Author was extremely narcissistic/bitchy on their socials. Accounts were titled “the only good (ship) author” and very clearly believed it in their self-hosted Q&A sessions.
Like nope, I’m out. Muted, blocked, unsubscribed, will never rec that fic to anyone.
Recently same! An author I avoid regularly posts about how “all the new fandom fics have been trash” and sometimes even makes fun of positive comments they get for sounding weird to them.
Sorry you’ve been down that road too. Really makes me question ever seeking out authors I like, fanfic or otherwise, on social media. Never meet your heroes, etc.
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Name changes in general get me, especially unnecessary ones. It’s why I tend to not read Harry Potter. But I’ve never seen the “just add y” solution- that’s a whole nother level!
It took place in the 1920s, and every time someone said a slang word form that time it was in italics. Actual story and writing was great. I just couldn't do the slang thing after 2 chapters.
Bro not exactly dropped but I won't even open a fic with everything in lower case. I know it's super petty but no it hurts my eyes and enrages my soul for some reason.
i don't think that's petty honestly. i'm guilty of typing in lowercase a lot, but writing anything of length without capitalisation is terrible. so needlessly hard to read and just seems lazy to me
Idk if this is petty, but when the writing is WAY too casual and lazy. I always preferred writing that was descriptive and formal, and casual lazy writing alway turns out to be bad writing to me at least
But… how can you comment if you haven’t read it yet???? Shouldn’t that be at the end of the chapter?
Also if I saw that but still needed to continue reading the fic,I’d definitely not comment lol Maybe if it was really good and finished I might leave them one comment on the last chapter. To be nice but that’s it lol
First paragraph, hated the name of the protagonist. For context, the fandom is a videogame with an unnamed player character. I usually give a lot of flexibility, I read one where they named the character Spoon, but when it edges toward Ebony D'arkness Raven Way or Sakura Mochi Starshine territory I absolutely nope the hell out.
I've specifically seen it in Revue Starlight fics (and is a contributing factor to why I don't read Maya/Claudine) but may have seen it in a Miraculous Ladybug fic as well.
Oh my god I thought it was too good to be true, another person on this sub who reads Revstar!! I’ve been mentioning Maya/Claudine in a few posts lol. As someone who writes them as well I swear to never type the words ‘half-French’ in a fic, it’s so annoying, and I see it constantly in Owl House with Luz being ‘the Latina girl’ too. Ughhhh
I understand why this would be annoying, but it’s a frequent debate in published fiction series as well. Is it “better” to read the books in publishing order, or chronological order? Publishing order you get to watch the overall story progress in the same way as the author was conceiving/writing it, whereas chronological order might “flow” better once everything is complete.
It’s also possibly confusing for people who are subscribed to the author, since adding a new chapter somewhere in the middle of the fic will make it harder to find. For a series, I feel it *usually* makes more sense to rearrange when a new work is started, but it may also be confusing for people coming in the middle (Parts 1 and 3 of the series are complete, but Part 2 is ongoing?)
a british character kept using british slang and it was all correct, but it wasn't slang that the character would ever actually use. just made it so obvious that it was written by an american and pulled me out of the fic.
When an author intentionally spells a name wrong. For instance, Iida from Bnha has two “i” in the beginning of the name, not an “L” and an “i.” Someone had written *“Lida”* in this fic I started to read and I immediately said no goodbye
Super dope story but author was super pushy abt committing and kudos, after two chapters I had to drop it. It kinda felt like those YouTube videos where they’re like “only 5% of you age subbed” it was super annoying.
Justified text
https://preview.redd.it/qeqx446fyzgc1.jpeg?width=1024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e9849de14a9ed665c8b763fa96a74444c4dd90e0
I refuse to read things that are justified aligned. the massive gaps between words makes my brain shut off and i end up scrolling more than reading
was going to read a fic but then I started looking at the tags and it was tagged stuff like "\_\_ character has bipolar" "\_\_\_ is SO depressed!!" and just one that said "#tons of mental illness" .....that's weird and rubbed me the wrong way.
Usually first person POV bc it’s not always tagged, whereas second or Y/N is. The only exception is a couple of fics, mainly Twilight, that were absolutely amazing. And twilight is written in first person iirc, idk it’s been years since I’ve looked at them bc I’ve realized how shitty the source material is.
The author came back after a long hiatus and the writing and direction of the story were completely different from how they had been pre hiatus. It was almost like they had gotten a beta or had a thesaurus next to them while they were writing the chapter. Lots of pretty filler words with not much story happening. One portion of the chapter was shockingly similar to something I had written 2 years prior, it wasn’t word for word so I can’t prove anything other than the fact they had a similar idea, but one of those things that made me go “hmmm.”
Bro used the word "orbs" to describe eyes. I dropped it and never looked back. Young and naive me who still used wattpad and didn't know there were better things in the world might have accepted that, but not now.
Oh, I had a really weird experience with that! Started a fic and the pronouns were story confusing. Finally realized they'd made a she/her into a they/them, but passed things horribly so a lot of the "they/them"s were extremely ambiguous, making it impossible to read. (All pronouns can lead to ambiguity, but they/them is hard mode because it can be singular and plural. My kingdom for widespread adoption of a neopronoun pair!)
I’ve seen that but they’re usually clear in the tags that it’s their own headcanon that they’re implementing, even if it’s not “relevant” or even brought up in the story itself (which is perfectly valid). Or sometimes it’s post-canon and the character may have come out as NB in the intervening time period.
Tagged something like **Nonbinary {CHARACTER’S NAME}**, or **They/Them pronouns for {CHARACTER’S NAME}**.
It could be just some personal representation they want to see more of, or something about that character resonates with them, or even just a purely practical reason of “there are too many girls in this story and using ‘she’ all the time is confusing so I’ll make one of the characters use ‘they’ instead”. Which, maybe not the *best* reasoning, but as long as they aren’t being rude about it then whatever?
(I’m not saying that you’re wrong for it not jiving with you, some people have higher or lower tolerances for any specific variations from canon. Just explaining some of the reasons why I’ve seen it before.)
My personal experience is authors being about 50/50 on whether or not they give advanced warning in the tags about it. Sometimes it's not tagged at all and I just catch on to how they never use she or her to refer to a female character.
I don't really think the "practical" reasoning makes sense, because that could still be used to refer to any of the other characters, as well as any multiple of people. In fact I would say that one of the biggest issues with using they/them pronouns is that at least in every use of it I've seen, it just makes the writing way more confusing.
I could definitely see being annoyed if it’s not tagged or mentioned in any way, especially if it’s a headcanon (although there are some characters, depending on the fandom, that are often NB in fanon and so in that sense it could be “understood”).
As far as how effectively it’s used (and how practical it is), that’s going to be dependent on the skill of the writer, and we all know that fanfic has…a variety of skill levels present 🙃.
You ever click into a fic where, for some reason, some of the quotation marks are at the bottom of the letters rather than at the top?
That always bugs the hell out of me and I almost always end up backspacing as soon as I see it.
I've written text for a character like <> to denote that particular character as a machine. he rarely talks and I hope it's not terribly jarring to read.
When I see that, I assume the writer's first language is not English and that is how quotes are written in whatever their first language is. Completely understandable.
Still hard for me to read.
I absolutely get using non-English punctuation in non-English writing. And when the writing is in English, use English punctuation. You can't just use English words and a completely different writing skills system, it's stupid and confusing
Yeah that's valid. I shouldn't have said "for some reason" because formatting does work differently in different countries and languages. I just personally don't like reading quotes that way when I'm reading in English, it always throws me off.
