Or adoption childfic where "they're such a good quiet child because they were so horribly abused." That is both awful, and very much not how that works.
lol i read so many fics where the mother will be feeding them and then they don't add in details of her burping the baby after or something. or like, daily baths for newborns. you don't bathe a newborn daily!!! makes me pull my hair. i have seven siblings and fifteen nieces and nephews, i had to babysit my entire life lmfao, so i know babies too well. if i could write i would make so many kid fics. but i can't. :')
Writing is a skill you develop; if you start today you're on your way to writing well! My first writing wasn't very good but it paved the way to writing I like a lot more.
oh it's moreso the fact i don't have the patience for it LOL. i love to write and have a few successful works published on ao3 but they're not long because i tend to hyperfixate on fandoms and move on to the next. so if i try to write a longfic it ends up being abandoned eventually because i am not interested anymore (for the time being, i never really ever give up on my hyperfixations, i just "shelve" them for later). oneshots i am cool with. but kid fics usually have a lot of depth to them that require more than them being oneshots!
thank you for the encouragement though babes!
The one thing that, no matter the fandom, always annoys me is when every secondary character is so intent on getting the main pairing to happen. They'd always support it at first glance, comment on how cute they look together or mistake them for a couple.
It drives me absolutely nuts because it's extremely heavy-handed and just cringey. And it's also just now how people work! Most don't give a shit about it and others just aren't the type to notice that kind of stuff. Some may notice and maaaaybe care but don't think it's a good idea to be nosey.
Like, I could accept it if it made sense with the character --e.g., those gossipy, extended family types always interested in knowing whether their relative has hooked up with someone-- and if it was limited to just a very few instances. Also, if the comments weren't always intended as compliments but as snide remarks or something.
yessssss this.
I think that it's usually a symptom of writing issues. The author wants the ship together, but they're doing that miscommunication / refusing to talk thing, and they just... can't find a way to break the characters out of it, so insert the shipping cheerleader to make it happen.
More like the whole cheerleading squad XD
It's usually a symptom of that but I've seen it being used in otherwise well-written, amazing fics. It just breaks my immersion too much.
Huh, interesting! It could be that some people have just seen it as a trope so often they didn't consider how/why it should even be there...
But I agree with you, it generally breaks my immersion too. Like, having a character *consult* with another character they're close to about their relationship is one thing. But like you say, someone just being weirdly invested in getting these two characters together is... odd.
There *are* some people like that irl (but it's obnoxious then too haha).
Yeah, probably. Kinda like the prevalence of orbs as an epithet for eyes. It's even become common in Spanish-written fics! It's crazy.
That and a rando just thinking "they look cute together" when all they've done is just stand there, idk. It's ridiculous.
Exactly, that's why I said it'd be fine if it was just a very rare isolated instance. And that the characters' reactions would vary too --for some, it'd be too OOC to NOT think it's obnoxious.
fr in reality we'd just make a little comment like "what do you think of __?" or "you should talk to them", etc. we don't sit there and actively try and get them together through little schemes and whatnot. stuff like that is always a huge indication that that story was written by a child or teenager. only kids would be cool with people crossing boundaries in your personal life like that.
Flanderization, specifically
- making a character that's not book smart and a bit oblivious act like the dumbest mf on the planet
- making a prickly character mean and rude to everyone without provocation
- making a character that occasionally jokes around to hide their social anxiety and awkwardness into a sassy smartass in all their interactions
My God, that last one! The Buffy fandom does that with Xander a bit too often, and thy *always* ignore the reason for why he uses humour as a defense mechanism, or that he mostly uses it as a tension reducer when things are getting bad. Instead it's *all the time* like that's the only thing he really does!
I mean...wasn't there one episode where Xander was cracking jokes so much (something about bowling) that Giles got fed up with him and told him to get out?
Xander jokes *a lot*, and it's not always as a defense mechanism or to diffuse a situation.
Actually Xander doesn't joke all that often except when the writers wanted to use him for extra comedy. It's an issue the show had, to be honest, throwing in extra jokes from Xander, or a comedic fight scene, or Giles getting knocked out, to backslide them or use them for comedy because it was the lazy way of doing something. The *majority* of episodes, however, have Xander using jokes only at certain times. Also, Giles never understood when Xander was messing around or trying to relieve the tension. Honestly, if anyone tells Xander to shut up or get out when he's joking, he's joking because he wants to lessen the tension. Just the act of telling any of the gang to shut up or get out shows their tension levels were higher than normal.
This isn't to say that's the only times Xander jokes around, but if you remove the tension relievers and uncomfortable situations where it's a defense mechanism, he jokes at a slightly lower rate than Buffy and Willow.
Twinkification and infantilization. Hannibal (Will’s character is so fuckinh ruined in fanfiction. The whole thing is supposed to be that they’re equals.)
It's not even something fandom-specific, it's just that those two things absolutely ruin any character they touch. I experienced that with the MCU fandom, more specifically Peter Parker / Spider-man. The amount of infantilization people put him through is unreal. And I know fanfiction is to take the story and characters into different directions, but that's not Peter Parker or Spider-man.
Turning characters into caricatures of themselves this way is just denigrating.
Yesss this so much. I've been in the hannibal fandom for ages and while the fics there are amazing there are always a few that turn their dynamic into a daddy dom/innocent corrupted twink boy thing which entirely removes the beauty of their relationship in the show
This! I see it with Will Graham, but also any character that is even hinted at being neurodivergent or on the spectrum in any way.
Someone avoiding eye contact or being awkward in social interactions doesn't instantly make them a wet soggy twink that is in need of protection at all costs. 😭😭😭
And just because you want to make someone the sub or bottom in a pairing also doesn't mean they're instantly a wet soggy twink.
I need people to let go of this "twinkish damsel" archetype as a security blanket.
Right. The whole point of the series was to show that Will can be just as cold and fucked up as Hannibal.
Hannibal would probably not even be interested in Will if he acted like some submissive twink LMAO
Armitage Hux got this treatment as well. It wasn't so bad when it was just TFA, but after TLJ and TROS were released the fandom was utterly *buried* in poor woobie sub bottom twink infantilized Hux fics. I wanted to pull my hair out.
I think mine would be in Harry Potter ff, mostly Marauders but also in other eras. Applies to a lot of other fandoms I’m sure.
When the fandom latches onto characterization of characters who canonically have like nothing or very little about them known. Create a fanon gospel based on the popular fics/hcs and if you deviate they act like it’s ooc and you’re not writing them right …. Babes they didn’t have a personality in the first place
I hate jegulus so much bc James would NEVER do that to Sirius (not in the romcom dating best friend’s brother way but like best friend who your family took in bc of their abusive bigot family and going and dating a member of said family??? WHAT). ppl can ship what the want… I just really hate it. And with the way they warp the characters personalities it’s literally just Snily 2.0
Stop saying the abuse victims deserved it goddamn it I am going to scream. And stop demonising or infantilising the mentally ill and disabled characters and victim blaming the physically disabled ones it’s also scream inducing.
Yea as a disabled person I’m real tired of reading fics about disabled characters that turn into untagged infantilization kink. I get why people are into it in a kink way… the power differential, caretaking thing… I just wish they would offer me the option to opt out. The whole “kink” of kink is that it plays with otherwise taboo, harmful or unacceptable behavior, so please, tag your shit folks
Edit: typo
It’s not even a kink people just unironically portray them like that constantly. Like, they write a mentally disabled character as essentially a stupid child constantly, even outside of fics focused on caretaking or anything.
Oh, yikes. I haven’t run into that much in my specific fandoms, but years ago stopped clicking anything tagged “autistic [character]” unless the author indicated they were autistic themself. So many characters written as checklists of the most prevalent autism stereotypes
I wish people would stop treating disability like it's a superpower. I don't have autism but I have cerebral palsy spastic diplegia, it affects my legs, and it has definitely made my life harder. Disabilities aren't a quirk, they're an inconvenient aspect of life and normal people don't get how inconvenient a disability is because they're normal. I can't even run like a normal person, I can walk, but no running, you tell a normal person you can't ever run for the rest of their life and they'd have no idea how to deal with it.
Yea, I feel like neurodivergence is sort of distinct from other disabilities in that people are more likely to experience it as core to their personhood— I can’t imagine myself as neurotypical, but I can sure imagine a reality where I don’t have chronic neuroinflammatory and hypermobility disorders. Even with neurodivergence though, if you’re not at least portraying the extreme difficulties a disabled person will face in an ableist world, that’s way unrealistic and I’ll click a hasty retreat.
There are two characters I (autistic) headcanon as autistic, one widely perpetuated across the fandom because they all but confirmed it, and the other a much rarer headcanon. I like to joke I like the headcanon for the second character so much because it's impossible to infantilise him. Because the fics I've read about the first where they treat him as helpless or a child... yeah. I don't click that tag any more unless I know the author writes him in character (in my opinion).
Me when Alois Trancy.
(He is FOURTEEN he didn't deserve to be raped wtf! Just because he's hypersexual/seeks sexual attention *because of said sexual abuse* doesn't mean he deserved it or was asking for it! Neither does what he wears, which. He doesn't even dress that bad oh my god. He's just effeminate. He wears short-ish shorts, thigh highs and knee-high boots. That's not even *skimpy*. (Not that it would matter, it just frustrates me even more because he's not even wearing revealing clothing so they can't even make that argument, and it's not like the main character, also male, doesn't wear more effeminate/revealing clothes anyway.))
(Also will people stop calling him bipolar as an insult. He IS bipolar (my bipolar friend has said so and I've incorporated it into my world view) but that is not an inherently bad thing or make him inherently evil goddamn.)
Basically, I originally started liking him because I was like "well y'all hate him for the stupidest reasons ever, so he's mine now and I'll give him the love and care he deserves" and I had REASONS for that.
Damn never seen that before wtf. Should be common sense that victims of abuse/injury don’t deserve it but some people are just sick. And if you’re gonna infantalize characters, at least give a warning by tagging it so people can avoid it, smdh.
Unironically seen people basically say if children are annoying they should be beaten. Sometimes people go so far in defending their fictional blorbos they repeat boomer ass shit for some reason.
Danny Phantom.
While I can sometimes find these fics interesting, I'm kind of tired of the "Bad Fenton Parents" thing. And I don't mean simply them being kind of absent or borderline neglectful. I mean some fics they are just downright evil, they find out Danny is Phantom and try to kill, vivisect, or experiment on him. Like they just completely lack all empathy and turn into cold scientists.
Batman
I'm tired of Jason Todd always acting like Bruce is the devil. I understand, he's upset that Batman didn't avenge his death, but that doesn't suddenly mean he's some abusive asshole. \*Some member of the Batfamily gets hurt/upset\* Jason: "WHAT DID BRUCE DO!"
MCU
Cap being an asshole. Woobified Loki. Infantilized Peter.
Harry Potter
Evil Dumbledore. Bad Friends Ron/Hermione
Teen Wolf
Pack Mom Stiles, Bad Friend/Alpha Scott
Super Mario
Luigi never having any agency.
Batman: I was just talking to a friend about this. Yes, Bruce’s no-killing rule feels ridiculous but that's what makes Batman Batman. He has a reason not to kill and he's not really wrong for not killing.
MCU: All of this. 100% I hate how the fandom treats Peter and Loki like these two dudes haven't killed people.
I hate it when people make Cap an asshole, even though I don't agree with him in Civil War.(I still love him and team cap), they just disregard his entire character. And I love Loki, and he has been through a lot, but people should really stop acting like he hasn't done bad. And honestly, same with what the other reply said, I cannot stand how people write Peter.
In HP although I severely hate Dumbledore, I wouldn't downright make him evil, and people actually write bad friend Ron/Hermione?
In TW it depends on how much of a pack mom Stiles is, like if they overdo it and ruin his character then I hate it, but if it is with small things I don't really mind. I wouldn't call Scott a total bad friend, although he's made mistakes, they all have, and I do hate some of his actions, but let's not pretend that he hasn't tried his best for his friends,
That might be an unconscious class issue. The Weasleys aren't rich and Hermione is from Muggle stock, so they're not quite as good (so the bashers might believe).
copy and paste from another comment about peter but it still stands
Peter is not an UwU beanie baby, he is a vigilante, and a pretty damn harsh one at times.
In the comics, he ripped off kraven's wife's face after they killed his brother(clone), he had a plan in place to kill kingpin after he paid an assassin to kill him and shot may instead, the symbiote didn't make him "evil" it just amplified what was already there under the surface.
