Minor annoyance, but when timelines don't match up. The characters leave a scene, have a long conversation, and when they get back nothing's changed. Not quite on the level of How Not to Write a Novel's citation of a character throwing a ball against a wall, watching a plane's progress across the sky, delivering a long monologue, and then catching the ball, but still.
Some people just leave me boggling at the total lack of comprehension of the canon. When the same list denies that a canonically abusive character is abusive while making another character turn evil for no reason, laughs off another character's mass murder, apparently doesn't realise two characters they've listed as romantic partners are a seventeen-year-old and an under-twelve, and claims a character is a fan of TV shows which wouldn't exist until two decades after the canon timeline, I wonder what the hell game they were playing. ETA: What's especially weird is that they laughed off the mass murder, but the other characters are still "rebelling" against this character and the one who they have turncoating to join them is treated as evil even though the one who actually did the things is not.
Same person; dude, can we not describe the perfectly compos mentis but mute character as "basically like a dog"?
So today I learned that I find it just as incredibly annoying when people meeble about "well you could read it either way" with obviously-canon het couples as well as m/m ones. Just because they don't make out onscreen doesn't mean they aren't in love! How can you read Rose and Martin as platonic?!
I now have eight possible different ways to arrange the Strilonde family tree in an AU and no idea which one would work best long-term. Spoiler: size (Purple = parent/child, red = reproductive partners, blue = siblings, orange = artificial creation, crown = OC)
IDK, probably by being autistic and, like, twelve when I read the book? Edit: I wouldn't insist it's canon or the intended reading or anything! But it was definitely my reading as a kid.
I was autistic too and even younger, and it never occurred to me that they'd be anything but a couple. But I get what you mean. Maybe I just picked up on different patterns in fiction in general than you tended to?
I'm trying to look for good osomatsu san fic (I'm picky and the tags I'm looking through looks like it just won't have good fanfic) And theres characters named Ichimatsu and Jyushimatsu, and author is calling them Itchy and Juicy??? Thats... pretty weird :weary:
It belatedly occurs to me that Kintsugi might be a good audience for this story of Why You Should Always Read The Tags: Some background, before we begin: The canon has a het love triangle. Boy A loves girl B, girl C loves Boy A, Boy A sort-of likes C back. Recently A and C started dating, but A was not invested in the relationship (it's really, really clear he'd rather spend time with B than C), and C eventually breaks up with him because of this. There are two authors in this fandom with very similar AO3 handles -- let's say one is Llama and the other is Larna. (These are not their actual handles.) Larna is in a fandom Discord server I'm in. They write a lot of aged-up joke porn, and they had a joke bondage fic in the works that they were talking about for about a week. So when I got a notification from AO3 that L(something)a had posted a fic with a title like "bound to you (don't set me free)", I eagerly clicked and started reading. I didn't bother to look at rating or tags. Early in the fic, I realized that the setting was immediately after the installment where C broke up with A. This struck me as a bit strange, since in canon they're around 14-15 and Larna pretty reliably ages them up, but lots of people do "canon timeline but they're all 16/18/21+ when it happens" for various reasons, and usually communicate this via tags (which again, I'd skipped). And the tone was way more melodramatic angst than I'm used to for joke porn, so it could've been a flashback? I mentally shrugged and kept reading. The fic continued to be A angsting about how he didn't love C and he'd hurt her by being in a relationship with her, and shouldn't have dated her at all when he wasn't that into her. This seemed to pretty reasonably reflect canon. Still couldn't see how you'd get joke bondage out of this setup, but I had faith in Larna. Then I got to the line: "I'm. Physically. Unable. To. Love." and then crushed his ice-cream cone in his hand. "He might have been crushing his own heart," the narrator told us. And I realized... this wasn't joke porn by Larna. This was aro issuefic by Llama.
Hey, maybe Larna could have written a fic with that plot where he then went to a kink party and asked someone to tie him up to punish him for that heinous waste of ice cream, you don't know, I believe in Larna.
tfw you want a specific AU flavor of your OTP and slowly realize as you start picking out the details that it's basically [unfinished and now deleted fic series] by [your fav author that nuked their entire Ao3 and disappeared from the internet] ;_____;
The inevitable sad realization once again, because apparently it didn’t sink in the last three million times, that searching tags is frustratingly inefficient, because the qualities of a story that really make it special aren’t things you can search that way. It’s like expecting people to tag for whether it will suit your tastes specifically. There are definitely things that are more likely to match up with stuff you like, but by far the most accurate predictor is the author.
I tend to have some luck by checking the author's bookmarks, or checking the people who bookmarked my favorite fic and checking their works/bookmarks, and doing a spiderweb of shared taste from there... But boy howdy, is that a process