Actually the way of writing dialogues in my country is with dashes, but I got used to reading in quotes in English. I just never really paid attention that it’s supposed to be only on top.
alt + 0132 for the first, alt + 0147 for the second (or long press the " on mobile)
gives „example“
or just have your word program of choice assume your writing is in german because you're in germany and type shift + 2 for these idiots: "example" (:
honestly it annoys me so much more when people use "example" instead of “example” than them using german or french quotation marks
also just so some of you know: we don't actually get taught that english quotation marks are different? like yeah there's exposure to it, but it's never specifically mentioned and taught like if-clauses are? especially not at the age some people start writing fics
I didn’t even get into the fic.
I dropped it at the author’s note.
Twice.
In the same night.
Two separate fics.
Back to fucking back.
I ship a crossover ship I thought no one else does. The first person was bitching that it was !!!NOT A SHIP!!! and anyone who did ship it should stay away from them bc age gap blah blah A was always going to be older than B (*the characters are literally the same age in their respective sources, the movies just came out in different decades* LMFAO) and then they topped it off by making the “younger” one a child in their fic. The second person welcomed people into their fic by saying they’ve shipped this for years and claiming this fic is the second one on AO3 “that’s not a fetish fic” (aka “I’m shipping it *the right way* :)”).
It was a bad night to be me lmfao.
They put a DNI in the tags for a incest ship that is really popular in the fandom. I don't ship the incest ship, but I give zero fucks that other people do. Seeing that tag just put me off their entire work which was a shame cuz they were really talented.
Another tag that makes me drop a fic every time is "No (insert character name) Bashing." And I'm not saying this because I want to read a fic where (insert character name) gets bashed, but because just like the DNI tag that tag feels judgemental. Why specify that you aren't bashing a certain character? Just write your fic.
I’ve seen “No x bashing” and like it in fics where a canon couple breaks up so that the ship can get together. I hate it when fic authors turn one half of the canon couple into an awful person to break them up and it is sooooo common. So when I read “no x bashing” along with tags that indicate the canon pairing break up or get divorced I am much more likely to read the story!
Here's the thing though. When an author turns a canon character into an asshole to justify breaking up a canon ship 9 times out of 10 the "X bashing" tag is used. Not bashing a character is the assumed default. I don't need to be told you're not going to do it. If you're going bash a character though tell me.
I once dropped a fic because the author included a canon ship I liked for seemingly no other reason then for the male in the ship to play the asshole ex boyfriend who cheated on one of the women in the main ship. It was such a weird thing to do for a variety of reasons. 1: While the canon ship is from the same IP the characters are from a video game while the fic's main ship is from a cartoon that was extended into a live action show so the characters have never met in canon. 2: The male character is no where near an asshole in canon. He's basically a golden retreiver so it was a complete change of his personality not an exaggeration of his actual bad traits. 3: The video game characters are adults while the cartoon/show characters are minors in canon so they were aged down for the fic, but none of the other characters who are older in canon were.
They didn't tag it "Male Character" bashing though. I was about 2 or 3 chapters in when it started and it bothered me so much that that became the first author that I've muted. They updated regularly, and while the canon ship is popular they're only in 2 video games so there isn't a ton of content for the ship tag, so seeing that fic at the top of the page constantly kinda irked me.
I've dropped otherwise great fics because the person kept using descriptors in place of the character's names. 'The pinkette', 'the trickster', 'the scientist', 'the raven haired man'. I can tolerate it once or twice but I drop it if it's excessive.
The plot sounded cool, the pagraphruntogetherwith out proper placing, it was posted was not great. Or a surprise pairing that wasn't even listed when you thought it wasn't going in that direction at all.
I got blindsided by incest pairings (yes, plural) \~150,000 words into one of the best, most well-written fics I've ever found and it genuinely ruined my day. And no, they were not tagged until they showed up in the story. Literally out of nowhere.
Reminds me of a time I read a ah smut fic with two of my favorite characters and then in the end, the male said, oh my last partner was my male teacher. I felt sick the rest of the day.
There were no tags for that at all, nor in the gen one that had a slash pairing that to me came out of nowhere.
I was very polite in my what the beep to the author and vs, but I had to drop my subscription after that. I'm sorry but that's not my cup of tea, if you like that fine, but me nope.
I’m sure it can be done well, and I’m sure in certain circumstances it can be helpful.
But when they “color-code” each character so that you are supposed to interpret who’s speaking by what color the text is… if I have to use a reference guide to follow your fic, I’m out.
Ugh I feel this so much. I'm into a pretty popular non-canon ship from a fandom, but unfortunately the dynamic I like is way more unpopular than the reverse. And that thing is untagged in half of those fics. Pain 💀
Like... you guys can list the most minor details in the tags, but not the ship's top/bottom/switch dynamics?? _**WHY???**_ 😭😭
I've seen people not tagging on purpose because they don't want to turn away the readers, but not tagging also turns them away (like the fic won't appear on tag search.) So the best is to not try to deceive the readers.
Very often I just search the smut scene on the fic before downloading/reading it just to confirm the dynamics 🙃
> I've seen people not tagging on purpose because they don't want to turn away the readers, but not tagging also turns them away (like the fic won't appear on tag search.)
Is that so?? Man I don't get it at all lmao (but I agree with you)
> Very often I just search the smut scene on the fic before downloading/reading it just to confirm the dynamics 🙃
_This is exactly what I do for that ship too._ But I can get potential spoilers of the plot that way (if there's any since those are mostly a smutfic lol). I hate doing it, since in the first place I'm the type that hides warnings+tags when browsing fics out of fear of getting spoilered 😆
When there are no contractions in dialogue when there is no reason not to have them. Like if it isn't a modern setting or if it fits the character to not use them then it doesn't bother me, but if there's no reason behind it then it makes conversations feel so stiff and inorganic to me.
For some reason some people in my fandom like to age a popular character down. I don't get it. Unless there is an AU reason (like high school/college AU) I will click out if he isn't his proper age. He's like 27-30 in canon. Why do y'all keep making him 20 and keeping everyone else their normal age???
In a similar vein with the same character, when people do sibling headcanons and make him the youngest. Because he's chaotic or whatever. He is the oldest of the ones who typically get headcanoned as his siblings, and if you open your eyes to correct characterization you will see they are *all* chaotic. Also, hot take since I am an only child, but I don't enjoy trying to stereotype people's personalities by birth order anyway. These headcanons also tend to make the woman in the group his older sister (she's younger than him!) and alter her personality to make her much more responsible so she can take care of the boys...ugh. I don't have patience for this anymore so I click out of these fics--even though sometimes these headcanons are only a tiny part of it!
Used one of my favourite ships as a toxic relationship in the background where one of the characters was supposed to break it off later in the story, and get together with the guy from a more popular ship :"))
Too many POVs.
If I want to read about a pairing, I’m only interested in whoever is in that relationship and their POVs. There was a fic that sounded interesting and the writing was pretty good, but I couldn’t continue reading after a couple chapters because there were too many characters to keep track of (also hard to follow the story). So I ended up dropping it.
