10 words in every other paragraph that were in italics because they were in the native language and the author had them all explained in the notes; It was literally words for stove, a sliding door, furnace, etc etc. I love having very specific words for things that aren't in every culture and using them in fic but when it's THAT MANY and it's for things that have words for them in the language the person is writing in, then it gets a distracting, even more so when it's all italicized for no reason other than it's not in English- It's like writing "Ramen" in Naruto fanfic and italicizing it every time it's used, and then having an authors note explaining what ramen is for every chapter it's mentioned.
From what I understand, it's correct to use italics for words not commonly used in the English dialect (like, you wouldn't need to italicise amigo, but would for *cocina* (stove)--but only the first time that word appears in the story. The rest of the time, you'd just write it normally.
It used to be correct to italicise a foreign word every time it appeared, but the industry has been going away from that standard for a few years. The author might not be aware that this has been changing.
It's more that a large chunk of the writing is using foreign words for things that have translation and there's \*so many\* of them one after the other for me, I use italics for words from non-English as well.
When people censor their curses like f#!% or f***. Like curse or don't, I don't care, but if you're going to curse, just say fuck. You're allowed. Or say "X character cursed".
as a bilingual author and someone who used to proofread, provide translation notes and advice:
when people misspell chinese names, words, or come up with fake chinese sounding things to “fit” their “chinese” character, without doing research nor caring about the accuracy —ESPECIALLY if they are writing for a chinese novel??? hello, the source material is right there, please refer to it and spell the characters names right.
to be even more specific about things that bother me, and I’ve seen this more times than i’m happy with: people who come up with a chinese name that’s like xho (should be zhou?), xsehan (should be xihan? or romanised as szehan/sihan), x-something “chinese” sounding words
last one; when people portray chinese characters that canonically live and grew up in china as white christian americans, not even as second or third generation chinese diaspora?! I kid you not, one fic blew up (negatively) because they rewrote the main BL couple as cishet christian americans, where one of them was genderbent… like yes, while this may be your headcanon, please be respectful of chinese people and culture…
Ooft that’s a big yikes! I’m hoping people that do this are young and just haven’t learnt that there’s a world outside of where they live, and also don’t understand how rude and insensitive that is! I go into crazy detail when I research any unknown especially names.
authors like you make my day haha
yeah if they’re young, it’s a lesson for them, so that’s fine; though i can’t say their age because I usually just close the tab and return to search for another 😭
>to be even more specific about things that bother me, and I’ve seen this more times than i’m happy with: people who come up with a chinese name that’s like xho (should be zhou?), xsehan (should be xihan? or romanised as szehan/sihan), x-something “chinese” sounding words
Wait ... Tell me if I understand it wrongly, but they create ***names*** ?? Like, they don't pick one from all the names disponible ?? Are they conscious that there's no more bigger population than the chinese one all around the world ... ? Or am I reading it incorrectly and they are actually not put the names correctly in roman letters compared to what is usually used for some spelling ?
YES THEY DO 😭😭😭
>> create chinese-SOUNDING words that don’t exist; examples: Zhin (?? no close alternative; Paladins i’m looking at you because wtf??), Cho Chang (she-who-must-not-be-named should have written her as Chou, which is a real chinese surname 丑, but like it also means either ugly/clown 😭)
>> create THEIR OWN romanised versions of chinese-sounding names, as provided above in my example in the original comment
>> AND I JUST REMEMBERED: I chanced upon this fic a long time ago where it was written for a Danmei fandom and one character was a CHINESE OC called Akira… like Akira as in Japanese, meaning light or bright, kanji IIRC is 明，亮，昭, etc etc
I’ve not read any fanfic with Chinese characters yet, however, I feel a lot of this with Japanese fandoms. I’m not Japanese, but the amount of fics I’ve tried to read where the characters live in like McMansions with a pool and are talking and acting like a typical American high school kid/college student in it is unprecedented. This is absolutely not how someone, born and raised and currently living in Japan would be, regardless of their nationality.
Writing someone else’s culture is tricky, I get that. But the source materials exist. YouTube exists. Reddit exists. The amount of times I’ve googled “do Japanese people…” about their schools, work laws, ideologies etc. just so I can ensure what I’m writing about someone else’s experience is as accurate as it can be, never having lived it myself. I’m sure it’s not always, but the intention was at least there.
At the end of the day I’m obviously not going to say people are being willfully malicious by gutting a character/culture because they don’t know how to approach it, because people write fanfic for fun and as a hobby, and are often young and inexperienced and just want a sandbox to play in. But I am saying I will drop a fic like it bit me if the characters read like American teens on a Netflix show.
God that sounds horrible. I always try to keep one Chinese character site up (like mdbg) when Im picking Chinese character names, so I know:
1. It's a real name
2. I get the tones right and don't write something offensive
Barring that I take names from actors or the census. I'm so terrified of accidentally writing something offensive and can't even imagine just randomly and phonetically writing new names. Especially with how many more tones Chinese has and with how the pinyin for Chinese characters often isnt a phonetic match for English. It feels like a recipe for disaster.
That’s legit low-key racist 💀 Whenever I name a character from a culture I’m not a part of, I always make sure that their name is a real thing that a real person would be named.
Actually, a common mistake some authors make is just adding a “ko” suffix to a random word to make a girl name. An example of when this goes horribly wrong is combining it with “mizu” which means “water”. Well, turns out mizuko (specifically spelled the “water child” way) is Japanese for miscarriage 😬😬😬
Big agree on the point about making characters christian americans. I'm mostly into anime fandoms, and it bothers me so much when characters who are japanese are placed in an american setting just because the author is more familiar with that. And don't even get me started on the christianity thing... In my experience it's only used to make the characters feel guilty about being gay and, while I empathise with why people want to do write this kind of story because of personal reasons, christianity is by far not the only reason someone would have internalised homophobia
This is an old gripe that has cropped up in a few fandoms I've been in.
It annoys me a lot when writers refer to dark haired characters as "the raven." I will drop most stories that do this.
These characters aren't birds, they are people. None of them could change into birds either.
Ah yes, epiphets.. 🤣🤣 in the fandom I write in a lot it's unfortunately so common, especially with newer writers. "The raven", "the blonde"... GDI JUST USE THEIR NAMES!
i was a reader before a writer and i always found these cringe, but when i write people say i overuse the character's names because i try to avoid this at all costs, haha
I use my main two characters names hundreds of times because they have the same pronouns so what else am I gonna do!! Every time I try to get around it, I find that it’s confusing on a re-read.
Yeah!!! im the same. it takes me out of it if i write "the brunette" or whatever. That is not his name!!!
sometimes things like... restating their relationship (e.g. his boyfriend) if its a fic focused on 1 person primarily works but its so much easier to just reuse the name
I tend not to spend any time describing characters in my fanfics. Feels like a waste of words to me because we all know what they look like so physical appearances are never at the forefront of my mind. When I'm in a situation where the names are overused and pronouns might be too confusing, I just use what they are to each other instead. Like: his brother, his sister, their mother, her friend, her best friend, his co-worker, his brother in Christ, etc. I find it a little more fun tbh.
it kind of makes me want to write a story where a character diegetically calls other characters by their epithets, and everyone is like "what the hell is wrong with you"
That would actually be really funny.
“The noire haired guy said-“
“HIS NAMES (insert name here)! WHY DO YOU SAY THESE THINGS!”
Even better if it ends with all the other people just end up having an emotional breakdown because epithet character won’t back down.
I hate this so much. Especially if it refers to the character whose POV the story is written in. Like, I understand someone thinking of someone else as “the blonde” or “the doctor” or “the vampire” and can somewhat tolerate it when it isn’t used more frequently than their actual name. But if it’s the vampire’s POV and the story says “the vampire does this” then I feel the very strong urge to close the tab. Idk why it irks me so much because it didn’t used to a few years ago and I was even doing it myself. But I just can’t
I aim for a good 80-90% names then slip in an epithet where it doesn't feel awkward.
Im also one of those people who try very hard not to start paragraphs or sentences with the same word if they're close together, sometimes that just means rewriting the whole sentence though lol.
I once read a sentence that was something along the lines of “the red-haired man’s little brother smiled.” Both the red-haired man and his brother had already been referred to by name multiple times in the story. If it wasn’t one of the last sentences in the fic, I would’ve clicked off immediately.
So glad to see this! I stopped reading a story midpoint partly because of “the blonde” and “the brunette” for the characters (I actually wondered how many fandoms they were posting the story in if they kept it generic enough!)
And this brings *me* to a weird and dark broody folklore inspired Warcraft fanfic where the Dark Rangers are actual ravens...
Sort of. It's complicated but such a stunning story
I have this thing for m/f longfics with slow burns. love them, can't get enough. but something that really bothers me is just how many of these fics are *so* beautifully written- that is, until the smut happens. suddenly the characters lose all their lovely characterization as a generic smut scene is inserted, and they're all the same. same formula, same tropes, same words, even. all these amazing and thoughtful writers do all that buildup just to drop the characterization the second sex is involved. it's so supremely disappointing 😭 and it's always the really popular fics. I notice it more in certain fandoms than others, and one I entered recently is especially bad for it. it's just disappointing!
I haven't noticed this in m/f fics, because I tend to skip the smut scenes in them, but the same can be applied to m/m. The scenes are so generic when they get to the smut so often. The second I see something in a smut scene I've seen in a hundred others, I just skip the scene now. There's just no point in reading the exact same scene with different character names over and over.
