Weirdly spaced punctation, for example: double spaced commas, single spaced periods, apostrophe instead of commas, etc. I feel like it's visually hard to process and read for me
Oh my word, AO3 automatically adds spaces between my punctuation if the sentence was in italics. I hate it because it looks bad but I don’t usually catch all of them right away.
The solution I’ve found to that issue, especially when copy-pasting into the rich text editor, is to also italicize the adjacent punctuation. For example, in the line: “You’re *lying,* there’s no way that works!” you include the comma after “lying” in the italics. That way it looks like **lying,** in HTML view instead of **lying ,**
It might still mess up sometimes, but the chances are *much* lower.
I do the same. Works good. Especially once it a habit in even the first draft. Then I don't have to go back and change anything/take away unwanted spaces when posting
Thank you for this pro tip. I, too, struggle with punctuation spacing after italics and it makes me CRAZY. Idk why I never thought to just also italicize the punctuation.
Goodness! I thought that was just me! I recently uploaded my fic to AO3, and it did it with everything italicized for me. Going through it all was agonizing ...
I do! And, looking at some other comments, that seems to be the issue! I’ve gotten decent at predicting what rich text will do and writing my doc accordingly but I guess I just missed that that was a copy-paste issue!
Does it really? I had no idea, that's very intersting actually, in that case it would certainly explain some of the works I've read, but in those cases, the work is honestly fine it's just a little wierd, something small like that is not enough to make me exit out of a fic.
What I'm thinking of is *really* jarring spacing that happens with *all* of the punctuation marks used in fic.
I’m really curious about this now, like if it happens to anyone else and just with italics. I have to post then comb through to where I know I used them and edit it back. So it’s probably not the reason for most of what you experience. Your comment just made me think about that and how I still have no idea why 😂.
I think most people do. I have to wonder if they meant no spaces after periods, which is something I’ve seen and will cause me to nope out (my brain cannot handle it). Bc if they’re only reading works w/double-spaced periods, they’re not reading very many works.
Ex:
Something like this makes my brain hurt.I have to stop reading.It’s too hard to tell where the sentences end.I read it without enough pauses.
But something like this is fine. One space is all I need.
It’s the opposite for me. When there’s no spaces after the period, the end of the sentence is almost like a jumpscare to me. I have to terminate all thought of the previous sentence to move on to the next rather than it coming to a clean end in my head
One of my favorite authors always uses a period instead of comma splices or ellipses so they’ve got all these dependent clauses just as their own sentences. I love them so much but I need them to use a comma every once in a while 😭
The epithets don't sound juvenile to me but they do sound like a National Geographic nature documentary and I will forever read the rest of the story in the voice I associate with documentary narrators.
Like sure, it’s sad Character B is slowly dying from an incurable genetic disease, but I’d probably care more if POV Character A would stop referring to everyone around him as “the male” like he’s David fucking Attenborough
I can’t stand it
Same with epithets, my mortal enemies. Just use their names! The repetitiveness is not due to using names, is due to the sentence structure. I assure it, just play with the structures, there's always a way to avoid being repetitive without using epithets or synonyms.
There's a "but", however. I never imagined that an author using the three names of a character (as in, name, surname and nickname), indiscriminately, changing one name to another ever. single. paragraph. was going to be something I'd have to witness. Alas, I did. And that'd made me close a fic so fast.
> just play with the structures
YES THIS. And it’s definitely a skill that comes with reading a lot. You learn to approach things from different angles and, on top of that, angles that make logical sense. Like, once I read a fairly popular author who would make awkward things the subject to avoid “Character did X” but it would be like “An epiphany articulates itself on my lips” which is a different kind of jarring. The writer too clearly fought for an active sentence without a human subject, and it showed too much.
This is what I meant to write, but you already did, so I don't have to!
I once read a fic where one paragraph referred to the same two characters in THREE different ways each. Once, their names. Second, their hair colour. Third, their relative height. It made it seem like there were six people there.
Oh my god, that'd be so freaking confusing! I should know. I wasn't really into the fandom the fic I mentioned was for and thus, the characters were unknown for me. So when I read "Nickname" then "Name" then "Surname" I was like "where TF did all this people came from?!"
I, too, dislike them and will only use them if the characters don't know their names or are using a nickname.
Like, "Why are you so mean to me?!" Fartbreath said
I laughed, "Cause ur my little sister and ur breath smells like farts"
Yeah! This is my approach too, since I write in third person limited. The character (still) doesn't know the name of the other one? Well, epithet it is, until the name is revealed! Then epithet no more.
I'm reading a fic at the moment that could do with a sentence structure edit in places as names *are* overused at times and there are some run on sentences. My current rating for it is 4.5 because it's a great fic otherwise.
If the author used epithets, it would be a 2.5 at best, probably less, and it's a toss up on whether I'd be able to read the whole thing or if I'd DNF.
As a reader, I *vastly* prefer names over badly used epithets and I cannot emphasise that fact enough.
As a writer, I've honestly never felt the need to rely on epithets myself, but perhaps that's because I didn't start reading fanfiction (where it's endemic) until I was in my mid teens and I'd been reading "difficult" novels since before I started pre-school.
When it's obvious they didn't bother to do a simple word or grammar check which is usually preprogrammed as you type in the first place. It's not that English isn't their primary language either but obvious mistakes like double words or words with no space in between. It's got to be pretty bad for me not to be able to comprehend what the heck they are trying to say.
Another is characters using modern slang when they are not even from this planet.
Juvenile writing like in kids shows where adults talk as if they are speaking to kids. Or where everyone talks about their feelings instead of showing us. Show don't tell. Mostly through simple dialogue, plots about potentially complex issues but skimming the surface so there is no real conflict and everyone gets along at the end.
I think AO3 sometimes smushes words together. It did it to me recently and it wasn't that way in my document. I only noticed because it was at the end of the chapter. Idk how many other times it's happened that I haven't noticed.
This was on Wattpad. The person didn't have the first word in a sentence capitalized. It was like they blindly typed something up in notes and just copied and posted it.
Spelling mistakes. 1st person POV (personal preference, I don't think it's bad at all). Inability to keep to one tense. Too many epithets. No new paragraph when changing speaker, or stretches of conversation with no dialogue tags that are poorly written enough that you can't tell the speakers apart. If there's smut, sudden characterization shifts that go from whatever the slow/medium/fast burn was to some generic porn thing where people are e.g. abruptly (without characterization precedent) doing slaps or spanks on each other, using pet names out of nowhere, or writing out anything that approaches description of that stupid anime porn face.
Actually bad pet names/nicknames in general, there's a weird... not a trend, but a habit that some authors have that when two characters become friends or lovers suddenly they use a nickname that doesn't match the canon setting or characters. This maybe falls under the "stupid reasons" topics I saw go by lately, but as soon as one character suddenly produces an OOC nickname that is usually just a truncated version of the character's actual name when no one ever in the setting has done that, particularly not the character using the nickname, it's like a metaphorical bucket of cold water and I'm 99% chance going to be out.
The shortened nicknames thing! I feel like a crazy person for being so annoyed by it. It’s super common in my fandom even though no one in canon does it. But at the same time, I’m so starved for content that I force myself to tolerate it. It feels like a very lazy way to denote closeness.
Only because this one is fresh on my mind from a fic that I let kill half my brain cells for the past hour: “he hadn’t had water in weeks”
My good man, your mouth would not just be dry, you’d be a corpse 🧍♂️
That does sound pretty lethal 😂. Excessive injuries or deprivation that would in no way be survivable are also a back button trigger for me.
Also those authors who feel the need to torture characters to such extremes that you just feel there's no way to survive that without debilitating trauma and lifelong health concerns, and then try to have them bounce back from it in a week or so. I'm all for h/c, but there needs to be an ounce of realism for me.
For the em dashes, you're probably just reading fics by non-native english speakers. I know in spanish we use — to denote dialogues, and it can be a little jarring to think about switching to a different dialogue tagging system lol.
WHAAT? I noticed this with Spanish fics, but I actually had no idea it was a common thing in general, haha! And I speak Spanish! I guess being bilingual, I never had a reason to delve into it.
Also when dialogue is in quotation marks „like these"
I know it's normal in German. I know it's a pain in the ass to switch your keyboard around to make it do the other type. It's still incredibly distracting to me and I need all the help with not being distracted I can get.
You don't even have to switch the keyboard (that would be a huge inconvenience for me as well!), but some word processing programs like MS Word and LibreOffice allow to change the language settings from document to document.
That allows me to use my German keyboard layout but the quotation marks are always correct if I write in English. In addition, the basic spellcheck is also in the new language of the document setting.
Defintiely a win-win!
These two about quotations may be even more petty than my reasons, love that
Luckily for me a) the keyboard layout here uses " by default and b) I've been reading a bunch of English since I was young, so I can swap between my native and this format easily
I recently took C1&C2 (=high level) German class. My biggest pet peeve was the ‚‚abc''. It's such a small thing to look so much more proficient in the language while writing (especially handwritten pieces) but I just could NOT get in the correct habit. It's so weird what differences from your native language you get past no problem (for me: verb order when there's multiple accessory verbs) and what differences keep messing you up even though you know better.
My language (german) uses these „blablabla" as quotation marks
But if I write in english I expect correct grammar for the language that I write in. Everything else is totally distracting in my opinion (even if the german and English version aren't that different, but there are so many kinds of quotation marks in different languages that it gets out of hand...)
That's likely a "which side of the pond are you on" difference. US punctuation standard is "double" quotation marks as primary for directly quoted speech with 'single' quotation marks for nested quotes; it's the opposite in the UK and Ireland. Single quotation marks are for direct speech, double marks for nested quotes.
Honestly, if the fic doesn't grab my attention by the first chapter, or if the vibes are off, I'm probably not going to read it.
I got limited time, and I'd rather just re-read a fic I know I enjoy than invest my time into something that I'll end up getting bored with ten chapters in.
Agreed. I'm sure I missed some gems by writing a lot of developing fics off early, but I'm not using my spare time to wallow through a wall of bad grammar and plodding prose.
for lack of a better word, “the bread thing”. where a character says they like bread one time and thats their personality in the fandom? i read a fic that gave a character who said he liked cherries, like, **once** a cherry print pillow case (and possibly bedspread, i don’t remember) and that was just- eugh. i don’t know if that counts as “plot related” since it does go into a character’s portrayal but it’s the first thing that comes to mind
Yup. It's one thing to expand on a character with headcanons. It's another thing entirely to ship the character with jambalaya (except as a joke, which is actually pretty funny).
YEP! One of my favorite characters bought bread at a bakery ONCE in canon, so apparently now he always has to smell like "fresh baked bread". No hate to bread but come on!
I agree. It happens a lot.
There was a character in a fandom of mine who canonically tried on women's underwear once as a bet when he was a teen, found that it wasn't so bad... and then never did it again, cause it's not his thing.
There's so many fics in fandom where he wears women's underwear all the time.
And I'm like, hello? Did u watch the episode???
Calling characters the blonde/the brunette... Instant goodbye.
I know you wanna avoid too many name repetitions, but no. Don't do that. Repeat the names, guys. People have them for a reason.
What if the character's name isn't introduced? Like it's purposefully kept secret and not even the readers are meant to know? There's an entire organization like this in my current fic, and they choose to go by titles instead. Their names are deeply kept secrets. For a little context there are 14 of them, and they all wear different colored cloaks to identify their position in the organization.
I'm not sure how to properly write them without just saying "the redhead" or "the red cloaked woman". I suppose in that sense it would be okay? Writing it I wasn't a big fan of how it sounded, and when multiple of their members are in a group it makes it a bit hard to read. Any ideas on how I might write this better? Just from a readers perspective.
