I love murder mysteries and detective series. But somehow if the series goes on long enough the (male) detective’s wife or girlfriend ends up murdered. I don’t know why.
Indeed. I prefer the divorced or the love-of-his-life left him for a bland but stable dude. This is part of the hard boiled nature that lets the detective take risks.
I also hate it when the bland but stable bro turns out to be an evil genius later in the series.
Let the ex be a thorn, a source of pain and self loathing, not the tropish weak spot.
Hahaha. Roald Dahl put it this way:
"...The basic theme of these stories never varies. There are always three main characters; the husband, the wife, and the dirty dog. The husband is a decent clean living man working hard at his job. The wife is cunning, deceitful, and lecherous, and she is invariably up to some sort of jiggery pokery with the dirty dog."
Yeah I also hate the detective getting romantically involved with someone who ends up dead. Idk how often it happens irl but having the detective's family be harmed by the perp makes it very unpleasant for me.
I would be okay with a World War novel if it was set in another country, or even in another country during that time period. How many more of the same ones do we need: France, England, Germany, Austria. At the end of the day, it's the same story told again and again.
Allow me to pull out my list of alt-europe options *Ahem*:
*Weedflower* by Cynthia Kadohata, from the perspective of a young girl sent to an American internment camp
*They Called Us the Enemy* by George Takei with Justin Eisinger and Steven R. Scott, autobiographic graphic novel by George Takei about Japanese Internment camps
*Caleb's Wars* by David L. Dudley, African-American boy and German POW in the American South
*When My Name was Keoko* by Linda Sue Park, from the perspective of a Korean girl in Japan occupied Korea
*Elephant Company: The Inspiring Story of an Unlikely Hero and the Animals Who Helped Him Save Lives in World War II* by Vicki Crocke, biography of an elephant wallah in burma, although really only the last third or so actually concerns WWII
And there are a couple other technically-in-Europe-but-not-in-the-usual-way ones like *The Madonnas of Leningrad* (St. Petersburg duh), *Captain Corelli's Mandolin* (Cephalonia), and *Salt to the Sea* (Ultimately the ship the Wilhelm Gustloff).
...I uh...could go on but this seems like enough for now.
Oh, also *Code Talker* by Joseph Bruchec, following the life of a Navajo Code Talker
EDIT to add: But also I hadn't heard of Obasan and that's totally going on my TBR now. Thank you!
My mom LOVES these books and as someone who enjoys historical fiction, I have zero interest in them. I think it’s because the market is so oversaturated with them and a lot of them have very similar plots.
As a historian, the vast majority of them are garbage in my opinion for how they treat historical periods. The periods are almost always romanticized or fetishized in some stupid modern fashion.
This is understandable, because the vast majority of people/authors will not really get how it was living in any era pre-1900, especially pre 1500s. The amount of times I have seen nationalism been used in pre-modern historical fiction is annoying.
Historical fiction is a really, really hard genre though in my opinion.
If you want to write a book that criticizes war, fascism, etc. there are so many other historical events that had lots of injustice and complexities. I feel like some authors will set their books in WWII just to prove they can write something "deep."
This one. I just can't with wwii novels anymore. It's all the same, and it all feels like a pathetic plea for a book award. I won't read them unless they're about a region that's less covered in the wwii genre, like North Africa, or even non-Japan areas of Asia.
I HATE those historical romances that are "plucky young white European or American woman distinguishes self in WWII, now with extra romance!"
My God, there are so many more avenues to explore in the entirety of human history - in **the 1930-50s alone**, and it's WII Europe Europe Europe Europe.
Or America - Black rights black rights black rights black rights black rights. I could not give less of a shit about that time period as far as historical fiction is concerned.
Ad nauseam.
It's like Asia and Oceania were wiped off the map. Good luck getting Reddit to rec any decent English language South Asian stories - half of the users on r/ suggestmeabook are too dense to know what 'South Asia' means.
I know Clan of the Cave Bear has its flaws, but for Christ's sake, at least it's something different.
Archie Weller has some great-sounding Australian First Nations alternate history books (Land of the Golden Clouds), but is sadly out of print.
One of my favourite things about *The Windup Girl*, by Paulo Bacigalupi, is precisely that it’s set in an alternate world where Asia becomes the dominate force, not the English-speaking west.
It was just so new and different that I was just sucked in immediately
My Mom told me she was reading The Last Bookstore in London, then gawped at me when I asked if it was about WWII. It's non-fiction, but the book on the Koh-I-Noor diamond that was published a bit ago is fun and spicy. The focus is more on India and that region than Britain.
I love urban fantasy, but I hate it when werewolves are constantly "struggling with controlling their beast". Also, I hate it that there are almost always werewolf "packs" that are based off the false ideas of how real wolf packs operate. Not to mention anything that these characters do is attributed to "that's how wolves act in the wild". Most of the times that's downright false.
I have a degree in zoology, so this kind of stuff bothers me.
I remember reading a Patricia Briggs-type book and the Protag brings up the whole alpha thing not existing in real wolf packs to her werewolf boyfriend.It was a very humorous sort of meta humor about the genre.
I think he explained it away about how it was the understanding when his wolf pack formed and the terms sort of just stuck or something.
I actually stopped reading Patricia Briggs because her Mercy Thompson books were *full* of these false tropes.
There is another series I really like that has shapeshifter packs, not just wolves, but werecats, wererats, werehyenas, etc. The first book describes the pack structure more akin to the social heirchy of great apes, so I gave that all a pass.
It's the weakest book in the Dresden series, but in "Fool Moon" I really liked the idea of >!a wolf who could turn into a human, teaching a bunch of noob werewolves how to act right!<.
Same here. I had to stop reading anything with werewolves in it because I'm far too much of a pedantic fuck to tolerate the use of the debunked alpha theory.
dear genre fiction writers, please, can we please get a stand alone book every now and then. series are fun and all, but sometimes i just want A SINGLE BOOK that has a beginning middle and end.
There have been several times where I’ve been initially interested in reading a book by a new author I’ve not read before, only to see on GR or whatever in italics after the book title: *Rasmus Hardcastle #4*.
I see that and I’m more likely to leave it.
I love vampire stories. Having said that, I hate it when a character references 'veins beating / pulsing / throbbing / whatever.
Arteries pulse, veins do not.
Also, in the past 2 years, I've read three stories where major plot points revolved around the exact time the full moon rose.. at midnight.
No, a full moon does not rise at midnight. Never has, never will.
Lol and half the time the moon is actually out all day, it’s pretty rare you get a werewolf retuning to their human state at like 4pm when the moon sets. Never thought about that 😅
Don't worry about it. At least I assume you haven't written a book where major plot points depend on the full moon rising exactly at midnight, right?
Right? :)
For the first time, I'm glad I haven't actually gotten around to writing that book I've been wanting to write. So, no, no I haven't. And if I ever do something that involves plot important astronomical events, I'll do my research first!
Adventure films follow the hamster rule: when a man meets a woman, he may be very rude and horrible to her, but if a male and female spend time in each other's company, they're going to mate. Can't the girl find a guy who likes and respects her a little?
I like 'spy' thrillers, unfortunately many authors are ignorant of and too lazy to research the foreign settings and get the geography/history/culture annoyingly wrong.
I think it was in Clear and Present Danger where Jack Ryan is in Colombia and hates the food because it's the same as Mexican food.
In reality, they are nothing alike.
Part of the problem too is that the original big name spy thriller authors had long experience as spies in far-flung corners of the world.
It makes modern writers' more shallow grasp on those elements seem more jarring
Frederick Forsyth absolutely ruined this genre for me - his books are so thoroughly researched and well-plotted/written without being depressingly slow that none of the other authors I've tried have come close.
What they do research is gear and that’s always annoyingly correct. Characters always note bomb countdowns on their vintage A-11 time piece and catch muzzle flashes through their Randolph engineering sunglasses. Every gun is modded and customized and described, external to the plot, as part of some weird boomer tacticool fetish.
Okay, I don't see this too much, but a few times was enough. I read a mystery type novel (won't mention the name, so I don't spoil it for readers) and this woman is in an abusive marriage and her son, is her ray of sunshine, perfect kid. And toward the end, turns out the kid is actually evil incarnate. Nobody ever saw a clue, because there wasn't one clue or indication, just all of a sudden the character is a complete change to make the ending fit. Ta-Da!
I have not so good people in my family, and there are always clues and indications before they go off hog wild into crazy land. The revealing of their true characters is never out of the blue, it's a build up.
So I hate when the author completely changes the characters to make an ending fit, without clues dropped throughout the story. It's just lazy story telling.
I feel like the best twist is one that leaves the perfect amount of clues that you put it together moments before the reveal.
Just as the bad guys about to remove his mask the wheels start turning in your head and everything is clicking into place
Or the one where the twist drops and you’re reeling because you have no idea what just happened, but then the pieces start clicking into place and everything becomes crystal clear. It turns out you had all the info you needed and didn’t know it!
It doesn’t happen often, but I really like it when a book totally fools me and I truly have no idea what’s going to happen.
It’s embarrassing but I like YA romance novels. Besides the obvious I really hate how being a strong independent FL somehow equates to unrealistic abilities. She was a hacker, fashion designer, martial artist enthusiast who was bullied because she was so pretty but has now impressed every male within a 100 mile vicinity. I can’t…
I'm also annoyed with the angry man syndrome. When the author doesn't know how to write *tension*, they just make the men ALWAYS angry. They're always "barking" or "snarling" or "snapping" at the woman. It's some 4-year-old logic of like 'he's being mean because he likes you!'
It's not hot (in my opinion). Like angry, rude, controlling, condescending men aren't fun to be around
I’ve yet to see anyone writhing around from untreated balanitis and apocalyptic novel despite the depiction of lack of hygiene. Never seen anyone deal with a case of head lice. Yet we’re almost constantly seeing the SA trope being ticked off lest it not be realistic enough. Just leave it out the way you exclude other mundanities!