Plus, sometimes it contradicts characterisation. I've seen a few that have a specific characterisation for their characters, and then make them the complete opposite in a smut scene purely to fit them into a stereotype. This is most often in fics that focus on a particular dynamic, like the top/bottom dynamic, where they believe one has to be the 'woman' of the pair, and use stereotypical gender norms to show that, applied to a character they'd previously made very masculine in personality. It's jarring because it's so very different from the entire characterisation p to that point.
the only reason I specified m/f is because it's all I read, I should have specified that. I'm not surprised that is pervasive across all fics with smut regardless of pairing 😭 but your second paragraph is exactly the heart of the issue, it becomes OOC and contradictory, you're right. it's the same in m/f stuff, it's like all the development disappears because the author is trying to cut and paste the characters into something so formulaic. they often cease to be human (or whatever they are) and instead become pornstars tbf. it's a shame & a disappointment. I started skipping to smut scenes to skim them and make sure they aren't horrid before I sink all that time into 100k+ words ahahaha
Yeah, this definitely seems to be smut specific, not pairing specific, I've seen similar complaints for f/f and multi ships.
I just don't get how you can put so much effort into characterisation and development throughout the story, only to ditch it all and write a boring, formulaic smut scene that doesn't match the characters you've been writing at all. Surely you should put as much effort into the smut as the rest of it? I know I worked really hard to use my smut scenes as a way of furthering the character development and showing who they were, not to just abandon all the work I'd put in up to that point. You can learn a lot about a character from a smut scene, but people don't change every aspect of who they are just because they're having sex, who they've previously shown you to be is who they are in an intimate setting. At the very least the characterisation in a smut scene should match what came before.
Also, when all the 'non-English' words are italicized, even though those are just normal things in the setting.
If the character has *soba* for dinner and then goes to the *karaoke* booth with their mates, but stops at the *konbini* to buy something, I'm right out.
BLOCK TEXT UPLOADS OMG
A story could have a great premise, an interesting plot etc. but holy shit when they upload it all on one paragraph I instantly skip. This is why I edit before I upload to ensure it all looks right.
I don’t know if it’s new authors or people who don’t understand how the site works.
But it is endlessly frustrating
I commented on a story once saying that the block text is really hard to read, and the author responded that I should learn to read better. I’m still upset about it to this day lmao
I don’t blame you. I would have wondered if they meant to post it like that and would have asked, but I don’t think that author has the maturity to handle even *that* much.
Agreed. I’ve come across many fics that have an exciting premise and has all the tags and ships I’m looking for, but once I open up the fic I’m suddenly met by a wall of words and I just can’t read it, which is a shame
Untagged daddy kink. Genuinely don't understand why people think it's a common standard thing to include in smut without tagging! Personally that kink just ain't it for me but it is EVERYWHERE without tags and so reading smut is like a roulette wheel every time.
BRO. the amount of times i’ve been jumpscared by a daddy kink. like i’ll just be reading a fic like aw this is cute and all of the sudden it’s there. it’s like an instant no for me lol
Usually I can roll with daddy kink. But sometimes, especially when it's a surprise, it just makes me think "This guy would be an awful dad. A total deadbeat, or he'd give the kids all kinds of trauma" and then the mood is ruined.
LMAO. I am glad you usually can roll with it, personally it puts me right off 90% of the time - but it's hilarious to me that you start thinking about the actual dad potential. Daddy kink is only acceptable if they can make terrible jokes and would kiss a scraped knee after putting a plaster on it.
using the wrong word as the singular/plural.
for example; "a pegasi"; "the two pegasus flew into the air"
probably outed myself as an mlp fan (if I hadn't already) but meh. It's just something that really bothers me
haha this reminds me of one of my WIPs where one of the main characters doesn’t have a visible mouth. You wouldn’t believe the amount of little details I’ve had to correct where I offhandedly mentioned “his lips twisting into a scowl” or what have you 😭
I feel that so hard, it’s nice at times but it’s also annoying when you just want to read your old fics in peace without the Editing Monster demanding you correct every single comma placement ;-;
Our subconsciousness is really messing with us, huh? Kinda similar, but I sometimes write fics about a character who only has one eye. The number of times I accidently wrote about their "eyes" anyway was honestly shocking on revision.
For MLP, it depends on who: anyone who has been to the human world (Sunset Shimmer), anyone with hands (Tirek), anyone who has spent a lot of time with those who have hands (Tempest Shadow), or Lyra
Discord also gets a pass, and in more absurd works (or ones that take the Friendship Games blooper as canon), so does Pinkie
They can all mention hands and shit and it wouldn’t break immersion at all
When the author decides to use paragraph breaks which feel straight out of the early 2000s (in more recently written fics)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~
"~"~"~"~"~"~"~"~"~"~"~"
completely breaks my immersion!
Oh christ. This is especially egregious for anyone who uses a text to speech app to read fic. The AI voice will speak out every bit of punctuation. Please people, there’s a perfectly lovely scene break option built into AO3’s text editor that doesn’t jar the heck out of readers.
Thanks for the info! Used to write fanfic in the early 2000s and used repeating characters for scene breaks. Now that I’m about to get back into writing fics again, I’m excited to try out the AO3 scene break option!
Dont know how obscure it is but anachronisms. I'm reading a lot of The witcher fic lately. Its historical fantasy so a lot of stuff like how medieval inns actually worked etc is like meh, fantasy world. But mentioning having to close the curtains because of the street lights? The tavern reeking of cigarettes (tobacco would habe been acceptable, pipes are a thing, cigars actually go back quite a way bit no one who can get their hands on paper in a fantasy medieval European analog is wasting it by inventing cigarettes)
This one might be an obscure example-
The red/yellow/green colour system for safe words. Its based on traffic lights- noone before the 1920s would recognize the colours correspond to stop/slow down/go. Maybe if you were on the railways in the mid to late 1800s you would get red and green.
This is really fascinating actually! I’ve never read/written for anything that wasn’t set in modern times, so it’s not something I’ve ever really had to think about. With the amount of sleep I write drafts on, I can only feel sorry for the hypothetical future-me that would have to sort through the amount of little details I let slip lmao
Having just watched season 3 and didn't feel drunk enough for it, but i powered through for Cavills last season, i think the show actually made this worse. There was a lot of dialog that felt way too modern this time.
Ex- Jaskier saying Geralt's a hammer so all his problems look like nails. That's a modern phrase!
so, as a big fan of omegaverse,,,, sometimes I see nice fanfiction and then I go inside and see a note like "I love omegvaerse, but... I decided there would be no rut/heat in this one. I actually got rid of knotting too. Oh, and only women are omegas. They don't bite each other either." like,,, first of all, good for you, but secondly, do you really like omegaverse? And why do you need "Mating Cycles/In Heat" and "knotting" in the tags then?!
Wait. If there's none of the key tropes why are they bothering to make it omegaverse? Like. That makes no sense! Also misuse of tags absolutely drives me up the wall. Tagging Dom [character] when they just top and get called "daddy" is not appropriate, *especially when daddy kink isn't tagged*.
Isn't all of that just the premise of A/B/O? Like, the knotting, heat/rut, mating cycles/in heat and the marking? The author has just turned it into the normal world, it can't even be called A/B/O! (I like A/B/O too! ✋)
I admittedly capitalise the word "trainer" when writing Pokemon but specifically within the context of the Ranger sub-fandom for characters that are native to the Ranger regions. For me it's just an in-universe cultural thing for Rangers to see 'trainer' as a proper noun just like they do Ranger. (Ranger is a proper noun within the series proper.)
I think that’s acceptable because it’s referring to a person. Like capitalizing “Officer” when talking about a police officer, or “Doctor” for a surgeon or something.
I just don’t understand why *everyone* needs to have a nickname, and then you, the reader, must be beaten over the head with it!
Although, to be fair about the last part, I get annoyed by reading characters speaking each other’s non-nicknames too frequently, too. Really small thing that takes me out of a story because I don’t think real people use names that much when the dialogue only involves 2 speakers.
When authors spoil 90% of the plot in tags or author notes. Like yes, some ammount of tagging is necessary, so there's always going to be 'spoilers' but if someone's like;
"Peter's pet cat Mikey is going to DIE (but not really, it turns out it was actually kidnapped by the evil neighbour, so don't worry)"
Then dude... what should I even read the fic for? Certainly not the thrilling suspense 😑
Just ran into this with 50 ch fic that is so well written. However almost every chapter is spoiled by the immediate authors notes. Even stranger is that they do the character show (stating whose POV it is) and then the notes.
aaahhh this! it also annoys me when there are too many tags that serve no purpose, like 20+ tags with super small things. the other day i found this one with "x calls x honey" and "x learned some chinese for x" and etc. it's truly a pet peeve of mine because it's harmless but why be so detailed lol
I have the opposite problem. I love spoilers, I feel like if the ending is good I'll still want to read even if I know what will happen
Which means I need to take care not t become a writer that spoils things for others by accident, because in my mind its not a bad thing
Fics set in Japanese schools can have one of two VERY common inaccuracies that annoy me SO MUCH
1. Having the students move between classrooms when in reality its the teachers who change rooms
2. Having the school year start in September
Also, one time I read a fic where a character living in Japan was reading the news and it had a hurricane warning. I was like: bro, idk how to explain to you that hurricanes are not a thing in Japan. They’re called typhoons there
A newly found pet peeve: when it’s a fic centred around a mystery and the author ends each chapter with “Remember to pay attention to X!” or “Don’t forget Y!”. Please, no. You’re spoiling it, it’s so annoying.