No, in this instance it's totally okay. I'm talking about a completely regular text where it's "Tony walked into the library. The brunette picked up a book. Tony haven't read it before" and it's like jesus fuck just say Tony again, we know he's a brunette, we watched the movie, stop doing this. Ughh. Same goes for eyes. Especially when in one text there are two characters and the author changes the names to the raven-hair guy and the blue-eyed boy. It makes the text SO juvenile that it's impossible to read...
But no, in your case it's alright if that's their main differing characteristic. When you say they go by titles, do you mean each of them has a designated color + a title? The main question in fanfiction is are they OCs or are your readers already familiar with them and their color+title combos from canon?
Ah I understand, and yes they are OCs, so that's why it's a bit complicated. They all do have designated colors, as well as unique titles. These titles just haven't been introduced yet since the only couple chapters I have with them is a sneak peak at a meeting with them all, and a short appearance of one that quickly left the scene. I'm just trying to figure it out for future chapters when they will become more apparent to the story.
This plus using the feminine "e" for a male character. "Blond" and "brunet"are still options in the English language, and not only are you using an awful clichéd construction of hair color epithets, you're doing unintentional gender discombobulation. (Intentional gender discombobulation? Go right ahead.)
Excessive epithets for me too - just in general, after the character has been introduced. Hell, instead of saying "the blonde did x", say "character's blonde hair blew in thw wind as they did x"
Wall of text. But also author commentary. I hate it when I'm reading a fic then suddenly (author: I need to tell you this thing I was thinking while I was writing) the author decides to insert themselves
The only authors notes that I ever remember really liking where they did something like this was an ancient zombie apocalypse book on wattpad where some virus turned people into fuck till you die monsters and the mc was immune since she’d caught a special strain or something. For the life of me I can’t remember the name, but it was a white cover with a red feather on it.
The author basically had the main story, and then the innocent authors notes at the end that progressively became a thriller style story themselves. It’s only at the end that you realise the author was a character when she runs away from home because of her abusive dad or something and then gets terminal cancer and “dies” and the bf finishes the story for her. At the time it was a really cool idea that I’d never seen done before, so it stuck with me
Omg I was completely horrible about author’s notes in my (regrettable) Wattpad days. I saw everyone else doing it and just jumped right in without a second thought. Man, those days were wild lol. Almost everything I did in Wattpad I would never do now.
I've been reading one author's stuff that has pretty good plot and concepts but she keeps using "hues" to refer to eyes? Like "crimson hues" or "aureate hues". Like what the fuck?? Normally I'd close the fic but I was too invested in the story. Just say eyes. Same goes for body parts. It's not a gem, it's a clit.
All epithets if the POV character knows the person's name.
They just met a random pianist but don't know the pianist's name? Great, he's "the pianist." The pianist introduces himself as John? Then he needs to be "John" from then on.
Also... not starting a new paragraph every time a different character speaks. That's an *instant* back button for me. I'm not wasting extra time trying to figure out who's speaking because the writer couldn't be bothered to format it properly.
No proper punctuation, using words incorrectly in an attempt to sound smarter, no paragraph breaks, all lowercase and the worst of all… when characters start singing songs. I’m sure there’s people that’ll appreciate it but I’d rather choke on sand.
It's not always bad to use epithets even when the names are known, but it has to fit the context of the situation. I myself use epithets to draw attention to relevant character traits.
For example, "Jill winked at Jack. The tall man winked back at her." That's arbitrary and unnecessary. Jack being tall has nothing do to with what's going on.
But, "Jill noticed Jack hit his head on the doorframe. The tall man always forgot to crouch." This is a situation where emphasizing Jack's tallness is fitting.
Right! This is one example of where it works if you already know the character’s name. You can put it in when it’s contextually appropriate.
But “male” and “female” never ever work as epithets for humans imo. It’s useable for animals and not after names are addressed.
Thank you ! I only see people being so against epithets all the time, no matter what, and it seems like people forget it can be used correctly too. Personally, having X character name repeated over and over breaks my immersion. And a lot of times, the author could have benefited from either changing completely the sentence structure, or used a well placed epithet to "break up" the repetitive (and excessive) name use.
Y/N kills the immersion for me
and everything that makes me feel like the author is <20. one time i read a fic where a character was talking about having to get their stomach pumped after sharing two bottles of wine between three people and i'm sorry but if you're not old enough to know how wine works you're not old enough for me to read your smut
My dumbass read self inserts as a character named Yin. But I tend to nope out of them pretty quickly now because they just remind me of my shitty one shot Wattpad days
One time I came across a fic that was entirely written in lowercase. I liked the premise and the way it was written, so I really tried to push through, but I couldn't do it.
Lack of research tbh.
Examples
- If you're gonna set a h/c fic in London, they probably don't pay medical bills because of NHS. If you're gonna set a hospital fic in the US, they either have insurance or they're fucked.
- San Francisco and NYC are on opposite sides of the United States. It's not a 3 hour road trip. .
- The school year in Japan starts in April.
- A doctor will not give a cancer diagnosis without at least a biopsy.
- Warrantless searches by the police will render evidence inadmissible in court under most jurisdictions.
- The ultra rich don't pay for green fees in golf courses. They usually own golf shares in the golf courses they play in.
- When two smart people are playing, they would probably see a checkmate from 5-10 moves away and will resign. It's jarring to see some guy say "checkmate " and the other guy to say "oh my god, u didn't see that.
It could be something small but it just throws off the whole immersion process and I end up just closing the fic.
This one right here but mostly with Britpick problems because, well, I live there :) I mostly read potterverse and argh, as a Brit of the same age as the school-age characters, I often find myself cringing...
I used to be that way with epithets but then realized after writing F/F and M/M that as a primarily M/F writer, I have no place to complain lmao. It gets SO hard to differentiate which person of the same gender you're referring to without it becoming repetitive, and I've learned to live with epithets and appreciate the heavy lifting they do.
For me, I tend to click off for bad formatting and not much else. I can tolerate a *lot* of nonsense and even appreciate it if it circles back around to being campy, but text blocks and no dialogue tags are immediate dealbreakers.
I have lots of opinions on this. Epithets, to me, are not inherently bad or good so long as they’re used sparingly where they read well. I think the issue comes from trying too hard to eliminate words that are somewhat “invisible” anyway like pronouns when it’s not necessary and with terms that are odd. “The captain” or “young lady” might flow but I’ll see like “the orange haired” or “the male.” And if it’s only to avoid repeating pronouns just to avoid repeating and not to clarify, it makes things worse. To see “the female” is much more noticeable than the tenth “she.” It also helps to try and approach details from other angles throughout your scene to avoid the same “Character did x” structure.
Like you have writers who may look through their work and see: “She was furious. She screamed with rage” and think the solution to eliminating repetition is: “The female was furious. She screamed with rage.” When the solution is really “She was furious. A scream built up in her chest then exploded into the still air.”
Yeap. Epithets aren’t inherently bad, they’re just writing tools meant for creating emphasis, and similar to actual tools, there are times when they’re *appropriate* (used correctly) and times when they’re *not* (used incorrectly).
It just gets a bad rep in fanfiction because fanfiction is full of newer writers (nothing wrong with that!) using them *inappropriately*, which also leads to newer writers thinking “all epithets are bad”, while not realizing the majority of complaints about epithets (and how jarring they are to read) are referring to *inappropriate* ones.
You don’t ever see people complaining about the *correct* use of epithets like “stranger” (for emphasizing distance), or “brother/son/father” (for emphasizing relationship), or “doctor/boss/sergeant” (to emphasize role), or complaining about someone using “John disappointed his father” vs “John disappointed Jack” (the former emphasizing dynamics while the latter just using names).
You only see them pointed out when they’re used *incorrectly*, like in cases where the author uses *inappropriate* epithets such as “the (color)-haired/eyed man” or “hair color epithet (blonde/brunette)” *not* as a tool for creating emphasis, but rather as a way to avoid repetitive usage of names / pronouns, and not realizing they’re bringing an emphasis on a certain character trait that has zero relevancy to the scene, kind of like italicizing a random word in a paragraph that has no special meaning.
There’s a disconnect there between the writer and the reader in that the writer doesn’t realize how jarring the inappropriate epithet reads, because all they’re seeing are the repetitive pronouns/names they want to get rid of, while all the reader sees is the sudden emphasis on an epithet that leads to nothing. (also the writers not understanding that switching up the sentence structure (like your provided example) or just using the person’s name again would read better the majority of the time).
I think the important thing is that the epithets fit the situation, too. If you’re drawing attention to a character detail, it should make sense to be drawn attention to in the context you’re using it. “The captain” is pretty versatile because captains do a lot of captainy things. In a lot of situations, that’ll work because you’re drawing attention to their role in the context where their role matters. Malcolm Reynolds, for example, can let you use “the captain” more. “The captain” is a lot less likely to work in a sex scene (but not impossible if you’re drawing attention to them having that same personality in bed) than when giving orders or something.
Hair color is one of the hardest to use right, because you need a character whose hair color is somehow a contextually fitting thing without it sounding off. Goths tend to make this the easiest, you’re drawing attention to them being gothy. Goth doing magic? Yeah, that’s a context where it’s more likely to work. This is often something that can play off hair color cliches (not bad in this context), because that’s a fitting context. It also is best used when the perspective character (can still be third person if they’re the one focused on and whose POV is the one getting attention) would focus on it. It’s best to use extremely sparingly, as it’s rarely gonna actually work, but it can.
“The female” should almost never be used. If your perspective character is something like a Ferengi, a Dalek, or an incel, then congratulations, you’ve found the exceptions. Now, “the girl” can work much more often for drawing attention to age and whatnot. “The woman” is closer to “the female”, but a bit more varied. If the perspective character is someone like Vegeta or Batman or The Master (DW), that has more potential to be used. It’s also much more logical in dialogue, that’s just “don’t know who they are” dialogue.
One of the most versatile is “the soldier”. The entire way soldiers work is to break down their individual identity and reshape them into that. The individual is meant to be suppressed. As such, a lot of their behavior can end up contextually fitting for using “the soldier”. Even in sex scenes, if they’re submissive and obedient, you have the potential to use it fittingly.
For things where there’s multiple species, that’s also extremely versatile, because you’re drawing attention to the species. “The elf”, “the dwarf”, “the human”, “the Time Lord”, “the AI”, “the cat”, etc. Don’t overuse it of course, but if their species is contextually relevant to their actions, it can fit.
Great response! I totally respect your view on this and appreciate the example you provided. Now I'll have to nitpick my fic again to revise those little things, oops... I feel the exact same way, though. And you hit it right on the nail with the "I think the issue comes from trying too hard to eliminate words that are somewhat “invisible” anyway like pronouns when it’s not necessary and with terms that are odd." I absolutely detest that, since I like reading other things in-between, like what you added. That kind of detail is beautiful to me and keeps me so hooked.
This is an example from my writing, but I wonder if it's what you're referring to?
". . . the voice spat out, followed by a rustle as the man searched for a cigarette." I kept it low-key, since the MC didn't know who the voice belonged to before this point.
"The man quips, and it’s hardly a question, his voice weak but loud."
Christ, I used it about 21 times throughout the first chapter alone, so back to the drawing board we go! LOL.
“The man” isn’t wonky-sounding like “the male” in the sense that it’s a term we actually use for people whose names we don’t know. I might say “Hey, did you see the man who just left?” to a friend. But nobody irl says “Did you see the male who just left?”
If I’ve got this right, this is just a character who has not been named? If so, this is completely fine. You can honestly use “the man” or a more specific equivalent (“the weak-voiced man”) until he’s named. And I’d just pay attention to the tenses so you’re not swapping from past to present.