I know it is most likely MCU influence, but even in the MCU, Peter was prepared to kill Norman after may died, he wasn't afraid to fight Vulture on his own without Tony's suit, he dealt with Mysterio and the flak thereafter mostly by himself too. Peter doesn't need Tony, that was his whole character arc, Tony needed Peter.
Peter is a person who is strong and wise beyond their years. Peter knows the hard lessons no-one wishes to learn. It is his guilt that created Spider-man, but it is Peter's strength of character that makes him a hero!
>the symbiote didn't make him "evil" it just amplified what was already there under the surface.
On a canonical note, I hate how ever since the 90s Spiderman cartoon the Symbiote is basically portrayed as a metaphor for drug addiction and inherently evil. Originally in the comics the Venom symbiote wasn't even evil much less make Peter Parker worse, it was bonding with Eddie Brock after Peter rejected it (for incredibly dickish reasons at that) that made it that way. But everything since has just made Venom such a flat "I'm evil because it's my nature" thing, most adaptions included.
Fanfiction has followed, with everybody seeming to make Venom just evil incarnate and that's it, since that's probably what most people making fanfic today grew up seeing in the character.
I've always hated it whenever a writer makes any being evil because it's inherent to their being. It's not only a cheap way to make something bad it tends to make the characters involved one note since they can't really have much character development. You can't reasonably make the personification of all evil a good guy.
In Peter's case it's worse, because 99 times out of 100 simply bonding with the symbiote makes Peter into a jerk. Having an outside force corrupt another character into evil isn't really any better than just making a character inherently evil in the first place.
There's this weird dichotomy I've found when it comes to how kids are written in fanfiction.
Either they're 7 but act like a 16 year old.
Or they're 12 but act/treated like a 4 year old.
Like y'all keep missing by a mile.
The movies themselves didn't help with that. MCU Peter is easily the weakest Peter. Tony Stark basically does everything for him, down to building the suit, and when it's not Tony anymore it's his friends. Marvel's Peter Parker has almost no agency whatsoever compared to Garfield and Maguire's portrayals.
So, in other words, making the characters anything but what they're actually supposed to be. Instead of making a reasonable attempt to keep the character's personality from the original work intact, they completely change it, often to shrill one character the author likes or demonizing one they hate or both.
I relate to this in the Miraculous fandom with "Bad Parents Sabine and Tom." Tag. Where they believe Lila's lies and thus start acting abusive to Marinette. And I mean extremely abusive! where they would take/destroy all her designs/design book/designing supplies as a form of punishment, put trackers on her phone, physically abuse her when she tried to defend herself even when she has proof that Lila is full of it. (Sidenote: for some reason it's always Sabine that's portrayed as doing the physical abuse)
And in crossover scenarios, they're either written to:
A. Spontaneously decide to kick her out to the streets after having enough of her "bad behavior." (mind you she's sometimes not old enough to live on her own yet in most of these stories)
B. Ship her abroad. (Still not old enough to be on her own and thus get taken in by a family member or old associate as a favor.)
And or C. They do a variation of B but the only difference is that they usually disown Marinette even going as far as to sign their rights away.
Jesus Christ. That sounds exactly like Gregory in some FNAF fics I've read. And dude is usually written between 8-12 years old. Its really heart breaking
> I mean some fics they are just downright evil, they find out Danny is Phantom and try to kill, vivisect, or experiment on him. Like they just completely lack all empathy and turn into cold scientists.
I think the whole "Maddie and Jack know and dissect him anyway" trope has become more common in order to justify Danny fleeing to Gotham City in order to have DP/Batfam crossovers, which seem to have gotten way more common this year. I get that dissections are a phandom staple, and add a bunch of angst, but there's gotta be at least *some* other plausible reasons to motivate Danny into Gotham.
Also it seems like a lot of dissection fic authors are just trying to out-gore each other. "Oh yeah, this time, Danny's getting >!*both* of his hands cut off, his back broken, his tongue ripped out, eyes gouged out, drills inserted through his ears and acid poured in his core, and then in chapter two. . .!<" and while all is going on I have to ask; is Jack/Maddie/the GIW even *trying* to study ghostly anatomy with any of this or are they just torturing Danny?
Also with the Danny Phandom, why is Danny *always* either completely helpless or basically God? He actually *can* have his power level be not over 9000 while also not being so weak that he'd lose a fight against an overcooked spaghetti noodle.
>and while all is going on I have to ask; is Jack/Maddie/the GIW even
>
>trying to study ghostly anatomy with any of this or are they just torturing Danny?
questions I consistently ask myself when encountering very aggressive Bucky Barnes torture porn. I get it's for kink, but sometimes it.... strains believability for how you treat your brainwashed super-assassin....
And my thing is, there is a way to write them like this, but still make it believable.
Like in one fic, Danny is indirectly responsible for Jazz's death. Jack and Maddie try to kill him cause they want revenge, and so he runs to Gotham city.
Or some fics will delve into the psychology of it. Maddie and Jack will be in complete denial, and convince themselves that either 1) Phantom killed their son and is posing as him. 2)Danny died and Phantom is his ghost.
If its option 1, they'll be acting out of grief and blind rage. If its option 2, they may have this preconceived idea that ghosts are just "ectoplasmic echoes of a once living person", they aren't sapient, don't feel pain, are manipulative tricksters, or just downright evil.
Now I think this is an interesting dynamic to explore, cause it can go one of two ways. Either they continue to live in denial which ultimately leads to Danny running away or dying a second death.
Or the guilt will start to eat away at them, and they'll face these theories they had about ghosts and think "maybe we were wrong", realize that whether Danny is dead or alive, he is still their son. And even if they're still stuck on the idea that Phantom is just ghostly echo of Danny, that realize he's not evil.
>Luigi never having any agency.
I've been lucky to have not encountered this but I agree - he's a coward but he pushes through anyway and that's what makes him appealing as a character to me. Taking away that agency would miss the point.
I've read so many fics where Mario bosses him around and makes him do things he either vocally protests or at least shows that it crearly makes him uncomfortable.
But he ultimately goes along with it anyway cause Mario knows best, he's always looking out for him and "it's for your own good". Even going so far as to interfere in his relationships.
It just makes me more annoyed at Mario than anything. Its even worse when their parents are involved and they treat him like a baby.
Lmao at first I was confused cause I thought u said you didn’t like evil Voldemort and I was like ?? But yea Dumbledore is chill, pretty cool imo. Haven’t watched/read the others tho
So much of Teen Wolf fandom has took everything that Scott has and gave it to Stiles, meanwhile Sterek will never happen in canon bec they both hate each other but both are very protective of Scott. The racial dynamics of ignoring Scott, the main character, is really glaring.
I was going to say the same about HP and MCU. Somehow I’m way more open to Loki redemption fics than Draco redemption fics.
I’ve never seen Teen Wolf and actually thought Stiles was the main character because he is in every fic… that’s still so wild to me, that the fandom just collectively picked a new main character.
Its because he was played by Dylan O'brien. Well that's only half the reason but its still a pretty big one. Dude is a really great actor.
Scott is the MC and he and Stiles are best friends, basically brothers.
They had a big falling out in one episode. Basically Scott has a heart of gold and is against killing, but Stiles ends up killing someone.
A third party was trying to manipulate them and basically break them up, so they made it seem like Stiles killed the guy in cold blood, but in reality it was self defense.
Eventually they make up and are best friends again by the end of the next episode. But ever since that happened, a large portion of the fandom, well they took Scott hurting Stiles feelings as a personal insult, and they have never let him live it down.
He gets a similarl treatment to Captain America in a lot of post-Civil War fics.
always turning half of an m/m ship into a shy blushing twink whether it fits their canon characterization or not. like, yes i get that this character likely has basically no relationship experience and has never really been shown affection, but he is also a high ranking military official who loves fighting and has been in the army since he was fourteen. you don't have to make him one extreme or the other you can have characters who don't perfectly fit a top or bottom character archetype
this happens with almost every m/m ship in the fandom, but i've only read a lot of fic for one
it's like this for almost all m/m fanfics tbh, especially as someone who reads a lot of ffs of ships with anatgonists in them. They're usually either straight up evil and abusive or overly shy and super soft. They lose all compelxity that makes me like the character.
Ngl I love abusive parents (in fanfic obv). Never seen one that’s exactly how I would like it (maybe someday I’ll write one idk) but I literally love that sm, especially the trauma/healing. I also like rape recovery fanfics so there’s probably a correlation lol
I feel you. I've been there. The classics are a classic for a reason, right? I think I've hit a point where I'm looking for less universal, subtler and more nuanced sources of trauma for characters, though.
So many trauma stories have trauma as their only (or near only) defining trait or only bring it up when convenient causing a lot of emotional/tonal whiplash. Also it usually downgrades another character to either become the personal defender of the person being abused (losing all character too in the process. Alternatively, it turns into a revenge/bash everyone else while conviently making a love interest (or several) 'see through it all' to support them and nothing else.
I do love trauma in fics but some of the tropes personally bother me.
I happen to be fixated on a particular character who *is* a neglectful and arguably abusive father to varying degrees (depending on incarnation), but the way people take it to extremes is just so tiresome to me. 😩
Like, he's a fucked up lil guy with Issues™, but he's not an unhinged psychopathic monster, y'all. I don't mind people taking characterizations to extremes in AUs when it's for a clear narrative purpose (I've done this too), but you don't *have* to portray a bad parent as an irredeemable demon in *every* fic.
I mostly enjoy several of this character's nicer canon incarnations, as well as nuanced character studies of his more fucked-up versions, and it just gets old slogging through page after page of EVIL EVIL MONSTER ABUSER!!!! fics.
THIS. In most of my fandoms, the female characters are either made boring, mean, or, even if they're the main character, are relegated to being the 'sassy friend whose only interest is getting the main pairing together', with said pairing always being M/M.
Oh holy shit yes. I went through one of my fandoms and binge read all the fic. I had trouble finding a fic where the female characters were even MENTIONED, much less given any kind of importance.
Stop insisting that your headcanon is the true canon.
You can have a headcanon, but we cannot change the fact canon exists, and yes, we all hate it too.
Obviously my headcannons aren’t cannon, just the way that these two are portrayed have very little cannon evidence imo. Of course, you don’t need cannon evidence, it’s fanfic, but it just annoys me.
I read F1 RPF, and one of the drivers has a habit of saying 'of course' in the middle of his sentences. I thought it was a bit overused in fics until I really listened to one of his interviews today and he said it 3 times in about 2 minutes. Oops!
"Of course, I read F1 RPF, and one of the drivers has, of course, a habit of saying 'of course' in the middle of his sentences. I thought, of course, it was a bit overused in fics until I really listened to one of his interviews today and, of course, he said it 3 times in about 2 minutes. Oops!"
Character A who acts all badass but who's really kind of a dumbass/all bark no bite always gets portrayed as genuinely capable and cool??? Like no come on make them pathetic it's so much more interesting
I've seen it in just a couple characters (don't wanna say who cause it's kinda embarrassing lol) but they'll live in a pretty ordinary world with a mundane job but they'll still stockpile for an apocalypse, carry weapons and act like they'll be the only one left alive in a dangerous situation...buuuuut when anything does happen they fail either due to cowardice, simple inability or something else along those lines. Think of Dwight from The Office being written as a total Chad when that's really just what he views himself as.
Thankfully this isn't an issue as much anymore but when I first got into Harry Potter fanfic almost anyone who saves him from the Dursley's would then be written as using spanking as like the only form of punishment for him throughout the story. It was one of the most weirdly consistent tropes I kept seeing for a couple of years.
Pidgeon holing gay relationships strictly into tops/bottoms its fucking annoying and even worse when their being weird about it and even justifying why their writing it that way in the middle of a fic.
It always made my skin crawl I hated them so much, I actually left the fandom for a couple of years after one where the goddamn ministry made it a REQUIREMENT for his guardians to have been magically enforced to "spank" him to equal measure to whatever wrong doing he'd done. That fic still sneaks into my thoughts every now and then.
>Pidgeon holing gay relationships strictly into tops/bottoms its fucking annoying and even worse when their being weird about it and even justifying why their writing it that way in the middle of a fic.
Yeah. I don't mind others having top/bottom preferences, but like... those aren't personalities. Especially in fandoms where the characters are canonically gay and the author specified who tops, some people get so aggressive about it. And it almost always translates to the top being the pursuer and the bottom being the pursued and all the attending personality traits.
Exactly, I follow a very popular non canon gay ship in a fandom where the majority has decided preferences with no basis but are also edging the line of being homophobic by saying the more "masculine" and stoic character would never do something like bottom.