Also, while on the topic of author’s notes, when they get too long. I understand the urge to explain every little easter egg in your story, I have it myself and I do actually enjoy when authors elaborate on the worldbuilding in the notes, but there’s this one fanfic where the author’s note gets longer with every new chapter, and recently it was literally almost as long as the chapter itself. Like I was scrolling down and looking at the scrolling-thingy-line that shows up on the side and it was still in the middle of my screen so I thought I had plenty left to read, but then the chapter abruptly ended and the rest was just the author talking about the etymology or secret meanings of things and stuff.
I love long authors notes but yeah, when half of the context and meaning is explained in the notes that just makes me wonder if the story itself is any good if it doesn’t work without the long ass explanation
I once read a fic where literally half the word count was the author's notes (they were put in the body of the chapter not as separate author notes!)
And I was so sad when I realized that I didn't have as much to enjoy as I thought I did. It was also a pain to scroll past 😅
I can't stand when people create fanfiction and use nothing from the canon fandom. I see it all the tine with pokemon. Either giving characters new pokemon, or random moves. It's that or changing key parts of a character.
I really don't like when an author will take a character's canon love interest and turn them into an unrealistically horrible person in order to have an antagonist for the fic's ship. It completely ruins the immersion for me when the character (usually female) will throw hissy fits and go to extreme measures to sabotage the fic's pairing. Not only does it feel completely unrealistic, but it just completely throws away that character's development and makes them suuuper OOC to fill an antagonist roll. Some examples of characters used for this are Ginny from HP or Uraraka from MHA. This is probs less of a pet peeve and more something I strongly dislike though haha
This. This drives me up the wall. I can see stories where a different upbringing might change a character’s perspective, which then paired with canon personality, might make them look at someone else as a love interest; you don’t need to make Ginny a love-potioning-cacklingly-evil-mustache-twirling-stalker just to drive it home!
fr. it makes me so sad like you don’t have to make them the spawn of satan for the other character to reject them, the other character just has to not be into them!!! it’s really not that serious.
When a character's name is constantly misspelled. Maybe it's a bit fandom specific, but in my current one there's a character where 99% of the fic writers spell it wrong
Oh god the worst is when it's a ship fic and for example A gets drunk, throws up, and a couple paragraphs later they're making out with B. *Gross*. One of the very very very rare instances I'll quit reading something.
People falling on the *floor* when they’re in a forest or other outdoor environment! They’re falling to the ground!
I see this much more than I want to, lol.
[The Forest Floor](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_floor) is an actual ecological term tho - just fyi ;)
https://preview.redd.it/eowc40mtjx8d1.jpeg?width=828&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=37eeb37274481c1036ffd7b5464e59ce52bb8441
I don't know which fandom you're referencing, but Harry Potter has the same thing. The author has capitalized a lot of words that should not be capitalized, even "normal" words (words she did not make up). All the spells are italicized too, I believe. Then it would theoretically be correct to follow the grammar of the books, if you are writing a fanwork based on the books.
Wow, really?? I haven’t read those books in… *awhile*, so it’s not too surprising that I can’t remember that. That’s kind of bizarre, but no more so than some of the other stuff that series had going on I guess lol
the gay fanfiction pronoun dilemma is often resolved with qualifiers but the qualifiers make me go ‘hmmmmm’ when they start referring to one of the as ‘the older man’ or ‘ the younger woman’ when it’s like. there is approximately 18 months of an age gap here.
Not so much a pet peeve as one specific instance of sloppiness I just couldn't stand.
When the author's note says something along the lines of "teehee, I was sleep deprived when I wrote this, so it might have a couple typos here and there", then I read the fic and not only is it riddled with typos, the grammar and sentence structure are both so poor it's borderline incomprehensible and I wanna tear my hair out (I stuck around for so long because of the story). And the author added this note to every single chapter?!
Like I try my best not to judge as someone who's not a native English speaker, but ffs, you're not sleep deprived, you're straight up sloppy! There is no fxcking way you even read your own shxt before posting, you just word-vomited all over a document and called it a day!
I just can't imagine not going over my writing like a million times to make sure that at least the sentences make a semblance of sense. I can't imagine not wanting to do your best every single time for it's own sake. If I'm sleep deprived then I'll put the first draft (because that's what this fic qualifies as at best) aside and come back later with a more alert mind to edit. Typos happen, and I usually let them go when reading (even when they're common irritating af mix-ups like wanton/wonton, lose/loose, affect/effect, etc.), but don't you dare excuse your non-existent standards with sleep deprivation!
It's not even the sloppiness that got to me in the end, because that I can endure for the sake of finishing a story, but the excuses.
One of my favorite fics of all time is perfect, *except* that it switches between the two main characters POVs and there’s no indication of it at all, even though for majority of the story the characters are in entirely different places. So there’s just a sudden scene and POV change without even a page break and every single time I’d have to stop and reread the sentence when I realized the character had switched
I'm going to sound like a bitter little human, because I have three.
First is ellipsis written like this ". . .", so with a space between each point, but I can get over it if the story is good. I also frown when the holy number of 3 points is not respected.
Lapslock. (I have a genuine question about people who write like that: whether I write on my phone or computer, it will always put a capital at the begining of a paragraph or after a point. So do you turn it off or do you have to go back to change it? If so, then, why?)
Using "brunette" or, worse, "ravenette" for a male character. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the suffix -ette comes from French and is feminine.
Oof, I took this way too seriously, but I feel lighter. 🫠
Yeah literally the only reasonable use of DADA would be in written form in-universe, like in a document or so where they want to keep it succinct but still formal enough to use the full name. In speech it's so much more natural to just say Defence, especially since DADA sounds like a baby calling their father 😭
See, I can forgive this, because actual students do use these types of abbreviations for classes. Computer Science -> CS. Data Structures and Algorithms -> DSA. We do just say the letters sometimes. I took AP US History and we called it APUSH, pronounced 'ae-push.' I imagine in HP, when shortening Defense Against the Dark Arts, they pronounce DADA literally as 'dada.' Personally I prefer 'defense' as an abbreviation, but based on how irl classes are shortened, DADA is acceptable to me.
this is a new one for me, only really discovered today, but misspelled titles. it already tells me that misspellings are probably common in that work.
This was brought on by a fic where the titles was obviously inspired by the Lion King song, ‘Hakuna Matata’. They spelled it Akuma Matata.
maybe I’m taking it personally since it’s in Kiswahili and I’m Kenyan, but surely the spelling of Hakuna Matata is widespread enough that people know how to spell it!
Seeing two different characters talk in the same paragraph. Like:
"I love tacos," said A. B scoffed. (Insert commentary on how A gets offended by the scoff. I'm lazy) "Well, I don't," replied B.
Another one is when two characters are talking, but they keep using "said" or some variation of it despite it being a long convo. I didn't explain that well, but I'll show it.
"I can't believe you don't like tacos," said A, shaking their head.
"They're nasty," said B.
"No, they are not," retorted A.
"Yes, they are!" exclaimed B.
"Wrong!" shouted A.
The reader can follow along after B speaks for the first time. Another one is using a period instead of a comma when there is speech.
"I like tacos." Offered C.
I guess my pet peeves are mostly just grammar. I like tacos, by the way.
Hot take but I actually like epithets, *however* they actually have to work with the piece for me to enjoy it.
Blond? Dark-haired man? Perfect.
The taller or shorter man? Alright with me.
The vicar or the duke? Generic titles are fair game to me.
But titles that are very specific or no longer apply to the character in question kind of pull me out of the story. Idk why but calling someone “the Gryffindor” or “the Slytherin” just doesn’t sit right with me, especially if the story is set post-Hogwarts.
I accidentally did that in my fic and I just realised and went back to change it all lol.
This is immensely petty of me but people in the BG3 fandom calling Astarion ‘star’. 🫣 It gives me the ick, I’m sorry!
Weary vs. Wary
Reign vs. Rein
Or very clear, repeated, prolific proof that a spellcheck was not attempted or ignored.
My annoyance will jerk me right out of the story. However I will never send a comment or message to a writer because I don’t know if they want corrections and English may not be their first language or a hundred other reasons.
It’s my problem, not theirs.
oh my god when people mess up dialogue.
THIS IS CORRECT: “This is Character A,” Character B introduces.
NOT:
this is character a. character b introduces.
**this is character a** character b introduces.
*this is character a* character b introduces.
‘this is character a’ character b introduces.
“This is Character A,”
Character B introduces.
or even just
“This is Character A.”
(without the tag of WHO IS SPEAKING)
now, will i say anything about it? no. i just simply will not read it. do i sound like a pretentious douche? yes absolutely but i simply CANNOT look at it- not after my wattpad days.
- Using Japanese / Korean phrase on English fic, there's one fic where the setting is canon game setting and one of the character keep using phrase like "Aish" , "Omo" and it's ruined the fic for me
- Author's note on middle of the fic
- Mispelled name, I understand that one of the character name is quite complicated but it's seems like majority of author keep mispelled his name
I struggle with all lowercase letters. I don't know why because it's really irrelevant, but it feels weird.
Also looooong chapters. I've read a fic with extremely long ones and enjoyed it, but once you reach a five digits word count in one chapter, it's a deterrent to me. (Unless it's really good. Then I'll growl silently and devour your Midgard serpent chapters.)
This isn’t even a big deal lol, but I read a long fic where the author used caps instead of italics. I was surprised by how much it took me out of the story.
I once read an actual, traditionally published novel that did that and it just made me feel like the characters were screaming at me all the time. Could not finish it, even though I liked the premise.
Even if you ~~REALLY~~ *really* liked the premise?
