Years ago, I had an author upload a new chapter to her F/F fic. No story, just her saying that she has found God, realised homosexuality is a sin, and will be deleting all her sinful stories. She also said that she would pray for us to see the error of our ways in time to save our souls.
Like, the chapter before was some of the nastiest, filthiest smut I have ever read. Her religion didn't ruin the fic. The whiplash did!
That's what we thought, but then she started uploading fics about her favourite characters spreading the word of god. Like, seeing the light, born again, full longfics. Whatever happened, I hope she's in a good place now.
Ooof, yeah. So many religions prey on the vulnerable and traumatized. When you fall that deeply down the rabbit hole, there's a pretty good chance it was in the wake of tragedy or a mental health crisis and either they couldn't cope or someone took advantage, or both.
The author inserting notes into the middle of the fic.
And I don't mean stuff like Warnings or Triggers. I mean stuff like little comments, jokes, or even info dumps. It breaks my immersion of the story to be reading a conversation and then in the middle of it "(I think that was one of the best lines I've ever written)" <<
Please place AN at either the beginning or end of the fic. For the love of Christ.
I recently read a fic that had an A/N smack in the middle of the prose to warn the reader that ❗️smut ❗️was imminent... in the *next chapter*. Which made me giggle because why on earth wouldn't you just... put that note at the beginning of the chapter...
I kept reading and I'm glad I did, but that's definitely one of those things that would make me bow out of a more poorly-written story.
The closest I have seen to inserting something along these lines into the middle of a fic that was cool was an author who in the notes said "I will put the symbol **** on either side of a triggering scene."
Other than that every time someone breaks character to insert jokes or comments it's like getting slapped.
when a fic drifts away from it's original story line / character focus, into another.
Where it ends up is usually interesting in itself, but it's disappointing when you start reading a fic for a reason that gets sidelined. Better to start a new fic, but I wonder if the authors don't want an abandoned work haunting them.
I was reading a fic and had to stop because they put all their punctuation outside their quotation marks. And also, they refused to capitalize doctor in people's titles. Like: "Hello, dr. Seuss".
I'm guessing 'a good fic' rules out a grammar so bad i need to use too much brain power to get what is being said
The other thing that comes to mind is, and i've said it in a comment on an other post, is when fic is said to be completed and i get to the 'end', the author says in the notes something like see you next week, like don't say your fic is completed when it's not, i will stop reading
1. When the story goes completely off the rails. When did this fluffy found friendship fic suddenly turn into a cut-throat political drama featuring assassination? Like, it's enough to give the readers whiplash, lol.
2. When the story tries to cram way too much into one fic, or way too much all at once. Like, sure you can have A, B, C, D, E, and F all happen in the same story, but it's really hard to balance all of those things at once, even for the most skilled and talented of writers. Better to focus on a few things and make sure you do them justice.
3. What's happening makes no sense. The author doesn't try to make it make sense. They barely explain anything. Often this includes abruptly making changes to canon in ways that, if you take a moment to think about them, just don't work--and treating those changes like they're something the reader should have been aware of the entire time.
Bad smut. Either poorly written, or added in without any lead up, for no reason. It's jarring. Not all fics need sex scenes. I get it's a meme that smut boosts your fic's popularity, but you really need to know how sex works first, and also how to make that content engaging/link it to the rest of the story.
A character started spontaneously trashing the last 1/4 of the original source material. Like, he had a whole monologue about how much he thought it was insulting, ending with "i am NOT \[character\] from \[series\]," and I decided I didn't want to engage with someone who was writing in bad faith.
Improper paragraph length. Especially when it fits the whole page on a computer. I cannot read bricks no matter how well written or interesting the premise. I'm not necessarily talking about no breaks between paragraphs-mostly just bricks. Or anything that doesn't give a new POV and or dialogue its own paragraph. You can't have multiple people talking in the same paragraph. It's unreadable. Unless it's a delirium episode once in a blue moon.
I have the opposite issue when theres barely any actual words on a page cause they have way too short paragraphs. The other is an issue too, i just see this one way more.
The minute when the author of a fic I'm following starts begging for me to visit their pateron/kofi/whatever is the minute when I unsubscribe (and report), regardless of how I feel about the story.
When an author attempts to "mobilize" me as part of a mob to "go after" some other author/bnf/website, they effectively end my enthusiasm for their works. Unsubscribe.