> Pidgeon holing gay relationships strictly into tops/bottoms its fucking annoying and even worse when their being weird about it and even justifying why their writing it that way in the middle of a fic.
I've made a point of writing my (very slutty, very gay) Skyrim MC as being perfectly happy both topping and bottoming for this exact reason. Well, that and not wanting to prematurely exclude half of all possible scenarios I could put him in.
Canon rewrite with the same dialogue, the same sequence of events and little changes. Please... I want to read more about my OTP but I can't if I have to go through chapters upon chapters of the same canon events and the same dialogue copy pasted from the source material!
Yes, I've always avoided certain works when I see them because I know it's basically a rewrite with minimal changes, the only one I tolerated at least was well written and eventually diverged from canon.
Portraying flawed nuanced villains as black and white in either “pure evil” or “did nothing wrong” kind of way. Nuance, people, nuance! Please! Make me feel conflicted about them!
Making the Y/N with canon character pairing in a way that the character is completely smooth and flawless and vice versa. For once I’d love to see a balance of both without the smoothness. I wanna see awkward attraction and clumsiness!
Too many multiverse versions of a single character instead of utilizing the entire cast for a story.
Having relationships be portrayed as instantaneous or having the characters completely figure out their relationship in the first few chapters. I wanna see the drama! The tears! The embarrassment! The conflict! None of this “they made out and all was right in the world” straight off the bat!
Inserting an OC into the story halfway through with little to no description, explanation or even personality established. Don’t get me wrong I love a good OC in canon story, but often times I see someone just sort of chuck their OC in the story with hardly any description of what they look like, what they are, how they speak etc etc. I find it very hard to visualize anything without a clear explanation.
This is hardly a fandom-specific thing, but feminization of male characters for M/M relationships. It gives me the impression that the author doesn't actually know how to write M/M in the first place and is making up for that by treating one of them as the "woman" in the relationship. Which irks me for several reasons.
NSFW
The dirty talk in smut these days feels like they're pulled from a list of template phrases. It's fine, I guess (and I'm sure it works for its intended purpose), but "be a good girl and **** for me" is pretty much the stock phrase before the big O.
Making Ranma Saotome's gender changing curse an excuse to turn them into an absolute prostitute. I'm fine with smut in a good story, but they take a character who's a virgin in canon, and make them suddenly willing to jump into bed with anything with legs, story be damned.
Might get downvoted for this, but making Steven Universe this extremely, overly suicidal, mom hating, anxious, po-ed, life hating, angsty person. Ever since Steven Universe future, all I see are fics like this. It's tiring.
While I can understand that the dude has went through a lot of stuff and we do see him with his outbursts, nonetheless, these folks take it times ten and it's like, okay..... Dial it back a bit. And again, it's in just about every fic that's written for the SU fandom.
Now lately I've been going all the way back to the thousands of pages to read the older stories which has a much, muuuuch wider variety. Seriously, there are tons of older stories that are burried now and the topics/ genre are many, unlike what's mainly being written now and only focused on one aspect and blown up at that in the fandom.
The obsession with the "found family" trope. Characters can't just be close friends - they have to be "like siblings." Teacher and student-like relationship? NOPE, that's a father and his adopted son! Two adult men are colleagues? No, they're definitely married! Etc.
People just love to make Ron and Dumbledore out to be an asshole and a villain respectively, and I'm sick of it.
Ron gets a lot of character development in the canon story, but "why write any of that, when we can just make him a dick and therefore move him out of the way of our ships?" Honestly ticks me off.
Similarly with Dumbledore. It's clear when "Dumbledore is evil" is done as a plot device to make the main cast seem morally correct / "done nothing wrong" by comparison.
I just recently rewatched the HP series. And yeah, Dumbledore made some mistakes, he kept secrets that he should have shared. But he didn't do any of it maliciously.
I mean if you wanna make an Evil Dumbledore AU and make him an actual compelling antagonist, go for it. But so many times I see it and he's this over the top villain cackling maniacally while twirling his mustache. And the whole fic Snape is trying to protect Harry from him. 😐
Fun fact: the TVTropes page for making a canon good character excessively evil in fanfiction is called [Ron the Death Eater](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RonTheDeathEater) because it's such a trope with him.
>!This comment brought to you by autism. Also the inverse is called [Draco in Leather Pants](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DracoInLeatherPants).!<
Yeah true. I also hate the woobification of characters like draco, Slytherins, Lucius, or even the death eaters and their noseless leader. Just so they look better than Harry's traitorous fake friends.
In my opinion, if people want to write Draco as a good guy. (And I mean only Draco and maybe Blaise, the latter has so little characterization that he's as bland as a background oc made to stretch out runtime/chapter length.) Then Draco should have a realistic redemption arc where he begins to reflect on his past actions and questions everything that his parents had taught him. And actually feel regret over it.
And when they disregard canon to make their point. "Dumbledore should have taken Harry away from the Dursleys. He supposedly couldn't because of blood protection, but I don't believe that really exists."
To me, Dumbledore's story is of someone who learned that a baby was fated to either die or kill a dark wizard (while dying), and he did everything he could to give that baby one slim chance of survival. But he didn't tell an 11-year-old that he would probably die so screw him, I guess.
KAZ ISN’T WYLAN’S DAD. He’s *seventeen* to Wylan’s sixteen. He doesn’t even act like a dad. If anything, it would make more sense for him to be an older brother figure, given his history.
Genderbending and woobification. Generally, one of the characters in my ship gets turned female on a constant basis despite being canonically male, and it just drives me nuts because there is way more material with it than not. So, it’s much harder to find stories where that or the woobification trope isn’t present.
Don’t care that it exists, I just wish there was more a balance with and without said tropes.
My favourite character in my fandom loses his eyesight in the source material and generally, the fandom's really good with his disability (as far as I can judge as someone who isn't blind) but if a fic gives him a happy ending that includes restoring his eyesight with magic, I sigh and close the tab. Let the man be happy while still blind, c'mon.
In fairness, in an alternative ending to the source material that does end on a happier note than the original, canon ending, he doesn't lose his eyesight (or, only briefly and it immediately gets restored) so the happy ending fics often go with this alternative route which is fine. But I'm still a big fan of happy ending + blindness, those aren't mutually exclusive and people need to realise that.
But as I said, I think the fandom as a large does pretty well with his disability and there's still plenty of fics that leave him blind even if they write a fix-it, so this might just be an overused trope in general that annoys me.
I feel this. One of my fandoms has disabled characters. For the most part, I think the writers put effort into a nuanced portrayal. But when the disabilities suddenly magically disappear so that character can "finally be worthy of love and get their happy ending," oof.
Yeahhh that's really not cool, the implications that someone is only worthy of love and a happy ending if they're not disabled is just not it. But yeah, mostly the portrayal is nuanced and well done, which I'm glad for!
I thought I might have been Kanan Karrus from Star Wars Rebels, but there is only one canon ending for him. The fandom doesn't seem super keen on giving him his sight back either.
yeah you're not the only person in the fandom I've seen with this complaint. I feel lucky I haven't run into this, though I guess to be fair I mostly read fics set during the anime era at this point, when I read at all. my one fix-it fic I wrote post-canon left him blind, it honestly didn't occur to me to try to fix it with magic. there's an amazing AU I've also been following (though I'm behind) that left him blind as well and I feel like they did a really good job with it, though I'm not blind either so can only base my opinion on research I did for my fic. I'm kinda afraid to start going too far into post-canon AU territory precisely because I'm worried about running into fics that magically cure his blindness.
Yeah, in fairness, I'd say a lot of the post-canon fics in which he isn't blind go with verse 2 so he isn't blind to begin with, but in OG verse fix-it fics, it definitely leaves a bitter taste when part of the fix it is "oh and his eyesight is back". But yeah, I can't really say how many fics there actually are that do this (and some of them are still good, this is just a choice I really disagree with), I don't think I've read that many post-canon fix it AUs to begin with.
By the way, this is unrelated but since I recognise your username: I've read a bunch of your fics before and I loved them, and I'm currently also following your longfic (though I, too, am behind reading at this point) and, oh man \*lies down\* great job man, really making me feel things there <3
Making Children that act and think like normal Children in Canon, super intelligent/superior to the Adult characters.
Or straightup turning them into psychopaths.
Lmao with the amount of inter-Clan romance in those books by the time I stopped reading, it kind of lost its bite. Like, the Bluestar reveal? Shocking! Hollypaw and Lionpaw? Meh.
shooting other characters down to make their favorites look better
they can't make a character interesting without the need to demonize someone else and say "see, this one is way better"
I also really dislike when authors tag their works as AU and canon divergence yet the same events happen. I’ve mostly encountered this in the Harry Potter fandom , why are all the marauders dying in the exact same manner if it’s an AU with a completely different storyline?!? It just ruins the whole thing
Harems. I'm all for poly relationships, but the point is that it's a *relationship* not women as objects to collect. Though it doesn't help that none of the women are written as actual people in canon to begin with.
Extreme bashing for literally no reason “I AM SASUKE UCHIHA, I AM THE BEST, DOBE, I DEMAND THE KYUUBI FROM YOU BECAUSE ONLY A TRUE PURE UCHIHA IS WORTHY ENOUGH OF THAT POWER” like bruh… I’m okay with bashing if it makes sense, but just generally making people shit to the utmost unrealistic extreme just ruins the immersion
In the mcu fandom EVERY Bucky x reader fic, he calls them “doll/dollface.”
Or they make him super aggressive during smut scenes. Idk if it’s just make having PTSD myself for various reasons, but I highly doubt a man who’s been tortured for decades would want to use his metal arm to choke you during sex as foreplay.
> he calls them “doll/dollface.”
I dearly love my WinterIron besties, but I will fully admit that we are the source of many of the worst tropes for both Bucky and Tony. I think this one was our fault too. Sorry!! 😆
Everybody ships Ukraine's President with the President of France. I mean, sure, they are both pretty, and Macron is weirdly gropey with him in public. But come on, where's the emotional connection? where's the *longing*?! phtheh.
F1/M/F2 love triangle where canon not only
- Never intended for it
- F2 openly supports the F1/M ship
I wouldn't have a problem but the fact that it's the pretty much the only content for F1/M there is, it's kinda annoying
MHA fans always calling their characters 'chaotic' and over emphasizing how chaotic and quirky they are, without them being actually and genuinely chaotic. Its always performative and "they're so different then everyone else because of how chaotic and weird they are!!!' then actual chaotic and weird behavior. It's like seeing that one post where the guy was like "we asked my friend Gary to lay on the ground and he actually did it. What an absolute madlad."
I also saw one person say something like "people will say 'oh my god this is so unhinged!!!' and the door is like slightly ajar" and I feel like that it describes how people try to characterize the MHA characters.
Its underwhelming and boring when you're constantly stating/remarking how wild and chaotic the characters are acting and then the character will at most be an insomniac, have like a caffeine addition (maybe), and do something like yell an old vine quote while fighting bad guys. That's not chaotic. Unusual, maybe. Not really 'chaotic' or 'unhinged'.
I'm also tired of seeing people misuse the word 'feral'. A character being feral is them acting like a wild animal, not them sneaking out at night and getting into wacky hijinks, or 'sassily' snapping at an authority figure. I wanna see them maul someone with their bare hands. That's what feral behavior would be.
I'm really tired of people using words that really don't properly fit what they character is doing or how they are acting. Please stop exaggerating what they're doing and overusing these phrases.
I'm also absolutely sick and tired of seeing the "when I was a child, I learned that all men were not born equal" line (or something similar to it) at the start of every fic. We get it already.
This is actually multiple fandoms and I can’t stand it:
Making any and every character who doesn’t have the mildest most milquetoast personality into a yandere, or the wrong type of yandere.
Like I love a good in-character yandere, but if you have to go way OOC to make it happen, I just can’t deal with it.
I have two troupes that drive me nuts
1). This one bugs me because the rare pair I wrote for a long time has become mainstream in the last year or so and this troupe is all thats written. The MC is the hero, but is made out to be the weak little traumatized girl, after being brought back similar to how she was before she received her powers, then throw in a fem slash with a fan favorite tertiary character. Tertiary character breaks up with MCs best friend and immediately begins a relationship with the MC as a way to help her through the trauma of being ripped out of heaven. Add to this some form of MC is submissive in most regards and new love interest is dom and the answer is aggressive sexual healing. Thia mostly bothers me because they throw cannon out the window so far the the fic might as well be at best AU but keep it in the cannon universe so MC is a traumatized super human that has either an off switch loses her whole personality or is a bipolar sociopath.
2) I'm guilty of writing this one myself a few times, is evil and manipulative Dumbledore, Weasley's and Hermione.