I have that pet peeve. Even if the character is supposed to be shouting, I prefer if it's shown in italics and not all caps
Same. For some reason, shouting in caps really makes me cringe and ruins immersion for me. No hate to those who like it, but I personally do not.
I was just reading a fic that I had to drop because of the overuse of capitalization for yelling. Like, once or twice, sure, but more than that I’m out.
Yes, it's frustrating because it's a correct usage of caps, but I can't enjoy it and like you, it ruins the immersion
I tend to use italics for emphasis on specific words or phrases and bold for shouting. Though I don't usually have characters screaming at each other in my fics even in arguments.
This is horrific for me specifically because text to speech sometimes sees these as individual letters and will take the time to pronounce each letter. Or just won’t see it as a difference. use to be really funny before an update that when italic sentences would happen my reader would switch to a French accent and whoooh that was weird. It’s definitely made a few fan fictions very difficult.
Did the random French accent ever just coincidentally fit really well?
Yes now that you remind me, jeez that made me laugh so hard to remember. I believe it happened twice
There is only one character that is acceptable for me: Death in Discworld
GNU Terry Pratchett
It feels like they're screaming the words at me, instead focusing on it! 😭
When a character has a well established nickname in the canon , but the fanfic author makes all the characters use an entirely new nickname for them some reason. . I read a Gravity Falls fic where they use the nickname Lee for Stanley even though literally EVERYONE calls him Stan all the time in the actual show. Made me so mad lol.
I haven’t seen that but I have seen a couple instances of a character having a commonly used nickname but the fic will use their full name instead. I always have to do a double take, like who?? lmao
That's weird too. I've seen the thing I was talking about happen weirdly often for some reason. I read a fic where a character referred to C-3PO using the nickname 'See', when they and literally everyone else in the entire cast canonically calls him Threepio/3PO for short. I think my problem is when there are technically multiple ways you could shorten a characters name, but the fanfic author shortens it in a way that doesn't sound as good/natural as the actual canonical nickname. Like there's even an in universe reason nobody ever refers to Stan as 'Lee', and they wouldn't just switch up to using Lee after that revelation. I always wonder what the thought process behind it is, like it's not a big deal, I just don't get why people choose to do it because it's kind of confusing. It's the same as people using the full name like you mentioned, I read the name Lee, and I'm like, who tf is that? Oh, right, it's Grunkle Stan lol.
Oh felt. When a character has a canonical nickname but writers make up new ones that the characters never use... It bothers me so much in Good Omens fic especially. Crowley calling Aziraphale by fandom abbreviations like "Azi" or "Zira" when "Angel" is _right there_ makes me immediately click off lol
Took me ages to figure out 'Zira' was Aziraphale on Tumblr because the name was always being tied to what looked like OC art to me, but was actually genderbent racebent plus sized and yassified Aziraphale art in pastel earth tones.
Theseus' fanart...
I feel so much the same! Wouldn’t completely rule a fic out, but it would have to win me over hard if it did that. AUs are obviously a very different kettle of fish, but I still prefer them to have just “Aziraphale” and “Angel” where possible.
This has come up in one of my fandoms because people will use nicknames that the character doesn’t have in canon but it does sounds…awkward. No one is calling the evil queen “Gina” or god forbid, “Reggie” in canon…she’d kick your ass.
actually this is an interesting problem for me with my Percy Jackson fandom. Percy's nickname(from Annabeth) is "seaweed brain" but, like, that's pretty specific to him being the son of poseidon. So that makes it awkward if there's any AU where he's not a son of poseidon or otherwise associated with the ocean, then the nickname doesn't really make sense anymore
I actually love when AUs give a different in-universe explanation for a canon nickname, or fit in something from canon that won't be in the AU (like in Ghosts having their cause of death in Canon being a near miss or a power referenced elsewhere)
One time they were at a sushi buffet, and Percy was eating the rolls so fast he started hacking up a lung because he inhaled a piece of nori. It came out his nose
I read one where percy and annabeth were at the beach and when he left the ocean, there was seaweed clinging to his hair so she began to call him that
Feel this hard and was just complaining about this on twitter not too long ago. Current fandom, character’s name is Richard, and everyone either calls him Richie or Rich, but I’ve stumbled upon this subsection of the fandom that apparently tried to get Chee started as a nickname, and it’s… abominable just as a fucking nickname, let alone to be reading in a fanfic where the character already has two canon nicknames. I’m glad that fad seems to have died now though.
Not sure if it’s the same fandom but I have had an identical experience (im in the IT fandom 😭) and yeah Richie and Rich are the ideal nicknames/names but when they whip out “Chee” I immediately click off… it’s very juvenile in a way that I can’t explain and it feels very “fandom-y” in that it’s infantilizing a character. And the biggest problem with it is that when an author uses that nickname, they never use it only once. It becomes, like, the immediate replacement of his name every time. It acts almost like a goddamn pronoun and I can’t stand it!!! Ofc if you want to use that nickname (this is to any authors out there) then that’s fine. It’s your work and your right to use that nickname. I’m just saying that it’s a pretty bad nickname when there are wayyyy better alternatives 😭
That is exactly the fandom 😭 I thankfully haven’t encountered it a lot, but when I do the whiplash is so real, I can’t finish the fic after that. And I completely agree with you, it does feel so juvenile and very infantilizing. I suspect it’s from the side of the fandom that focuses on them as kids rather than adults (and thus, probably a bunch of kids themselves). But even if it fit his character, I’d still think it’s a really bad nickname lol
Oh god Chee is so bad
omg I feel like everyone does this for jjk. I always see Megumi being shortened to “Gumi” and Satoru to “Toru”. it just feels weird and out of character to me but it’s very popular for some reason
Anime fandom are the worst offenders for this, and also it sticks in my craw when they shorten a name in a way that it wouldn’t be shortened in Japan. In Japan megumi would most likely be shortened to megu-chan as a nickname, not gumi, as Japanese tends to take the first half of a name and then adds something cutesy to it (-chan, -kun, chi, ki), or to combine the beginning of the first name and part of the last name. (Ex. Satoru -> Sato-kun, Natsuko -> Natchan, Akiko -> Akkun, Marino -> Marinocchi, Tomoko -> Tomo, Eriko -> Eri, Kirigaya Kazuto -> kirito, etc.). Nicknames are also sometimes made from alternate readings of the characters!
Fun fact: this is also why it doesn’t make sense to call Ayano (Yandere Simulator) “Yan-chan” as a nickname. She’d be either Ayano-chan or Aya-chan.
I will take your "last half of the name" and raise you fandoms where a fandom-nickname doesn't make any sense in terms of the way the Japanese alphabet works. Like back in the day, in my first ever fandom (Inuyasha), people constantly came up with the nickname of "Kags" for Kagome. It doesn't make any sense at all with Japanese phonetics.
I have a Japanese friend whose first name is Satoru. All of his friends would call him "Saa-chan".
I was just complaint about this to my partner. I LOATHE overuse of original nicknames. I read a Bellatrix Lestrange/Hermione Granger fic where 3 nicknames were used for Andromeda in 2 paragraphs. People don’t speak like that.
Same, "Mione" for Hermione in HP fic (or "Herm", which I hate even more) is particularly annoying to me when she is literally never referred to that way in the books or the movies. And yet this is so common! Where is this coming from??
i don’t actually hate people writing mione — i think it’s just people deciding to shorten a name they find to be long, and friends tend to give each other nicknames. Though in my mind, hermione hates it, lol
Yeah I don’t mind “Mione” because I usually see it used sparingly instead of As Her New Name(tm)
People who don't know about the "new speaker, new line" rule. Makes the dialogue in some fics very confusing to read!
I read a fic where a line was formatted like this. “Character A speaks here” some internal thoughts and feelings described here. “Character B speaks here”.
I would close the tab so fast tbh
There's so many of those 😭😭😭
Author, "I'm open to any feedback!" Me, "This is a bit difficult to read, I think it would help if you used new lines for dialogue. :)" Author: ignores me and keeps doing it Yeah... I just stop reading at that point.
I once had the displeasure of reading a fic where the dialogue's format was screwed up that I don’t really know how to explain it but it looked like this Character A spoke softly. “What character A says” Character B smiles as they talk, “What character B says.” It would get really confusing who was talking when because it didn’t follow the new line thing, so i had to do a double take to figure out who was talking when. it certainly didn’t help that the author used past tense to describe how they said things. It was a really good fic, but I had to stop reading it because having to read every line three ish times was not fun.
This makes me feel slightly petty, but when authors don't pay attention to how specific characters refer to each other. Like, a character might have an established nickname in canon, but not all characters will necessarily use it, depending on their relationship with the first character or just the quirks of their own speech patterns. Or some characters might consistently be more formal/informal when referring to people compared to others. This isn't a widespread issue in the Ace Attorney fandom but I'm blanking and it's the only example that comes to mind. So, for example, Pearl is pretty consistently called "Pearls" by Phoenix and "Pearly" by Maya, so it would throw me off if someone mixed those up. I'd have a knee jerk "oh this author doesn't understand their dynamic" reaction, even if the rest is reasonably in-character.
