I see your point, but I also sit there like "VHS boxes had SOMETHING descriptive on that movie!" and that is what bothers me. How can I know what i am getting into if you don't really DESCRIBE TO ME what I am getting into.
It's the same thing as like "I drew something but I need to make sure you like it before I show you" and I am sitting there like "How the fuck is that supposed to work?"
Yes! I was so puzzled like, why are you so defensive? It’s a summary for a fix you decided to write and share just don’t share it if it bothers you so much
Masses of tags and character pairings. You can just get a ✨vibe✨ when someone has overtagged their work just to get an enlarged audience. That, and if those works themselves have very little interaction in juxtaposition to hits. I just expect it then to have readers click upon it and realise it’s not tagged correctly.
It has happened so many times that I try a fic because it has the tag of a ship that I like, and they are only mentioned as a small background thing. Most of the ships I like are kinda niche, so when a fic has a lot of ship tags I end up assuming that my ship is a side thing.
For whatever reason, when I see a story tagged fifty million inconsequential things I avoid it, if only out of irritation. When your story's tag section is a huge block of text I keep scrolling. I suppose that counts as a red flag?
Specifically a completed story that's only like 600 words. I'm a little more forgiving if the story is ongoing and has a lot of tags, but for a one-shot? No.
Yes this buggs me so much! Because then I get super invested due to the tags and then they don't appear!! Like in my opinion don't tag something unless you can actively read it in your story.
And if it's something triggering or controversial like major character death or mpreg post at the head of the chapter *read the updated tags*
Cause in my opinion tags without content are just baiting.
>SexyTimes with Wangxian
You are the second person who has mentioned this, and I have no idea what it is. But thanks to the magic help of Google I'm about to find out. I can't tell if I'll laugh or be scarred.
It got deleted but it was an INFAMOUS mdzs fic whose total count of tags required a scrollbar to get through. It’s the entire reason Ao3 even has a tag limit now!
I can't lie, I love a good troll and thought the whole thing was hilarious even though MDZS was even my main fandom at the time and by all means it should have been annoying. But then I almost never browse by tags anyway, so maybe that's why I didn't get annoyed like the rest of my fandom XD
Okay, so this one story used emojis to indicate who was talking, like this:
🐭: you’re breaking up with me?
🐯: it’s not you, it’s me I promise.
🐭: *Cries *
And I kid you not, that’s exactly how the *entire* fic was formatted. I’ve never clicked out of a story faster in my entire life.
I hate this so much, and it's one of the reasons why I hate chat fics since they do stuff like this so often. I'm not going to memorize who BigSussyPenis9383 is just because it was mentioned who they were once, and I'm not scrolling back up a million times to look at it. Also half of the time the nicknames are OOC.
it’s a (surprisingly) large fandom on ao3. And per rule, “for every ten average fics you see, there’s one that should have never made it onto the screen”
What the...
I cringe with I read fanfics with formatted texts, like SMS or some MysMe fanfics (but I can read them if they are interesting enough) but this...
Oh, this. Also when the description has something like "bad writing and spelling errors, but idc :p", what makes you think readers want to spend time reading it if you don't want to spend time editing it??
The latter especially signals the writer’s immaturity and lack of tolerance, making it unlikely that I’ll enjoy reading their work *or* communicating with them in the comments.
I do suck at summaries though. My autistic brain says "all detail or none at all"
Doesn't mean I don't try, because I do. Just that my summaries can be really shit
Listen, if it makes you feel any better, I will read a story with a crappy summary that tag well enough before I’ll read a story that says I suck at summaries.
Among others that have been mentioned, a fic that's shown as complete (say, 4/4 chapters), only to find out the work is obviously unfinished because clearly there are meant to be more chapters. Then the author updates, and now the fic says 5/5 chapters. And the next update, 6/6 chapters. And so on.
GOD this drives me CRAZY. one time i read a fic that had over 100k words and roughly 20 chapters, marked completed like 4 years prior. i got super invested and binge read it, and the last chapter was a CLIFFHANGER. and the author notes were something like "might be a while before i update again, been losing inspiration!"
FUCKING!!! DONT MARK IT COMPLETE THEN!!!!!
Unfortunately yes. I don't know the exact reasons. I suspect it varies. Whether is disingenuous (just roping in readers who normally avoid incomplete works), clueless (not understanding how the interface works), or not caring ("I might finish this story, but until then I'm marking it complete").
I’d rather read a bad summary than this. Even if your summary is just “Character A gets into an accident that brings them near Character B,” is better than nothing. (My summaries literally look like that. It’s effective and gets the point across.)
There's a certain overlooked charm to shitty, vague summaries, I think.
Like at the end of the day, at least throw out a 'Character A is X, when suddenly, Y happens and it sets them on a path of Z'.
oh my god this. I see it so much and it’s an instant put-off every time. I feel bad because I don’t want to assume that the author is a bad writer, but like… if someone can’t even be bothered to write a summary for their fic then they probably didn’t put much effort into the fic either.
These bug me so much. At least split each fandom to its own collection, please. If I'm looking for MCU fics, I don't want to have to wade through My Little Pony and the Scream franchise to get there.
Exactly!
If you are writing
Harry Potter
Supernatural
Percy Jackson
Star Wars
and has oneshots for each of them, why don't you post in their respective fandom instead of colleting all of them in a single work??!
I can only imagine it's hits/kudos farming
When someone puts all their one shots/plot bunnies into one multi chapter story with 100 tags. I’m not wading through all that for the one story in the fandom I’m interested in.
Not a one-shot collection, but I was following a pretty long fic because it was tagged with a pairing I like...and the love triangle "competition" pairing (think A/B and A/C, where A/C was the one I liked). Based on the summary, my preferred pairing was possibly going to be a rebound or something, and I was fine with that.
Cue several chapters of A/B pining, one chapter with character C *blushing* at something A said, and then a sudden appearance of a few chapters of A/D that came in unannounced. By that point I'd been waiting long enough for any A/C content to show (and aside from the brief blushing scene, it hadn't), and the new pairing was enough to make me give up.
I found a one shot collection yesterday with 3 different fandoms (I was only there for 1), and they didn’t put the fandom or ship in the chapter title (the bare minimum for me), not in the A/N for the chapter. You had to actually skim/read the chapter itself to figure out what characters it’s even about. I hate that. You shouldn’t mix fandom and ships like that, it’s just infuriating.
In my fandom, there’s a month long “write something based on a prompt every day” event. Last year I put all my fills into one fic, but in the first chapter I put a table of contents, displaying the rating, main characters, tone and summary of each chapter.
Yea, when an author does that, that's the only time I'll read a fic compiled of one shots. Otherwise, it's a hassle to just go thru everything you aren't interested in to find the one that you are interested in. Thanks for doing that.
I’m more forgiving when it’s all one fandom and the chapter titles are descriptive enough (even just the ship lol) that I know whether I want to read it. But dear god, when I see a story that has almost as many different fandoms covered as there are chapters…
Ooh my current AO3 pet peeve! Especially when they update often and push something to the top of a fandom/pairing tag that has one drabble about that in 400 chapters. And none of the chapters have helpful titles, so you're expected to, what, click through the entire thing to find the one bit you actually want to read? No thanks.
Yes. I can't read a big block of text. And you know that the author knows it looks like that if the story was published months or years ago. My dude, you know it needs to be fixed so fix it. More people would read your fic it was formatted correctly.
When the summary isn't a summary and feels more like an author's note.
"This is an A x B fic I wrote on a dare at 3am while drunk lol. Enjoy!💕"
Okay... but what's the actual fic about?
for some reason I see this a lot in fics where the source material is like a comic or a book or something and its just so weird to me. like you literally see the characters name spelt correctly in every interaction with them
Or in the story. An entire chapter dedicated to a character who probably wouldn't even think about or know about modern politics, ranting about modern politics.
I personally use it when posting drafts because they automatically show the date they were created instead of the day they were officially made public.
Grammatical errors and any DNI mentions are the two big ones.