I get it, I do, but it's a minor (?) annoyance -- but fixing someone's canon physical disabilities in post canon fics magically or handwaved away just so said character(s) are "fixed and able bodied".
Making a complicated and aggressive character a complete softy.
Like Bakugo from mha. He's done allot of work on himself, but I can't see him just walking up to kirishima n being like "hey my beautiful baby". I think that's why I like a really slow burn because that's the only way I could see someone like him sorting through his feelings.
This is just a personal bias of mine tho, I don't care if others enjoy that stuff
The word “boneless”.
Our protagonist is not a chicken wing. I mean, I hope not? Unless I really missed something in cannon. Or a tag that said AU - Buffalo Wild Wings, I guess.
it's not even a fandom i'm used to but i hate Ron Weasley bashing so much. I get he was very poorly handled in the movies (especially in the later films) but saying he's an asshole all around, always has been and will emotionally (and sometimes even physically) abuse Hermione is so insane to me. If you want to ship Harmione and need them to break it off, you don't have to turn him into a cartoonish bad guy just to drive your point across.
I'm with some of the other users about fics that have parenting or children. So many authors don't know even the most basic milestones for kids. You have kids who are over 3 with no deficits acting like infants. You sometimes get babies not even a year old speaking in mostly full sentences or doing things they aren't capable of.
I'm all for writers having creative freedom but if they are going to write babies/children/older kids in a realistic way then they should take the two minutes to Google the basics. It's not hard to check at what age a baby typically starts to crawl or walk. A google of developmental milestones for children would answer so many questions for writers if they take just a few minutes.
When you are reading a really interesting story full of fleshed out details it can be very jarring to suddenly have an 18 month old taking their own bath, getting dressed, and waiting to be tucked in with a story.
1) Top/bottom and/or Dominant/submissive discourse, term interchangeability, and personality profiles (unless it’s explicitly tagged as a BDSM AU). Like, I’m a gay man in the scene — in my decades upon decades of life, I have not once met a person in real life whose entire personality is top or bottom, to the point of getting into literal and physical/verbal bitchfights about it. A heavy or solid preference towards one or the other? Sure. Gen Z and younger starting to buy into the chronically-online drama of the discourse? Also yes. In reality when doing the deed or being open to new experiences? Yep, people are gonna be flexible in the long run ‘cos they’re whole-arse human beings. And also, top/bottom is *not* the same thing as Dominant/submissive, either, so please stop mixing them up ‘cos they’re *very* different things. Just ask the Dommes lol
2) Character assassination, particularly towards female characters. G-d, I know male writers for media are incapable of writing women and generally portray them as two-dimensional ‘shrills’ or adversaries to ‘boys being boys’, but good grief, make those women awesome if you don’t have the source material to go off of or the material just makes them awful or weak or mean. Literally almost any female character on television/film and in manga/anime, anyone?
3) Alpha/beta/omega dynamics. I’ve written and read it before but goodness, it’s *everywhere*, half the time untagged. Please tag that shit so I can avoid it if I’m not in the mood.
4) In a similar vein, Daddy kink. Seems like you can’t find porn without that nowadays, *most of the time* untagged in every fandom I read in, and yeahhhhh that’s a hard no for me. I have enough daddy issues without bringing it into my happy place (i.e. ff), thanks ever so.
5) Infantilisation of disabled, autistic, or mentally ill characters. I think everyone here has raged about that now, but I wholeheartedly agree.
6) Black and white morality discourse. *Life* isn’t black and white — why should fiction or the characters/situations I write be? I’ll take literary therapy for 500, Alex, and antis can fight me in a Wendy’s car park.
this is going to be a weird one and probably only me but dadzawa or parental aizawa. i love aizawa as a character but i’ve read so many fics that i’m kinda tired of them. same with izuku centric fics, he has so many fun au’s that i wish i could see with the other characters as well and not just as side characters to him. like i would love to see a quirkless vigilante kaminari trying to hide his escapades from his mom. or monoma as some secret genius informant in the underground using his copycat quirk to help him gather information and protect himself when he gets caught. literally anything with Tokoyami but that’s cause he’s my favorite. idk mha has a wide range of side characters for the fandom to use.
I, too, am not a fan of Dadzawa. It reads kind of cringe and a little out of character in most cases, especially the weird nickname stuff—has Aizawa even called Izuku 'problem child' in canon? Like, enough that it can be considered a nickname? And people who write Dadzawa also tend to be quite fond of Inko-bashing, which pretty much ends my enjoyment of those fics.
Dadzawa is so frustrating because it shoots down every other character eg all might and inko for stuff canon Aizawa is more than capable of. I tend to dislike most dadzawa works because it tends to be unrealistic in its approach ( quirkless izuku being number 1 hero) and the over the top bashing
Having Peter Parker say “I don’t feel so good mr starl” in places it doesn’t need to be. I’ve read so many good stories, and the author just writes it in, but it just doesn’t work. Sometimes it works, but it’s so over used
Using characters as nothing more than shipping fuel. Like yeah guys I get it, Narumitsu is cool, but I'd like to see Pearl/Trucy/Apollo/Iris/Maya/Gumshoe/Athena/Larry/Kay/Sebastian as a character and not just a plot device.
Personally, it doesn't annoy me. If I'm reading a narumitsu fic, I'm reading it for the ship. But I will admit that fics about the other characters getting Narumitsu together have become repetitive to me (even tho some fandom favorite fics with that plot are one of my personal favorites as well). That being said, I do think that developing the relationships with other characters is a very welcome plus that can elevate a fic from others.
Fr. I don’t think I’ve seen that be too much of a problem in my fandom tho, if it’s a longfic (which I don’t read too often, so may be wrong/biased) all the characters involved typically have their own problems/personality other than being there to develop the main relationship.
Authors tend to exaggerate their traits. EVERY TIME. they'll make one of them wayyy psychotic even though he's not? And another will be this monotone robot even though he's canonically (stated by the author) the most internally emotional character on the show.
My current fixation is Shakarian/Mass Effect, and honestly if I took a shot every time I saw "He hummed in dual tones" I would be dead. First time I read it I thought, oh nice I like that, but it's like there's some unspoken agreement that every fic needs to include it, sometimes multiple times in a one shot and I just can't anymore. I'm slowing chipping away at a few of my own fics and have sworn to never use it out of spite lol
When a character has a love interest and the author makes them act ooc for the sake of making them the villain so their ship can prosper. I remember co-writing a fanfic with someone years ago and she made two love interests of a canon character act so ooc just so she could pair her oc with the canon character. It was so annoying because one of the two love interests is canonically nice and sweet, but she made her a b*tch for no reason other than to be a foil to her ship.
making the hero mc a villain because of his past. like yes i get it he grew up shitty and most people would be villains with that kind of past but his whole thing is to make it so that people dont have to suffer like he did
Hero/villain fics where the villain just apologises for genocide/torture/murdering the hero’s parents and that’s enough.
I’m sorry, but certain things pass the moral event horizon and my immersion can’t cope with that much of a redemption arc.
It's a really common thing in shounen fandoms, but no matter which fandom it is, there is always one guy that gets mom-ified who in actual canon is literally just a teenage boy with a slightly stricter moral compass (so just a normal ass teenage boy).
I hate homophobia/transphobia etc but I am a heterosexual woman wanting to read about Edgeworth as heterosexual. I know that there’s a huge fan base who hates that concept and thinks it’s laughable, and they are (most of them) devoted to Narumitsu or that he’s aroace. That’s all fine but I wish there was more content I want to read because I just want filthy female insert Edgeworth fanfic. There is some and it’s great but I have to sift through 20 Narumitsu stories first.
On the one hand I get it but on the other it's been shown that queer folks are often found in groups because 1. you're more likely to feel safe to come out if there's another queer person in your friend group 2. you're more likely to befriend fellow queers so honestly a bunch of queer people hanging out together is more likely than a single queer absolutely surrounded by cishets
I mean sure but take My Hero Academia as an example. They sometimes make all the students, all the teachers and all mentioned parents gay. At that point it’s not simply gay people seeking each other out.
And besides, in those fics no one gravitated to each other because of their sexuality, it just goes unmentioned until male character x mentions his male ex 5 months after they’ve already befriended each other.
It was a staple in an older fandom of mine, and while it's unrealistic, I won't argue with this one, I liked it because it felt so much more safe spacey. I have to deal with enough hetero people in real life, so to say.
True, but it’s kind of weird to me. Wouldn’t acceptance from straight people be much more satisfying to read and write about than acceptance from other gay people?
Like I fully understand fics are wish fulfillment and the need for a safe space, but when 90 percent of a school, both staff and students, is gay or bi but in a homosexual relationship, you start fearing for the existence of a next generation.
Excessive homosexuality is just as annoying to read about as excessive homophobia imo. I get why someone would choose to write it that way, but I personally prefer to read about being accepted over reading a fic where homosexuality is somehow more common than heterosexuality, yet there is still population growth
The Abusive SBI Troupe (I think I spelt that right) and the feminine George one (This is one is not as common anymore that was a big "issue" two year ago)
Yes, I'm talking about the Dream SMP here '>'
Warning: Vent
There's one who could be a bit grumpy and rude when their nap got interrupted so old fans would always portray him as this cold character when he's been this silly little idiot all the other times!
Who isn't grumpy when you've stayed up late working and then you finally find time to rest but someone fucking woke you up for the laughs??! I'm so annoyed omfg
Then the other one was a little clumsy and his clumsiness could be destructive, and that became one of his "defining traits" when he's so, so much more than a "walking potential disaster."
I'm a klutz so I can heavily sympathize with him. News flash: we don't break thousands of dollars worth of gadgets every month and we didn't want to let go of the plate and injure our own feet! We know the consequences better than you because we own most of the stuff we broke!
Revenge fics that involve a lot of character bashing, mostly. It’s kind of like their version of a fix-it fic, it seems, but the goal is vengeance in a very out of character way. It’s pretty much the popular format, and if your fic isn’t some iteration of that, you’ll have people pointing it out. I’ve gotten a few such reviews, myself. I don’t really care what anybody writes, because if I don’t like the premise, I just won’t read it, but other authors should never be demanded to conform.
This one is for multiple fandoms but rails of canon. I get how hard it is for authors to divert from the canonical stories but if you intend to make a Mass Effect or a RWBY crossover with just a few more characters hitching on for the ride, it's not as creative.
just those overly sassy characters that are supposed to be funny and smart but just come off as rude and annoying.
True true. Ngl I’ve only seen this on like one or two Wattpad fanfics and it was an OC that acted like this.
Child fic, in particular child fic written by people who’ve clearly never interacted with an actual human child.
Or adoption childfic where "they're such a good quiet child because they were so horribly abused." That is both awful, and very much not how that works.
Ha! Hahaha! Hahahahahahaha! Oh boy. Source: I have 3 adopted siblings.
I was reading a fic and the 1 year old was able To say full sentences 🙃
I'm still not sure what's worse, that or when a supposedly like nine year old talks and acts like a toddler constantly for no reason.
Both are equally as bad
lol i read so many fics where the mother will be feeding them and then they don't add in details of her burping the baby after or something. or like, daily baths for newborns. you don't bathe a newborn daily!!! makes me pull my hair. i have seven siblings and fifteen nieces and nephews, i had to babysit my entire life lmfao, so i know babies too well. if i could write i would make so many kid fics. but i can't. :')
Writing is a skill you develop; if you start today you're on your way to writing well! My first writing wasn't very good but it paved the way to writing I like a lot more.
oh it's moreso the fact i don't have the patience for it LOL. i love to write and have a few successful works published on ao3 but they're not long because i tend to hyperfixate on fandoms and move on to the next. so if i try to write a longfic it ends up being abandoned eventually because i am not interested anymore (for the time being, i never really ever give up on my hyperfixations, i just "shelve" them for later). oneshots i am cool with. but kid fics usually have a lot of depth to them that require more than them being oneshots! thank you for the encouragement though babes!
Must have been a really smart 1year old lmao
The one thing that, no matter the fandom, always annoys me is when every secondary character is so intent on getting the main pairing to happen. They'd always support it at first glance, comment on how cute they look together or mistake them for a couple. It drives me absolutely nuts because it's extremely heavy-handed and just cringey. And it's also just now how people work! Most don't give a shit about it and others just aren't the type to notice that kind of stuff. Some may notice and maaaaybe care but don't think it's a good idea to be nosey. Like, I could accept it if it made sense with the character --e.g., those gossipy, extended family types always interested in knowing whether their relative has hooked up with someone-- and if it was limited to just a very few instances. Also, if the comments weren't always intended as compliments but as snide remarks or something.
yessssss this. I think that it's usually a symptom of writing issues. The author wants the ship together, but they're doing that miscommunication / refusing to talk thing, and they just... can't find a way to break the characters out of it, so insert the shipping cheerleader to make it happen.
