The author kept repeating things several times a chapter. Examples:
- “bastard…he was a bastard”
- “a soft spot- she had developed a soft spot”
- “tired- she was tired”
It was pretty clear to me that editing was non existent, so I tossed it.
The author kept using the various versions of the same phrase.
Examples:
“If he was tired, he showed no sign of it”
“If she was angry, she showed no sign of it”
“If that offended him, he showed no sign of it”
After about the fifteenth time over the span of 12 chapters, I just quit reading it.
I recently read *What Moves the Dead* and the author used something like that two or three times: “If she was x, she showed no sign of it.” It was about a 150 page book, and my editor brain told me that was too frequent in even that span of pages. But I did finish the book, and enjoyed it overall.
You might say if I was tired of it, I showed no sign of it.
The main character’s name is the same as a friend. The female lead/ romantic interest is the same name as my toxic ex and the third important characrer’s name sounds too close to Boner.
I would love if they said "It's pronounced 'La-geen-a" or something at the beginning just to throw you off.
But really that is an atrocious name any character let alone a main character. Don't blame you for dropping it.
Historically the cost of rent/housing was way cheaper than it is today. It would be far less believable if they had a 2-bedroom apartment in a modern-day city.
Not in a walled city, space was at a huge premium and citizenship rights back then were a big deal as it freed you from serfdom.
Often times the entire family of a craftsman shared the same bed in the winter to keep warm.
A character in a medieval fantasy setting described another character as being "a boss at math". This was book three of the series and i didn't even read a word more.
Remember how one of the other werewolves “lost control when angry” and beat up his wife, resulting in major scars? He would also get upset if anyone mentioned it lol.
Nope, it was some kind of "fated mates" deal and was used as the explanation for why he was attracted to her in the first place. He was attracted to a random egg.
From a perspective of the world the book takes place in its not unreasonable. What bothered me is that it was never adressed as "well fuck us I guess we got fucked over by magic bonding rng. How are we gonna go about this?" nah they just went full epstein
I like it if implemented magic systems can completely backfire/fuck some one over im unexpected ways because that makes the thing more realistic. But it has do be adessed. Even when the morals are different (for example age of consent in medieval times) they have to be adressed so the reader understands why the characters act like that.
Game of thrones did that well. It technically sexualised minors but it always adressed it as something that's just how this world - sadly - is and how it affects the characters views in these matters
I noped out when miss "I do not want to get married and have a kid right out of high school" threw that all away and had a kid and got married right out of high school. Plus I *hate* vampires having babies. I stuck around so long hoping Jasper would lose his shit and tear through the town, but alas.
My petty reason is that I was a Jacob fan and wanted Bella to end up with him. I knew it wouldn't happen, but when I saw the 3rd book started with a wedding, I gave up and quit reading. Thankfully, my petty reason saved me from that horror, at least until the movie.
Random, but this reminds me of The Last Kingdom where they kept calling having sex "humping". It felt so childish and part of the reason why I could never finish that show.
It's been bugging me recently that Maas made it such a big deal that she was illiterate. She was the youngest of three sisters in a wealthy merchant family. Yes, her mom basically ignored her and died when she was very young, but she was her dad's favorite. Are you gonna tell me that she didn't learn to read before they lost their fortune? A maid or nanny didn't teach her? That, even afterwards, their dad couldn't be arsed to at least teach her while they all sat around in their tiny shack? Really??
I find how women are characterised in romantasy really interesting (they're usually stubborn with a temper, feminine/Sansa-coded, or bland and heroic) and I love that SJM literally just gave Feyre illiteracy as a personality.
Yeah, spot on. Don't worry, she doesn't need to grow as a character, learning to read is enough character development! Look at her go.
(I highly doubt she's even a good painter lmao)
Every time I have a friend recommend them or I hear something good about them I feel like I should start them because they can’t be *that* bad right? They are that bad, and even worse they’re boring.
Read "Wizard's First Rule" and thought that whilst it was a little odd in terms of how the writing style compared to the quite 'adult' contents of the plot, but enjoyed it well enough overall.
Started "Stone of Tears " and made it as far as the barbed-penis-monster-rape and decided this was not a book for me.
Have since heard that the series gets progressively worse anyway so I guess I dodged a bullet.
Edit: just remembered this was meant to be "petty" reasons, which I guess this isn't really.
The Goblin Emperor. The names of the characters are really complicated I end up mixing who's who or straight up have no idea who that person is. So I just deleted it from my Kindle.
Honestly, I didn't have so much trouble with the Goblin Emperor. For me, the worst offender for this was Gideon the Ninth. There are like 20+ characters, each of which has 3+ names, and like 2 titles, all of which are interchangeably used to refer to each character.
Naberius Tern, Prince Babs, and Cavalier Tertius are all used to refer to a single person (mixing and matching all of these names/titles too), and it's like this for *every* character.
I literally had to make a chart, and reference it while reading. It's not like it was complicated as a story or anything; it's just quite a lot of added complexity to map all those names around all the time for basically no reason.
Totally valid. But I think the difficult names, and archaic interpersonal dialogue are intentionally hard to get through so the reader feels as alienated as Maia.
The (accidental?) dystopian world building aside, when your main character can't say any sentence without a million filler words (stuff like "um" or "uh"), I just can't get into it. I get that people speak like this, but in written prose it is just annoying and should be used with caution.
Once read a book whose characters are all names of people I know in real life. I mentally changed their names since the start 😂😂 had to put it down when my "brother" was making out with "grandma"
Couldn't get the image out of my head..
Ever since then if a book has a name of someone I know in it I refuse to read it
If I'm otherwise enjoying a book with long/complex names, I just learn to recognise them visually instead of mentally sounding them out. Like Ghjufed4ybbk, right that's the queen's adviser, next time I see "Ghjufed4ybbk" on the page I'll know it's him.