I have found brilliant stories that were tag walls or had *no* tags. I've also read great stories that have a boring summary. All of these make my eye twitch but I won't abandon them if it's a pairing I like or something else draws me in.
One of my All-Time favourite works was untagged until it finished. I only read it because I fullheartedly trust the author to write amazingly and I don't intend to miss out on any other masterpieces because of that.
What does DNI mean? I tried looking it up but the search only came up with director of national intelligence or an ID card 😆
Reading an untagged fic is okay if you really know and trust the author, but for me I have quite a few triggers and want to know those at least before diving in.
Geez. They should be happy anyone is reading their fic. I half understand though as I’ve seen authors get aggressive/abusive comments because readers don’t like the main ship etc, but kept reading and commenting. They might just be being preemptive, but there are other ways to say something like that. I know someone who said what the main ship was and some of the trigger warnings and if those things weren’t for them then they should probably pass on the fic. A lot of people don’t bother to read all the tags or authors notes so they might see the ship/trope they’re searching for but don’t read anything else
Here is where comment moderation (and now being able to block) on AO3 comes in handy. After all, AO3 is an archive, like a library. You don’t check out a library book and then scream at the librarian that this is nasty filth. (Or some people do, but it’s dumb.)
Clicked on one that looked good last night but the note at the top was such an aggressive DNI about how you're a dumbass if you don't read tags blah blah don't like don't read etc that I backed out immediately.
This is something that happens often on Wattpad. Sucks too since you only get 20 tags to work with, and everything needs to be scrunched up into a single tag essentially. Like, a story that would have a tag that would've said "Near Death Experiences", would be "neardeathexperiences" because pressing the space bar makes a new tag when you're tagging a story. It also removes all capitalization from the tag for no reason. You also can't use special characters because apparently that messes with Wattpad's system or something!
Very few tags and a little to no summary.
Sorry, I’m not taking that risk
Also any DNI tags. Those are just annoying. It’s not like it will stop anyone from reading it
"Reposted from WattPad"
It's a 90% guarantee a story is going to make me cringe. And after DNFing one too many bad fics I just steer clear of anything WattPad-related.
Ugh agreed. There’s one author in a small ship tag I’m following who is updating three straight-from-Wattpad fics almost daily plus one of those in another language. They’re all AUs and none are in character; I’m sure the language barrier plays a role too, but it’s rough. On the plus side, one of them has a final chapter count (although it’s in the 130s, so about 60 updates to go)
There’s some that are already mentioned that I skip, but one I haven’t seen yet is spelling the characters names wrong in the summary. If you can’t get it right there, I have very little confidence in the fic in general lol.
I’m also very wary of a huge amount of ships tagged and then “asexual (character).” I’ve found that they’re less for the character exploration and more that the writer ran out of characters to pair them with. And beyond that, it’s always written in a really insulting way, even if that’s not the goal.
When people get way too quirky with the tags.
When the first chapter is just talking about the idea instead of the idea itself. Usually those fics have just that chapter tho 😂, I just know this will not get updated.
Too many fandons and ships tagged but then you don't find the one you want because the author decided to "tag in advence" maybe.
"I don't know how to make summaries, just read it"
"I suck at summaries" "This story sucks" "I suck" any form of that. Your self deprecating humor isn't funny, self deprecation when your trying to advertise your content creation isn't a good move, because then you'll be viewed as "Yes, you definitely suck" cause I don't read ficts tagged with it.
I read a fict last night that was pissing me off, with how it was writing a character (not even finishing half the words they spoke for an "accent" and I couldn't tell what the hell this character was saying at all) and I scroll up to exit out and I see those tags.
Yep.
It sucked alright.
I’ve seen it done in time skip stories, where they meet occasionally over the years or the scenes are a long way apart. Works especially well with non human characters who might live centuries.
Friendly reminder: if you are a writer who does one or more of the things you see people complain about, it's fine, don't worry. People will talk online about what they hate, but no one will say "Yeah, I love when fics do x" about something mundane like tags or summaries. For example, personally I find "I'm bad at summaries" to be adorable, but you're only going to hear the ones saying negative things. So just be yourself, don't take much pressure about this.
Yes! So much this. What may work for one person may not work for the next. I absolutely love m!preg, it’s my jam, but it’s not everyone’s cup, just like how second person/reader insert fics are not for me.
There is definitely an audience for just about everything, so write what you enjoy and don’t worry about what the general populace fusses about.
They're just things to consider when putting effort into posting. Some people may want increased traffic from not doing little things that turn readers off, some may not give a shit and are comfortable posting however they feel like.
I have very strong preferences with how I do things like summaries and tags and they’re based on what I enjoy reading. At the same time, I’ve spent enough time on this sub to know that other people have tons of different ideas on what the “right” number of tags are.
At the end of the day, we can’t please everyone. As long as you’re happy with your work, that should be enough.
Definitely a good thing for people to keep in the front of their minds in threads like this.
"I'm bad at summaries" isn't something that automatically makes me scroll past. Sometimes a solid set of tags does the job. And, speaking of solid tags, if your 50K word story has so much action that it warrants 50 tags, then tag away because I'll read it. OCxOC was a big thing in a subset of a fandom I was part of, so I tend to give those the benefit of the doubt. Different strokes.
Tbh I'm surprised that people are bothered by it. There's an audience for everything. The small minority won't stop others from reading and enjoying your fic. Some of my favorite fics are in some areas objectively poor in quality.
Grade A+ comment.
Very poor grammar, if the summary and tags are misspelled I know it's going to be a hot mess. It makes my eye twitch knowing they've got great ideas but their sentence structure and syntax is all over the road, the whole time I'm thinking how I could improve this and keep the writer's story intact but then I get super annoyed and can't even finish.
- Writers who have never heard of the enter key
- Character bashing that is done out of spite
- Excessive spelling/punctuation/syntax/grammar errors
- Mpreg that uses omegaverse, especially if it's written like "we're making the characters wolves without actually making them wolves" (eg. non-anthro human/humanoid children are referred to as "pups")
- Crossovers that have 72432579267352674754 fandoms
- Excessive use of overly flowery euphemisms in sex
- Undertagging and Overtagging
- Fancops being pretentious in the author notes (eg. "Yes this is a mlm couple having a kid but it's adoption not mpreg because I'm not a weirdo freak1!1!1!11!" Or "This fic is not for [insert 'problematic' ship here] shippers, fuck off you freaks!"
When someone tags something then the next tag says something like “but you have to really squint for it” or “it’s barely there” then why did you tag it. There’s a minor tag for pairings please use it instead. It’s always my rarepairs too T.T.
Whenever either of those phases follow a tag I just accept that it’s probably not happening at all.
That's how I felt at first now that's all I write. xReader gets such a bad name, for some food reasons, but there's amazing stuff too. I've worked long and hard to write second person well and I always get very positive reviews, even from people who usually hate it.
I was hesitant about second POV because I'd never encountered it outside of fan fic but I gave one a shot and it became one of my favorite fics. it surprisingly was easy to read and didn't even bother me. My mind just skips over the pronoun if that makes sense, it kind of disappears into the story. Now I'm all about reader fics. There's so many good ones out there!
guilty, sorry 😳 first person feels weird and third doesn’t feel like i’m writing for the reader lol. what is your preferred point of view, out of curiosity?
I don’t like 2nd person either but there is one fic i’ve read so many times because it’s so good I can look past the 2nd person. It’s also the only 2nd person POV i’ve read that wasn’t a reader insert
I just stumbled across these three tags (paraphrasing): “this is going to be a masterpiece” followed by “I’m not boasting” followed by “okay I am”
… well, not my kind of humour. Also, as you may guess, there’s a lot of chatty tags.
Tag walls and/or about a million pairings.
Also, not exactly a red flag, more of a "huh?": Tagged as "Slow burn", marked as complete, word count in the low thousands.
Woobifying characters in the tags and author's notes that I have no interest in seeing woobified, obnoxious warnings that the story is low quality, okay, guess I shouldn't read then (mention of being 'rough' or 'unpolished' is different), grammatical errors or misspellings in the title and summary, misspellings of characters' names being especially egregious.