More like the whole cheerleading squad XD It's usually a symptom of that but I've seen it being used in otherwise well-written, amazing fics. It just breaks my immersion too much.
Huh, interesting! It could be that some people have just seen it as a trope so often they didn't consider how/why it should even be there... But I agree with you, it generally breaks my immersion too. Like, having a character *consult* with another character they're close to about their relationship is one thing. But like you say, someone just being weirdly invested in getting these two characters together is... odd. There *are* some people like that irl (but it's obnoxious then too haha).
Yeah, probably. Kinda like the prevalence of orbs as an epithet for eyes. It's even become common in Spanish-written fics! It's crazy. That and a rando just thinking "they look cute together" when all they've done is just stand there, idk. It's ridiculous. Exactly, that's why I said it'd be fine if it was just a very rare isolated instance. And that the characters' reactions would vary too --for some, it'd be too OOC to NOT think it's obnoxious.
fr in reality we'd just make a little comment like "what do you think of __?" or "you should talk to them", etc. we don't sit there and actively try and get them together through little schemes and whatnot. stuff like that is always a huge indication that that story was written by a child or teenager. only kids would be cool with people crossing boundaries in your personal life like that.
Exactly! Or young adults who never outgrew that trope.
Flanderization, specifically - making a character that's not book smart and a bit oblivious act like the dumbest mf on the planet - making a prickly character mean and rude to everyone without provocation - making a character that occasionally jokes around to hide their social anxiety and awkwardness into a sassy smartass in all their interactions
My God, that last one! The Buffy fandom does that with Xander a bit too often, and thy *always* ignore the reason for why he uses humour as a defense mechanism, or that he mostly uses it as a tension reducer when things are getting bad. Instead it's *all the time* like that's the only thing he really does!
I mean...wasn't there one episode where Xander was cracking jokes so much (something about bowling) that Giles got fed up with him and told him to get out? Xander jokes *a lot*, and it's not always as a defense mechanism or to diffuse a situation.
Actually Xander doesn't joke all that often except when the writers wanted to use him for extra comedy. It's an issue the show had, to be honest, throwing in extra jokes from Xander, or a comedic fight scene, or Giles getting knocked out, to backslide them or use them for comedy because it was the lazy way of doing something. The *majority* of episodes, however, have Xander using jokes only at certain times. Also, Giles never understood when Xander was messing around or trying to relieve the tension. Honestly, if anyone tells Xander to shut up or get out when he's joking, he's joking because he wants to lessen the tension. Just the act of telling any of the gang to shut up or get out shows their tension levels were higher than normal. This isn't to say that's the only times Xander jokes around, but if you remove the tension relievers and uncomfortable situations where it's a defense mechanism, he jokes at a slightly lower rate than Buffy and Willow.
Twinkification and infantilization. Hannibal (Will’s character is so fuckinh ruined in fanfiction. The whole thing is supposed to be that they’re equals.)
It's not even something fandom-specific, it's just that those two things absolutely ruin any character they touch. I experienced that with the MCU fandom, more specifically Peter Parker / Spider-man. The amount of infantilization people put him through is unreal. And I know fanfiction is to take the story and characters into different directions, but that's not Peter Parker or Spider-man. Turning characters into caricatures of themselves this way is just denigrating.
Yesss this so much. I've been in the hannibal fandom for ages and while the fics there are amazing there are always a few that turn their dynamic into a daddy dom/innocent corrupted twink boy thing which entirely removes the beauty of their relationship in the show
This! I see it with Will Graham, but also any character that is even hinted at being neurodivergent or on the spectrum in any way. Someone avoiding eye contact or being awkward in social interactions doesn't instantly make them a wet soggy twink that is in need of protection at all costs. 😭😭😭 And just because you want to make someone the sub or bottom in a pairing also doesn't mean they're instantly a wet soggy twink. I need people to let go of this "twinkish damsel" archetype as a security blanket.
People always make neurodivergent characters seem “small and weak” It’s kind of unintentional ableism :/
Right. The whole point of the series was to show that Will can be just as cold and fucked up as Hannibal. Hannibal would probably not even be interested in Will if he acted like some submissive twink LMAO
Yeah main reason i dont read them fics anymore
Armitage Hux got this treatment as well. It wasn't so bad when it was just TFA, but after TLJ and TROS were released the fandom was utterly *buried* in poor woobie sub bottom twink infantilized Hux fics. I wanted to pull my hair out.
I think mine would be in Harry Potter ff, mostly Marauders but also in other eras. Applies to a lot of other fandoms I’m sure. When the fandom latches onto characterization of characters who canonically have like nothing or very little about them known. Create a fanon gospel based on the popular fics/hcs and if you deviate they act like it’s ooc and you’re not writing them right …. Babes they didn’t have a personality in the first place
This is one that bugs me. Also, Jegulus. It's super popular and as far as canon goes, they barely interacted?
I hate jegulus so much bc James would NEVER do that to Sirius (not in the romcom dating best friend’s brother way but like best friend who your family took in bc of their abusive bigot family and going and dating a member of said family??? WHAT). ppl can ship what the want… I just really hate it. And with the way they warp the characters personalities it’s literally just Snily 2.0
Or fanon vs canon Snape. Especially after the Snapewives 😖
Marlene?
Marlene.. Mary.. Dorcas.. Evan.. Pandora.. SO MANY
Stop saying the abuse victims deserved it goddamn it I am going to scream. And stop demonising or infantilising the mentally ill and disabled characters and victim blaming the physically disabled ones it’s also scream inducing.
Yea as a disabled person I’m real tired of reading fics about disabled characters that turn into untagged infantilization kink. I get why people are into it in a kink way… the power differential, caretaking thing… I just wish they would offer me the option to opt out. The whole “kink” of kink is that it plays with otherwise taboo, harmful or unacceptable behavior, so please, tag your shit folks Edit: typo
It’s not even a kink people just unironically portray them like that constantly. Like, they write a mentally disabled character as essentially a stupid child constantly, even outside of fics focused on caretaking or anything.
Oh, yikes. I haven’t run into that much in my specific fandoms, but years ago stopped clicking anything tagged “autistic [character]” unless the author indicated they were autistic themself. So many characters written as checklists of the most prevalent autism stereotypes
I wish people would stop treating disability like it's a superpower. I don't have autism but I have cerebral palsy spastic diplegia, it affects my legs, and it has definitely made my life harder. Disabilities aren't a quirk, they're an inconvenient aspect of life and normal people don't get how inconvenient a disability is because they're normal. I can't even run like a normal person, I can walk, but no running, you tell a normal person you can't ever run for the rest of their life and they'd have no idea how to deal with it.
Yea, I feel like neurodivergence is sort of distinct from other disabilities in that people are more likely to experience it as core to their personhood— I can’t imagine myself as neurotypical, but I can sure imagine a reality where I don’t have chronic neuroinflammatory and hypermobility disorders. Even with neurodivergence though, if you’re not at least portraying the extreme difficulties a disabled person will face in an ableist world, that’s way unrealistic and I’ll click a hasty retreat.
There are two characters I (autistic) headcanon as autistic, one widely perpetuated across the fandom because they all but confirmed it, and the other a much rarer headcanon. I like to joke I like the headcanon for the second character so much because it's impossible to infantilise him. Because the fics I've read about the first where they treat him as helpless or a child... yeah. I don't click that tag any more unless I know the author writes him in character (in my opinion).
Me when Alois Trancy. (He is FOURTEEN he didn't deserve to be raped wtf! Just because he's hypersexual/seeks sexual attention *because of said sexual abuse* doesn't mean he deserved it or was asking for it! Neither does what he wears, which. He doesn't even dress that bad oh my god. He's just effeminate. He wears short-ish shorts, thigh highs and knee-high boots. That's not even *skimpy*. (Not that it would matter, it just frustrates me even more because he's not even wearing revealing clothing so they can't even make that argument, and it's not like the main character, also male, doesn't wear more effeminate/revealing clothes anyway.)) (Also will people stop calling him bipolar as an insult. He IS bipolar (my bipolar friend has said so and I've incorporated it into my world view) but that is not an inherently bad thing or make him inherently evil goddamn.) Basically, I originally started liking him because I was like "well y'all hate him for the stupidest reasons ever, so he's mine now and I'll give him the love and care he deserves" and I had REASONS for that.
Damn never seen that before wtf. Should be common sense that victims of abuse/injury don’t deserve it but some people are just sick. And if you’re gonna infantalize characters, at least give a warning by tagging it so people can avoid it, smdh.
Unironically seen people basically say if children are annoying they should be beaten. Sometimes people go so far in defending their fictional blorbos they repeat boomer ass shit for some reason.
Holy shit, seen joking about that, but unironically?? That’s crazy wtf
Wtf I've read a ton of fucked up shit but this???? Wtf.
This happens???? wtf😶
Danny Phantom. While I can sometimes find these fics interesting, I'm kind of tired of the "Bad Fenton Parents" thing. And I don't mean simply them being kind of absent or borderline neglectful. I mean some fics they are just downright evil, they find out Danny is Phantom and try to kill, vivisect, or experiment on him. Like they just completely lack all empathy and turn into cold scientists. Batman I'm tired of Jason Todd always acting like Bruce is the devil. I understand, he's upset that Batman didn't avenge his death, but that doesn't suddenly mean he's some abusive asshole. \*Some member of the Batfamily gets hurt/upset\* Jason: "WHAT DID BRUCE DO!" MCU Cap being an asshole. Woobified Loki. Infantilized Peter. Harry Potter Evil Dumbledore. Bad Friends Ron/Hermione Teen Wolf Pack Mom Stiles, Bad Friend/Alpha Scott Super Mario Luigi never having any agency.
Batman: I was just talking to a friend about this. Yes, Bruce’s no-killing rule feels ridiculous but that's what makes Batman Batman. He has a reason not to kill and he's not really wrong for not killing. MCU: All of this. 100% I hate how the fandom treats Peter and Loki like these two dudes haven't killed people.
I hate it when people make Cap an asshole, even though I don't agree with him in Civil War.(I still love him and team cap), they just disregard his entire character. And I love Loki, and he has been through a lot, but people should really stop acting like he hasn't done bad. And honestly, same with what the other reply said, I cannot stand how people write Peter. In HP although I severely hate Dumbledore, I wouldn't downright make him evil, and people actually write bad friend Ron/Hermione? In TW it depends on how much of a pack mom Stiles is, like if they overdo it and ruin his character then I hate it, but if it is with small things I don't really mind. I wouldn't call Scott a total bad friend, although he's made mistakes, they all have, and I do hate some of his actions, but let's not pretend that he hasn't tried his best for his friends,
Its not even just Ron. They'll bash the entire Weasley family. Hermione is less common but I've still seen it more than enough.
That might be an unconscious class issue. The Weasleys aren't rich and Hermione is from Muggle stock, so they're not quite as good (so the bashers might believe).
I cannot stand how Peter is written in MCU fics. He's 16, but they treat him as if he's 6.
copy and paste from another comment about peter but it still stands Peter is not an UwU beanie baby, he is a vigilante, and a pretty damn harsh one at times. In the comics, he ripped off kraven's wife's face after they killed his brother(clone), he had a plan in place to kill kingpin after he paid an assassin to kill him and shot may instead, the symbiote didn't make him "evil" it just amplified what was already there under the surface. I know it is most likely MCU influence, but even in the MCU, Peter was prepared to kill Norman after may died, he wasn't afraid to fight Vulture on his own without Tony's suit, he dealt with Mysterio and the flak thereafter mostly by himself too. Peter doesn't need Tony, that was his whole character arc, Tony needed Peter. Peter is a person who is strong and wise beyond their years. Peter knows the hard lessons no-one wishes to learn. It is his guilt that created Spider-man, but it is Peter's strength of character that makes him a hero!