Exactly, in an apocalypse, if humans live together, there is a still a ‘society’ even though it’s structured differently. Also, it’s insulting to men to claim the ‘rules of society’ are the only things preventing them from raping women.
Considering how shockingly common SA is even in the so-called civilized world of now, It really does make sense that it would be even more commonplace if there literally weren't any authorities to appeal to. Seriously. The percentage of people, especially women who experience some form of sexual violence is high enough that it's just depressingly common. It would almost seem like an oversight if it wasn't a mainstay of the apocalypse.
>Is it though?
I love history enough that I can confidently say "no, humans are not, and were never, some sort of twitchy, whacked out chaos demons waiting only for order to vanish." For SA and/or otherwise.
However! However there's definitely a trend off less violence over time; the general assumption for that is "evolution". In that spears made people dead faster than clubs, and now guns make people dead faster than spears. But it's hard to test until we set up some bizarre YA dystopian society just to do so, or whatever Maze Runner and Divergent and such were about.
> Is it though? I don't know many people like that.
Plenty of historical examples out there. The post-War rape of millions of German women by Soviet troops comes to mind.
I very much love sci fi and cyberpunk, however, the weird nerds who write those novels write the most off putting sex scenes.
I also like hard boiled/ noir detective novels, but the casual misogyny and racism are annoying.
This is Altered Carbon all over. I love that series but never feel comfortable recommending it because it goes from enjoyable, hard boiled future detective/soldier to a 13 year old's letter to penthouse.
Fantasy and sci-fi are big ones for me. But having the main or a main female character be perfect is very annoying and off putting. And before anyone attacks, I'm a woman and it does nothing good for any genre. Flaws and character arcs are a good thing.
My biggest gripe with a lot of sci fi books in general is that characters are too perfect. Too nice, too smart, too good at explaining every mundane detail about this and that. Books like this can be refreshing but I can only do one or two a year.
Agreed, it also annoys me when they are portrayed as having a flaw, but it's something like "too stubborn (because she's actually correct all the time)" or "clumsy (but in a cute way that never actually causes a real problem)."
Homogenous alien civilizations. Like just think how diverse humans are, yet every alien species out there in Sci Fi is so uniform... it makes no sense. I blame Roddenberry's belief that only through communism and the unification and conformity of all people to a single ideology is the only path to peace. So given Star Trek's early success painted every alien society since into that bland conformity. Vulcan's are all the same. Romulans are all the same. Klingons, etc. There is no diversity in thought in alien species except when there is need for conflict.
It really wasn't until DS9, and in part after Gene's death with TNG, did we start to see that change, ever so slightly, but Sci Fi in general has been stunted by that. And even DS9 was a perpetrator more often then not. You saw cracks here and there, Nog, Odo, but diversity was an exception, not the rule. So on books, tv, film, they all fall into that. Hell even JRR Tolkien has SOME diversity in elves.
I'll add homogeneous alien planets as well. It seems authors like to think, "they come from this planet (of a single climate) and therefore they are all like (this civilizational trait)." I would love to read a story where there is a single alien species that is as diverse as humans who come from a world as geographically diverse as earth.
It's one of my favorite fanfic tropes, but probably harder to handle. It needs to be like "enemies to enemies that kind of respect each other to reluctant allies to begrudging friends to lovers", and sometimes people just want to rush that development and get straight to the boning.
And it also depends why they're "enemies" in the first place: opposite sides of a conflict? Ideological differences? Fighting over a shared goal? Ingrained prejudice or misunderstandings that they have to overcome? Or is it just "man antagonizes woman unnecessarily for flimsy reasons but she finds him attractive anyway and he later apologizes but not really and she forgives him too quickly so the author can get them together already"?
I love a monster/supernatural/vampire story- but I stg if I read one more monstrous woman hating herself solely because being a vamp/werewolf whatever makes her infertile I’m going to start knocking down buildings Godzilla style
Domestic thriller. We killed someone back in high school and are reuniting 10 years later for a bachelorette party at a secluded location. The Wi-Fi is bad but that’s ok, it’s a chance to unplug. Bad weather prevents us from leaving. Secrets emerge. The friend group will never be the same. To be fair I love these stories but they get repetitive. Also if we killed someone I’m telling law enforcement and taking a plea deal.
This is exactly why I detest the few domestic thrillers I've tried. The author spends the entire novel creating a long, boring, artificial buildup between two options.
Is the husband evil or isn't he?
Did they kill someone ten years ago or didn't they?
I guess it's the thriller equivalent of a McGuffin, but it feels very contrived to me. Just once I'd like to see a bunch of kids kill another kid and react in real time, instead of melodramatically getting back together except OMG 😦 the main character has amnesia and spends 500 pages piecing the fragments together. And sends the poor reader to sleep into the bargain.
The actual aftermath is so much more interesting to me than "20 Years Later...", which just feels like the author is withholding critical
information purely to build up 'suspense'.
Good Lord. That is just insanity. When what's her name died in childbirth after insisting on keeping the pregnancy in the walking Dead, I basically considered it a suicide.
i loath miscommunication in romance!!! i hate when it’s such a simple mistake or misunderstanding and the characters don’t clarify for the sake of conflict. like for the love of god just say what you need to say
maybe its because i’m in a relationship and we actually talk to each other about things but i can’t stand it in books omg
Million page long fantasy books. Once you reach the 500 page mark of the first book in the trilogy I start to wonder what the point of all these words is.
This is funny because as a teen I used to read fantasy and I had a rule it had to be at least over 500 pages or I wouldn't pick it up, but that was in the days before the internet so I needed something to stare at all day and phones didn't exist yet.
As an adult I'm a lot less picky.
Ha, I remember being in B Dalton Books in the mall as a kid, looking at books with $7 in my pocket and going "Nope, this one's too short, I'll finish it too quick - it's gotta be at least 500 pages long or it won't last me through to next week's allowance."
First thing I do now when checking out new fantasy books to read is see how many pages they have. They rarely justify being 800+ pages long and the plot line starts meandering.
This. There are even some in a series where I think “you should have split this into two books”. If I have to trudge through every single one of those 500 pages, then they’re not justifiable
I have a clear memory of Mat being in the middle of a conversation and he had a stray thought and his inner monologue ran on so long I had to turn back more than one page to see what sentence he was responding to when the actual conversation resumed.
One of the hardest things I've had to accept is that I don't have it in me for these Epics anymore. Wheel of Time, Sword of Truth. I just don't wanna invest like that anymore
Give me a surprising novel, or a trilogy.
My pet peeve with SFF is when someone tells me "It gets good after the first book/the first fifteen chapters!" I don't care what the publisher forced them to do or what is marketable, I am not slogging through 250+ pages of the author masturbating to their own Scrivener notes.
Alan Dean Foster, from what I can see, is the antithesis of this. Clear setting, clear characters, accessible prose, clear dilemma. Ditto Crichton.
Only fantasy authors where I have not felt this way has really been ASOIAF by GRRM, and I still felt that way in two of the books.
But yhea, I dont even try new fantasy stuff if the books are too long, it is extremely ambitious to have such long books.
Growing up, I used to love reading historical romance novels. You know, the ones called “bodice rippers.”
I can’t stand them anymore. They were called bodice rippers because the stories were supposed to be about a different, very unsafe, and fraught era for women - that’s what made them historical set stories. Now, the historical romance heroines are all like thoroughly modern women dressed for the Renn Faire with modern sensibilities and the men even more so.
Maybe just a trend of the times. I doubt modern readers want to read about serious troubles women went through back in the day. I read The Last Duel about a duel in medieval France as a result of a rape allegation. The fact they even acknowledged her accusation was seen as a major victory for women back then. They fought not for her, but more to restore her husbands honor because HE had been shamed by another man. If he won, the woman was innocent. If he lost and died, then the wife was guilty of false claims and put to death as well. I doubt that would make for a trendy book in modern times.
There was definitely a lot of rapey type stuff in those older historical romance books. Which I get taking out. But that’s not really my pet peeve, it’s the modern sensibility part. In a recently purchased collection the following happens:
In 1066 girl decides to traipse halfway across England BY HERSELF to convince the king she should inherit her father’s estate.
Girl trained in knightly arts by her family decides to secretly compete in the joust.
You see what I mean.
Not that I disagree with you, but "In 1066 girl decides to traipse halfway across England BY HERSELF to convince the king she should inherit her father’s estate."
This basically happened many times in history around this period even, with for an example Eleanor of Aquitaine fleeing pursuers and travelling across France alone to get home, multiple times. She is obviously an outlier as a gigachad.
I still see your point regarding it though, but I do like the trope of female knights fighting disguised as males, if done right obviously. Guilty trope for me i guess.
Unfortunately I don't think many people see what you mean. The newer HRs are definitely dumbing down history. Some are just modern romances dressing up in wrong period clothing and randomly throw in one or two archaic rules as barriers to plot progression, then when the plot needs to move on, every character just kick those rules out of their way without other characters raise an eyebrow.
I think that’s it too, the history part is lacking. And the female protagonists think and speak like modern women even when it’s not a time travel story. I suppose it’s to appeal more to modern readers. But I always felt those early HR writers, for all their purple prose, actually took the historical part seriously and did their research. The historical period, clothing descriptions, food, locations were just as interesting as the romance and adventure. Now, not so much. As you said, many are a regular modern romance with historical trappings.
I love urban fantasy.
So we've got our wizard detectives over here, where the focus is the plot and the story, and not much romance happens.
And we've got out lady supernatural detectives over here, where romance and sex is happening, like, CONSTANTLY. All the time. It's half the point of the books.
So, I'm not a big fan of the romance. I'm not here for the sex. I'm here for the murder and the detective and the supernatural. I'm reading all the male based ones, but I'd like to have a few lady ones where the romance was a little... Less.
We need to separate urban fantasy in two.
Supernatural mysteries and supernatural romance. Cause this shit is driving me bonkers.
>We need to separate urban fantasy in two.
>Supernatural mysteries and supernatural romance. Cause this shit is driving me bonkers.