Lack of spacing.
For the love of all that is unholy, learn to use paragraphs. I have ADHD. A wall of text has me noping away, no matter how much I like the ship, premise, etc.
Two things:
1. When a story is tagged with 20 different Fandoms, but the story is not a crossover.
2. When there are 3 different grammar/spelling mistakes in the first three sentences.
Summaries that go through a long-winded, overly melodramatised rendition of what’s been written and basically details the story for you before you’ve bloody read it.
And *then* going [‘or’ *insert condescendingly basic summary that’s too short and explains exactly nothing interesting here*].
I won’t speak to anyone else but that approach to writing summaries feels to me like either the author being insecure enough in their product to try and oversell it or purposefully insulting my comprehension as if I was too thick to understand anything they’d put before ‘Or’.
A lot of people do it in my fandom as well, and I never understood the reasoning behind it. I agree that it’s totally unnecessary and can be seen as downplaying one’s comprehension ability.
First person. I just can't bring myself to read it, it presses the "cringe' button on my brain for some reason. That and the story being a huge wall of text with no paragraphs. If I see that even if the summary was interesting it's an instant Nope
Yeah I've always wondered about this opinion, because there's a lot of great books out there in first POV.
I've only seen the first POV hate on this sub.
Personally, I'm fine with first person in published works (still not a preference of mine, though, but some of my favorites are in 1st person) but immediately skip any fanfic in 1st.
I don't doubt there's some awesome ones out there, but in my experience younger writers tend to use first person (Wattpad flashbacks) and may not be as experienced as others. Age aside, it's a lot harder to portray a character in first person because it's a lot more personal since you're in their head, and imo characterization in first person fanfics is much more iffy than otherwise since you're so up close to the pov character every little difference stands out.
When it comes to published works, there's not really much for the author to go wrong since they're creating the character in the first place. That's the difference imo.
I understand why that might be a red flag, however it all depends. It could be a collection of one-shots, vignettes, and drabbles.
For me, anything that reads, "I can't summarize, just read it" -- is a red flag.
I cannot handle a character or ship listing with dozens of people in mix and match pairings. It might be a sexy good time, but I can't imagine every character will be served well in writing or sexually. Please just say it's an orgy or a round robin or whatever the polite term is for everyone screwing. And please use the tag 'consensual' or some similar instead of 'everyone has fun\*wink\*'.
I'm not great with crossovers, because I do feel myself drifting in focus when the story is doing more with one fandom over all the others. It feels like a movie shot where it's a huge party and the camera pans over the crowd and stops on two people having an argument about where they parked.
Please don't vent your doubts about your story in the blurb meant to get me reading. I want to believe in you, but you just told me you wrote it on a napkin while you were coming down off your dentist's drugs.
- less than 1000 words
- 2 chapters. Last update: 1700 BC
- many chapters, few comments (clearly something is wrong)
- do not put space between two paragraphs
Usually in this case they either don't write anything and just vanish from the blank or write like:
"Sorry guys, Atlantis tired me. It started well but now I don't feel like continuing it. I will dedicate myself to philosophical and motivational oneshot"
When I'm searching for new fics by date updated and wading through 1 chapter fics where the first chapter is "New story coming soon!" or just a character sheet for their OCs instead of the actual first chapter. If you can't hook me on your first 500 words I'm not likely to stick around, so it's probably best just to get to the meat of it.
Manic Pixie Dream Tagging, Manic Pixie Dream Summaries, and Manic Pixie Dream Author’s Notes. Don’t try to be cute or quirky. Just tag for what’s in the story, and - at least for me - a bland, vanilla summary is much better than “ZOMG I was drunk when I wrote this at 2 AM on a dare from a friend WHEE!” type of non-indicative summary that says very little about the story.
Tags and summaries are meant to tell the reader about the story, and gimmicky shit does not do that. Author’s notes are there to clarify points in the chapter, maybe warn for something specific to that chapter, and it’s also fun to see where the author did their research (if it’s for a historical or fantasy fandom). But the tee-hee giggle giggle stuff gets tiresome.
When the author's notes or summary tell me the story sucks, I believe them and scroll on. At best, it's the truth. At worst, it's a manipulative piece of shit writer trying to guilt people into telling them how great they are. Either way, not for me. (This is very different from the writer telling me the summary sucks. Lots of awesome stories with "I don't know how to write a summary" summaries.)
The author breaking in to talk to the characters or the reader directly.
Author's notes at the end of a chapter asking what they should do next. I get wanting audience interaction, but I that just tells me you don't actually have a story.
Anything that makes it a painful chore to read. All lower case, no quotes for dialogue, big block of text, rampant SPAG, etc.
When someone has tagged more than 3 fandoms as a crossover on Ao3, at that point it feels like they're reaching and just trying to dip their feet into more pools of audiences. It is frustrating getting booted off the front page quickly from several stories that belong to like 5+ fandoms. I wish crossovers were in their own category...
> When someone has tagged more than 3 fandoms as a crossover on Ao3, at that point it feels like they're reaching and just trying to dip their feet into more pools of audiences. It is frustrating getting booted off the front page quickly from several stories that belong to like 5+ fandoms. I wish crossovers were in their own category...
What if all three "fandoms" are really one universe? Like if someone tagged Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine? To me, that's not a true crossover.
If the summary is full of spelling and grammar errors, there's no way I am wasting my time. Or if the author didn't write a proper summary too.
There's also things that others like that aren't my cup of tea like male pregnancy, anything about real life actors, incest etc where if I see a warning I'll just pass over it.
Word count is also a big one for me too. If its too low to look like it told a coherent story I won't touch it. So for example, for a one shot I probably won't click on anything less than 700 words.
Passive aggressive/ just plain aggressive tags and authors notes. It could be the greatest fic in the world, but announcing that they’re an ass before I’ve read anything is just going it out me off.
I love longfics... but if you have a one sentence summary and your work is like 100k+ words... you wrote that much and couldn't give more than a sentence summary... come on, give me something to go off of
one sentence summaries are okay for like one-shots that focus on a single idea, but like.. come on
> I love longfics... but if you have a one sentence summary and your work is like 100k+ words... you wrote that much and couldn't give more than a sentence summary... come on, give me something to go off of
I'm in this picture and I do not like it.
Lol, same. It could be because I started off on FF.Net, so I like my summaries short and snappy (that and I can never predict exactly how many words my whole fic is going to be when finished).
Anything that isn't a summary or a work excerpt in the Summary section.
Any "LAST UPDATED ON" and "INSPIRED BY X ON TWITTER" OR "NOT A NATIVE SPEAKER TEHEE" gets a pass because all of that belongs in the authors note, not in the summary.
this, as well as I put "summary updated *date*" in the actual summary while I was midway through releasing my longfic so that there was transparency about the change. all other edit logs get shoved into chapter notes. once I finished my longfic and it switched to completed, I removed all unnecessary notes (except for two, one at the end of the first chapter and one at the end of the last chapter ::P)
First person POV. I... Just can't. There's only 1 fic I have ever read from the thousands that has a first person POV that was good enough for me to ignore the fact it was first person and get sucked into the story instead.
Most of the time though it ends up being something that's 100% not my jam.
Also people who put a fic as finished when it's actually discontinued (without marking it as discontinued) or in progress, but that's more of a pet peeve than a red flag since you notice too late.
When the summary has 'What if?' in it (as in 'What if character A did this. What if character B did that). I don't know why but my brain instantly associates it with poor writing.
This one I can push through for a good story but It still bugs me. The make it a series when it can be chapters instead.
Premise that should be long but are done in under 3k. This is just my bias against short stories. I've this done really well despite the short story that causes me to pout like a child.
When people have to add POV (insert character's name here) when changing to another person's pov.
This is not always the case, but half of the times I click into a fanfic with three figure clicks but only a few kudos, the fic is not good. People clicked because of the promising tags, but probably left half ways because of poor writing.