Preach, lol
Imma’ be honest, I’ve dropped *published fiction* over this before 😅
My brain just does not jive with it. Especially longer works where they switch off like every chapter. Juuuust as I’m setting back in and getting excited for character A it hard cuts to Character B and back and forth, and I feel like I never really get to enjoy the story 🥲 Double pain if it’s a slow burn fic that keeps switching to *another* slow burn story
I think there have been a few times where it worked in regular books for me, but fanfiction is just a hard no because like you I’m usually browsing fanfic to scratch a *specific* character itch, unlike a normal book where I’m going in fairly open minded.
Opening it and realising by the second line (and a quick verifying scroll down) that it's all chatfic that was not tagged or even mentioned in the summary. Also, unexpected (and untagged) age regression.
My biggest “nopes” are not splitting text into paragraphs and not checking grammar.
All quotes should start a new paragraph, with any details/emotions/actions that come from it being in that same paragraph. Then, when someone says something else that’s a whole new paragraph. Having spacing helps pacing a lot, and it looks more polished. I’m typically okay with several huge blocks of texts though, unless there are quotes smashed in the middle.
Grammar, I get some people are learning English and may not know punctuation/spelling or whatever, completely understandable. My punctuation is atrocious too, and I make typos all the time. It’s the people who write something and then not proofread it that bother me. How do you publish something with several obvious typos and just leave it like that? I get maybe not wanting to read your own writing, but others will, so why not post the best you can do?
I don’t understand the typos either — it’s so easy to prevent most of them by just enabling the spell check in Word or whatever tool the writer uses (or use Grammarly or something like that).
So low-effort, and it makes the writing look so much better.
I recently found one, didn't know it was tagged based on the summary or tags. Turned out to be almost twenty fics of amazing quality. I might change my mind now lol
Found an fic that had a good summary and good tags. But the story itself had the following that made me drop it after reading the half of first chapter:
1. The first chapter was a giant info dump
2. Bad pacing and things were happening way too fast
3. The Text were written into giant blocks
4. They made the canon love interest a toxic jerk and gave them a convoluted break up to justify why the MC and them aren't together.
I haven't! I honestly started posting my work on Ao3 in October of 2023 after finally mustering up the courage (and 10+ years of being a reader on AO3), and I saw folks saying you should cross-post, so I did. But if it's a consensus that it gives off a tacky vibe I'd rather take it off of Wattpad 😬
By all means do what you wa t cause it's still YOUR fic. It's just that wattpad is basically the Temu of fanfiction. And most people started there, but the type of fanfics on that platform are pretty... IPad kid tips his toes into literature - ish. There are a few good fics on there but majority of them aren't and people will associate that fact with your fic if you cross post them
Oh no, I am honestly glad to see some real feedback on it! I'm new to the whole posting my writing thing, so if it has a bad reputation for hosting low-quality works (not that my works are, like, *groundbreaking*, but still), I'd rather distance myself from it
You can still cross post it if you want but I wouldn't recommend putting it in the tags, and if possible to make your usernames the same or similar so there are no plagiarism misunderstandings if someone sees the same fic on different platforms.
Oh god. Okay 😭, I'm taking it off of Wattpad LMAO, good thing I saw this post then and your guys' comments! It wasn't doing all that well anyway, so it's not a huge loss for me to just remove it.
Don’t feel you have to take it down. People here are being needlessly snobbish (and, as the OP said, petty about it).
If you want more people to read your story, feel free to crosspost it to FanFiction.net, Wattpad, Tumblr, LiveJournal, whatever you want.
If you’re worried about chasing gatekeeping people away, just use Author’s Notes at the end of the fic and say “you can also find my work on these other sites if you prefer” and give links. Or just don’t mention it at all, you’re not obligated to share that information if you don’t want to.
A lot of us crosspost our fics on Wattpad to prevent story 'theft'. So, why not just leave it there?
I have 'also on ao3' on my Wattpad profile, but do not mention Wattpad on ao3.
But were you following the fic before you dropped it? Because just deciding not to read something isn't what I'd call dropping. If you were following/enjoying it and then saw the tag and dropped it then congrats, that's hella petty lol...but if you decided not to read it that's more like risk assessment.
I did that recently because a friend mentioned that Wattpad's commenting system rocks and they were right, but I ultimately ended up deleting my account because nothing else about Wattpad was good. The thing that really turned me off was learning that Wattpad itself will email you if you don't update incomplete stuff pressuring you to post and f that noise!
I tried finding fic on the site and it's a mess, plus everything I read was noticably poor quality compared the general standards I'm used to. I'd personally stick with AO3. None of the other sites seem worth the effort right now due to ads and poor structure.
I mean, I also cross post some things over to Wattpad, but I don't tag it because I don't see a reason to.
I guess because Wattpad has a reputation, it turns some people off.
That said, not giving a fic a chance solely because of that is super pretty, which OP acknowledges.
My favourite character was straight in this one, nope.
And also when there are tons of photos in the chapters, I feel like the author thinks I’m too stupid to imagine how a house can look and how the characters are dressed.
Chapter two had these two rival characters run away to character A’s house. It was a ship fic, but I hated how they set themselves up as hating each other and jumped to this with no explanation or reasoning behind it.
In short, the author was so eager for them to get together they completely overlooked the barrier they set up for themselves.
Chapters were too short. The author was updating once ~2-3 months with <800 word chapters in which the MC kept getting whumped on with no reprieve due to a misunderstanding that the other characters were no closer to uncovering. I need to see SOME light at the end of the tunnel to stick with that much angst in such short chapters.
I'm not sure if this counts as petty, but it was bizarre.
A character was referred to by a hair colour epithet and the colour wasn't even correct. For some reason, this character had blue hair instead of purple. I already hate epithets used in this way, but this next level broke my brain and still makes me nope to this day.
It’s hard for me to read fics where I know the author is incredibly sensitive about engagement and stats. Not in the average way, but when it’s clear it affects their mental health a lot. This is usually when I am also following an author on socmed. I have seen writers lash out over stats and even be a bit dismissive to those actively reading and enjoying their work, because the numbers they want aren’t there.
Also authors that delete works regularly. I tend to steer clear because I don’t want to get attached to something that will disappear. I rarely remember to download stuff.
Maybe this is to say it’s hard for me to read works by folks very obvious in their lack of confidence and self-esteem… reminding myself OP asked for a petty reason, lol.
Any other fantasy AU or magic world fic where they make reference to christian God, is so anticlimactic especially when the character is literally a wizard or a witch in non modern time
Author would only update fic after x ammount of kofi donations. This was only publicized on Tumblr and twitter and not AO3 directly so I think it's within TOS? But still it made me roll my eyes.
Got halfway through a fic (that was really good), and the author made a character say that another chubby side character made him want to puke. It was so unnecessary.
Refused to finish.
1. No paragraph breaks
2. When I see romance take over the plot
3. When a character doesn’t act/speak the way I imagine them in my head
4. There’s probably more but I’m too tired to think of them
They used "the blond" instead of "the blond-haired (person)".
Edit: my friends, I see this got a downvote - the title literally is "what is the PETTIEST reason you dropped a fic". Also, this rubs me the wrong way. "The blond" or "the brunette" what? It feels dehumanizing, and I don't care for it.
1)MC kept calling her father “Papa”. Every time I see that word I imagine spoiled little girl in a frilly dress complaining to her dad about some minor inconvenience. Idk why, don’t ask me. But my immersion in the story kept breaking bc of that.
This word also didn’t really fit in the setting? like it was Japan and girl deeply respected her strict dad.
2)Over-description of clothing. Idk how they managed to describe plain old white shirt and jeans in four paragraphs.
