What are your fan fiction gripes?

What recurring themes/plots/ideas/trope annoy or upset you?

Right now I am kind of peeved by Voltron Legendary Defender fics where Allura is not the heir due to primogeniture (Altean!Lance as the first born son and therefore heir) or due to not being allowed to rule in her own right (It's Shiro/her husband that's the heir/future king). I and by "peeved" I actually mean "incandescent with rage."

 

Background lesbians. When I'm looking for fics of a particular f/f pairing I tend to just not even bother if an m/m ship is listed in the tags. Because chances are the f/f pairing is just there to background lesbian to the m/m ship that I have no interest in. I'd rather authors just not even tag the background lesbian ships at all.

Trangst tends to be a peeve of mine because very rarely do I find fics where the trans version of this character is anything other than an angst fuckdoll.

Spoiler: sexual abuse whoooooo

And then there's sexual abuse. I will be the first to admit that I have a rape kink, but I am particular about it. We need to admit that some characters are in fact sexual abusers. We also need to think about how unlikely it is for others to be sexual abusers. I don't mind fics where someone who hasn't canonically molested someone does so. I do have a problem with this being haphazardly done and with no real thought to the character's personality. Cronus I can reasonably see raping someone. Porrim? Not so much.

 

maybe this will help; this meme generator on tumblr made an f/f bot just for that.

i also get annoyed by background lesbians but there's so few f/f that i ship that it doesn't bother me too much. on pairing tags though, i get frustrated when i look up [ X ] ship with characters a and b and a fic pops up, but it mostly has character a with another character, c, and character a / character b ship is just teased. why would you trick me like this whyyyy

 

It's basically the vast majority of what I ship so it plagues me fucking constantly. Or at least what I ship hard enough to want to read stories about. I might think DaveKat is cute but I've no interest in fic for it.

 

domestic AU's in general are just very not my thing

... as is most fluff, actually, but domestic AU's (especially those involving the characters having non-canonical children) is just very very no for me

 

background lesbians has also spent years vexing me. it's frustrating to think that I've finally found a fun fic for a ship I like and... nope. 1/20 of the fics that LOOK like the ship I want are actually about it to a significant degree, because FEMALES

but I came here to say that there's this one thing that's REALLY common in fic language (not unheard of outside but much more common in fic in my experience) that bothers me-- describing something as 'all xs and ys and zs' to show that it is comparable to x and y and z or composed of them or else full of them. Example: she was all curves and reds and movement.

I don't even know why but that phrasing bugs the bejesus out of me, and I thought my bejesus left years ago. Maybe it's overuse, maybe I saw a particularily bad use of it that pisses me off, but a lot of sincerely good fic writers use it so it must be mostly me who hates this.

It's jarring every time though because I hate that innocent way of phrasing descriptions SO MUCH.

 

My gripes are more with... presentation/organization, usually;

• I am deeply irritated by the people who decide that they need to tag everything under the sun in their fic (on AO3.) This ESPECIALLY applies to those massive collections of oneshots/drabbles that just accumulate relationship tags, character tags, and other tags, but sometimes the really long fics accumulate tags like this as well. There's a point at which you should just use the freaking notes section.
  • In general, tagging every single character and ship that shows up instead of only tagging the main characters and ships involved bugs me a lot; this oftentimes leads to the irritating background lesbians problem.
• If your fic has “Character A/Character B” in the relationship section, you DO NOT need to say “Character A/Character B is a thing btw” in the goddamn summary. We know. We can read. (This was on AO3, too, where the relationship section is prominent.)
• There are times where I wish I could just filter by one fandom and only one fandom, ie. filtering out all crossovers (and, most pertinently, oneshot collections that have a dozen different fandoms). I wouldn't want to do this all the time, but I wish I had the option. (That's more an AO3 issue than an issue with fanfic itself tho)

 

oh god i can't believe i forgot about the overuse of epithets but the overuse of epithets is my least favorite fanfic thing

 

I'm not gonna lie, tagging background ships pisses me off faster than anything. Like, I recognize that sometimes you wanna make sure people won't get blindsided. That's great. That's what the notes are for.

I didn't used to get this mad about it, but having to blacklist every variation of hetship for DAI just to find fics without obnoxious Sassy Gay Friend tropes was... a breaking point I think.

 

Hrm, a few, depending on fandom. Fandom-wide fanon/charactisations that don't actually come from canon but are accepted as such are probably my least favourite of all the Shit Fandom Does, though. Like sometimes it's fun, but other times (most other times), it's like, well, this has no basis in canon really, and everyone writes this character like this now, can we see a different interpretation of this character?

(Another one that's less a pet peeve and more 'cute.' is when people use character dialogue to display their knowledge of social justice rather than their plot and writing. I see this a lot with Metal Gear, which is hilarious. That entire series runs on defunct self-awareness, guys, and I'd reckon Otacon spends far more time on Reddit than Tumblr).

 

i usually tag side/background stuff as "some background [ship]" or like "[character name] makes a short appearance"

which i know AO3 has said totally fucks with their tagging system, but i've never experienced it causing issues so..? basically it allows me to mention stuff while both letting the readers know if it's not the main thing and also avoid extensive notes. and if i write a lot of fic with background [ship], then it might really become a semi useful tag.

eta: also i refuse to use epithets which makes writing slash interesting because you can't use the character names too much or it doesn't read well. but strategically placing pronouns in relation to names in a way that keeps everything clear is kind of really fun to me? so.

 

Can't read stuff that's written in past tense any more, or at least it needs to be really really good stylewise, because Homestuck absolutely ruined me.

Another thing is, if a character dynamic is clearly pitch in canon, and all the shipping fic is sickeningly sweet flushed. Augh. No. Give me prank wars, butting heads, give me people being little shits to each other, being absolutely infuriated by that one other person but still respecting the hell out of them, and give me them being a finely-tuned force of nature when someone tries to butt in.