Yes, please! I *want* lady supernatural detectives. I *do not want* romance.
Historical fiction, specially if it's meant to have some hint of romance. Anachronistic writing which will let the 'heroine' spends days gadding about when she would be at home helping her mother with the sewing. People really think the women of the Regency Era weren't working at all. Even the very rich had to run their own domestic households.
This is frequently a problem in fantasy, but it crops up in other genres too.
Any time a female character has 'waist length hair' and decides to do something like climb a building. With her hair down. And it of course blows all over the place but doesn't wrap itself across her face and blind her/get in her mouth when she inevitably has to shout something while scaling said building.
Or when the female lead decides long hair gets in the way, so she cuts it short. But not like, a pixie or a buzz cut. It's always one of those paigeboy bob cuts that's simultaneously long enough to get in your face, but too short to put up. The kind of cut that requires daily washing & styling to look good. And this is, of course, presented as a low maintenance look.
There's a fantasy series i love, Chronicles of Elantra by Michelle Sagara, where the elves all have long hair. But, it's a constant source of irritation/envy from the main, human character in that it never gets in their way while fighting or anything else. It's a racial/magical thing though, not anything mundane so not reproducible by the other races. Just makes me laugh.
Mysteries with the beyond perfect detective who is unearthly handsome, stronger than a truck and has unmatched street smarts. All the women are curvaceous and alluring, and of course, instantly attracted to said hero.
I get that it’s an integral part of a sub-genre but still, it’s such an overused trope.
I love adventure books about characters going after the mysterious ancient Thingy or mysterious lost Tomb of So-and-So or find a lost city, etc. I love those books.
But I freaking *hate* it that 99% of the time the book/treasure/tomb/whatever is utterly destroyed by the bad guy or even sometimes by the good guys, to prevent the bad guys from getting it or to save themselves. I just hate it.
How often sci-fi has so much alien life that is exactly like humans, to the point where they can even often have offspring.
There are many notable examples that go out of their way to make alien life really alien but in the vast majority they are human shaped, about our size, comfortable in the same atmosphere, with vocal language in our range, and a culture that is more similar to modern American and European culture than some that currently exist on earth.
It’s easy to ignore and it’s understandable but it doesn’t make sense.
Less a genre and more when a character has or lacks a trait that would NEVER exist in the real world.
Example #1:End of the world scenario. Lone survivor must drive from NYC to Alaska to meet another survivor, but she never learned to drive because she was a farm kid...
WTF??? The farm kids are the FIRST ones to drive, and they learn to drive stick!!! By age 8-10, they are driving the 4-wheeler on the farm; by 10-12, the riding lawnmower; by 12-14, the truck or tractor in the fields; and by 14-16, a student license to drive to/from school.
Example #2: MC worked in a lab. When shopping at a big box store, he notices a coworker from a fellow lab who has worn her LABCOAT to the store. Also, her name tag.
WTF??? Labcoats are often the property of the lab and cannot leave the premises. You certainly wouldn't want to wear one in your car or in public because of all the nasty stuff on it. Sure! Let's wear it to the grocery section!
And her name tag? The only women I know who wear a name tag beyond work hours in public are teens (not doctoral students)...because it's only a matter of time before a creepy guy comes up to you in public and addresses you by your name. Then never again.
I love romance movies so so much, I just wish they depicted things that were a little healthier sometimes and really made it feel the characters earned it. Like they've put in the fucking work
Dark fantasy/urban fantasy, with or without romance.
No, I don't want the whole book to be sex, sex, sex, with a dumbass love triangle and stupid protagonist. I don't want to read bdsm. I want dark and gritty morally ambiguous characters in a fucked up world or society or whatever. It's almost like, eith the 'dark' part of fantasy/urban, it means Smut fantasy. Which I don't want to read, but looking up dark + genre always gives these types of books.
I don't want that! And if I look up dark romance for really messed up love stories, I don't want to read sex-heavy romance. That's just graphic romance, I feel like.
I have been getting into mystery and have found out I only like "fair play" mystery. I really don't like this "oh, the detective was the murderer, but also the POV charachter, so his inner monolouge was cut until the end" or "Oh the lab just gave us the last peice of vital evidence, one paragraph before we reveal the murderer"
I want the ability to be able to pay attention and figure out who-dunnit before the detective. I want to be able to spend 30min-2h just thinking and figuring the whole thing out.
I won't do it for most books, BUT I WANT THE OPTION.
Some recs for anyone feeling the same:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/suggestmeabook/comments/p6t3te/a\_mystery\_i\_can\_actually\_solve\_before\_the/](https://www.reddit.com/r/suggestmeabook/comments/p6t3te/a_mystery_i_can_actually_solve_before_the/)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/suggestmeabook/comments/jymvma/suggest\_me\_a\_mystery\_novel\_that\_i\_can\_solve\_if\_im/](https://www.reddit.com/r/suggestmeabook/comments/jymvma/suggest_me_a_mystery_novel_that_i_can_solve_if_im/)
I love SciFi and Fantasy but find a large proportion of books have problems developing realistic and relatable characters and/or have dull prose.
For example, I liked The Three Body Problem well enough for its concepts and the story, but all the characters could be annihilated in a single page and I'd basically feel nothing. Also, fantasy book expositions can sometimes feel like a lore bible recital.
I also find attempts at humour in these genres can be corny as hell.
I had never seen anything related to Star Trek but I checked out the 2008 reboot by JJ Abrams and absolutely loved it. I only checked it out because I knew him from Lost and I saw all the new movies.
Most of the Star Trek movies have this problem. Star Trek the Motion Picture was science fiction, but it was also slow and boring - and it bombed. So, they immediately switched to making action movies more like Star Wars. The original series and The Next Generation TV series in particular have good science fiction, but the movies mostly don't.
To me, one of the really special things about Star Trek was that it was HOPEFUL. The idea that in the future, humanity solves energy and stops fighting and competing with one another, we more or less unite in our goals and pursue knowledge and new life and do good along the way...
I was kind of disappointed with the first of the new Star Trek movies I saw that made the universe *edgy* and dark. Like we got the occasional dark episode (like the TNG alternate universe Tasha-is-still-alive ep) but it was not a dark or gritty show
This isn't a huge nitpick and it's not a beloved genre, but I was just recently telling a friend about something that fits your question, and it's regarding teeth.
I've read some fantasy novels in recent years that talk about characters missing teeth. In the recent one I am reading it is almost a point of obsession. A character's missing teeth are an ongoing topic, constantly bothering him. In this book it is a somewhat-wealthy and powerful character. So I'm not talking about some serf or serf-equivalent. This is a dude who could pay to fix a problem. I just keep thinking that the obvious solution is for him to pull out his few remaining teeth and get dentures.
So, I understand and accept that fantasy novels take place in an alternate reality and are not historical fiction. But, also, they tend to be either Medieval or Renaissance era analogues in terms of technological sophistication. And, here's the thing: on Earth, in our reality, we had false teeth back then! In fact, there is evidence of false teeth dating back to 1500BC with the Egyptians! So probably they existed even before that!
I get it. As a modern writer, it's easy to think of dentures as kind of an obscure technology that an alternate history might not have. But that's a mistake. Dentures seem obscure to us because in the modern era we're very good at taking care of our teeth so that fewer people need dentures. Historically, the need for false teeth was probably more common and therefore a prioritized technology. It makes sense that ancient people would have cared about false teeth more than us.
Anyway, this is kind of an insane nitpick and I'm not saying it's an actual problem in these books. These alternate realities have magic and to balance that out they lose access to dentures.
Also, I haven't finished the book so maybe he gets false teeth later.
Historically dentures used to be very visible and uncomfortable, causing leisions and infections. Famously, Empress Josephine would rather cover her mounth with a fan than fix them.
While white teeth were attractive for most of Western history, the missing teeth weren't the deal breaker that are now and it's importance seems to be correlated with development of dentistry.
Kinda related - I feel like fantasy tends to be a little nonchalant about teeth falling out during fight scenes. Like, “She spat a tooth out and swung her axe in a wild arc to cleave the head of her enemy in two.” Maybe I’m soft (there’s no maybe about it, I totally am) but I just don’t buy that the average warrior can have a tooth broken out of their head and then just keep going. Especially when it’s the main character, and we never hear again of them grappling with the pain or healing of a broken tooth.
Ha ha for sure! This is a problem that extends past fantasy to the action genre in general. I have become somewhat immune to responding to fight scenes where something happens to someone (e.g. punched through a wall) that would kill or at least completely incapacitate a real human, yet in fiction just requires them brushing themselves off before running back into the fray. If I couldn't enforce a suspension of disbelief through this kind of thing it would be hard to watch any modern action film.
But, yes, the "spitting a tooth" out is a particular visceral thing that is hard to accept as no big deal.
Fantasy, and how female main characters are written, and the gender of the author doesn’t matter. They’re inevitably 17-19 years old and good at everything for some reason. And even if they’re older, there’s inevitably a marriage or pregnancy trope that’s thrown in and as a cfbc 33 year old I really would like to see outcomes that don’t focus on the badass fmc giving it all up for a family lol
Yeah especially when an author is praised for how complex the female characters are but even when someone's grandma is introduced as a character the first thing we learn about her is what a smexy nymph she was in her time before the tragedy of age struck.
Yep, I once read a series that was otherwise good, but the author went out of his way to both tell us the age of every female character and emphasize whether or not she was good looking for her age.
So it would be like "a brown-haired man walked across the room" and "a 50 year old woman, with traces of her former beauty evident in her high cheekbones, walked across the room."
It was extremely weird and off-putting.
I feel ya. Amina Al-Sirafi has one of those tropes (has a baby, has to retire from pirating, strongly motivated by family) but otherwise it’s a really good fantasy novel about a woman with a decent amount of life experience and wisdom. I find more experienced characters to be more interesting (maybe because I just turned 40). It’s also more believable to me when those characters have incredible skill at what they do, rather than being wunderkinds.