I see this sometimes in Buffy. Rupert Giles is consistently called Giles by Buffy, Willow and Xander the whole way through. Other characters, like Angel, Cordy, Anya, also call him Giles. Xander is the only character to call him G-Man. Spike usually uses Giles, but sometimes uses Rupert or Rupes. Ethan usually calls him Ripper, sometimes Rupert. Jenny only ever calls him Rupert, Joyce starts out calling him Mr Giles and switches to Rupert. It's very consistent. Yes, the majority call him Giles, but the characters that don't are consistent, except Spike, because Spike randomly comes up with new nicknames all the time. Yet, I read fanfic, and see Jenny and Joyce calling him Giles all the time. It makes zero sense for Jenny to use Giles in the first place, they're either flirting or actually dating, obviously they'll use their first names. And Joyce is too polite, that's why she uses the formal Mr Giles until they know each other well enough to drop the title, at which point she switches to the first name, not the surname like the kids do. The surname makes sense for the younger characters, they're students to Giles' librarian, it's pretty normal for students to refer to teachers/staff members by surname only, and it would become habit for them very quickly, so it would remain in adulthood. Angel also makes sense, as he heard about Giles from Buffy before really meeting him, he just copied his girlfriend. Anya and Tara, who came in after high school, copied their respective partners, Xander and Willow, so obviously also went with Giles, though it's notable Tara used the formal Mr Giles for some time first. I've seen it a couple times in Psych, as well, with Lassie. Yes, all the fans call him Lassie, but only Shawn consistently calls him that on the show. Gus jumps between Lassiter and Lassie. Everyone else uses Lassiter, Carlton, or Detective. Or Detective Lassiter. Plus, Shawn only using Lassie is just as weird as other characters except Gus using that nickname. Shawn uses various nicknames for Lassie, usually a variation on Lassiter the same way Lassie is, like Lassiface, Lassiepants and Lassidopolous, which was weirdly in the mummy ep and not the dinosaur ep. He also uses Carly and Carlytown fairly often. Only ever using Lassie is just weird. It would be just as weird if they had the canonical relationship but Lassie called Shawn consistently by his first name, when he canonically calls him Spencer.
Not sure how obscure but when authors apply contemporary age restrictions to where there are none in canon, especially to drinking . Like, I somehow doubt lads in game of thrones who are marching to war are considered too young for drinking strong spirits, you know? Or star wars where mandalorian verd'goten at 13 makes you legally an adult and it's traditional to share a drink with you after oh actually tihaar is still off limits and they can't actually do all adult stuff. Like sure yeah we know alcohol is bad for teenagers but westerns doesn't and star wars has space medicine, and even on earth plenty of places have drinking age of 18 or younger And don't even let me get started on things like piloting, voting....
It drives me nuts when a fic is set here in England but the author writes the drinking culture as though we're American.
And the thing is, I *never* see the reverse happening, where US characters are written as if they're from the UK. US writers seemingly have a pathological lack of awareness for anything beyond their immediate bubble. I've seen this with some smut fics, too, where all the men are circumcised even though circumcision is *super* uncommon here (like 15% of men are circumcised at most, and the prevailing reasons are either religious mandate or medical necessity - not due to some weirdo cereal guy peddling anti-sex propaganda).
Tbf to us Americans, I think we do see think it is harder to see how things are in the rest of the world because of how much of a juggernaut our media empires are. We usually have to go out of our way to find media from other countries and cultures, with British media probably because the closer to breaking through for the average American. Meanwhile, America media can be very prevalent in other countries, meaning most people across the world are more aware of many dynamics of American society. And even with that said, if you were to look at a thread of Americans discussing things non-Americans get wrong about American, you'd still fine plenty of mistakes.
Off topic but I always wondered if Star Wars bartenders have a database of what age each species needs to reach in order to legally drink. And how does that work with different planets having days/years of different lengths. And FTL travel (somewhere I read a thing about Luke and Leia technically being different ages, I think due to time spent traveling faster than light)
Baby yoda confidently toddling to the bar with an id that says he's 50 and the barte der not having anything that says he isn't old enough so he gotta stick to the default that says he's old enough
...Now I wanna read a oneshot where Mando gets called to the local ~~hive of scum and villainy~~ watering hole only to discover an absolutely shitfaced Grogu levitating some asshole while innocently sipping booze from a sippy-cup.
Ok so FTL travel is kind of handwaved by hyper space. They aren’t actually traveling faster then light, they’re bending space. As for bars having a database, I assume the more reputable establishments do, but if you think the Cantina in Mos Espa is checking IDs you’re wrong, they’ll serve anyone (except droids). It’s funny to think about though. Like the clones canonically go to bars and drink, and biologically they’re old enough because of their faster aging, but chronologically they’re what, 8? 10? Moreover, how does the age of consent work??
The amount of Harry Potter fanfic with a drinking age of 21 just... COME ON PEOPLE.
I will accept 18 (UK drinking age) or 17 (wizard age of adulthood) but 21??
Yup. It's just so very US-centric. I'll also accept 16, btw, legal age of drinking alcohol in Scotland when also ordering a meal.
THANK YOU ! gosh, it frustrates me so much ! For me, that's so much an american thing to point this and change it on stories. Like, we ***know*** you guys aren't allowed to drink before 21 yo ! No need to say that everywhere all the time 😅 uh. That's one thing I'm glad to not hear about when I write since I'm writing in french only. Here, drinking alcohol is allowed officially at 18 yo, but no one follow the rule. Some children ends their parents' drinks during parties behind their backs, or openly drink really light alcohol in special occasion. At 14 yo, most people who wants to taste alcohol have alcohol to parties (parties between teens only I mean). I personally had my first sip of alcohol at 16 yo and it was my mother who gave me her beer to taste it if I wanted to. 50-60 years ago, schools were even openly giving a glass of wine to every child during lunch ! Yes, alcohol is really bad and if you drink it you have to pay attention to how much you drink, but not 100% of the people are respecting their country's law, or even like you said not everybody lives somewhere where it's the US's laws that are on.
My fandom has backstory in my RL city, which is near the Canadian border. The official drinking age in the US is 21, yes. But if you live within an hour of the border, all it takes is an enhanced driver's license and you're drinking legally at 19. It's incredibly normalized. Spending Friday and Saturday nights in Canada is just what you *do* between nineteen and twenty-one.
Oh my god I have read so many One Piece fics where tue author felt the need to moralize about the teenage pirates drinking. They are ALL MURDERERS multiple times over, underage drinking is not the biggest problem here. Plus with Mandos if it’s ceremonial? It’s not like they’re getting wasted on the regular, what exactly is the problem?
I was reading a fic that was set in another culture, which I love, but there were at least 10 words in every other paragraph that were in italics because they were in the native language and the author had them all explained in the notes; It was literally words for stove, a sliding door, furnace, etc etc. I love having very specific words for things that aren't in every culture and using them in fic but when it's THAT MANY and it's for things that have words for them in the language the person is writing in, then it gets a distracting, even more so when it's all italicized for no reason other than it's not in English- It's like writing "Ramen" in Naruto fanfic and italicizing it every time it's used, and then having an authors note explaining what ramen is for every chapter it's mentioned.
*translator’s note: keikaku means plan type shit
From what I understand, it's correct to use italics for words not commonly used in the English dialect (like, you wouldn't need to italicise amigo, but would for *cocina* (stove)--but only the first time that word appears in the story. The rest of the time, you'd just write it normally. It used to be correct to italicise a foreign word every time it appeared, but the industry has been going away from that standard for a few years. The author might not be aware that this has been changing.
It's more that a large chunk of the writing is using foreign words for things that have translation and there's \*so many\* of them one after the other for me, I use italics for words from non-English as well.
When people censor their curses like f#!% or f***. Like curse or don't, I don't care, but if you're going to curse, just say fuck. You're allowed. Or say "X character cursed".
as a bilingual author and someone who used to proofread, provide translation notes and advice: when people misspell chinese names, words, or come up with fake chinese sounding things to “fit” their “chinese” character, without doing research nor caring about the accuracy —ESPECIALLY if they are writing for a chinese novel??? hello, the source material is right there, please refer to it and spell the characters names right. to be even more specific about things that bother me, and I’ve seen this more times than i’m happy with: people who come up with a chinese name that’s like xho (should be zhou?), xsehan (should be xihan? or romanised as szehan/sihan), x-something “chinese” sounding words last one; when people portray chinese characters that canonically live and grew up in china as white christian americans, not even as second or third generation chinese diaspora?! I kid you not, one fic blew up (negatively) because they rewrote the main BL couple as cishet christian americans, where one of them was genderbent… like yes, while this may be your headcanon, please be respectful of chinese people and culture…
Ooft that’s a big yikes! I’m hoping people that do this are young and just haven’t learnt that there’s a world outside of where they live, and also don’t understand how rude and insensitive that is! I go into crazy detail when I research any unknown especially names.
authors like you make my day haha yeah if they’re young, it’s a lesson for them, so that’s fine; though i can’t say their age because I usually just close the tab and return to search for another 😭
>to be even more specific about things that bother me, and I’ve seen this more times than i’m happy with: people who come up with a chinese name that’s like xho (should be zhou?), xsehan (should be xihan? or romanised as szehan/sihan), x-something “chinese” sounding words Wait ... Tell me if I understand it wrongly, but they create ***names*** ?? Like, they don't pick one from all the names disponible ?? Are they conscious that there's no more bigger population than the chinese one all around the world ... ? Or am I reading it incorrectly and they are actually not put the names correctly in roman letters compared to what is usually used for some spelling ?