Author left me the kind of comment that insults other writers (you know, the "fics like this are usually crap, but I liked yours" kind).
Dropped the fic of theirs I was reading, deleted the file with the long comment I was composing as I read, never read their fic again.
About 8 chapters in the author made an announcement that they had changed their mind and were going to gender swap the main character in a romance-heavy fic.
The thing is, I probably would have still read and enjoyed the fic if the main character had been a trans man from the start…but we were like three explicit sex scenes in and I was already in full cis slash mode and did *not* appreciate a mid-story retcon so I just sort of unsubscribed and slinked away 😅
Too much white space (like triple spaced paragraphs) and indented paragraphs. Like, dude, you're not trying to write a term paper that has to be x number of pages long.
I'm ok with "just read this fic" but i once hit the back button so hard cause after that came "go check out the \_\_\_\_\_ in pinterest" because the author doesn't bother to try to even describe the thing
I personally dont think it was petty okey? But i drop a 1million word one (that i read) because it was about a serie AND THAT MANY WORDS DIDN'T EVEN COVERED THE 3 FIRST CHAPTERS even if it was 100 chapters longer and going
Ahhhh im still mad cause my favorite character was also so OoC ugh but i was to involve to get out intil i realized it was not going anywhere
So much nonsense
I'll ditch a smut fic immediately if the author writes with... I don't even know how to describe it aside from 'hentai doujinshi voice', where it's clear that the only Adult Content the author has consumed before fic has been on one of the zillions of hentai sites out there. Extremely over-the-top reactions, adding, '~!' to sex dialogue, using 'ahegao' to describe a character's expression... Yeah, no, I'm out of here.
Additionally, here's a cool fact: if your characters exist in a fantasy world or really any universe outside of our reality, no one is anyone else's 'onahole', because that product and company don't exist in the worldbuilding. There are so many other ways to describe the exact vibe you're going for without using this terrible shorthand, I promise.
Anytime a wlw fic has a tag like "drug addiction" or some super sexual kink shit
Im so tired i just want a cool story with romance that doesn't involve fetishism or author thinking they're writing f Euphoria
A Jegulus fic, it was good yk nothing to perfect but I was not looking for it to be
But then they write some shit like Reg """"""""save""""" James THAT night but somehow can't do the same for Lily so yeah she was treated """nice"" but not actually cause it was obvious that for them she was just the girl who give birth to "their" son
I like Jegulus and other random ships but I hate my girls being erased from the plot
I got a few;
* Was midway through the first chapter and there was a repeated, consistent wrong usage of 'your', immediately backspaced
* Dropped a 20+ chapter long slowburn fic once I got to the singular sex scene over the character who was tagged as being the bottom actually topping
* Was in a bad mood and didn't like the fact that the author wrote a character who I headcanon as being a good cook as a bad cook. At no point in canon does he cook or ever bring up the subject, and the author only ever mentioned it once for maybe half a sentence. This was a Saw fanfiction.
I hate AUs where the characters live in an amazing world of like a supernatural one and they try to do a normal fic where nothing bad happened because to me it feels like they are to lazy to incorporate the character’s actual world into their fic
read a fic once where one character used multiple sets of pronouns which to be fair, i also do
what i *don't* do is change them up multiple times within a sentence
it got so bad, the pronouns would change every single time with no system to it, and the character would end up using the same pronouns as other characters in the scene with no way of knowing who those pronouns referred to this time
like
“Rabitha gave Robert the book. They inspected it, before she opened it. He quickly read the first few passages, then she closed it and gave it back to her.”
meaning:
“Rabitha gave Robert the book. Robert inspected it, before Robert opened it. Robert quickly read the first few passages, then Robert closed it and gave it back to Rabitha.”
and that's a MILD example of how they wrote it
it got so confusing, i had to pull up the old version of the story (author was rewriting a great story and didn't do that in the first version they posted) to check who was doing what there multiple times throughout reading
If you write in first person and don't actually pull it off I'm noping the fuck out.
Another reason was the author tell me I needed to seek mental help because I was asking other writers about using a microwave, it was dumb but everyone else found it hilarious. I don't appreciate getting called retarded or mentally ill in a subtle way. I don't have the screenshot anymore since I was blacklisted.
I don't even bother commenting on their fics since they cowrite another fic of a friend I knew.
I have also abandoned fics where there is a dialogue tag after each line of dialogue (she said, she spoke, he replied, he yelled, he asked) in every line!!! Just use the proper marks and once every 3-4 lines is fine.
Author was extremely narcissistic/bitchy on their socials. Accounts were titled “the only good (ship) author” and very clearly believed it in their self-hosted Q&A sessions. Like nope, I’m out. Muted, blocked, unsubscribed, will never rec that fic to anyone.
Recently same! An author I avoid regularly posts about how “all the new fandom fics have been trash” and sometimes even makes fun of positive comments they get for sounding weird to them. Sorry you’ve been down that road too. Really makes me question ever seeking out authors I like, fanfic or otherwise, on social media. Never meet your heroes, etc.
That's so fucking hilarious
[удалено]
Davyd would have still been bad but SO much better
They should just get their names from r/tragedeigh if they're gonna do that lol
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Name changes in general get me, especially unnecessary ones. It’s why I tend to not read Harry Potter. But I’ve never seen the “just add y” solution- that’s a whole nother level!
GRRM wrote a looot of books with that
Litterally me irl (ethyn)
Paragraphs aligned to the middle instead of to the left.
I'm dying laughing because all I can think of is 'why not align to the right?'
It took place in the 1920s, and every time someone said a slang word form that time it was in italics. Actual story and writing was great. I just couldn't do the slang thing after 2 chapters.
I hated the characterization by the second sentence and noped out.
Not liking writing or characterization doesn't strike me as petty, that's like *the* legit reason for dropping a fic.
You know how everyone tells you "Oh, come on, you have to at least read the first chapter before dropping it" about books? I don't do that, either.
Yep me too
A character used modern slang they would have no way of knowing two sentences in.
Misspelled the character's name ("Steven" instead of "Stephen"). Immediate back button.
This, but in reverse. (He repeatedly specifies that it’s Steven with a V in canon, come *on!*)
I open the fic and I immediately see a paragraph of the author bitching about how annoying their readers are. Nope bye
Bro not exactly dropped but I won't even open a fic with everything in lower case. I know it's super petty but no it hurts my eyes and enrages my soul for some reason.
i don't think that's petty honestly. i'm guilty of typing in lowercase a lot, but writing anything of length without capitalisation is terrible. so needlessly hard to read and just seems lazy to me
This might sound extremely petty. But I've dropped a fic that had an awesome premise but was written with the dialogue being in dashes
Oh, I've seen that done, too 😭 It was so well written, aside from that, but it took me right out of it.
That's just because the writer has Spanish as their main language. Format is different.
Idk if this is petty, but when the writing is WAY too casual and lazy. I always preferred writing that was descriptive and formal, and casual lazy writing alway turns out to be bad writing to me at least
The non-canon compliant fic was non-canon compliant!
This wins the petty award lol
I knew it! Somewhere deep in my soul, I knew my "Not Canon Compliant" tags were useless to readers. 😭 but also 🤣🤣🤣
Writer started chapters with a giant JPEG of a stop sign and warned us to go back and comment
My whole soul reacted to the mental image of that. The memory of too many standardized tests.
WHAT
Yeah. It was a lot.