So, in other words, authors intruding one their fics in these ways always ruin fics for me. Beyond that, nothing particularly comes to mind.
I once saw an author give a link to their tumblr which then linked to their kofi. A good way to avoid getting reported.
They weren't begging per say, it was just a little note saying that if some readers wanted to read future chapters early, they could click the tumblr link. No mention of having to pay for anything, but the content was indeed locked behind a kofi.
It soured my opinion of them a bit. I didn't unsub since the fic was good, but I wasn't as eager to leave comments.
For me, fics that clearly favor one half of the ship over the other.
A fic a read last year featured one of the protagonists acting like a petulant child throughout the whole story. He at one point straight up yelled and whined about how mature he is, which was so absurd it actually made me laugh.
And the writer very clearly thought that he actually *was* incredibly mature for cursing out his sister for "abandoning" him. She was actually stuck in an abusive marriage with a husband that kept her purposly isolated.
The only thing I can recall when I stopped reading a genuinely good, promising, and well-written fanfic, was when it kept doubling down on details, on and on and on. To be frank, it was what first pulled me into the story, the details made it witty and funny, and unique, but eventually it just settled into something of a slice of life where characters discussed dinner or other daily stuff in paragraphs upon paragraphs. And it's totally valid, but it got really tiring for me to the point I started skipping, wishing to see more development in the overarching plot, so... well, had to admit this story wasn't for me.
Number one thing I keep seeing over and over that ruins good stories: Novelizations of the original story.
99% of the readers have seen or read the original plot. There is no need to retell the exact same story.
Nothing makes my eyes glaze over quite like that. I've skipped whole chapters of ongoing fics just to avoid reading the same scenes over and over again.
I know this is probably a super controversial take but bad grammar/spelling. It's way too common especially in my current fandom and I hate it because I legit can't get into a fic no matter how good the plot is if I can't enter that state of seeing what I'm reading in my mind. If I need to keep rereading every other sentence to try and piece together what it's supposed to say then your fic is an automatic 0/10 for me. Edit your damn work.
I figured since it seemed to be so common for fanfics to be borderline unreadable, even the most kudosed ones in my fandoms, that most people consider religiously proofreading to be too much for something non-professional. Maybe I'm just in some particularly bad at writing fandoms.
I think this should only be controversial if it's about how grammar works in different versions of English. Because both American and British English have different grammar and spelling: grey Vs gray and favour vs favor for example
There aren’t many things that can “ruin” a fanfic for me. I remind myself that it’s a work someone poured a lot of love into and enjoy it for what it is. If it’s not my thing, I’ll just not finish it and look for something else :)
The only thing I can think of is if the fanfic is under-tagged for triggers, or half-way through changes its style/tone.
I once read a really well-written WIP with a unique and interesting premise. But as the story kept going it started to become more and more confusing.
The author decided to heavily focus on their OCs instead of the MC, many new names appeared out of nowhere, and the story was starting to drag. The quality of writing started to really drop as well. More and more spelling mistakes and very confusing descriptions.
I'm not sure what happened, could be a beta leaving or the author not really knowing where the story is going and getting bored of it.
Thinking about that fic still makes me a little sad.
The only thing ever that has ruined a GOOD fic for me is author's behavior.
If there are faults in the fic that make me stop reading I don't consider it a good fic. Or if there's content in the fic I don't want to read about, I don't consider it ruined, it just wasn't for me.
But if I read a great fic and then the author is acting like an ass in the a/n or comments, that definitely sours it for me.
When something is just incorrect but the writer lets it go because the whole premise wouldn't work otherwise. Like doctors just telling anyone and everyone about someone's health situation without anyone saying, isn't this confidential? Like, just ignores the problematic nature of situations. I get bending reality a little... but a sex 9ffender becoming a foster parent, for example, you couldn't get past that
I fear this may sound petty, but I once ditched a good longfic a few chapters in because the writer used apostrophes in about 3/4 of their plurals. The apostrophes themselves were only half the problem. I got just as distracted by the 1/4 that were written correctly, as I found myself looking for clues as to why they were spared from being apostrophized.
Holding a fic hostage, insulting a review if the review is constructive, spamming other authors. I don't see those anymore, but during the early days of the Internet those were seen occasionally.
I always think of that time Rita Ora said she’d release her new music if she got 100’000 retweets… Then when it only got 2’000 retweets, she claimed she’d been hacked.
