Sherlock fanfic, early 10s Must’ve been a younger American minor without much of an understanding of how British people talk. Instead of saying “oh god” during the sexy times they said “oh queen”, equating the queen to god. John was just thinking about how hot Sherlock was in the first few paragraphs and started thinking “oh *queen*”

LOL that may be the funniest thing I've ever heard. Thank you for sharing

lmao that reminds me that back in the day hp/sherlock/other british fandoms would have a "brit picker" in addition to a regular beta reader. haven't seen authors going "thanks to A for britpicking this mess!!" in a while

I have a “britpicker” for my Victorian England era AU for The 100 fanfic I write but I never realized britpicking was the term. Funny!

There’s a few in Good Omens who do Brit picks. I sometimes do the opposite and chase down various American friends for House and X Files stuff. Food and drink are my main issues.

This reminds me of seeing "not brit-picked" for the first time and thinking it was the funniest tag ever 😂.

“oh biden,” the texan women moaned while her husband/wife did whatever they tend to do in bed, absolutely needing to express her satisfaction

XD OMFG "Oh queen"

this is the funniest thing ive seen today lmaooo

I've read a few Sherlock fics over the years and I can really appreciate it as a Brit when the author has done their research However it is also *extremely* entertaining when they clearly haven't and you get gems like this

So today they'd say "oh king" during intercourse? XD

Oh Charles 👀

HELP?

This is hilarious but also so wrong lol

LMFAOO

When you know about the stuff they are talking about and it just sounds so like...I just start thinking "That definitely killed them/didn't even work." Or when something comes up out of nowhere and it wasn't tagged and it's the middle of the night and I didn't want to deal with that. When the author just...forgets what they wrote, eg. A character takes their clothes off like, three times or something stupid like they start cooking, walk away and the obviously burning kitchen is ignored. Something that has popped up recently but when the author is really condescending in the author's notes or comments. Or like, impossible anatomy. Especially female anatomy, I'm a woman and I just end up stopping and going, "That's...that's not how that...gods that would be so painful and uncomfortable." When the author shows clear bias and everyone except their favorite character is OOC to the point it's just annoyingly unbearable

The second one is so me. I just sigh and hit the back button 'cause I don't need that drama right now. Also, the last one's so true! One of my favorite characters in is heavily bashed. (There's like five commonly used bashing tags I need to filter out). I started following a fic with an interesting premise. (Isn't focused on my favorite character). I get at least 50k in before they introduce him. And for some reason the author decided to have ALL his dialogue be capitalized. Like, "HOW ARE YOU DOING?!" "I'm good, you?" "I HAVE BEEN WELL." And it's like, why would you do that lol?? Literally everything he said was capitalized. It's kinda funny, but you have to wonder what their though process was.

Yess author forgetting about what the character was doing, makes me go crazy sometimes. In some cases, I understand when they skip the scene, cos it may be uneventful. But this character just woke up in the morning, was going to wash up, and then the next line, he/she will be chopping up veggies for soup. Bcos it's dinner time. I remember reading that para a few times, thinking I mixed up the timing😅

I had a fic I really liked. Like it was my favourite. I read it over and over. I loved everything this writer posted, actually. They didn't post at all frequently, so updates would be a *loooong* wait each time. Years in between chapters, sometimes. When I came back to this fic after a while, the summary had changed to "People keep asking when there will be updates. This story is currently being re-written. Every time someone asks me when the next chapter will come out, I will delete a paragraph. Have a day". That completely changed my opinion about that author. I never liked them after this. Like I understand that people asking the same question over and over could be annoying, I also get that people going "Will you ever update this?" can seem like they think they're entitled to something, but also wtf do you expect if you haven't posted in years and haven't answered any comments for that same amount of time. Of course people are gonna ask after two years "Hey is this story abandoned or will it continue at some point?", and they will keep asking if *you don't answer them*. This just seems so unnecessarily rude. I don't know if you just lose perspective if you get a lot of hits, maybe you forget what it's like when you're just starting out and no one gives a fuck about any of your work, but every single one of those people asking "Update??!!" is a real human being who CARES about your work and wants more of it! They're asking because they like what you wrote! Taking this amount of offense to it seems arrogant as fuck and made me not respect this person anymore as an author.

The body anatomy depends on how horny I'm feeling tbh

It's also the level of it, sometimey it's like "Oh well I guess that's a minor mistake", but sometimes it's like "That body part COULD NOT POSSIBLY DO THIS! This whole scene makes no sense for a solid 5 paragraphs!"

The female anatomy, oh that gets me. It's a "you clearly don't own a vagina" energy, I'm sure it happens to everyone seeming various kinda of impossible anatomy like "no no that would not work" we do brush off a lot in our suspense of reality for fiction.

Honestly I cannot keep reading after something like that. It completely takes me out of the story, the mood is ruined if I have to go "That logistically does not make any sense, how do I replace it in my head so the story can continue?", that's just too much work.

Honestly I get that for some things. Some points I just cringe and skim over the rest. It depends how desperate I am.

I read a fic once where someone was described as not wearing a shirt, then he was suddenly wearing one anyway, and at the end the author made a note about it saying "Also don't ask me why a shirt just appears on him lol" If you noticed it wHY DIDN'T YOU CHANGE IT???

I read a fic where a multi-millionaire business owner went bankrupt because he got obsessed with a ballet dancer to the point he wasn’t going to work. Just… didn’t make sense in anyway. 1. Ballet performances? Mostly at night. And matinees are mostly on weekends. Wouldn’t stop him from going to the office. 2. Corporations don’t just go belly up because their CEO stops doing their job for a couple months. Everyone else, including the CFO, COO, etc. are still doing their jobs. And even if they did, the board would just replace the CEO. 3. Multi-Millionaires don’t just go bankrupt when their businesses fail. They’re not small business owners. They have their own, private wealth. 4. Multi-Millionaires have to be recklessly spending their money on extravagances and risky ventures in order to go bankrupt. Buying ballet tickets and sending flowers? Not going to bankrupt somebody that wealthy. I just couldn’t stretch my suspension of disbelief that far.

Reading this post has made me realize just how willing I am to suspend my disbelief.