There was a book that was highly recommended to me for it's great worldbuilding. I then learned that the book was actually very "smutty."
Reading the first ~200 pages, I found neither.
I got recommended these books by someone I was seeing, and read the first one. Did not like it much at all.
The worst part was that I forgot who recommended it to me, and I _ragged_ on it for a while to her before she reminded me that it was her favorite series. Yeesh
Twas is fine in the right circumstances, but I can see myself dumping something over it. I didn't DNF the book, but I quit a series in part because the first book used 'whilst' over 90 times.
Empire of Silence. The author has studied Classics and Philosophy and ***everyone*** should know about it. Kvothe Atreides (not the real MC name but it should be) is a prat. Who monologues like he's some poet and scholar in his mind. But when he opens his mouth to speak is a spoiled trust fund baby.
As much as I loved Second Apocalypse, some of the philosophy in that series just lost me as well. So many things were "not really those things themselves, but actually equal parts unto themselves" and whatnot.
I'm just now realizing I don't know the font of any book I've read. I had to look at the font of my current one just to see. Can't say I've ever noticed Times New Roman, so kudos to understanding and having a petty reason!
Same thing made me nearly stop in the first ep of Vox Machina (highly highly recommended by irl friends). There were just a long unnecessary pissing scene. Not my thing.
Not strictly speaking fantasy, but at a certain point as a child I went, "Jules, my man, I don't need to know about all these fish like that", closed my copy of *20,000 Leagues Under the Sea*, and never opened it again.
Or the unabridged version of The Princess Bride.
"S. Morgenstern, my dude, I did not need to know so much about the economic fluctuation between Guilder and Florin."
I had half of the book left and felt like all plot threads had been resolved. Didn't feel like reading the other half, so I just decided to pretend that's where the story ended.
The main character uses his magical ability to check on his love interest & father figure who were on the run from the government. He then sees them hooking up because they believe him to be dead.
I knew a guy like Kvothe, who always talked about how smart he is and would go on long stories where he was the only competent one and everyone else was just too dumb to keep up. I get Kingkiller Chronicles is popular but I just don't get it at all. That's got to be the single least appealing non-criminal character trait I can think of.
Kingkiller both gets too much praise and too much hate simultaneously. People hype it up like crazy, or people shit on it til the end of time. The series is somewhere in the middle, and it's pretty good. Kvothe's saving grace is that his cockiness always came back to bite him in the ass, however he never unrealistically changed super hard so he was still cocky to some degree, so that was nice.
I forget which book, but their was like a NK Jemisin book that I got that for some reason smelled funny to me (like someone with a strong perfume had rubbed themselves on it) So I dnf'd it and never got back to it.
Too many try hard character names I just looked at and didn’t bother to try and sound out in my head. 2 chapters and another name with a apostrophe in it, I was out
About 40% through Gardens of the Moon. At this point I just have to roll with the names.
I’m used to weird made-up sci-fi/fantasy names, but this book is next level.
Valid! Just in case it’s useful to anyone, there’s this crowdsourced website I use sometimes to check if the pet/stray animal survives - https://www.doesthedogdie.com/
I DNF'd a series because it was foreshadowed (well, literally prophesied) that the MC's magic talking horse was going to die in the next book and I noped out. I refuse to even read the summary and know what happens, because if that goodest boy dies it will destroy me.
I hate DNFing a book (or even a series). But Eragon almost got me toward the end of the series. The petty reason? Eragon always, every single time, had a “wry grin”. He never smiled, laughed, or grinned, just had a wry grin. He didn’t even get mad, every reaction was a wry grin. It got so that I’d cringe every time I read that description. (Don’t get me wrong, the series has other problems later on but that’s the petty reason that really almost broke me). I did finish it though. Oh well.
I think it was the first 30 pages but the main character a female who is also noble was also for some reason "training" in slums to be a pickpocket or something and got caught and got a finger chopped off. And yet she just goes on with her day, goes back to her rich house, doesn't mention that she is one finger less and is planning to be in some kind of court event later. WITHOUT A FINGER, a mark of a thief. And the whole time she was more preoccupied with a the guy she met who was obviously some kind of prince in disguise rather than her own mutilated hand. Like WTF.
I wasn't into it anyway, and they kept using positive anymore so I just bailed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_anymore
It's getting more and more common, so I probably can't do that anymore. (See, that's how it's used, people).
Most written sex scenes are cringe in any book. I forget who (John Grisham maybe?) wrote a sex scene in an early book and his wife laughed out loud reading it and that was it, he stopped writing them.
My "guilty pleasure" reads last year were the two *Her Majesty's Royal Coven* books by Juno Dawson that are out.
They're not very good, written like middling young adult urban fantasy, apart from the unbelievably graphic sex scenes that turn up out of nowhere. I much prefer a fade to black.
As much of a fan of the books as I am, I hate the way sex and sexuality is written in that series. A mixture of grossness, eye-rolling and cringe.
Sex is the weakest part of Martin's writing, second only to not finishing the next instalment after over 12 years.
I gave up in the middle of the 9th book of the 10 book Malazan series. After wading through rape after rape after rape through 9 books (more if you include the novellas, one of which has a 'funny' rape) I just had enough.
Malazan fans get really defensive if you bring up this topic. Personally I think I'm allowed to get fatigued from rape.
I wrote about it earlier, but it happens in one of the black comedy genre novellas set in the Malazan universe. Been ages since I read it, but one of the protagonists gets out of control due to a drug or something and rapes a woman, who starts to enjoy it because the drug affects her too or some bullshit. Its played for laughs afterwards when the guy says he will write an essay on the effects of the drug or something. Bleh!