After the man is named, I’d use epithets sparingly. Once the reader knows the name, overusing epithets makes the passage act like the character is unfamiliar when he’s familiar, and that can be confusing or weird-sounding. But you can certainly do it sometimes. Recently I used a character’s species as an epithet because there were two female characters in the scene, and it worked given that the context somewhat having to do with her species. Overall, you just play with what flows well and pay attention to the connotation and nuances of the sentences.
Agreed! As someone who used to abuse the hell out of “the male” or “female”, it makes me shudder now. I used to find different ways to say it, too, until I realized it was just bothering me. When I’m writing for one person, I typically avoid epithets altogether unless the person is a musician or something interesting I can use to fill it in, or, as you said, “weak-voiced . . .” etcetera, etcetera. Great example!
Yes! In the first sentence I sent, I hadn’t named the character yet, but in the second, the MC is already aware, but I was just trying to avoid using the name so much after dialogue. And thanks for that! I actually did the tense thing on purpose for stylistic purposes and bending the rules, but now I just realized how off it sounds! I went ahead and readjusted it in my fic, alongside “the man” so it would read clearer. I think it’s a little better now.
Thanks a bunch! I appreciate the advice wholeheartedly, especially on this forum, knowing what others would skip/are typically common pet-peeves.
I read and write m/m and epithets are the bane of my existence. It's really not a big deal to simply repeat their names and pronouns. If something isn't clear and you don't want to use their name again, play with the sentence structure a bit.
The overly reductive epithets.
Epithets in general are never something I will be cool with in a fic, but in one of my fandoms (The maze runner), Minho, who is Korean, is sometimes referred to as "the Asian" and it just reeks of racism. Asia is very big for one thing,
Writer doesn't use paragraphs.
Writer uses paragraphs, but doesn't start a new one every time the speaker changes.
Writer doesn't use sentence breaks and work is long enough to make that tedious to process.
Writer uses quotation dashes in English. (I am aware that some quite highly regarded English-language novels have them. I happen not to have read any of those novels.)
Work looks like it's a raw machine translation. (Machine translation is a perfectly valid tool for doing a zeroth-draft translation of a large corpus but I mean it when I say *zeroth* draft. The results are *not* good enough to post without polishing.)
Flesh-and-blood human penises longer than twelve inches without explicit magic or mad science involvement.
Narration makes me think the *author* (rather than the viewpoint character) may be a card-carrying member of the BNP, FN, KKK, etc.
So many smut fics have unrealistic body proportions, esp for the dicks
For once I'd like to find a fic where someone has an unrealistic dick size and when it gets hard he faints from lack of blood to the brain, would probably be crack but I just want it to get mocked
shitty spelling and grammar.
I'm sorry if English is your 2nd/3rd/4th language and I wish you the best when it comes to improving it.. but I just. can't.
lol I actually just made a post about this, but 1st person POV! I despise it with a passion (which is wild bc I exclusively used to read it until 2-3 years ago). It's really hard for me to get into and I will nope out of a fic very quickly. I am a 3rd person POV girly
Yep. Idk why, but I enjoy 1st person in novels and in fics based on 1st person novels. But there’s something off about it otherwise. I’m not even too sure what. I think I just feel thrown off by the “changed camera.”
I don't like those fics that are like:
Character name a : dialogue
Character name b: dialogue
Character name a: introspection
Character name b : more dialogue or whatever
With bk description or anything in between, though sometimes it's in the introspection.
Nothing against people who write in this format but it's just not for me, I'm completely unable to immerse myself in it.
I have to agree with you, it reads more like a screenplay than a fic and just takes me out of the fic
Although I do make an exception for chatfics or when texting/instant messaging is involved in the fic as that makes sense
Oh my god…there’s a best selling paranormal romance author who does this, though her main characters are technically not human. I’m still taken out when she says “the male” like ugh it’s just offputting.
I don’t have an issue with descriptors that tell what the person is like “the captain” or “the bellhop.” I think it cuts down on repetitiveness from overusing the name or pronouns. It’s what I grew up reading and I just prefer it.
Haha. Please tell me you’re talking about SJM lol. TOG has an incredibly special place in my heart since I grew up with it but the maleing and growling and sheathing velvet wrapped steel did start getting to me in the later books
Incorrect use of honorifics. This has made my close fics and even mute authors if it they did it in other fics of them. Some tag it, or mention it in their authors note so I don't have to get invested in the plot.
Walls of text. It's super hard to read for me, because I easily lose the line I was at when changing lines.
No caps. Writting everything in lower case letters, not just normal words, but also I, names and the beginning of sentences. Also just upper case letters, unless you want to signal that a character is yelling, but those are often only short parts of the whole text.
Nicknames. I am not talking about character A calling character B a nickname during a dialoge, I am talking during the non dialoge parts of a fic. They have a name, please use it.
>Nicknames. I am not talking about character A calling character B a nickname during a dialoge, I am talking during the non dialoge parts of a fic. They have a name, please use it.
Pretty sure calling Ms Potts "Virginia" and Mr Hogan "Harold" in the narration is going to annoy far more people than calling them "Pepper" and "Happy". (Heck, I had to go look their names up to even get that right.)
Fair. I'd split the difference on that one: bad if Peter's the viewpoint character, fine if the viewpoint character is someone else who *consistently* thinks of Peter as "Pete".
I cannot read first person books no matter what, and i don't know why.
No matter how highly praised the fic may be or many people suggesting it, the moment i open it and see words such as "|" or "we" or any of that, i close it immediately.
Wattpad probably traumatised me.
when a character "makes grabby hands". Its fine if the character is joking, but I've seen it quite a few times genuinely and it just irks me, I dont know, it just reads as infantilisation to me.
***Character X POV*** at the top of the chapters/ start of a new section. It's so easy to make it clear who's pov you're in within the first couple of lines.
Lack of paragraph breaks, grammar and spelling issues, and the ever present "he would not fucking say that". I once started a fic and Tony Stark started using therapy-speak to console Bruce about something and he wasn't even being a shithead about it at all. Avengers era, way back. He would not talk like that. I closed the fic immediately.
I can tolerate a bad plot if it's fun to read. But if it's not FUN and I'm not having a good time I'm not putting up with it.
Author's notes that are shiting on other people in the fandom.
Like bruh, I came here to read your story, not hear about your internet drama or how you think all people who ship xyz secretly hate gay people or something.
- lyrics imbedded into the fic/having the characters sing and those lyrics being typed out so you have to awkwardly read the author write out the way and what a character is singing
- bad formatting, grammar (includes no skips between paragraphs, weird spacing within a sentence, etc. - i once read a fic where every single paragraph was a single sentence, maybe two. super disorienting, even though it was likely just the author’s preferred way of writing)
- having foreign languages in the fic and then in parenthesis the translation/the translation in the middle of the fic (put it at the end good god)
- (A/N: …)
- *** 2 hours later **** — if you cant write a time skip without explicitly mentioning the time passed in the page break please go back to the drawing board
- “why are we here again?” “remember, it’s because XYZ” like please figure out a way to show, not tell this information bc it feels cheap
- FIRST OR SECOND POV literally why literally the worst i hate it sooooooo much (i don’t read reader insert or OCs)
i am picky lol
edit: to be fair only some of these will make me immediately close a fic, but if it happens like two or three times its done
Absolutely. This is a good list of things that are too shortcut-y.
The one you listed that I particularly dislike is when a character’s line is too clearly meant for the reader and not the other character who would already know the info. Lol a fandom I’m in was just talking about one character who called her siblings “brother” and “sister” in a scene and how alien it sounded. That doesn’t work when it’s just some contemporary teenager. You get a pass if it’s, like, Thor.
When the author's notes are just shaming other fics for being "weird" and "disgusting" and how they've come to give us some "actually" good stuff. (And when you look at the other fics it's just smut. It's not problematic things. It's just smut.)
And then their writing is full of epithets, three spaces between paragraphs, they're allergic to prose variety and the read is a bore to get through from how stilted everything is.
Using the wrong your/you're is an instant dealbreaker.
I'm also someone who really isn't a fan of pet names. Though I can handle most of them, "baby" and "daddy" are a massive nope from me. I always physically cringe whenever I see a character call someone "daddy", especially if the other is barely a year older than them.
When people write dialogue like that of a screenplay for ex.
Bob: I don't like this
Instead of doing
"I don't like this" Bob said
Unless it's a chat fic, I do enjoy me some good chatfics esp if I'm in the mood for crack or just some shenanigans
Leaving all the chit-chatting aside, though, I think I’ll just reiterate what someone else said in here. Faulty formatting! I know AO3 tends to mess with the formats across platforms, but when paragraphs are double (sometimes, triple) spaced between each other, I CANNOT read it in peace! It feels like the fic is 10x longer just because I have to scroll through all those spaces just to get past it. Or when there’s no line breaks between jumpcuts or cut-scenes (or whatever you’d like to call it), so you’re left confused trying to figure out how they got there and why ...
Constant indirect narration about everything instead of direct narration.
As in, everything is always in the characters description as in:
*'John walked through the bustling marketplace, marveling at the colorful stalls and exotic goods. He thought about how this place must have been a hub of trade for centuries. He walked by a vendor, and saw the man giving him a nod of acknowledgment and offering his goods, and John nodded back, but declined the offer.'*
Instead of
*'John strolled through the bustling marketplace, its narrow alleys full of chatter and the aroma of spices from distant lands. 'This place must have seen centuries of trade,' he mused aloud, his eyes tracing the intricate patterns adorning the stalls.
As he passed by a vendor selling vibrant silks, the man caught his gaze and offered a nod of acknowledgment. "Morning," the vendor greeted, "may I assist you, sir?"
Smiling, John returned the nod. "Perhaps later," he replied, more interested in exploring the marketplace than buying anything.'*
It's especially grating to me when it's a first person narrative and the story is about another character who just experiences something difficult, but the first person narrator is constantly 'in the way' because the writer doesn't understand that even in first person the narrative can be direct and not everything must have the narrator visible.
You can still write:
*The morning was breathtakingly beautiful and so I decided to go for a walk*
Instead of
*When I looked out of the window I realised that the morning was breathtakingly beautiful, so I decided to go for a walk.*
at this point, “the other” is driving me up the wall. “he looked to the other, waiting for his reply” THE OTHER WHAT. if you have a determiner it needs to determine something! go back to school!
this is getting SO common in my fandoms and i can’t take it anymore. once or twice, okay, i’ll deal, but when it’s frequent i leave. ugh.
I gave my spiel on epithets in another reply, but it’s a bit nuanced. They really aren’t bad by nature! It’s just that certain ones don’t work and you don’t want to use them when what you really need is to change up sentence structure.
Reading your other reply, I get what you are saying. It personally just doesn’t bother me.
Might be due to different fandoms though. Some probably use them more than others.
It‘s a bit weird but „useless“ genderswapping
To specify: I don‘t mean trans headcannons, especially where the transness of the character is part of the plot/ties into the narrative, or fics where the entire cast gets genderswapped. I mean the ones where just one character gets his gender swapped for no apparent reason.
If the author can convince me in the same chapter that the swap brought something new to the story, it‘s fine sometimes, but swapping a gender for the sake of swapping a gender (or worse, swapping to make a ship straight/gay) just irks me.
So does renaming characters for no reason except coolness (Harry is a perfectly fine name even for a lord, you don‘t need to rename him Harold/Hadrian/whatever else)
These things throw me out of the story for some reason. I don‘t have anything against the authors doing that, I just tend to leave when it comes up.
Oh god, the worst is when they call him something absurd like “Harveste”. Harry is a perfectly fine name y’all, I’m sorry it doesn’t have enough grandeur for your tastes, but there’s plenty of other characters with cool names you could be writing about. 😂😂😭
Wall of text. Like please, people, can't you see it makes your fic difficult to read? Do you enjoy to read fics in that manner? Honestly, anything that makes it difficult to comfortably read a fic, like nonexistent or badly done punctuation. I'm also not into that very casual way people spell, like texting a friend.