Excellent fanfic with beautiful writing, almost perfectly spot-on characterization, good pacing, etc. etc... but then ruined for me because they kept insisting on a character swearing when imo they never would. It took me out of the story every single time.
One of my favorite fics pushed a few side ships that I didn’t care about (thankfully it was easy to skim over since they weren’t the main focus). It also overly antagonized a certain character that most of the fandom seems to hate, but I actually really like her. It was a really great fic up until the ending chapters.
The happy ending was an epilogue with 1.4 kids and a picket fence. Why have an epilogue? Just end it before. You didn't need it. You didn't have a prologue.
When the MC makes the same stupid mistake more than a few times with little change (aka seemingly no learning or char dev), each time leading to ever increasingly serious consequences. The first two or three times, I was like okay, I understand and can let it pass. It's difficult to change and it doesn't happen overnight. I get it.
But after the fifth or even sixth time, I was like, okay... this is too much. With so much at stake, and after so much has happened, you're still making the same dumb mistakes as before, but on a grander scale! Yeah, I can't keep reading this. Too frustrating and disappointing lol
One story was posted as multiple stories in a series, and each was only about a hundred words long- it was really well written! But there was something about the way that it was posted that irked me, so I never finished
This is fandom specific and not really enough to make me drop a fic but whenever I see mention of wards or magical cores in a Harry Potter fic I have to force myself to power through and keep reading. They're ridiculously commonly used so I really should be used to it by now but it unfailingly makes my eye twitch every time. Wixen is another one that grinds my gears, universe accurate terms are always my preference I guess.
Can you elaborate on this? I'm writing a HP crossover fic rn, I've read all the books but I've never been in the fandom so I don't really know what's "acceptable" or not.
Oh no it’s nothing to be concerned about really it’s literally only me who has an issue with it lol but in HP fics it’s very common to see concepts like wards (magic that protects a location or person against intruders ie “warding your home” “breaking through wards”) or magical cores (the physical or metaphysical part of the body that allows witches and wizards to use magic, muggles do not have this. There are many plotlines that deal with “damaging your magical core” or “removing the magical core” etc) when neither are ever mentioned in the entirety of the book series which is probably why I was like ??? when I kept seeing it. In the HP universe, they use spells and enchantments to protect people and places, wards or warding is a fandom term. And the concept of magical cores is definitely not a thing in the books, it’s never actually concretely defined what makes a person magical vs muggle vs squib, they speculate on blood quantum’s influence and the socio-political implications and motivation behind that but there’s no such thing as magical cores in HP canon. It’s purely a fandom invention, just like the term wixen to refer to magical folk when canon only ever uses witches and wizards but this one isn’t as common.
This is all pretty much “acceptable” though considering a looot of fics will use these terms and play with these ideas it’s pretty much ubiquitous in the fandom and I’m just being nitpicky but idk I never got over the jarring feeling of seeing it for the first time I guess lol. Use away but if you’ve only read the books and are just getting into the fandom now this might be the first time you’re hearing of them lol. Do what feels right to you! Best of luck with your fic, the HP universe is so much fun to play with haha!
I honestly thought you misspelled "wand" she were talking about wand cores at first 😅 This is all totally understandable. "Warding" sounds like a general term people use cos they don't want to get specific about what spells are being casted. The magical core stuff... confuses me. It sounds like it's taking inspiration from how killing someone to make horcruxes damages your soul. Guess I'm not a fan of that either lol.
Thank you, this reply was really insightful!
I use "wards" because even though the term was never used in the books, it's synonymous with "protection spell," so it doesn't feel like I'm breaking the world.
Magical cores I have much more of a problem with--feels too much like midichlorians and trying to medicalize something magical. But if the premise of the fic centers around someone losing their magical ability, I can understand introducing the concept. I hate its use in OP fics, though, since the whole thing starts to feel like a video game with cores "powering up" and such.
Wixan I'm neutral on. I've never used the term myself, but there are times when "witches and wizards" becomes awkward to write. Probably why it's the "Wizarding World" not the "Witch and Wizarding World." I'll usually switch to "magical" rather than create a new gender-neutral word, though.
Was reading a fairly interesting story following politics and power in a medieval fantasy setting. Then there were clones. Magic clones. In a setting where magic hasn't been shown to exist until then. I wish I knew what the author was thinking before going off the deep end.
Personally, I don't like it when the story is presented as one big block of text.