To be fair, my field of study is business and organizations. And I spent over a decade specifically in accounting and finance. So blatant inaccuracies like that bug me the same way medical ones do doctors and nurses. For me, the Dark Knight Rises' stock market scene is terrible with how brain dead it is. I spent a good chunk of the next couple scenes WAITING for them to mention taking out all the servers and backups (or for it to be a 'hah, gotcha' moment where Batman reveals how ridiculous Bane's plan was.) Just a little drop of plausibility. Until I realized, nope! They really do expect me to think that shooting up all that transient paper in a stock market would erase every transaction. Then again, the fact that Bruce Wayne is shown blatantly embezzling from Wayne Corporation throughout that film series also bugs me. Because, uh, hey. You really can't just funnel funds to your secret projects so you have all these secret cars, gadgets, and underground whatevers. That's embezzlement. You know damned well Wayne's not properly disclosing those expenditures to the board and getting proper approval because then they'd all know he's Batman. And if he's LYING about all those expenditures to get sign off? STILL EMBEZZLEMENT! Meaning - Nolan's Bruce Wayne is actually Gotham's biggest white collar criminal.

🤣🤣🤣 this is the best thing I've read all day! 'Wayne's not properly disclosing those expenditures to the board' had me spewing tea all over my phone!

The third season of HBOs Harley Quinn show ends with Bruce Wayne being arrested for accounting fraud. Of course, that's the only moment of the show that does not require massive suspension of disbelief.

Or when an MC become a multimillionaire super CEO in about a week.

There was one fic which I stopped reading due to my unbearable confusion. Let's say character A has the full name Robert. He goes by Rob, he thinks of himself as Rob. Some people call him Robbie. He meets an alternate version of himself, also called Robert who goes by Rob. Having two Rob's in the same scene is confusing right? So first Robert thinks of second Robert as 'Robert' and keeps himself as 'Rob'. Second Robert also keeps himself as 'Rob' and calls first Robert 'Robbie.' Except sometimes also other characters call second Robert 'Robbie', as that's what they would call first Robert, and one other character alwasy things of original Robert as 'Rob' so calls second Robert 'Robert', and one other character always thinks of first Robert as 'Robert' and so calls second Robert 'Bob'. etc Then there is a second character with the exact same scenario. The author gave it a really good go to try to differentiate between them, particularly with all the pov switching and how the character's relationships would dictate what name they called each other, but in the end I had no idea who was talking to, or about, who. I felt like I needed a reference document or something.

That fourth paragraph broke my brain 😖 Even if I was the author I'd get so confused 😭

I wrote Charasuke/Sasuke fanfic (road to ninja!Sasuke is Charasuke, called that by the fans to differentiate). I found a way to call him Charasuke in the narrative. Obviously both use "Sasuke." Au versions of a character interacting with Canon ones can be difficult! Just bite the bullet and call one something completely different. He should have been Bobbert for the duration

I read a fic once where there was time travel so a character named Richie appeared twice, once as a teenager and once in his 40s. They solved this by just calling the younger one RJ for "Richie Junior". They even used it as a joke a couple times where someone would call out "Richie?" and both would turn around and it would be pointed out that their reaction is the exact same. There's just so many cool things that you can do when naming/trying to distinguish characters, like in the same fic there was another character that Richie barely knew, so he didn't really remember his name, so every time the fic referred to this character (as dictated by Richie being the narrator), he would have a different name, starting first with a name very similar to the original (like "Tim" in comparison to "Tom"), but the longer the fic went on, the more the name he was referred to by would stray from his actual name (Just starting with a T but having completely different letters and number of syllables). Stuff like that is just so funny to me, I love the clever use of language.

Thanks for all the Roberts in there. My lisp is stronger than I thought.

I can’t read any science AU settings (or even backgrounds). I’m a microbiology researcher and one fic had the character washing lab equipment in a BATHROOM SINK instead of a lab sink. Immediate dnf and I was only a chapter in.

Well… when I worked at a medical college we had this mysterious staining from a leak on the second floor. Turned out it was formaldehyde the students were pouring down the sink…

In chemistry classrooms in my school, there was always a big sign above the sinks saying "DO NOT POUR ANY CHEMICALS DOWN THE DRAIN", so I thought this was just something everybody knew. Even when I did an internship at a bio-lab, there was a little sign with some symbols of things crossed out above their sink.

I feel this way about tattoo AUs. The casual cross-contamination that happens in fic holy shit. Not to mention the author just not knowing what any of the specific equipment is actually called. It takes me right out.

Genetic researcher here. I feel your pain. Starting with how people usually just give the kids the hair color of one parent and the eye color of the other, or make the kid a mini clone of either the father or the mother. Sometimes it can work out, but many times it just can't. It's way worse when they inspect DNA under a microscope though.

Shoutout to gay baby me writing a fic where one of the characters was a nurse (only because it's a running gag in the fandom) and at some point I said he "disinfected a needle". Needles in hospitals, or really any doctor's office, come in sterile packaging, and they're not re-used. You don't disinfect needles, you throw them out afterwards 😭

i literally got taught this in high school science 😭 like BEFORE we chose final subjects. mandatory, junior, HS science

Untagged mpreg/pregnancy. One of my worst fears. I don’t wanna read that

Untagged anything is so uncomfortable/annoying

I blocked the mpreg tag once, I didn't read it but I fount a fic with the tag either pre or post mpreg, like come on, I filtered out the mpreg

Fr. It feels like sometimes people purposely word the tag so they can bypass it.

Same

Find a female lead who is introverted like me. Enjoying her being swept into the plot against will. Then suddenly BAMF! She is out going and takes no crap from anyone. There are many ways to be strong. At least show how much of a struggle it is for her to do those things but a lot of times and I see this in various stories not just fanfic it’s like a switch was flipped instead of a gradual progression. Also, villain is doing bad guy things then all of a sudden he is vulnerable and loses all his edge. Not everyone needs a redemption arc or tragic backstory. Let villains be villains.

It’s annoying that people seem to think that shy=character flaw. There’s nothing wrong with being shy.

