🙅🏽‍♀️ quick fic squicks

[carboxyl]

was browsing through dw and found one of these and now i HAVE to write some of these because i will explode if i don't, thanks.



i've been reading from wattpad and ao3 for over seven years now and i think i have developed and lost enough braincells over time to formulate my likes and dislikes in fic writing (this includes tropes, ship dynamics, AND formatting stuff).

aus and tropes

1. coffee shop/cafe aus: the worst out of the bunch. get this the fuck out of my face. i don't mind if there are scenes occurring in a coffee shop but to make an entire au out of it? insufferable.
2. flower shop/tattoo parlor aus: I HAVE NEVER SEEN THIS EXISTING IN REAL LIFE EVER. i particularly don't like the dynamic of the intended ship either because one's soft uwu boy and the other one's like MACHO MAN GET FUCKED UP kinda guy. like ugh, get over the cliche's.
3. coming of age aus: well, i guess it's because i've literally moved past that age and it wasn't exactly spectacular like these fics told me it would be and now i feel betrayed. this includes fics set in high school, by the way (but excludes boarding schools that have a religious backdrop because MMM .. who wouldn't love some homophobia and some catholic guilt paired with angst and forbidden love, huh?)
4. friends to lovers: now, let me get this straight. i don't particularly hate friends to lovers but i'm absolutely sick of how people tend to write them like it's the best feeling in the world lol. well, flash news, real friends to lovers is much more pain than an average strangers to lovers or HELL, even enemies to lovers because there's the inherent fear of fucking up a friendship that means so much more than a relationship, any day. and most fics, capture only the happy parts and not the angsty ones so i tend to avoid them unless the tags explicitly say that the characters go through a lot of shit for each other. (see what i mean when i say i'm picky?)
5. hospital/psych themed aus: look, i'm here to have a good time. not to see them die or wallow in pain.
6. fantasy aus: i'm shit at remembering details, that's all. i could read this if there was proper worldbuilding though... however what i mean by fantasy aus is the forest fairy, dragons, spirits, magic kinda stuff. not really into that.
7. bakery aus: coffee shop au with a little bit of variety, i guess. still the same shit, though.
8. apocalypse style aus: i don't really mind dystopia, in fact, i really love them because of the different concepts they can have. for example, tayttimus on ao3 wrote a fic about a city that oversleeps and i thought it was very interesting. however, i don't like aus where characters have to genuinely fight for survival and all that, and i tend to avoid them. it's mostly very hard to imagine and constantly have a picture of the scene without a visual representation.
9. hybrids: it used to be cute but all the shit i see now are pushing my brain capacity to the limit. we went from simple cats and dogs to fucking mice and cockroaches?? HOW ARE WE AS A SPECIES, EVOLVING.
10. aus that require comprehensive knowledge about a place/event/etc: listen here buddy, we're all strangers here and i'm on the internet to learn new things and explore new avenues. like okay, i'm sure that there will be a specific niche set of readers that your fic will cater to and i'm happy for them but to an average reader it's very off-putting and somewhat ostracizing. i thank the lords when i see aus where the authors write that we don't need prior knowledge about the setting to enjoy the fic. this and the use of the au-specific jargon with no explanation always makes me feel bad.

ship dynamics

i don't have much to say here because everything mostly comes down to the au/trope that's mentioned in the tags if i have to click on a fic to read it. but i'll put in some ones that i really can't stand.

1. bully/bullied pair: speaks for itself. i hope your pillow is always warm if you like this dynamic fr.
2. one who rejects love/one who keeps giving love: bae, it's not worth your time, move on.
3. childhood friends (?): is this a dynamic? anyway, y'all are super obnoxious and annoying and this is why nobody wants to be friends with you or touch you with a ten foot pole.

writing and formatting

i'm very hard on myself to keep pushing to write the right way. ignore the lapslock though, i'm away from uni in my little anti-times new roman bubble. well, aside from the lapslock, i think i'm pretty consistent in how i format and edit my works and i know it's kind of unreasonable of me to expect the same from others all the time ... some fics really do need the PROPER makeover.

1. irregular paragraph spacing: prefacing this by saying that i have my ao3 zoomed in so that i can read fics without downloading them. now, with this thing on, it is so jarring to see unwarranted gaps in between paragraphs that isn't a scene change. if you're writing with single or even double spacing, please stick to them throughout, i'm begging.
2. epithets: extended rant thread over here.
3. unnecessary tagging: i am NOT going to click on your fic if you have more than ten tags on it that either a) give away the plot on it's own or b) is your fucking rant space about how messy your fic is. save that for your a/n and don't make it look like it's a crowded market.
4. writing yangyang as YangYang: listen... just. please don't.
5. ending dialogues with no periods: i'm sorry, i immediately click away if i see this repeated more than thrice in the same fic.
6. summaries with no summaries: i'm looking at those people who publish fics with the whole "i suck at summaries, just read to find out i guess 🥴". girl, if you aren't even confident about writing a small synopsis of your fic, why would people believe that it's a good fic to read in the first place? reverse psychology doesn't work well here, sorry to break it to you.

well, that's all of the salty stuff i could think of right now but i shall update this if i remember. i apologize if this came off as a tad mean T__T lol anyways, take care. see u. and happy october.

Comments

[haechan]

we are the same person

[miltokki]

first of all! this looks really fun and i'll definitely try doing this too!

aus and tropes
the COFFEE SHOP ONE OMG i feel the same way and i don't get why they're so popular. it all feels the same to me (same with the florist/tattooist) and it just gets boring rather than wholesome for me. and i generally avoid all kinds of hybrid (COCKROACHES AND MICE??? those are the creatures i hate the most irl like it's a borderline phobia). anyway stereotypes and cliches are probably what have kept me away from ao3 for a bit now. like there's 20 fics on a tag each day but somehow there's nothing. (not trying to discredit writers, it's a subjective feeling).

ship dynamics:
wtf is bully/bullied? i've only seen that work in "a silent voice" and i'm not sure if they actually got together at the end? they were really cute though. i like a shade of realism in fics which is why stereotypes drive me up the wall! (so when you mention repressed teens in a boarding school with slight homophobia, forbidden relationships and the imprisoning sides of catholicism... mmhmmm) i like to feel things when i read but lately i'm not feeling anything at all.

formatting
YangYang is triggering to see. i had to laugh out loud about the summaries with no summaries thing that i've seen countless times, and the tagging "this is literally a shit post with barely any plot because i'm so bad at writing omg" "this story is so cringe i don't even know why i wrote this" is not going to motivate me to read a fic that could even potentially be good. it really needs to stop for the sake of readers as well as a writer's own self confidence.
for the ending dialogues with no periods, is it something like "thanks for the meal".?