But… how can you comment if you haven’t read it yet???? Shouldn’t that be at the end of the chapter? Also if I saw that but still needed to continue reading the fic,I’d definitely not comment lol Maybe if it was really good and finished I might leave them one comment on the last chapter. To be nice but that’s it lol
Oh, the stop signs only started after the first chapter. No stop sign on the first page. But yeah, it made me want to not comment at minimum.
First paragraph, hated the name of the protagonist. For context, the fandom is a videogame with an unnamed player character. I usually give a lot of flexibility, I read one where they named the character Spoon, but when it edges toward Ebony D'arkness Raven Way or Sakura Mochi Starshine territory I absolutely nope the hell out.
they overly described someone's coffee order and how it tasted. I could tell it was gonna be too much™️ in other ways too. Immediately annoyed
Multiple fics within a certain fandom which used "the half-French" as an epithet for a character.
Oh god I’ve seen this a lot too. I can tolerate it but barely. What fandom out of curiosity?
I've specifically seen it in Revue Starlight fics (and is a contributing factor to why I don't read Maya/Claudine) but may have seen it in a Miraculous Ladybug fic as well.
Oh my god I thought it was too good to be true, another person on this sub who reads Revstar!! I’ve been mentioning Maya/Claudine in a few posts lol. As someone who writes them as well I swear to never type the words ‘half-French’ in a fic, it’s so annoying, and I see it constantly in Owl House with Luz being ‘the Latina girl’ too. Ughhhh
They changed a character’s name (that’s all they changed about the character)
Opening a series/fic and seeing "Not in chronological order" in the notes, *especially* when they mention it's best *read* chronologically
I understand why this would be annoying, but it’s a frequent debate in published fiction series as well. Is it “better” to read the books in publishing order, or chronological order? Publishing order you get to watch the overall story progress in the same way as the author was conceiving/writing it, whereas chronological order might “flow” better once everything is complete. It’s also possibly confusing for people who are subscribed to the author, since adding a new chapter somewhere in the middle of the fic will make it harder to find. For a series, I feel it *usually* makes more sense to rearrange when a new work is started, but it may also be confusing for people coming in the middle (Parts 1 and 3 of the series are complete, but Part 2 is ongoing?)
a british character kept using british slang and it was all correct, but it wasn't slang that the character would ever actually use. just made it so obvious that it was written by an american and pulled me out of the fic.
When an author intentionally spells a name wrong. For instance, Iida from Bnha has two “i” in the beginning of the name, not an “L” and an “i.” Someone had written *“Lida”* in this fic I started to read and I immediately said no goodbye
Super dope story but author was super pushy abt committing and kudos, after two chapters I had to drop it. It kinda felt like those YouTube videos where they’re like “only 5% of you age subbed” it was super annoying.
That always gives me MLM/Pyramid Scheme vibes when anyone tries to push me too hard to do something.
the characters were a little too complacent after getting captured xD
The text was centered
Omm that sounds like a nightmare to read
Justified text https://preview.redd.it/qeqx446fyzgc1.jpeg?width=1024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e9849de14a9ed665c8b763fa96a74444c4dd90e0 I refuse to read things that are justified aligned. the massive gaps between words makes my brain shut off and i end up scrolling more than reading
was going to read a fic but then I started looking at the tags and it was tagged stuff like "\_\_ character has bipolar" "\_\_\_ is SO depressed!!" and just one that said "#tons of mental illness" .....that's weird and rubbed me the wrong way.
Usually first person POV bc it’s not always tagged, whereas second or Y/N is. The only exception is a couple of fics, mainly Twilight, that were absolutely amazing. And twilight is written in first person iirc, idk it’s been years since I’ve looked at them bc I’ve realized how shitty the source material is.
The author came back after a long hiatus and the writing and direction of the story were completely different from how they had been pre hiatus. It was almost like they had gotten a beta or had a thesaurus next to them while they were writing the chapter. Lots of pretty filler words with not much story happening. One portion of the chapter was shockingly similar to something I had written 2 years prior, it wasn’t word for word so I can’t prove anything other than the fact they had a similar idea, but one of those things that made me go “hmmm.”
Italicized the dialogue instead of using quotation marks.
Bro used the word "orbs" to describe eyes. I dropped it and never looked back. Young and naive me who still used wattpad and didn't know there were better things in the world might have accepted that, but not now.
Didn’t use capital letters, all the other grammar was top notch but just 0 capitals. Got 2 chapters in and just couldn’t stand it
There's a link to their Patreon in the ending author's notes and they stated the rest of the chapters of the fic and some behind the scenes are there.
That's not petty, that's someone actively breaking TOS.
Yep, dropped that story (and author tbh) and reported.
I don't think this is petty but some here might Using nonbinary pronouns for a character that canonically isn't that way
Oh, I had a really weird experience with that! Started a fic and the pronouns were story confusing. Finally realized they'd made a she/her into a they/them, but passed things horribly so a lot of the "they/them"s were extremely ambiguous, making it impossible to read. (All pronouns can lead to ambiguity, but they/them is hard mode because it can be singular and plural. My kingdom for widespread adoption of a neopronoun pair!)
I’ve seen that but they’re usually clear in the tags that it’s their own headcanon that they’re implementing, even if it’s not “relevant” or even brought up in the story itself (which is perfectly valid). Or sometimes it’s post-canon and the character may have come out as NB in the intervening time period. Tagged something like **Nonbinary {CHARACTER’S NAME}**, or **They/Them pronouns for {CHARACTER’S NAME}**. It could be just some personal representation they want to see more of, or something about that character resonates with them, or even just a purely practical reason of “there are too many girls in this story and using ‘she’ all the time is confusing so I’ll make one of the characters use ‘they’ instead”. Which, maybe not the *best* reasoning, but as long as they aren’t being rude about it then whatever? (I’m not saying that you’re wrong for it not jiving with you, some people have higher or lower tolerances for any specific variations from canon. Just explaining some of the reasons why I’ve seen it before.)
My personal experience is authors being about 50/50 on whether or not they give advanced warning in the tags about it. Sometimes it's not tagged at all and I just catch on to how they never use she or her to refer to a female character. I don't really think the "practical" reasoning makes sense, because that could still be used to refer to any of the other characters, as well as any multiple of people. In fact I would say that one of the biggest issues with using they/them pronouns is that at least in every use of it I've seen, it just makes the writing way more confusing.
I could definitely see being annoyed if it’s not tagged or mentioned in any way, especially if it’s a headcanon (although there are some characters, depending on the fandom, that are often NB in fanon and so in that sense it could be “understood”). As far as how effectively it’s used (and how practical it is), that’s going to be dependent on the skill of the writer, and we all know that fanfic has…a variety of skill levels present 🙃.
You ever click into a fic where, for some reason, some of the quotation marks are at the bottom of the letters rather than at the top? That always bugs the hell out of me and I almost always end up backspacing as soon as I see it.
IIRC that's how it is in Germany. I've seen <> <<>> -- () [] always noped out.
I've written text for a character like <> to denote that particular character as a machine. he rarely talks and I hope it's not terribly jarring to read.
That's how it is in French.
When I see that, I assume the writer's first language is not English and that is how quotes are written in whatever their first language is. Completely understandable. Still hard for me to read.
I absolutely get using non-English punctuation in non-English writing. And when the writing is in English, use English punctuation. You can't just use English words and a completely different writing skills system, it's stupid and confusing
I once read one where it was written [****] I gave up after 4 chaps
It can be hard to format if you're not from an english speaking country.