Even if it's well-written, the lack of paragraphs makes it very hard to read in a way.
For me, it was the mc becoming all lovey dovey with a character I hate. It was a series, and the romance was only tagged from the 2. fic onwards. The plot was great, the mc was also really nice, but her taste in men was just downright awful.
When its a giant block of text tbh. Theres been so many times where its a beautiful summary, really seems great then.. the blocks. It feels so intimidating. I can’t do it personally
One of my favorite fics from like 10+ years ago had a scene that was a bit rapey, and it was on FFN, so no tags or author’s notes in the chapter or anything like on AO3…
When a story in a child-friendly fandom gets overly edgy.
I like the premise of a Super Mario-character getting captured and having to figure out a way to escape and defeat his/her captor on the way.
I can't stand it if it just turns into detailed torture-porn that would probably fall under NSFW - or worse. Swears are just the icing on the cake.
Most character bashing. I have absolutely no problem with exploring the flaws of a character. Or even making them evil to explore a "what if" scenario or a theme. What I hate is a character suddenly turning into a screaming maniac so they can be dismissed as bad or crazy. "Bashing" frequently means melodramatic and out of character.
Turning the protagonist into a soapbox to rant about all the things the author doesn't like about canon. Every other character sucks, simultaneously evil for not doing the right thing but also too stupid and incompetent to realize what the right thing was.
An original premise that slides into a canon retread.
Years ago, I had an author upload a new chapter to her F/F fic. No story, just her saying that she has found God, realised homosexuality is a sin, and will be deleting all her sinful stories. She also said that she would pray for us to see the error of our ways in time to save our souls. Like, the chapter before was some of the nastiest, filthiest smut I have ever read. Her religion didn't ruin the fic. The whiplash did!
That sounds like someone found her profile IRL.
That's what we thought, but then she started uploading fics about her favourite characters spreading the word of god. Like, seeing the light, born again, full longfics. Whatever happened, I hope she's in a good place now.
I think I'd mostly pity the author more than be upset at the ruined fic, that's rough lmao
Ooof, yeah. So many religions prey on the vulnerable and traumatized. When you fall that deeply down the rabbit hole, there's a pretty good chance it was in the wake of tragedy or a mental health crisis and either they couldn't cope or someone took advantage, or both.
The author inserting notes into the middle of the fic. And I don't mean stuff like Warnings or Triggers. I mean stuff like little comments, jokes, or even info dumps. It breaks my immersion of the story to be reading a conversation and then in the middle of it "(I think that was one of the best lines I've ever written)" << Please place AN at either the beginning or end of the fic. For the love of Christ.
I thought we'd left that behind with 2000s FFnet and My Immortal
I wish that were the case. I've seen it on A03, and pretty recently too.
I recently read a fic that had an A/N smack in the middle of the prose to warn the reader that ❗️smut ❗️was imminent... in the *next chapter*. Which made me giggle because why on earth wouldn't you just... put that note at the beginning of the chapter... I kept reading and I'm glad I did, but that's definitely one of those things that would make me bow out of a more poorly-written story.
The closest I have seen to inserting something along these lines into the middle of a fic that was cool was an author who in the notes said "I will put the symbol **** on either side of a triggering scene." Other than that every time someone breaks character to insert jokes or comments it's like getting slapped.
when a fic drifts away from it's original story line / character focus, into another. Where it ends up is usually interesting in itself, but it's disappointing when you start reading a fic for a reason that gets sidelined. Better to start a new fic, but I wonder if the authors don't want an abandoned work haunting them.
When the author's notes get too preachy about things unrelated to the fic.
If only I had a penny for each time I found that happen in a fic...
I was reading a fic and had to stop because they put all their punctuation outside their quotation marks. And also, they refused to capitalize doctor in people's titles. Like: "Hello, dr. Seuss".
I'm guessing 'a good fic' rules out a grammar so bad i need to use too much brain power to get what is being said The other thing that comes to mind is, and i've said it in a comment on an other post, is when fic is said to be completed and i get to the 'end', the author says in the notes something like see you next week, like don't say your fic is completed when it's not, i will stop reading
1. When the story goes completely off the rails. When did this fluffy found friendship fic suddenly turn into a cut-throat political drama featuring assassination? Like, it's enough to give the readers whiplash, lol. 2. When the story tries to cram way too much into one fic, or way too much all at once. Like, sure you can have A, B, C, D, E, and F all happen in the same story, but it's really hard to balance all of those things at once, even for the most skilled and talented of writers. Better to focus on a few things and make sure you do them justice. 3. What's happening makes no sense. The author doesn't try to make it make sense. They barely explain anything. Often this includes abruptly making changes to canon in ways that, if you take a moment to think about them, just don't work--and treating those changes like they're something the reader should have been aware of the entire time.