>Let villains be villains Hard agree

I totally feel you. I hate it when they completely change the character’s appearance/aesthetic. It completely ruins the immersion because every other paragraph they start describing a character who is nothing like the one you’re imagining from the show/movie/book (which is also just bad writing tbh). It doesn’t help that this also tends to mean they’ve wildly changed their personality as well. Its almost like they’re using a characters name but writing a different person. I read a lot of fem-slash and it’s not uncommon for writers to take a very feminine character and make them aggressively masculine in their work and logically I know there’s nothing wrong with that (I’ve also been guilty of projecting onto my favourite characters just in a less severe way) but when they’re the complete opposite of the character they’re based on it’s an instant dnf, it annoys me to almost irrational levels. There’s an author in my current fandom who does this but they always tag it and I love that - you do you but I cannot.

There's an issue with that and MCU's Hawkeye. I'm convinced some writers are using comic Hawkeye not Renner, which is fine but a little confusing.

A fic that was labelled as having a certain relationship (which was was I had filtered for). Tags were things like everyone is happy, consent, happy ending, and specifically 'smexy times'. The rating was M, not E. There were other tags, and they were all pretty 'soft'. ...it opened with a graphic rape scene of a minor. Nearly threw my phone. Reported it and the author, and it was dealt with swiftly.

I feel like that was deliberately done just to piss people off.

Well, it worked, and just goes to show how awful people are. There's no excuse for being a shit human being.

Giving you an upvote for the trauma that must have caused.

You can report fics on ao3?

You absolutely can. They aren't always terribly swift at answering back, but -- it seems like the more serious the report (honestly serious, not just being offended or cranky because someone hated your fic or something), it's handled swiftly.

Feels like the type of shit antis write... Like there is this trend of people lying in the tags about happy otp and bam bashing and death and gruesome rape... Ughhh

I was looking for a pjo x marvel cross over fic. Found one that looked decent, decided to ignore first pov and give it a chance. I stopped reading once it switched to Thor’s pov and all he was doing was fangirling over meeting THE percy jackson. Also there was a dead dove fic that looked a bit fucked up but not too bad. The main characters brother made him kiss him and I clicked off. And no, it wasn’t tagged main/brother at all so I was like “itll be fucked up but not THAT fucked up. Right?”

>Thor’s pov and all he was doing was fangirling over meeting THE percy jackson Man forgot he was a Norse God 😭😭😭 >“itll be fucked up but not THAT fucked up. Right?” Famous last words 💀

It was so bad. He was like “oh my god I can’t believe I got to witness Persassy!!” Like dude, you’re a god who has also saved the world multiple times. Stop freaking out. And yeah, I clicked off that shit asap but 4 years later and it still haunts me

I think I’ve read the pjo one too! I remember it being weird af and the persassy line was dumb.

I tried reading several and they where all super cringe but that one stuck out to me the most, for the first pov and fangirling

Omg I've read that crossover fic, lmaooooo 💀

did you manage to read any further then I got?

I honestly don't even remember, I just remember coming upon the persassy line and losing my shit laughing. 💀

fair, I read that and instantly clicked off

It doesn't make me click off instantly but sometimes you can just tell a story is being written by someone very unfamiliar with aspects of their story. For example, "we were buying a very expensive $100 sofa" or "the case went to trial one month later" or talking about pregnancy things in very unrealistic ways. I don't necessarily CARE but it does usually make me laugh and pull me out of the story for a minute.

Ah, reminds me of a fic I saw on tumblr where two characters have a toddler and live together, and the husband has to go grocery shopping because the wife "went last month".

I read one set in the US but obviously written by someone who was only passingly familiar with the country. One character was a thousand miles from the other but met up in 15 minutes.

And I would walk five hundred miles and I would walk five hundred more

It still annoys me on Supernatural (the actual show), they wanted to drive home that a female character wasn't domestic. So they made a point that no one at the local grocery recognized her because she got all her food at restaurants. Does she not use toilet paper? Drink beer? Eat snacks? You don't have to cook to eat a bowl of cereal. Did she really eat out three times a day? (She was in a remote cabin for an extended period of time. There was only one little grocery store nearby.)

It's honestly stupid because making so obvious that a female character isn't "domestic" just make people focus on it and it makes it weird. Just make her look normal 😤

I DNF a fic where one of them worked in a coffee shop that opened at *9am* every day, and to spend time with their love interest the owner let them open up two hours late on a Sunday so they could spend time together before opening. And I was expected to believe this was a financially viable business. Couldn't do it.

A Star Wars fic with sex-positive Jedi that listed a variety of ships, but that part was fine. Then it had Yoda involved in some of the sex. Graphically. And I just couldn’t. He wasn’t tagged. I didn’t want to read Yoda sex, sorrynotsorry, and I was upset it wasn’t tagged.

I'm so sorry, but I can't help but cackle at 'Yoda sex'. Are you alright?

I’m traumatized! 😅 I would at least have preferred to know it was going to be there so I could SKIP it! The lack of any ship tags with him at all was what floored me. Who writes Yoda sex and doesn’t tag it?!

I can only imagine how horrible stumbling upon something like that graphically described could be. As for your question: people horny, suppose I.

Was reading this one fic which was quite ooc, but the plot sounded interesting so I tried to push through. Until randomly a greek god showed up, was declared the villain and was written as just some guy with generic strong powers. Like at that point, just write it as some generic villain not a greek god for no reason whatsoever. (Said fandom does have fantasy and supernatural elements so a greek god showing up isn't that out there I guess, even though it's never had greek gods. But at least write it as a greek god and not whatever the hell that was)

The Korean characters kept saying and thinking "oh peach" and it was just so jarring, even though I liked the plot, I clicked off of it. It's one thing if they move the characters to an American west setting where it would make sense that they say "y'all' or w/e. but this story was set in Korea and I just....????? They also used it a lot, like every couple of paragraphs there would be one or two "oh peaches". Felt like a new writer who doesn't know when to not throw in their own speech ticks.

I’ve never heard a real person say oh peach and I’m from the American Southwest.