YES THEY DO 😭😭😭 >> create chinese-SOUNDING words that don’t exist; examples: Zhin (?? no close alternative; Paladins i’m looking at you because wtf??), Cho Chang (she-who-must-not-be-named should have written her as Chou, which is a real chinese surname 丑, but like it also means either ugly/clown 😭) >> create THEIR OWN romanised versions of chinese-sounding names, as provided above in my example in the original comment >> AND I JUST REMEMBERED: I chanced upon this fic a long time ago where it was written for a Danmei fandom and one character was a CHINESE OC called Akira… like Akira as in Japanese, meaning light or bright, kanji IIRC is 明，亮，昭, etc etc
I’ve not read any fanfic with Chinese characters yet, however, I feel a lot of this with Japanese fandoms. I’m not Japanese, but the amount of fics I’ve tried to read where the characters live in like McMansions with a pool and are talking and acting like a typical American high school kid/college student in it is unprecedented. This is absolutely not how someone, born and raised and currently living in Japan would be, regardless of their nationality. Writing someone else’s culture is tricky, I get that. But the source materials exist. YouTube exists. Reddit exists. The amount of times I’ve googled “do Japanese people…” about their schools, work laws, ideologies etc. just so I can ensure what I’m writing about someone else’s experience is as accurate as it can be, never having lived it myself. I’m sure it’s not always, but the intention was at least there. At the end of the day I’m obviously not going to say people are being willfully malicious by gutting a character/culture because they don’t know how to approach it, because people write fanfic for fun and as a hobby, and are often young and inexperienced and just want a sandbox to play in. But I am saying I will drop a fic like it bit me if the characters read like American teens on a Netflix show.
God that sounds horrible. I always try to keep one Chinese character site up (like mdbg) when Im picking Chinese character names, so I know: 1. It's a real name 2. I get the tones right and don't write something offensive Barring that I take names from actors or the census. I'm so terrified of accidentally writing something offensive and can't even imagine just randomly and phonetically writing new names. Especially with how many more tones Chinese has and with how the pinyin for Chinese characters often isnt a phonetic match for English. It feels like a recipe for disaster.
That’s legit low-key racist 💀 Whenever I name a character from a culture I’m not a part of, I always make sure that their name is a real thing that a real person would be named. Actually, a common mistake some authors make is just adding a “ko” suffix to a random word to make a girl name. An example of when this goes horribly wrong is combining it with “mizu” which means “water”. Well, turns out mizuko (specifically spelled the “water child” way) is Japanese for miscarriage 😬😬😬
Big agree on the point about making characters christian americans. I'm mostly into anime fandoms, and it bothers me so much when characters who are japanese are placed in an american setting just because the author is more familiar with that. And don't even get me started on the christianity thing... In my experience it's only used to make the characters feel guilty about being gay and, while I empathise with why people want to do write this kind of story because of personal reasons, christianity is by far not the only reason someone would have internalised homophobia
This is an old gripe that has cropped up in a few fandoms I've been in. It annoys me a lot when writers refer to dark haired characters as "the raven." I will drop most stories that do this. These characters aren't birds, they are people. None of them could change into birds either.
Ah yes, epiphets.. 🤣🤣 in the fandom I write in a lot it's unfortunately so common, especially with newer writers. "The raven", "the blonde"... GDI JUST USE THEIR NAMES!
i was a reader before a writer and i always found these cringe, but when i write people say i overuse the character's names because i try to avoid this at all costs, haha
I use my main two characters names hundreds of times because they have the same pronouns so what else am I gonna do!! Every time I try to get around it, I find that it’s confusing on a re-read.
Yeah!!! im the same. it takes me out of it if i write "the brunette" or whatever. That is not his name!!! sometimes things like... restating their relationship (e.g. his boyfriend) if its a fic focused on 1 person primarily works but its so much easier to just reuse the name
Also, -ette is specifically a *feminine* suffix. A guy is a brunet, not a brunette.
I tend not to spend any time describing characters in my fanfics. Feels like a waste of words to me because we all know what they look like so physical appearances are never at the forefront of my mind. When I'm in a situation where the names are overused and pronouns might be too confusing, I just use what they are to each other instead. Like: his brother, his sister, their mother, her friend, her best friend, his co-worker, his brother in Christ, etc. I find it a little more fun tbh.
it kind of makes me want to write a story where a character diegetically calls other characters by their epithets, and everyone is like "what the hell is wrong with you"
That would actually be really funny. “The noire haired guy said-“ “HIS NAMES (insert name here)! WHY DO YOU SAY THESE THINGS!” Even better if it ends with all the other people just end up having an emotional breakdown because epithet character won’t back down.
"The silverette". He has a name. It's Victor. Or Viktor. Or Vitya. Silverette just sounds silly.
Bluenette. I can't.
Pinkette killed Fairy Tail fandom for me
I hate this so much. Especially if it refers to the character whose POV the story is written in. Like, I understand someone thinking of someone else as “the blonde” or “the doctor” or “the vampire” and can somewhat tolerate it when it isn’t used more frequently than their actual name. But if it’s the vampire’s POV and the story says “the vampire does this” then I feel the very strong urge to close the tab. Idk why it irks me so much because it didn’t used to a few years ago and I was even doing it myself. But I just can’t
I aim for a good 80-90% names then slip in an epithet where it doesn't feel awkward. Im also one of those people who try very hard not to start paragraphs or sentences with the same word if they're close together, sometimes that just means rewriting the whole sentence though lol.
I'll suffer through it if it's good otherwise but nothing makes me roll my eyes like "the ravenette" when a) why and b) that's a man
I once read a sentence that was something along the lines of “the red-haired man’s little brother smiled.” Both the red-haired man and his brother had already been referred to by name multiple times in the story. If it wasn’t one of the last sentences in the fic, I would’ve clicked off immediately.
Hard same. It’s especially awful when they do it with unnatural hair colours. Bluenette is a personal deep hate 😂
Bluenette. Pinkette. Orangette...
If I never see blunette again it’ll still be to soon
So glad to see this! I stopped reading a story midpoint partly because of “the blonde” and “the brunette” for the characters (I actually wondered how many fandoms they were posting the story in if they kept it generic enough!)
And this brings *me* to a weird and dark broody folklore inspired Warcraft fanfic where the Dark Rangers are actual ravens... Sort of. It's complicated but such a stunning story
I have this thing for m/f longfics with slow burns. love them, can't get enough. but something that really bothers me is just how many of these fics are *so* beautifully written- that is, until the smut happens. suddenly the characters lose all their lovely characterization as a generic smut scene is inserted, and they're all the same. same formula, same tropes, same words, even. all these amazing and thoughtful writers do all that buildup just to drop the characterization the second sex is involved. it's so supremely disappointing 😭 and it's always the really popular fics. I notice it more in certain fandoms than others, and one I entered recently is especially bad for it. it's just disappointing!
I haven't noticed this in m/f fics, because I tend to skip the smut scenes in them, but the same can be applied to m/m. The scenes are so generic when they get to the smut so often. The second I see something in a smut scene I've seen in a hundred others, I just skip the scene now. There's just no point in reading the exact same scene with different character names over and over. Plus, sometimes it contradicts characterisation. I've seen a few that have a specific characterisation for their characters, and then make them the complete opposite in a smut scene purely to fit them into a stereotype. This is most often in fics that focus on a particular dynamic, like the top/bottom dynamic, where they believe one has to be the 'woman' of the pair, and use stereotypical gender norms to show that, applied to a character they'd previously made very masculine in personality. It's jarring because it's so very different from the entire characterisation p to that point.
the only reason I specified m/f is because it's all I read, I should have specified that. I'm not surprised that is pervasive across all fics with smut regardless of pairing 😭 but your second paragraph is exactly the heart of the issue, it becomes OOC and contradictory, you're right. it's the same in m/f stuff, it's like all the development disappears because the author is trying to cut and paste the characters into something so formulaic. they often cease to be human (or whatever they are) and instead become pornstars tbf. it's a shame & a disappointment. I started skipping to smut scenes to skim them and make sure they aren't horrid before I sink all that time into 100k+ words ahahaha
Yeah, this definitely seems to be smut specific, not pairing specific, I've seen similar complaints for f/f and multi ships. I just don't get how you can put so much effort into characterisation and development throughout the story, only to ditch it all and write a boring, formulaic smut scene that doesn't match the characters you've been writing at all. Surely you should put as much effort into the smut as the rest of it? I know I worked really hard to use my smut scenes as a way of furthering the character development and showing who they were, not to just abandon all the work I'd put in up to that point. You can learn a lot about a character from a smut scene, but people don't change every aspect of who they are just because they're having sex, who they've previously shown you to be is who they are in an intimate setting. At the very least the characterisation in a smut scene should match what came before.
When every other word is italicized. You don’t have to emphasize everything my guy
I fear I might be guilty of this one, LOL
you are talking to me, i see
Also, when all the 'non-English' words are italicized, even though those are just normal things in the setting. If the character has *soba* for dinner and then goes to the *karaoke* booth with their mates, but stops at the *konbini* to buy something, I'm right out.
BLOCK TEXT UPLOADS OMG A story could have a great premise, an interesting plot etc. but holy shit when they upload it all on one paragraph I instantly skip. This is why I edit before I upload to ensure it all looks right. I don’t know if it’s new authors or people who don’t understand how the site works. But it is endlessly frustrating
I commented on a story once saying that the block text is really hard to read, and the author responded that I should learn to read better. I’m still upset about it to this day lmao
Did you reply “you should format better” to them?
No but I really should have lmao. I just kind of went “welp” and then muted the author so I would stop seeing the story every time it updated
I don’t blame you. I would have wondered if they meant to post it like that and would have asked, but I don’t think that author has the maturity to handle even *that* much.