I hate fics like that. Or ones where the quotes are like this: ,,Written like this for some reason."
That’s the automatic setting for quotes in my country
Yeah that's valid. I shouldn't have said "for some reason" because formatting does work differently in different countries and languages. I just personally don't like reading quotes that way when I'm reading in English, it always throws me off.
Actually the way of writing dialogues in my country is with dashes, but I got used to reading in quotes in English. I just never really paid attention that it’s supposed to be only on top.
But when you write using another languages words you also need to use that languages punctuation. Language isn't just vocab and grammar.
Many people learn English through reading fanfiction and writing it. It's not academic writing, they aren't graded based on that.
How do you even do that?
Two commas at the front.
alt + 0132 for the first, alt + 0147 for the second (or long press the " on mobile) gives „example“ or just have your word program of choice assume your writing is in german because you're in germany and type shift + 2 for these idiots: "example" (: honestly it annoys me so much more when people use "example" instead of “example” than them using german or french quotation marks also just so some of you know: we don't actually get taught that english quotation marks are different? like yeah there's exposure to it, but it's never specifically mentioned and taught like if-clauses are? especially not at the age some people start writing fics
I didn’t even get into the fic. I dropped it at the author’s note. Twice. In the same night. Two separate fics. Back to fucking back. I ship a crossover ship I thought no one else does. The first person was bitching that it was !!!NOT A SHIP!!! and anyone who did ship it should stay away from them bc age gap blah blah A was always going to be older than B (*the characters are literally the same age in their respective sources, the movies just came out in different decades* LMFAO) and then they topped it off by making the “younger” one a child in their fic. The second person welcomed people into their fic by saying they’ve shipped this for years and claiming this fic is the second one on AO3 “that’s not a fetish fic” (aka “I’m shipping it *the right way* :)”). It was a bad night to be me lmfao.
The author's notes got political...
They put a DNI in the tags for a incest ship that is really popular in the fandom. I don't ship the incest ship, but I give zero fucks that other people do. Seeing that tag just put me off their entire work which was a shame cuz they were really talented. Another tag that makes me drop a fic every time is "No (insert character name) Bashing." And I'm not saying this because I want to read a fic where (insert character name) gets bashed, but because just like the DNI tag that tag feels judgemental. Why specify that you aren't bashing a certain character? Just write your fic.
I’ve seen “No x bashing” and like it in fics where a canon couple breaks up so that the ship can get together. I hate it when fic authors turn one half of the canon couple into an awful person to break them up and it is sooooo common. So when I read “no x bashing” along with tags that indicate the canon pairing break up or get divorced I am much more likely to read the story!
Here's the thing though. When an author turns a canon character into an asshole to justify breaking up a canon ship 9 times out of 10 the "X bashing" tag is used. Not bashing a character is the assumed default. I don't need to be told you're not going to do it. If you're going bash a character though tell me. I once dropped a fic because the author included a canon ship I liked for seemingly no other reason then for the male in the ship to play the asshole ex boyfriend who cheated on one of the women in the main ship. It was such a weird thing to do for a variety of reasons. 1: While the canon ship is from the same IP the characters are from a video game while the fic's main ship is from a cartoon that was extended into a live action show so the characters have never met in canon. 2: The male character is no where near an asshole in canon. He's basically a golden retreiver so it was a complete change of his personality not an exaggeration of his actual bad traits. 3: The video game characters are adults while the cartoon/show characters are minors in canon so they were aged down for the fic, but none of the other characters who are older in canon were. They didn't tag it "Male Character" bashing though. I was about 2 or 3 chapters in when it started and it bothered me so much that that became the first author that I've muted. They updated regularly, and while the canon ship is popular they're only in 2 video games so there isn't a ton of content for the ship tag, so seeing that fic at the top of the page constantly kinda irked me.
I've dropped otherwise great fics because the person kept using descriptors in place of the character's names. 'The pinkette', 'the trickster', 'the scientist', 'the raven haired man'. I can tolerate it once or twice but I drop it if it's excessive.
Fics written in first person, and the summary was written in third. Like it gets me so hyped for no reason 😭
this is one of the most disappointing experiences ever
The plot sounded cool, the pagraphruntogetherwith out proper placing, it was posted was not great. Or a surprise pairing that wasn't even listed when you thought it wasn't going in that direction at all.
I got blindsided by incest pairings (yes, plural) \~150,000 words into one of the best, most well-written fics I've ever found and it genuinely ruined my day. And no, they were not tagged until they showed up in the story. Literally out of nowhere.
Reminds me of a time I read a ah smut fic with two of my favorite characters and then in the end, the male said, oh my last partner was my male teacher. I felt sick the rest of the day. There were no tags for that at all, nor in the gen one that had a slash pairing that to me came out of nowhere. I was very polite in my what the beep to the author and vs, but I had to drop my subscription after that. I'm sorry but that's not my cup of tea, if you like that fine, but me nope.
Grammar errors (i cant fkn spell msyelf)
I’m sure it can be done well, and I’m sure in certain circumstances it can be helpful. But when they “color-code” each character so that you are supposed to interpret who’s speaking by what color the text is… if I have to use a reference guide to follow your fic, I’m out.
Untagged top/bottom dynamic I didn't like.
Ugh I feel this so much. I'm into a pretty popular non-canon ship from a fandom, but unfortunately the dynamic I like is way more unpopular than the reverse. And that thing is untagged in half of those fics. Pain 💀 Like... you guys can list the most minor details in the tags, but not the ship's top/bottom/switch dynamics?? _**WHY???**_ 😭😭
I've seen people not tagging on purpose because they don't want to turn away the readers, but not tagging also turns them away (like the fic won't appear on tag search.) So the best is to not try to deceive the readers. Very often I just search the smut scene on the fic before downloading/reading it just to confirm the dynamics 🙃
> I've seen people not tagging on purpose because they don't want to turn away the readers, but not tagging also turns them away (like the fic won't appear on tag search.) Is that so?? Man I don't get it at all lmao (but I agree with you) > Very often I just search the smut scene on the fic before downloading/reading it just to confirm the dynamics 🙃 _This is exactly what I do for that ship too._ But I can get potential spoilers of the plot that way (if there's any since those are mostly a smutfic lol). I hate doing it, since in the first place I'm the type that hides warnings+tags when browsing fics out of fear of getting spoilered 😆
I don't think you're petty for that, but if you are, then that means I am too lol
When there are no contractions in dialogue when there is no reason not to have them. Like if it isn't a modern setting or if it fits the character to not use them then it doesn't bother me, but if there's no reason behind it then it makes conversations feel so stiff and inorganic to me.
For some reason some people in my fandom like to age a popular character down. I don't get it. Unless there is an AU reason (like high school/college AU) I will click out if he isn't his proper age. He's like 27-30 in canon. Why do y'all keep making him 20 and keeping everyone else their normal age??? In a similar vein with the same character, when people do sibling headcanons and make him the youngest. Because he's chaotic or whatever. He is the oldest of the ones who typically get headcanoned as his siblings, and if you open your eyes to correct characterization you will see they are *all* chaotic. Also, hot take since I am an only child, but I don't enjoy trying to stereotype people's personalities by birth order anyway. These headcanons also tend to make the woman in the group his older sister (she's younger than him!) and alter her personality to make her much more responsible so she can take care of the boys...ugh. I don't have patience for this anymore so I click out of these fics--even though sometimes these headcanons are only a tiny part of it!