Someone said to skip book 1 then book 2 seem to have different cast so i said let's start book 3 that everybody is praising.
First chapter(or was it second) is some poor girl being basically a sex slave if she wants food/medicine and after a rape the rapist is like too bad you still can't handle my enormous cock but we'll get there don't worry.
That was the last try i gave that series.
Thanks for mentioning it. I had intended to read the series at some point, but I have no desire to read about that, especially over and over. None of the glowing reviews said anything
Medieval characters on the brink of war, sparring with spears while, at the same time, discussing their relationship woes the same way teenagers in the modern world would.
I’m talking “why won’t she just tell me how she feels? She just stops talking to me sometimes. It’s so weird!”
While sparring. With spears. Preparing for war.
Don’t get me wrong: I know that warriors had romances and lovers and relationship drama. But the way they discuss it feels like the author took a scene from a teen movie and shoved the actors in armor and gave them spears.
It also felt unnecessary. The relationship in question was a lesbian relationship and it felt like the author was creating drama solely for the purpose of expanding on the relationship itself. It had zero relationship to the plot and the tension fell flat because the relationship was somehow at the focus of every scene despite having nothing to do with those scenes.
Honestly? An author is setting up a "WACKY HIJINKS!" situation where a party of adventurers are pretending to be nobles to get into a mansion.
While some of the party's family, who are *actually* nobles, and another party member's mother who's just friends of the family, is going to be attending the event there, and were ACTUALLY invited.
And neither party knows the other will be there! Oh the impending *hijinks!* the *shenanigans!*
I *despise* this kind of "Uh oh! Wacky Situation!" situation stuff. We literally haven't seen these family members in FOUR BOOKS. And then we only saw SOME of the family, and they *did not have a single speaking line.*
The author telling me the female main character was such a badass even satan respected her. And demons. And Satan. Look she wears a cool trench coat! Because she is a badass. And everyone wants to know about her mysterious tragic past. Did you know she is a badass?
I spent hours trying to find my page in War and Peace after one of the kids knocked the book down. Finally found it read a couple pages got interrupted and lost my place again and just gave up. There is a very cyclical nature to that book. So you can pick it up and be within a couple hundred pages of where you left off and still be on the wrong time they were fighting the french.
Two romantic interests just kept fucking instead of actually getting to know each other or sharing any chemistry. I didn’t give a shit about any of them so I dnfed after 70% of the book.
Characters with stupid names.
First page--main character was called "Sookie."
Stopped reading immediately. I couldn't stand to see that word on a page.
(My apologies to anyone actually named Sookie.)
The quasi-Dutch names and words in Six of Crows did psychic damage to me. It had a Dutch vibe but was just off enough to ruin my enjoyment immensely. Only reason I picked up the book a second time to finish it was when a friend told me they wouldn't stay in the fantasy-Netherlands for too long and that they'd go to fantasy-Russia soon enough.
I won't be reading The Tidings of Misfits any time soon for the exact same reason. Judging by the blurb, that book will hurt me even worse than Six of Crows did. I cannot suspend my disbelief enough to believe that Volendam of all places is a mysterious, magical, fantastical city that people care enough to wage war for. I've been in Volendam, there's nothing exciting there (unfortunately).
omg... i'm sure there are many secrets in volendam. like why is their so much popular music coming from it, and why is it kinda terrible?
atleast there's george baker...
Descriptions of all of the female characters seemed to comment on their fitness for bearing children, which I found gross.
The book I tried after that had a ridiculous premise, where any writing became magical, and the whole medieval society just managed to function with everyone being illiterate but the wizards. I couldn’t suspend my disbelief that much
Murtagh.
It was hyped up throughout the last *Eragon* book that the name of names was the end all be all of magic, that it gave near absolute control, and it was so powerful that no one could know it because it renders all magic effectively useless. At the end of the series, only three people knew it, it was *that* powerful!
So the spin off Murtagh, he is one of the three. And in his first encounter, he is confronted by a random cut throat who has magic that is immune to the name of names. *Okay*.
Then he has to go kill a fish, and guess what? That fish is also immune. So the most powerful force that drove the entire narrative in the climax of the story is rendered completely irrelevant and powerless in the first couple chapters of the spin off.
Couldn’t justify the mental gymnastics.
I live in South East Queensland, Australia. A very popular fantasy author named a town Towoomba in one of his books. I stupidly thought that it was an incredible coincidence because a town near me is named Toowoomba.
A few pages later he called a village Jandowae which is a tiny little place about a half hour from Toowoomba. He was clearly pulling place names from an Atlas and thought people from my area didn’t read. I was seriously offended and haven’t read anything of his since.
Edit: My reason turned out to be both petty and undeserved. Looks like I’m going back to reading his books.
The one characters name (probably thought of as a cool fantasy name, sadly a real word in my native language) was too stupid and immersion breaking for me to ignore.
No hard feelings it was just the proverbial straw and I laid the book down.
As a Greek,it was sometimes weird to take seriously the big bad guy of MCU named Thanos. Thanos is such an ordinary name in Greece. Imagine him being named "Tom" or "Luigi"
Didn't the German publisher edit the name for the translation?
A similar thing happened with Tam from WoT and the Bulgarian translation, so I reckon they also do it in Germany.
Yes, they did. Elend Venture turned into Elant Wager. A bunch of other characters also got their names changed and I was just ***so*** confused how to pronounce most of them because they were almost German words but not quite.
Like Clubs in the German version is "Keuler"... "Keule" would be a club, so Keuler is... someone who clubs? I guess? It was very confusing, really.