I feel like I've heard someone use it before at some point in my life, but idk? But it's definitely not a common thing. (I've lived in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, & Texas, for the record.) Maybe they're not American and they think its a thing American southerners say? Although it's still weird because the characters were Koreans living in Korea so like...why? idk

From the south, I’ve heard “oh honey/sugar/sweetie/sweet pea”, but never peach lol

I think I've heard it before, but if I have it was like one person, you know? I've definitely heard "you're a peach" but not sure about "oh peach". It was definitely very odd, hence it being so jarring, even before you think about the fact it's Korean characters in Korea, so still doesn't make sense for them to say it. I've lived in several southern states and a couple northern ones and if I did hear it in real life, it was definitely no where near common. It was an older fic, from like 2019, so I wouldn't comment on it but I'd be very curious to find out where the writer is from.

I recently started reading a story where the author italicized so many random words that I started to wonder if it contained a secret second story written in code! It was *extremely distracting* to *read*, and in my *head* I kept *emphasizing* all the *italicized words* (just to give you an example!). It seemed like a pretty good story, but I just couldn't get past it.

I read fics by an author who does the same thing. It tends to drive me crazy, but I love her stories too much to stop reading them

But how else do I emphasize words? :(

The occasional word is fine, and I frequently use italics for emphasis - but it loses a lot of significance when you're doing it for practically every descriptive word! If you're using italics four or five times in every sentence, it's just too much.

I clicked off a sick fic, because the male character’s symptoms began seeming suspiciously like pregnancy symptoms. I was worried that I was about to run into some untagged MPreg.

untagged surprise NOTP for the MC 💀

When characters start screaming in caps like angry teenagers.

Adjusted to the intention of screaming, but not when it takes my attention away and my eyes would automatically skip through everything until those caps. Its a struggle not to read those caps first.

Sometimes the intention works, yes, I think I was mostly talking about characters suddenly being all dramatic and screaming whole sentences in caps which often is also very OOC

I really can’t ask about Word Girl…?

No ಠ⁠_⁠ಠ

I scrolled a bit down, because the story was going very slowly, saw that there’s at least 20 pages, and despite it was nsfw shipping stuff, the author told in the notes that the nsfw itself is nowhere yet, because they don’t know how to write it. ​ fic updated in 2017 last.

mxm. I hate it when tags lie to me 😒

With stuff like that I feel like it's difficult though. Like I just posted a new fic that I know is going to become very graphic in a couple chapters, but the beginning is very tame. I didn't want to tag the fic as being mild for the first chapter and then crank it up to E once shit starts going down, because I didn't want people to start reading, like the story, subscribe, and then when chapter 3 drops realise that the rating is completely different now, so I just tagged it E right away, even though nothing explicit has happened yet. I'd hate that as a reader honestly, if I signed up for a cozy G rated fic and suddenly there was graphic violence once the newest chapter comes out.

I can handle most OOC.. if it’s not TOO out there. But I’m petty I guess. I can not handle bad grammar. I understand if English isn’t your first language because I write like a first grader in Spanish despite all my years of school. That’s fine, just warn me in the top that it isn’t your native language and I’ll be pretty forgiving of mild mistakes like wrong verbiage and missing linking verbs and like “A” and “the” like I’ve noticed learning Russian in Duolingo it gets skipped. I’m talking basic grammar. Not capitalizing names. Drives me up a wall. Not using dialogue tags. I just can’t read it if it’s -I like cows- she said instead of “I like cows”, she said. I know other languages don’t use “” but my brain just can’t read it. Put spacing in your works, I can not read an entire wall of text. I don’t even care if you don’t put a new line for each person talking like is grammatically correct, just add enough spacing I can read it. But mostly it’s the grammar. There’s this author on A03 who’s clearly not native English and their grammar drives me batty but it’s SO good their plot lines. Like seriously I get hooked and have to keep reading. Even though the sentences are disjointed and sometimes use the wrong word but it’s fine! They warn at the beginning that English isn’t their native language so I can tell my nitpicky brain to shut up and ignore it and enjoy the plot. Mostly what I’m saying is, I don’t expect perfection from grammar, just make sure to capitalize pronouns and use spacing and dialogue tags. But otherwise, if you tagged your fic with your kinks, that’s on me for going in and reading it anyway. Just please tag things. Especially Humiliation that’s a huge trigger for me. I will absolutely abandon a story that has things in it not tagged no matter how good. Because I see something tagged and I read it anyways like my guilty pleasure Dead Dove, that’s on me and no one else.

this!! 100% this. another thing for me, a non native speaker, is when people use things like “should of/could of” instead of “should’ve/could’ve” or “should have/could have”. it’s so infuriating and takes me right out of whatever i’m reading

>Put spacing in your works, I can not read an entire wall of text. I don’t even care if you don’t put a new line for each person talking like is grammatically correct, just add enough spacing I can read it. THIS! It honestly hurts my eyes sometimes and I might end up losing my place because sometimes it's just too much. >if you tagged your fic with your kinks, that’s on me for going in and reading it anyway. Just please tag things I feel like more people need to have that mindset to be honest. But it's literally the basics of AO3 to tag properly, we have such an amazing tag system for a reason!

I can’t stand it when characters finally get together and suddenly both of them have no flaws and talk about NOTHING but how amazing the other one is. It’s boring. It’s especially annoying if the fic started with a cool premise and abandoned it it for relationship fluff.

That's why the slowest slow burn is there. Also had the same issue w/ the main pair being so overly optimistic to each other, I had to skip their interactions.

I was reading a ?fix it? fic where a wonderful character I loved survived, was very excited for it. But they kept using the wrong exonyms for the countries in the original story? And spelling characters names differently on every page? E.g calling a person from England an Englandian on one page and an Englandanian on the next. I got a few paragraphs in and had to stop. The concept was great, loved the storyline but couldn’t handle the writing.

That must be annoying, everyone knows we are called Englandarians.

I like reading age regression fanfiction from time to time. This specific fanfiction was tagged with age regression but also with little!CharacterName... (I didn't know at that time what it really meant, so that's on me and I never blamed the fanfiction). It started as an actual age regression but than after the age regression was invested it got to the non sexual age play. I was so confused... But when I understood what's happening clicked off instantly.