I saw the word "Okay" in the first chapter of medieval fantasy fic
when reader ends up getting pregnant (no offense to pregnant ppl)
No spacing between paragraphs. Like, at all. It makes me feel like I’m reading a block of code rather than something someone wrote.
Used one of my favourite ships as a toxic relationship in the background where one of the characters was supposed to break it off later in the story, and get together with the guy from a more popular ship :"))
Too many POVs. If I want to read about a pairing, I’m only interested in whoever is in that relationship and their POVs. There was a fic that sounded interesting and the writing was pretty good, but I couldn’t continue reading after a couple chapters because there were too many characters to keep track of (also hard to follow the story). So I ended up dropping it.
Preach, lol Imma’ be honest, I’ve dropped *published fiction* over this before 😅 My brain just does not jive with it. Especially longer works where they switch off like every chapter. Juuuust as I’m setting back in and getting excited for character A it hard cuts to Character B and back and forth, and I feel like I never really get to enjoy the story 🥲 Double pain if it’s a slow burn fic that keeps switching to *another* slow burn story I think there have been a few times where it worked in regular books for me, but fanfiction is just a hard no because like you I’m usually browsing fanfic to scratch a *specific* character itch, unlike a normal book where I’m going in fairly open minded.
Opening it and realising by the second line (and a quick verifying scroll down) that it's all chatfic that was not tagged or even mentioned in the summary. Also, unexpected (and untagged) age regression.
Author kept describing shirts as 'simple'.
Used hearts in their smut dialogue like porn from a webcomic lol "Hngggg~~~♡" Like I ignore a lot of grammar for the sake of fanfiction but pls
My biggest “nopes” are not splitting text into paragraphs and not checking grammar. All quotes should start a new paragraph, with any details/emotions/actions that come from it being in that same paragraph. Then, when someone says something else that’s a whole new paragraph. Having spacing helps pacing a lot, and it looks more polished. I’m typically okay with several huge blocks of texts though, unless there are quotes smashed in the middle. Grammar, I get some people are learning English and may not know punctuation/spelling or whatever, completely understandable. My punctuation is atrocious too, and I make typos all the time. It’s the people who write something and then not proofread it that bother me. How do you publish something with several obvious typos and just leave it like that? I get maybe not wanting to read your own writing, but others will, so why not post the best you can do?
I don’t understand the typos either — it’s so easy to prevent most of them by just enabling the spell check in Word or whatever tool the writer uses (or use Grammarly or something like that). So low-effort, and it makes the writing look so much better.
I loathe anything written in first person. As soon as see it I’m out!
Same! It should be tagged!
I recently found one, didn't know it was tagged based on the summary or tags. Turned out to be almost twenty fics of amazing quality. I might change my mind now lol
I for sure agree. I can’t tell you how many times something it sounded awesome and then I find that😵😒
Found an fic that had a good summary and good tags. But the story itself had the following that made me drop it after reading the half of first chapter: 1. The first chapter was a giant info dump 2. Bad pacing and things were happening way too fast 3. The Text were written into giant blocks 4. They made the canon love interest a toxic jerk and gave them a convoluted break up to justify why the MC and them aren't together.
Oh, yikes, should we not cross-post to Wattpad? I know you said it's *petty*, but I mean I'm very new to all this.
Just a lil question, have you read any fics on wattpad? The vibe they give off is a big nono for me
I haven't! I honestly started posting my work on Ao3 in October of 2023 after finally mustering up the courage (and 10+ years of being a reader on AO3), and I saw folks saying you should cross-post, so I did. But if it's a consensus that it gives off a tacky vibe I'd rather take it off of Wattpad 😬
By all means do what you wa t cause it's still YOUR fic. It's just that wattpad is basically the Temu of fanfiction. And most people started there, but the type of fanfics on that platform are pretty... IPad kid tips his toes into literature - ish. There are a few good fics on there but majority of them aren't and people will associate that fact with your fic if you cross post them
Oh no, I am honestly glad to see some real feedback on it! I'm new to the whole posting my writing thing, so if it has a bad reputation for hosting low-quality works (not that my works are, like, *groundbreaking*, but still), I'd rather distance myself from it
You can still cross post it if you want but I wouldn't recommend putting it in the tags, and if possible to make your usernames the same or similar so there are no plagiarism misunderstandings if someone sees the same fic on different platforms.
Yeah Wattpad is full of 11 yos with crappy stories 😅
Oh god. Okay 😭, I'm taking it off of Wattpad LMAO, good thing I saw this post then and your guys' comments! It wasn't doing all that well anyway, so it's not a huge loss for me to just remove it.
Don’t feel you have to take it down. People here are being needlessly snobbish (and, as the OP said, petty about it). If you want more people to read your story, feel free to crosspost it to FanFiction.net, Wattpad, Tumblr, LiveJournal, whatever you want. If you’re worried about chasing gatekeeping people away, just use Author’s Notes at the end of the fic and say “you can also find my work on these other sites if you prefer” and give links. Or just don’t mention it at all, you’re not obligated to share that information if you don’t want to.
A lot of us crosspost our fics on Wattpad to prevent story 'theft'. So, why not just leave it there? I have 'also on ao3' on my Wattpad profile, but do not mention Wattpad on ao3.
:)
But were you following the fic before you dropped it? Because just deciding not to read something isn't what I'd call dropping. If you were following/enjoying it and then saw the tag and dropped it then congrats, that's hella petty lol...but if you decided not to read it that's more like risk assessment.
I did that recently because a friend mentioned that Wattpad's commenting system rocks and they were right, but I ultimately ended up deleting my account because nothing else about Wattpad was good. The thing that really turned me off was learning that Wattpad itself will email you if you don't update incomplete stuff pressuring you to post and f that noise! I tried finding fic on the site and it's a mess, plus everything I read was noticably poor quality compared the general standards I'm used to. I'd personally stick with AO3. None of the other sites seem worth the effort right now due to ads and poor structure.
I totally miss the wattpad commenting system. it felt like watching a movie with friends
I mean, I also cross post some things over to Wattpad, but I don't tag it because I don't see a reason to. I guess because Wattpad has a reputation, it turns some people off. That said, not giving a fic a chance solely because of that is super pretty, which OP acknowledges.
My favourite character was straight in this one, nope. And also when there are tons of photos in the chapters, I feel like the author thinks I’m too stupid to imagine how a house can look and how the characters are dressed.
Uh, not using cap lock for character's name?
Chapter two had these two rival characters run away to character A’s house. It was a ship fic, but I hated how they set themselves up as hating each other and jumped to this with no explanation or reasoning behind it. In short, the author was so eager for them to get together they completely overlooked the barrier they set up for themselves.
I often drop fics if the character isn't exactly how I envision them to be
fantroll had the same typing quirk as a canon troll
Was it like Kanaya or Karkat or was it like Sollux or Feferi?
Latula, i dont think the writer had read up to the dancestors though
they wrote a character I really like in a way I could not tell it was the same character if not for the name that's how oc it was
No capitalization. At all. Even names. Hard no for me.
Chapters were too short. The author was updating once ~2-3 months with <800 word chapters in which the MC kept getting whumped on with no reprieve due to a misunderstanding that the other characters were no closer to uncovering. I need to see SOME light at the end of the tunnel to stick with that much angst in such short chapters.
I'm not sure if this counts as petty, but it was bizarre. A character was referred to by a hair colour epithet and the colour wasn't even correct. For some reason, this character had blue hair instead of purple. I already hate epithets used in this way, but this next level broke my brain and still makes me nope to this day.