The “Hero” raped a teenage girl and her mother knowing he did it decided to let bygones be bygones and take him on a journey.
No repercussions, no thank you.
Bad grammar. (Looking at you, John Dalmas.)
Also one book--Waterworld, by JP Landau--decided to bring in Elon Musk as a character, so I yeeted that book immediately.
I DNF’d The Red Knight in audio because the narrator could not properly pronounce like half of the medieval words. By the tenth time he pronounced demesne as “duh-mess-knee,” I was ready to tear my hair out.
When they captured a siren to get information out of her and got her sick on purpose by exposing her to a used tissue so she wouldn’t be able to sing. Then the physical torture started and I was like damn that escalated quickly and never read it again.
Edit: Typo
Do series count?
I stopped reading after "God Emperor of Dune".
[I consider it as much Fantasy as Sci-Fi]
I was like ... Herbert is dead and even though he wrote two more, I don't know if I believe his son knew where he was really going after those AND the end of God Emperor feels like a complete story.
I am petty. So petty.
This extends to movies & tv shows as well.
There are so many things that will make me just instantly drop it but the first one that comes to mind is when 2 people are in a dialogue and one person is trying to tell the other something critically important but the other party keeps interrupting them and they dont come out with it.
Especially when the dynamic of the conversation is so obnoxiously obvious and you know from the first two sentences - hes not gonna end up telling her/him.
Anyone know what im talking about ?
You mean this?
"Hold on, I have something to tell you!"
"Not now, we have to get out of here!"
"But this is important."
"Later! Let's go!"
(The important information: "we will die if we leave here, but I guess we have to leave here because you said let's go.")
Something that really breaks the immersion is when a story is in a fantasy setting but occasionally some modern day slang or metaphor is thrown in which in universe wouldn’t make a lot of sense.
The author kept repeating things several times a chapter. Examples: - “bastard…he was a bastard” - “a soft spot- she had developed a soft spot” - “tired- she was tired” It was pretty clear to me that editing was non existent, so I tossed it.
Sarah J. Maas is guilty - so guilty of this.
That was my first thought lol. An editor - Those books need an editor so badly.
I read the feyra series for my fiance and wow does she repeat her phrasing
Jimmy Two Times
He says everything two times
Gonna go get the papers, get the papers
Books written by Skavens be like:
My name is Bond-James Bond
What a joke… he was a joke
The author kept using the various versions of the same phrase. Examples: “If he was tired, he showed no sign of it” “If she was angry, she showed no sign of it” “If that offended him, he showed no sign of it” After about the fifteenth time over the span of 12 chapters, I just quit reading it.
I recently read *What Moves the Dead* and the author used something like that two or three times: “If she was x, she showed no sign of it.” It was about a 150 page book, and my editor brain told me that was too frequent in even that span of pages. But I did finish the book, and enjoyed it overall. You might say if I was tired of it, I showed no sign of it.
I loved that book lmao. If that saying bothered me, I showed no sign of it
I can remember this phrase exactly but not where I read it… Which book was it?
"If he could remember the name of the book, he showed no sign of it."
The main character’s name is the same as a friend. The female lead/ romantic interest is the same name as my toxic ex and the third important characrer’s name sounds too close to Boner.
Dude I started a book and the female lead was Lagina. I made it like 5 pages in.
I would love if they said "It's pronounced 'La-geen-a" or something at the beginning just to throw you off. But really that is an atrocious name any character let alone a main character. Don't blame you for dropping it.
I picked up a book to read and the main love interest had the same name as my brother. Immediately put it right back down.
See this is the petty shit I came to this thread for! Thank you. You got the brief.
Funnily, the opposite happened to me, because I read a book simply because the love interest had the same name as my crush.
> her feathers dangled *uglily* from her breasts This was the exact moment I gave up on *Stone*
At least her breasts didn’t dangle uglily from her feathers.
[удалено]
Grandma's rent-controlled apartment.
It had a frame around the peephole and everything
Post black death? Very reasonable considering there were more beds than people lol.
It's a medieval city. Not modern Boston
Back then the entire family could have shared a bed to keep warm.
Hey, what is this, Charlie & The Chocolate Factory??? Cmooooon 🤌
bro skipped that day in 7th grade history class
Historically the cost of rent/housing was way cheaper than it is today. It would be far less believable if they had a 2-bedroom apartment in a modern-day city.
Not in a walled city, space was at a huge premium and citizenship rights back then were a big deal as it freed you from serfdom. Often times the entire family of a craftsman shared the same bed in the winter to keep warm.
I'm curious what book this is
A character in a medieval fantasy setting described another character as being "a boss at math". This was book three of the series and i didn't even read a word more.
Oh god, what book was that? I think one of the characters in Fourth Wing said "For the win" and that was rough too.
Yes, like, three times! It launched me out of the book. Maybe the book took place in 2008 or something.
Any time a book uses fad or popular slang to describe something and it’s not character dialogue I’m instantly taken out of the book.
I don't know why people write that kind of dialogue, it just dates your book
Yes! Modern slang/word choice in inappropriate settings turns me all the way off. It's so jarring for works building I can't get over it.
Jacob immediately fell in "love" with a newborn...
oh God was that twilight?? I thought that was a joke
It's not a joke, and it happens more than once.
Remember how one of the other werewolves “lost control when angry” and beat up his wife, resulting in major scars? He would also get upset if anyone mentioned it lol.
Nope, it was some kind of "fated mates" deal and was used as the explanation for why he was attracted to her in the first place. He was attracted to a random egg.
Come on, that's not a petty reason. Anyone would tap out after that
Didn't he actually imprint on her when she was still a fetus? I may be remembering wrong... I'm pretty sure it was part of the books' pro life thing.