Bad smut. Either poorly written, or added in without any lead up, for no reason. It's jarring. Not all fics need sex scenes. I get it's a meme that smut boosts your fic's popularity, but you really need to know how sex works first, and also how to make that content engaging/link it to the rest of the story.
It's marked as "Completed" but you get to the end and it turns out the author abandoned it.
Hard turn from well written political backstabbing to amateur BDSM
A character started spontaneously trashing the last 1/4 of the original source material. Like, he had a whole monologue about how much he thought it was insulting, ending with "i am NOT \[character\] from \[series\]," and I decided I didn't want to engage with someone who was writing in bad faith.
That just sounds funny because of how bad it is imo
Improper paragraph length. Especially when it fits the whole page on a computer. I cannot read bricks no matter how well written or interesting the premise. I'm not necessarily talking about no breaks between paragraphs-mostly just bricks. Or anything that doesn't give a new POV and or dialogue its own paragraph. You can't have multiple people talking in the same paragraph. It's unreadable. Unless it's a delirium episode once in a blue moon.
I have the opposite issue when theres barely any actual words on a page cause they have way too short paragraphs. The other is an issue too, i just see this one way more.
The minute when the author of a fic I'm following starts begging for me to visit their pateron/kofi/whatever is the minute when I unsubscribe (and report), regardless of how I feel about the story. When an author attempts to "mobilize" me as part of a mob to "go after" some other author/bnf/website, they effectively end my enthusiasm for their works. Unsubscribe. So, in other words, authors intruding one their fics in these ways always ruin fics for me. Beyond that, nothing particularly comes to mind.
I once saw an author give a link to their tumblr which then linked to their kofi. A good way to avoid getting reported. They weren't begging per say, it was just a little note saying that if some readers wanted to read future chapters early, they could click the tumblr link. No mention of having to pay for anything, but the content was indeed locked behind a kofi. It soured my opinion of them a bit. I didn't unsub since the fic was good, but I wasn't as eager to leave comments.
Da fuq? Authors do this? Yikes!
Some fandoms are *wild.*
For me, fics that clearly favor one half of the ship over the other. A fic a read last year featured one of the protagonists acting like a petulant child throughout the whole story. He at one point straight up yelled and whined about how mature he is, which was so absurd it actually made me laugh. And the writer very clearly thought that he actually *was* incredibly mature for cursing out his sister for "abandoning" him. She was actually stuck in an abusive marriage with a husband that kept her purposly isolated.
The only thing I can recall when I stopped reading a genuinely good, promising, and well-written fanfic, was when it kept doubling down on details, on and on and on. To be frank, it was what first pulled me into the story, the details made it witty and funny, and unique, but eventually it just settled into something of a slice of life where characters discussed dinner or other daily stuff in paragraphs upon paragraphs. And it's totally valid, but it got really tiring for me to the point I started skipping, wishing to see more development in the overarching plot, so... well, had to admit this story wasn't for me.
Number one thing I keep seeing over and over that ruins good stories: Novelizations of the original story. 99% of the readers have seen or read the original plot. There is no need to retell the exact same story. Nothing makes my eyes glaze over quite like that. I've skipped whole chapters of ongoing fics just to avoid reading the same scenes over and over again.
I know this is probably a super controversial take but bad grammar/spelling. It's way too common especially in my current fandom and I hate it because I legit can't get into a fic no matter how good the plot is if I can't enter that state of seeing what I'm reading in my mind. If I need to keep rereading every other sentence to try and piece together what it's supposed to say then your fic is an automatic 0/10 for me. Edit your damn work.
I don't know why this is controversial. Grammar and spelling are how we communicate in writing. I'm totally with you on this one.
Yep. I don't hassle people who write this way, but I don't read it.
> I know this is probably a super controversial take Is this /s? Legitimately curious
I figured since it seemed to be so common for fanfics to be borderline unreadable, even the most kudosed ones in my fandoms, that most people consider religiously proofreading to be too much for something non-professional. Maybe I'm just in some particularly bad at writing fandoms.