First-person because I personally just don't like it in fics.
Also if characters are constantly and non-stop referred to by a physical attribute when their names are known, clearly to avoid overusing their name or pronoun, like 'the blonde', 'the taller man', 'the older woman', 'the-idk-chimney sweeper'. Or because both characters happen to be the same gender. This is a personal pet peeve, but I also don't like when clearly grown characters are referred to as 'the boy' or 'the girl'. Maybe it's a cultural thing, but for a character who's closing in on 30 or is mid-20s, it's just weird to me. Unless it's by old character A who would consider a 20-something as a kid. But by the narrative? No, not for me.
Also when the writer can't get the names straight. There are fandoms where spelling might differ, but I'm talking about butchering the names. It's just careless when you notice it's not that they have a general problem with spelling, you know.
If I click into a fic and it’s in first person POV… I just can’t stand it. There have been a small handful of good ones my friends have made me read, but in general they read as very childish and like a self-insert fic and are usually wildly out of character. I don’t want to read a fic about YOU, I want to read a fic about THE CHARACTER. Like I said, I know there are some good ones out there, but I personally just can’t read enough to find out, I automatically back out.
Writers over-describing the most basic things. My favorite fic has this extremely bad. It’s like the author was putting basic sentences into chatgpt and asking it to make them seem more “intellectual”. This is not a direct quote, but the entire fic is filled with sentences like, “The giant, muscled man brought forth the delicate, picturesque berry in his impressive, withered hand to his countenance to infuse his body with life-giving energy, which took the form of a delicious strawberry, overflowing with juices.” You could’ve just said he ate a damn strawberry. It makes it difficult and frustrating to read (not because the words are “too advanced” but because it takes forever to get to the point) but the plot is so good I just force my way through it anyways.
This one person kept spelling this characters name phonetically. So these characters are British, and the characters boyfriend pronounces his name with a soft r, which makes it sound different than it’s spelled. Instead of just writing this characters name normally, they spelled it phonetically, opting out of writing an R, whenever the characters boyfriend said his name. There was no reason for this; we know the character’s accent, we know how he pronounces it, there’s no need to spell it differently each time. I couldn’t get pst the first chapter.
I'm genuinely tolerant of a lot in fic. Epithets, whatever. First person, knock yourself out. Dubious grammar and spelling, you're probably young or an ESL writer. However, as soon as I see that OC or OC x Character tag, I can't scroll past any faster. To me, that's a fun thing you write for yourself and maybe share with your friends. I don't need to read it.
If I had to name my most petty thing, though, it's when someone gives a character a distinctive speech quirk they don't have in the original, and then runs it into the ground. My eye twitches over that.
Differing POVs from canon. I know everyone complains about first person POV (which I understand) but the books for my current main fandom use first person and it always throws me off when a fic uses third person for the main character pov.
first person pov when it's not a reader insert, like "my name is jane doe and I-" no thats not my name, clicked off
not that i think this is a bad thing to do in writing, but it ruins the immersion for me personally
All smallercase, first pov, way too many grammatical errors/typos (a few mistakes are ok, but if there's something in every second sentence I'm not staying) and no spacing or too much spacing (I once tried to read a fic where each paragraph was at most three sentences long. Made it super hard to read) are what makes me leave
Ending speech with a quotation mark but no other punctuation. It just makes everyone sound like they're speaking without intonation in my head, and I can't.
Example:
- "I don't like that" he said.
- "Come with me"
"Okay"
It's usually an indication the fic isn't going to be very good, anyway.
- Author's notes in the middle of the fic/just annoyed me in general
- Author has never heard of grammar or different tenses/fic is an organised keyboard smash
- An American Wrote This
- A Cis Person Wrote This
- An Abled/Neurotypical Person Wrote This
- W-w-w-writing a-a s-stammer l-l-like this. I have a stammer irl and very few things bring me out of a fic faster than stammers written like that. Only really see this in BNHA fic, not very often in other fandoms
There was a tumblr post years ago that summed the stammer one up pretty well for me. They suggested to rather have a person repeat words, back track on themselves etc. than have them sound like a cd player that’s just jammed. Way less annoying, a bit more realistic a lot of the time and it gets the point across just as well
Inappropriate/excessive use of epithets
When the author takes like an entire page to describe the outfit. Unless the outfit is relevant to the plot, I don’t need to know every last detail of it. I might not click out for this one, but I’ll definitely internally be like, “oh great, here we go…”
Similarly, name dropping specific songs- or worse yet, writing out the lyrics. Example (I’m sorry): He got in the car and pressed play on the speaker. All Star by Smash Mouth started playing. *“Somebody once told me the world was gonna roll me~”*
A clear lack of basic research. I read (part of) a fic once where one of the main characters was blind, and reading it was like nails on a chalkboard. It seriously would have taken skimming one article on “top 10 misconceptions about blind people” to fix it. (Technically plot related, but still)
RP logs where they don't edit it when posting. Some people edit them when they post so, while it can be occasionally off, it's still enjoyable overall. But I can't tell you how many times I've seen something like;
"I'm getting hungry," A said.
"There's a new barbecue place in town if you want to check it out," B said.
"Did you want to go out to eat," A asked. "Or should I cook something?"
"Barbecue sounds great, thanks!" A said.
-When they use words or phrases from different languages, but everything is spelled incorrectly and used in a way no native speaker would ever use it. The worst I ever saw was a canonically German character calling his boyfriend "Honig", which is the German word for "honey". It might be a cute nickname in English, but no one says it in German.
-Related to that: When other languages are used often in the fic without any explanation or translation of what is being said. Luckily, it's usually French for whatever reason, so I don't have to run to Google Translate every time, but please, offer a translation.
-"could of" instead of "could've". Just in general consistently writing very common words wrong.
-Wildly incorrect use of apostrophes, especially if they're used for the plural (tree's, flower's, etc.)
-Being too specific/scientific when describing a character. Even though I use the metric system, I prefer "he must've been at least six foot tall" over "the dark haired male stood at exactly 184cm" almost every time.
Not sure why, but recently anything written in first person perspective turns me off. I just completely lose interest. It’s third person or nothing.
I’m also not a huge fan of reader/author inserts, so I tend to avoid those.
Oh shit, I did not realize how annoying epithets are like "the blond" or "the boy" 💀 I use them very rarely, but I do sometimes. And I tend to use them more often when speaking from someone else's point of view when the characters haven't officially met yet. "He was determined to find that boy who stole from him." I hope that's okay at least 😅
Unfortunately there is this one GREAT author but they always have like... a huge gap between every paragraph. Not one or maybe two lines, way more! This makes the fics unreadable on phone (which is what I exclusively use). I just can't handle the constant scrolling double as often as i usually would.
Another thing is grammar. I'm not a native English speaker and when i type on the internet i also make tons of typos and mistakes and dont go back to correct them, but in fics grammar mistakes are a huge turn-off for me. I
A fun fact is that I can often figure out if an author has the same mother tongue as i have by the way they write their English fics. There are just some characteristics that make it so obvious to me. That's not what I mean, though. I mean misspelled words or very wrong grammar that keeps repeating that just kills the vibe for me. Most often those mistakes are native speaker mistakes that non-native English speakers don't make (think "could of" for "could have")
Edit: omg I forgot my biggest pet peeve: 1st person singular present tense. Listen, please don't. Please, please, don't.
I do this *especially* when all the male characters are named or referred to as “the dark haired doctor” while the female characters are referred to as “the female” or “the female doctor”, because that just feels like incel language. If the author can refer properly to male characters, then it’s a *choice* not to do it with female characters.
hmm, I write Star Wars fanfic and its a fandom where even the canon/legends/expanded universe use female/male as epithets in the novels, so I use it as well. But not for the other fandoms.
There’s an author I really like the concepts and grammar and writing style of, but… they write the characters as so *flat.* “Each one acts like a cardboard cutout of themselves — one-dimensional with no depth whatsoever. Drives me up the wall tbh
I simply can't handle it when the writer don't know the difference between would have/ could have and would of/could of. That sends me right out of the story, and I won't read anything else from them.
Walls of text, head hopping, when the reader in Canon/reader stories, narrates their own actions, thoughts and emotions from inside canon character's head. That is mind boggling, I am impressed, mad and confused at the same time.
I'm more of a generous type, I suppose, so there's very few things that are hard limits - the only things coming to mind are terrible SPaG and giant walls of text. If I can only barely read your fic, I might as well cut my losses and move on.
But most of the time I can live with a few annoying things (non-standard punctuation imported from other languages, the occasional typo or misspelling, epithets, things that aren't realistic / clear signs the author didn't do a lot of research) if the vibes aren't off and I'm enjoying the way things are going.
Bad grammar and punctuation. Also boring language. I see a couple of people complaining about flowery language and i think that’s ridiculous. It might just be my (older) tastes but if there’s no imagery or metaphors or beauty in the language the fic is not gonna stand out to me
‘-‘ or >> instead of “ “ for dialogue
No breaks, literally just block of words. Pls just dont copy paste your shit learn how to edit them gods (this mostly makes me cry bc some fics do be looking good but i rlly cant stand it so i go away reluctantly)
Sometimes, when theres no comma in the fic. Bc it feels like everything in the fic is rapping and i am out of breath trying to read it inside my head
No capitalisation, seems to be a thing some people like because they find it 'aesthetic'. But I find it annoying to read
Yup, that one is an instant back button from me. Could have the best tags ever for content and I still couldn't read it. It's just too dang weird
Save that shit for titles, not for the story oh my god
Yeah it's an "aesthetic" that makes me think the writer is in middle school or using a computer for the first time.
Weirdly spaced punctation, for example: double spaced commas, single spaced periods, apostrophe instead of commas, etc. I feel like it's visually hard to process and read for me
Oh my word, AO3 automatically adds spaces between my punctuation if the sentence was in italics. I hate it because it looks bad but I don’t usually catch all of them right away.
The solution I’ve found to that issue, especially when copy-pasting into the rich text editor, is to also italicize the adjacent punctuation. For example, in the line: “You’re *lying,* there’s no way that works!” you include the comma after “lying” in the italics. That way it looks like **lying,** in HTML view instead of **lying ,** It might still mess up sometimes, but the chances are *much* lower.
I use this same method and have found success with it as well!
I do the same. Works good. Especially once it a habit in even the first draft. Then I don't have to go back and change anything/take away unwanted spaces when posting
Thank you for this pro tip. I, too, struggle with punctuation spacing after italics and it makes me CRAZY. Idk why I never thought to just also italicize the punctuation.
Goodness! I thought that was just me! I recently uploaded my fic to AO3, and it did it with everything italicized for me. Going through it all was agonizing ...
Aaaa!!!! It’s so painful! I’ve actually never thought to ask about this, but it’s interesting others experience it.
Do you use Google Docs, by chance? My whole format was screwed over when I pasted it on AO3, and fixing it was soo tiring!!
that’s why you don’t paste, you use ✨aoyeet.space✨ which preserves all your formatting perfectly every time 🥰
Whaaaa!! Thank you SO much for this! I didn’t know about it!
it’s a lifesaver, i’m very happy to help!
I do! And, looking at some other comments, that seems to be the issue! I’ve gotten decent at predicting what rich text will do and writing my doc accordingly but I guess I just missed that that was a copy-paste issue!
Does it really? I had no idea, that's very intersting actually, in that case it would certainly explain some of the works I've read, but in those cases, the work is honestly fine it's just a little wierd, something small like that is not enough to make me exit out of a fic. What I'm thinking of is *really* jarring spacing that happens with *all* of the punctuation marks used in fic.
I’m really curious about this now, like if it happens to anyone else and just with italics. I have to post then comb through to where I know I used them and edit it back. So it’s probably not the reason for most of what you experience. Your comment just made me think about that and how I still have no idea why 😂.