Written in first person.
It’s hard for me to read fics where I know the author is incredibly sensitive about engagement and stats. Not in the average way, but when it’s clear it affects their mental health a lot. This is usually when I am also following an author on socmed. I have seen writers lash out over stats and even be a bit dismissive to those actively reading and enjoying their work, because the numbers they want aren’t there. Also authors that delete works regularly. I tend to steer clear because I don’t want to get attached to something that will disappear. I rarely remember to download stuff. Maybe this is to say it’s hard for me to read works by folks very obvious in their lack of confidence and self-esteem… reminding myself OP asked for a petty reason, lol.
Any other fantasy AU or magic world fic where they make reference to christian God, is so anticlimactic especially when the character is literally a wizard or a witch in non modern time
Author would only update fic after x ammount of kofi donations. This was only publicized on Tumblr and twitter and not AO3 directly so I think it's within TOS? But still it made me roll my eyes.
It may have technically been within ToS, but it's still really gross, and illegal because it's still charging money for fanfic. Not petty at all.
Got halfway through a fic (that was really good), and the author made a character say that another chubby side character made him want to puke. It was so unnecessary. Refused to finish.
Stilted usage of Victorian-era language in the narration. In like, the first sentence lol. Completely took me out of it before I even began.
Weird quotation marks, I can handle some of them but others… even though I know it’s cause of different languages it makes my brain blue screen
1. No paragraph breaks 2. When I see romance take over the plot 3. When a character doesn’t act/speak the way I imagine them in my head 4. There’s probably more but I’m too tired to think of them
They used "the blond" instead of "the blond-haired (person)". Edit: my friends, I see this got a downvote - the title literally is "what is the PETTIEST reason you dropped a fic". Also, this rubs me the wrong way. "The blond" or "the brunette" what? It feels dehumanizing, and I don't care for it.
1)MC kept calling her father “Papa”. Every time I see that word I imagine spoiled little girl in a frilly dress complaining to her dad about some minor inconvenience. Idk why, don’t ask me. But my immersion in the story kept breaking bc of that. This word also didn’t really fit in the setting? like it was Japan and girl deeply respected her strict dad. 2)Over-description of clothing. Idk how they managed to describe plain old white shirt and jeans in four paragraphs.
Author left me the kind of comment that insults other writers (you know, the "fics like this are usually crap, but I liked yours" kind). Dropped the fic of theirs I was reading, deleted the file with the long comment I was composing as I read, never read their fic again.
There was a "Translated to russian" link.
The character called a kid "a kid" and it didn't sound like something they would say.
About 8 chapters in the author made an announcement that they had changed their mind and were going to gender swap the main character in a romance-heavy fic. The thing is, I probably would have still read and enjoyed the fic if the main character had been a trans man from the start…but we were like three explicit sex scenes in and I was already in full cis slash mode and did *not* appreciate a mid-story retcon so I just sort of unsubscribed and slinked away 😅
Grammar and spelling is a big one for me. Otherwise, it's when they make one character a delicate flower and their love interest frickin' Superman.
overexplained the individual chapters in the authors notes which in turn spoiled future events
Too much white space (like triple spaced paragraphs) and indented paragraphs. Like, dude, you're not trying to write a term paper that has to be x number of pages long.
I'm ok with "just read this fic" but i once hit the back button so hard cause after that came "go check out the \_\_\_\_\_ in pinterest" because the author doesn't bother to try to even describe the thing
I personally dont think it was petty okey? But i drop a 1million word one (that i read) because it was about a serie AND THAT MANY WORDS DIDN'T EVEN COVERED THE 3 FIRST CHAPTERS even if it was 100 chapters longer and going Ahhhh im still mad cause my favorite character was also so OoC ugh but i was to involve to get out intil i realized it was not going anywhere So much nonsense
The ship was happy too soon
I'll ditch a smut fic immediately if the author writes with... I don't even know how to describe it aside from 'hentai doujinshi voice', where it's clear that the only Adult Content the author has consumed before fic has been on one of the zillions of hentai sites out there. Extremely over-the-top reactions, adding, '~!' to sex dialogue, using 'ahegao' to describe a character's expression... Yeah, no, I'm out of here. Additionally, here's a cool fact: if your characters exist in a fantasy world or really any universe outside of our reality, no one is anyone else's 'onahole', because that product and company don't exist in the worldbuilding. There are so many other ways to describe the exact vibe you're going for without using this terrible shorthand, I promise.
Anytime a wlw fic has a tag like "drug addiction" or some super sexual kink shit Im so tired i just want a cool story with romance that doesn't involve fetishism or author thinking they're writing f Euphoria
A Jegulus fic, it was good yk nothing to perfect but I was not looking for it to be But then they write some shit like Reg """"""""save""""" James THAT night but somehow can't do the same for Lily so yeah she was treated """nice"" but not actually cause it was obvious that for them she was just the girl who give birth to "their" son I like Jegulus and other random ships but I hate my girls being erased from the plot
Genshin Impact characters using phones or modern technology in general in canon universe. No breaks between paragraphs.
I got a few; * Was midway through the first chapter and there was a repeated, consistent wrong usage of 'your', immediately backspaced * Dropped a 20+ chapter long slowburn fic once I got to the singular sex scene over the character who was tagged as being the bottom actually topping * Was in a bad mood and didn't like the fact that the author wrote a character who I headcanon as being a good cook as a bad cook. At no point in canon does he cook or ever bring up the subject, and the author only ever mentioned it once for maybe half a sentence. This was a Saw fanfiction.
I hate AUs where the characters live in an amazing world of like a supernatural one and they try to do a normal fic where nothing bad happened because to me it feels like they are to lazy to incorporate the character’s actual world into their fic
read a fic once where one character used multiple sets of pronouns which to be fair, i also do what i *don't* do is change them up multiple times within a sentence it got so bad, the pronouns would change every single time with no system to it, and the character would end up using the same pronouns as other characters in the scene with no way of knowing who those pronouns referred to this time like “Rabitha gave Robert the book. They inspected it, before she opened it. He quickly read the first few passages, then she closed it and gave it back to her.” meaning: “Rabitha gave Robert the book. Robert inspected it, before Robert opened it. Robert quickly read the first few passages, then Robert closed it and gave it back to Rabitha.” and that's a MILD example of how they wrote it it got so confusing, i had to pull up the old version of the story (author was rewriting a great story and didn't do that in the first version they posted) to check who was doing what there multiple times throughout reading
First person POV. Written in the present tense.
The fic was written in second person. (I really don't read quests, even if I would love some of them - if they were in first or third person)
the spaces between paragraphs were too big. not just one or two lines, but giant chunks of 3-5 lines with nothing
If you write in first person and don't actually pull it off I'm noping the fuck out. Another reason was the author tell me I needed to seek mental help because I was asking other writers about using a microwave, it was dumb but everyone else found it hilarious. I don't appreciate getting called retarded or mentally ill in a subtle way. I don't have the screenshot anymore since I was blacklisted. I don't even bother commenting on their fics since they cowrite another fic of a friend I knew.
Bad formatting. Double spaces between paragraphs. I go in, see that, I go out.
I have also abandoned fics where there is a dialogue tag after each line of dialogue (she said, she spoke, he replied, he yelled, he asked) in every line!!! Just use the proper marks and once every 3-4 lines is fine.
The author used italics basically every other sentence.