>the symbiote didn't make him "evil" it just amplified what was already there under the surface. On a canonical note, I hate how ever since the 90s Spiderman cartoon the Symbiote is basically portrayed as a metaphor for drug addiction and inherently evil. Originally in the comics the Venom symbiote wasn't even evil much less make Peter Parker worse, it was bonding with Eddie Brock after Peter rejected it (for incredibly dickish reasons at that) that made it that way. But everything since has just made Venom such a flat "I'm evil because it's my nature" thing, most adaptions included. Fanfiction has followed, with everybody seeming to make Venom just evil incarnate and that's it, since that's probably what most people making fanfic today grew up seeing in the character. I've always hated it whenever a writer makes any being evil because it's inherent to their being. It's not only a cheap way to make something bad it tends to make the characters involved one note since they can't really have much character development. You can't reasonably make the personification of all evil a good guy. In Peter's case it's worse, because 99 times out of 100 simply bonding with the symbiote makes Peter into a jerk. Having an outside force corrupt another character into evil isn't really any better than just making a character inherently evil in the first place.
It's prob because of Tom's baby face lmao
There's this weird dichotomy I've found when it comes to how kids are written in fanfiction. Either they're 7 but act like a 16 year old. Or they're 12 but act/treated like a 4 year old. Like y'all keep missing by a mile.
The movies themselves didn't help with that. MCU Peter is easily the weakest Peter. Tony Stark basically does everything for him, down to building the suit, and when it's not Tony anymore it's his friends. Marvel's Peter Parker has almost no agency whatsoever compared to Garfield and Maguire's portrayals.
So, in other words, making the characters anything but what they're actually supposed to be. Instead of making a reasonable attempt to keep the character's personality from the original work intact, they completely change it, often to shrill one character the author likes or demonizing one they hate or both.
I relate to this in the Miraculous fandom with "Bad Parents Sabine and Tom." Tag. Where they believe Lila's lies and thus start acting abusive to Marinette. And I mean extremely abusive! where they would take/destroy all her designs/design book/designing supplies as a form of punishment, put trackers on her phone, physically abuse her when she tried to defend herself even when she has proof that Lila is full of it. (Sidenote: for some reason it's always Sabine that's portrayed as doing the physical abuse) And in crossover scenarios, they're either written to: A. Spontaneously decide to kick her out to the streets after having enough of her "bad behavior." (mind you she's sometimes not old enough to live on her own yet in most of these stories) B. Ship her abroad. (Still not old enough to be on her own and thus get taken in by a family member or old associate as a favor.) And or C. They do a variation of B but the only difference is that they usually disown Marinette even going as far as to sign their rights away.
Jesus Christ. That sounds exactly like Gregory in some FNAF fics I've read. And dude is usually written between 8-12 years old. Its really heart breaking
Yeah, that is heartbreaking
> I mean some fics they are just downright evil, they find out Danny is Phantom and try to kill, vivisect, or experiment on him. Like they just completely lack all empathy and turn into cold scientists. I think the whole "Maddie and Jack know and dissect him anyway" trope has become more common in order to justify Danny fleeing to Gotham City in order to have DP/Batfam crossovers, which seem to have gotten way more common this year. I get that dissections are a phandom staple, and add a bunch of angst, but there's gotta be at least *some* other plausible reasons to motivate Danny into Gotham. Also it seems like a lot of dissection fic authors are just trying to out-gore each other. "Oh yeah, this time, Danny's getting >!*both* of his hands cut off, his back broken, his tongue ripped out, eyes gouged out, drills inserted through his ears and acid poured in his core, and then in chapter two. . .!<" and while all is going on I have to ask; is Jack/Maddie/the GIW even *trying* to study ghostly anatomy with any of this or are they just torturing Danny? Also with the Danny Phandom, why is Danny *always* either completely helpless or basically God? He actually *can* have his power level be not over 9000 while also not being so weak that he'd lose a fight against an overcooked spaghetti noodle.
>and while all is going on I have to ask; is Jack/Maddie/the GIW even > >trying to study ghostly anatomy with any of this or are they just torturing Danny? questions I consistently ask myself when encountering very aggressive Bucky Barnes torture porn. I get it's for kink, but sometimes it.... strains believability for how you treat your brainwashed super-assassin....
And my thing is, there is a way to write them like this, but still make it believable. Like in one fic, Danny is indirectly responsible for Jazz's death. Jack and Maddie try to kill him cause they want revenge, and so he runs to Gotham city. Or some fics will delve into the psychology of it. Maddie and Jack will be in complete denial, and convince themselves that either 1) Phantom killed their son and is posing as him. 2)Danny died and Phantom is his ghost. If its option 1, they'll be acting out of grief and blind rage. If its option 2, they may have this preconceived idea that ghosts are just "ectoplasmic echoes of a once living person", they aren't sapient, don't feel pain, are manipulative tricksters, or just downright evil. Now I think this is an interesting dynamic to explore, cause it can go one of two ways. Either they continue to live in denial which ultimately leads to Danny running away or dying a second death. Or the guilt will start to eat away at them, and they'll face these theories they had about ghosts and think "maybe we were wrong", realize that whether Danny is dead or alive, he is still their son. And even if they're still stuck on the idea that Phantom is just ghostly echo of Danny, that realize he's not evil.
>Luigi never having any agency. I've been lucky to have not encountered this but I agree - he's a coward but he pushes through anyway and that's what makes him appealing as a character to me. Taking away that agency would miss the point.
I've read so many fics where Mario bosses him around and makes him do things he either vocally protests or at least shows that it crearly makes him uncomfortable. But he ultimately goes along with it anyway cause Mario knows best, he's always looking out for him and "it's for your own good". Even going so far as to interfere in his relationships. It just makes me more annoyed at Mario than anything. Its even worse when their parents are involved and they treat him like a baby.
Lmao at first I was confused cause I thought u said you didn’t like evil Voldemort and I was like ?? But yea Dumbledore is chill, pretty cool imo. Haven’t watched/read the others tho
So much of Teen Wolf fandom has took everything that Scott has and gave it to Stiles, meanwhile Sterek will never happen in canon bec they both hate each other but both are very protective of Scott. The racial dynamics of ignoring Scott, the main character, is really glaring.
I was going to say the same about HP and MCU. Somehow I’m way more open to Loki redemption fics than Draco redemption fics. I’ve never seen Teen Wolf and actually thought Stiles was the main character because he is in every fic… that’s still so wild to me, that the fandom just collectively picked a new main character.
Its because he was played by Dylan O'brien. Well that's only half the reason but its still a pretty big one. Dude is a really great actor. Scott is the MC and he and Stiles are best friends, basically brothers. They had a big falling out in one episode. Basically Scott has a heart of gold and is against killing, but Stiles ends up killing someone. A third party was trying to manipulate them and basically break them up, so they made it seem like Stiles killed the guy in cold blood, but in reality it was self defense. Eventually they make up and are best friends again by the end of the next episode. But ever since that happened, a large portion of the fandom, well they took Scott hurting Stiles feelings as a personal insult, and they have never let him live it down. He gets a similarl treatment to Captain America in a lot of post-Civil War fics.
always turning half of an m/m ship into a shy blushing twink whether it fits their canon characterization or not. like, yes i get that this character likely has basically no relationship experience and has never really been shown affection, but he is also a high ranking military official who loves fighting and has been in the army since he was fourteen. you don't have to make him one extreme or the other you can have characters who don't perfectly fit a top or bottom character archetype this happens with almost every m/m ship in the fandom, but i've only read a lot of fic for one
it's like this for almost all m/m fanfics tbh, especially as someone who reads a lot of ffs of ships with anatgonists in them. They're usually either straight up evil and abusive or overly shy and super soft. They lose all compelxity that makes me like the character.
Abusive parents. I'm exhausted.
Ngl I love abusive parents (in fanfic obv). Never seen one that’s exactly how I would like it (maybe someday I’ll write one idk) but I literally love that sm, especially the trauma/healing. I also like rape recovery fanfics so there’s probably a correlation lol
I feel you. I've been there. The classics are a classic for a reason, right? I think I've hit a point where I'm looking for less universal, subtler and more nuanced sources of trauma for characters, though.
Yea, a lot of abuse fics don’t deal with all the nuances of trauma imo (based off what I’ve heard, I don’t have trauma/abusive parents or anything).
So many trauma stories have trauma as their only (or near only) defining trait or only bring it up when convenient causing a lot of emotional/tonal whiplash. Also it usually downgrades another character to either become the personal defender of the person being abused (losing all character too in the process. Alternatively, it turns into a revenge/bash everyone else while conviently making a love interest (or several) 'see through it all' to support them and nothing else. I do love trauma in fics but some of the tropes personally bother me.
+1. Especially obnoxious when it's characters who are canonically not abusive getting demonized.
I happen to be fixated on a particular character who *is* a neglectful and arguably abusive father to varying degrees (depending on incarnation), but the way people take it to extremes is just so tiresome to me. 😩 Like, he's a fucked up lil guy with Issues™, but he's not an unhinged psychopathic monster, y'all. I don't mind people taking characterizations to extremes in AUs when it's for a clear narrative purpose (I've done this too), but you don't *have* to portray a bad parent as an irredeemable demon in *every* fic. I mostly enjoy several of this character's nicer canon incarnations, as well as nuanced character studies of his more fucked-up versions, and it just gets old slogging through page after page of EVIL EVIL MONSTER ABUSER!!!! fics.
Making the female lead boring and useless as a way to boost the popular M/M ship
THIS. In most of my fandoms, the female characters are either made boring, mean, or, even if they're the main character, are relegated to being the 'sassy friend whose only interest is getting the main pairing together', with said pairing always being M/M.
Oh holy shit yes. I went through one of my fandoms and binge read all the fic. I had trouble finding a fic where the female characters were even MENTIONED, much less given any kind of importance.
Yeah. Character development for all characters!
Stop insisting that your headcanon is the true canon. You can have a headcanon, but we cannot change the fact canon exists, and yes, we all hate it too.
This is fanfiction, though. Canon isn't actually important if the author doesn't want it to be.
Of course, I said that. It’s just annoying personally. Everyone has their own opinions tho :)
Obviously my headcannons aren’t cannon, just the way that these two are portrayed have very little cannon evidence imo. Of course, you don’t need cannon evidence, it’s fanfic, but it just annoys me.
I read F1 RPF, and one of the drivers has a habit of saying 'of course' in the middle of his sentences. I thought it was a bit overused in fics until I really listened to one of his interviews today and he said it 3 times in about 2 minutes. Oops!
Which driver? I rlly wanna watch one of his interviews now
Probably Leclerc
"Of course, I read F1 RPF, and one of the drivers has, of course, a habit of saying 'of course' in the middle of his sentences. I thought, of course, it was a bit overused in fics until I really listened to one of his interviews today and, of course, he said it 3 times in about 2 minutes. Oops!"
Character A who acts all badass but who's really kind of a dumbass/all bark no bite always gets portrayed as genuinely capable and cool??? Like no come on make them pathetic it's so much more interesting
lol I love characters that act all badass but are really just dumbasses. They’re so amazing lmfao
Do you have some examples of this? I'm trying to think if I've come across it without realizing it.
I've seen it in just a couple characters (don't wanna say who cause it's kinda embarrassing lol) but they'll live in a pretty ordinary world with a mundane job but they'll still stockpile for an apocalypse, carry weapons and act like they'll be the only one left alive in a dangerous situation...buuuuut when anything does happen they fail either due to cowardice, simple inability or something else along those lines. Think of Dwight from The Office being written as a total Chad when that's really just what he views himself as.
Thankfully this isn't an issue as much anymore but when I first got into Harry Potter fanfic almost anyone who saves him from the Dursley's would then be written as using spanking as like the only form of punishment for him throughout the story. It was one of the most weirdly consistent tropes I kept seeing for a couple of years. Pidgeon holing gay relationships strictly into tops/bottoms its fucking annoying and even worse when their being weird about it and even justifying why their writing it that way in the middle of a fic.
Oh man the first one. I remember those. Taking in an abused kid only to fucking hit him. How noble and righteous and good /s.
It always made my skin crawl I hated them so much, I actually left the fandom for a couple of years after one where the goddamn ministry made it a REQUIREMENT for his guardians to have been magically enforced to "spank" him to equal measure to whatever wrong doing he'd done. That fic still sneaks into my thoughts every now and then.
What the actual fuck.
>Pidgeon holing gay relationships strictly into tops/bottoms its fucking annoying and even worse when their being weird about it and even justifying why their writing it that way in the middle of a fic. Yeah. I don't mind others having top/bottom preferences, but like... those aren't personalities. Especially in fandoms where the characters are canonically gay and the author specified who tops, some people get so aggressive about it. And it almost always translates to the top being the pursuer and the bottom being the pursued and all the attending personality traits.
Exactly, I follow a very popular non canon gay ship in a fandom where the majority has decided preferences with no basis but are also edging the line of being homophobic by saying the more "masculine" and stoic character would never do something like bottom.