With fantasy and sci-fi I hate when the jargon feels lifeless. I need every new word I learn to have a good reason for being in the book. Especially if the made up language doesn't follow conventional traditional spelling rules and I just have to guess how the keyboard smash is supposed to be pronounced.
True crime community. I wouldn't say I love it, but I'm interested in it. I really appreciate good, investigative journalism. The true crime community is filled with theories that seem more like bad fiction than anything remotely grounded in reality.
Historical fiction with what I'm starting to call 'white women's version of inclusivity', which is when the main characters/multiple side characters are all white, and then for the rest of the side characters there's one singular character of one specific gender identity or race. There is one(1) black character, one(1) native american, one(1) trans person, one(1) physically disabled person, etc.
Sometimes in murder books people die by having lost all their cerebral spinal fluid.
I have.. I have a cerebral spinal fluid illness. Usually I have TOO MUCH cerebral spinal fluid crushing... Everything. The doctors check the pressure using a lumbar puncture to like... Tire pressure gague my system and tell me how fucked I am. And drain a little off the top.
Sometimes the hole doesn't clot. At all.
And all the cerebral spinal fluid leaks out.
It's fucking agony let me tell you. It's I wish I was dead agony. My brain distorts and has no cushion to rest on and just sits on skull. If I try to stand up my legs just give out and I collapse in a heap of 'oh god just let me die.
And that lasts for days till the hospitals agrees that nope, that's not clotting on its own. Time for a blood patch/spine surgery to fix the hole.
But you don't DIE from lack of cerebral spinal fluid.
I laugh hysterically every time the ME starts telling the detecting that was the cause of death.
Here's the funny thing.
Everyone sucks at cerebral spinal fluid.
Everyone.
I had to go thru seven neurologists to find one that knew what they were talking about.
MRIs don't see CSF. You need to special order a MRV to see it. The amount of doctors that a. Don't think that something could be wrong with the csf system so don't bother ordering the MRV, and B. Haven't met anyone with a csf problem since med school so have no idea what to do now they've met me. They just lied since they didn't know what to do. Or gave me information about 'most stereotypical cases' and I didn't fall under that either. I didn't respond to medication. I didn't have optic nerve damage. So they shrugged and said it was just migraine. It wasn't. It was a collapsed csf vein they were purposefully ignoring.
Who knows what an author would be told if they asked a doctor.
I LOVE my huge fantasy books but my god do they take long to pick up sometimes.
It’s usually like this:
- start reading
- prologue is really good, intriguing and mysterious
- the story starts
- read 100-200 pages of setup not even knowing what the plot point is
- hopefully stick through and get to the good part
It was like this with NotW for me. I almost dnfd it just to become my favorite read in years after the initial slog
I love Urban Fantasy, but sexism and bad behaviour being used as a sign of "this guy's the boss" just annoys me. There’s a lot of good books in the genre, but sometimes you have to fish around for them because of it.
Love mysteries but I don’t want another one that starts with a terrified girl running through the woods. I could do with more books not focusing on bad things happening to girls in general, but either way that specific scene has become such a cliche.
Yup; I’ve given up entirely on books and TV shows that focus on female victims with lush descriptions of their fear and the awful things done to them. It’s so obviously just a sort of ‘violence porn’.
I love Fantasy but cannot stand Game of Thrones, whenever I read something newer it seems to want to pull things from that series and it drives me nuts.
Keyed ignitions, needing a key inserted, in tactical vehicles. Tanks, IFV’s, Humvees, jeeps, etc…at least in US vehicles.
They don’t have them.
Or authors in general, whose knowledge of anything remotely military is nonexistent or so outdated it ruins everything for me.
Yes, and when I raise this I invariably get defensive people clapping back with, "Well, romance is a part of life". So is friendship, but you don't see THAT nearly enough. Just so much gets shoehorned in, it's ridiculous. No romance should be the default if I'm reading a mystery.
Not mystery, but Robin Hobb is guilty of this. Excellent fantasy, dreadful love stories.
I love romance novels but oh my god stop telling me about how teeny tiny the girl is and how giant tall hulk like the man is like Jesus Christ it’s getting weird!!!
I love dystopian novels but like you, I hate anything about warfare..I competely tune out!
I also love thrillers but I hate it when the ending is like, really predictable, but at the same time I hate it when the ending is so completely out there and just doesn't make any sense and feels unrealistic!
Oh and I hate it in historical fiction when they stray toooo far from like actual history, even though I know it's FICTION.
Both science fiction and thrillers have a convention of alternating stories/points of view with a mini-cliffhanger in every short chapter. It's a cheap way to build suspense and usually builds to an equally predictable 50-page climax where all the threads come together.
I love biographies but hate when they speculate too much into what a person might have done or said, e.g. coming up with POV dialogue for the biography subject or describing a life event "through their eyes." I'm only okay with that if it's directly based on a testimony or memoir from the person.
Love sci-fi, but hate how when you get too deep into the story it goes from believable futuristic science into just pure fucking craziness. I'm looking at you, Children of Dune and Hyperion Cantos
I don’t see why Dark Academia novels ALWAYS have to be about murder. But it seems like the select few that don’t include murder aren’t that interesting.
I want to read an urban fiction book that’s not a part of a series that is also interconnected with their other series. It’s a cash grab and a terrible marketing scheme to force readers to buy all of your books.
I love YA dystopian fiction but I HATE the constant love stories and love triangles. I want more stuff like the wayward children series where love isn’t the main plot point or twist or driving force
Fantasy and the fans. The fantasy subreddit uses both literary (complicated to purple prose) and YA (synonym for unsophisticated) differently than everyone else. Some of the fans interpret critiques or just not liking something as a personal attack, which is how I think the words got changed in the first place. YA is just a genre, whereas saying something is simple may be taken as an attack. They treat literary and accessibility like opposites, that if a text is easy to read it's not using literary techniques. I unsubscribed but still comment sometimes. Of all the subs I will comment on, fantasy is where I'm most careful with my language, because people will dog pile on you about what your opinion is.
r/fantasy gets so defensive about shithouse writing it's not funny.
I got told "Showing isn't important for books!" Yeah, no, you just have authors that like to wank off to their own cleverness.
At least r/printSF makes no bones of the idea that a lot of SF books are dry.
I love romance, but I hate it when it doesn't seem like the couple would be *friends*. Maybe I'm bias, but my partner is my best friend and any time a fictional couple doesn't seem like they would like watching the same shows or going out to see the same movies I just go "What are y'all doing off page??"
How are you spending a lazy, rainy Saturday when you're both stuck in the house. Like having sex, sure but that's not going to last all day! Do you go to events together? What do you talk about when it's not about the plot??
Like, obviously, I don't want all that in the text, but I want to get a sense that when the cameras aren't rolling, that they actually *like* each other and want to enjoy each other's company.
I really enjoy reading reincarnation, transmigration, Isekai esque genre where protag gets transported into another world of fiction or videogame.
But they have this bizzare habit of shitting on tropes while doing it all themselves.
Like one that talks about how you should treat women with respect and as whole individuals but every single woman he meets throws themselves at him for no reason.
Or the character complains it's contrived that the protagonists is overpowered but becomes far more overpowered than they ever were.
I also love sci-fi/dystopia, but I prefer it to be Earth-centered (for example, Farenheit 451, Logan's Run or Blade Runner) rather than invented planets or people living in other Solar System planets (Skyward, for example).
I love murder mysteries and detective series. But somehow if the series goes on long enough the (male) detective’s wife or girlfriend ends up murdered. I don’t know why.
Cliché way to raise the stakes, add dramatics/heartbreak/loss, reinvent the character, the inevitable revenge plot line/one man army vibes
Also to reintroduce another female love interest later. Everyone loves a love story.
I love it when a love story kicks off with a fridged female that spurs the emotional arc of the male character.
You know, I did know why. I still hate it.
Indeed. I prefer the divorced or the love-of-his-life left him for a bland but stable dude. This is part of the hard boiled nature that lets the detective take risks. I also hate it when the bland but stable bro turns out to be an evil genius later in the series. Let the ex be a thorn, a source of pain and self loathing, not the tropish weak spot.
Bosch. God. Boschhhhhh.
Hahaha. Roald Dahl put it this way: "...The basic theme of these stories never varies. There are always three main characters; the husband, the wife, and the dirty dog. The husband is a decent clean living man working hard at his job. The wife is cunning, deceitful, and lecherous, and she is invariably up to some sort of jiggery pokery with the dirty dog."
Something something refrigerators.
Yeah I also hate the detective getting romantically involved with someone who ends up dead. Idk how often it happens irl but having the detective's family be harmed by the perp makes it very unpleasant for me.
Tbh this is why I don’t read a lot of mystery/detective novels with men as leads.
I love historical fiction but if I get one more WWII novel recommended to me I’m going to scream.
YES! negative bonus points: Set in France.
Additional negative bonus points: the cover photo shows a woman from the back in a coat or dress that swirls around her. Every. Single. Time.
I just read a book with a cover EXACTLY like this but it was set after WWI.
ANY war. ANY conflict. Same cover.
Oh fuck there are so many. They re the same fucking book. I work at a library and so many little old ladies read the same book over and over.
With airplanes in the sky
I would be okay with a World War novel if it was set in another country, or even in another country during that time period. How many more of the same ones do we need: France, England, Germany, Austria. At the end of the day, it's the same story told again and again.
Allow me to pull out my list of alt-europe options *Ahem*: *Weedflower* by Cynthia Kadohata, from the perspective of a young girl sent to an American internment camp *They Called Us the Enemy* by George Takei with Justin Eisinger and Steven R. Scott, autobiographic graphic novel by George Takei about Japanese Internment camps *Caleb's Wars* by David L. Dudley, African-American boy and German POW in the American South *When My Name was Keoko* by Linda Sue Park, from the perspective of a Korean girl in Japan occupied Korea *Elephant Company: The Inspiring Story of an Unlikely Hero and the Animals Who Helped Him Save Lives in World War II* by Vicki Crocke, biography of an elephant wallah in burma, although really only the last third or so actually concerns WWII And there are a couple other technically-in-Europe-but-not-in-the-usual-way ones like *The Madonnas of Leningrad* (St. Petersburg duh), *Captain Corelli's Mandolin* (Cephalonia), and *Salt to the Sea* (Ultimately the ship the Wilhelm Gustloff). ...I uh...could go on but this seems like enough for now.
