Bad formatting? Lack of editing? What really puts you off of a fic and why?
Keep in mind that pet peeves are not universal. I’m sure I’ll be guilty of the plenty of things that come to mind for many people.
(Sorry not sorry! :D)
This goes without saying, but I’m saying it anyway: Please be nice!
There are many things that take me out of fic but don’t really upset me. If I come across a fic that has no capitalisation I just back out.
My greatest grief is in very particular fandoms- those that claim they are going to explore something realistically when they actually mean grimdark. This usually involves works with magical beasts and starting to treat them like various animals from our world. Expect it’s clear they didn’t do any research of animal behaviour. That their reference pool is “insert eco-terrorist propaganda from your country”.
Having friends, family and myself having years of experiences working against those kinds of people, I just… I cannot handle that well.
Please spell the names of canon characters, locations, events and artifacts correctly.
“…as the friar said to the lady” is the punchline of a joke, not how you should refer to your named and familiar characters.
Do you EVER, in your own head, think of your friend as “the blonde”? How often do you think of them as “the youngest [surname]”? What about their title? Do you think of yourself in those terms?
Referencing these in dialogue is fine, and referencing things about them is equally fine. It’s the aversion to using a character’s name that is a huge pet peeve, and is right up there with replacing a perfectly acceptable speech tag with “he ejaculated verbosely”.
Hahahaha! I had never considered that. I am definitely guilty of this one.