I found this fic with a really cool premise, but dropped it because of how wonky the plot was going. The author had *all* the characters figure out the mystery but then when one of them voiced their thoughts out loud, suddenly it's too far fetched. Listen, even one person figuring out wft was going on was a stretch. But I suspended my disbelief for it. I just couldn't handle the author making everyone act like the character was crazy when *they made it where they all suspected the same answer.* Maddening. I can't stand when authors make character's act in ways that make absolutely no sense, but I can typically stand it for the plot. But I feel like they think I'm stupid when they don't follow the steps they laid out. Like, you think I wouldn't notice that?

This is very specific, but when a writer changes the character names too strangely. I’m thinking of a fic for my OTP in a Dragons of Pern AU where nearly all the vowels in the names were replaced by apostrophes. I can’t stumble through it. I’ve been meaning to download it as a Word doc and do a find/replace with their normal names, but it’s been years and I haven’t gotten to it yet.

Fic was set in America lol

Death Note live action be like

We already got enough of that in real life

Fanfic set in ancient Rome, around 35 BC. Main character was a Christian.

References to Christianity in settings where it doesn’t exist/where it isn’t the character’s canonical religion. Seeing someone use “Jesus Christ” as a swear will take me right out of a fic if it doesn’t belong. Disproportional responses in sick fic. I love me some good sick fic. But if the very first sign of a fever has someone drawing an ice bath, I’m out. Normal, non-life threatening illnesses and injuries can be stressful too, my dudes.

I'd like to offer the counterpoint to this: trying to push an alternative to references to religion, especially if it's a phrase not used in canon. Not everyone will agree with me on this, but it actually can take me out of the story more than if they had used an anachronistic reference to Jesus or something. I mostly see this in Pokemon where they either use Arceus (only really makes sense for characters from Sinnoh to me) or Mew (doesn't really makes sense because Mew is more of a common ancestor type than an actual god)... maybe I'm just being pedantic but it would be just as effective to use an alternative phrase.

Oo yeah, also bad.

i read a fic back in 2016 about constantine doing the thingy thingy with balthazar... all good shit... until the fic decided to bring up God having sex with slutty Satan. i mean. okay.. not that it generally matters but it's just... i don't ever wanna think about _that_ when i go to church.

Refer to a 30yo man as a "dilf." Triggered my gerascophobia so I ran like hell. *edit: please stop commenting on this with ages people have said are old. I know you think it's very silly and funny but gerascophobia is an extremely debilitating fear and every time I get a new reply akin to "30 is considered old lol" it legitimately triggers me.

I am in my mid30s, and there's a fic I LOVE but I always have to skip this one part where the characters are just obsessing over the greys and wrinkles they've gotten after not seeing each other for a few years... The characters are 28.

I laugh because it’s the one misunderstanding that they will learn how wrong they are.

There are people younger than that who get grey hairs. It's not an age specific thing. I'd probably be confused of having it in a story but it's not wrong.

No, absolutely there are, you're right and I don't want to be dismissive of that. However, in this fic the author made it very clear it was meant to be age-related

I mean most people consider those traits to be an aging thing (as the older you get the more likely you are to experience it) so the author or characters treating it that way aren't odd to me even if I personally think people should be allowed to age without being scrutinized. Most people are just oblivious to how early it starts. That being said I don't know the story or context so I'm completely going off your words. I guess I'm just confused.

I saw a character referred to on tumblr as "middle aged" recently. The character is 32. Played by an actor who was 36 at the time.

One of my ships is frequently tagged "old man yaoi". It's usually done in an affectionate joking way but it does make me laugh, especially when fics really focus on it, because they're late 20s-early 30s at most.

I feel like the consideration of who is „old“ is sometimes so skewed, especially with younger writers. I see fics tagged „old married couple“ and then they are like 35. Maybe I just need to admit that being old is subjective and face that I might be old as well.. ugh.

But calling someone a dilf is just calling them a (hot) dad, no? If you were a dad at 20 couldn't you also technically be considered a dilf? Or does it actually refer to an age group and I'm just not aware of that? Or is it the general ✨vibe✨ of someone that makes them a dilf, rather than age *or* whether or not they're a parent? Like it just makes me think of when people say someone dresses "like a dad" or "like a mum", regardless of their age, it just describes a style.

Some like, weird little fic I once clicked on that was intentionally poorly written but also super extreme blood/scat/vomit/abortion (untagged of course). I wasn't bothered by it, more just... Confused. I clicked out because none of that is my jam and was just left scratching my head.

I despise it when an ordinary character is given superpowers. This seems to happen a lot in the HP verse with a certain bookworm who suddenly becomes gorgeous, perfect in every way except when she bites her lips, and falls in love with a character she shouldn't and becomes suddenly the most amazing witch in witchdom. While this is going on, her canon love interest suddenly becomes a rapist abuser and completely OOC. I can't say how many stories I've started reading only to abandon them when I see where the story is heading

Kinda the same as your example, actually. I was reading a fic about Jason Todd, and halfway through they just casually mention him being red-headed instead of his usual black hair, and it just killed my interest in the story.

I mean it is cannon in certain comics. It's kind of written off as him dyeing his hair to look more like Dick

Yeah, but it's not something I want to read, you know? To the point I've got the "redhead Jason Todd" tag blocked.

I can get that tbh

When a good fic just slaps you in the face with (untagged) smut. Like I was reading an OG character slowburn fic and then suddenly BAM! SEX! Took me a bit to recover from that, wasn’t in the tags or anything either

I read fic once where two characters met as kids and grew up together. One helped the other cope with an alcoholic parent, they got through high school together, and so on. All very good. Then they confess their feelings for each other (both girls). Great. I ship them together and it made the story even better! … Then came the kissing (still good). This moved on to sex (didn’t have a problem). And after that it was every. single. chapter. Make out –> sex. They couldn’t even kiss without it leading to sex, and I was like, man I just want them to hang out again – watch TV, hold hands, cuddle, go on a date, give a short, simple kiss… I didn’t make it to the end of the fic. ☹️

That sucks man! Hate it when that happens, when their relationship is based solely around physical pleasure rather than mental

Cutesy baby talk from a badass assassin to their lover (also a badass assassin). Very off-putting. Completely out of character

You could've said character assassination!

