...this isn't quite what I wanted : < I guess three is way too many lesbians to have alive. Thank you for answering the question though! I'll store this in the brainlogs anyway.
I reread these recently, and the pacing is kinda frustrating at parts, but the trilogy honestly held up way better than I expected it to. And Spoiler Yeah, A and B are together, and I think C is quietly crushing hard but thinking she'll never be part of the relationship because A and B are Meant To Be, but after B dies, she comforts A and they find emotional intimacy together. On the one hand, frustrating, because bury your gays. On the other hand, the series itself explicitly says that yeah, if B had made it out alive, A, B, and C would probably have all been together. And even with one death, we've still got a loving lesbian relationship (with a significant age difference, iirc?) that's pretty much framed as a definitely happy long-term thing. And even if B died, she was a lady in a high-death-rate, pseudo/semi/sometimes-military role, and I'll accept a death there much more than I'll accept a death for reasons of Because Tragedy. Also, these books came out in the late eighties, and I'm really impressed Mercedes Lackey was able to slip in polyamorous lesbians in any serious capacity. That being said, I think this was the first Valdemar series, and the later books in the series make for much more satisfying reads, in my opinion. Her second trilogy (I think) has a gay protagonist, even though bury your gays does slip in there. And a later set of books (might be her third/fourth trilogies, it's just been so long since I read these) has a gay major supporting character, where, in retrospect, I get major nonbinary vibes. He gets a happy relationship with a total sweetheart with no gay-burying involved whatsoever. And even though the soulmates thing definitely slips into Valdemar books here and there, it's one of the versions of the trope I don't actually mind very much. And I dodge it entirely in fic, I'm not sure I've ever even finished a fanfic where soulbonding was a major plot point. I'm not sure why this series pings me differently, I've gotta reread some of these books sometime to see what it is about the construction of the romance that hits me in a happy place. Because usually, soulmates are very much not my thing, but most of the soulbonded couples I can remember in this series make me really happy.
This isn't precisely a pet peeve and is very much a Me Problem, but the main reason I don't read more fanfic is that I'm way, way oversensitive to even slightly awkward prose or character voices that feel off. To the point of wanting to nope out after a sentence or two even if I like everything else/know the author/really really want to understand what people are talking about. Re: other stuff in this thread: I'm also on Team "Soulmate fic creeps me the hell out" and very "???" about the sheer volume of A/B/O.
Oh, one that probably does count as a pet peeve: video game fic that takes game mechanics literally when it doesn't make sense, or where people are awkwardly shouting attack names. If you're describing a fight and I'm imagining it in the game engine, there's a problem. (I've also seen this with published DnD novels.)
I will read the thread in whole and reply later, but I have a pet peeve when things are labeled as [major canon ship] but are actually... basically gen, and there's virtually no ship stuff at all? This is for the reverse reason that you might think, I am usually looking for the gen, but nonetheless. (It's why my massive AU fic is tagged "canon typical shipping" because that tag needs to be more of a thing. we already have "canon typical violence" in common use, cmon guys.)
Yeah I have this problem too and it's the reason i only read recc'd fic anymore. I just can't stand amateur prose. I'm not sure why. Maybe too many creative writing classes of reading classmates awkward first stories? I'm in the camp of thinking ABO is fucking hilarious. Perhaps because it's not really prevalent in the fandoms I frequent. Perhaps also because the kinks are not inherently squick-y to me. ABO is frequently in our pile of bad fic to read outloud because of how it inevitably warps people in OOC madness and is usually accompanied by Shitty Cliche Storm.
I feel pretty bad about my brain's prose snobbery, 'cause it hits ESL people a lot, but. My inner editor just starts screaming and I can't focus on reading the thing.
Pretty much the main reason why I rarely read fanfiction (and sometimes abandon original fiction as well). I edit pretty much everything I read as I go along, so once the editing reaches a certain threshold, I just can't follow the story or attend to anything but my dumb critical brainthoughts. ETA: I also feel bad about this. :(
i'm a ESL person and i suffer from this. my attempts to read zootopia fic were somewhat painful (and, honestly, it's the reason i don't publish anything i write. i'm very critical of my own writing and i know it's pretty amateurish, i can't stop editing the things, and the only thing i wrote and published gives me massive anxiety,)
so many things. apologies for quote pileup. +1, and why the character I play as bisexual in RP self-describes as non-preferential. bisexual isn't a term he has; if it was explained to him it'd be very much "oh yeah, yes, that" but no one has done that yet. ME. IT'S MY GRIPE because I can't follow the plot through that much description, my attention deficit brain wanders off entirely. Mix description and action/dialogue? Cool. I'm here for the characters and I want to see them doing things; I enjoy meta discussion on worldbuilding and etc but that's in the form of META, not as part of a fic. Point 1: Same, oh my fucking god. I had a person I was trying to co-write a KH fic with (we are now no longer on speaking terms and I have happily jettisoned her ideas) and she kept trying to shoehorn a character into a Roxas-type plotline with the whole data world thing, and I just kept being like, THIS MAKES NO SENSE IN THE CONTEXT OF THE STORY. THERE IS NO REASON FOR HIM TO BE IN THAT SITUATION. STOP TRYING TO CLONE THE CANON. Point 2: I read canted as "sung," which is significantly more hilariously inappropriate. +1 and an RP pet peeve as well.
