What are your fan fiction gripes?

no here's a purely interest based questio with no bearing on my own projects whatsoever (sarcasm), how would you say do slowburn-y fics focused more on political drama but with a strong undercurrent of devotion and love just no real acting on it rank?
Kinda depends how i market it, I don't want to market my fantasy assassin drama lesbians as more of a shipfic than it is if that'll get read as like... dishonest marketing to try and get views?

 

Honestly? Pretty well.*

Slowburn's talked up a lot on tumblr, but it is actually a genre a lot of people get invested in--and the fact that it's more likely to be long means there's more for people to engage with, and speculate on. Political drama, same deal; slightly less accessible than, for instance, a coffee shop AU, but the flipside of that is that people have something to sink their teeth into. Again, engagement's more likely, and speculation about the direction the story is going.

(The real difficult part to get people to jump in on is going to be the lesbians, tbh. :/ Oh f/f, so underacknowledged and unappreciated....)

*Off the cuff summation based on a rough survey of something like ~20 fandoms. The author acknowledges that some of their assumptions are based on things like reclists, which in their circles often include slowburn and political drama in spades, which may introduce bias into their assessment.

 

hey two outta 3 ain't bad for the first big project since I switched to exclusively writing fic in english :P

 

How well the femslash is received would probably depend somewhat on the fandom, to be fair. I’ve been in a few fandoms now where femslash—while still unpopular compared to slash and het—is often very well-received. (And then there are a few glorious fandoms that are mostly femslash. This is by FAR the best aspect of the SU fandom tbh.)

Of course, it also depends heavily on the ship—in my experience, writing a Very Popular Ship often leads to a disproportionate amount of attention compared to less high-profile ships, even ships that are still relatively well-liked by the fandom?

 

ah yeah this is OC/established female main cast member, in Dragon Age, and the OC is an elven member of a highly elite assassin order so frankly I'm mostly waiting for accusations Marisela is a mary sue either way, or just no engagement at all, tho OC/established charatcer pairings are a bit more of a thing in Bioware RPG fandoms as opposed to other fandoms i've been in because of the power of canon romance routes with a customizable player character, but either way I'm ssssorta straining what's generally accepted deviations from the norm
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

It probably says something about me that I completely forgot that Marisela is an OC and not a canon side character, huh.

 

I AM? SO FLATTERED? But no this fic is literally like 90% OCs by volume, the named montilyets and zevran aside sdfghjkl

 

author, this is a quite interesting fic premise with decent writing, and I would have been happy to sink 30 minutes or so that I should have spent sleeping into it if you hadn't hit enter after every single sentence

 

Oh yeah no, the major chunk of the slowburn will be taken up by their status differences, the whole part where Marisela is an undercover plant by one of the Houses of a major assassin's guild and Plot Shenanigans (tm). In other words 'How many words of Marisela describing her boss in ridiculously loving romantically tinged terms can I write before I need to make Plot Happen to derail her from her writing poetry about the curl of Josephine's eyelashes, but you know, this is a totally normal way for a servant to feel about someone so great, nothing to see here, nope :)'

 

Thing that just bugs me and I keep seeing while tag-trawling: when people write origfic one-shots and prompt fic on AO3 and tag all the characters and pairings by name. The characters that only exist in this one, 2500 word story.

I mean, okay, it's an archive, you're allowed to just tag for your own use rather than the concerns of a random person tag-browsing, but if you do want an audience it seems like it might be more effective to use tags that mean anything at all to people who haven't already read the story.

 

Furry-specific issue; when you have a character who is a shark, and a separate character who is not a shark but whose name is Mako, things get confusing very quickly.

 

solution: body-swapping

 

okay but you have tmbg’s version of walking my cat named dog stuck in my head now...dastardly

 

"I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive your brother." Author, the entire audience spent five episodes of the anime screaming at the screen for this kid to stop forgiving his brother. There's not much canon evidence he ever did stop. And meanwhile it's really weird to give this line to someone who deliberately decided not to save the brother's life.

And even if none of that were true, it's just a douchy thing to say to someone about their abuser; and there is no sign in the text that you, author, are remotely aware of that.

 

I've noticed this mostly in furry fiction and I don't know if it's an issue anywhere else, but... gay-male-written furry fiction tends towards a creepy lack of women in the background. Characters interacting with their fathers never even hint at ever having had a mother. Background couples or characters are invariably all male. I know gay guys don't want to focus on women in their smut and the main male characters are the point, but when several chapters go by with no hint that women even exist it's mildly unsettling.

 

I defs get the desire to focus on dudes and their relationships but I think the big "woah what" for me was in one specific series where the whole background story of several female characters and their role in the werewolf universe was set up in book one...and then no female characters ever appeared or were mentioned again

 

Female-written m/m is somewhat more likely to remember female characters exist, but a lot more likely to bash them. Choices, choices.