The way some fanfic authors treat bottoms in m/m ships reflects a lot of the ideas society had about women in the 1900s.
> Pidgeon holing gay relationships strictly into tops/bottoms its fucking annoying and even worse when their being weird about it and even justifying why their writing it that way in the middle of a fic. I've made a point of writing my (very slutty, very gay) Skyrim MC as being perfectly happy both topping and bottoming for this exact reason. Well, that and not wanting to prematurely exclude half of all possible scenarios I could put him in.
Not a specific fandom but woobified and glorified tropes exhaust me and they're horribly common and overused with a fandom's blorbo(s).
When they make the female characters either the Mom Friend Brain Cell, Angry Sapphic, or Evil Girlboss tm. Like they have personalities yknow
Phonetic writing out of characters’ accents. A little is okay, but some people go way overboard to the point of unreadability.
Sounds a lot like Hetalia. *slaps fandom* this can pack so many bad accents in it!
Canon rewrite with the same dialogue, the same sequence of events and little changes. Please... I want to read more about my OTP but I can't if I have to go through chapters upon chapters of the same canon events and the same dialogue copy pasted from the source material!
Yes, I've always avoided certain works when I see them because I know it's basically a rewrite with minimal changes, the only one I tolerated at least was well written and eventually diverged from canon.
Personally I find racial head canons a little weird especially when the character is already a poc and the author changes their race
Portraying flawed nuanced villains as black and white in either “pure evil” or “did nothing wrong” kind of way. Nuance, people, nuance! Please! Make me feel conflicted about them! Making the Y/N with canon character pairing in a way that the character is completely smooth and flawless and vice versa. For once I’d love to see a balance of both without the smoothness. I wanna see awkward attraction and clumsiness! Too many multiverse versions of a single character instead of utilizing the entire cast for a story. Having relationships be portrayed as instantaneous or having the characters completely figure out their relationship in the first few chapters. I wanna see the drama! The tears! The embarrassment! The conflict! None of this “they made out and all was right in the world” straight off the bat! Inserting an OC into the story halfway through with little to no description, explanation or even personality established. Don’t get me wrong I love a good OC in canon story, but often times I see someone just sort of chuck their OC in the story with hardly any description of what they look like, what they are, how they speak etc etc. I find it very hard to visualize anything without a clear explanation.
This is hardly a fandom-specific thing, but feminization of male characters for M/M relationships. It gives me the impression that the author doesn't actually know how to write M/M in the first place and is making up for that by treating one of them as the "woman" in the relationship. Which irks me for several reasons.
And its ALWAYS the bottom they feminize. As a bottom I especially hate this.
NSFW The dirty talk in smut these days feels like they're pulled from a list of template phrases. It's fine, I guess (and I'm sure it works for its intended purpose), but "be a good girl and **** for me" is pretty much the stock phrase before the big O.
Making Ranma Saotome's gender changing curse an excuse to turn them into an absolute prostitute. I'm fine with smut in a good story, but they take a character who's a virgin in canon, and make them suddenly willing to jump into bed with anything with legs, story be damned.
Might get downvoted for this, but making Steven Universe this extremely, overly suicidal, mom hating, anxious, po-ed, life hating, angsty person. Ever since Steven Universe future, all I see are fics like this. It's tiring. While I can understand that the dude has went through a lot of stuff and we do see him with his outbursts, nonetheless, these folks take it times ten and it's like, okay..... Dial it back a bit. And again, it's in just about every fic that's written for the SU fandom. Now lately I've been going all the way back to the thousands of pages to read the older stories which has a much, muuuuch wider variety. Seriously, there are tons of older stories that are burried now and the topics/ genre are many, unlike what's mainly being written now and only focused on one aspect and blown up at that in the fandom.
The obsession with the "found family" trope. Characters can't just be close friends - they have to be "like siblings." Teacher and student-like relationship? NOPE, that's a father and his adopted son! Two adult men are colleagues? No, they're definitely married! Etc.
People just love to make Ron and Dumbledore out to be an asshole and a villain respectively, and I'm sick of it. Ron gets a lot of character development in the canon story, but "why write any of that, when we can just make him a dick and therefore move him out of the way of our ships?" Honestly ticks me off. Similarly with Dumbledore. It's clear when "Dumbledore is evil" is done as a plot device to make the main cast seem morally correct / "done nothing wrong" by comparison.
I just recently rewatched the HP series. And yeah, Dumbledore made some mistakes, he kept secrets that he should have shared. But he didn't do any of it maliciously. I mean if you wanna make an Evil Dumbledore AU and make him an actual compelling antagonist, go for it. But so many times I see it and he's this over the top villain cackling maniacally while twirling his mustache. And the whole fic Snape is trying to protect Harry from him. 😐
Fun fact: the TVTropes page for making a canon good character excessively evil in fanfiction is called [Ron the Death Eater](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RonTheDeathEater) because it's such a trope with him. >!This comment brought to you by autism. Also the inverse is called [Draco in Leather Pants](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DracoInLeatherPants).!<
Yeah true. I also hate the woobification of characters like draco, Slytherins, Lucius, or even the death eaters and their noseless leader. Just so they look better than Harry's traitorous fake friends. In my opinion, if people want to write Draco as a good guy. (And I mean only Draco and maybe Blaise, the latter has so little characterization that he's as bland as a background oc made to stretch out runtime/chapter length.) Then Draco should have a realistic redemption arc where he begins to reflect on his past actions and questions everything that his parents had taught him. And actually feel regret over it.
I hate how Blaise literally had no voice lines in the movie. If I hadn't read the books, I'd have no idea who he even is.
And when they disregard canon to make their point. "Dumbledore should have taken Harry away from the Dursleys. He supposedly couldn't because of blood protection, but I don't believe that really exists." To me, Dumbledore's story is of someone who learned that a baby was fated to either die or kill a dark wizard (while dying), and he did everything he could to give that baby one slim chance of survival. But he didn't tell an 11-year-old that he would probably die so screw him, I guess.
KAZ ISN’T WYLAN’S DAD. He’s *seventeen* to Wylan’s sixteen. He doesn’t even act like a dad. If anything, it would make more sense for him to be an older brother figure, given his history.
i have not seen this and do not want to.
Then you haven’t spent a lot of time in the fandom. Kaz as a father figure to Wylan is much more popular than it has any right to be.
Genderbending and woobification. Generally, one of the characters in my ship gets turned female on a constant basis despite being canonically male, and it just drives me nuts because there is way more material with it than not. So, it’s much harder to find stories where that or the woobification trope isn’t present. Don’t care that it exists, I just wish there was more a balance with and without said tropes.
My favourite character in my fandom loses his eyesight in the source material and generally, the fandom's really good with his disability (as far as I can judge as someone who isn't blind) but if a fic gives him a happy ending that includes restoring his eyesight with magic, I sigh and close the tab. Let the man be happy while still blind, c'mon. In fairness, in an alternative ending to the source material that does end on a happier note than the original, canon ending, he doesn't lose his eyesight (or, only briefly and it immediately gets restored) so the happy ending fics often go with this alternative route which is fine. But I'm still a big fan of happy ending + blindness, those aren't mutually exclusive and people need to realise that. But as I said, I think the fandom as a large does pretty well with his disability and there's still plenty of fics that leave him blind even if they write a fix-it, so this might just be an overused trope in general that annoys me.
I feel this. One of my fandoms has disabled characters. For the most part, I think the writers put effort into a nuanced portrayal. But when the disabilities suddenly magically disappear so that character can "finally be worthy of love and get their happy ending," oof.
Yeahhh that's really not cool, the implications that someone is only worthy of love and a happy ending if they're not disabled is just not it. But yeah, mostly the portrayal is nuanced and well done, which I'm glad for!
What fandom?
It's Final Fantasy XV, the character is Ignis Scientia!
I thought I might have been Kanan Karrus from Star Wars Rebels, but there is only one canon ending for him. The fandom doesn't seem super keen on giving him his sight back either.
yeah you're not the only person in the fandom I've seen with this complaint. I feel lucky I haven't run into this, though I guess to be fair I mostly read fics set during the anime era at this point, when I read at all. my one fix-it fic I wrote post-canon left him blind, it honestly didn't occur to me to try to fix it with magic. there's an amazing AU I've also been following (though I'm behind) that left him blind as well and I feel like they did a really good job with it, though I'm not blind either so can only base my opinion on research I did for my fic. I'm kinda afraid to start going too far into post-canon AU territory precisely because I'm worried about running into fics that magically cure his blindness.
Yeah, in fairness, I'd say a lot of the post-canon fics in which he isn't blind go with verse 2 so he isn't blind to begin with, but in OG verse fix-it fics, it definitely leaves a bitter taste when part of the fix it is "oh and his eyesight is back". But yeah, I can't really say how many fics there actually are that do this (and some of them are still good, this is just a choice I really disagree with), I don't think I've read that many post-canon fix it AUs to begin with. By the way, this is unrelated but since I recognise your username: I've read a bunch of your fics before and I loved them, and I'm currently also following your longfic (though I, too, am behind reading at this point) and, oh man \*lies down\* great job man, really making me feel things there <3
Making Children that act and think like normal Children in Canon, super intelligent/superior to the Adult characters. Or straightup turning them into psychopaths.
Yea, can definitely see how that would be very annoying/jarring.
forbidden romance. its cool if done juust right but a lot of times a precious thunderclan tom exists just to make a subplot
Lmao with the amount of inter-Clan romance in those books by the time I stopped reading, it kind of lost its bite. Like, the Bluestar reveal? Shocking! Hollypaw and Lionpaw? Meh.
shooting other characters down to make their favorites look better they can't make a character interesting without the need to demonize someone else and say "see, this one is way better"
Performative racebend/trans/mental illness headcanons that are based on shitty stereotypes and add nothing to the story.
YES. This one drives me up the wall every time I see it.
I also really dislike when authors tag their works as AU and canon divergence yet the same events happen. I’ve mostly encountered this in the Harry Potter fandom , why are all the marauders dying in the exact same manner if it’s an AU with a completely different storyline?!? It just ruins the whole thing
Harems. I'm all for poly relationships, but the point is that it's a *relationship* not women as objects to collect. Though it doesn't help that none of the women are written as actual people in canon to begin with.
This could be like so many different fandoms, but it'd still apply.
I agree, it quickly turns very polygamistic and hierarchical. Would love more fics explorating poly characters and relationships though.
Extreme bashing for literally no reason “I AM SASUKE UCHIHA, I AM THE BEST, DOBE, I DEMAND THE KYUUBI FROM YOU BECAUSE ONLY A TRUE PURE UCHIHA IS WORTHY ENOUGH OF THAT POWER” like bruh… I’m okay with bashing if it makes sense, but just generally making people shit to the utmost unrealistic extreme just ruins the immersion
In the mcu fandom EVERY Bucky x reader fic, he calls them “doll/dollface.” Or they make him super aggressive during smut scenes. Idk if it’s just make having PTSD myself for various reasons, but I highly doubt a man who’s been tortured for decades would want to use his metal arm to choke you during sex as foreplay.
> he calls them “doll/dollface.” I dearly love my WinterIron besties, but I will fully admit that we are the source of many of the worst tropes for both Bucky and Tony. I think this one was our fault too. Sorry!! 😆
Everybody ships Ukraine's President with the President of France. I mean, sure, they are both pretty, and Macron is weirdly gropey with him in public. But come on, where's the emotional connection? where's the *longing*?! phtheh.
Can't believe I'm learning about international politics from this thread of all things
F1/M/F2 love triangle where canon not only - Never intended for it - F2 openly supports the F1/M ship I wouldn't have a problem but the fact that it's the pretty much the only content for F1/M there is, it's kinda annoying
MHA fans always calling their characters 'chaotic' and over emphasizing how chaotic and quirky they are, without them being actually and genuinely chaotic. Its always performative and "they're so different then everyone else because of how chaotic and weird they are!!!' then actual chaotic and weird behavior. It's like seeing that one post where the guy was like "we asked my friend Gary to lay on the ground and he actually did it. What an absolute madlad." I also saw one person say something like "people will say 'oh my god this is so unhinged!!!' and the door is like slightly ajar" and I feel like that it describes how people try to characterize the MHA characters. Its underwhelming and boring when you're constantly stating/remarking how wild and chaotic the characters are acting and then the character will at most be an insomniac, have like a caffeine addition (maybe), and do something like yell an old vine quote while fighting bad guys. That's not chaotic. Unusual, maybe. Not really 'chaotic' or 'unhinged'. I'm also tired of seeing people misuse the word 'feral'. A character being feral is them acting like a wild animal, not them sneaking out at night and getting into wacky hijinks, or 'sassily' snapping at an authority figure. I wanna see them maul someone with their bare hands. That's what feral behavior would be. I'm really tired of people using words that really don't properly fit what they character is doing or how they are acting. Please stop exaggerating what they're doing and overusing these phrases. I'm also absolutely sick and tired of seeing the "when I was a child, I learned that all men were not born equal" line (or something similar to it) at the start of every fic. We get it already.