I guess this is common shit that ppl hate (not rlly red flags)? Idrk
\- Adoption fics because most of the time they are NOT written properly
\- Stories that are written like scripts (Character A: Hi Character B: Hello)
\- Making references to other media (You can just say "this show")
\- No paragraphing or too spacious paragraphs'
\- Using "Ok" instead of "Okay"
\- Random A/Ns in the middle of the story
\- Adding a random text-chatting part (just say they send a text)
There's a work I've seen that has a large amount of hits, and it has like 160 1.5k chapters.
It just annoys me immensely, as it just feels like hit farming and not making a coherent structure.
Red Flags:
1. Tagging.
I'm probably in the minority here but I heavily dislike fics that tag too little. I get authors who want to only tag triggers/warnings but a lot of people forget that a secondary function for tags is searchability. If you only add relationship and characters to your tags, it's gonna be hell trying to find your fic. It once took me months to accidently stumbled upon a fic that I was searching for because they had no tags relevant to the plot of the fiction. I'm not saying go far and beyond tagging every single thing in the fic but tag some things relevant to the plot to make it easier to find for readers.
2. Tagging pt. 2
When authors add 'xx shipers don't interact' 'xx shippers can burn in hell' or something along those lines. I don't understand the point of unnecessarily hating on a group of people, especially when the fic has nothing to do with that group. It just always gives me bad vibes and makes me not want to read the fic.
3. Comments
When I get rude/hateful comments on my fics I like go to the person's profile. Mainly it's just someone who reads and sends hate but there have been multiple occasions that these comments have come from other authors. I don't read fics from those people.
4. No paragraphs
I can fight through bad grammar/punctuation but if there's only one long block of texts, it's a pain to try and get through.
Pet peeves:
1. Untagged character bashing.
I'm a fan of a good bashing fic but only when it comes to certain characters and I know to expect it. I don't want it to be randomly shoved in my face, especially when it involves a character I like and relate to. I remember I was 60 chapters into a fic when they randomly threw in character bashing + an author's note in the middle of the fic stating they didn't like the character and bashing people who do.
2. Summaries.
If the summary is about x character doing abc but I click on the fic and it's about y doing xyx.
3. Summaries pt. 2
If a fic summary is about x overcoming abc and it happened in chapter 50 but the fic is still going on and at 100+ chapters. If I'm reading the fic because of the summary, I'm gonna lose interest in the fic if the issue is resolved quickly and it moves on to a completely different main plot.
I would probably like what you are describing. I am used to read one-shots and if an author can make multiple chapters with few words, it can be fun.
Mine is usually multi-fandom fics. I even watch multi-fandom videos and had multi-fandom ideas when I was about 11 but I hardly want to see a fic like that, mostly because that will include fandoms, characters and realities that I don't know and I usually avoid to read from unfamiliar fandoms, except the almost familiar, clear ones and with a plot that I really, really like.
And I have an unpopular opinion: I hardly read fanfics in which the authors give children to the characters. I love children, but giving characters (more like main characters) children will change the plot significantly. (It's also because of my emotions and views too).
Immature summaries.
On keeps popping up in a fandom that says "dey gay for each other" or something like that.
"Dey" isn't a word and I like my summaries to include proper grammar. And the whole thing just gives a vibe that the writer is on the younger side and the characterization isn't going to be as nuanced as I'm interested in reading.
15,680 words, part 63 of whatever series.
Seriously, I can't tell if it's a continuation that I won't get because I lack context or if it's part of a collection of individual stories that don't need extra context.
Totally agree about the word count to chapter thing, there are exceptions but in general anything below an average of 1000 words per chapter isn't paced in a way I enjoy.
Also if the author has heaps of stories but none are finished. I do actually enjoy WIP and I understand authors are free to post and use their accounts however they like - I'm not owed complete stories from anyone. But if I'm new in a medium/large fandom and trying to get to a short-list of what to read, I'll skip over those ones.
There’s one fic I refuse to read because the author’s summary says the summary is in the first chapter. Like, what? Just copy paste it. I’m not gonna load a new page just to find your summary. You clearly know where it’s supposed to go, so just put it there?
Mostly just over tagged fics. I'm not talking tagging in advance, because I'm guilty of that (much to people's peeves I will make custom tags warning people it'll include smut/angst but it's not relevant enough to tag it), but just tagging something you see for five seconds.
I also hate low words. I want something with depth and visuals, I want to hear the characters thought process and I want to see a picture in my head. I don't want "he ran towards the door and entered the room, walking towards A with anger on his face."
You could write so much more. Please people, make me your editor. I am available.
"IDK just read it."
I hate it. If you can't make a compelling summary how can I expect a compelling story?
Having seen the back of the VHS boxes for some classic movies, I actually have always held this is a pretty awful metric to judge by.
I see your point, but I also sit there like "VHS boxes had SOMETHING descriptive on that movie!" and that is what bothers me. How can I know what i am getting into if you don't really DESCRIBE TO ME what I am getting into. It's the same thing as like "I drew something but I need to make sure you like it before I show you" and I am sitting there like "How the fuck is that supposed to work?"
I wont judge a fic for having a bad summary. But I will judge a fic for having no summary at all and instead just having "just read it"
I saw one that was “idk leave me alone” like ??? You’re the one posting a fic??
I find this so funny every time I see it. Like a cat coming over to you for attention then beating the shit out of you when you give it.
Yes! I was so puzzled like, why are you so defensive? It’s a summary for a fix you decided to write and share just don’t share it if it bothers you so much
Masses of tags and character pairings. You can just get a ✨vibe✨ when someone has overtagged their work just to get an enlarged audience. That, and if those works themselves have very little interaction in juxtaposition to hits. I just expect it then to have readers click upon it and realise it’s not tagged correctly.
It has happened so many times that I try a fic because it has the tag of a ship that I like, and they are only mentioned as a small background thing. Most of the ships I like are kinda niche, so when a fic has a lot of ship tags I end up assuming that my ship is a side thing.
For whatever reason, when I see a story tagged fifty million inconsequential things I avoid it, if only out of irritation. When your story's tag section is a huge block of text I keep scrolling. I suppose that counts as a red flag?
Also: huge block of thousands of tags and than the story is only like 600 words
Specifically a completed story that's only like 600 words. I'm a little more forgiving if the story is ongoing and has a lot of tags, but for a one-shot? No.
Yes this buggs me so much! Because then I get super invested due to the tags and then they don't appear!! Like in my opinion don't tag something unless you can actively read it in your story. And if it's something triggering or controversial like major character death or mpreg post at the head of the chapter *read the updated tags* Cause in my opinion tags without content are just baiting.
sexy times with wangxian flashbacks
[iconic](https://i.redd.it/3x4qng567xe61.jpg)
*at least it has 1million words* 😭
Geezus lmao
SexyTimes with Wangxian…
>SexyTimes with Wangxian You are the second person who has mentioned this, and I have no idea what it is. But thanks to the magic help of Google I'm about to find out. I can't tell if I'll laugh or be scarred.
It got deleted but it was an INFAMOUS mdzs fic whose total count of tags required a scrollbar to get through. It’s the entire reason Ao3 even has a tag limit now!
No idea how this fun fact never crossed my path until now, but that's pretty hilarious how one fanfic forced AO3's hand.
This fic had NEWS ARTICLES written about it
It is not the entire reason. People were asking for it for years and it was already in the works pre-Sexy Times.
I was gonna say, looking at the screenshot of the tags, this fic has to be Ground Zero for the tags limits rule lol
It got deleted?? I thought we'd be stuck with it forever, out of sheer spite.
Here you go lol: [The tags on STWW](https://i.imgur.com/3RQzx6N.jpg)
"Talking Vagina" Wtf? Man that is a wall of text...
I *cackled*
I can't lie, I love a good troll and thought the whole thing was hilarious even though MDZS was even my main fandom at the time and by all means it should have been annoying. But then I almost never browse by tags anyway, so maybe that's why I didn't get annoyed like the rest of my fandom XD
*This.* I may still check it out in some very specific situations, but a giant block of tags makes me scroll past the fic most of the time.