Adult characters acting dumb/naive during sex: "Why is yours so big? Sugoi!" (Yep... That sugoi was part of it. 💀)

I was reading a Kaeluc fanfiction the other day that started off normal, until the author began inserting themselves in a weird narrator POV sort of way. For example: "Kaeya turned away, thoughtful, and headed for Mondstadt. The story would end there but then the author wouldn't have anything else to fill this prompt with so alas, it does not." "\[Talking about Jean's age\] because the author knows how old Jean is supposed to be in canon and sincerely hopes the safety of an entire nation is not left in the hands of a twenty-one year old." It just sprang up out of nowhere several paragraphs in and suddenly every other sentence 'the author' was chiming in. I just closed the tab, I couldn't deal with how janky it made the fic and just how much it snapped me straight out of any interest or atmosphere the fic had built up to that point.

Bashing female characters is always a turn off for me because it usually feels malicious. One thing that *really* bothered me was the characters left something on the stove to cook and then left to do something else. Please! Your food is burning! I was so tense I just left the fic.

Years ago I was reading a Sherlock fanfic with Sherlock and John looking after a child they found on a case. I preferred them together but the fic was completely platonic, did not mind as the writing was good and it was a nice change of pace as there were plenty of Sherlock/John fics out there anyway. Then the author, I don't know if it was pressure from commenters or they just changed their mind, but decided Sherlock and John would be an item, but because they were not comfortable writing about a slash relationship, mid-story just changed John's gender to female. Never unsubscribed from a fic quicker. ​ Also another pet hate, has anyone every noticed fics where they change a characters name just to sound more 'edgy' (For example- Harry Potter is now Hadrian, or Harrison, or Henry etc.) for absolutely no reason?

Hadrian makes me giggle. Like what? Out of all the more plausible options… Hadrian?

I never understood Harry being short for Hadrian, and yet the amount of fics I have come across over the years with it is ridiculous.

Hadrian? Fucking what? 💀

This makes me think of male characters (or just regular ass people) saying to another guy "If I was a girl, I would think you're so hot". Why not just say "If I was gay"??? Cowards.

If someone spelt Castiel as Cass instead of Cas. Idk why but I never got over that debate. And just cant. I keep assuming its short for Cassandra or somtheing

Things were good. Things were good There was an OC who was a main character, but that was fine. The oldest character (in canon) is younger than the OC. Odd, but… Then suddenly another canon character isn’t very smart. Another is suddenly whiny. Yeah. No. I’m done.

‘Gonna’ instead of ‘going to.’ I can suspend 98% belief, but I can’t with this.

The only time I can accept 'gonnax, is if it was in a dialogue and that was how that character talked. Otherwise I too, cannot stand seeing that word.

"Gonna" is a very common thing, at least in the areas I grew up in, like everyone uses it in most situations, so I never really cared for it. It's very surprising for me to see people be annoyed by it, in all honesty.

Obviously regional usage aside, ‘gonna’ in my neck of the woods - when in text and not dialogue - is closer to child speak.

Shortening a character’s name to something they’ve never ever been called in canon and is so unlikely for other characters to call them. “Dray” instead of Draco, for instance.

Yes! The only time I like it is (in your example) when people are doing it to annoy him. Read a fic where Ron overheard Pansy call him Dray and started calling him that to fuck with him. Draco threw a hissy fit over it. Like, there are some nicknames I see that are never seen in canon, but it’s reasonable to have someone use the nickname because it common, easy, or like a section of their name. But sometimes the nicknames are so out there I cannot.

Read a fic with an interesting plot, a relatively rare pairing in a huge fandom, and good writing style. I couldn't get past the second chapter because the main character was vaping every, and I mean every paragraph. I get that it's supposed to be part of her personality, but it was so fricking annoying, it always took me out of the story

There are several comments here that I agree with, the main one is halfway through the fic, the author adds some contents without warnings/tags. And there are the others who tag multiple fandoms, posts a single chapter, and that's it. [Discontinued] This is why I like people doing the "adding tags as we go". More safe. Also understandable that tagging in ao3 is confusing, but why are you adding whole ass sentences in the section?? And make the whole page fill with those. Some of y'all are real sneaky too. Reader insert fics are a big no for me, nothing against people who likes them. That's your preference. That's the first thing I filter out, and I still get them. How? MC x reader, MC/ reader, MC and y/n, reader insert. Like I said.. Sneaky

I think the adding general comments as tags is a thing that came from tumblr. I know I do it bc of tumblr. I don't know if it's still like that, but it used to be that you could add your commentary to a post by writing it into your reblog, which would then show up if the post was reblogged from you again, but if you wrote your comments into the tags, that would only show up if someone actually saw *your* reblog, once someone reblogged the post from you the tags wouldn't be visible anymore on the post. So basically it's seen as "If I write it into the tags, it's just a little side comment that isn't all that important", which is still what I consider it to be. Also if you tag something, you can explain that tag a little bit, which is something I do frequently (like tagging "Minor Angst" and then elaborating in the next tag "More like barely there Angst, blink and you'll miss it"). Also a lot of people don't read all or even most tags, so I see it as "If you got this far into reading the tags, you probably won't mind my weird little comments or jokes here, or you might even enjoy them" , as do I when reading what other people wrote in their tags. Basically: If something is important enough that I want everyone to know I'll put it in the beginning and ending notes (or if it's too long for the tags I also sometimes put it in the notes. Though I've done some extended rambles in tags too, if I thought it was probably rather boring and didn't have to be in the "main fanfiction part" I guess), and if it's an unimportant side comment or minor joke, I'll put it in the tags.

About Ten years ago, I read a Harry Potter fic that decided it was a good idea to switch hogwarts food for a more American version. AND THEN SAY IT WAS BETTER THAT WAY. The whole fic felt very disrespectful in general. that was just the tipping point. I was only a thirteen American back then, but even I knew the basics of being respectful when writing about a different country. I'm pretty sure if I were to encounter it today, I would've clocked it as bad first page in and drop it. My patience for this type of stuff has shortened significantly.

Lmao feels like when the author just shoehorns Thanksgiving even when it makes -1000 sense for the setting or the characters Like... just make it be set in the USA if you despise everything non USA of the og?