 

first person fics. ive read a handful that were good but i usually cringe because going into first person means really getting into the character's head and most of the time the fic is just really unbelievable. like your characterization has to be absolutley on point for first person fic to work which is not an easy thing to do and characterization that might work very well in 3rd person often falls flat when we're literally inside the character's head.

 

That, and clearly pale dynamics that get hammered into flushed shape, because redrom is the only type of acceptable love there is. Augh.

(Pitch dynamics made red will never cease to make me scream. Give me two people to live to piss each other off. Hell, if you want redrom dynamics there there's situations where you need to show a united front, but even then. Give me people who snipe at each other while one is hooked up to an IV just after surgery and sassing right back. Hell, give me them trying to act lovey-dovey to troll everyone else.

Same. If I see the fic is first person I tend to immediately close the tab, unless it's written in a way that makes it seem like it's being narrated to me by the first person narrator.

 

this could also go under epithets but. describing characters by their hair colors. i know i used to do this too when i was younger, but please can you just use their names? it's not that hard. that said i will still. probably read fics with this if they are otherwise well-written but otherwise please no.

 

Hmmm, I guess I can understand that. My personal issues with heavily-tagged oneshot collections are:

-all the tags take up a lot of screen space (this mostly irritates me when reading fic on my phone & i have to scroll through it)
-the oneshots I might actually be interested in reading are included with probably about twenty that I'm not interested in. This especially applies when all of the author's oneshots are put in one fic, no matter the fandom.

In general, oneshot collections probably aren't going to interest me unless I already like the author in particular (& even then it's nice if the author separates them by fandom) or if they are all in a particular setting (ex. Modern Westeros.)

But hey, it's really just a personal gripe, nothing against you :p

"Background [ship]" is a happy medium that I see occasionally, & definitely helps with displaying which ships are actually featured as the main ships.

Definitely agreed on the pitch thing, and in general characters who are in canon snarky and/or assholes (to each other, or separately) being portrayed as lovey-dovey kind of makes me go :| - or at least, when this is done without the proper buildup (say, enemies to friends to lovers) and without keeping at least some element of snark/assholery.

First person definitely requires very good characterization, and even beyond that the general feel of first person just throws me off. Second person is very comfortable (thanks, Homestuck), and third person is always safe, but first? ...eh.

Also. Also something that has doggedly confused me throughout my experience reading Marvel Cinematic Universe is. Where did Clint Barton/Phil Coulson come from? Why did fandom decide that was a thing? Steve/Tony, I get (esp. snarky/pitch.) Steve/Bucky, I get. Most permutations of the Avengers, I get. But why? Why is it such a big Thing?

I mean. I've definitely read fics that pull it off / execute it well. But I've also read a lot that just have it as a given and I'm just like..???????

Oh, speaking of MCU, I get irritated by the prevalance of Darcy/X, where Darcy is more or less a self-insert. I mean... I understand self-insert shipping and I understand that as a snarky young female nerd (who has no superpowers), Darcy more or less represents most of us fans, but... I feel like using Darcy as more or less a glorified self-insert kind of robs her of her actual character. Why not just write an actual self-insert? ...stigma, I guess.

(Also, I feel like I might actually be interested in reading Darcy/Jane or even Darcy/Jane/Thor, but it's nearly always Darcy/Bucky, Darcy/Steve, or Darcy/Steve/Bucky. And it's nearly always a soulmate fic! The unoriginality bugs me.)

Bluh, I don't know if I'm just being petty/elitist here but... it bugs me, is all I'm trying to say.

 

Here's some weird ones -

-IDK if this should be a peeve, or if I'm just an ancient dinosaur, but when the characters in smut have to stop everything to give verbal consent, no matter what's happening, every time they have sex seems really unnatural to me. But again, maybe I'm just way out of the loop.

-I have the opposite problem, when fanficcers user descriptors like 'the smaller male', at least it'll remind me visually how the scene is supposed to look. When the bots are described as their alt mode, suddenly there's one humanoid mech interacting with a literal plane or ambulance just for a moment in my head and it takes me out of the story. I'm all robots putting the moves on other robot in their alt modes, but most of the stories where this crops up aren't about that. I don't know, this one might go away the longer I'm in the transformers fandom. I used to have a big problem with some of the..fanon terms for naughty bits, but I got used to them after a few days.

- A callout to the transformers fandom, for being so small that there's not enough good fanfic for all the pairings I ship.

- overly formal/purple/flowery POV from characters who are rougher and more down to earth.

 

I didn't know that was a thing, but I am horrified and I know what to avoid now.

In general, one of my least-favorite things is shipfics where the the author pairs characters A and B, and not characters A and C, and so in order to make this make sense, they decide to make C either a complete jerk or guilty of doing something horrible to character A in order to "justify" their pairing--never mind how out of character that is. Like, you are the author. You can pair whoever you want for whatever reasons. If you really can't handle writing B and C having a rivalry make up a reason for C to go abroad, just don't write them badly.

Timetravel fics are my guilty pleasure and I am in the process of writing one now; I get so frustrated when they just turn into slightly-smoother canon rewrites though. Especially when they're in a fandom that has a lot of canon material and they come complete with large swathes of quoted text...there's no way someone's getting through, like, 40-some volumes of manga material or 7 books worth of canon like that. They're gonna burn out and the fic will end up unfinished and I'm gonna cry. Also it's more fun when the timetraveler changes things.

I am always bitter about how little well-written long gen there is. I don't have a lot of ships; even then I am usually more interested in seeing them cuddle and be happy in the same room than anything more detailed. Cater to me random people on the internet (sarcasm)