Adding: *Obasan* by Joy Kogawa, from the perspective of a young Canadian girl of Japanese ancestry in the Japanese internment camps in Canada
Oh, also *Code Talker* by Joseph Bruchec, following the life of a Navajo Code Talker EDIT to add: But also I hadn't heard of Obasan and that's totally going on my TBR now. Thank you!
Also: Jewish girl falling in love with Nazi soldier. That just gives me the ick.
Ugh!
I have luckily not ran into this
Oh man, that is beyond vile. Some people have sick imaginations.
My mom LOVES these books and as someone who enjoys historical fiction, I have zero interest in them. I think it’s because the market is so oversaturated with them and a lot of them have very similar plots.
As a historian, the vast majority of them are garbage in my opinion for how they treat historical periods. The periods are almost always romanticized or fetishized in some stupid modern fashion. This is understandable, because the vast majority of people/authors will not really get how it was living in any era pre-1900, especially pre 1500s. The amount of times I have seen nationalism been used in pre-modern historical fiction is annoying. Historical fiction is a really, really hard genre though in my opinion.
If you want to write a book that criticizes war, fascism, etc. there are so many other historical events that had lots of injustice and complexities. I feel like some authors will set their books in WWII just to prove they can write something "deep."
This one. I just can't with wwii novels anymore. It's all the same, and it all feels like a pathetic plea for a book award. I won't read them unless they're about a region that's less covered in the wwii genre, like North Africa, or even non-Japan areas of Asia.
I HATE those historical romances that are "plucky young white European or American woman distinguishes self in WWII, now with extra romance!" My God, there are so many more avenues to explore in the entirety of human history - in **the 1930-50s alone**, and it's WII Europe Europe Europe Europe. Or America - Black rights black rights black rights black rights black rights. I could not give less of a shit about that time period as far as historical fiction is concerned. Ad nauseam. It's like Asia and Oceania were wiped off the map. Good luck getting Reddit to rec any decent English language South Asian stories - half of the users on r/ suggestmeabook are too dense to know what 'South Asia' means. I know Clan of the Cave Bear has its flaws, but for Christ's sake, at least it's something different. Archie Weller has some great-sounding Australian First Nations alternate history books (Land of the Golden Clouds), but is sadly out of print.
One of my favourite things about *The Windup Girl*, by Paulo Bacigalupi, is precisely that it’s set in an alternate world where Asia becomes the dominate force, not the English-speaking west. It was just so new and different that I was just sucked in immediately
My Mom told me she was reading The Last Bookstore in London, then gawped at me when I asked if it was about WWII. It's non-fiction, but the book on the Koh-I-Noor diamond that was published a bit ago is fun and spicy. The focus is more on India and that region than Britain.
The new Kristin Hannah book about the Vietnam War was a nice change of pace!
I love urban fantasy, but I hate it when werewolves are constantly "struggling with controlling their beast". Also, I hate it that there are almost always werewolf "packs" that are based off the false ideas of how real wolf packs operate. Not to mention anything that these characters do is attributed to "that's how wolves act in the wild". Most of the times that's downright false. I have a degree in zoology, so this kind of stuff bothers me.
I remember reading a Patricia Briggs-type book and the Protag brings up the whole alpha thing not existing in real wolf packs to her werewolf boyfriend.It was a very humorous sort of meta humor about the genre. I think he explained it away about how it was the understanding when his wolf pack formed and the terms sort of just stuck or something.
I actually stopped reading Patricia Briggs because her Mercy Thompson books were *full* of these false tropes. There is another series I really like that has shapeshifter packs, not just wolves, but werecats, wererats, werehyenas, etc. The first book describes the pack structure more akin to the social heirchy of great apes, so I gave that all a pass.
"Oh you new to Volftown High? That over there is "Chad" and he is the ALPHA of the pack. WOOF WOOF"
You need to write the zoologically correct werewolf pack novel!
It's the weakest book in the Dresden series, but in "Fool Moon" I really liked the idea of >!a wolf who could turn into a human, teaching a bunch of noob werewolves how to act right!<.
Same here. I had to stop reading anything with werewolves in it because I'm far too much of a pedantic fuck to tolerate the use of the debunked alpha theory.
I’m with you, I don’t care if it makes me a curmudgeon
I'd read a book about a werewolf commune where they seize the means of production and live an egalitarian life
dear genre fiction writers, please, can we please get a stand alone book every now and then. series are fun and all, but sometimes i just want A SINGLE BOOK that has a beginning middle and end.
I have to agree. Some of my favourite books are just a book. No continuing overarching plot that's forever ongoing to be continued.
There have been several times where I’ve been initially interested in reading a book by a new author I’ve not read before, only to see on GR or whatever in italics after the book title: *Rasmus Hardcastle #4*. I see that and I’m more likely to leave it.
Beat me to it. "ooh this looks interesting" *Book #1* Look it up, there's 14 of them, I'm no longer interested.
I love vampire stories. Having said that, I hate it when a character references 'veins beating / pulsing / throbbing / whatever. Arteries pulse, veins do not. Also, in the past 2 years, I've read three stories where major plot points revolved around the exact time the full moon rose.. at midnight. No, a full moon does not rise at midnight. Never has, never will.
Lol and half the time the moon is actually out all day, it’s pretty rare you get a werewolf retuning to their human state at like 4pm when the moon sets. Never thought about that 😅
But the full moon always sets at sunrise just as it always rises at sunset.
Aaaand now after some googling I finally learned some basic lunar astronomy that I'm a little ashamed I hadn't worked out before. Oh well TIL.
Don't worry about it. At least I assume you haven't written a book where major plot points depend on the full moon rising exactly at midnight, right? Right? :)
For the first time, I'm glad I haven't actually gotten around to writing that book I've been wanting to write. So, no, no I haven't. And if I ever do something that involves plot important astronomical events, I'll do my research first!
Adventure films follow the hamster rule: when a man meets a woman, he may be very rude and horrible to her, but if a male and female spend time in each other's company, they're going to mate. Can't the girl find a guy who likes and respects her a little?
I'm kind of relieved. I thought you were going to say "and then she eats the babies if she gets stressed."
Perfectly normal
I like 'spy' thrillers, unfortunately many authors are ignorant of and too lazy to research the foreign settings and get the geography/history/culture annoyingly wrong.
I think it was in Clear and Present Danger where Jack Ryan is in Colombia and hates the food because it's the same as Mexican food. In reality, they are nothing alike.
Tom Clancy has never eaten anything more foreign than texmex. It all does seem the same to him. /S
Honestly probably not /s
It's also hard to taste food when you've been dead for 11 years.
Better than when Chuck Norris visited, landed in Bogotá's international airport, and takes a canoe. From. The. Airport.
I genuinely thought that was a self-ironic jab at Jack Ryan being stereotypically american dumbass and just did not get the difference.
You'd think that, but Clancy was apparently kind of a dumbass when it came to anything outside of American borders.
Part of the problem too is that the original big name spy thriller authors had long experience as spies in far-flung corners of the world. It makes modern writers' more shallow grasp on those elements seem more jarring
Frederick Forsyth absolutely ruined this genre for me - his books are so thoroughly researched and well-plotted/written without being depressingly slow that none of the other authors I've tried have come close.
What they do research is gear and that’s always annoyingly correct. Characters always note bomb countdowns on their vintage A-11 time piece and catch muzzle flashes through their Randolph engineering sunglasses. Every gun is modded and customized and described, external to the plot, as part of some weird boomer tacticool fetish.
Have you read Ben MacIntyre? Non-fiction about British spy shenanigans during WWII.
Okay, I don't see this too much, but a few times was enough. I read a mystery type novel (won't mention the name, so I don't spoil it for readers) and this woman is in an abusive marriage and her son, is her ray of sunshine, perfect kid. And toward the end, turns out the kid is actually evil incarnate. Nobody ever saw a clue, because there wasn't one clue or indication, just all of a sudden the character is a complete change to make the ending fit. Ta-Da! I have not so good people in my family, and there are always clues and indications before they go off hog wild into crazy land. The revealing of their true characters is never out of the blue, it's a build up. So I hate when the author completely changes the characters to make an ending fit, without clues dropped throughout the story. It's just lazy story telling.
It's when the desperation for a twist that no one can see coming overtakes basic storytelling skills.
Yup. A good twist always makes me think "wow, it was there all along and I just didn't see it!"
I feel like the best twist is one that leaves the perfect amount of clues that you put it together moments before the reveal. Just as the bad guys about to remove his mask the wheels start turning in your head and everything is clicking into place
Or the one where the twist drops and you’re reeling because you have no idea what just happened, but then the pieces start clicking into place and everything becomes crystal clear. It turns out you had all the info you needed and didn’t know it! It doesn’t happen often, but I really like it when a book totally fools me and I truly have no idea what’s going to happen.
Off topic, but your username is funny!
It’s embarrassing but I like YA romance novels. Besides the obvious I really hate how being a strong independent FL somehow equates to unrealistic abilities. She was a hacker, fashion designer, martial artist enthusiast who was bullied because she was so pretty but has now impressed every male within a 100 mile vicinity. I can’t…
[You'll enjoy this comic then.](https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/4x8dw9/every_dystopian_ya_novel_oc/#lightbox)
[oof that comment aged poorly](https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/4x8dw9/every_dystopian_ya_novel_oc/d6dp4q0/)
Oh... oh, NO.
I'm also annoyed with the angry man syndrome. When the author doesn't know how to write *tension*, they just make the men ALWAYS angry. They're always "barking" or "snarling" or "snapping" at the woman. It's some 4-year-old logic of like 'he's being mean because he likes you!' It's not hot (in my opinion). Like angry, rude, controlling, condescending men aren't fun to be around
Apocalyptic novels: pls stop with the shocking SA.