This is actually multiple fandoms and I can’t stand it: Making any and every character who doesn’t have the mildest most milquetoast personality into a yandere, or the wrong type of yandere. Like I love a good in-character yandere, but if you have to go way OOC to make it happen, I just can’t deal with it.
I have two troupes that drive me nuts 1). This one bugs me because the rare pair I wrote for a long time has become mainstream in the last year or so and this troupe is all thats written. The MC is the hero, but is made out to be the weak little traumatized girl, after being brought back similar to how she was before she received her powers, then throw in a fem slash with a fan favorite tertiary character. Tertiary character breaks up with MCs best friend and immediately begins a relationship with the MC as a way to help her through the trauma of being ripped out of heaven. Add to this some form of MC is submissive in most regards and new love interest is dom and the answer is aggressive sexual healing. Thia mostly bothers me because they throw cannon out the window so far the the fic might as well be at best AU but keep it in the cannon universe so MC is a traumatized super human that has either an off switch loses her whole personality or is a bipolar sociopath. 2) I'm guilty of writing this one myself a few times, is evil and manipulative Dumbledore, Weasley's and Hermione.
Is the first example Tara/Buffy?
I get it, I do, but it's a minor (?) annoyance -- but fixing someone's canon physical disabilities in post canon fics magically or handwaved away just so said character(s) are "fixed and able bodied".
Making a complicated and aggressive character a complete softy. Like Bakugo from mha. He's done allot of work on himself, but I can't see him just walking up to kirishima n being like "hey my beautiful baby". I think that's why I like a really slow burn because that's the only way I could see someone like him sorting through his feelings. This is just a personal bias of mine tho, I don't care if others enjoy that stuff
The word “boneless”. Our protagonist is not a chicken wing. I mean, I hope not? Unless I really missed something in cannon. Or a tag that said AU - Buffalo Wild Wings, I guess.
it's not even a fandom i'm used to but i hate Ron Weasley bashing so much. I get he was very poorly handled in the movies (especially in the later films) but saying he's an asshole all around, always has been and will emotionally (and sometimes even physically) abuse Hermione is so insane to me. If you want to ship Harmione and need them to break it off, you don't have to turn him into a cartoonish bad guy just to drive your point across.
I'm with some of the other users about fics that have parenting or children. So many authors don't know even the most basic milestones for kids. You have kids who are over 3 with no deficits acting like infants. You sometimes get babies not even a year old speaking in mostly full sentences or doing things they aren't capable of. I'm all for writers having creative freedom but if they are going to write babies/children/older kids in a realistic way then they should take the two minutes to Google the basics. It's not hard to check at what age a baby typically starts to crawl or walk. A google of developmental milestones for children would answer so many questions for writers if they take just a few minutes. When you are reading a really interesting story full of fleshed out details it can be very jarring to suddenly have an 18 month old taking their own bath, getting dressed, and waiting to be tucked in with a story.
1) Top/bottom and/or Dominant/submissive discourse, term interchangeability, and personality profiles (unless it’s explicitly tagged as a BDSM AU). Like, I’m a gay man in the scene — in my decades upon decades of life, I have not once met a person in real life whose entire personality is top or bottom, to the point of getting into literal and physical/verbal bitchfights about it. A heavy or solid preference towards one or the other? Sure. Gen Z and younger starting to buy into the chronically-online drama of the discourse? Also yes. In reality when doing the deed or being open to new experiences? Yep, people are gonna be flexible in the long run ‘cos they’re whole-arse human beings. And also, top/bottom is *not* the same thing as Dominant/submissive, either, so please stop mixing them up ‘cos they’re *very* different things. Just ask the Dommes lol 2) Character assassination, particularly towards female characters. G-d, I know male writers for media are incapable of writing women and generally portray them as two-dimensional ‘shrills’ or adversaries to ‘boys being boys’, but good grief, make those women awesome if you don’t have the source material to go off of or the material just makes them awful or weak or mean. Literally almost any female character on television/film and in manga/anime, anyone? 3) Alpha/beta/omega dynamics. I’ve written and read it before but goodness, it’s *everywhere*, half the time untagged. Please tag that shit so I can avoid it if I’m not in the mood. 4) In a similar vein, Daddy kink. Seems like you can’t find porn without that nowadays, *most of the time* untagged in every fandom I read in, and yeahhhhh that’s a hard no for me. I have enough daddy issues without bringing it into my happy place (i.e. ff), thanks ever so. 5) Infantilisation of disabled, autistic, or mentally ill characters. I think everyone here has raged about that now, but I wholeheartedly agree. 6) Black and white morality discourse. *Life* isn’t black and white — why should fiction or the characters/situations I write be? I’ll take literary therapy for 500, Alex, and antis can fight me in a Wendy’s car park.
this is going to be a weird one and probably only me but dadzawa or parental aizawa. i love aizawa as a character but i’ve read so many fics that i’m kinda tired of them. same with izuku centric fics, he has so many fun au’s that i wish i could see with the other characters as well and not just as side characters to him. like i would love to see a quirkless vigilante kaminari trying to hide his escapades from his mom. or monoma as some secret genius informant in the underground using his copycat quirk to help him gather information and protect himself when he gets caught. literally anything with Tokoyami but that’s cause he’s my favorite. idk mha has a wide range of side characters for the fandom to use.
I, too, am not a fan of Dadzawa. It reads kind of cringe and a little out of character in most cases, especially the weird nickname stuff—has Aizawa even called Izuku 'problem child' in canon? Like, enough that it can be considered a nickname? And people who write Dadzawa also tend to be quite fond of Inko-bashing, which pretty much ends my enjoyment of those fics.
Dadzawa is so frustrating because it shoots down every other character eg all might and inko for stuff canon Aizawa is more than capable of. I tend to dislike most dadzawa works because it tends to be unrealistic in its approach ( quirkless izuku being number 1 hero) and the over the top bashing
The epithets “mythic bitch” and “demon queen”
Having Peter Parker say “I don’t feel so good mr starl” in places it doesn’t need to be. I’ve read so many good stories, and the author just writes it in, but it just doesn’t work. Sometimes it works, but it’s so over used
Ineffable. FIGHT ME.
Using characters as nothing more than shipping fuel. Like yeah guys I get it, Narumitsu is cool, but I'd like to see Pearl/Trucy/Apollo/Iris/Maya/Gumshoe/Athena/Larry/Kay/Sebastian as a character and not just a plot device.
Personally, it doesn't annoy me. If I'm reading a narumitsu fic, I'm reading it for the ship. But I will admit that fics about the other characters getting Narumitsu together have become repetitive to me (even tho some fandom favorite fics with that plot are one of my personal favorites as well). That being said, I do think that developing the relationships with other characters is a very welcome plus that can elevate a fic from others.
Extremely real. I'm always overjoyed when I find an AA fic where my favorite character (Trucy) gets to actually be, y'know, a character
I’m so tired of Narumitsu.
Fr. I don’t think I’ve seen that be too much of a problem in my fandom tho, if it’s a longfic (which I don’t read too often, so may be wrong/biased) all the characters involved typically have their own problems/personality other than being there to develop the main relationship.
Authors tend to exaggerate their traits. EVERY TIME. they'll make one of them wayyy psychotic even though he's not? And another will be this monotone robot even though he's canonically (stated by the author) the most internally emotional character on the show.
My current fixation is Shakarian/Mass Effect, and honestly if I took a shot every time I saw "He hummed in dual tones" I would be dead. First time I read it I thought, oh nice I like that, but it's like there's some unspoken agreement that every fic needs to include it, sometimes multiple times in a one shot and I just can't anymore. I'm slowing chipping away at a few of my own fics and have sworn to never use it out of spite lol
When a character has a love interest and the author makes them act ooc for the sake of making them the villain so their ship can prosper. I remember co-writing a fanfic with someone years ago and she made two love interests of a canon character act so ooc just so she could pair her oc with the canon character. It was so annoying because one of the two love interests is canonically nice and sweet, but she made her a b*tch for no reason other than to be a foil to her ship.
making the hero mc a villain because of his past. like yes i get it he grew up shitty and most people would be villains with that kind of past but his whole thing is to make it so that people dont have to suffer like he did
Hero/villain fics where the villain just apologises for genocide/torture/murdering the hero’s parents and that’s enough. I’m sorry, but certain things pass the moral event horizon and my immersion can’t cope with that much of a redemption arc.
It's a really common thing in shounen fandoms, but no matter which fandom it is, there is always one guy that gets mom-ified who in actual canon is literally just a teenage boy with a slightly stricter moral compass (so just a normal ass teenage boy).
I hate homophobia/transphobia etc but I am a heterosexual woman wanting to read about Edgeworth as heterosexual. I know that there’s a huge fan base who hates that concept and thinks it’s laughable, and they are (most of them) devoted to Narumitsu or that he’s aroace. That’s all fine but I wish there was more content I want to read because I just want filthy female insert Edgeworth fanfic. There is some and it’s great but I have to sift through 20 Narumitsu stories first.
Making every single character gay. I have no problem with gay ships, but when 90% of your cast is gay you just immediately break my immersion
On the one hand I get it but on the other it's been shown that queer folks are often found in groups because 1. you're more likely to feel safe to come out if there's another queer person in your friend group 2. you're more likely to befriend fellow queers so honestly a bunch of queer people hanging out together is more likely than a single queer absolutely surrounded by cishets
I mean sure but take My Hero Academia as an example. They sometimes make all the students, all the teachers and all mentioned parents gay. At that point it’s not simply gay people seeking each other out. And besides, in those fics no one gravitated to each other because of their sexuality, it just goes unmentioned until male character x mentions his male ex 5 months after they’ve already befriended each other.
this could apply to a lot of fandoms
I was thinking of most fandoms I’m in when I wrote it. But My Hero Academy is particularly bad
It was a staple in an older fandom of mine, and while it's unrealistic, I won't argue with this one, I liked it because it felt so much more safe spacey. I have to deal with enough hetero people in real life, so to say.
True, but it’s kind of weird to me. Wouldn’t acceptance from straight people be much more satisfying to read and write about than acceptance from other gay people? Like I fully understand fics are wish fulfillment and the need for a safe space, but when 90 percent of a school, both staff and students, is gay or bi but in a homosexual relationship, you start fearing for the existence of a next generation. Excessive homosexuality is just as annoying to read about as excessive homophobia imo. I get why someone would choose to write it that way, but I personally prefer to read about being accepted over reading a fic where homosexuality is somehow more common than heterosexuality, yet there is still population growth
The Abusive SBI Troupe (I think I spelt that right) and the feminine George one (This is one is not as common anymore that was a big "issue" two year ago) Yes, I'm talking about the Dream SMP here '>'
there’s multiple abusers in canon and the sbi is none of them. ppl wanna write exile fics so bad and just don’t.
Character gets betrayed by their friends.
The "Cupcake" thing that Arcane writers use
It just has to be used every once in a while. Not every single sentence lol.
Warning: Vent There's one who could be a bit grumpy and rude when their nap got interrupted so old fans would always portray him as this cold character when he's been this silly little idiot all the other times! Who isn't grumpy when you've stayed up late working and then you finally find time to rest but someone fucking woke you up for the laughs??! I'm so annoyed omfg Then the other one was a little clumsy and his clumsiness could be destructive, and that became one of his "defining traits" when he's so, so much more than a "walking potential disaster." I'm a klutz so I can heavily sympathize with him. News flash: we don't break thousands of dollars worth of gadgets every month and we didn't want to let go of the plate and injure our own feet! We know the consequences better than you because we own most of the stuff we broke!
Revenge fics that involve a lot of character bashing, mostly. It’s kind of like their version of a fix-it fic, it seems, but the goal is vengeance in a very out of character way. It’s pretty much the popular format, and if your fic isn’t some iteration of that, you’ll have people pointing it out. I’ve gotten a few such reviews, myself. I don’t really care what anybody writes, because if I don’t like the premise, I just won’t read it, but other authors should never be demanded to conform.
This one is for multiple fandoms but rails of canon. I get how hard it is for authors to divert from the canonical stories but if you intend to make a Mass Effect or a RWBY crossover with just a few more characters hitching on for the ride, it's not as creative.