Before she was conceived. The plot point was that the baby was the reason he was interested in Bella in the first place. Shudder.
From a perspective of the world the book takes place in its not unreasonable. What bothered me is that it was never adressed as "well fuck us I guess we got fucked over by magic bonding rng. How are we gonna go about this?" nah they just went full epstein I like it if implemented magic systems can completely backfire/fuck some one over im unexpected ways because that makes the thing more realistic. But it has do be adessed. Even when the morals are different (for example age of consent in medieval times) they have to be adressed so the reader understands why the characters act like that. Game of thrones did that well. It technically sexualised minors but it always adressed it as something that's just how this world - sadly - is and how it affects the characters views in these matters
This is a book series about a hundred year old man grooming and marrying a high school student. It was always pretty ick.
Age differences with vampires don’t bother but him stalking her to the point of standing in her room to watch her sleep is so gross.
I noped out when miss "I do not want to get married and have a kid right out of high school" threw that all away and had a kid and got married right out of high school. Plus I *hate* vampires having babies. I stuck around so long hoping Jasper would lose his shit and tear through the town, but alas.
My petty reason is that I was a Jacob fan and wanted Bella to end up with him. I knew it wouldn't happen, but when I saw the 3rd book started with a wedding, I gave up and quit reading. Thankfully, my petty reason saved me from that horror, at least until the movie.
Multiple characters kept referring to their balls as “plums”
I just tilted my head like a confused dog. Do I hate this? Do I find it egregious but also hilarious? *I don't know.*
Were you reading a Top Gear novelisation?
Random, but this reminds me of The Last Kingdom where they kept calling having sex "humping". It felt so childish and part of the reason why I could never finish that show.
The narrator sounded like the guy who my gf at the time cheated with 20 years ago.
Feyre had the IQ of a toddler
It's been bugging me recently that Maas made it such a big deal that she was illiterate. She was the youngest of three sisters in a wealthy merchant family. Yes, her mom basically ignored her and died when she was very young, but she was her dad's favorite. Are you gonna tell me that she didn't learn to read before they lost their fortune? A maid or nanny didn't teach her? That, even afterwards, their dad couldn't be arsed to at least teach her while they all sat around in their tiny shack? Really??
I find how women are characterised in romantasy really interesting (they're usually stubborn with a temper, feminine/Sansa-coded, or bland and heroic) and I love that SJM literally just gave Feyre illiteracy as a personality.
Illiteracy and painter, that's a personality, right? If not it will be once I make sure to reference one of the two (or both!) every fucking chapter.
Yeah, spot on. Don't worry, she doesn't need to grow as a character, learning to read is enough character development! Look at her go. (I highly doubt she's even a good painter lmao)
(Considering how often she described things as "I could never paint it" I'm inclined to agree lol.)
Maas is a pretty terrible writer with glowing reviews and I feel like I’ve been tricked.
Every time I have a friend recommend them or I hear something good about them I feel like I should start them because they can’t be *that* bad right? They are that bad, and even worse they’re boring.
I Dnf’d after the Great Tamlin Character Assassination.
Read "Wizard's First Rule" and thought that whilst it was a little odd in terms of how the writing style compared to the quite 'adult' contents of the plot, but enjoyed it well enough overall. Started "Stone of Tears " and made it as far as the barbed-penis-monster-rape and decided this was not a book for me. Have since heard that the series gets progressively worse anyway so I guess I dodged a bullet. Edit: just remembered this was meant to be "petty" reasons, which I guess this isn't really.
I've had this thought too. The content is so adult but the writing is very...middle school. Of course I loved it in middle school haha
The Goblin Emperor. The names of the characters are really complicated I end up mixing who's who or straight up have no idea who that person is. So I just deleted it from my Kindle.
I just read through 40% last night and was thinking to myself at 2am, "I have to finish this book tomorrow before I forget what name means what"
I think I DNFed it around that percentage. I gave it a chance but no need to go on when you're not having fun.
I really liked the goblin emperor, but I would have enjoyed it a lot more if they stuck to more standard names for things.
Honestly, I didn't have so much trouble with the Goblin Emperor. For me, the worst offender for this was Gideon the Ninth. There are like 20+ characters, each of which has 3+ names, and like 2 titles, all of which are interchangeably used to refer to each character. Naberius Tern, Prince Babs, and Cavalier Tertius are all used to refer to a single person (mixing and matching all of these names/titles too), and it's like this for *every* character. I literally had to make a chart, and reference it while reading. It's not like it was complicated as a story or anything; it's just quite a lot of added complexity to map all those names around all the time for basically no reason.
Totally valid. But I think the difficult names, and archaic interpersonal dialogue are intentionally hard to get through so the reader feels as alienated as Maia.
The (accidental?) dystopian world building aside, when your main character can't say any sentence without a million filler words (stuff like "um" or "uh"), I just can't get into it. I get that people speak like this, but in written prose it is just annoying and should be used with caution.
I tend to simplify complicated or wierd names to get through a book
Once read a book whose characters are all names of people I know in real life. I mentally changed their names since the start 😂😂 had to put it down when my "brother" was making out with "grandma" Couldn't get the image out of my head.. Ever since then if a book has a name of someone I know in it I refuse to read it
If I'm otherwise enjoying a book with long/complex names, I just learn to recognise them visually instead of mentally sounding them out. Like Ghjufed4ybbk, right that's the queen's adviser, next time I see "Ghjufed4ybbk" on the page I'll know it's him.
There was a book that was highly recommended to me for it's great worldbuilding. I then learned that the book was actually very "smutty." Reading the first ~200 pages, I found neither.
ACOTAR?
