Fanfiction 'Red Flags' (r/FanFiction)

Here are some personal red flags that Reddit users from r/FanFiction have when they're looking for stories to read online. Do you agree or disagree? What are your own red flags? Let me know!

(some comments in this video have been slightly edited for length)

[chloe]

one time I read a sickfic where the author spelled out every single sneeze like a keyboard smash, like 'hGCHXhEhHWEXSH' ☠ and it was otherwise well written

[oneangryboi]

My biggest pet peeve is finding the best fanfics ever only to realize that they are unfinished and haven't been updated for years.

[ladyleonr]

One glaring red flag, is when an author holds a fic hostage. "I won't release any new chapters unless I get x numbers of reviews."

[throwbackdubs]

my biggest pet peeve in fanfics is when authors use "nette" after every hair color. a purplenette, pinknette, bluenette etc etc is not a thing.

[kaineedshelp]

I don't care if the writing is superb, and I don't care if my favourite ship is in there. NEVER expect me to read a multifandom oneshot collection.

[kokothehuman]

7:03 let's just appreciate that they read the whole number correctly

[tarabaumgarten]

You know you're desperate when the story has a lot of your pet peeves and red flags but you ignore all of them, because you've already read all the 'good' stories but are starving for more

[star_sstruck]

My biggest red flag in fanfictions is when the author doesn't know when to stop a sentence. I once remember seeing a fic in which every chapter was just one giant sentence. Probably my biggest pet peeve when it comes to fanfiction.

[lilistuber]

I actually like fanfics with 2 summaries split up by an ‘Or’! Not only does it give a super descriptive summary to those who want it but it also allows pea brains like me to get the main idea of the plot without spending half my time reading the first summary.

[WorldThatNeverWas]

My BIGGEST pet peeve in fanfics is when authors have more than one character speaking dialogue in a single paragraph. Every time a new character speaks, you need to start a new paragraph. Yes, this does mean dialogues between multiple characters might be filled with a bunch of tiny paragraphs, but trust me: that is not only grammatically correct, it is *way* less confusing to keep up with who is saying what.

[certainnoodlesinapasta.]

My pet peeve is that in mlm fanfics, A has a crush on B, B already had a girlfriend, and she is underdeveloped, unnecessarily horrible, cheap in personality, and created by the author to be bashed at. And B leaves her quite easily to get to A. The bias is slapped into my eyes and the ridiculousness of it all is surreal. This goes along with any other biases of characters and ideals.

[liyasilverstone]

I personally LOVE and specifically seek out "what if x happened instead of y" fics, especially when it's for the sake of character exploration. Just the ittiest bit of canon divergence can be the perfect stage for a favorite character to shine.

[jackkain]

My biggest pet peeve is when the author sticks in an OC without tagging it or saying smth beforehand. It's literally so confusing reading a fic and then seeing someone along the lines of like Malthesia Cooper-Adamson pop out of nowhere and then me spending half an hour searching if it's a background character that I missed

[elfies.bazaar]

one thing for me, not necessarily a red flag or peeve, but it is when you find a fanfic where the author states "english isn't my first language so apologies if there are misspellings or incorrect words, " and they go to write the most museum worthy, plot thickening, adrenaline rushing, and addicting story ever!

[synthetic_human_unit.]

The reddest flag I've ever seen was when I was trying to find new fanfics to read and stumbled across a fic that was so atrociously written that I couldn't read two paragraphs of it. Every single "and" was replaced with "&", every single "with" was written as "w/" and every single numeral was written using the representative number (i.e. 1 moment). Like please just write the words if you're trying to tell a story 😭😭

[Winter-Wolfi]

My pet peeve is when characters are written COMPLETELY out of character for no reason other than "oh they are comfortable with this character". These fics can be cute and enjoyable but they can also be unbareably annoying.

Ex: When characters who are straight up murderers, gang members, organized crime members, cold-hearted violent bastards in canon are made into UWU soft bois, who swoon over their love intrest since the second they meet.

This gets especially jarring if you reread/rewatch the original piece of media and see how the characters actually are.

[RJ-vjws]

I actually like it when people do:
**Plot summary 1*
OR
*simplified plot summary**
It's cute, and the story ends up being good most of the times too

[laurenhaehae]

CANNOT agree with the person who complained about "what if x happened instead of y." canon divergence is one of the most prevalent types of fanfiction (and for good reason! it's great!), and summarizing this way is efficient

[mimsilvernote]

When an author loves or hates a controversial and/or divisive character to the point of mischaracterisation . We all have that one character that is either characterised as “uwu did nothing wrong” or “this character is the absolute worst and here’s them doing stuff they’d actually never do” in fics. Whilst this can happen to any character, it’s particularly noticeable and common with the complicated, morally grey/ questionable characters that are divisive figures in the fandom .

[mikealheit]

I'm lucky to not ever have seen it on Ao3, but on Wattpad my biggest red flag was seeing people use pictures to show the reader what each characters outfit (or even just general appearance) looked like, rather than just describing it with words or just not describing it at all unless it's necessary for the story. The worst part is when it's a fic for a series that's mostly drawn or animated and then I'm suddenly told to visualise them all as real people to match the descriptions given, which is super jarring for my brain that's used to visualising them all as mostly 2d drawings.