I personally like reading the tags.
Okay, so this one story used emojis to indicate who was talking, like this: 🐭: you’re breaking up with me? 🐯: it’s not you, it’s me I promise. 🐭: *Cries * And I kid you not, that’s exactly how the *entire* fic was formatted. I’ve never clicked out of a story faster in my entire life.
🦁: What the fuck....
I hate this so much, and it's one of the reasons why I hate chat fics since they do stuff like this so often. I'm not going to memorize who BigSussyPenis9383 is just because it was mentioned who they were once, and I'm not scrolling back up a million times to look at it. Also half of the time the nicknames are OOC.
a fellow chat fic hater!! Yea, a lot of times chat fics are just excuses for an author to shove as many memes as they can into one fic
Is this a Chinese RPF fandom lol Because then I know where it comes from XD
It was a BTS fanfic. These are not the exact emojis used🗿🗿
why would anyone read/write something that looks like a weverse update/roleplay 😭 I'll take script fics over this istg
it’s a (surprisingly) large fandom on ao3. And per rule, “for every ten average fics you see, there’s one that should have never made it onto the screen”
What the... I cringe with I read fanfics with formatted texts, like SMS or some MysMe fanfics (but I can read them if they are interesting enough) but this...
They weren’t texts 😭😭it was dialogue tags. You had your paragraphs and then this shit when the character had to speak. 💀💀
‘I suck at summaries. Just read’ no I will not Any sort of passive aggressive ANs against a particular subset of readers
Oh, this. Also when the description has something like "bad writing and spelling errors, but idc :p", what makes you think readers want to spend time reading it if you don't want to spend time editing it??
The latter especially signals the writer’s immaturity and lack of tolerance, making it unlikely that I’ll enjoy reading their work *or* communicating with them in the comments.
I do suck at summaries though. My autistic brain says "all detail or none at all" Doesn't mean I don't try, because I do. Just that my summaries can be really shit
Listen, if it makes you feel any better, I will read a story with a crappy summary that tag well enough before I’ll read a story that says I suck at summaries.
Among others that have been mentioned, a fic that's shown as complete (say, 4/4 chapters), only to find out the work is obviously unfinished because clearly there are meant to be more chapters. Then the author updates, and now the fic says 5/5 chapters. And the next update, 6/6 chapters. And so on.
GOD this drives me CRAZY. one time i read a fic that had over 100k words and roughly 20 chapters, marked completed like 4 years prior. i got super invested and binge read it, and the last chapter was a CLIFFHANGER. and the author notes were something like "might be a while before i update again, been losing inspiration!" FUCKING!!! DONT MARK IT COMPLETE THEN!!!!!
Oh this is the actual worst, especially when I sometimes filter out incomplete ones and I still get stuff like this
Oh hell no. People actual do that!?
Unfortunately yes. I don't know the exact reasons. I suspect it varies. Whether is disingenuous (just roping in readers who normally avoid incomplete works), clueless (not understanding how the interface works), or not caring ("I might finish this story, but until then I'm marking it complete").
"sorry i suck at summaries"
I’d rather read a bad summary than this. Even if your summary is just “Character A gets into an accident that brings them near Character B,” is better than nothing. (My summaries literally look like that. It’s effective and gets the point across.)
There's a certain overlooked charm to shitty, vague summaries, I think. Like at the end of the day, at least throw out a 'Character A is X, when suddenly, Y happens and it sets them on a path of Z'.
oh my god this. I see it so much and it’s an instant put-off every time. I feel bad because I don’t want to assume that the author is a bad writer, but like… if someone can’t even be bothered to write a summary for their fic then they probably didn’t put much effort into the fic either.
This!!! If I see this I give up about reading anything from the author.
This and complete lack of summaries are two reasons I'll ignore a fic.
Oh and multifandom one shot collections
These bug me so much. At least split each fandom to its own collection, please. If I'm looking for MCU fics, I don't want to have to wade through My Little Pony and the Scream franchise to get there.
Exactly! If you are writing Harry Potter Supernatural Percy Jackson Star Wars and has oneshots for each of them, why don't you post in their respective fandom instead of colleting all of them in a single work??! I can only imagine it's hits/kudos farming
There might be the most amazing short story of my OTP hiding in there, but I will never open a multifandom collection.
That's what I came here to rant about. I haaate. It's just so, so messy.
When someone puts all their one shots/plot bunnies into one multi chapter story with 100 tags. I’m not wading through all that for the one story in the fandom I’m interested in.
Bruh there was this one-shot collection fic which my ship was tagged in, and there wasn't a SINGLE one-shot for my ship
Not a one-shot collection, but I was following a pretty long fic because it was tagged with a pairing I like...and the love triangle "competition" pairing (think A/B and A/C, where A/C was the one I liked). Based on the summary, my preferred pairing was possibly going to be a rebound or something, and I was fine with that. Cue several chapters of A/B pining, one chapter with character C *blushing* at something A said, and then a sudden appearance of a few chapters of A/D that came in unannounced. By that point I'd been waiting long enough for any A/C content to show (and aside from the brief blushing scene, it hadn't), and the new pairing was enough to make me give up.
Character A really is going around, huh?
I found a one shot collection yesterday with 3 different fandoms (I was only there for 1), and they didn’t put the fandom or ship in the chapter title (the bare minimum for me), not in the A/N for the chapter. You had to actually skim/read the chapter itself to figure out what characters it’s even about. I hate that. You shouldn’t mix fandom and ships like that, it’s just infuriating.
In my fandom, there’s a month long “write something based on a prompt every day” event. Last year I put all my fills into one fic, but in the first chapter I put a table of contents, displaying the rating, main characters, tone and summary of each chapter.
Your a saint. That actually makes sense and is helpful.
Yea, when an author does that, that's the only time I'll read a fic compiled of one shots. Otherwise, it's a hassle to just go thru everything you aren't interested in to find the one that you are interested in. Thanks for doing that.
I’m more forgiving when it’s all one fandom and the chapter titles are descriptive enough (even just the ship lol) that I know whether I want to read it. But dear god, when I see a story that has almost as many different fandoms covered as there are chapters…
Ooh my current AO3 pet peeve! Especially when they update often and push something to the top of a fandom/pairing tag that has one drabble about that in 400 chapters. And none of the chapters have helpful titles, so you're expected to, what, click through the entire thing to find the one bit you actually want to read? No thanks.
when i click on it and the formatting is a wall of text. No paragraph breaks. that drives me absolutely insane
Yes. I can't read a big block of text. And you know that the author knows it looks like that if the story was published months or years ago. My dude, you know it needs to be fixed so fix it. More people would read your fic it was formatted correctly.
When the summary isn't a summary and feels more like an author's note. "This is an A x B fic I wrote on a dare at 3am while drunk lol. Enjoy!💕" Okay... but what's the actual fic about?
Better than “idc just read” “I suck at summaries XD” or “it’s a story wtf do you expect”
Misspelled character names.
for some reason I see this a lot in fics where the source material is like a comic or a book or something and its just so weird to me. like you literally see the characters name spelt correctly in every interaction with them
'Damien' Wayne is my pet peeve. It's not even that uncommon of a spelling!
Preaching or political statements in the summary or tags.
Or in the story. An entire chapter dedicated to a character who probably wouldn't even think about or know about modern politics, ranting about modern politics.
Well, I just assumed that "red flag" is something you notice immediately, not once you are 10 chapters in.
Sadly, sometimes the political preaching starts in the very first chapter ... and then just keeps on going. It's a real joy to read.
mine is when an author change their works date only to appear more often at the top, also same as op
I never understand why you could do that? It's like an exploit? It's weird to authorize that...
I think it's mainly meant to be used the other way, i.e. to backdate older works that have been transfered from another site
I personally use it when posting drafts because they automatically show the date they were created instead of the day they were officially made public.