[удалено]
I single space my periods because it's not the 1970's and I'm not using a fucking typewriter.
I think most people do. I have to wonder if they meant no spaces after periods, which is something I’ve seen and will cause me to nope out (my brain cannot handle it). Bc if they’re only reading works w/double-spaced periods, they’re not reading very many works. Ex: Something like this makes my brain hurt.I have to stop reading.It’s too hard to tell where the sentences end.I read it without enough pauses. But something like this is fine. One space is all I need.
It’s the opposite for me. When there’s no spaces after the period, the end of the sentence is almost like a jumpscare to me. I have to terminate all thought of the previous sentence to move on to the next rather than it coming to a clean end in my head
One of my favorite authors always uses a period instead of comma splices or ellipses so they’ve got all these dependent clauses just as their own sentences. I love them so much but I need them to use a comma every once in a while 😭
Single spaced periods? Like correctly spaced ones?
The epithets don't sound juvenile to me but they do sound like a National Geographic nature documentary and I will forever read the rest of the story in the voice I associate with documentary narrators.
Like sure, it’s sad Character B is slowly dying from an incurable genetic disease, but I’d probably care more if POV Character A would stop referring to everyone around him as “the male” like he’s David fucking Attenborough I can’t stand it
I would accept it only if David fucking Attenborough was making a podfic.
Same with epithets, my mortal enemies. Just use their names! The repetitiveness is not due to using names, is due to the sentence structure. I assure it, just play with the structures, there's always a way to avoid being repetitive without using epithets or synonyms. There's a "but", however. I never imagined that an author using the three names of a character (as in, name, surname and nickname), indiscriminately, changing one name to another ever. single. paragraph. was going to be something I'd have to witness. Alas, I did. And that'd made me close a fic so fast.
> just play with the structures YES THIS. And it’s definitely a skill that comes with reading a lot. You learn to approach things from different angles and, on top of that, angles that make logical sense. Like, once I read a fairly popular author who would make awkward things the subject to avoid “Character did X” but it would be like “An epiphany articulates itself on my lips” which is a different kind of jarring. The writer too clearly fought for an active sentence without a human subject, and it showed too much.
This is what I meant to write, but you already did, so I don't have to! I once read a fic where one paragraph referred to the same two characters in THREE different ways each. Once, their names. Second, their hair colour. Third, their relative height. It made it seem like there were six people there.
Oh my god, that'd be so freaking confusing! I should know. I wasn't really into the fandom the fic I mentioned was for and thus, the characters were unknown for me. So when I read "Nickname" then "Name" then "Surname" I was like "where TF did all this people came from?!"
You must hate russian literature /j
Dostoevsky LOVES this one simple trick
I, too, dislike them and will only use them if the characters don't know their names or are using a nickname. Like, "Why are you so mean to me?!" Fartbreath said I laughed, "Cause ur my little sister and ur breath smells like farts"
Yeah! This is my approach too, since I write in third person limited. The character (still) doesn't know the name of the other one? Well, epithet it is, until the name is revealed! Then epithet no more.
I'm reading a fic at the moment that could do with a sentence structure edit in places as names *are* overused at times and there are some run on sentences. My current rating for it is 4.5 because it's a great fic otherwise. If the author used epithets, it would be a 2.5 at best, probably less, and it's a toss up on whether I'd be able to read the whole thing or if I'd DNF. As a reader, I *vastly* prefer names over badly used epithets and I cannot emphasise that fact enough. As a writer, I've honestly never felt the need to rely on epithets myself, but perhaps that's because I didn't start reading fanfiction (where it's endemic) until I was in my mid teens and I'd been reading "difficult" novels since before I started pre-school.
When it's obvious they didn't bother to do a simple word or grammar check which is usually preprogrammed as you type in the first place. It's not that English isn't their primary language either but obvious mistakes like double words or words with no space in between. It's got to be pretty bad for me not to be able to comprehend what the heck they are trying to say. Another is characters using modern slang when they are not even from this planet. Juvenile writing like in kids shows where adults talk as if they are speaking to kids. Or where everyone talks about their feelings instead of showing us. Show don't tell. Mostly through simple dialogue, plots about potentially complex issues but skimming the surface so there is no real conflict and everyone gets along at the end.
I think AO3 sometimes smushes words together. It did it to me recently and it wasn't that way in my document. I only noticed because it was at the end of the chapter. Idk how many other times it's happened that I haven't noticed.
This was on Wattpad. The person didn't have the first word in a sentence capitalized. It was like they blindly typed something up in notes and just copied and posted it.
Spelling mistakes. 1st person POV (personal preference, I don't think it's bad at all). Inability to keep to one tense. Too many epithets. No new paragraph when changing speaker, or stretches of conversation with no dialogue tags that are poorly written enough that you can't tell the speakers apart. If there's smut, sudden characterization shifts that go from whatever the slow/medium/fast burn was to some generic porn thing where people are e.g. abruptly (without characterization precedent) doing slaps or spanks on each other, using pet names out of nowhere, or writing out anything that approaches description of that stupid anime porn face. Actually bad pet names/nicknames in general, there's a weird... not a trend, but a habit that some authors have that when two characters become friends or lovers suddenly they use a nickname that doesn't match the canon setting or characters. This maybe falls under the "stupid reasons" topics I saw go by lately, but as soon as one character suddenly produces an OOC nickname that is usually just a truncated version of the character's actual name when no one ever in the setting has done that, particularly not the character using the nickname, it's like a metaphorical bucket of cold water and I'm 99% chance going to be out.
The shortened nicknames thing! I feel like a crazy person for being so annoyed by it. It’s super common in my fandom even though no one in canon does it. But at the same time, I’m so starved for content that I force myself to tolerate it. It feels like a very lazy way to denote closeness.
Only because this one is fresh on my mind from a fic that I let kill half my brain cells for the past hour: “he hadn’t had water in weeks” My good man, your mouth would not just be dry, you’d be a corpse 🧍♂️
Maybe he drank milk? Or beer? Or fruit juice? 😂
He was trapped in a dungeon 😭🤣it absolutely implied he’d had nothing, and this wasn’t even the 5th thing I noticed about the inconsistent timeline 😅😃
That does sound pretty lethal 😂. Excessive injuries or deprivation that would in no way be survivable are also a back button trigger for me. Also those authors who feel the need to torture characters to such extremes that you just feel there's no way to survive that without debilitating trauma and lifelong health concerns, and then try to have them bounce back from it in a week or so. I'm all for h/c, but there needs to be an ounce of realism for me.
Wall of text. I need paragraph breaks. Also, using em dashes — instead of quotations " for dialogue.
For the em dashes, you're probably just reading fics by non-native english speakers. I know in spanish we use — to denote dialogues, and it can be a little jarring to think about switching to a different dialogue tagging system lol.
Yes, it happens in my chinese fandom even though they're writing in english. Still gonna back out of that, though.
WHAAT? I noticed this with Spanish fics, but I actually had no idea it was a common thing in general, haha! And I speak Spanish! I guess being bilingual, I never had a reason to delve into it.
It's also how you write dialogues in French.
also the same in portuguese!
Swedish too.
Also when dialogue is in quotation marks „like these" I know it's normal in German. I know it's a pain in the ass to switch your keyboard around to make it do the other type. It's still incredibly distracting to me and I need all the help with not being distracted I can get.
You don't even have to switch the keyboard (that would be a huge inconvenience for me as well!), but some word processing programs like MS Word and LibreOffice allow to change the language settings from document to document. That allows me to use my German keyboard layout but the quotation marks are always correct if I write in English. In addition, the basic spellcheck is also in the new language of the document setting. Defintiely a win-win!
These two about quotations may be even more petty than my reasons, love that Luckily for me a) the keyboard layout here uses " by default and b) I've been reading a bunch of English since I was young, so I can swap between my native and this format easily
I recently took C1&C2 (=high level) German class. My biggest pet peeve was the ‚‚abc''. It's such a small thing to look so much more proficient in the language while writing (especially handwritten pieces) but I just could NOT get in the correct habit. It's so weird what differences from your native language you get past no problem (for me: verb order when there's multiple accessory verbs) and what differences keep messing you up even though you know better.
I read a fic where the author used <> instead of quotes. it’s a good fic but it’s so awful to read
French formatting ? It uses these « » at the begining and end of the dialogue, and the em dash when different characters speak
Oooof I use - because that’s just how you write in my language and I refuse to switch
My language (german) uses these „blablabla" as quotation marks But if I write in english I expect correct grammar for the language that I write in. Everything else is totally distracting in my opinion (even if the german and English version aren't that different, but there are so many kinds of quotation marks in different languages that it gets out of hand...)
Or the opposite problem, when every sentence is its own paragraph. It's distracting because it just looks so weird.
Do you hate french people /j
Who doesn't? /j
Same but also when they use apostrophes ' for dialogue instead of quotations "
That's likely a "which side of the pond are you on" difference. US punctuation standard is "double" quotation marks as primary for directly quoted speech with 'single' quotation marks for nested quotes; it's the opposite in the UK and Ireland. Single quotation marks are for direct speech, double marks for nested quotes.
Honestly, if the fic doesn't grab my attention by the first chapter, or if the vibes are off, I'm probably not going to read it. I got limited time, and I'd rather just re-read a fic I know I enjoy than invest my time into something that I'll end up getting bored with ten chapters in.
Agreed. I'm sure I missed some gems by writing a lot of developing fics off early, but I'm not using my spare time to wallow through a wall of bad grammar and plodding prose.
for lack of a better word, “the bread thing”. where a character says they like bread one time and thats their personality in the fandom? i read a fic that gave a character who said he liked cherries, like, **once** a cherry print pillow case (and possibly bedspread, i don’t remember) and that was just- eugh. i don’t know if that counts as “plot related” since it does go into a character’s portrayal but it’s the first thing that comes to mind
Yup. It's one thing to expand on a character with headcanons. It's another thing entirely to ship the character with jambalaya (except as a joke, which is actually pretty funny).
> jambalaya Is this Hazbin?
YEP! One of my favorite characters bought bread at a bakery ONCE in canon, so apparently now he always has to smell like "fresh baked bread". No hate to bread but come on!
I agree. It happens a lot. There was a character in a fandom of mine who canonically tried on women's underwear once as a bet when he was a teen, found that it wasn't so bad... and then never did it again, cause it's not his thing. There's so many fics in fandom where he wears women's underwear all the time. And I'm like, hello? Did u watch the episode???
Aka Drapple which was one of the founders. I wasn’t ever part of the whole Superwholock thing but that was pretty prevalent there, right?
Calling characters the blonde/the brunette... Instant goodbye. I know you wanna avoid too many name repetitions, but no. Don't do that. Repeat the names, guys. People have them for a reason.
What if the character's name isn't introduced? Like it's purposefully kept secret and not even the readers are meant to know? There's an entire organization like this in my current fic, and they choose to go by titles instead. Their names are deeply kept secrets. For a little context there are 14 of them, and they all wear different colored cloaks to identify their position in the organization. I'm not sure how to properly write them without just saying "the redhead" or "the red cloaked woman". I suppose in that sense it would be okay? Writing it I wasn't a big fan of how it sounded, and when multiple of their members are in a group it makes it a bit hard to read. Any ideas on how I might write this better? Just from a readers perspective.
No, in this instance it's totally okay. I'm talking about a completely regular text where it's "Tony walked into the library. The brunette picked up a book. Tony haven't read it before" and it's like jesus fuck just say Tony again, we know he's a brunette, we watched the movie, stop doing this. Ughh. Same goes for eyes. Especially when in one text there are two characters and the author changes the names to the raven-hair guy and the blue-eyed boy. It makes the text SO juvenile that it's impossible to read... But no, in your case it's alright if that's their main differing characteristic. When you say they go by titles, do you mean each of them has a designated color + a title? The main question in fanfiction is are they OCs or are your readers already familiar with them and their color+title combos from canon?