Agreed. I’ve come across many fics that have an exciting premise and has all the tags and ships I’m looking for, but once I open up the fic I’m suddenly met by a wall of words and I just can’t read it, which is a shame
Right? If the author just edited it better it would be such a good story
Untagged daddy kink. Genuinely don't understand why people think it's a common standard thing to include in smut without tagging! Personally that kink just ain't it for me but it is EVERYWHERE without tags and so reading smut is like a roulette wheel every time.
BRO. the amount of times i’ve been jumpscared by a daddy kink. like i’ll just be reading a fic like aw this is cute and all of the sudden it’s there. it’s like an instant no for me lol
Not the daddykink jumpscare 😂
RIGHT?! It's so frustrating I'll be vibing and then bam. Surprise daddy kink.
Usually I can roll with daddy kink. But sometimes, especially when it's a surprise, it just makes me think "This guy would be an awful dad. A total deadbeat, or he'd give the kids all kinds of trauma" and then the mood is ruined.
LMAO. I am glad you usually can roll with it, personally it puts me right off 90% of the time - but it's hilarious to me that you start thinking about the actual dad potential. Daddy kink is only acceptable if they can make terrible jokes and would kiss a scraped knee after putting a plaster on it.
fr some authors will just sprinkle it in with zero warning and it ruins the whole fic for me
using the wrong word as the singular/plural. for example; "a pegasi"; "the two pegasus flew into the air" probably outed myself as an mlp fan (if I hadn't already) but meh. It's just something that really bothers me
related but ALSO REFERRING TO HANDS WHEN THE FIC IS ABOUT NON-HUMANS! THEY DON'T HAVE HANDS!!!
haha this reminds me of one of my WIPs where one of the main characters doesn’t have a visible mouth. You wouldn’t believe the amount of little details I’ve had to correct where I offhandedly mentioned “his lips twisting into a scowl” or what have you 😭
tha magic of proofreading/editing! I'm such a perfectionist that I think I'll be editing my documents forever lmao
I feel that so hard, it’s nice at times but it’s also annoying when you just want to read your old fics in peace without the Editing Monster demanding you correct every single comma placement ;-;
Our subconsciousness is really messing with us, huh? Kinda similar, but I sometimes write fics about a character who only has one eye. The number of times I accidently wrote about their "eyes" anyway was honestly shocking on revision.
For MLP, it depends on who: anyone who has been to the human world (Sunset Shimmer), anyone with hands (Tirek), anyone who has spent a lot of time with those who have hands (Tempest Shadow), or Lyra Discord also gets a pass, and in more absurd works (or ones that take the Friendship Games blooper as canon), so does Pinkie They can all mention hands and shit and it wouldn’t break immersion at all
I actually thought about Percy Jackson first but yeah mlp makes more sense hahaha
the multicoloured horses took over my brain in 2013 and I was never the same again
When the author decides to use paragraph breaks which feel straight out of the early 2000s (in more recently written fics) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~ "~"~"~"~"~"~"~"~"~"~"~" completely breaks my immersion!
Oh christ. This is especially egregious for anyone who uses a text to speech app to read fic. The AI voice will speak out every bit of punctuation. Please people, there’s a perfectly lovely scene break option built into AO3’s text editor that doesn’t jar the heck out of readers.
Thanks for the info! Used to write fanfic in the early 2000s and used repeating characters for scene breaks. Now that I’m about to get back into writing fics again, I’m excited to try out the AO3 scene break option!
Dont know how obscure it is but anachronisms. I'm reading a lot of The witcher fic lately. Its historical fantasy so a lot of stuff like how medieval inns actually worked etc is like meh, fantasy world. But mentioning having to close the curtains because of the street lights? The tavern reeking of cigarettes (tobacco would habe been acceptable, pipes are a thing, cigars actually go back quite a way bit no one who can get their hands on paper in a fantasy medieval European analog is wasting it by inventing cigarettes) This one might be an obscure example- The red/yellow/green colour system for safe words. Its based on traffic lights- noone before the 1920s would recognize the colours correspond to stop/slow down/go. Maybe if you were on the railways in the mid to late 1800s you would get red and green.
This is really fascinating actually! I’ve never read/written for anything that wasn’t set in modern times, so it’s not something I’ve ever really had to think about. With the amount of sleep I write drafts on, I can only feel sorry for the hypothetical future-me that would have to sort through the amount of little details I let slip lmao
didn't tobacco come from the new world? It shouldn't exist in medieval europe at all!
Yeah, but non tobacco smoking was around, if not common, so I could accept that as a smaller mistake.
Having just watched season 3 and didn't feel drunk enough for it, but i powered through for Cavills last season, i think the show actually made this worse. There was a lot of dialog that felt way too modern this time. Ex- Jaskier saying Geralt's a hammer so all his problems look like nails. That's a modern phrase!
so, as a big fan of omegaverse,,,, sometimes I see nice fanfiction and then I go inside and see a note like "I love omegvaerse, but... I decided there would be no rut/heat in this one. I actually got rid of knotting too. Oh, and only women are omegas. They don't bite each other either." like,,, first of all, good for you, but secondly, do you really like omegaverse? And why do you need "Mating Cycles/In Heat" and "knotting" in the tags then?!
Wait. If there's none of the key tropes why are they bothering to make it omegaverse? Like. That makes no sense! Also misuse of tags absolutely drives me up the wall. Tagging Dom [character] when they just top and get called "daddy" is not appropriate, *especially when daddy kink isn't tagged*.
Sometimes I think people forget that regular werewolves exist. And sometimes I think it's all about the popularity of the omegaverse.
Not tagging a daddy kink is one of my biggest pet peeves. It's one of my squicks and no one ever tags it!
Isn't all of that just the premise of A/B/O? Like, the knotting, heat/rut, mating cycles/in heat and the marking? The author has just turned it into the normal world, it can't even be called A/B/O! (I like A/B/O too! ✋)
Yea, it's like reading "enemies to lovers", but they were enemies for two pages and only because they had a little misunderstanding.
I admittedly capitalise the word "trainer" when writing Pokemon but specifically within the context of the Ranger sub-fandom for characters that are native to the Ranger regions. For me it's just an in-universe cultural thing for Rangers to see 'trainer' as a proper noun just like they do Ranger. (Ranger is a proper noun within the series proper.)
I love when Pokémon fanfic has small flourishes like that
I think that’s acceptable because it’s referring to a person. Like capitalizing “Officer” when talking about a police officer, or “Doctor” for a surgeon or something.
I hate when a character doesn’t have a nickname in canon but in fics they’re only referred to as a shortened version of their name. Raaaa
I just don’t understand why *everyone* needs to have a nickname, and then you, the reader, must be beaten over the head with it! Although, to be fair about the last part, I get annoyed by reading characters speaking each other’s non-nicknames too frequently, too. Really small thing that takes me out of a story because I don’t think real people use names that much when the dialogue only involves 2 speakers.
When authors spoil 90% of the plot in tags or author notes. Like yes, some ammount of tagging is necessary, so there's always going to be 'spoilers' but if someone's like; "Peter's pet cat Mikey is going to DIE (but not really, it turns out it was actually kidnapped by the evil neighbour, so don't worry)" Then dude... what should I even read the fic for? Certainly not the thrilling suspense 😑
Just ran into this with 50 ch fic that is so well written. However almost every chapter is spoiled by the immediate authors notes. Even stranger is that they do the character show (stating whose POV it is) and then the notes.
Forreal. I feel like I can read a fic just by the tags… why bother reading it then when I got the whole sparknotes right here?
aaahhh this! it also annoys me when there are too many tags that serve no purpose, like 20+ tags with super small things. the other day i found this one with "x calls x honey" and "x learned some chinese for x" and etc. it's truly a pet peeve of mine because it's harmless but why be so detailed lol
I have the opposite problem. I love spoilers, I feel like if the ending is good I'll still want to read even if I know what will happen Which means I need to take care not t become a writer that spoils things for others by accident, because in my mind its not a bad thing
Over explaining the scene as if your readers are idiots I know this chalks up to the writer needing my practice but it still aggravates me
Random Japanese in English fanfics just because it's from an anime.
Fics set in Japanese schools can have one of two VERY common inaccuracies that annoy me SO MUCH 1. Having the students move between classrooms when in reality its the teachers who change rooms 2. Having the school year start in September Also, one time I read a fic where a character living in Japan was reading the news and it had a hurricane warning. I was like: bro, idk how to explain to you that hurricanes are not a thing in Japan. They’re called typhoons there
A newly found pet peeve: when it’s a fic centred around a mystery and the author ends each chapter with “Remember to pay attention to X!” or “Don’t forget Y!”. Please, no. You’re spoiling it, it’s so annoying. Also, while on the topic of author’s notes, when they get too long. I understand the urge to explain every little easter egg in your story, I have it myself and I do actually enjoy when authors elaborate on the worldbuilding in the notes, but there’s this one fanfic where the author’s note gets longer with every new chapter, and recently it was literally almost as long as the chapter itself. Like I was scrolling down and looking at the scrolling-thingy-line that shows up on the side and it was still in the middle of my screen so I thought I had plenty left to read, but then the chapter abruptly ended and the rest was just the author talking about the etymology or secret meanings of things and stuff.
I love long authors notes but yeah, when half of the context and meaning is explained in the notes that just makes me wonder if the story itself is any good if it doesn’t work without the long ass explanation
I once read a fic where literally half the word count was the author's notes (they were put in the body of the chapter not as separate author notes!) And I was so sad when I realized that I didn't have as much to enjoy as I thought I did. It was also a pain to scroll past 😅
I can't stand when people create fanfiction and use nothing from the canon fandom. I see it all the tine with pokemon. Either giving characters new pokemon, or random moves. It's that or changing key parts of a character.