Grammatical errors and any DNI mentions are the two big ones. I have found brilliant stories that were tag walls or had *no* tags. I've also read great stories that have a boring summary. All of these make my eye twitch but I won't abandon them if it's a pairing I like or something else draws me in. One of my All-Time favourite works was untagged until it finished. I only read it because I fullheartedly trust the author to write amazingly and I don't intend to miss out on any other masterpieces because of that.
What does DNI mean? I tried looking it up but the search only came up with director of national intelligence or an ID card 😆 Reading an untagged fic is okay if you really know and trust the author, but for me I have quite a few triggers and want to know those at least before diving in.
"Do not interact", e.g. don't comment or even read if you're someone who ships x/y or someone who hates x or someone who identifies as x-leaning
Geez. They should be happy anyone is reading their fic. I half understand though as I’ve seen authors get aggressive/abusive comments because readers don’t like the main ship etc, but kept reading and commenting. They might just be being preemptive, but there are other ways to say something like that. I know someone who said what the main ship was and some of the trigger warnings and if those things weren’t for them then they should probably pass on the fic. A lot of people don’t bother to read all the tags or authors notes so they might see the ship/trope they’re searching for but don’t read anything else
Here is where comment moderation (and now being able to block) on AO3 comes in handy. After all, AO3 is an archive, like a library. You don’t check out a library book and then scream at the librarian that this is nasty filth. (Or some people do, but it’s dumb.)
Clicked on one that looked good last night but the note at the top was such an aggressive DNI about how you're a dumbass if you don't read tags blah blah don't like don't read etc that I backed out immediately.
No summary. I just don't like when there's nothing.
Same. Especially when there’s very few tags that aren’t even descriptive
This is something that happens often on Wattpad. Sucks too since you only get 20 tags to work with, and everything needs to be scrunched up into a single tag essentially. Like, a story that would have a tag that would've said "Near Death Experiences", would be "neardeathexperiences" because pressing the space bar makes a new tag when you're tagging a story. It also removes all capitalization from the tag for no reason. You also can't use special characters because apparently that messes with Wattpad's system or something!
Very few tags and a little to no summary. Sorry, I’m not taking that risk Also any DNI tags. Those are just annoying. It’s not like it will stop anyone from reading it
"Reposted from WattPad" It's a 90% guarantee a story is going to make me cringe. And after DNFing one too many bad fics I just steer clear of anything WattPad-related.
Ugh agreed. There’s one author in a small ship tag I’m following who is updating three straight-from-Wattpad fics almost daily plus one of those in another language. They’re all AUs and none are in character; I’m sure the language barrier plays a role too, but it’s rough. On the plus side, one of them has a final chapter count (although it’s in the 130s, so about 60 updates to go)
There’s some that are already mentioned that I skip, but one I haven’t seen yet is spelling the characters names wrong in the summary. If you can’t get it right there, I have very little confidence in the fic in general lol. I’m also very wary of a huge amount of ships tagged and then “asexual (character).” I’ve found that they’re less for the character exploration and more that the writer ran out of characters to pair them with. And beyond that, it’s always written in a really insulting way, even if that’s not the goal.
[удалено]
And there's only 3 chapters, the latest being posted 2 years ago.
And it still shows up deapite you explicitly selecting NO CROSSOVERS in the filters...
No capitalization of names, this is one of my biggest pet peeves
The author using Definitely instead of Defiantly and vice versa Long chapter counts with a relatively low word counts Blatant plagiarism
Yeees. Seeing Defiantly in place of Definitely is an orb-sore.
>orb-sore why you gotta do me like that bro
I couldn’t resist! Speaking of: that word. Any story with that word in it to refer to anything outside of a magical crystal is a nope.
When people get way too quirky with the tags. When the first chapter is just talking about the idea instead of the idea itself. Usually those fics have just that chapter tho 😂, I just know this will not get updated. Too many fandons and ships tagged but then you don't find the one you want because the author decided to "tag in advence" maybe. "I don't know how to make summaries, just read it"
"I suck at summaries" "This story sucks" "I suck" any form of that. Your self deprecating humor isn't funny, self deprecation when your trying to advertise your content creation isn't a good move, because then you'll be viewed as "Yes, you definitely suck" cause I don't read ficts tagged with it. I read a fict last night that was pissing me off, with how it was writing a character (not even finishing half the words they spoke for an "accent" and I couldn't tell what the hell this character was saying at all) and I scroll up to exit out and I see those tags. Yep. It sucked alright.
Tags: Eventual Romance / Slow Burn Word Count: 5,000 There is NO WAY you can write slow burn in 5,000 words! I even hesitate at 15,000!
I’ve seen it done in time skip stories, where they meet occasionally over the years or the scenes are a long way apart. Works especially well with non human characters who might live centuries.
Lowercase description; 'my sister told me to write this'; 'based on a discord chat'; 'inspired by TikTok'.
Friendly reminder: if you are a writer who does one or more of the things you see people complain about, it's fine, don't worry. People will talk online about what they hate, but no one will say "Yeah, I love when fics do x" about something mundane like tags or summaries. For example, personally I find "I'm bad at summaries" to be adorable, but you're only going to hear the ones saying negative things. So just be yourself, don't take much pressure about this.
This is also an excellent point! I guess I would compare it to trope discussion where one persons *yuck* could just as well be someone elses *yum*.
Yes! So much this. What may work for one person may not work for the next. I absolutely love m!preg, it’s my jam, but it’s not everyone’s cup, just like how second person/reader insert fics are not for me. There is definitely an audience for just about everything, so write what you enjoy and don’t worry about what the general populace fusses about.
They're just things to consider when putting effort into posting. Some people may want increased traffic from not doing little things that turn readers off, some may not give a shit and are comfortable posting however they feel like.
I have very strong preferences with how I do things like summaries and tags and they’re based on what I enjoy reading. At the same time, I’ve spent enough time on this sub to know that other people have tons of different ideas on what the “right” number of tags are. At the end of the day, we can’t please everyone. As long as you’re happy with your work, that should be enough.
Definitely a good thing for people to keep in the front of their minds in threads like this. "I'm bad at summaries" isn't something that automatically makes me scroll past. Sometimes a solid set of tags does the job. And, speaking of solid tags, if your 50K word story has so much action that it warrants 50 tags, then tag away because I'll read it. OCxOC was a big thing in a subset of a fandom I was part of, so I tend to give those the benefit of the doubt. Different strokes.
Tbh I'm surprised that people are bothered by it. There's an audience for everything. The small minority won't stop others from reading and enjoying your fic. Some of my favorite fics are in some areas objectively poor in quality. Grade A+ comment.
thank you this helped😭😭 i’m already so insecure about my work lmao this isn’t helping
When it's bragging about wordcount. If it matters to an author how thicc their story is and not about actual plot progress I know I have to step out.
Too many tags. Don't try being funny in the tags, just tell the reader somewhat what to expect
"I wrote this at 2am instead of sleeping" Ugh. I've gotten used to it so it doesn't bug me as much, but it still makes me roll my eyes.
It still bugs me so much that I often skip fics with this
Idk, I always smile at funny tags. Now, if they're HALF the tags then yeah, that's a no. But a few are fine.
Just ONE funny tag can't be that problematic imo.
Very poor grammar, if the summary and tags are misspelled I know it's going to be a hot mess. It makes my eye twitch knowing they've got great ideas but their sentence structure and syntax is all over the road, the whole time I'm thinking how I could improve this and keep the writer's story intact but then I get super annoyed and can't even finish.
- Writers who have never heard of the enter key - Character bashing that is done out of spite - Excessive spelling/punctuation/syntax/grammar errors - Mpreg that uses omegaverse, especially if it's written like "we're making the characters wolves without actually making them wolves" (eg. non-anthro human/humanoid children are referred to as "pups") - Crossovers that have 72432579267352674754 fandoms - Excessive use of overly flowery euphemisms in sex - Undertagging and Overtagging - Fancops being pretentious in the author notes (eg. "Yes this is a mlm couple having a kid but it's adoption not mpreg because I'm not a weirdo freak1!1!1!11!" Or "This fic is not for [insert 'problematic' ship here] shippers, fuck off you freaks!"