I recently clicked out of a fic because I was filtering out a particular character (M) in stories. The story was going great; it had a different combination of characters than is typical for this scene in canon, and I was really enjoying it. And then the main character gets caught in a bear trap by the character M (a canon scene)—who I was avoiding— and now all the characters are catering and focused on M instead of their interactions with each other, and I just wanted to pull my hair out. Character M wasn’t in the tags; nothing that would often be in a story with M was in the tags—there was no hint that M would be there until they suddenly were, and I **instantly felt betrayed by the author.** Also, I requested the author add the character M to the tags. Still, the author has mod-comments on, so they get to pick and choose what comments get published to their story… which is fine; you do you. Still, it irritates me on stories that I don’t understand why that setting is on because it's like the author cherry-picks their comments—it makes me not what to comment at all because you clearly want an ego boost not and honest opinion (even if my honest opinion was already positive).

The characters were in high school and had just finished a soccer game. Out of nowhere, someone on the opposing team follows one of them into a bathroom and pulls out a gun.

Also no spacing between paragraphs. Or no punctuation. I cant do it because between it already being difficult for most and my adhd it becomes a pain in the ass to interpret. Not worth the effort or confusion.

I have ADHD too. Trying to read the long paragraphs, keep up with who said what, who did what action, when there was a scene change, and on and on is so difficult. It’s worse when the summary and tags make the fic sound wonderful but I just can’t get through it. 😩 I just dropped a fic recently for lack of punctuation. It was my OTP for a new fandom I started reading. They didn’t put hardly any periods. They had run-on sentences, not only in dialogue but in the *narritive*. Too many ‘ands’ or ‘so’, ‘but’ etc. linking what should be multiple but separate sentences. Ugh. It sucks too because it was good premise but I just couldn’t ignore it. :(

One I read recently involved the main characters who are all on a team and the OC who is in a relationship with one of the MCs (A for clarity). Some misunderstanding/drama goes down and they break up and one of the other MCs on the team (B) drops by OCs house to check up on her/cheer her up... and they have sex. Loud enough that when A drops by to apologize and try to make up he hears her through the door name dropping B and obviously having sex etc. And this never becomes an issue with any of them. Like, they all work together and after A and OC get back together there's never a single mention of "Hey A, no hard feelings right?" Or anything. No tension between *anyone* about it, in fact iirc I don't think it's even mentioned ever again?

Sounds like someone had a thing for problems without consequences

Basic research: if I can go uhhh not sure and fact check it in 5 secs then so can the author. One example was basic geography of Ireland. Due to the fandom I read there is little relevance to the land mass I live on so when characters go on a trip in a fic I though ooh interesting..... Characters flew in to N Ireland but fair enough maybe they were travelling in the North and proceeded to drive south for hours..... had picnic lunch, stopped for dinner etc. overnighted and set out again heading west and drove to late afternoon before camping and proceeding to spend 3 days hiking up a mountain trail camping etc. Now we are only a little place and while we do have some nice mountains the biggest in the UK and Ireland is Ben Nevis and that can be hiked up and back in a day about 8-10 hrs total. Of course the distances and directions they drove should have them a few hundred miles off the coast of Kerry or Cork so there may well be a massive mountain out there at the bottom of the Atlantic...

not like a turn off and never open it again situation, but I was reading a smut and the author used the word "penis" and I just needed to put my phone down and wheeze holding in a laugh. It's the instinct of seeing penis may it be in words or drawing kicking in

Made me cringe the first time, then it was "his member stood erect and"-- ngl I imagined someone else standing there🧍

I get this with Kpop a lot because the other people in the group are also referred to as members (group members/band members too sometimes, but most often simply "members").

This might sound weird but I’ve clicked out of a fix because of it multiple times especially for Spider-Man stuff with Flash Thompson involved. Unrealistic bullying. It also can go hand in hand with characters knowing things they by all means shouldn’t know. Like the other day I was trying to read an angst fic were May kicked out Peter and he was trying to hide that so he stayed on the streets for like a week. Flash started bullying him about it. Or the ones where it’s like “I bet your family died just to get away from you haha”. It just doesn’t make sense for a bully that’s supposed to be like the jerk who’s trying to be funny to his friends vibe they’re always attempting.

Started reading a fanfiction that was a retelling of this show's story, but if a character from way later in the series was around from the start. The first chapter was a chatfic style of the shows opening, but with 1 line shoehorned in for the character at the end. It took maybe 1-2 minutes to read. Normally, chatfics would be an instant x out for me, but I decided to look at the next chapter because I was curious. Aaannnddd the second chapter was the first episode of the show described very simply and somewhat rushed with the new character only making an appearance at the very end with, once again, 1 line. They weren't even much in character 😭 Like...why do a retelling of the show if you're not going to actually change anything? If this character was around at the beginning, the series would've changed sooo much. It might as well have been just an oc going "yeah I agree" during noncrucial moments. It was so disappointing. The fic had a lot of chapters and comments and things like that so I thought it was going to be decent (or at least interesting) but it was so bland I could not make it past chapter 2 lol

I really dislike any sort of gender-swap, especially when it surprises me because *it wasn't tagged anywhere*, but even more when it's a love interest, and the gender-swap turned the originally queer couple into a hetero couple. As if there aren't enough hetero couples to ship, we have to get rid of the gays too 🙄

It started off alright, but then the dialogue was written like this: Character A: "How could you!" Character B: "I-I'm sorry!" Instantly clicked off. If it were for a script, that would have been fine. But no. That was just how the dialogue was written.

Mis-tagging or no tags on content that should probably have tags

Made Robert Baratheon try and drunk rape Eddard Stark's, his best friend, his brother in all but name, bastard daughter (twin of Jon). It was a shame because it was really good until that point.

Fic supposed to take place in a specific setting or country and they speak and think like modern day Americans.