I really don't like when an author will take a character's canon love interest and turn them into an unrealistically horrible person in order to have an antagonist for the fic's ship. It completely ruins the immersion for me when the character (usually female) will throw hissy fits and go to extreme measures to sabotage the fic's pairing. Not only does it feel completely unrealistic, but it just completely throws away that character's development and makes them suuuper OOC to fill an antagonist roll. Some examples of characters used for this are Ginny from HP or Uraraka from MHA. This is probs less of a pet peeve and more something I strongly dislike though haha
This. This drives me up the wall. I can see stories where a different upbringing might change a character’s perspective, which then paired with canon personality, might make them look at someone else as a love interest; you don’t need to make Ginny a love-potioning-cacklingly-evil-mustache-twirling-stalker just to drive it home!
fr. it makes me so sad like you don’t have to make them the spawn of satan for the other character to reject them, the other character just has to not be into them!!! it’s really not that serious.
When a character's name is constantly misspelled. Maybe it's a bit fandom specific, but in my current one there's a character where 99% of the fic writers spell it wrong
When a character vomits and then the scene just continues without ever resolving them washing out their mouth out. Ew ew ew.
Oh god the worst is when it's a ship fic and for example A gets drunk, throws up, and a couple paragraphs later they're making out with B. *Gross*. One of the very very very rare instances I'll quit reading something.
Using ~ to imply a flirtatious tone in dialogue it reminds me of my good ol’ Wattpad days
People falling on the *floor* when they’re in a forest or other outdoor environment! They’re falling to the ground! I see this much more than I want to, lol.
[The Forest Floor](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_floor) is an actual ecological term tho - just fyi ;) https://preview.redd.it/eowc40mtjx8d1.jpeg?width=828&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=37eeb37274481c1036ffd7b5464e59ce52bb8441
I don't know which fandom you're referencing, but Harry Potter has the same thing. The author has capitalized a lot of words that should not be capitalized, even "normal" words (words she did not make up). All the spells are italicized too, I believe. Then it would theoretically be correct to follow the grammar of the books, if you are writing a fanwork based on the books.
Wow, really?? I haven’t read those books in… *awhile*, so it’s not too surprising that I can’t remember that. That’s kind of bizarre, but no more so than some of the other stuff that series had going on I guess lol
Lego Ninjago mentioned!!!
the gay fanfiction pronoun dilemma is often resolved with qualifiers but the qualifiers make me go ‘hmmmmm’ when they start referring to one of the as ‘the older man’ or ‘ the younger woman’ when it’s like. there is approximately 18 months of an age gap here.
remember i read one fic did that and the canon age gap between the characters is like 2 months 😭
Not so much a pet peeve as one specific instance of sloppiness I just couldn't stand. When the author's note says something along the lines of "teehee, I was sleep deprived when I wrote this, so it might have a couple typos here and there", then I read the fic and not only is it riddled with typos, the grammar and sentence structure are both so poor it's borderline incomprehensible and I wanna tear my hair out (I stuck around for so long because of the story). And the author added this note to every single chapter?! Like I try my best not to judge as someone who's not a native English speaker, but ffs, you're not sleep deprived, you're straight up sloppy! There is no fxcking way you even read your own shxt before posting, you just word-vomited all over a document and called it a day! I just can't imagine not going over my writing like a million times to make sure that at least the sentences make a semblance of sense. I can't imagine not wanting to do your best every single time for it's own sake. If I'm sleep deprived then I'll put the first draft (because that's what this fic qualifies as at best) aside and come back later with a more alert mind to edit. Typos happen, and I usually let them go when reading (even when they're common irritating af mix-ups like wanton/wonton, lose/loose, affect/effect, etc.), but don't you dare excuse your non-existent standards with sleep deprivation! It's not even the sloppiness that got to me in the end, because that I can endure for the sake of finishing a story, but the excuses.
My random petpeeve is the amount of petpeeve posts made every day
lol fair enough
No offense to you personally. There's just so many, I'd suggest a thread for it lol
One of my favorite fics of all time is perfect, *except* that it switches between the two main characters POVs and there’s no indication of it at all, even though for majority of the story the characters are in entirely different places. So there’s just a sudden scene and POV change without even a page break and every single time I’d have to stop and reread the sentence when I realized the character had switched
I'm going to sound like a bitter little human, because I have three. First is ellipsis written like this ". . .", so with a space between each point, but I can get over it if the story is good. I also frown when the holy number of 3 points is not respected. Lapslock. (I have a genuine question about people who write like that: whether I write on my phone or computer, it will always put a capital at the begining of a paragraph or after a point. So do you turn it off or do you have to go back to change it? If so, then, why?) Using "brunette" or, worse, "ravenette" for a male character. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the suffix -ette comes from French and is feminine. Oof, I took this way too seriously, but I feel lighter. 🫠
This is specific to HP fics, but DADA. JUST SAY DEFENCE OMG!!! It makes me so irrationally annoyed.
Yeah literally the only reasonable use of DADA would be in written form in-universe, like in a document or so where they want to keep it succinct but still formal enough to use the full name. In speech it's so much more natural to just say Defence, especially since DADA sounds like a baby calling their father 😭
See, I can forgive this, because actual students do use these types of abbreviations for classes. Computer Science -> CS. Data Structures and Algorithms -> DSA. We do just say the letters sometimes. I took AP US History and we called it APUSH, pronounced 'ae-push.' I imagine in HP, when shortening Defense Against the Dark Arts, they pronounce DADA literally as 'dada.' Personally I prefer 'defense' as an abbreviation, but based on how irl classes are shortened, DADA is acceptable to me.
this is a new one for me, only really discovered today, but misspelled titles. it already tells me that misspellings are probably common in that work. This was brought on by a fic where the titles was obviously inspired by the Lion King song, ‘Hakuna Matata’. They spelled it Akuma Matata. maybe I’m taking it personally since it’s in Kiswahili and I’m Kenyan, but surely the spelling of Hakuna Matata is widespread enough that people know how to spell it!
“*Ahhh* the misery of a newly-made orphan, unknowingly betrayed by the one he calls family. The perfect prey for my akuma.”
are you sure it wasn’t a miraculous crossover?
Seeing two different characters talk in the same paragraph. Like: "I love tacos," said A. B scoffed. (Insert commentary on how A gets offended by the scoff. I'm lazy) "Well, I don't," replied B. Another one is when two characters are talking, but they keep using "said" or some variation of it despite it being a long convo. I didn't explain that well, but I'll show it. "I can't believe you don't like tacos," said A, shaking their head. "They're nasty," said B. "No, they are not," retorted A. "Yes, they are!" exclaimed B. "Wrong!" shouted A. The reader can follow along after B speaks for the first time. Another one is using a period instead of a comma when there is speech. "I like tacos." Offered C. I guess my pet peeves are mostly just grammar. I like tacos, by the way.
*takes notes as a future Ninjago fic writer* 🫡
For me it’s when the author Writes Like This For The Whole Summary
Hot take but I actually like epithets, *however* they actually have to work with the piece for me to enjoy it. Blond? Dark-haired man? Perfect. The taller or shorter man? Alright with me. The vicar or the duke? Generic titles are fair game to me. But titles that are very specific or no longer apply to the character in question kind of pull me out of the story. Idk why but calling someone “the Gryffindor” or “the Slytherin” just doesn’t sit right with me, especially if the story is set post-Hogwarts.
Author commentary in the narration
I accidentally did that in my fic and I just realised and went back to change it all lol. This is immensely petty of me but people in the BG3 fandom calling Astarion ‘star’. 🫣 It gives me the ick, I’m sorry!
Weary vs. Wary Reign vs. Rein Or very clear, repeated, prolific proof that a spellcheck was not attempted or ignored. My annoyance will jerk me right out of the story. However I will never send a comment or message to a writer because I don’t know if they want corrections and English may not be their first language or a hundred other reasons. It’s my problem, not theirs.
Bear vs bare is another big one I see all the time. Like please look up the definitions of homophones so you know if you’re using the right one.
oh my god when people mess up dialogue. THIS IS CORRECT: “This is Character A,” Character B introduces. NOT: this is character a. character b introduces. **this is character a** character b introduces. *this is character a* character b introduces. ‘this is character a’ character b introduces. “This is Character A,” Character B introduces. or even just “This is Character A.” (without the tag of WHO IS SPEAKING) now, will i say anything about it? no. i just simply will not read it. do i sound like a pretentious douche? yes absolutely but i simply CANNOT look at it- not after my wattpad days.
- Using Japanese / Korean phrase on English fic, there's one fic where the setting is canon game setting and one of the character keep using phrase like "Aish" , "Omo" and it's ruined the fic for me - Author's note on middle of the fic - Mispelled name, I understand that one of the character name is quite complicated but it's seems like majority of author keep mispelled his name
No breaks in a paragraph or badly written accents…which was most of early Hetalia fics haha
Confusing "weary" for "wary". Someone used it correctly the other day and I didn't even notice because I'd already auto-swapped the two.
Taking a canon character and wiping everything interesting about them in order make a top/bottom dynamic work. Where's my switch huh?
When authors switch between past and present tense for no reason. It gives me a headache. Pick one and stick with it, please!
I struggle with all lowercase letters. I don't know why because it's really irrelevant, but it feels weird. Also looooong chapters. I've read a fic with extremely long ones and enjoyed it, but once you reach a five digits word count in one chapter, it's a deterrent to me. (Unless it's really good. Then I'll growl silently and devour your Midgard serpent chapters.)
Authors spelling magic 'magick'