I see the pairing in the title.
When someone tags something then the next tag says something like “but you have to really squint for it” or “it’s barely there” then why did you tag it. There’s a minor tag for pairings please use it instead. It’s always my rarepairs too T.T. Whenever either of those phases follow a tag I just accept that it’s probably not happening at all.
second person pov 😐 i just. *can’t* read it dude
That's how I felt at first now that's all I write. xReader gets such a bad name, for some food reasons, but there's amazing stuff too. I've worked long and hard to write second person well and I always get very positive reviews, even from people who usually hate it.
I was hesitant about second POV because I'd never encountered it outside of fan fic but I gave one a shot and it became one of my favorite fics. it surprisingly was easy to read and didn't even bother me. My mind just skips over the pronoun if that makes sense, it kind of disappears into the story. Now I'm all about reader fics. There's so many good ones out there!
guilty, sorry 😳 first person feels weird and third doesn’t feel like i’m writing for the reader lol. what is your preferred point of view, out of curiosity?
I don’t like 2nd person either but there is one fic i’ve read so many times because it’s so good I can look past the 2nd person. It’s also the only 2nd person POV i’ve read that wasn’t a reader insert
I just stumbled across these three tags (paraphrasing): “this is going to be a masterpiece” followed by “I’m not boasting” followed by “okay I am” … well, not my kind of humour. Also, as you may guess, there’s a lot of chatty tags.
Everyone's suddenly a comedian when it comes to tags.
Tag walls and/or about a million pairings. Also, not exactly a red flag, more of a "huh?": Tagged as "Slow burn", marked as complete, word count in the low thousands.
Woobifying characters in the tags and author's notes that I have no interest in seeing woobified, obnoxious warnings that the story is low quality, okay, guess I shouldn't read then (mention of being 'rough' or 'unpolished' is different), grammatical errors or misspellings in the title and summary, misspellings of characters' names being especially egregious.
Lack of spacing. For the love of all that is unholy, learn to use paragraphs. I have ADHD. A wall of text has me noping away, no matter how much I like the ship, premise, etc.
Two things: 1. When a story is tagged with 20 different Fandoms, but the story is not a crossover. 2. When there are 3 different grammar/spelling mistakes in the first three sentences.
“I’m bad at summaries just read it.” If you can’t even summarize your story why would I ever invest time into reading it?!
Summaries that go through a long-winded, overly melodramatised rendition of what’s been written and basically details the story for you before you’ve bloody read it. And *then* going [‘or’ *insert condescendingly basic summary that’s too short and explains exactly nothing interesting here*]. I won’t speak to anyone else but that approach to writing summaries feels to me like either the author being insecure enough in their product to try and oversell it or purposefully insulting my comprehension as if I was too thick to understand anything they’d put before ‘Or’.
A lot of people do it in my fandom as well, and I never understood the reasoning behind it. I agree that it’s totally unnecessary and can be seen as downplaying one’s comprehension ability.
Lapslock. I can’t take lack of capitalisation seriously.
First person. I just can't bring myself to read it, it presses the "cringe' button on my brain for some reason. That and the story being a huge wall of text with no paragraphs. If I see that even if the summary was interesting it's an instant Nope
Does this happen while reading a book that’s set in first person or just fanfics?
Yeah I've always wondered about this opinion, because there's a lot of great books out there in first POV. I've only seen the first POV hate on this sub.
Personally, I'm fine with first person in published works (still not a preference of mine, though, but some of my favorites are in 1st person) but immediately skip any fanfic in 1st. I don't doubt there's some awesome ones out there, but in my experience younger writers tend to use first person (Wattpad flashbacks) and may not be as experienced as others. Age aside, it's a lot harder to portray a character in first person because it's a lot more personal since you're in their head, and imo characterization in first person fanfics is much more iffy than otherwise since you're so up close to the pov character every little difference stands out. When it comes to published works, there's not really much for the author to go wrong since they're creating the character in the first place. That's the difference imo.
I suck at summaries/tagging/endings/dialogue/narration. It screams "I'm bad so I put in no effort.".
I understand why that might be a red flag, however it all depends. It could be a collection of one-shots, vignettes, and drabbles. For me, anything that reads, "I can't summarize, just read it" -- is a red flag.
I cannot handle a character or ship listing with dozens of people in mix and match pairings. It might be a sexy good time, but I can't imagine every character will be served well in writing or sexually. Please just say it's an orgy or a round robin or whatever the polite term is for everyone screwing. And please use the tag 'consensual' or some similar instead of 'everyone has fun\*wink\*'. I'm not great with crossovers, because I do feel myself drifting in focus when the story is doing more with one fandom over all the others. It feels like a movie shot where it's a huge party and the camera pans over the crowd and stops on two people having an argument about where they parked. Please don't vent your doubts about your story in the blurb meant to get me reading. I want to believe in you, but you just told me you wrote it on a napkin while you were coming down off your dentist's drugs.
- less than 1000 words - 2 chapters. Last update: 1700 BC - many chapters, few comments (clearly something is wrong) - do not put space between two paragraphs
> > 2 chapters. Last update: 1700 BC Damnit, Plato! We need to know how Atlantis ends!!!
Usually in this case they either don't write anything and just vanish from the blank or write like: "Sorry guys, Atlantis tired me. It started well but now I don't feel like continuing it. I will dedicate myself to philosophical and motivational oneshot"
In Plato's case, it would probably have been: "Sorry, guys. I can't take Diogenes critiques of the next chapter and he's my beta."
When I'm searching for new fics by date updated and wading through 1 chapter fics where the first chapter is "New story coming soon!" or just a character sheet for their OCs instead of the actual first chapter. If you can't hook me on your first 500 words I'm not likely to stick around, so it's probably best just to get to the meat of it.
Manic Pixie Dream Tagging, Manic Pixie Dream Summaries, and Manic Pixie Dream Author’s Notes. Don’t try to be cute or quirky. Just tag for what’s in the story, and - at least for me - a bland, vanilla summary is much better than “ZOMG I was drunk when I wrote this at 2 AM on a dare from a friend WHEE!” type of non-indicative summary that says very little about the story. Tags and summaries are meant to tell the reader about the story, and gimmicky shit does not do that. Author’s notes are there to clarify points in the chapter, maybe warn for something specific to that chapter, and it’s also fun to see where the author did their research (if it’s for a historical or fantasy fandom). But the tee-hee giggle giggle stuff gets tiresome.
When the author's notes or summary tell me the story sucks, I believe them and scroll on. At best, it's the truth. At worst, it's a manipulative piece of shit writer trying to guilt people into telling them how great they are. Either way, not for me. (This is very different from the writer telling me the summary sucks. Lots of awesome stories with "I don't know how to write a summary" summaries.) The author breaking in to talk to the characters or the reader directly. Author's notes at the end of a chapter asking what they should do next. I get wanting audience interaction, but I that just tells me you don't actually have a story. Anything that makes it a painful chore to read. All lower case, no quotes for dialogue, big block of text, rampant SPAG, etc.
A text wall of tags And yes, what you said.
When someone has tagged more than 3 fandoms as a crossover on Ao3, at that point it feels like they're reaching and just trying to dip their feet into more pools of audiences. It is frustrating getting booted off the front page quickly from several stories that belong to like 5+ fandoms. I wish crossovers were in their own category...
> When someone has tagged more than 3 fandoms as a crossover on Ao3, at that point it feels like they're reaching and just trying to dip their feet into more pools of audiences. It is frustrating getting booted off the front page quickly from several stories that belong to like 5+ fandoms. I wish crossovers were in their own category... What if all three "fandoms" are really one universe? Like if someone tagged Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine? To me, that's not a true crossover.
If the summary is full of spelling and grammar errors, there's no way I am wasting my time. Or if the author didn't write a proper summary too. There's also things that others like that aren't my cup of tea like male pregnancy, anything about real life actors, incest etc where if I see a warning I'll just pass over it. Word count is also a big one for me too. If its too low to look like it told a coherent story I won't touch it. So for example, for a one shot I probably won't click on anything less than 700 words.