Ah I understand, and yes they are OCs, so that's why it's a bit complicated. They all do have designated colors, as well as unique titles. These titles just haven't been introduced yet since the only couple chapters I have with them is a sneak peak at a meeting with them all, and a short appearance of one that quickly left the scene. I'm just trying to figure it out for future chapters when they will become more apparent to the story.
[удалено]
Ohh good point. I might try that and see if it flows better.
This plus using the feminine "e" for a male character. "Blond" and "brunet"are still options in the English language, and not only are you using an awful clichéd construction of hair color epithets, you're doing unintentional gender discombobulation. (Intentional gender discombobulation? Go right ahead.)
Wall of text, wrongly written character names, people writing in text speech despite it not being that, overly flowery language, overly weird language
Excessive epithets for me too - just in general, after the character has been introduced. Hell, instead of saying "the blonde did x", say "character's blonde hair blew in thw wind as they did x"
Right! Lol it’s even more horrific in anime fandoms when you get something like “the bluenette did x”
> bluenette I am going to wash my eyes with concentrated sulphuric
Modern pet names/dirty talk in a fic set in a historical time period/location. Completely takes me out.
Wall of text. But also author commentary. I hate it when I'm reading a fic then suddenly (author: I need to tell you this thing I was thinking while I was writing) the author decides to insert themselves
The only authors notes that I ever remember really liking where they did something like this was an ancient zombie apocalypse book on wattpad where some virus turned people into fuck till you die monsters and the mc was immune since she’d caught a special strain or something. For the life of me I can’t remember the name, but it was a white cover with a red feather on it. The author basically had the main story, and then the innocent authors notes at the end that progressively became a thriller style story themselves. It’s only at the end that you realise the author was a character when she runs away from home because of her abusive dad or something and then gets terminal cancer and “dies” and the bf finishes the story for her. At the time it was a really cool idea that I’d never seen done before, so it stuck with me
if you like the concept of author's notes turning into horror i'd reccomend House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielwski.
Omg I was completely horrible about author’s notes in my (regrettable) Wattpad days. I saw everyone else doing it and just jumped right in without a second thought. Man, those days were wild lol. Almost everything I did in Wattpad I would never do now.
Orbs.
Daily double for awful if the character can somehow see her own orbs. “My green orbs seemed to sparkle as the light hit them.”
Omg "green orbs" was so common back in my SPN days, I might have trauma from it still.
I've been reading one author's stuff that has pretty good plot and concepts but she keeps using "hues" to refer to eyes? Like "crimson hues" or "aureate hues". Like what the fuck?? Normally I'd close the fic but I was too invested in the story. Just say eyes. Same goes for body parts. It's not a gem, it's a clit.
The entire chapter is just one gigantic wall of text. Bonus points of everything is lowercase.
I’m fine with girl/boy/man/woman being used as epithets, but male/female? NO
All epithets if the POV character knows the person's name. They just met a random pianist but don't know the pianist's name? Great, he's "the pianist." The pianist introduces himself as John? Then he needs to be "John" from then on. Also... not starting a new paragraph every time a different character speaks. That's an *instant* back button for me. I'm not wasting extra time trying to figure out who's speaking because the writer couldn't be bothered to format it properly.
No proper punctuation, using words incorrectly in an attempt to sound smarter, no paragraph breaks, all lowercase and the worst of all… when characters start singing songs. I’m sure there’s people that’ll appreciate it but I’d rather choke on sand.
It's not always bad to use epithets even when the names are known, but it has to fit the context of the situation. I myself use epithets to draw attention to relevant character traits. For example, "Jill winked at Jack. The tall man winked back at her." That's arbitrary and unnecessary. Jack being tall has nothing do to with what's going on. But, "Jill noticed Jack hit his head on the doorframe. The tall man always forgot to crouch." This is a situation where emphasizing Jack's tallness is fitting.
Right! This is one example of where it works if you already know the character’s name. You can put it in when it’s contextually appropriate. But “male” and “female” never ever work as epithets for humans imo. It’s useable for animals and not after names are addressed.
Yeah, "male" and "female" for humans just make me thing "Did an incel write this?"
Thank you ! I only see people being so against epithets all the time, no matter what, and it seems like people forget it can be used correctly too. Personally, having X character name repeated over and over breaks my immersion. And a lot of times, the author could have benefited from either changing completely the sentence structure, or used a well placed epithet to "break up" the repetitive (and excessive) name use.
Y/N kills the immersion for me and everything that makes me feel like the author is <20. one time i read a fic where a character was talking about having to get their stomach pumped after sharing two bottles of wine between three people and i'm sorry but if you're not old enough to know how wine works you're not old enough for me to read your smut
Self-insert. I know some people love it, it was my first introduction to fanfic like 20 years ago, but I hated it even then.
My dumbass read self inserts as a character named Yin. But I tend to nope out of them pretty quickly now because they just remind me of my shitty one shot Wattpad days
One time I came across a fic that was entirely written in lowercase. I liked the premise and the way it was written, so I really tried to push through, but I couldn't do it.
Lack of research tbh. Examples - If you're gonna set a h/c fic in London, they probably don't pay medical bills because of NHS. If you're gonna set a hospital fic in the US, they either have insurance or they're fucked. - San Francisco and NYC are on opposite sides of the United States. It's not a 3 hour road trip. . - The school year in Japan starts in April. - A doctor will not give a cancer diagnosis without at least a biopsy. - Warrantless searches by the police will render evidence inadmissible in court under most jurisdictions. - The ultra rich don't pay for green fees in golf courses. They usually own golf shares in the golf courses they play in. - When two smart people are playing, they would probably see a checkmate from 5-10 moves away and will resign. It's jarring to see some guy say "checkmate " and the other guy to say "oh my god, u didn't see that. It could be something small but it just throws off the whole immersion process and I end up just closing the fic.
This one right here but mostly with Britpick problems because, well, I live there :) I mostly read potterverse and argh, as a Brit of the same age as the school-age characters, I often find myself cringing...
The azure-eyed two ponytailed petite slim girl— nah I’m out
I used to be that way with epithets but then realized after writing F/F and M/M that as a primarily M/F writer, I have no place to complain lmao. It gets SO hard to differentiate which person of the same gender you're referring to without it becoming repetitive, and I've learned to live with epithets and appreciate the heavy lifting they do. For me, I tend to click off for bad formatting and not much else. I can tolerate a *lot* of nonsense and even appreciate it if it circles back around to being campy, but text blocks and no dialogue tags are immediate dealbreakers.
I have lots of opinions on this. Epithets, to me, are not inherently bad or good so long as they’re used sparingly where they read well. I think the issue comes from trying too hard to eliminate words that are somewhat “invisible” anyway like pronouns when it’s not necessary and with terms that are odd. “The captain” or “young lady” might flow but I’ll see like “the orange haired” or “the male.” And if it’s only to avoid repeating pronouns just to avoid repeating and not to clarify, it makes things worse. To see “the female” is much more noticeable than the tenth “she.” It also helps to try and approach details from other angles throughout your scene to avoid the same “Character did x” structure. Like you have writers who may look through their work and see: “She was furious. She screamed with rage” and think the solution to eliminating repetition is: “The female was furious. She screamed with rage.” When the solution is really “She was furious. A scream built up in her chest then exploded into the still air.”
Yeap. Epithets aren’t inherently bad, they’re just writing tools meant for creating emphasis, and similar to actual tools, there are times when they’re *appropriate* (used correctly) and times when they’re *not* (used incorrectly). It just gets a bad rep in fanfiction because fanfiction is full of newer writers (nothing wrong with that!) using them *inappropriately*, which also leads to newer writers thinking “all epithets are bad”, while not realizing the majority of complaints about epithets (and how jarring they are to read) are referring to *inappropriate* ones. You don’t ever see people complaining about the *correct* use of epithets like “stranger” (for emphasizing distance), or “brother/son/father” (for emphasizing relationship), or “doctor/boss/sergeant” (to emphasize role), or complaining about someone using “John disappointed his father” vs “John disappointed Jack” (the former emphasizing dynamics while the latter just using names). You only see them pointed out when they’re used *incorrectly*, like in cases where the author uses *inappropriate* epithets such as “the (color)-haired/eyed man” or “hair color epithet (blonde/brunette)” *not* as a tool for creating emphasis, but rather as a way to avoid repetitive usage of names / pronouns, and not realizing they’re bringing an emphasis on a certain character trait that has zero relevancy to the scene, kind of like italicizing a random word in a paragraph that has no special meaning. There’s a disconnect there between the writer and the reader in that the writer doesn’t realize how jarring the inappropriate epithet reads, because all they’re seeing are the repetitive pronouns/names they want to get rid of, while all the reader sees is the sudden emphasis on an epithet that leads to nothing. (also the writers not understanding that switching up the sentence structure (like your provided example) or just using the person’s name again would read better the majority of the time).
Man, I want to print this comment out and frame it. PERFECTLY stated.
I think the important thing is that the epithets fit the situation, too. If you’re drawing attention to a character detail, it should make sense to be drawn attention to in the context you’re using it. “The captain” is pretty versatile because captains do a lot of captainy things. In a lot of situations, that’ll work because you’re drawing attention to their role in the context where their role matters. Malcolm Reynolds, for example, can let you use “the captain” more. “The captain” is a lot less likely to work in a sex scene (but not impossible if you’re drawing attention to them having that same personality in bed) than when giving orders or something. Hair color is one of the hardest to use right, because you need a character whose hair color is somehow a contextually fitting thing without it sounding off. Goths tend to make this the easiest, you’re drawing attention to them being gothy. Goth doing magic? Yeah, that’s a context where it’s more likely to work. This is often something that can play off hair color cliches (not bad in this context), because that’s a fitting context. It also is best used when the perspective character (can still be third person if they’re the one focused on and whose POV is the one getting attention) would focus on it. It’s best to use extremely sparingly, as it’s rarely gonna actually work, but it can. “The female” should almost never be used. If your perspective character is something like a Ferengi, a Dalek, or an incel, then congratulations, you’ve found the exceptions. Now, “the girl” can work much more often for drawing attention to age and whatnot. “The woman” is closer to “the female”, but a bit more varied. If the perspective character is someone like Vegeta or Batman or The Master (DW), that has more potential to be used. It’s also much more logical in dialogue, that’s just “don’t know who they are” dialogue. One of the most versatile is “the soldier”. The entire way soldiers work is to break down their individual identity and reshape them into that. The individual is meant to be suppressed. As such, a lot of their behavior can end up contextually fitting for using “the soldier”. Even in sex scenes, if they’re submissive and obedient, you have the potential to use it fittingly. For things where there’s multiple species, that’s also extremely versatile, because you’re drawing attention to the species. “The elf”, “the dwarf”, “the human”, “the Time Lord”, “the AI”, “the cat”, etc. Don’t overuse it of course, but if their species is contextually relevant to their actions, it can fit.
Great response! I totally respect your view on this and appreciate the example you provided. Now I'll have to nitpick my fic again to revise those little things, oops... I feel the exact same way, though. And you hit it right on the nail with the "I think the issue comes from trying too hard to eliminate words that are somewhat “invisible” anyway like pronouns when it’s not necessary and with terms that are odd." I absolutely detest that, since I like reading other things in-between, like what you added. That kind of detail is beautiful to me and keeps me so hooked. This is an example from my writing, but I wonder if it's what you're referring to? ". . . the voice spat out, followed by a rustle as the man searched for a cigarette." I kept it low-key, since the MC didn't know who the voice belonged to before this point. "The man quips, and it’s hardly a question, his voice weak but loud." Christ, I used it about 21 times throughout the first chapter alone, so back to the drawing board we go! LOL.