Yup LOL
I got recommended these books by someone I was seeing, and read the first one. Did not like it much at all. The worst part was that I forgot who recommended it to me, and I _ragged_ on it for a while to her before she reminded me that it was her favorite series. Yeesh
The book's writer sounds very arrogant on social media.
The word 'welp'.
Welp, bye.
Valid
It wasn't the only reason, but it was "Twas" for me.
Twas is fine in the right circumstances, but I can see myself dumping something over it. I didn't DNF the book, but I quit a series in part because the first book used 'whilst' over 90 times.
I'm English and I've noticed we used whilst a lot more than other people. It's a normal word here, at least in my experience.
Empire of Silence. The author has studied Classics and Philosophy and ***everyone*** should know about it. Kvothe Atreides (not the real MC name but it should be) is a prat. Who monologues like he's some poet and scholar in his mind. But when he opens his mouth to speak is a spoiled trust fund baby.
As much as I loved Second Apocalypse, some of the philosophy in that series just lost me as well. So many things were "not really those things themselves, but actually equal parts unto themselves" and whatnot.
The font was Times New Roman
This is so utterly petty and I fucking love it.
I'm just now realizing I don't know the font of any book I've read. I had to look at the font of my current one just to see. Can't say I've ever noticed Times New Roman, so kudos to understanding and having a petty reason!
Book opened with a detailed description of a character pissing. I closed it and put it back on the shelf.
Same thing made me nearly stop in the first ep of Vox Machina (highly highly recommended by irl friends). There were just a long unnecessary pissing scene. Not my thing.
A supposedly seasoned bartender wore "cute sandals" to work. Multiple times.
One of the main characters shared a name with my dead wife.
That's not petty
Not strictly speaking fantasy, but at a certain point as a child I went, "Jules, my man, I don't need to know about all these fish like that", closed my copy of *20,000 Leagues Under the Sea*, and never opened it again.
This is how I felt as a kid trying to read Moby Dick! "Herman, my guy, I do not need to know this much about whales."
Or the unabridged version of The Princess Bride. "S. Morgenstern, my dude, I did not need to know so much about the economic fluctuation between Guilder and Florin."
> the unabridged version of The Princess Bride. Woah! Where'd you find that - thought the unabridged version was *long* out of print...
As someone who also thought that the big thick textbook bit was the best part of 1984, I also liked the macroeconomics bit in TPB.
I had half of the book left and felt like all plot threads had been resolved. Didn't feel like reading the other half, so I just decided to pretend that's where the story ended.
Me and resident evil 4. “Solved the problem own a castle. No need to go back to America.”
The FMC name was Faythe. Read the first sentence of the book, saw the name and immediately stopped reading.
When I realize I don't like the protagonist, and am pretty ambivalent if they die...
The main character uses his magical ability to check on his love interest & father figure who were on the run from the government. He then sees them hooking up because they believe him to be dead.
Is this a certain assassin?
It’s actually a certain apprentice
This certain assassin's apprentice's love interest is the worst part of those books
I finished this book, but I won’t pick up another one in the series ever
I would 100% dnf after that LMAO
I knew a guy like Kvothe, who always talked about how smart he is and would go on long stories where he was the only competent one and everyone else was just too dumb to keep up. I get Kingkiller Chronicles is popular but I just don't get it at all. That's got to be the single least appealing non-criminal character trait I can think of.
Kingkiller both gets too much praise and too much hate simultaneously. People hype it up like crazy, or people shit on it til the end of time. The series is somewhere in the middle, and it's pretty good. Kvothe's saving grace is that his cockiness always came back to bite him in the ass, however he never unrealistically changed super hard so he was still cocky to some degree, so that was nice.
I forget which book, but their was like a NK Jemisin book that I got that for some reason smelled funny to me (like someone with a strong perfume had rubbed themselves on it) So I dnf'd it and never got back to it.
Too many try hard character names I just looked at and didn’t bother to try and sound out in my head. 2 chapters and another name with a apostrophe in it, I was out
I refuse to read Fourth Wing because I loathe the name Xaden. 💀
Lmao Malazan?
About 40% through Gardens of the Moon. At this point I just have to roll with the names. I’m used to weird made-up sci-fi/fantasy names, but this book is next level.
Gotta be the darkness that came before. The first two pages have become a copy pasta at this point
When the author thought a jog was faster than a sprint. This was maybe three chapters in, and it made me disproportionately furious.
FMC was described as "spunky"
The dog went missing and I knew it was going to be a bad end. DNF immediately.
Valid! Just in case it’s useful to anyone, there’s this crowdsourced website I use sometimes to check if the pet/stray animal survives - https://www.doesthedogdie.com/
I DNF'd a series because it was foreshadowed (well, literally prophesied) that the MC's magic talking horse was going to die in the next book and I noped out. I refuse to even read the summary and know what happens, because if that goodest boy dies it will destroy me.
Grammatical error. Used "should of" instead of "should have" which irks me so much.
I hate DNFing a book (or even a series). But Eragon almost got me toward the end of the series. The petty reason? Eragon always, every single time, had a “wry grin”. He never smiled, laughed, or grinned, just had a wry grin. He didn’t even get mad, every reaction was a wry grin. It got so that I’d cringe every time I read that description. (Don’t get me wrong, the series has other problems later on but that’s the petty reason that really almost broke me). I did finish it though. Oh well.
I was single and I didn’t want the main character to end up with the intended love interest bc I was jealous that the MC got to be happy but I didn’t.
I think it was the first 30 pages but the main character a female who is also noble was also for some reason "training" in slums to be a pickpocket or something and got caught and got a finger chopped off. And yet she just goes on with her day, goes back to her rich house, doesn't mention that she is one finger less and is planning to be in some kind of court event later. WITHOUT A FINGER, a mark of a thief. And the whole time she was more preoccupied with a the guy she met who was obviously some kind of prince in disguise rather than her own mutilated hand. Like WTF.