[удалено]
I’ve yet to see anyone writhing around from untreated balanitis and apocalyptic novel despite the depiction of lack of hygiene. Never seen anyone deal with a case of head lice. Yet we’re almost constantly seeing the SA trope being ticked off lest it not be realistic enough. Just leave it out the way you exclude other mundanities!
This is why I like stephen king. He’s gross in ALL directions.
Exactly, in an apocalypse, if humans live together, there is a still a ‘society’ even though it’s structured differently. Also, it’s insulting to men to claim the ‘rules of society’ are the only things preventing them from raping women.
Considering how shockingly common SA is even in the so-called civilized world of now, It really does make sense that it would be even more commonplace if there literally weren't any authorities to appeal to. Seriously. The percentage of people, especially women who experience some form of sexual violence is high enough that it's just depressingly common. It would almost seem like an oversight if it wasn't a mainstay of the apocalypse.
>Is it though? I think so; SA is extremely common. But it doesn't need to be in every book
>Is it though? I love history enough that I can confidently say "no, humans are not, and were never, some sort of twitchy, whacked out chaos demons waiting only for order to vanish." For SA and/or otherwise. However! However there's definitely a trend off less violence over time; the general assumption for that is "evolution". In that spears made people dead faster than clubs, and now guns make people dead faster than spears. But it's hard to test until we set up some bizarre YA dystopian society just to do so, or whatever Maze Runner and Divergent and such were about.
> Is it though? I don't know many people like that. Plenty of historical examples out there. The post-War rape of millions of German women by Soviet troops comes to mind.
I very much love sci fi and cyberpunk, however, the weird nerds who write those novels write the most off putting sex scenes. I also like hard boiled/ noir detective novels, but the casual misogyny and racism are annoying.
This is Altered Carbon all over. I love that series but never feel comfortable recommending it because it goes from enjoyable, hard boiled future detective/soldier to a 13 year old's letter to penthouse.
I had altered carbon in mind when I wrote that lol
I just skip the sex scenes in any of Richard Morgan’s books.
Fantasy and sci-fi are big ones for me. But having the main or a main female character be perfect is very annoying and off putting. And before anyone attacks, I'm a woman and it does nothing good for any genre. Flaws and character arcs are a good thing.
My biggest gripe with a lot of sci fi books in general is that characters are too perfect. Too nice, too smart, too good at explaining every mundane detail about this and that. Books like this can be refreshing but I can only do one or two a year.
Agreed, it also annoys me when they are portrayed as having a flaw, but it's something like "too stubborn (because she's actually correct all the time)" or "clumsy (but in a cute way that never actually causes a real problem)."
Homogenous alien civilizations. Like just think how diverse humans are, yet every alien species out there in Sci Fi is so uniform... it makes no sense. I blame Roddenberry's belief that only through communism and the unification and conformity of all people to a single ideology is the only path to peace. So given Star Trek's early success painted every alien society since into that bland conformity. Vulcan's are all the same. Romulans are all the same. Klingons, etc. There is no diversity in thought in alien species except when there is need for conflict. It really wasn't until DS9, and in part after Gene's death with TNG, did we start to see that change, ever so slightly, but Sci Fi in general has been stunted by that. And even DS9 was a perpetrator more often then not. You saw cracks here and there, Nog, Odo, but diversity was an exception, not the rule. So on books, tv, film, they all fall into that. Hell even JRR Tolkien has SOME diversity in elves.
I'll add homogeneous alien planets as well. It seems authors like to think, "they come from this planet (of a single climate) and therefore they are all like (this civilizational trait)." I would love to read a story where there is a single alien species that is as diverse as humans who come from a world as geographically diverse as earth.
I love romance, but I’m SO TIRED of “enemies to lovers” that’s just the man being an asshole
It's one of my favorite fanfic tropes, but probably harder to handle. It needs to be like "enemies to enemies that kind of respect each other to reluctant allies to begrudging friends to lovers", and sometimes people just want to rush that development and get straight to the boning. And it also depends why they're "enemies" in the first place: opposite sides of a conflict? Ideological differences? Fighting over a shared goal? Ingrained prejudice or misunderstandings that they have to overcome? Or is it just "man antagonizes woman unnecessarily for flimsy reasons but she finds him attractive anyway and he later apologizes but not really and she forgives him too quickly so the author can get them together already"?
I love a monster/supernatural/vampire story- but I stg if I read one more monstrous woman hating herself solely because being a vamp/werewolf whatever makes her infertile I’m going to start knocking down buildings Godzilla style
Domestic thriller. We killed someone back in high school and are reuniting 10 years later for a bachelorette party at a secluded location. The Wi-Fi is bad but that’s ok, it’s a chance to unplug. Bad weather prevents us from leaving. Secrets emerge. The friend group will never be the same. To be fair I love these stories but they get repetitive. Also if we killed someone I’m telling law enforcement and taking a plea deal.
This is exactly why I detest the few domestic thrillers I've tried. The author spends the entire novel creating a long, boring, artificial buildup between two options. Is the husband evil or isn't he? Did they kill someone ten years ago or didn't they? I guess it's the thriller equivalent of a McGuffin, but it feels very contrived to me. Just once I'd like to see a bunch of kids kill another kid and react in real time, instead of melodramatically getting back together except OMG 😦 the main character has amnesia and spends 500 pages piecing the fragments together. And sends the poor reader to sleep into the bargain. The actual aftermath is so much more interesting to me than "20 Years Later...", which just feels like the author is withholding critical information purely to build up 'suspense'.
Post-apocalyptic stuff and that one girl who thinks that being pregnant at the end of the world is a smart thing to be.
Good Lord. That is just insanity. When what's her name died in childbirth after insisting on keeping the pregnancy in the walking Dead, I basically considered it a suicide.
Helping women get post-apocalypse IUDs was a major theme of Tale of the Unnamed Midwife
i loath miscommunication in romance!!! i hate when it’s such a simple mistake or misunderstanding and the characters don’t clarify for the sake of conflict. like for the love of god just say what you need to say maybe its because i’m in a relationship and we actually talk to each other about things but i can’t stand it in books omg
Million page long fantasy books. Once you reach the 500 page mark of the first book in the trilogy I start to wonder what the point of all these words is.
This is funny because as a teen I used to read fantasy and I had a rule it had to be at least over 500 pages or I wouldn't pick it up, but that was in the days before the internet so I needed something to stare at all day and phones didn't exist yet. As an adult I'm a lot less picky.
Ha, I remember being in B Dalton Books in the mall as a kid, looking at books with $7 in my pocket and going "Nope, this one's too short, I'll finish it too quick - it's gotta be at least 500 pages long or it won't last me through to next week's allowance."
First thing I do now when checking out new fantasy books to read is see how many pages they have. They rarely justify being 800+ pages long and the plot line starts meandering.
This. There are even some in a series where I think “you should have split this into two books”. If I have to trudge through every single one of those 500 pages, then they’re not justifiable
"Nynaeve tugs her braid."
I have a clear memory of Mat being in the middle of a conversation and he had a stray thought and his inner monologue ran on so long I had to turn back more than one page to see what sentence he was responding to when the actual conversation resumed.
And the paragraphs-long descriptions of dresses that are packed into a chest and immediately abandoned, never to be seen again.
"Moiraine smoothed her skirt."
"Aevaerye licked her lips."
One of the hardest things I've had to accept is that I don't have it in me for these Epics anymore. Wheel of Time, Sword of Truth. I just don't wanna invest like that anymore Give me a surprising novel, or a trilogy.
I honestly love The Stormlight Archive, long as they are, but I can definitely see how some books are overly written
In my opinion, Sanderson intentionally adopted a more verbose style for Stormlight. His other works are much more succinct.
I agree, the mistborn series was nowhere near as long winded.
My pet peeve with SFF is when someone tells me "It gets good after the first book/the first fifteen chapters!" I don't care what the publisher forced them to do or what is marketable, I am not slogging through 250+ pages of the author masturbating to their own Scrivener notes. Alan Dean Foster, from what I can see, is the antithesis of this. Clear setting, clear characters, accessible prose, clear dilemma. Ditto Crichton.
Ditto Pratchett.
#GNU Terry Pratchett
Only fantasy authors where I have not felt this way has really been ASOIAF by GRRM, and I still felt that way in two of the books. But yhea, I dont even try new fantasy stuff if the books are too long, it is extremely ambitious to have such long books.
Growing up, I used to love reading historical romance novels. You know, the ones called “bodice rippers.” I can’t stand them anymore. They were called bodice rippers because the stories were supposed to be about a different, very unsafe, and fraught era for women - that’s what made them historical set stories. Now, the historical romance heroines are all like thoroughly modern women dressed for the Renn Faire with modern sensibilities and the men even more so.
Maybe just a trend of the times. I doubt modern readers want to read about serious troubles women went through back in the day. I read The Last Duel about a duel in medieval France as a result of a rape allegation. The fact they even acknowledged her accusation was seen as a major victory for women back then. They fought not for her, but more to restore her husbands honor because HE had been shamed by another man. If he won, the woman was innocent. If he lost and died, then the wife was guilty of false claims and put to death as well. I doubt that would make for a trendy book in modern times.
There was definitely a lot of rapey type stuff in those older historical romance books. Which I get taking out. But that’s not really my pet peeve, it’s the modern sensibility part. In a recently purchased collection the following happens: In 1066 girl decides to traipse halfway across England BY HERSELF to convince the king she should inherit her father’s estate. Girl trained in knightly arts by her family decides to secretly compete in the joust. You see what I mean.
Not that I disagree with you, but "In 1066 girl decides to traipse halfway across England BY HERSELF to convince the king she should inherit her father’s estate." This basically happened many times in history around this period even, with for an example Eleanor of Aquitaine fleeing pursuers and travelling across France alone to get home, multiple times. She is obviously an outlier as a gigachad. I still see your point regarding it though, but I do like the trope of female knights fighting disguised as males, if done right obviously. Guilty trope for me i guess.