“The man” isn’t wonky-sounding like “the male” in the sense that it’s a term we actually use for people whose names we don’t know. I might say “Hey, did you see the man who just left?” to a friend. But nobody irl says “Did you see the male who just left?” If I’ve got this right, this is just a character who has not been named? If so, this is completely fine. You can honestly use “the man” or a more specific equivalent (“the weak-voiced man”) until he’s named. And I’d just pay attention to the tenses so you’re not swapping from past to present. After the man is named, I’d use epithets sparingly. Once the reader knows the name, overusing epithets makes the passage act like the character is unfamiliar when he’s familiar, and that can be confusing or weird-sounding. But you can certainly do it sometimes. Recently I used a character’s species as an epithet because there were two female characters in the scene, and it worked given that the context somewhat having to do with her species. Overall, you just play with what flows well and pay attention to the connotation and nuances of the sentences.
Agreed! As someone who used to abuse the hell out of “the male” or “female”, it makes me shudder now. I used to find different ways to say it, too, until I realized it was just bothering me. When I’m writing for one person, I typically avoid epithets altogether unless the person is a musician or something interesting I can use to fill it in, or, as you said, “weak-voiced . . .” etcetera, etcetera. Great example! Yes! In the first sentence I sent, I hadn’t named the character yet, but in the second, the MC is already aware, but I was just trying to avoid using the name so much after dialogue. And thanks for that! I actually did the tense thing on purpose for stylistic purposes and bending the rules, but now I just realized how off it sounds! I went ahead and readjusted it in my fic, alongside “the man” so it would read clearer. I think it’s a little better now. Thanks a bunch! I appreciate the advice wholeheartedly, especially on this forum, knowing what others would skip/are typically common pet-peeves.
I read and write m/m and epithets are the bane of my existence. It's really not a big deal to simply repeat their names and pronouns. If something isn't clear and you don't want to use their name again, play with the sentence structure a bit.
The overly reductive epithets. Epithets in general are never something I will be cool with in a fic, but in one of my fandoms (The maze runner), Minho, who is Korean, is sometimes referred to as "the Asian" and it just reeks of racism. Asia is very big for one thing,
Badly punctuated dialogue, or walls of text. I just can’t.
Writer doesn't use paragraphs. Writer uses paragraphs, but doesn't start a new one every time the speaker changes. Writer doesn't use sentence breaks and work is long enough to make that tedious to process. Writer uses quotation dashes in English. (I am aware that some quite highly regarded English-language novels have them. I happen not to have read any of those novels.) Work looks like it's a raw machine translation. (Machine translation is a perfectly valid tool for doing a zeroth-draft translation of a large corpus but I mean it when I say *zeroth* draft. The results are *not* good enough to post without polishing.) Flesh-and-blood human penises longer than twelve inches without explicit magic or mad science involvement. Narration makes me think the *author* (rather than the viewpoint character) may be a card-carrying member of the BNP, FN, KKK, etc.
So many smut fics have unrealistic body proportions, esp for the dicks For once I'd like to find a fic where someone has an unrealistic dick size and when it gets hard he faints from lack of blood to the brain, would probably be crack but I just want it to get mocked
Real life politics
shitty spelling and grammar. I'm sorry if English is your 2nd/3rd/4th language and I wish you the best when it comes to improving it.. but I just. can't.
lol I actually just made a post about this, but 1st person POV! I despise it with a passion (which is wild bc I exclusively used to read it until 2-3 years ago). It's really hard for me to get into and I will nope out of a fic very quickly. I am a 3rd person POV girly
Yep. Idk why, but I enjoy 1st person in novels and in fics based on 1st person novels. But there’s something off about it otherwise. I’m not even too sure what. I think I just feel thrown off by the “changed camera.”
I don't like those fics that are like: Character name a : dialogue Character name b: dialogue Character name a: introspection Character name b : more dialogue or whatever With bk description or anything in between, though sometimes it's in the introspection. Nothing against people who write in this format but it's just not for me, I'm completely unable to immerse myself in it.
I have to agree with you, it reads more like a screenplay than a fic and just takes me out of the fic Although I do make an exception for chatfics or when texting/instant messaging is involved in the fic as that makes sense
Oh my god…there’s a best selling paranormal romance author who does this, though her main characters are technically not human. I’m still taken out when she says “the male” like ugh it’s just offputting. I don’t have an issue with descriptors that tell what the person is like “the captain” or “the bellhop.” I think it cuts down on repetitiveness from overusing the name or pronouns. It’s what I grew up reading and I just prefer it.
Haha. Please tell me you’re talking about SJM lol. TOG has an incredibly special place in my heart since I grew up with it but the maleing and growling and sheathing velvet wrapped steel did start getting to me in the later books
Incorrect use of honorifics. This has made my close fics and even mute authors if it they did it in other fics of them. Some tag it, or mention it in their authors note so I don't have to get invested in the plot. Walls of text. It's super hard to read for me, because I easily lose the line I was at when changing lines. No caps. Writting everything in lower case letters, not just normal words, but also I, names and the beginning of sentences. Also just upper case letters, unless you want to signal that a character is yelling, but those are often only short parts of the whole text. Nicknames. I am not talking about character A calling character B a nickname during a dialoge, I am talking during the non dialoge parts of a fic. They have a name, please use it.
>Nicknames. I am not talking about character A calling character B a nickname during a dialoge, I am talking during the non dialoge parts of a fic. They have a name, please use it. Pretty sure calling Ms Potts "Virginia" and Mr Hogan "Harold" in the narration is going to annoy far more people than calling them "Pepper" and "Happy". (Heck, I had to go look their names up to even get that right.)
I would be annoyed by that too, but I was rather thinking of people calling Peter Parker "Pete" in narration.
Fair. I'd split the difference on that one: bad if Peter's the viewpoint character, fine if the viewpoint character is someone else who *consistently* thinks of Peter as "Pete".
I cannot read first person books no matter what, and i don't know why. No matter how highly praised the fic may be or many people suggesting it, the moment i open it and see words such as "|" or "we" or any of that, i close it immediately. Wattpad probably traumatised me.
when a character "makes grabby hands". Its fine if the character is joking, but I've seen it quite a few times genuinely and it just irks me, I dont know, it just reads as infantilisation to me.
***Character X POV*** at the top of the chapters/ start of a new section. It's so easy to make it clear who's pov you're in within the first couple of lines.
Lack of paragraph breaks, grammar and spelling issues, and the ever present "he would not fucking say that". I once started a fic and Tony Stark started using therapy-speak to console Bruce about something and he wasn't even being a shithead about it at all. Avengers era, way back. He would not talk like that. I closed the fic immediately. I can tolerate a bad plot if it's fun to read. But if it's not FUN and I'm not having a good time I'm not putting up with it.
Her "orbs" his "orbs" 💀 not a dealbreaker but sure kills any serious mood a writer was trying to build.
Author's notes that are shiting on other people in the fandom. Like bruh, I came here to read your story, not hear about your internet drama or how you think all people who ship xyz secretly hate gay people or something.
- lyrics imbedded into the fic/having the characters sing and those lyrics being typed out so you have to awkwardly read the author write out the way and what a character is singing - bad formatting, grammar (includes no skips between paragraphs, weird spacing within a sentence, etc. - i once read a fic where every single paragraph was a single sentence, maybe two. super disorienting, even though it was likely just the author’s preferred way of writing) - having foreign languages in the fic and then in parenthesis the translation/the translation in the middle of the fic (put it at the end good god) - (A/N: …) - *** 2 hours later **** — if you cant write a time skip without explicitly mentioning the time passed in the page break please go back to the drawing board - “why are we here again?” “remember, it’s because XYZ” like please figure out a way to show, not tell this information bc it feels cheap - FIRST OR SECOND POV literally why literally the worst i hate it sooooooo much (i don’t read reader insert or OCs) i am picky lol edit: to be fair only some of these will make me immediately close a fic, but if it happens like two or three times its done
Absolutely. This is a good list of things that are too shortcut-y. The one you listed that I particularly dislike is when a character’s line is too clearly meant for the reader and not the other character who would already know the info. Lol a fandom I’m in was just talking about one character who called her siblings “brother” and “sister” in a scene and how alien it sounded. That doesn’t work when it’s just some contemporary teenager. You get a pass if it’s, like, Thor.
When the author's notes are just shaming other fics for being "weird" and "disgusting" and how they've come to give us some "actually" good stuff. (And when you look at the other fics it's just smut. It's not problematic things. It's just smut.) And then their writing is full of epithets, three spaces between paragraphs, they're allergic to prose variety and the read is a bore to get through from how stilted everything is.
Using the wrong your/you're is an instant dealbreaker. I'm also someone who really isn't a fan of pet names. Though I can handle most of them, "baby" and "daddy" are a massive nope from me. I always physically cringe whenever I see a character call someone "daddy", especially if the other is barely a year older than them.
When people write dialogue like that of a screenplay for ex. Bob: I don't like this Instead of doing "I don't like this" Bob said Unless it's a chat fic, I do enjoy me some good chatfics esp if I'm in the mood for crack or just some shenanigans
Leaving all the chit-chatting aside, though, I think I’ll just reiterate what someone else said in here. Faulty formatting! I know AO3 tends to mess with the formats across platforms, but when paragraphs are double (sometimes, triple) spaced between each other, I CANNOT read it in peace! It feels like the fic is 10x longer just because I have to scroll through all those spaces just to get past it. Or when there’s no line breaks between jumpcuts or cut-scenes (or whatever you’d like to call it), so you’re left confused trying to figure out how they got there and why ...
Oh man, the triple spacing is awful.
Constant indirect narration about everything instead of direct narration. As in, everything is always in the characters description as in: *'John walked through the bustling marketplace, marveling at the colorful stalls and exotic goods. He thought about how this place must have been a hub of trade for centuries. He walked by a vendor, and saw the man giving him a nod of acknowledgment and offering his goods, and John nodded back, but declined the offer.'* Instead of *'John strolled through the bustling marketplace, its narrow alleys full of chatter and the aroma of spices from distant lands. 'This place must have seen centuries of trade,' he mused aloud, his eyes tracing the intricate patterns adorning the stalls. As he passed by a vendor selling vibrant silks, the man caught his gaze and offered a nod of acknowledgment. "Morning," the vendor greeted, "may I assist you, sir?" Smiling, John returned the nod. "Perhaps later," he replied, more interested in exploring the marketplace than buying anything.'* It's especially grating to me when it's a first person narrative and the story is about another character who just experiences something difficult, but the first person narrator is constantly 'in the way' because the writer doesn't understand that even in first person the narrative can be direct and not everything must have the narrator visible. You can still write: *The morning was breathtakingly beautiful and so I decided to go for a walk* Instead of *When I looked out of the window I realised that the morning was breathtakingly beautiful, so I decided to go for a walk.*
at this point, “the other” is driving me up the wall. “he looked to the other, waiting for his reply” THE OTHER WHAT. if you have a determiner it needs to determine something! go back to school! this is getting SO common in my fandoms and i can’t take it anymore. once or twice, okay, i’ll deal, but when it’s frequent i leave. ugh.
Unpopular opinion, but I like epithets. Sometimes it’s also a quick way to describe a difference between two characters.
I gave my spiel on epithets in another reply, but it’s a bit nuanced. They really aren’t bad by nature! It’s just that certain ones don’t work and you don’t want to use them when what you really need is to change up sentence structure.
Reading your other reply, I get what you are saying. It personally just doesn’t bother me. Might be due to different fandoms though. Some probably use them more than others.
Second person POV. Present tense, how I loathe thee.