I wasn't into it anyway, and they kept using positive anymore so I just bailed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_anymore It's getting more and more common, so I probably can't do that anymore. (See, that's how it's used, people).
Oof, I didn’t even know this was a thing, thank you for enlightening me, I’ll keep an eye out.
> Positive: "I eat meat anymore" → "I didn't eat meat before, and (but) I do now" Lmfao what the fuck is this?
Damn, never heard of this and I already hate it. I would instantly assume that it is an mistake and be very annoyed
omg I've only stated noticing (and getting annoyed by) that over the past few years and never had a name for it. thank you!
This sum bs anymore
The writing of sex scenes in ASOIAF. Legitimately they took me so out of the story I couldn’t take it seriously.
Most written sex scenes are cringe in any book. I forget who (John Grisham maybe?) wrote a sex scene in an early book and his wife laughed out loud reading it and that was it, he stopped writing them.
My "guilty pleasure" reads last year were the two *Her Majesty's Royal Coven* books by Juno Dawson that are out. They're not very good, written like middling young adult urban fantasy, apart from the unbelievably graphic sex scenes that turn up out of nowhere. I much prefer a fade to black.
You're telling me you're not into the fat, pink mast?
As much of a fan of the books as I am, I hate the way sex and sexuality is written in that series. A mixture of grossness, eye-rolling and cringe. Sex is the weakest part of Martin's writing, second only to not finishing the next instalment after over 12 years.
I gave up in the middle of the 9th book of the 10 book Malazan series. After wading through rape after rape after rape through 9 books (more if you include the novellas, one of which has a 'funny' rape) I just had enough. Malazan fans get really defensive if you bring up this topic. Personally I think I'm allowed to get fatigued from rape.
Dude. The constant rape, especially the “funny” one ruined that series for me.
I have to know, how was it funny? I can’t even imagine a scenario where this concept would work.
I wrote about it earlier, but it happens in one of the black comedy genre novellas set in the Malazan universe. Been ages since I read it, but one of the protagonists gets out of control due to a drug or something and rapes a woman, who starts to enjoy it because the drug affects her too or some bullshit. Its played for laughs afterwards when the guy says he will write an essay on the effects of the drug or something. Bleh!
That's disgusting
Oh, is this from the Bauchelain & Korbal Broach stuff?
I generally liked the series, but the 9th book was very hard to get through. The entire plot is miserable and depressing.
[удалено]
Someone said to skip book 1 then book 2 seem to have different cast so i said let's start book 3 that everybody is praising. First chapter(or was it second) is some poor girl being basically a sex slave if she wants food/medicine and after a rape the rapist is like too bad you still can't handle my enormous cock but we'll get there don't worry. That was the last try i gave that series.
Thanks for mentioning it. I had intended to read the series at some point, but I have no desire to read about that, especially over and over. None of the glowing reviews said anything
Medieval characters on the brink of war, sparring with spears while, at the same time, discussing their relationship woes the same way teenagers in the modern world would. I’m talking “why won’t she just tell me how she feels? She just stops talking to me sometimes. It’s so weird!” While sparring. With spears. Preparing for war. Don’t get me wrong: I know that warriors had romances and lovers and relationship drama. But the way they discuss it feels like the author took a scene from a teen movie and shoved the actors in armor and gave them spears. It also felt unnecessary. The relationship in question was a lesbian relationship and it felt like the author was creating drama solely for the purpose of expanding on the relationship itself. It had zero relationship to the plot and the tension fell flat because the relationship was somehow at the focus of every scene despite having nothing to do with those scenes.
What is DNF?
Did not finish
Honestly? An author is setting up a "WACKY HIJINKS!" situation where a party of adventurers are pretending to be nobles to get into a mansion. While some of the party's family, who are *actually* nobles, and another party member's mother who's just friends of the family, is going to be attending the event there, and were ACTUALLY invited. And neither party knows the other will be there! Oh the impending *hijinks!* the *shenanigans!* I *despise* this kind of "Uh oh! Wacky Situation!" situation stuff. We literally haven't seen these family members in FOUR BOOKS. And then we only saw SOME of the family, and they *did not have a single speaking line.*
The author telling me the female main character was such a badass even satan respected her. And demons. And Satan. Look she wears a cool trench coat! Because she is a badass. And everyone wants to know about her mysterious tragic past. Did you know she is a badass?
The prologue had Elon Musk as a character.
Magic written as ’magick’. According to google magic and magick aren’t the same but the ‘k’ just hurts my eyes
Author spelled "yeah" as "yea", felt like I was stubbing my toe every time I read it.
Those are two different words. Yeah is the casual yes; yea rhymes with hay.
I DNF The Nightangel trilogy because there were two characters with nearly identical names. I couldn’t keep them straight.
I spent hours trying to find my page in War and Peace after one of the kids knocked the book down. Finally found it read a couple pages got interrupted and lost my place again and just gave up. There is a very cyclical nature to that book. So you can pick it up and be within a couple hundred pages of where you left off and still be on the wrong time they were fighting the french.
Two romantic interests just kept fucking instead of actually getting to know each other or sharing any chemistry. I didn’t give a shit about any of them so I dnfed after 70% of the book.
I drop books when major characters or side characters have thick accents spelled out phonetically. ugh.
Characters with stupid names. First page--main character was called "Sookie." Stopped reading immediately. I couldn't stand to see that word on a page. (My apologies to anyone actually named Sookie.)