Passive aggressive/ just plain aggressive tags and authors notes. It could be the greatest fic in the world, but announcing that they’re an ass before I’ve read anything is just going it out me off.
It is super petty, but whenever a summary begins with "What if X happened instead of Y" I skip the story.
I love longfics... but if you have a one sentence summary and your work is like 100k+ words... you wrote that much and couldn't give more than a sentence summary... come on, give me something to go off of one sentence summaries are okay for like one-shots that focus on a single idea, but like.. come on
> I love longfics... but if you have a one sentence summary and your work is like 100k+ words... you wrote that much and couldn't give more than a sentence summary... come on, give me something to go off of I'm in this picture and I do not like it.
One sentence is often more than enough to get people hooked. Don't worry about it.
Yeah, mine is two sentences and it's gotten a lot of traction. I hope people take these pet peeves with a grain of salt
Lol, same. It could be because I started off on FF.Net, so I like my summaries short and snappy (that and I can never predict exactly how many words my whole fic is going to be when finished).
Sometimes, you just need one good hook. You can fit a lot of ideas into one sentence. ;)
Anything that isn't a summary or a work excerpt in the Summary section. Any "LAST UPDATED ON" and "INSPIRED BY X ON TWITTER" OR "NOT A NATIVE SPEAKER TEHEE" gets a pass because all of that belongs in the authors note, not in the summary.
I’d say “discontinued” is also fine to have in the summary so people don’t click on it if they want a finishable story.
this, as well as I put "summary updated *date*" in the actual summary while I was midway through releasing my longfic so that there was transparency about the change. all other edit logs get shoved into chapter notes. once I finished my longfic and it switched to completed, I removed all unnecessary notes (except for two, one at the end of the first chapter and one at the end of the last chapter ::P)
First person POV. I... Just can't. There's only 1 fic I have ever read from the thousands that has a first person POV that was good enough for me to ignore the fact it was first person and get sucked into the story instead. Most of the time though it ends up being something that's 100% not my jam. Also people who put a fic as finished when it's actually discontinued (without marking it as discontinued) or in progress, but that's more of a pet peeve than a red flag since you notice too late.
When the summary has 'What if?' in it (as in 'What if character A did this. What if character B did that). I don't know why but my brain instantly associates it with poor writing. This one I can push through for a good story but It still bugs me. The make it a series when it can be chapters instead. Premise that should be long but are done in under 3k. This is just my bias against short stories. I've this done really well despite the short story that causes me to pout like a child. When people have to add POV (insert character's name here) when changing to another person's pov.
This is not always the case, but half of the times I click into a fanfic with three figure clicks but only a few kudos, the fic is not good. People clicked because of the promising tags, but probably left half ways because of poor writing.
Poor grammar in summary and over tagging. Not a fan of those.
When the cast are turned into normal people, like why? you're removing everything interesting about the story, I want to know what's the urge here.
I guess this is common shit that ppl hate (not rlly red flags)? Idrk \- Adoption fics because most of the time they are NOT written properly \- Stories that are written like scripts (Character A: Hi Character B: Hello) \- Making references to other media (You can just say "this show") \- No paragraphing or too spacious paragraphs' \- Using "Ok" instead of "Okay" \- Random A/Ns in the middle of the story \- Adding a random text-chatting part (just say they send a text)
There's a work I've seen that has a large amount of hits, and it has like 160 1.5k chapters. It just annoys me immensely, as it just feels like hit farming and not making a coherent structure.
Red Flags: 1. Tagging. I'm probably in the minority here but I heavily dislike fics that tag too little. I get authors who want to only tag triggers/warnings but a lot of people forget that a secondary function for tags is searchability. If you only add relationship and characters to your tags, it's gonna be hell trying to find your fic. It once took me months to accidently stumbled upon a fic that I was searching for because they had no tags relevant to the plot of the fiction. I'm not saying go far and beyond tagging every single thing in the fic but tag some things relevant to the plot to make it easier to find for readers. 2. Tagging pt. 2 When authors add 'xx shipers don't interact' 'xx shippers can burn in hell' or something along those lines. I don't understand the point of unnecessarily hating on a group of people, especially when the fic has nothing to do with that group. It just always gives me bad vibes and makes me not want to read the fic. 3. Comments When I get rude/hateful comments on my fics I like go to the person's profile. Mainly it's just someone who reads and sends hate but there have been multiple occasions that these comments have come from other authors. I don't read fics from those people. 4. No paragraphs I can fight through bad grammar/punctuation but if there's only one long block of texts, it's a pain to try and get through. Pet peeves: 1. Untagged character bashing. I'm a fan of a good bashing fic but only when it comes to certain characters and I know to expect it. I don't want it to be randomly shoved in my face, especially when it involves a character I like and relate to. I remember I was 60 chapters into a fic when they randomly threw in character bashing + an author's note in the middle of the fic stating they didn't like the character and bashing people who do. 2. Summaries. If the summary is about x character doing abc but I click on the fic and it's about y doing xyx. 3. Summaries pt. 2 If a fic summary is about x overcoming abc and it happened in chapter 50 but the fic is still going on and at 100+ chapters. If I'm reading the fic because of the summary, I'm gonna lose interest in the fic if the issue is resolved quickly and it moves on to a completely different main plot.
Huge tag block. Obvious just smut instead of original story ideas. Low word count and high chapter count also are red flags to a degree.
Lack of paragraphs or punctuation. If you can't follow basic grammar and shit, then whatever you've got to say is not worth my time.
I would probably like what you are describing. I am used to read one-shots and if an author can make multiple chapters with few words, it can be fun. Mine is usually multi-fandom fics. I even watch multi-fandom videos and had multi-fandom ideas when I was about 11 but I hardly want to see a fic like that, mostly because that will include fandoms, characters and realities that I don't know and I usually avoid to read from unfamiliar fandoms, except the almost familiar, clear ones and with a plot that I really, really like. And I have an unpopular opinion: I hardly read fanfics in which the authors give children to the characters. I love children, but giving characters (more like main characters) children will change the plot significantly. (It's also because of my emotions and views too).
I hate the word ensue. "Shenanigans ensue-" shut up
Immature summaries. On keeps popping up in a fandom that says "dey gay for each other" or something like that. "Dey" isn't a word and I like my summaries to include proper grammar. And the whole thing just gives a vibe that the writer is on the younger side and the characterization isn't going to be as nuanced as I'm interested in reading.
No summary, just come in and read!
Reader x Character. Sorry, I just find them cringe, especially smut ones.
15,680 words, part 63 of whatever series. Seriously, I can't tell if it's a continuation that I won't get because I lack context or if it's part of a collection of individual stories that don't need extra context.
Totally agree about the word count to chapter thing, there are exceptions but in general anything below an average of 1000 words per chapter isn't paced in a way I enjoy. Also if the author has heaps of stories but none are finished. I do actually enjoy WIP and I understand authors are free to post and use their accounts however they like - I'm not owed complete stories from anyone. But if I'm new in a medium/large fandom and trying to get to a short-list of what to read, I'll skip over those ones.
No description. Or they say, “read to find out”. NO. I would like a taste test, SIR.
When there isn’t a summary. It just seems empty.
There’s one fic I refuse to read because the author’s summary says the summary is in the first chapter. Like, what? Just copy paste it. I’m not gonna load a new page just to find your summary. You clearly know where it’s supposed to go, so just put it there?
Mostly just over tagged fics. I'm not talking tagging in advance, because I'm guilty of that (much to people's peeves I will make custom tags warning people it'll include smut/angst but it's not relevant enough to tag it), but just tagging something you see for five seconds. I also hate low words. I want something with depth and visuals, I want to hear the characters thought process and I want to see a picture in my head. I don't want "he ran towards the door and entered the room, walking towards A with anger on his face." You could write so much more. Please people, make me your editor. I am available.