What are your fan fiction gripes?

And while we're at it: when a smutty fanfic has exactly the kind of sex dynamic I like, but the author is trying to up their writing game and keeps failing in small ways that take me out of the smut but aren't quite hilarious enough to be entertaining on their own.

Spoiler: NSFW

[Male character] smacked his lips over your defenseless nape, allowing his teeth to catch on your delicate skin and nibble at his discretion.

EDIT:

Spoiler: more NSFW

He tossed [reader's clothes] aside and dragged his eyes over [reader's] naked form, shedding his own clothes while keeping his eyes locked[sic] [reader's],

That is quite an achievement.

 

Am I the only one who hates "You" fic? I do not want what he's doing, TYVM.

 

(edited to update quote)

Second-person reader-insert is not generally my cuppa, but I occasionally venture there if the other tags seem to indicate something will be My Jam.

Anyway, I still prefer it over third-person reader-inserts where one of the character is [y/n] ("your name").

 

Maintain eye contact through shirt to establish dominance.

 

Okay but now I’m imagining eye-nipples and I am very afraid

 

I was imagining a button-down shirt.

 

i'm losing my shit at this misspelling found in a fic summary (emphasis mine);

 

Please tell me it's a virus that eats its victims please tell me its a virus that eats its victims please please tell me it's a virus that eats its victims

 

Are we just going to let "fiend a cure" go unremarked?

 

That's the next priority after finding out if it's a virus that eats its victims

(please be a virus that eats its victims)

 

Unfortunately this is a Detroit: Become Human fic, so... probably not? Full summary:

(author's note also says they're "not very good at english," so they might be ESL)

 

:( this is the worst news I've heard all day.

Also English is Hell, I think that's a pretty good 'practicing at English' summary!

 

English is hell to learn as a second language. I've been learning it for like, twenty years and i still get all confused about my prepositions, so i'm pretty forgiving about it but

punctuation whomst

 

I used to think I wanted to be an ESL teacher. Then I realized that I have no idea how to explain this hot mess to anyone. I fuck up English grammar all the damn time, and it's the only language I'm fluent in.

 

English has the advantage of having actually less prepositions and ... verb conjugations, i think? than Brazilian Portuguese, and not being a gendered language, but by gods did i suffer to get used to the sentence structure. it's hilarious how the most basic elements of a language can be the most baffling

 

I was so excited about the new AO3 search so I could filter out the AUs I don't like, and I went to try it on Les Mis, and...~8 of the fics on the filtered top page are untagged Modern AUs. Please, I am begging you, Les Mis fandom, tag your AUs so I can avoid them and I don't have to whine about you!

*I filtered out modern, college, high school, and coffee shop AUs, and only one of the modern fics on the front page had any AU tag at all

 

Honestly, the failure to tag AUs is--speaking as someone who writes a lot of AUs--completely fucking baffling to me. :/ IT'S NOT THAT HARD TO TAG YOUR SHIT, PEOPLE!

 

Even worse, by not tagging you're limiting your audience too. There's been a lot of times where I want a certain type of AU to scratch an itch, and filter out everything but those AUs--not tagging them gets you coming and going.

 

This is an excellent point too! I hadn't actually considered that but you're 100% right.

 

i again want studies on the tagging habits of fandoms

Also like not just data collection of the hard numbers on ao3. But like ethnographic studies of the fandoms and how they write their fic.

Dear Anthropology,

Do fandom based ethnographies more.