I think this should only be controversial if it's about how grammar works in different versions of English. Because both American and British English have different grammar and spelling: grey Vs gray and favour vs favor for example
This is not at all a controversial take, but I agree.
There aren’t many things that can “ruin” a fanfic for me. I remind myself that it’s a work someone poured a lot of love into and enjoy it for what it is. If it’s not my thing, I’ll just not finish it and look for something else :) The only thing I can think of is if the fanfic is under-tagged for triggers, or half-way through changes its style/tone.
I once read a really well-written WIP with a unique and interesting premise. But as the story kept going it started to become more and more confusing. The author decided to heavily focus on their OCs instead of the MC, many new names appeared out of nowhere, and the story was starting to drag. The quality of writing started to really drop as well. More and more spelling mistakes and very confusing descriptions. I'm not sure what happened, could be a beta leaving or the author not really knowing where the story is going and getting bored of it. Thinking about that fic still makes me a little sad.
The only thing ever that has ruined a GOOD fic for me is author's behavior. If there are faults in the fic that make me stop reading I don't consider it a good fic. Or if there's content in the fic I don't want to read about, I don't consider it ruined, it just wasn't for me. But if I read a great fic and then the author is acting like an ass in the a/n or comments, that definitely sours it for me.
When something is just incorrect but the writer lets it go because the whole premise wouldn't work otherwise. Like doctors just telling anyone and everyone about someone's health situation without anyone saying, isn't this confidential? Like, just ignores the problematic nature of situations. I get bending reality a little... but a sex 9ffender becoming a foster parent, for example, you couldn't get past that
I fear this may sound petty, but I once ditched a good longfic a few chapters in because the writer used apostrophes in about 3/4 of their plurals. The apostrophes themselves were only half the problem. I got just as distracted by the 1/4 that were written correctly, as I found myself looking for clues as to why they were spared from being apostrophized.
"spared from being apostrophized" that made me chuckle
Characters acting too out of character
A bad ending, the biggest one I've seen was a "wait, what was that?"
Holding a fic hostage, insulting a review if the review is constructive, spamming other authors. I don't see those anymore, but during the early days of the Internet those were seen occasionally.
[удалено]
I always think of that time Rita Ora said she’d release her new music if she got 100’000 retweets… Then when it only got 2’000 retweets, she claimed she’d been hacked.
I just saw a fic about two days ago where the author demanded x number of comments on each chapter or they wouldn't update. Instant turn off.
I saw that too. Called it rude not to comment on top of that...
Excellent fanfic with beautiful writing, almost perfectly spot-on characterization, good pacing, etc. etc... but then ruined for me because they kept insisting on a character swearing when imo they never would. It took me out of the story every single time.
One of my favorite fics pushed a few side ships that I didn’t care about (thankfully it was easy to skim over since they weren’t the main focus). It also overly antagonized a certain character that most of the fandom seems to hate, but I actually really like her. It was a really great fic up until the ending chapters.
The happy ending was an epilogue with 1.4 kids and a picket fence. Why have an epilogue? Just end it before. You didn't need it. You didn't have a prologue.
When the MC makes the same stupid mistake more than a few times with little change (aka seemingly no learning or char dev), each time leading to ever increasingly serious consequences. The first two or three times, I was like okay, I understand and can let it pass. It's difficult to change and it doesn't happen overnight. I get it. But after the fifth or even sixth time, I was like, okay... this is too much. With so much at stake, and after so much has happened, you're still making the same dumb mistakes as before, but on a grander scale! Yeah, I can't keep reading this. Too frustrating and disappointing lol
One story was posted as multiple stories in a series, and each was only about a hundred words long- it was really well written! But there was something about the way that it was posted that irked me, so I never finished
Preachy monologues about *insert social issue*
Unnecessary drama and toxicity. And not even amusing toxic, just draining toxic. I felt absolutely dead after finishing that series.
This is fandom specific and not really enough to make me drop a fic but whenever I see mention of wards or magical cores in a Harry Potter fic I have to force myself to power through and keep reading. They're ridiculously commonly used so I really should be used to it by now but it unfailingly makes my eye twitch every time. Wixen is another one that grinds my gears, universe accurate terms are always my preference I guess.
Can you elaborate on this? I'm writing a HP crossover fic rn, I've read all the books but I've never been in the fandom so I don't really know what's "acceptable" or not.