Interestingly plotted, well characterised fic that devolves into PWP after the first time the characters have sex. I don't mind too much if the ending's like that, but I've read too many fics where all the the plot threads are just dropped while you get chapter after chapter of really generic sex scenes. (Also halfhearted britpicking. Either do your research properly or put an author's note up and ignore it entirely)
Corollary: fight scenes where people get hit a crap-ton of times. I especially shouldn't be picturing little health bars going down when they get hit. (I'm not asking for full "all fights are over in a few seconds" realism here, but I used up my tolerance for fights that just go "attack attack attack try a different attack" reading Bleach in high school.)
Tip: circumstances under which either Batman or Superman are inspired to utter the phrase "What the fuck" should not occur more than once per fic, much less multiple times per chapter, and the severity of the situation should be around the order of a planet not being where it was expected to be, or possibly having had its entire mass replaced by pink elephants singing show tunes. Even then, Superman would still probably substitute "fudge."
ALL CAPS even for shouting dialouge i think all caps can sometimes be used stylistically and sometimes it does make the fic better but most of the time whenever i see all caps in a fic i cringe
anything where cronus is even the slightest bit a decent person i will violently reject it unless its built up slowly. veeeeeeery slowly does this tie into my sore nuts about totally-not-kantula-cronkri? yes. very much so. hell, even kanruss would work better for the dynamic theyre going for. why would you pick the two douchiest characters in homestuck if youre just going to neuter them
Sympathetic villain-centric fanfic gripe: people writing amoral but not irredeemable charismatic jerks as morally conflicted emotional wrecks with a thin veneer of disagreeableness on the outside. Seriously, "likes a select few people and wants them to like him back" is not the same thing as "understands that murdering people and blowing up planets is bad". If you want the guy to be an empathetic, guilt-ridden hero plagued by low self-esteem, fine, you can write about how he magically grows a conscience and begins to regret his actions because they were wrong and hurt people instead of because they didn't work out the way he wanted them to, but stop pretending he had morals and just forgot about them because he was really upset at the time. #grump grump
99% of the time, there's no reason to use tildes in a fic, and some people apparently need to have their tilde key confiscated (as punctuation, not for ñ)
OH, not a gripe of mine, I read all of first/second/third-person povs just fine. But ever since homestuck sucked me in, I've been wallowing in all second person writing all the time always, because it just feels so fricking good. Now. Second person is pretty commonplace in homestuck fandom, but when I slid on over into the transformers fandom, I had a brief mini-crisis over oh shiiiiiiit, should I change my everything? Because otherwise everyone will hate my work and hate me, catastrophizing, catastrophizing, etc. I stuck to second person, because one, inertia. Two, I want to enjoy writing things and I just love the hell out of second person. And three, I figured I'd just win people's love through sheer volume. But here's the funny thing. I've had multiple people comment that 'oh, it's interesting that you write in [voice], I usually hate it, but this was nice!' And until last night, not a single person got [voice] correct. I've had a number of comments on my work being in first person (and one about it being in... third person?). I never ask why they say it that way, because I don't want to be like 'awww, thanks! but also... you're wrong. tell me why.' I speculated a while back that maybe it's because first and second person dump you directly into the narrator's shoes, and maybe that second person is uncommon enough (outside of homestuck) that some people aren't even processing that it's an option? But it's so funny to me, because I was expecting to hit a lot of people's NOPE button, but nearly everyone who's commented about me pleasantly surprising them has gotten the NOPE thing I did completely wrong.
this is probably a very specific pet peeve of mine, but i read a...lot of davekat. and one of the big trends i'm noticing as of late is that either dave or karkat, never both, has not only all their emotional problems and trauma that they have in canon, but a laundry list of others, all dialed up to 11. (this wouldn't normally necessarily bug me, but in this case, it does). and the other one focuses his entire self on taking care of his alien bf, and all the issues that he might have had in canon or the particular world the author is working with are handwaved away entirely so that he can Fully Devote Himself to taking care of his boyfriend. there is also a shiny version of this, where the Emotional Support does have problems, but only when it's convenient to the plot. illness is not convenient >:0 and kind of a peeve: people telling me that unless my writing has some underlying ~purpose~ or topic i want to address, then i shouldn't write it, and i should especially never write AUs unless those have a purpose besides "it makes me happy" because they're Silly and therefore Bad