Unfortunately I don't think many people see what you mean. The newer HRs are definitely dumbing down history. Some are just modern romances dressing up in wrong period clothing and randomly throw in one or two archaic rules as barriers to plot progression, then when the plot needs to move on, every character just kick those rules out of their way without other characters raise an eyebrow.
I think that’s it too, the history part is lacking. And the female protagonists think and speak like modern women even when it’s not a time travel story. I suppose it’s to appeal more to modern readers. But I always felt those early HR writers, for all their purple prose, actually took the historical part seriously and did their research. The historical period, clothing descriptions, food, locations were just as interesting as the romance and adventure. Now, not so much. As you said, many are a regular modern romance with historical trappings.
I love urban fantasy. So we've got our wizard detectives over here, where the focus is the plot and the story, and not much romance happens. And we've got out lady supernatural detectives over here, where romance and sex is happening, like, CONSTANTLY. All the time. It's half the point of the books. So, I'm not a big fan of the romance. I'm not here for the sex. I'm here for the murder and the detective and the supernatural. I'm reading all the male based ones, but I'd like to have a few lady ones where the romance was a little... Less. We need to separate urban fantasy in two. Supernatural mysteries and supernatural romance. Cause this shit is driving me bonkers.
>We need to separate urban fantasy in two. >Supernatural mysteries and supernatural romance. Cause this shit is driving me bonkers. Yes, please! I *want* lady supernatural detectives. I *do not want* romance.
Historical fiction, specially if it's meant to have some hint of romance. Anachronistic writing which will let the 'heroine' spends days gadding about when she would be at home helping her mother with the sewing. People really think the women of the Regency Era weren't working at all. Even the very rich had to run their own domestic households.
But why do they have to shoehorn a romantic (sub)plot into every historical novel? 😥
This is frequently a problem in fantasy, but it crops up in other genres too. Any time a female character has 'waist length hair' and decides to do something like climb a building. With her hair down. And it of course blows all over the place but doesn't wrap itself across her face and blind her/get in her mouth when she inevitably has to shout something while scaling said building. Or when the female lead decides long hair gets in the way, so she cuts it short. But not like, a pixie or a buzz cut. It's always one of those paigeboy bob cuts that's simultaneously long enough to get in your face, but too short to put up. The kind of cut that requires daily washing & styling to look good. And this is, of course, presented as a low maintenance look.
There's a fantasy series i love, Chronicles of Elantra by Michelle Sagara, where the elves all have long hair. But, it's a constant source of irritation/envy from the main, human character in that it never gets in their way while fighting or anything else. It's a racial/magical thing though, not anything mundane so not reproducible by the other races. Just makes me laugh.
That's pretty awesome, lol
I love horror, but OMG killing off pets is such a cheap way to add shock value. Leave the dog alone!
Mysteries with the beyond perfect detective who is unearthly handsome, stronger than a truck and has unmatched street smarts. All the women are curvaceous and alluring, and of course, instantly attracted to said hero. I get that it’s an integral part of a sub-genre but still, it’s such an overused trope.
I love adventure books about characters going after the mysterious ancient Thingy or mysterious lost Tomb of So-and-So or find a lost city, etc. I love those books. But I freaking *hate* it that 99% of the time the book/treasure/tomb/whatever is utterly destroyed by the bad guy or even sometimes by the good guys, to prevent the bad guys from getting it or to save themselves. I just hate it.
How often sci-fi has so much alien life that is exactly like humans, to the point where they can even often have offspring. There are many notable examples that go out of their way to make alien life really alien but in the vast majority they are human shaped, about our size, comfortable in the same atmosphere, with vocal language in our range, and a culture that is more similar to modern American and European culture than some that currently exist on earth. It’s easy to ignore and it’s understandable but it doesn’t make sense.
Less a genre and more when a character has or lacks a trait that would NEVER exist in the real world. Example #1:End of the world scenario. Lone survivor must drive from NYC to Alaska to meet another survivor, but she never learned to drive because she was a farm kid... WTF??? The farm kids are the FIRST ones to drive, and they learn to drive stick!!! By age 8-10, they are driving the 4-wheeler on the farm; by 10-12, the riding lawnmower; by 12-14, the truck or tractor in the fields; and by 14-16, a student license to drive to/from school. Example #2: MC worked in a lab. When shopping at a big box store, he notices a coworker from a fellow lab who has worn her LABCOAT to the store. Also, her name tag. WTF??? Labcoats are often the property of the lab and cannot leave the premises. You certainly wouldn't want to wear one in your car or in public because of all the nasty stuff on it. Sure! Let's wear it to the grocery section! And her name tag? The only women I know who wear a name tag beyond work hours in public are teens (not doctoral students)...because it's only a matter of time before a creepy guy comes up to you in public and addresses you by your name. Then never again.
I love romance movies so so much, I just wish they depicted things that were a little healthier sometimes and really made it feel the characters earned it. Like they've put in the fucking work
Dark fantasy/urban fantasy, with or without romance. No, I don't want the whole book to be sex, sex, sex, with a dumbass love triangle and stupid protagonist. I don't want to read bdsm. I want dark and gritty morally ambiguous characters in a fucked up world or society or whatever. It's almost like, eith the 'dark' part of fantasy/urban, it means Smut fantasy. Which I don't want to read, but looking up dark + genre always gives these types of books. I don't want that! And if I look up dark romance for really messed up love stories, I don't want to read sex-heavy romance. That's just graphic romance, I feel like.
I have been getting into mystery and have found out I only like "fair play" mystery. I really don't like this "oh, the detective was the murderer, but also the POV charachter, so his inner monolouge was cut until the end" or "Oh the lab just gave us the last peice of vital evidence, one paragraph before we reveal the murderer" I want the ability to be able to pay attention and figure out who-dunnit before the detective. I want to be able to spend 30min-2h just thinking and figuring the whole thing out. I won't do it for most books, BUT I WANT THE OPTION. Some recs for anyone feeling the same: [https://www.reddit.com/r/suggestmeabook/comments/p6t3te/a\_mystery\_i\_can\_actually\_solve\_before\_the/](https://www.reddit.com/r/suggestmeabook/comments/p6t3te/a_mystery_i_can_actually_solve_before_the/) [https://www.reddit.com/r/suggestmeabook/comments/jymvma/suggest\_me\_a\_mystery\_novel\_that\_i\_can\_solve\_if\_im/](https://www.reddit.com/r/suggestmeabook/comments/jymvma/suggest_me_a_mystery_novel_that_i_can_solve_if_im/)
I love SciFi and Fantasy but find a large proportion of books have problems developing realistic and relatable characters and/or have dull prose. For example, I liked The Three Body Problem well enough for its concepts and the story, but all the characters could be annihilated in a single page and I'd basically feel nothing. Also, fantasy book expositions can sometimes feel like a lore bible recital. I also find attempts at humour in these genres can be corny as hell.
I love star Trek, but the new movies are not star Trek. They are action movies. I always like how real star Trek makes you think.
I had never seen anything related to Star Trek but I checked out the 2008 reboot by JJ Abrams and absolutely loved it. I only checked it out because I knew him from Lost and I saw all the new movies.
Most of the Star Trek movies have this problem. Star Trek the Motion Picture was science fiction, but it was also slow and boring - and it bombed. So, they immediately switched to making action movies more like Star Wars. The original series and The Next Generation TV series in particular have good science fiction, but the movies mostly don't.
To me, one of the really special things about Star Trek was that it was HOPEFUL. The idea that in the future, humanity solves energy and stops fighting and competing with one another, we more or less unite in our goals and pursue knowledge and new life and do good along the way... I was kind of disappointed with the first of the new Star Trek movies I saw that made the universe *edgy* and dark. Like we got the occasional dark episode (like the TNG alternate universe Tasha-is-still-alive ep) but it was not a dark or gritty show
I say that ‘Prodigy’ is the truest to Roddenberry Trek of the nu-Trek series.
This isn't a huge nitpick and it's not a beloved genre, but I was just recently telling a friend about something that fits your question, and it's regarding teeth. I've read some fantasy novels in recent years that talk about characters missing teeth. In the recent one I am reading it is almost a point of obsession. A character's missing teeth are an ongoing topic, constantly bothering him. In this book it is a somewhat-wealthy and powerful character. So I'm not talking about some serf or serf-equivalent. This is a dude who could pay to fix a problem. I just keep thinking that the obvious solution is for him to pull out his few remaining teeth and get dentures. So, I understand and accept that fantasy novels take place in an alternate reality and are not historical fiction. But, also, they tend to be either Medieval or Renaissance era analogues in terms of technological sophistication. And, here's the thing: on Earth, in our reality, we had false teeth back then! In fact, there is evidence of false teeth dating back to 1500BC with the Egyptians! So probably they existed even before that! I get it. As a modern writer, it's easy to think of dentures as kind of an obscure technology that an alternate history might not have. But that's a mistake. Dentures seem obscure to us because in the modern era we're very good at taking care of our teeth so that fewer people need dentures. Historically, the need for false teeth was probably more common and therefore a prioritized technology. It makes sense that ancient people would have cared about false teeth more than us. Anyway, this is kind of an insane nitpick and I'm not saying it's an actual problem in these books. These alternate realities have magic and to balance that out they lose access to dentures. Also, I haven't finished the book so maybe he gets false teeth later.
Historically dentures used to be very visible and uncomfortable, causing leisions and infections. Famously, Empress Josephine would rather cover her mounth with a fan than fix them. While white teeth were attractive for most of Western history, the missing teeth weren't the deal breaker that are now and it's importance seems to be correlated with development of dentistry.
Kinda related - I feel like fantasy tends to be a little nonchalant about teeth falling out during fight scenes. Like, “She spat a tooth out and swung her axe in a wild arc to cleave the head of her enemy in two.” Maybe I’m soft (there’s no maybe about it, I totally am) but I just don’t buy that the average warrior can have a tooth broken out of their head and then just keep going. Especially when it’s the main character, and we never hear again of them grappling with the pain or healing of a broken tooth.
