My biggest red lines (outside the obvious, of course), can be really quite annoying. Sometimes I'm reading through a story, brain mostly turned off, and then I see something like:

or

This then immediately prompts me to skim the entire chapter for 'said-isms'. Usually, this means I discover, to my horror, that the story I was actually enjoying has a complete dearth of 'said' in its tags. Sometimes the second is simply a symptom of the writer not knowing the difference between a tag and a beat, and I'm usually willing to overlook that, but often it is because the writer is allergic to using the same tag twice in a single chapter, and they're having to scrape the bottom of their thesaurus.

Once I have come to this realisation, no matter how much I might have been enjoying the story before it, I am incapable of enjoying the story, as with every single line of dialogue, I am reminded of this mild annoyance, and drawn out of the story once again.

The next is even more insidious. Sometimes I'll be liking the ideas a story has, but be unable to really get into it. Then, a couple of chapters in, I'll realise why. I'll take a glance at the first word of every sentence and see:

Every single paragraph beginning with a name, pronoun or definite article. Sometimes, the rot can run even deeper. Sometimes you can do the same thing at the sentence level for similar results.

For an example of both critical aversion to 'said', and 'fuckit, lets just use the same sentence structure everywhere', take a look at something like Cadmean Victory. Due to these red lines, it is completely unreadable for me.

 

You mean you don't enjoy reading about Slughorn ejaculating?

 

Certainly not when Snape is the reason why.

 

Until very recently, I flat out refused to read a fic where the author failed to capitalize the title properly. Out of sheer boredom, I finally broke down and read one a couple of weeks ago, and it was really, really good. So now I've actually started looking for ones like that, and oddly enough, I'm starting to associate the lack of capitalization in a story's title with a high likelihood of the fic in question being well above average in quality.

All these years, I've always thought of uncapitalized titles as a clear sign of a writer so bad that they fail at basic rules of grammar. I still think it looks shitty, but now I'm starting to believe that it's frequently done as some sort of annoying artistic statement. I still don't like it, and I roll my eyes every time I see it, but I no longer pre-judge the entire fic by that alone.

 

What or who is 'Grammer'? Is it edible? Is it something like 'Spell'?

 

Pretty much what Othalan said, really.

Femslash is more relatable than fem-male relationship, even though I don't really read stories with female protagonists either. It's not a deal breaker or anything, I've just found that I don't particularly enjoy them, whether fanfiction or published novels.

I suppose I came off strongly homophobic, which is a possibility, though I do have a gay male friend. Mostly, it's just putting myself in the main character's shoes, while having zero romantical interest in other guys.

Since female-female is more tolerable than male-male or female-male, perhaps I should have said 'male romantical interest' instead of just generic 'homosexuality'.

 

Uncapitalized titles might also indicate the author isn't a native English speaker. For example, in French only the first word in a title is capitalized (e.g., À la recherche du temps perdu).

Or did you mean they aren't even capitalizing the first word?

 

Yeah @Clerith, I tried to keep my post from coming across as an actual accusation of homophobia. Unlike half of r/hpff, I don't think avoiding slash fics automatically makes you homophobic.

I suppose the idea of refusing to read a fic/novel because the MCs sexuality doesn't match my own just seems utterly ludicrous, because I'd have very little decent reading material if I did that.

To me its just another facet of the character that you adapt to - I'm not a wizard, but I can still relate to Harry Potter and Harry Dresden. I'm not female, but I can still relate to any number of female main characters across fiction. I'm not a demigod, dyslexic, and I don't have ADHD, but I can still relate to Percy Jackson. I'm not an orphan, but thats never stopped me relating to the main characters that are orphans.

 

It's a trend on AO3. I couldn't guess why.

 

I blame vaping.

 

*Shrug* I don't particularly have a problem relating to characters like that either, (I think) because I can still imagine myself in those situations. But there's just a conceptual block for me when it comes to being sexually attracted to males. I suppose I should clarify too that it's only romance-heavy (or smut) m/m slash stories that I have this problem with. If it's a background thing that rarely gets dragged into the spotlight or if it's kept very non-explicit, I can pretty much ignore it. But trying to read a scene that starts with something like "His muscles glistened in the moonlight, as his pants bulged enticingly"? Gonna have to nope on that.

