leverage ficcers writing eliot as the 'never smiles' trope. he smiles plenty! he's not always grumpy, either. he's just grumpy more often than is socially expected. and he's not inherently terrifying. he would never have been able to pass as a country singer, baseball player, etcetera, if he were. i'm getting real tired of one-note bitchface eliot. he's honestly a sweet guy and a good friend. did you even watch the show. augh.
Hell, even half the time Eliot is being grouchy, it's because someone disrespected one of the many things he's deeply passionate about and he's angrily defending it. "They're called flight attendants!"
authors who put 'modern AU' in the summary instead of the tag so I can't filter it out. like for the love of god please put more in the tags than just the relevant characters, 'Im trying to weed out my least favourite tropes here.
Okay, I LOLed at this comment about weird BDSM/slavefics: Spoiler: sex slavery mention I guess the point is luxury porn? Still kind of funny.
On a similar note- photo-collage moodboards at the top of Ao3 fics, which makes the interface go all wobbly on mobile, and tend to actively jar me out of immersion. My brain wants to do the pictures, dammit! Don’t tell my brain what to see before you tell my brain what to see!
[thinks about all the ways in which i try to filter out group chat fics] yeah... mood (i mean, ao3 savior has a summary blacklist as well as a tag blacklist, but it's still annoying :p)
you add the Tampermonkey extension (which is in the chrome store) and then install the ao3 savior and ao3 savior config scripts! the other script i use is ao3 crossover savior - hides works with too many fandoms, and you can edit the "maxFandoms" value to decide how many fandoms is too many (default is 2, but i have mine set to 6 for reasons) ao3 also has a list of unofficial ao3 tools!
Somehow, even though I KNOW the driver's seat is on the right in Britain, even though I've watched the show twice over and have SEEN the layout of the Bentley, I still keep accidentally picturing Crowley on the left side of the car, and have to jarringly re-arrange my mental image of the whole scene when I catch it.
is there anything on ao3 to deal with the glut of 'crossovers' that are actually a single fandom with two outlets? good omens, for instance, which often has two 'fandoms' listed on each fic, the book and the tv series. or avengers fics often having 'mcu' and 'all media' listed. it's hard to find actual crossovers for these fandoms because of that.
Those also create the exact inverse problem, where if you're very into one particular version of canon, it's nigh impossible to filter fics that just have to do with that universe, and aren't some omni-adaptation amalgam. Brought to you by, no I really only want Young Justice fic about the versions of the characters from the cartoon, with the cartoon series of events, please stop using that tag for fic obviously about the completely incompatible comics versions.
Tag's still buried in Connor/Tim even though they've never even been onscreen together in the show, I take it?
i haven't even checked, but probably. The thing is, it's a perfectly sane ship in the comics, so if you're writing all-media fic then fine go ahead, enjoy the dynamic, but please don't then tag it with the show where they have an 8 year age gap and have never spoken to each other, it gives the weirdest sort of cognitive dissonance.
Big yeet. This isn’t a fanfic-only problem for me either. If I read anything with a recurring setting, I will eventually have a mental map spontaneously generated from bits of description and probably spaces I’m familiar with in real life or on TV or something. I’ll become incredibly discombobulated if something contradicts it. Flashback to that time I managed to form a mirror image mental map of the newbie area in a text game, even though navigation was done entirely by typing map directions. (N, S, E, W, and U, D, as well as NE, SW, etc.) I had east and west confused in my head, but only for that one area, and not for the east-west road it branched off of, or for any other areas. I’d occasionally get oddly turned around and not know why, but mostly I navigated seamlessly. It wasn’t until I mapped the whole thing on graph paper that I realized anything was wrong. Then I was even more likely to get lost because I couldn’t easily invert my mental picture of what the area looked like.
I’m very much like that with character appearance, personally. The best personal example is probably Looking For Alaska, where the titular Alaska’s hair color is not, as far as I remember, defined until fairly late in the book. Turns out it’s dark brown. I had spent the entire book up to that point picturing her as a blonde. The mention of her hair color really threw me off. (Also, as for settings...I once read an AGGRESSIVELY British SU humanstuck set in England, and there’s a few scenes in cars. I have only just now realized that despite everything about the fic being incredibly British, I had pictured the cars as...American-style cars. WHOOPS.)
lord yes. please, people, either give a loose description of your characters early on, or don't describe them at all. i lean toward the former, because it's hard for me to form a mental picutre off zero cues. i might describe too much in my own original work, but it feels workmanlike, if not graceful. just a paragraph. at least as much as the police would mention if they put out an APB, you know? middle eastern male, 25-30, 6'2", long hair, goatee, walking a baby dragon. just the facts.
Writer, you don't need to tag your fic "cock" if it's gay porn. We can assume those are there. I mean, yes, non-cis characters exist, but it would be rude to tag them with their genitals and cis people are the presumed social default so with them it's just baffling.
speaking of unnecessary tags, am i missing something about the ‘character of color’ tag i keep seeing? because it feels like So Woke self-backpatting at best, and at worst a way for borderline or subconscious racists to pass the fic over. i mean, would anyone search such a vague tag? it certainly conveys no information to a reader searching by fandom. e.g. anyone reading leverage fic expects hardison to exist.
It might be for them to be able to look over their own fics and see how they're doing. I know someone who tags bechdel/reverse bechdel pass/fail for that reason.