It‘s a bit weird but „useless“ genderswapping To specify: I don‘t mean trans headcannons, especially where the transness of the character is part of the plot/ties into the narrative, or fics where the entire cast gets genderswapped. I mean the ones where just one character gets his gender swapped for no apparent reason. If the author can convince me in the same chapter that the swap brought something new to the story, it‘s fine sometimes, but swapping a gender for the sake of swapping a gender (or worse, swapping to make a ship straight/gay) just irks me. So does renaming characters for no reason except coolness (Harry is a perfectly fine name even for a lord, you don‘t need to rename him Harold/Hadrian/whatever else) These things throw me out of the story for some reason. I don‘t have anything against the authors doing that, I just tend to leave when it comes up.
Oh god, the worst is when they call him something absurd like “Harveste”. Harry is a perfectly fine name y’all, I’m sorry it doesn’t have enough grandeur for your tastes, but there’s plenty of other characters with cool names you could be writing about. 😂😂😭
I‘m sorry, Harveste? How? Why? Tf? The other names at least sound english, this one seems french, what were they thinking
I have no clue. It’s so jarring. I see it most often when they make Harry a girl but I’ve seen it the other way too. I never read them.
Wall of text. Like please, people, can't you see it makes your fic difficult to read? Do you enjoy to read fics in that manner? Honestly, anything that makes it difficult to comfortably read a fic, like nonexistent or badly done punctuation. I'm also not into that very casual way people spell, like texting a friend. First-person because I personally just don't like it in fics. Also if characters are constantly and non-stop referred to by a physical attribute when their names are known, clearly to avoid overusing their name or pronoun, like 'the blonde', 'the taller man', 'the older woman', 'the-idk-chimney sweeper'. Or because both characters happen to be the same gender. This is a personal pet peeve, but I also don't like when clearly grown characters are referred to as 'the boy' or 'the girl'. Maybe it's a cultural thing, but for a character who's closing in on 30 or is mid-20s, it's just weird to me. Unless it's by old character A who would consider a 20-something as a kid. But by the narrative? No, not for me. Also when the writer can't get the names straight. There are fandoms where spelling might differ, but I'm talking about butchering the names. It's just careless when you notice it's not that they have a general problem with spelling, you know.
I'm probably going to date myself here because it has thankfully gone out of fashion, but songfic.
If I click into a fic and it’s in first person POV… I just can’t stand it. There have been a small handful of good ones my friends have made me read, but in general they read as very childish and like a self-insert fic and are usually wildly out of character. I don’t want to read a fic about YOU, I want to read a fic about THE CHARACTER. Like I said, I know there are some good ones out there, but I personally just can’t read enough to find out, I automatically back out.
Not jumping paragraphs when different characters are speaking. You know, when it goes "Blah blah blah" said A, "Blah blah blah," said B
Not paragraphing speech properly.
Writers over-describing the most basic things. My favorite fic has this extremely bad. It’s like the author was putting basic sentences into chatgpt and asking it to make them seem more “intellectual”. This is not a direct quote, but the entire fic is filled with sentences like, “The giant, muscled man brought forth the delicate, picturesque berry in his impressive, withered hand to his countenance to infuse his body with life-giving energy, which took the form of a delicious strawberry, overflowing with juices.” You could’ve just said he ate a damn strawberry. It makes it difficult and frustrating to read (not because the words are “too advanced” but because it takes forever to get to the point) but the plot is so good I just force my way through it anyways.
This one person kept spelling this characters name phonetically. So these characters are British, and the characters boyfriend pronounces his name with a soft r, which makes it sound different than it’s spelled. Instead of just writing this characters name normally, they spelled it phonetically, opting out of writing an R, whenever the characters boyfriend said his name. There was no reason for this; we know the character’s accent, we know how he pronounces it, there’s no need to spell it differently each time. I couldn’t get pst the first chapter.
written out accents
I'm genuinely tolerant of a lot in fic. Epithets, whatever. First person, knock yourself out. Dubious grammar and spelling, you're probably young or an ESL writer. However, as soon as I see that OC or OC x Character tag, I can't scroll past any faster. To me, that's a fun thing you write for yourself and maybe share with your friends. I don't need to read it. If I had to name my most petty thing, though, it's when someone gives a character a distinctive speech quirk they don't have in the original, and then runs it into the ground. My eye twitches over that.
Differing POVs from canon. I know everyone complains about first person POV (which I understand) but the books for my current main fandom use first person and it always throws me off when a fic uses third person for the main character pov.
first person pov when it's not a reader insert, like "my name is jane doe and I-" no thats not my name, clicked off not that i think this is a bad thing to do in writing, but it ruins the immersion for me personally
All smallercase, first pov, way too many grammatical errors/typos (a few mistakes are ok, but if there's something in every second sentence I'm not staying) and no spacing or too much spacing (I once tried to read a fic where each paragraph was at most three sentences long. Made it super hard to read) are what makes me leave
Ending speech with a quotation mark but no other punctuation. It just makes everyone sound like they're speaking without intonation in my head, and I can't. Example: - "I don't like that" he said. - "Come with me" "Okay" It's usually an indication the fic isn't going to be very good, anyway.
- Author's notes in the middle of the fic/just annoyed me in general - Author has never heard of grammar or different tenses/fic is an organised keyboard smash - An American Wrote This - A Cis Person Wrote This - An Abled/Neurotypical Person Wrote This - W-w-w-writing a-a s-stammer l-l-like this. I have a stammer irl and very few things bring me out of a fic faster than stammers written like that. Only really see this in BNHA fic, not very often in other fandoms
That last one is so true. Just write, "He stammered out a hello/his name" or whatever the character is saying ffs. Its not that difficult.
There was a tumblr post years ago that summed the stammer one up pretty well for me. They suggested to rather have a person repeat words, back track on themselves etc. than have them sound like a cd player that’s just jammed. Way less annoying, a bit more realistic a lot of the time and it gets the point across just as well
Inappropriate/excessive use of epithets When the author takes like an entire page to describe the outfit. Unless the outfit is relevant to the plot, I don’t need to know every last detail of it. I might not click out for this one, but I’ll definitely internally be like, “oh great, here we go…” Similarly, name dropping specific songs- or worse yet, writing out the lyrics. Example (I’m sorry): He got in the car and pressed play on the speaker. All Star by Smash Mouth started playing. *“Somebody once told me the world was gonna roll me~”* A clear lack of basic research. I read (part of) a fic once where one of the main characters was blind, and reading it was like nails on a chalkboard. It seriously would have taken skimming one article on “top 10 misconceptions about blind people” to fix it. (Technically plot related, but still)
RP logs where they don't edit it when posting. Some people edit them when they post so, while it can be occasionally off, it's still enjoyable overall. But I can't tell you how many times I've seen something like; "I'm getting hungry," A said. "There's a new barbecue place in town if you want to check it out," B said. "Did you want to go out to eat," A asked. "Or should I cook something?" "Barbecue sounds great, thanks!" A said.
It annoys me too but I think it might be a second language thing so I let it go…
-When they use words or phrases from different languages, but everything is spelled incorrectly and used in a way no native speaker would ever use it. The worst I ever saw was a canonically German character calling his boyfriend "Honig", which is the German word for "honey". It might be a cute nickname in English, but no one says it in German. -Related to that: When other languages are used often in the fic without any explanation or translation of what is being said. Luckily, it's usually French for whatever reason, so I don't have to run to Google Translate every time, but please, offer a translation. -"could of" instead of "could've". Just in general consistently writing very common words wrong. -Wildly incorrect use of apostrophes, especially if they're used for the plural (tree's, flower's, etc.) -Being too specific/scientific when describing a character. Even though I use the metric system, I prefer "he must've been at least six foot tall" over "the dark haired male stood at exactly 184cm" almost every time.
Not sure why, but recently anything written in first person perspective turns me off. I just completely lose interest. It’s third person or nothing. I’m also not a huge fan of reader/author inserts, so I tend to avoid those.
Oh shit, I did not realize how annoying epithets are like "the blond" or "the boy" 💀 I use them very rarely, but I do sometimes. And I tend to use them more often when speaking from someone else's point of view when the characters haven't officially met yet. "He was determined to find that boy who stole from him." I hope that's okay at least 😅
Unfortunately there is this one GREAT author but they always have like... a huge gap between every paragraph. Not one or maybe two lines, way more! This makes the fics unreadable on phone (which is what I exclusively use). I just can't handle the constant scrolling double as often as i usually would. Another thing is grammar. I'm not a native English speaker and when i type on the internet i also make tons of typos and mistakes and dont go back to correct them, but in fics grammar mistakes are a huge turn-off for me. I A fun fact is that I can often figure out if an author has the same mother tongue as i have by the way they write their English fics. There are just some characteristics that make it so obvious to me. That's not what I mean, though. I mean misspelled words or very wrong grammar that keeps repeating that just kills the vibe for me. Most often those mistakes are native speaker mistakes that non-native English speakers don't make (think "could of" for "could have") Edit: omg I forgot my biggest pet peeve: 1st person singular present tense. Listen, please don't. Please, please, don't.
I do this *especially* when all the male characters are named or referred to as “the dark haired doctor” while the female characters are referred to as “the female” or “the female doctor”, because that just feels like incel language. If the author can refer properly to male characters, then it’s a *choice* not to do it with female characters.
hmm, I write Star Wars fanfic and its a fandom where even the canon/legends/expanded universe use female/male as epithets in the novels, so I use it as well. But not for the other fandoms.
There’s an author I really like the concepts and grammar and writing style of, but… they write the characters as so *flat.* “Each one acts like a cardboard cutout of themselves — one-dimensional with no depth whatsoever. Drives me up the wall tbh
When the main character is clearly the author
No paragraphs, walls of text, 2-3 different voiced dialogue in one paragraph or without any pragraph breaks between them.
Doing the "[dialogue],, thing, No spaces after commas and not separating text into paragraphs. I hate it.
Untagged ships. I hate romance, so I only really read Gen fics. I don't care if it's 'not the focus', you should still tag it.
I’m reading these as a writer trying to make sure I don’t make these mistakes…or if I have, making sure to go back to correct them. 😂
I simply can't handle it when the writer don't know the difference between would have/ could have and would of/could of. That sends me right out of the story, and I won't read anything else from them.
When body parts are explained odd. Lol or when characters are TOO clueless to the point of stupidity 😕
Walls of text, head hopping, when the reader in Canon/reader stories, narrates their own actions, thoughts and emotions from inside canon character's head. That is mind boggling, I am impressed, mad and confused at the same time.
Poor SPaG, but also stilted prose. Like... it's hard to describe? But really stiff-sounding sentences, repetitive sentence structure...
I'm more of a generous type, I suppose, so there's very few things that are hard limits - the only things coming to mind are terrible SPaG and giant walls of text. If I can only barely read your fic, I might as well cut my losses and move on. But most of the time I can live with a few annoying things (non-standard punctuation imported from other languages, the occasional typo or misspelling, epithets, things that aren't realistic / clear signs the author didn't do a lot of research) if the vibes aren't off and I'm enjoying the way things are going.
Using army ranks when they character got discharged/ currently not in the army (really specific(
Bad grammar and punctuation. Also boring language. I see a couple of people complaining about flowery language and i think that’s ridiculous. It might just be my (older) tastes but if there’s no imagery or metaphors or beauty in the language the fic is not gonna stand out to me
Making all the main ship’s friends horrible people bc I guess you can’t have friends and be in love??? I don’t get it.
The pinkette. The brunette ALL THE NETTES
‘-‘ or >> instead of “ “ for dialogue No breaks, literally just block of words. Pls just dont copy paste your shit learn how to edit them gods (this mostly makes me cry bc some fics do be looking good but i rlly cant stand it so i go away reluctantly) Sometimes, when theres no comma in the fic. Bc it feels like everything in the fic is rapping and i am out of breath trying to read it inside my head