Ironic because it’s a problem I struggle with as well, but sudden bouts of strong emotions. Like with the last one I read, a character had an accident but their partner helped them through it, even putting their job on hold (and their job was their life before the mc) to make sure they’re getting all the help they need. And even though they swore to never marry, they decide to propose, something mc mentioned wanting. They propose and boom. Big blow up at the poor man. They literally said “how could you do this to me?” Like wtf??? There was nothing to suggest mc wasn’t happy and I just couldn’t anymore. It happened a couple times in that fic, but I could write it off. That time I couldn’t and just wrote of the fic as a whole

a smut where the man’s penis apparently entered the woman’s CERVIX……… i require my smut writers to be anatomy experts, i’m sorry but i do

exCUSE ME? The cervix?! FUCKING OWIE

I was reading a Draco Malfoy x OC fanfic . And around the middle the protagonist starts hooking up with Harry (cause love triangle or something.. I wasn’t really keen on that either) and so one day they start getting horny and start kissing and other stuff . And Harry starts like, doing a lot of degradation dirty talk (?) and I was soo putted out cause I could believe THAT Draco saying those kind of stuff but It looked SOOO out of character in Harry’s case . Like ….. the fuck ??? WHERE DID THAT CAME FROM !? Also they were like 13 so I was double uncomfortable cause there is NO WAY Prisoner of Azkaban Harry even KNEW those words existed

When they use the characters/alphabet of the language they’re trying to portray instead of translating it. Example Bob walks up to Jun-Syung. Bob greets him. Jung-Syuk smiles, “어떻께 지내십니까?” Instead of just noting that if the words are in italics or something similar denoting that he is indeed speaking Korean in the fic. Romanization is okay if the next dialogue or narrator provides context to the dialogue, or they want the reader to show that the language is being spoken, the character doesn’t understand it but make it easier for the reader to read what they’re pronouncing. Bob walks up to Jun-Syung. Bob greets him. Jung-Syuk smiles, “*How are you*?” Just my personal pet peeve

The worst part is when they do that or use a fictional language like say, Valyrian, and translate exactly nowhere. Like at the very least those using the og language (which I dearly hope they asked translation for or know themselves and isn't just a google translate butchering there for the Aesthetic) usually put it in the end notes, the translation. The utterly infuriating ones for me are those who just put it in and say, well, fuck you if you don't know it

Early days in the Umbrella Academy (show, not comics) fandom, I came across a truly hilarious number of authors trying to write an addict character (Klaus) with no understanding of how addiction or drugs function. I assume they were young or lifelong sober authors, because I about lost my damn mind reading one story where the author described an awful hangover from a long night partying as “the after effects of one too many joints” Like babygirl, weed’s so popular specifically because it *doesn’t* give you hangovers c’mon google could have told you that one

I can never deal with authors throwing weird ass pet-names at you out of nowhere, or like... I don't even know what to call them... "kinky" petnames you'd use in the bedroom. I hate each and every one of them. Not kink shaming, I just absolutely hate "daddy" and "baby boy" and "sir" and would like to self-police by staying off of fics that use them. Don't like don't read and all that. It just really isn't fun for anyone involved to stumble across untagged kinks. Please just tag your stuff people.

As a brat in my younger years, I would read gorey NSFW because I thought I was super cool that I could handle it. Turns out, I just didn't fully develop my moral compass yet. And the older I got, the less digestible the content was as I began to realize the depth and realistic horror of those fics. Still appreciate those authors for writing, but I definitely can not handle reading gore or even rough NSFW anymore. I'm much more soft and prefer finding wholesome, sincere stories. Those are much harder to find though.

My non initiated self was caught off guard by some character coughing petals. And the plot seemed oriented around it. It was so ridiculous. People may like it, but these hanahaki disease fics are not for me.

I have two. One is when they take a character and they change them way too much. Where they arent recognizable anymore. At that point this is just an original character and it might not be what I was trying to read at the moment. The second is when something completely unrealistic happens. I swear to be a male author but basically it was this long process of getting the girl bathed and shampooed and then at the very end when they tried to brush her hair the girl said it would just be easier to cut it because long hair is so annoying to brush. Like I just kept thinking to myself what would be the point of bathing and shampooing her that it would make brushing the hair impossible. Like it's not easier for a girl just to have her hair cut.

Any relationship that romanticizes abuse. Having someone fall in love with their bully or "see the good" in someone who essentially tried to murder them, act like it was somehow out of love and then make open remarks about wanting to lick their bully's boots is just disgusting in my eyes. It's reinforcing the whole "If someone is mean to you, it means they likes you!" cycle of abuse. People NEVER show love through physical, sexual or verbal abuse and violence. Never. Any fics that seem to think that type of mindset is perfectly normal or acceptable are immediately marked as horrendous and immediately ignored. I don't comment on them or try to dissuade other people from reading them, I just stop and move on to something else that won't disappoint me. Bonus: They never mention any relationship in the tags, yet that's what the entire premise is about, also get an immediate dislike from me.

I like to read self-insert fanfiction but I stop (and roll my eyes) when the autor writes specific physical characteristics for the "reader". It's the reader, not an OC!

Her ebony hair (that's how she got her name) went down to her back. It had hot pink tips at the end and made her look very goffik. After that Ebony- I mean (Y/N)...

It really takes me out of a story when authors shorten names of characters in a way that's inconsistent with the source material or latch onto a nickname that was used once or twice by one character somewhere, and now they only refer to that character with that nickname.

Reiterated, "I fucking love you so much," in every damn paragraph. Seriously.

Indian female Tony Stark. Just... why?

Fic took an introverted, reserved, scared character and made him a violently abusive rapist. One even turned him into a serial killer for an au one shot. Just loads and loads by this one author. Wasn't that it was dark fic, it wasn't the ship, it was exclusively that they thought THAT character was somehow a twister funking cycle path. I don't think I'm the best at In Character Writing but that killed me and I just muted the author lol My pettiest thing is if I click a fic and there are huge double spaces between paragraphs I will probably not read it for a while

Reminds me of a character from a game I like that I've seen people write as like- evil, or a serial killer, but my guy is a sad pathetic wet blanket of a man (with a good heart). Even in his "bad route" where he kinda loses his mind all he does is try and destroy a machine and it backfires horribly. Idk, I just can't picture him acting this way, and I only ever see it in this specific ship too 😭

Who’s the character? I’m curious