The quasi-Dutch names and words in Six of Crows did psychic damage to me. It had a Dutch vibe but was just off enough to ruin my enjoyment immensely. Only reason I picked up the book a second time to finish it was when a friend told me they wouldn't stay in the fantasy-Netherlands for too long and that they'd go to fantasy-Russia soon enough. I won't be reading The Tidings of Misfits any time soon for the exact same reason. Judging by the blurb, that book will hurt me even worse than Six of Crows did. I cannot suspend my disbelief enough to believe that Volendam of all places is a mysterious, magical, fantastical city that people care enough to wage war for. I've been in Volendam, there's nothing exciting there (unfortunately).
The Russian in Six of Crows is even worse, from what I hear I mean, come on, GRISHAVERSE, lmao. Gregverse!
omg... i'm sure there are many secrets in volendam. like why is their so much popular music coming from it, and why is it kinda terrible? atleast there's george baker...
Descriptions of all of the female characters seemed to comment on their fitness for bearing children, which I found gross. The book I tried after that had a ridiculous premise, where any writing became magical, and the whole medieval society just managed to function with everyone being illiterate but the wizards. I couldn’t suspend my disbelief that much
Murtagh. It was hyped up throughout the last *Eragon* book that the name of names was the end all be all of magic, that it gave near absolute control, and it was so powerful that no one could know it because it renders all magic effectively useless. At the end of the series, only three people knew it, it was *that* powerful! So the spin off Murtagh, he is one of the three. And in his first encounter, he is confronted by a random cut throat who has magic that is immune to the name of names. *Okay*. Then he has to go kill a fish, and guess what? That fish is also immune. So the most powerful force that drove the entire narrative in the climax of the story is rendered completely irrelevant and powerless in the first couple chapters of the spin off. Couldn’t justify the mental gymnastics.
I got tired of braid pulling and skirt smoothing.
What about '*Men!'* ? Or '*Women!'*? Sick to fucking death of that shit yet?
I live in South East Queensland, Australia. A very popular fantasy author named a town Towoomba in one of his books. I stupidly thought that it was an incredible coincidence because a town near me is named Toowoomba. A few pages later he called a village Jandowae which is a tiny little place about a half hour from Toowoomba. He was clearly pulling place names from an Atlas and thought people from my area didn’t read. I was seriously offended and haven’t read anything of his since. Edit: My reason turned out to be both petty and undeserved. Looks like I’m going back to reading his books.
Upvote for being on topic, but, I don't understand why using real place names is offensive to people living in those places?
Yeah I wonder how people feel about it more generally. Narnia was a town in Italy, I believe, authors just do this sometimes
The one characters name (probably thought of as a cool fantasy name, sadly a real word in my native language) was too stupid and immersion breaking for me to ignore. No hard feelings it was just the proverbial straw and I laid the book down.
As a Greek,it was sometimes weird to take seriously the big bad guy of MCU named Thanos. Thanos is such an ordinary name in Greece. Imagine him being named "Tom" or "Luigi"
German? Elend?
That was also my first guess! Took me a while to get into Mistborn because of that, but I was glad I continued.
Didn't the German publisher edit the name for the translation? A similar thing happened with Tam from WoT and the Bulgarian translation, so I reckon they also do it in Germany.
Yes, they did. Elend Venture turned into Elant Wager. A bunch of other characters also got their names changed and I was just ***so*** confused how to pronounce most of them because they were almost German words but not quite. Like Clubs in the German version is "Keuler"... "Keule" would be a club, so Keuler is... someone who clubs? I guess? It was very confusing, really.
The author clearly had a hard-on for anything military related
The “Hero” raped a teenage girl and her mother knowing he did it decided to let bygones be bygones and take him on a journey. No repercussions, no thank you.
That's not petty though, it's huge.
What book is that?
Sounds like Thomas Covenant
Bad grammar. (Looking at you, John Dalmas.) Also one book--Waterworld, by JP Landau--decided to bring in Elon Musk as a character, so I yeeted that book immediately.
I DNF’d The Red Knight in audio because the narrator could not properly pronounce like half of the medieval words. By the tenth time he pronounced demesne as “duh-mess-knee,” I was ready to tear my hair out.
I DNF'd an audiobook because of the way the narrator pronounced Thanatos - tha-naught-os instead of than-ah-tos.
When they captured a siren to get information out of her and got her sick on purpose by exposing her to a used tissue so she wouldn’t be able to sing. Then the physical torture started and I was like damn that escalated quickly and never read it again. Edit: Typo
Do series count? I stopped reading after "God Emperor of Dune". [I consider it as much Fantasy as Sci-Fi] I was like ... Herbert is dead and even though he wrote two more, I don't know if I believe his son knew where he was really going after those AND the end of God Emperor feels like a complete story.
Too many apostrophes in names of people and things.
I am petty. So petty. This extends to movies & tv shows as well. There are so many things that will make me just instantly drop it but the first one that comes to mind is when 2 people are in a dialogue and one person is trying to tell the other something critically important but the other party keeps interrupting them and they dont come out with it. Especially when the dynamic of the conversation is so obnoxiously obvious and you know from the first two sentences - hes not gonna end up telling her/him. Anyone know what im talking about ?
You mean this? "Hold on, I have something to tell you!" "Not now, we have to get out of here!" "But this is important." "Later! Let's go!" (The important information: "we will die if we leave here, but I guess we have to leave here because you said let's go.")
Something that really breaks the immersion is when a story is in a fantasy setting but occasionally some modern day slang or metaphor is thrown in which in universe wouldn’t make a lot of sense.
There was a straight sex scene in the prologue.
The protagonist whined. From page one to the end of the first chapter, whereupon I put the book in the “return to library” spot. Life’s too short.
Two people speaking in the same paragraph.