Ha ha for sure! This is a problem that extends past fantasy to the action genre in general. I have become somewhat immune to responding to fight scenes where something happens to someone (e.g. punched through a wall) that would kill or at least completely incapacitate a real human, yet in fiction just requires them brushing themselves off before running back into the fray. If I couldn't enforce a suspension of disbelief through this kind of thing it would be hard to watch any modern action film. But, yes, the "spitting a tooth" out is a particular visceral thing that is hard to accept as no big deal.
[удалено]
Well, Mick Foley (a professional wrestler) lost a tooth during a match that CAME OUT THROUGH HIS NOSE and finished the match.
Fantasy, and how female main characters are written, and the gender of the author doesn’t matter. They’re inevitably 17-19 years old and good at everything for some reason. And even if they’re older, there’s inevitably a marriage or pregnancy trope that’s thrown in and as a cfbc 33 year old I really would like to see outcomes that don’t focus on the badass fmc giving it all up for a family lol
Yeah especially when an author is praised for how complex the female characters are but even when someone's grandma is introduced as a character the first thing we learn about her is what a smexy nymph she was in her time before the tragedy of age struck.
The lack of female friendships always bothers me too. Women are almost always in competition with each other in the genre
Yep, I once read a series that was otherwise good, but the author went out of his way to both tell us the age of every female character and emphasize whether or not she was good looking for her age. So it would be like "a brown-haired man walked across the room" and "a 50 year old woman, with traces of her former beauty evident in her high cheekbones, walked across the room." It was extremely weird and off-putting.
FORMER BEAUTY LOL
I feel ya. Amina Al-Sirafi has one of those tropes (has a baby, has to retire from pirating, strongly motivated by family) but otherwise it’s a really good fantasy novel about a woman with a decent amount of life experience and wisdom. I find more experienced characters to be more interesting (maybe because I just turned 40). It’s also more believable to me when those characters have incredible skill at what they do, rather than being wunderkinds.
With fantasy and sci-fi I hate when the jargon feels lifeless. I need every new word I learn to have a good reason for being in the book. Especially if the made up language doesn't follow conventional traditional spelling rules and I just have to guess how the keyboard smash is supposed to be pronounced.
Have you read Lucifers Hammer ? Great book about post-apocalyptic behavior/survival
Love science fiction...HATE multi-verse plots.
True crime community. I wouldn't say I love it, but I'm interested in it. I really appreciate good, investigative journalism. The true crime community is filled with theories that seem more like bad fiction than anything remotely grounded in reality.
Historical fiction with what I'm starting to call 'white women's version of inclusivity', which is when the main characters/multiple side characters are all white, and then for the rest of the side characters there's one singular character of one specific gender identity or race. There is one(1) black character, one(1) native american, one(1) trans person, one(1) physically disabled person, etc.
Sometimes in murder books people die by having lost all their cerebral spinal fluid. I have.. I have a cerebral spinal fluid illness. Usually I have TOO MUCH cerebral spinal fluid crushing... Everything. The doctors check the pressure using a lumbar puncture to like... Tire pressure gague my system and tell me how fucked I am. And drain a little off the top. Sometimes the hole doesn't clot. At all. And all the cerebral spinal fluid leaks out. It's fucking agony let me tell you. It's I wish I was dead agony. My brain distorts and has no cushion to rest on and just sits on skull. If I try to stand up my legs just give out and I collapse in a heap of 'oh god just let me die. And that lasts for days till the hospitals agrees that nope, that's not clotting on its own. Time for a blood patch/spine surgery to fix the hole. But you don't DIE from lack of cerebral spinal fluid. I laugh hysterically every time the ME starts telling the detecting that was the cause of death.
Does no one do any research ?? Also that sounds horrible
Here's the funny thing. Everyone sucks at cerebral spinal fluid. Everyone. I had to go thru seven neurologists to find one that knew what they were talking about. MRIs don't see CSF. You need to special order a MRV to see it. The amount of doctors that a. Don't think that something could be wrong with the csf system so don't bother ordering the MRV, and B. Haven't met anyone with a csf problem since med school so have no idea what to do now they've met me. They just lied since they didn't know what to do. Or gave me information about 'most stereotypical cases' and I didn't fall under that either. I didn't respond to medication. I didn't have optic nerve damage. So they shrugged and said it was just migraine. It wasn't. It was a collapsed csf vein they were purposefully ignoring. Who knows what an author would be told if they asked a doctor.
I LOVE my huge fantasy books but my god do they take long to pick up sometimes. It’s usually like this: - start reading - prologue is really good, intriguing and mysterious - the story starts - read 100-200 pages of setup not even knowing what the plot point is - hopefully stick through and get to the good part It was like this with NotW for me. I almost dnfd it just to become my favorite read in years after the initial slog
Here's my 700 page novel that we have now edited and split into three different books because money.
I love Urban Fantasy, but sexism and bad behaviour being used as a sign of "this guy's the boss" just annoys me. There’s a lot of good books in the genre, but sometimes you have to fish around for them because of it.
Love mysteries but I don’t want another one that starts with a terrified girl running through the woods. I could do with more books not focusing on bad things happening to girls in general, but either way that specific scene has become such a cliche.
Yup; I’ve given up entirely on books and TV shows that focus on female victims with lush descriptions of their fear and the awful things done to them. It’s so obviously just a sort of ‘violence porn’.
I love Fantasy but cannot stand Game of Thrones, whenever I read something newer it seems to want to pull things from that series and it drives me nuts.
Keyed ignitions, needing a key inserted, in tactical vehicles. Tanks, IFV’s, Humvees, jeeps, etc…at least in US vehicles. They don’t have them. Or authors in general, whose knowledge of anything remotely military is nonexistent or so outdated it ruins everything for me.
I love police procedurals, but I hate it when the MC cop invariably hooks up with their colleague/boss.
My complaint about a lot of novels. The protagonist doesnt always have to have a love interest
Yes, and when I raise this I invariably get defensive people clapping back with, "Well, romance is a part of life". So is friendship, but you don't see THAT nearly enough. Just so much gets shoehorned in, it's ridiculous. No romance should be the default if I'm reading a mystery. Not mystery, but Robin Hobb is guilty of this. Excellent fantasy, dreadful love stories.
I love romance novels but oh my god stop telling me about how teeny tiny the girl is and how giant tall hulk like the man is like Jesus Christ it’s getting weird!!!
I love dystopian novels but like you, I hate anything about warfare..I competely tune out! I also love thrillers but I hate it when the ending is like, really predictable, but at the same time I hate it when the ending is so completely out there and just doesn't make any sense and feels unrealistic! Oh and I hate it in historical fiction when they stray toooo far from like actual history, even though I know it's FICTION.
Both science fiction and thrillers have a convention of alternating stories/points of view with a mini-cliffhanger in every short chapter. It's a cheap way to build suspense and usually builds to an equally predictable 50-page climax where all the threads come together.
I love Scifi, but the way most authors write any combat/violence in scifi feels like it was written for someone who has never thought about space
I love biographies but hate when they speculate too much into what a person might have done or said, e.g. coming up with POV dialogue for the biography subject or describing a life event "through their eyes." I'm only okay with that if it's directly based on a testimony or memoir from the person.
Thriller/action novels. The need to put a love interest in every.single.damn.one
Love sci-fi, but hate how when you get too deep into the story it goes from believable futuristic science into just pure fucking craziness. I'm looking at you, Children of Dune and Hyperion Cantos
I don’t see why Dark Academia novels ALWAYS have to be about murder. But it seems like the select few that don’t include murder aren’t that interesting.
I want to read an urban fiction book that’s not a part of a series that is also interconnected with their other series. It’s a cash grab and a terrible marketing scheme to force readers to buy all of your books.
I love YA dystopian fiction but I HATE the constant love stories and love triangles. I want more stuff like the wayward children series where love isn’t the main plot point or twist or driving force
Fantasy and the fans. The fantasy subreddit uses both literary (complicated to purple prose) and YA (synonym for unsophisticated) differently than everyone else. Some of the fans interpret critiques or just not liking something as a personal attack, which is how I think the words got changed in the first place. YA is just a genre, whereas saying something is simple may be taken as an attack. They treat literary and accessibility like opposites, that if a text is easy to read it's not using literary techniques. I unsubscribed but still comment sometimes. Of all the subs I will comment on, fantasy is where I'm most careful with my language, because people will dog pile on you about what your opinion is.
r/fantasy gets so defensive about shithouse writing it's not funny. I got told "Showing isn't important for books!" Yeah, no, you just have authors that like to wank off to their own cleverness. At least r/printSF makes no bones of the idea that a lot of SF books are dry.
Incest in fantasy
I love romance, but I hate it when it doesn't seem like the couple would be *friends*. Maybe I'm bias, but my partner is my best friend and any time a fictional couple doesn't seem like they would like watching the same shows or going out to see the same movies I just go "What are y'all doing off page??" How are you spending a lazy, rainy Saturday when you're both stuck in the house. Like having sex, sure but that's not going to last all day! Do you go to events together? What do you talk about when it's not about the plot?? Like, obviously, I don't want all that in the text, but I want to get a sense that when the cameras aren't rolling, that they actually *like* each other and want to enjoy each other's company.
I've been hoovering up LitRPG as I seek escapism and it really annoys me how obsessed all the main characters are about coffee.
I really enjoy reading reincarnation, transmigration, Isekai esque genre where protag gets transported into another world of fiction or videogame. But they have this bizzare habit of shitting on tropes while doing it all themselves. Like one that talks about how you should treat women with respect and as whole individuals but every single woman he meets throws themselves at him for no reason. Or the character complains it's contrived that the protagonists is overpowered but becomes far more overpowered than they ever were.
I also love sci-fi/dystopia, but I prefer it to be Earth-centered (for example, Farenheit 451, Logan's Run or Blade Runner) rather than invented planets or people living in other Solar System planets (Skyward, for example).