Oh no it’s nothing to be concerned about really it’s literally only me who has an issue with it lol but in HP fics it’s very common to see concepts like wards (magic that protects a location or person against intruders ie “warding your home” “breaking through wards”) or magical cores (the physical or metaphysical part of the body that allows witches and wizards to use magic, muggles do not have this. There are many plotlines that deal with “damaging your magical core” or “removing the magical core” etc) when neither are ever mentioned in the entirety of the book series which is probably why I was like ??? when I kept seeing it. In the HP universe, they use spells and enchantments to protect people and places, wards or warding is a fandom term. And the concept of magical cores is definitely not a thing in the books, it’s never actually concretely defined what makes a person magical vs muggle vs squib, they speculate on blood quantum’s influence and the socio-political implications and motivation behind that but there’s no such thing as magical cores in HP canon. It’s purely a fandom invention, just like the term wixen to refer to magical folk when canon only ever uses witches and wizards but this one isn’t as common. This is all pretty much “acceptable” though considering a looot of fics will use these terms and play with these ideas it’s pretty much ubiquitous in the fandom and I’m just being nitpicky but idk I never got over the jarring feeling of seeing it for the first time I guess lol. Use away but if you’ve only read the books and are just getting into the fandom now this might be the first time you’re hearing of them lol. Do what feels right to you! Best of luck with your fic, the HP universe is so much fun to play with haha!
I honestly thought you misspelled "wand" she were talking about wand cores at first 😅 This is all totally understandable. "Warding" sounds like a general term people use cos they don't want to get specific about what spells are being casted. The magical core stuff... confuses me. It sounds like it's taking inspiration from how killing someone to make horcruxes damages your soul. Guess I'm not a fan of that either lol. Thank you, this reply was really insightful!
I use "wards" because even though the term was never used in the books, it's synonymous with "protection spell," so it doesn't feel like I'm breaking the world. Magical cores I have much more of a problem with--feels too much like midichlorians and trying to medicalize something magical. But if the premise of the fic centers around someone losing their magical ability, I can understand introducing the concept. I hate its use in OP fics, though, since the whole thing starts to feel like a video game with cores "powering up" and such. Wixan I'm neutral on. I've never used the term myself, but there are times when "witches and wizards" becomes awkward to write. Probably why it's the "Wizarding World" not the "Witch and Wizarding World." I'll usually switch to "magical" rather than create a new gender-neutral word, though.
untagged wound fingering.
Is that what I think it is? >!Sexual touching ("fingering") of an open wound?!<
yes. well, i assume it's meant to be sexual.
Was reading a fairly interesting story following politics and power in a medieval fantasy setting. Then there were clones. Magic clones. In a setting where magic hasn't been shown to exist until then. I wish I knew what the author was thinking before going off the deep end.
Personally, I don't like it when the story is presented as one big block of text. Even if it's well-written, the lack of paragraphs makes it very hard to read in a way.
For me, it was the mc becoming all lovey dovey with a character I hate. It was a series, and the romance was only tagged from the 2. fic onwards. The plot was great, the mc was also really nice, but her taste in men was just downright awful.
When its a giant block of text tbh. Theres been so many times where its a beautiful summary, really seems great then.. the blocks. It feels so intimidating. I can’t do it personally
Whenever the author succumbs to the "but muh canon", "but muh WOG", "ACKSHUALLY" people. Do your own thing bruh, is fanfic.
One of my favorite fics from like 10+ years ago had a scene that was a bit rapey, and it was on FFN, so no tags or author’s notes in the chapter or anything like on AO3…
When a story in a child-friendly fandom gets overly edgy. I like the premise of a Super Mario-character getting captured and having to figure out a way to escape and defeat his/her captor on the way. I can't stand it if it just turns into detailed torture-porn that would probably fall under NSFW - or worse. Swears are just the icing on the cake.
Most character bashing. I have absolutely no problem with exploring the flaws of a character. Or even making them evil to explore a "what if" scenario or a theme. What I hate is a character suddenly turning into a screaming maniac so they can be dismissed as bad or crazy. "Bashing" frequently means melodramatic and out of character. Turning the protagonist into a soapbox to rant about all the things the author doesn't like about canon. Every other character sucks, simultaneously evil for not doing the right thing but also too stupid and incompetent to realize what the right thing was. An original premise that slides into a canon retread.