 

This is so interesting to me because I just noticed it a week ago and am now furiously combing through my own writing. I'm more guilty than I'd like. It's one of those things I can't stop focusing on now that I'm aware of it.

 

I’ve read few of the “best of slash fanfiction” recommendations over the years, and it was always shit. Always

 

It strikes me that someone who is compiling a Best of Slash rec list is probably looking more for lots of quite explicit slash and slash romance fics, rather than the more general positive traits that a best of list might ordinarily highlight.

My advice would be to stop caring about whether a fic is slash, if it's recommended in a way that makes it sound interesting other than it being slash then give it a go. Focusing exclusively on pairing is a weird as fuck way to choose what you're going to read.

 

Hear, hear!

I could never understand shippers. I mean, I dislike some pairings like HarryxHermione and NarutoxHinata, but I don't get liking a fictional pairing enough that it becomes similar to supporting a football team, complete with fights (though online ones). Of course, while I don't dislike pure Romance fics, it's not my preferred genre, so.... (Shrugs) I don't like slash, but I can ignore it if the fic is good.

Why would one care whether Harry and Ginny or Harry and Parvati (examples) get together in an action-adventure/Drama fic?

 

As far as I can tell, it has to do with how invested you are in the characters. If there's a character I can identify with on a reasonably deep level, I want to see that character succeed in their life/ventures. Part of that life is romance. It doesn't have to be a major focus of the story (in fact it's usually better if it isn't), but there's a certain vicarious thrill in seeing "your" character triumph in that part of their life. And if there's a potential love interest that has reasonable chemistry with "your" character, and seems to possess traits you yourself would find attractive irl, well...

People basically just read too much of themselves into their favorite characters, and it makes them pretty passionate and emotional about the whole thing. Some people (you for example, apparently) are immune to this weird psychological effect, but most (myself included, as un-manly as that feels to admit) don't seem to be.

I do have preferred ships, and I have a few red-line ships as well. My shipping red-lines are pretty much always ones that include a character that I find deeply irritating - like Snape - or deeply boring - like Lupin. Essentially I'm just not interested in reading about good things happening to people I dislike.

 

I think I feel the same way about male protagonist / female character. It's not sexy reading about bouncing titties if you're straight, just mildly irritating. All told, I'd much rather see some enticing bulges.

Sexuality aside, imo slash can be a little more irritating than het in fanfiction due to the sheer popularity of hurt/comfort tropes. I hate running into passive, clueless protagonists, and when there's romance involved a lot of it comes off as rather... simpering. I find that's less of a problem with het - but het has its own problems too.

I hate the whole idea that every story needs to have a pairing. Writers putting up a poll and everything, like the romance is barely relevant yet to still needs to be thrown in to shut up the readers constantly asking.

#Gen4Lyfe

 

Of course it is. But many of the pairings have, statistically, used specific tropes, and by general, are first clue about what are the themes of the story - angst and hurt/comfort, feminization in slash. Muggle wank / Hermione has all the answers in H/Hr, etc. When I look for slash fics, I usually hope for a good story despite or regardless of the pairing

 

This sounds like good advice, but like @James, I've glanced at highly popular slash fics and haven't found one that didn't (a) focus mostly on making the slash pairing happen, and (b) mutilate one of the characters beyond all recognition (usually Harry) to make him submissive. Is there an 'On the Way to Greatness,' 'Harry Potter and the Boy Who Lived,' or 'Insert Your Favorite Fic' out there that also happens to be slash? I'm genuinely curious.

Totally agree. The slash stories I've encountered always employ an obvious dom/sub and hurt/comfort trope. The feminized Harry is always rescued by an uberdominant Malfoy or Snape.

Like you said, a similar problem occurs in het stories, particularly if it has smut. That same dom/sub dynamic turns Harry into an asshole who treats his girls like sex slaves (and, of course, they like that), because anything resembling realistic sex means Harry is a cuck. So much of it is obviously written by an incel or a 14-year-old who is afraid of girls.

If an alien read only Harry Potter fanfiction to understand human sexuality, he'd be forgiven for thinking that sex was an inherently violent act that involved one human commanding another to do something degrading because they like that. What ever happened to simple erotica?